US asks Greece to close airspace to Russian military flights headed to #Syria amid buildup jitters
http://reut.rs/1EMJKdg
Greece initially denied the US request as the Russians had declared the military flight "aid" flights--the exact same drill used in the Ukraine when they send in "humanitarian aid convoys" which are nothing more than "masked" munitions, fuel and military supplies for her army and her supported mercenaries.
Russian non linear warfare deep at work now in Syria and using massive "weaponization of information to mask her operations and intentions.
In German------
Neuer Schock-Bericht der UN zu Syrien
Warum Assad kein Partner gegen ISIS ist
http://www.bild.de/politik/ausland/s...3042.bild.html …
UN-Bericht beschreibt Verbrechen gegen die Menschlichkeit durch das syrische Regime ++ Russlands Putin schickt bereits Truppen zu dessen Unterstützung
This article is dedicated to the brave men of the Free Syrian Army, defending civilians in #Syria against #ISIS' and #Assad's terrorism.
ISIS dude on Twitter asks car company GMC Arabia why their SUVs back wheels can't handle 1.5 tonnes of car explosives pic.twitter.com/7lJbPfeSHL
Intriguingly, if Putin did not reconquer Crimea from Kyiv junta, Crimean draftees would have no chance to die in Syria for Assad
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opini...395_story.html
The horrific results of Obama’s failure in Syria
By Michael Gerson
September 3 2015
One little boy in a red T-shirt, lying face down, drowned, on a Turkish beach, is a tragedy. More than 200,000 dead in Syria, 4 million fleeing refugees and 7.6 million displaced from their homes are statistics. But they represent a collective failure of massive proportions.
For four years, the Obama administration has engaged in what Frederic Hof, former special adviser for transition in Syria, calls a “pantomime of outrage.” Four years of strongly worded protests, and urgent meetings and calls for negotiation — the whole drama a sickening substitute for useful action. People talking and talking to drown out the voice of their own conscience. And blaming. In 2013, President Obama lectured the U.N. Security Council for having “demonstrated no inclination to act at all.” Psychological projection on a global stage.
Always there is Obama’s weary realism. “It’s not the job of the president of the United States to solve every problem in the Middle East.” We must be “modest in our belief that we can remedy every evil.”
But we are not dealing here with every problem or every evil; rather a discrete and unique set of circumstances: The largest humanitarian failure of the Obama era is also its largest strategic failure.
At some point, being “modest” becomes the same thing as being inured to atrocities. President Bashar al-Assad’s helicopters continue to drop “barrel bombs” filled with shrapnel and chlorine. In recent attacks on the town of Marea, Islamic State forces have used skin-blistering mustard gas and deployed, over a few days, perhaps 50 suicide bombers. We have seen starvation sieges, and kidnappings, and beheadings, and more than 10,000 dead children.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel has changed her country’s asylum rules to welcome every Syrian refugee who arrives. Syrians have taken to calling her “Mama Merkel, Mother of the Outcasts.” I wonder what they call the U.S. president.
At many points during the past four years, even relatively small actions might have reduced the pace of civilian casualties in Syria. How hard would it have been to destroy the helicopters dropping barrel bombs on neighborhoods? A number of options well short of major intervention might have reduced the regime’s destructive power and/or strengthened the capabilities of more responsible forces. All were untaken.
This was not some humanitarian problem distant from the center of U.S. interests. It was a crisis at the heart of the Middle East that produced a vacuum of sovereignty that has attracted and empowered some of the worst people in the world. Inaction was a conscious, determined choice on the part of the Obama White House. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and CIA Director David Petraeus advocated arming favorable proxies. Sunni friends and allies in the region asked, then begged, for U.S. leadership. All were overruled or ignored.
In the process, Syria has become the graveyard of U.S. credibility. The chemical weapons “red line.” “The tide of war is receding.” “Don’t do stupid [stuff].” These are global punch lines. “The analogy we use around here sometimes,” said Obama of the Islamic State, “and I think is accurate, is if a JV team puts on Lakers uniforms, that doesn’t make them Kobe Bryant.” Now the goal to “degrade and destroy” the Islamic State looks unachievable with the current strategy and resources. “The time has come for President Assad to step aside,” said Obama in 2011. Yet Assad will likely outlast Obama in power.
What explains Obama’s high tolerance for humiliation and mass atrocities in Syria? The Syrian regime is Iran’s proxy, propped up by billions of dollars each year. And Obama wanted nothing to interfere with the prospects for a nuclear deal with Iran. He was, as Hof has said, “reluctant to offend the Iranians at this critical juncture.” So the effective concession of Syria as an Iranian zone of influence is just one more cost of the president’s legacy nuclear agreement.
Never mind that Iran will now have tens of billions of unfrozen assets to strengthen Assad’s struggling military. And never mind that Assad’s atrocities are one of the main recruiting tools for the Islamic State and other Sunni radicals. All of which is likely to extend a war that no one can win, which has incubated regional and global threats — and thrown a small body in a red T-shirt against a distant shore.
Russian military experts in Syria are expanding air bases and runways http://read.bi/1KAaAYt pic.twitter.com/wdcff6qfL9Originally Posted by OUTLAW 09
MFA Russia ✔ @mfa_russia
Russia never concealed deliveries of military equipment to official Syrian authorities in the fight against terrorism http://sputniknews.com/politics/2015...#ixzz3l3dl4DhD …
http://www.bne.eu/content/story/stol...lly-be-syrious
STOLYPIN: Can Putin really be Syrious?
Mark Galeotti of New York University
September 7, 2015
While Russian forces remain bogged down in the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine, prop up unrecognized regimes in Abkhazia, South Ossetia and Trasnistria, and wander (and occasionally shell) the uplands of the North Caucasus, can the Kremlin really be committing itself to a substantive military deployment to Syria? Common sense would seem to say no, but the facts on the ground are beginning to suggest the answer is a – conditional – yes. Is there a rationale to such a move, or is this simply a piece of knee-jerk international posturing? And what might it portend?
Boots on the sand
Russia has long had a limited commitment in Syria – one of its last real allies, after all, alongside such equally threadbare assets as Nicaragua, Venezuela and some grudging Central Asian “’stans.” It has a very small naval installation at Tartus, not the “naval base” some allege but a limited logistical point amounting to a pier and some warehouses. More generally, though, it is clear that Russian advisers and technical personnel have been present, especially in providing intelligence support, through flying drones – probably from Latakia air base – and manning radio-electronic interception stations. Beyond that, as Assad continues to buy Russian kit, technicians have come to train Syrians to use it, and military advisers have helped plan operations.
So far, so (relatively) limited. However, there are not clear and compelling indicators that Russia is upping the stakes. At the very time that Moscow is showing growing real concern about the scope for Islamic State (IS) to penetrate and galvanize the insurgency in the North Caucasus, it is also talking up its own role fighting jihad in the Middle East. Putin recently, while noting that Russia is “already giving Syria quite serious help with equipment and training soldiers, with our weapons” dismissed as “premature” any talk of a deeper military presence. Rather, he talked up the creation of “some kind of an international coalition to fight terrorism and extremism”.
Meanwhile, a variety of news outlets and other sources have shown Russian Naval Infantry in squad and platoon strength in Damascus, Homs and Latakia, and recordings suggest Russians crewing brand-new BTR-82A combat vehicles, a scarce sight so far even in the Motherland’s forces. Other, less open sources have whispered of teams of elite commandos in Damascus, possibly army Spetsnaz, maybe the shadowy Zaslon unit of the Foreign Intelligence Service.
Latakia, with its port and air base, appears to be one of the foci of Russia’s increasingly muscular presence, but talk of “thousands” of troops being deployed appears premature. First of all, assuming Moscow wants to retain a surge capacity in the Donbas, its expeditionary forces – the paratroopers, Naval Infantry marines and Spetsnaz – are operating at close to capacity.
The Black Sea Fleet’s Ropucha-class landing ship Tsezar Kunikov appears to have set sail for Syria, with a complement of at least 300 marines from the 810th Independent Naval Infantry Brigade (based in Crimea). Recently the Alligator-class Nikolai Filchenkov likewise travelled to Latakia, albeit with a load of trucks, materiel and combat vehicles rather than personnel, and the Ropucha-class Azov with materiel. Although it would be possible to airlift in men and vehicles, this is expensive and would tie up a large proportion of Russia’s air fleet. Instead, then, we are talking about a shift from perhaps a few hundred technical personnel and advisers – including officers from GRU military intelligence and the FSB security service – to fewer than a thousand, but including well-trained, frontline combat troops.
A Quixotic Deployment?
Why go in now, arguably at the very time the Syrian regime’s prospects appear gloomiest? Perhaps that is the point, but when it comes down to it, what is Assad to Putin? There is no evidence of a particular personal tie, and while it would embarrass Moscow if an ally fell, it is hard to regard this as more than a 24-hour wonder. There are no strategic assets to be lost – Tartus is hardly worth mentioning – and nor is Damascus’s fate central to the Kremlin’s narrative of Russia’s national interests. Indeed, given that Syria is likely to be a roiling mess for years to come, would common sense not suggest extrication more than escalation?
The answer is, of course, yes.
If Moscow wants to look like a loyal patron, at least it could offer the Assads a nice McDacha mansion in the upscale Barvikha gated community and a chance to get out before the collapse. If Moscow wants to keep a friendly regime in place, it could even try to broker some suitable “everyone-against-IS” coalition to replace Assad. Of course, to do that it needs leverage – and here the logic, such as it is, of any escalation emerges.
The first and most basic point to remember is this: the Middle East doesn’t matter to Moscow. Nor, for that matter, does Africa or Latin America. China just about does. But essentially, all of the Kremlin’s policies are directed towards the West. Even policy towards China is really meant to fill in the gaps in credits and exports left and hopefully make the West jealous enough to reopen relations. It may sound arrogant and be uncomfortable come from a Westerner, but yes: it really is ‘All About Us’.
Putin is coming to the UN General Assembly in September, itself a big deal given that his last attendance was in 2005. With the prospects of an acceptable deal over the conflict in Donbas receding, with the Russian economy expected to continue to decline, he’s looking for his own “reset” and sees it in some civilizational anti-jihadist coalition.
For some time, Moscow has hoped that cooperation against IS and terrorism in general could be the leverage point to get the West to relax its tough line over Ukraine. The appointment in March of former FSB deputy director Oleg Syromolotov to a new deputy foreign minister for counter-terrorism cooperation position was an early indication, one which has borne little fruit.
So the Russians seem to be upping the ante, making Syria a battleground not so much for the preservation of an ally – though they will hardly mind if they also manage to save Assad – but instead the formation of an anti-jihadist coalition. That way Moscow does its best to wipe out IS militants in the Middle East, before they manage also to infiltrate the North Caucasus, and also makes its case to be the West’s ally against a common enemy.
It is unlikely to work. The West will gladly take what intelligence cooperation Russia offers – even while treating the fruits with a certain skepticism – and will hardly mourn any IS fighters killed by Russian bombs or Russian guns. Just as the US and Iran have an arm’s length understanding in Iraq against IS without becoming friends, so too a Russian role in Syria is not going to create any deep or lasting amity.
Nonetheless, that this is the Kremlin’s game plan says two things. First, that it is desperate to break out of its current impasse, for all its bullish claims. Second, that it does not understand the West, that it thinks everything is for sale, and that if only it can find the right offer, the sovereignty of Ukraine, the integrity of the global international order and justice for the dead of MH17 are all on the table.
Mark Galeotti is Professor of Global Affairs at the SPS Center for Global Affairs, New York University and Director of its Initiative for the Study of Emerging Threats. He writes the blog In Moscow’s Shadows (http://inmoscowsshadows.wordpress.com/) and tweets as @MarkGaleotti.
All lip service in comments by Kerry and DoS---
RA-86496 Russian Air Force Ilyushin IL62M allegedly today. Looks Greece is not closing the airspace. Or Bulgaria. https://twitter.com/ProtestSPb/statu...92218304294912 …
https://now.mmedia.me/lb/en/NewsRepo...kies-to-israel
Published: 7/09/2015 01:54 PM
Pro-Hezbollah daily: Russia will close Syria’s skies to Israel
Al-Akhbar boasted that Tel Aviv will face "the predicament of a resistance region in southern Syria that has Russian cover.”
BEIRUT – A pro-Hezbollah daily has boasted that Russia’s widely expected military intervention in Syria will prevent Israel from conducting further airstrikes in the country.
A report in Lebanese daily Al-Akhbar said Monday that Russia’s “participation in fighting in Syria will have an escalatory effect,” especially on the strategic level, where it will be “considered a show of strength to Israel and Turkey.”
“Israel, having understood the message even before receiving it formally, has realized that Syrian skies will be closed to Israeli planes,” the newspaper claimed.
A flurry of reports have emerged in recent weeks that Russia has been dispatching large numbers of military advisors to Syria and is planning to set up an airbase in the Latakia province to conduct airstrikes on behalf of the Bashar al-Assad regime.
An unnamed US official told Reuters over the weekend that Washington has detected “worrisome preparatory steps” by the Russians that could signal the country “is readying deployment of heavy military assets” in Syria.
Al-Akhbar—which firmly supports Hezbollah—further said that Tel Aviv “will face the predicament of a resistance region in southern Syria that has Russian cover.”
Israel has conducted a number of airstrikes in the Golan in recent months, most recently on August 21 following a rocket attack on Israel. Hezbollah, meanwhile, has repeatedly vowed that it has been developing a “resistance front” in the border region to confront Israel.
Israel’s Haaretz newspaper also tackled the effect of Moscow’s expected intervention on Tel Aviv’s policymaking regarding Syria, where the Jewish State has conducted a number of reported strikes against shipments of advances weapons headed for Hezbollah in Lebanon.
“The entry of Russia into the Syrian arena changes the rules of this game,” Haaretz’s defense and military analyst Amos Harel wrote in an article published Sunday.
The leading Israeli military journalist added that “if Russia is dispatching its jet fighters and establishing a new military base in Syria, Israel will have to deal with new and different kinds of constraints, especially if the aircraft are equipped with Russian air-to-air missiles.”
“Increased Russian military presence in the region may demand that Israel’s military intelligence undertake more forceful efforts to deal with this development.”
Last week, Israeli daily Yedioth Ahronoth reported that Russia would begin dispatching thousands of military personnel to Syria, adding that that Moscow’s aerial operations on behalf of the Bashar al-Assad regime would “represent a challenge to the Israeli Air Force's freedom of operation in the skies above the Middle East.”
Israel’s government has yet to make any official comment regarding the growing reports of Russia’s impending military intervention in Syria.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opini...a3a_story.html
Obama’s Syria achievement
By Fred Hiatt Editorial page editor
September 6 at 7:06 PM
This may be the most surprising of President Obama’s foreign-policy legacies: not just that he presided over a humanitarian and cultural disaster of epochal proportions, but that he soothed the American people into feeling no responsibility for the tragedy.
Starvation in Biafra a generation ago sparked a movement. Synagogues and churches a decade ago mobilized to relieve misery in Darfur. When the Taliban in 2001 destroyed ancient statues of Buddha at Bamiyan, the world was appalled at the lost heritage.
Today the Islamic State is blowing up precious cultural monuments in Palmyra, and half of all Syrians have been displaced — as if, on a proportional basis, 160 million Americans had been made homeless. More than a quarter-million have been killed. Yet the “Save Darfur” signs have not given way to “Save Syria.”
One reason is that Obama — who ran for president on the promise of restoring the United States’ moral stature — has constantly reassured Americans that doing nothing is the smart and moral policy. He has argued, at times, that there was nothing the United States could do, belittling the Syrian opposition as “former doctors, farmers, pharmacists and so forth.”
He has argued that we would only make things worse — “I am more mindful probably than most,” he told the New Republic in 2013, “of not only our incredible strengths and capabilities, but also our limitations.”
He has implied that because we can’t solve every problem, maybe we shouldn’t solve any. “How do I weigh tens of thousands who’ve been killed in Syria versus the tens of thousands who are currently being killed in the Congo?” he asked (though at the time thousands were not being killed in Congo).
On those rare occasions when political pressure or the horrors of Syrian suffering threatened to overwhelm any excuse for inaction, he promised action, in statements or White House leaks: training for the opposition, a safe zone on the Turkish border. Once public attention moved on, the plans were abandoned or scaled back to meaningless proportions (training 50 soldiers per year, no action on the Turkish border).
Perversely, the worse Syria became, the more justified the president seemed for staying aloof; steps that might have helped in 2012 seemed ineffectual by 2013, and actions that could have saved lives in 2013 would not have been up to the challenge presented by 2014. The fact that the woman who wrote the book on genocide, Samantha Power, and the woman who campaigned to bomb Sudan to save the people of Darfur, Susan Rice, could apparently in good conscience stay on as U.N. ambassador and national security adviser, respectively, lent further moral credibility to U.S. abdication.
Most critically, inaction was sold not as a necessary evil but as a notable achievement: The United States at last was leading with the head, not the heart, and with modesty, not arrogance. “Realists” pointed out that the United States gets into trouble when it lets ideals or emotions rule — when it sends soldiers to feed the hungry in Somalia, for example, only to lose them, as told in “ Black Hawk Down,” and turn tail.
The realists were right that the United States has to consider interests as well as values, must pace itself and can’t save everyone. But a values-free argument ought at least to be able to show that the ends have justified the means, whereas the strategic results of Obama’s disengagement have been nearly as disastrous as the human consequences.
When Obama pulled all U.S. troops out of Iraq, critics worried there would be instability; none envisioned the emergence of a full-blown terrorist state. When he announced in August 2011 that “the time has come for President Assad to step aside,” critics worried the words might prove empty — but few imagined the extent of the catastrophe: not just the savagery of chemical weapons and “barrel bombs,” but also the Islamic State’s recruitment of thousands of foreign fighters, its spread from Libya to Afghanistan, the danger to the U.S. homeland that has alarmed U.S. intelligence officials, the refugees destabilizing Europe.
Even had Obama’s policy succeeded in purely realist terms, though, something would have been lost in the anesthetization of U.S. opinion. Yes, the nation’s outrage over the decades has been uneven, at times hypocritical, at times self-serving.
But there also has been something to be admired in America’s determination to help — to ask, even if we cannot save everyone in Congo, can we not save some people in Syria? Obama’s successful turning of that question on its head is nothing to be proud of.
Last edited by OUTLAW 09; 09-07-2015 at 03:51 PM.
If an American journalist can see this developing just why cannot Kerry, the entire 700 person NSC, and Obama see this coming at them???
The Russian Deployment To Syria Is About To Make Things Much Worse
15:06 (GMT)
The Interpreter's editor-in-chief Michael Weiss has been following the Russian military deployment to Syria, and has written two articles assessing the evidence for The Daily Beast. On September 1, the size of Russia's growing military presence in Syria was small but alarming:
On August 22, the Bosphorus Naval News website showed the Alligator-class Russian ship Nikolai Filchenkov, part of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet, two days earlier passing through Istanbul’s famed waterway en route to an unknown location in the Mediterranean (hint, hint).
But what was remarkable about the Filchenkov was that military equipment was visible on deck—namely, Kamaz trucks and, judging by the tarpaulin outlines, at least four BTR infantry fighting vehicles. (This doesn’t include any matériel that might have been stored in the ship’s below-deck cargo hold.)
On August 24, the Oryx Blog, which tracks military dynamics in the Middle East and North Africa, discovered that at least one BTR-82A had turned up in the coastal province of Latakia, where Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad’s family hails from and which has lately been contested, impressively, by Jaysh al-Fatah, or the Army of Conquest, a collection of Islamist rebels groups including Jabhat al Nusra, the official al Qaeda franchise in Syria.
So important to Assad is fortifying Latakia against rebel assault that his regime has mounted a significant counteroffensive made up of the Syrian Arab Army, the praetorian Republican Guard, and the National Defense Force, a consortium of sectarian militias constructed, trained, and financed by Iran’s elite Revolutionary Guards Corps-Quds Force.
By September 5, however, evidence suggested that Russian troops were positioned at their naval base in Tartus and in their new deployment in Latakia, but also in Damascus. Russian airforce was also reportedly patrolling the skies of Syria's northern Idlib province:
The opposition-linked website All4Syria seems to corroborate such eyewitness accounts. Many residents of Damascus, it claimed, have “observed in the first three days of September a noticeable deployment of Iranian and Russian elements in the neighborhoods of Baramkeh, al-Bahsa, and Tanzim Kfarsouseh.” The Venezia Hotel in al-Bahsa “has been turned into a military barracks for the Iranians.”
Such news comes amid a flurry of reports that Russia has made plans for a direct military intervention in Syria’s four-year civil war and may actually have started one already. The New York Times reported Saturday that Russia has sent prefabricated housing units, capable of sheltering as many as 1,000 military personnel, and a portable air traffic control station to another Syrian airbase in Latakia. That coastal province, the Assad family’s ancestral home, has already seen Russian troops caught on video operating BTR-82 infantry fighting vehicles against anti-Assad rebels, atop rumors that Moscow may be deploying an “expeditionary force,” including Russian pilots who would fly combat missions.
They may already be doing so. A social media account affiliated with the al-Qaeda franchise Jabhat al-Nusra posted images of what appeared to be Russian Air Force jets and drones flying in the skies of Syria’s northwest Idlib province. They were, specifically, the Mig-29 Fulcrum, the Sukhoi Su-27 Flanker, the Su-34 Fullback, and the Pchela-1T drone. These images were analyzed as credible by the specialist website The Aviationist, which also noted that “during the past days, Flightradar24.com has exposed several flights of a Russian Air Force… Il-76 airlifter (caught by means of its Mode-S transponder) flying to and from Damascus using radio call sign ‘Manny 6,’ most probably supporting the deployment of a Russian expeditionary force.”
As Weiss noted, the terrorist group ISIS is not in Idlib province -- preliminary evidence suggests, then, that the Russian intention is not to kill terrorists but to combat all forces opposed to Syrian President Bashar al Assad, including moderate units which are nominally supported by the West:
ISIS featured the use of MANPADS (anti-aircraft shoulder missiles) again in their very new video from #Sinai #Egypt pic.twitter.com/KPJQNUTVlY
Putin is now calling out Obama with his Syrian Express naval operation in full swing and the parallel airlift starting-----
Putin is going all-in for his boy Assad. To show Obama as weak, powerless, and unreliable. Because he can. He knows it. The world watches.
RU Foreign Ministry: "No, there are no RU soldiers in Syria, EU spreads this rumor and it is just as untrue as the rumors about Ukraine"
Notice the Russian weaponization of information at work--core of the Russian non linear warfare and the WH says absolutely nothing.
Haaretz.com ✔ @haaretzcom
WATCH: Russia holds military drill as experts in Syria inspect and expand air bases http://dlvr.it/C4v59P pic.twitter.com/5jmTFjpTNb
More Russian ships through the Bosphorous today https://twitter.com/YorukIsik/status/640922550546120708 …
More Russian ships covering their bulky cargo with tarps.
Built in Yantar Zavod in Kaliningrad, 50-year-old Saratov is equipped with bow and stern ramps for unloading vehicles pic.twitter.com/lqfbRamyCe
Tapir class Saratov 150 hoisted 'Stay Clear of Me' signal flag, on the Bosphorus pic.twitter.com/vgi2x2CS4x
BSF landing ship Saratov packed to the gunnels with military equipment en route to #Syria @bellingcat @IHS4DefRiskSec pic.twitter.com/Wnx7AmlBN3
SyrianExpress continues. Project 1171 BSF Alligator class landing ship Saratov 150 transits southbound Bosphorus pic.twitter.com/8gU1sCCMaz
More Russian weaponization of information on Syria---tone is changing and getting harsher---
West meddled in social engineering in MidEast and results are knocking on its door. They try to drag RU into this" http://www.rus.rusemb.org.uk/fnapr/4527
AND more of the same Syrian weaponization information theme---
Sputnik International
17:17 07.09.2015(updated 18:20 07.09.2015)
Western media earlier reported that Russia had allegedly made a deal with the United States and Saudi Arabia on ousting Syrian leader Bashar Assad.
MOSCOW (Sputnik) — Russia considers recent media reports indicating changes in its stance on Syria and the future of President Bashar Assad as false allegations aimed at shifting responsibility for the failure of Western policies in the Middle East, the Russian Foreign Ministry said Monday.
"Russia consistently and determinedly supports the strict implementation of the Geneva communique on Syria adopted on June 30, 2012, adhering the norms and principles of the international law and respecting the sovereignty of other states," ministry's spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said in a statement.
"I would like to reiterate that Russia does not practice social engineering, we do not appoint or dismiss foreign presidents, being it on our own will or in agreement with somebody else. It concerns Syria and other states in the region, which are able to decide their future by themselves," Zakharova stressed.
Russia Never Concealed Hardware Deliveries to Syrian Government
Syria has been mired in civil war since 2011 as government forces loyal to President Assad have been fighting several opposition and radical Islamist militant groups, including Nusra Front and Islamic State.
A number of Western countries have long supported what they call "moderate" rebel fighters, while Russia has repeatedly stated that Assad is the legitimate president of Syria, and that the people of Syria must choose their government and leaders without outside intervention.
In August, the Syrian president said that he highly appreciated Russia's assistance, by which Moscow had proved its firm position in supporting Damascus during the military conflict.
http://sputniknews.com/politics/2015...#ixzz3l4fTVk00
Humor---
We are not sending arms to Syria. We are sending legs, bodies & heads too.
A Russian Antonov 124 flying into Latakia, Syria today. One of two tracked by @GeordieNick89 https://twitter.com/GeordieNick89/st...33715770777600 …
Real reason Russians in Syria—check the pipelines that run through Syria.
pic.twitter.com/CJNNtyOAfG
Russian military cargo ships Saratov, Ktachenko and Korolev go to #Tartus passing through #Bosphorus. #Syria pic.twitter.com/ZhZbDSLIzp
Last edited by OUTLAW 09; 09-07-2015 at 05:45 PM.
On the same day @mfa_russia says "no RU troops in Syria", actual RU marines with guns post their [geotagged] photos. WHAT'S GOING ON??
Yesterday in Tartus, Syria: now we have the exact brigade id. pic.twitter.com/VsJEPz5XJQ
Confirmation of the Russian fighting in the posted video yesterday—fighting NOT advising……
Ukrainian activists saying this BTR-82 belongs to В/ч 61899 СЕВАСТОПОЛЬСКАЯ 27 ОМСБр pic.twitter.com/NrCsumE3Hk
336 Baltic-navy brigade, now in Syria, was previously sent twice near the Ukraine border https://informnapalm.org/3133-podraz...yl-vtorzhenyya …
Last edited by OUTLAW 09; 09-07-2015 at 05:55 PM.
Aftermath of the deadly barrel bomb attack in Ariha earlier today. #Syria #Idlib pic.twitter.com/t05bjeAN5a
Michael Weiss ✔ @michaeldweiss
This--> Barrel Bombs, Not ISIS, Are the Greatest Threat to Syrians http://nyti.ms/1SNJi4N
Islamic State takes Syrian state's last oilfield
http://www.unian.info/world/1119739-...-oilfield.html … pic.twitter.com/6GAZ5qMrEh
Russian troops posting on vKontakte from Tartus, Syria yesterday …" http://ow.ly/RSOCz
BREAKING: #RUSSIA|N SUBMARINE WITH 20 ICBMs AND 200 #NUCLEAR WARHEAD IS SALING TO #SYRIA. http://www.debka.com/article/24873/R...iling-to-Syria …
Lavrov to Kerry: premature to discuss #Russia's military ops in #Syria. It's always premature, until it's too late. http://reut.rs/1iroobw
Last edited by OUTLAW 09; 09-07-2015 at 06:36 PM.
Druze Shk. Balous in leaked video before he was killed accuses Ali Mamlouk and regime of planning to kill him.
http://www.aljazeera.net/home/Getpag...7-f52a52435338 …
New Assad recruiting campaign : "are you between 18-45? Can you operate a weapon? Come and get armed"
Last edited by OUTLAW 09; 09-07-2015 at 06:52 PM.
http://www.interpretermag.com/september-7-2015/#9853
First Reports of 'Cargo 200' from Syria Not Verified; Russians Are in Syria But No Confirmation of Deaths
18:17 (GMT)
The first "Cargo 200" or soldier Russian soldier killed in action has been reported from the war in Syria, Joininfo.ua, Press.today and Riasv.ru reported September 5.
Yet The Interpreter has found that the stories appear to be either garbled or deliberate disinformation and cannot be verified.
"Russia's army is letting itself be known due to its losses not only in the Donbass but in the Middle East where the conflict with ISIS continues," says Pressa.today. At least 10 Russian Federation Armed Forces infantry were killed in battle, says Pressa.today, citing Russian social media (translation by The Interpreter):
A Russian blogger, Yelena Weber, claimed on Facebook that the bodies of as many as 103 Russian mliitary who died in a missile strike in the Syrian province of Raqqa were discussed at the military airport in Ain Issa.
The story is accompanied by pictures from social media of Russian paratroopers in their typical blue-and-white telnashka or t-shirt standing next to a poster of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and President Vladimir Putin.
Joinfo.ua doesn't supply a link to that Facebook, but then posts a screenshot of a Tweet from a Russian blogger @Shymanovski:
He made the tweet on September 4 and has it pinned it to the top of his feed now:
Translation: New Russian Series, "Moscow Doesn't Believe in Coffines." Season 2. Syria.
The reference is to a famous movie of the perestroika era, "Moscow Doesn't Believe in Tears" and in this context refers to the unwillingness of Russians to believe their country's soldiers are deployed -- and killed -- abroad.
Joininfo.ua showed Shymanovski's tweet juxtaposed to Weber's Facebook post, but it turns out it's not @Shymanovski who has tweeted the link to her, but visa versa:
We found Weber's post on Facebook.
Weber's Facebook page shows she is a Russian-language blogger based in Neuhardenberg, Germany. It's not her original report, but a copy of a post in a group in the Russian social media network VKontakte called "Tipichny Dombas," which is a pejorative version of the term "Donbass," i.e. which translates to"Typical Dumbass," with the comment, "Well, it's started!" She didn't link to the group, but we found their post here.
She -- like other bloggers and groups -- copied verbatim the text posted September 5 (translation by The Interpreter).
The Turkish authorities reported that 45 Pskov paratroopers became victims of a rocket strike during an operation on the territory of Syria. As a result of shelling of a training camp in the Syrian province of Raqqa, five servicemen from the GRU spetsnaz were killed. According to information from Associated Press, as a result of shelling 10 marines from Vladivostok were killed.
As Press TV reports siting a local television network, the bodies of the remaining soldiers remain unidentified although it is known that military came to the eastern and northern military districts of districts of Russia. Another 70 servicemen, the majority of whom are paratroopers, were wounded, some of them are in serious condition.
According to the TV channel, more than 40 units of armor and military trucks were destroyed durint the shelling, including 12 T-72 tanks, and three Ka-51 military plans and two IL-76 transport planes were burnt.
Even members of "Tipichny Dombas" commented that they thought the story was fake, but others said it must be true because Russia always denied its presence in foreign wars and then it was later confirmed.
But we didn't find any such report on the AP of any Russian military deaths.
The New York Times quoted AP on September 4 in a story about the Russian presence, without any such references to Russians killed in action:
Russia has sent a military advance team to Syria and is taking other steps the United States fears may signal that President Vladimir V. Putin is planning to vastly expand his military support for President Bashar al-Assad of Syria, administration officials said Friday.
The Russian moves, including the recent transport of prefabricated housing units for hundreds of people to a Syrian airfield and the delivery of a portable air traffic control station there, are another complicating factor in Secretary of State John Kerry’s repeated efforts to enlist Mr. Putin’s support for a diplomatic solution to the bloody conflict in Syria.
The Russians have also filed military overflight requests with neighboring countries through September.
The story mentions Putin speaking in Vladivostok at the recent Eastern Economic Forums, but nothing about any soldiers from that city who were killed.
As for the "Turkish authorities," we couldn't find any credible news report of this statement, either. Independent Russian media has reported the Russian presence in Syria, but not any "Cargo 200". Novaya Gazeta did make the point, however, that the news reminded them of the early days of the war in Ukraine:
Dmitry Peskov, press secretary of the president of Russian denies the participation of Russian Armed Forces in the conflict in Syria, and official NATO representatives are keeping silent for the time being. The situation around the the Russian military presence is technically reminiscent of the onset of the hybrid war on the territory of Ukraine. Incidentally, parallel to the first rumors of the appearance of the Russian corps in Syria observers recorded a sharp de-escalation of the conflict in the Donbass. It's as if the specialists in conducting "hybrid war" have been drawn away to a new project.
It is mainly alternative Ukrainian press that have reported this "Cargo 200 from Syria" story and some Russian bloggers and commenters, such as one reader named "SALO SPEC" who posted the same exact text as Elena Weber regarding the bodies of "103 Russian military" and the "Turkish authorities" on the "45 Pskov paratroopers" in the comments section belowthe Novaya Gazeta story,
Continued........
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