Appears that the US does not quite understand who they are actually supporting in Syria right now.....how can they get it so wrong and especially when supposedly the CIA is working with them.......
Hezbollah media post exclusive pics taken inside Menage airbase taken by YPG indicate the two militias coordinating.
pic.twitter.com/c9KjKLPhzS
Classifying Nusra & ISIL in one group is calculated move. They know Nusra (traditional & effective enemy of ISIL) will not fight under US/RU
Day1 after the #Munich deal.
People in #Daraya celebrate #Assad's mercy! ...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8rSx6h4N8ro …
pic.twitter.com/oAN7syNdl2
For those that do not want to believe there is an intertwining of Russian non linear warfare being conducted in eastern Ukraine and now in Syria....there is...
Echoes of Eastern Ukraine: A ceasefire in #Syria, if achieved, could freeze in place #Assad territorial gains won w critical Russian support...
EXACTLY as has the Minsk 2 agreements.....this was especially evident when Russian military forces attacked and captured Debaltseve which was to be under Ukrainian control TWO DAYS after Minsk 2 was signed BECAUSE Putin fought Merkel verbally for it in Minsk and had announced at a press reference during his Norway visit that the Russians had captured it and stated the UAF had been beaten by nothing but "truck drivers and miners".
BUT lo and behold the Russian planned attack which was to last two days ended up being a hard fought three weeks and the supposedly Putin announced surrounded and captured 2.5K UAF retrograded out of Debaltseve with minimum losses AND Russian military loses were actually high.
Last edited by OUTLAW 09; 02-12-2016 at 11:19 AM.
After Flawed Munich Agreement, Air Strikes Continue
http://www.interpretermag.com/after-...ikes-continue/ …
pic.twitter.com/ylEa8W2Nxv
But the ceasefire agreement is neither immediate nor comprehensive, with the "cessation of hostilities" to commence in one week.
According to the text of the agreement:
The International Syria Support Group (ISSG) members agreed that a nationwide cessation of hostilities must be urgently implemented, and should apply to any party currently engaged in military or paramilitary hostilities against any other parties other than Daesh, Jabhat al-Nusra, or other groups designated as terrorist organizations by the United Nations Security Council. The ISSG members commit to exercise influence for an immediate and significant reduction in violence leading to the nationwide cessation of hostilities.
An ISSG task force is to be established in order to "delineate the territory held by Daesh, JaN and other groups designated as terrorist organizations by the United Nations Security Council"
The problem here is that Jabhat al-Nusra (JaN) operate alongside various other rebel groups and are spread across swathes of opposition-held territory, over much of which they do not impose exclusive control. This means that it would be extremely hard to target JaN alone without attacking other opposition groups.
It will also have to be seen how effective the task force would be in effectively monitoring and controlling Russian and regime air operations, given that both Assad and Putin have continuously lied about the nature of their targets, claiming that all air strikes have been directed against ISIS, JaN or "other terrorist groups."
The Russian foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, subtly mocked the complaints of these practices during the press conference.
The Interpreter translates:
"All these months we have had a rather emotional discussion over who is carrying out strikes on the right or wrong targets. We have repeatedly offered to deal with these issues professionally. Now, with the agreement that the task group will define the areas which are held by ISIS and Jabhat al-Nusra, and also other terrorist groups, we have made a very important practical step in this direction."
Lavrov also said that it was important to note that the agreement called for the full implementation of prior UN Security Council resolutions, including demands the cessation of the "flow of terrorists, militants from foreign states, the illegal oil trade and other contraband."
This has been previously been used an excuse by the Kremlin for the targeting of vital roads to the Turkish border, most notably the border town of Azaz, through which thousands of refugees are now passing to escape the fighting north of Aleppo.
It should be noted that Lavrov did not mention the UN Security Council demand actually referred to in the text of the agreement, which called for "the end of any discriminate use of weapons."
Russia has been not only conducting indiscriminate bombing of population centres, often using unguided bombs, but also using cluster bombs on a regular basis.
It was particularly strange to see US Secretary of State John Kerry, sitting next to Lavrov, describing the effects of the air campaign against Aleppo while failing to mention that the jets conducting these strikes belong not to the Assad regime, but the Russian Air Force.
Kerry said that:
"The regime of Bashar al-Assad was violating international law by trying to force surrender through starvation, and with the help of indiscriminate bombing the regime intensified its assault in Aleppo, killing civilians and forcing more than 60 thousand Syrians to flee their homes in search of refuge across the Turkish border. And it is our perception that rather than hurting Daesh, this process is in fact empowering Daesh to take advantage of the chaos."
Nor is any mention of the huge role played in the war by ground forces from Iran, which is a party to last night's agreement.
Indeed, Kerry concluded by saying reaffirming the importance of Russia to the process;
"We also agreed in the ISSG that there's no way to institute a ceasefire, effectively, and no way to produce the access we want for humanitarian assistance, without all of the ISSG members working with Russia and others in an effort to guarantee that the access is provided and that cessation of hostilities actually takes hold. To that end, we have agreed, all of us, to work with Russia in a way that deals with the political, the humanitarian and the military components of this challenge."
Meanwhile, the morning after the announcement, what can we see so far of progress towards a ceasefire?
BOMBINGS still continue all over Syria and targeting mainly FSA positions...no change there in the Russian position and neither Kerry and or Obama has any idea how to stop Russia.....
Reported video shows two barrel bombs being dropped by regime helicopters on the rebel-held Damascus suburb of Daraya this morning.
There are also reports of Russian air strikes the Aleppo, Homs and Daraa provinces:
Meanwhile Turkey's foreign minister, Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu, said today that neither the ceasefire will hold, nor humanitarian access be secured, unless Russia ceases air strikes on opposition groups.
Other observers are equally sceptical:
Last edited by OUTLAW 09; 02-12-2016 at 02:01 PM.
A long read worth completely reading as it has an excellent analysis of the intertwining of Russia and IS that the western MSM has not wanted to cover for some reason.....
https://kyleorton1991.wordpress.com/...islamic-state/
Russia is No Partner Against the Islamic State
By Kyle Orton February 12, 2016
This morning, Russia ostensibly agreed to help the U.S. impose a ceasefire in Syria within a week—on the way to a negotiated settlement. This could not work right now, even if Russia intended it to. But Russia does not. Russia’s role since intervening in Syria in late September 2015 has been to bolster the regime of Bashar al-Assad and a primary tactic in that overarching strategic aim has been the attempt to destroy all opposition to Assad that the international community could possibly deal with, and to create a binary situation where there is only the regime and jihadi-Salafist terrorists, primarily the Islamic State (IS), and secondarily—in areas where they do not threaten key regime interests—Jabhat an-Nusra (al-Qaeda). Moscow will eventually turn on IS, but in the short-term Russia has engaged in indirect coordination with IS to weaken the rebels and push them out of key strategic areas, notably in eastern Aleppo where Russia bombed rebels out of the way who had been holding IS out for years. On Tuesday, Foreign Policy reported on another aspect of this Russia-IS collaboration that aims to empower the takfiris in the short-term as part of the long-term plan, also supported by Iran, to secure the Assad regime’s longevity.
Funding Takfiris
Foreign Policy reports:
The Tuweinan gas facility, which is located roughly 60 miles southwest of the Islamic State’s de facto capital of Raqqa, is the largest such facility in Syria. It was built by Russian construction company Stroytransgaz, which is owned by billionaire Gennady Timchenko, a close associate of Putin. … The Syrian government originally awarded the contract to construct the Tuweinan facility to Stroytransgaz in 2007. The construction utilized a Syrian subcontractor, Hesco, which was owned by Russian-Syrian dual national George Haswani. …
A senior Turkish official said that after its seizure, Stroytransgaz, through its subcontractor Hesco, continued the facility’s construction with the Islamic State’s permission. He also claimed that Russian engineers have been working at the facility to complete the project.
Syrian state-run newspaper Tishreen published a report appearing to corroborate this claim. In January 2014, after the facility was captured by the Islamic State, the paper cited Syrian government sources, saying that Stroytransgaz had completed 80 percent of the project and expected to hand over the facility to the regime during the second half of the year. The article didn’t mention that the facility was under the control of the Islamic State.
According to David Butter, … who has seen a letter written by George Haswani explaining the details of the project, the facility’s first phase of production started towards the end of 2014, and it became fully operational during 2015. “Some of the natural gas goes to the Aleppo power station, which operates under the Islamic State’s protection, and the remainder is pumped to Homs and Damascus,” he said.
Abu Khalid[, a member of a rebel brigade that took over the facility in 2013,] said that Russian engineers still work at the facility, and Haswani brokered a deal with the Islamic State and the regime for mutually beneficial gas production from the facility. “IS allowed the Russian company to send engineers and crew in return for a big share in the gas and extortion money,” he said … “Employees of the Russian company were changing their shifts via a military base in Hama governorate.” …
The details of the Tuweinan deal brokered between the Islamic State and Hesco was first reported by the Syrian media collective Raqqa Is Being Slaughtered Silently in October 2014.
Much of the DNA of this story—that Syria’s energy sector is effectively a joint enterprise of the Assad regime and IS, with a strong official Russian role in facilitation—was already known.
All the way back in March 2014 I was able to write of the regime using oil deals as one facet of its provocation (what the Russians call provokatsiya), the Moscow-perfected tactic of having your terrorist enemies do your work for you, something that has served Russian intelligence since the 1870s. By helping fund IS, Assad—and his allies in Moscow and Tehran—intended to empower IS to destroy or absorb all the other insurgents, allowing Assad present himself to the population and the world as the last line of defence. It had worked for Algeria and by the end of 2014 it appeared to be working in Syria, too.
For Tuweinan specifically, as Foreign Policy summarized:
In October 2015, the Financial Times reported that the gas produced in the plant was sent to the Islamic State-held thermal power plant in Aleppo. The deal provides [per day:] 50 megawatts of electricity for the regime, while the Islamic State receives 70 megawatts of electricity and [is able to produce] 300 barrels of condensate. The engineers who worked at the plant told the Financial Times that Hesco also sends the Islamic State roughly $50,000 every month to protect its valuable equipment [worth millions of dollars].
These cash and in-kind payments (often of specialist equipment and technicians) from Assad to IS, in exchange for oil and gas, were replicated all across the areas under the caliphate. The integration of the Assad regime and IS on energy matters was markedly increased after the fall of Tadmor and the adjacent, ancient city of Palmyra to IS in May 2015, when IS captured several gas facilities in the surrounding Homs desert.
Gas supplies ninety percent of Syria’s power grid and by the end of the summer, as The Financial Times reported, IS controlled “at least eight power plants in Syria, including three hydroelectric facilities and the country’s largest gas plant.”
The largest gas plant under IS control is in Deir Ezzor, called “Conoco” after the American company that build it, and is the one processing plant IS holds. Conoco is used by IS to produce gas canisters for domestic consumption by the population it controls and to provide fuel for a regime-controlled power station in Jandar, Homs.
IS has several times gained control of parts of the Shaer gas field, about ninety miles north-west of Palmyra, which supplies just under half of Syria’s electricity. “Marwan,” a Sunni engineering graduate who has now fled Syria, told The Financial Times that after IS took Palmyra, “many of his friends working at Hayyan, near Shaer, wanted to flee. ‘The army wouldn’t let them. They said who ever tried to run will be shot dead’.”
One of the most comprehensive attempts to put some numbers on this was undertaken by Matthew Reed of Foreign Reports in late October. Reed showed that the regime was receiving 20,000 barrels per day (BPD) of oil from an unnamed source. If IS was filling that gap from its estimated 50,000 BPD production, it meant the regime was paying forty percent of IS’s hydrocarbon income. If Reed’s estimate that IS was selling oil for between $15 and $25 per barrel is correct, then Assad was transferring between $300,000 and $500,000 to IS per day either directly in cash or in other resources needed to keep its statelet alive.
(While the oil question is important to assessing the Assad regime’s politico-military strategy, it should be noted that the oil angle of IS’s finances is overworked in general and the situation has changed and varied wildly over the last year. For example, documents from early 2015 showed that IS was making much less from oil than had been believed, though there seems to have been a recovery of sorts by late 2015.)
Nor is the Russian element to this exactly a revelation. U.S. Treasury sanctions in November blacklisted Haswani, essentially for funding terrorism as the Assad regime’s “middleman” in the hydrocarbon trade that transferred Syrian State funds to IS. European Union sanctions had already been applied to Haswani for “orchestrating millions of dollars’ worth of secret oil and gas trades between” Assad and IS.
The Treasury sanctions last fall laid bare the very strong Putin-approved Russian element in the Assad regime’s mechanisms for funding IS, from banks to companies. Those sanctions listed HESCO as a designated entity, a company that was essentially the Syrian wing of Stroytransgaz, a Russian sub-entity of the Volga Group. Both Stroytransgaz and Volga had Treasury sanctions applied in April 2014, as did their owner, Timchenko, for their close relations to the Kremlin and provision of services enabling Vladimir Putin’s criminal aggression against Ukraine.
Turkey and the Propaganda War
The recent accusations from Moscow against Turkey, that Ankara was colluding with IS in trading oil, can therefore be filed in the Freudian category.
After Turkey shot down a Russian jet that violated its airspace on November 24, Moscow increased the volume of its propaganda—already extensive—that said Ankara was in cahoots with IS.
It is true that Turkey allowed an open border for a long time to jihadi-Salafists, including those joining IS, and it is also true that to this day Turkey regards a Kurdish State on its border as a greater threat to its national security than IS. But Russia had been sending jihadi-Salafists into Syria; it was a bit rich to be complaining that Turkey had let them.
Moreover, Russia’s propaganda was on its face absurd: inter alia the Defence Ministry named the three crossings IS was supposedly smuggling oil across into Turkey; one was in Idlib miles from any IS position, one was in Iraqi Kurdistan, and the other is held by the increasingly-obviously Russia-aligned PYD/PKK.
Continued.....
Presumably #TOW strike by Faylaq al Sham taking out a tank in Tal Jibbin, N. #Aleppo front.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uRU0LXTB7UI …
ISSG unanimously commits to immediately facilitate full implementation of UNSC Res 2254
http://www.un.org/sg/offthecuff/index.asp?nid=4369 …
Will be interesting to see if Russia stops the indiscriminate targeting and killing of civilians as per 2254....
Sham Front using a field gun to shell enemy forces in Khirbat al-Naqus: #Ghab plain
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=alujnFWH2WI … http://wikimapia.org/#lang=en&lat=35...22088&z=14&m=b …
FSA mortar shells the Gerbel checkpoint west of #Harbinafsah
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vvRsDS77WeI …
http://wikimapia.org/#lang=en&lat=34...10946&z=18&m=b … southern #Hama
Mosques damaged in #Aleppo by #Assad & #Putin's air raids
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FN8VVzPuVFg …
Rebel TOW missile destroys a bulldozer on the #Bashkuy front
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C5R-EX5-Ke4 …
http://wikimapia.org/#lang=en&lat=36...21429&z=14&m=b … #Aleppo #Syria
Last edited by OUTLAW 09; 02-12-2016 at 02:20 PM.
In addition to IRAM rockets Assad helicopters dropped about 20 bombs on #Daraya so far today. #Damascus #Syria
Death toll of this morning's heavy #Russia|n airstrikes on the rebel-held town of Al-Ghantou, #Homs has risen to 17.
Russian destruction of Syria is Chechnya on steroids......
http://www.middleeasteye.net/columns...36303678#.dpuf
Russia’s scorched earth policy in Syria
Lara Nelson
Thursday 11 February 2016 12:38 UTC
Recent regime advances across Syria demonstrate Assad's complete dependence on Russian air strikes and foreign Shia militias
“It’s like Stalingrad. They raze entire areas. Then they send in the militias,” Yamen Ahmad, an FSA commander in Latakia, described. He was in Selma, Latakia province, leading his brigade when the regime took back the area from the opposition in January. “There is no way to resist this scorched earth policy the Russians are deploying with their strikes across Syria.”
Since Russia began its strikes in Syria on 30 September, the regime has been able to make some gains across the country. Despite declaring that their military goal was strictly to target ISIS in Syria, studies have clearly documented their strikes have the main purpose of supporting the Assad regime’s military operations on the ground against moderate opposition forces, and have done little to seriously combat ISIS.
“Russia is simply acting as the regime’s air force against our moderate forces now,” said spokesman for the FSA’s Southern Front and defected officer Major Issam Al Reis. In Aleppo, the frontline between the regime and ISIS is a de facto safe zone, while they both focus their weaponry on opposition forces. As one media activist on the ground observed in the recent battle for Aleppo: “During the north Aleppo offensive, not a single Russian bomb hit ISIS - not a single ISIS attack hit Assad's front.”
Osama Abu Zeid, a legal advisor to the Free Syrian Army, returned from Syria three days ago. He described how Russian strikes were ignoring ISIS and in fact hitting Free Syrian Army forces while they were fighting ISIS in northern Aleppo countryside. He described the frontline between ISIS and the regime as “entirely peaceful”.
There is a clear pattern in military strategy when looking at the areas of recent gains in Latakia, Daraa and Aleppo. The regime was not able to make headway until the start of heavy Russian airstrikes which then pave the way for regime forces that are now composed almost entirely of foreign militia. In the Selma offensive, Yamen Ahmad stated that 75 percent of regime forces were foreigners. When they intercepted the radio communication, the orders were coming in Persian while the general chatter between the forces was in an unrecognisable language he described as “from mid-Asia”.
Scorched earth
In the south, the regime took over the town of Sheikh Miskin, in Daraa, which had previously been held by the FSA’s Southern Front for over a year. The regime’s operation began on 16 October, 2015, however, no significant progress was made until after 28 November when Russian air strikes started in the area. Russia conducted around 800 heavy air strikes on the area until it fell on 26 January, 2016. They are operating a “scorched earth policy that no force could stand up to,” the FSA’s Southern Front spokesman Major Issam Al Reis stated.
A Russian agency posted a video titled “Dead City Sheikh Miskin” which captured the grim aftermath of the operation with the utter devastation of the city. The FSA Southern Front’s statement after the fall of Sheikh Miskin, said that this operation was “not a success story for the regime but a demonstration of how much it relies on Russia as its airforce, and foreign militia as its ground troops in order to recontrol areas of the country.” Al Reis commented: “The reality is that regime is not able to reclaim one metre of land without Russia fully destroying the area with its strikes.”
The military strategy in Selma held parallels to Sheikh Miskin. Yamen Ahmad described how the regime had been trying to take the area from the opposition for over three years. There had been over 50 battles but with little regime success, he told me. When the Russians intervened with their strikes “they burned the entire area,” he said. In 40 hours there were over 150 airstrikes, in addition to 1,500 Grad missile strikes. “There was no way to resist this fire power.”
By the end of this operation around 80 percent of buildings in the area had been damaged or destroyed. “You can barely find a building that is untouched by these strikes.” He described a similar dynamic in the operation over Al Noba mountain, Latakia province, where Russian strikes had been so heavy that “no tree had been left standing, the mountain was totally burned.” Twenty five air strikes had been dropped on a one-square-kilometre area. This was followed by cluster bombs and an unidentified weapon that burned entire areas: “everything it touched turned completely black”. Human Rights Watch issued a report this week documenting Russia’s ongoing use of “internationally banned cluster munitions” across Syria.
Aleppo is the same story. Osama Abu Zeid described the recent case of the village of Ritian in northern Aleppo countryside. The battle for this village started with eight hours of Russian air strikes, the militia (Iranian, Afghani, Lebanese Hezbollah) failed to move in to take the village so there were another 12 strikes, but again the militia’s ground operation failed, so Russia undertook another 10 airstrikes, until FSA forces withdrew and the militia were able to take the area. “Any areas are taken over solely because of the Russian strikes,” and only after “total destruction,” said Abu Zeid.
Once regained, civilians cannot return; the extent of the destruction makes the areas inhabitable: “Who wants to live in piles of rubble?” Al Reis asked me. Sheikh Miskeen is now empty. No civilians want to return as the city is completely destroyed, the same goes for Selma.
Aid agencies issued a report this week detailing that 40,000 people had been displaced from Aleppo since late January and the “number of displaced is likely to surpass 100,000” as the operation continues. Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu said on Wednesday that Russia is carrying out ethnic cleansing in Aleppo.
Militia ground forces
There is a stark contrast between the heavy Russian firepower and corresponding weakness of regime ground forces and therefore their reliance on Shia militia. It was Shia militia that recently broke the opposition siege of Nubl and Zahra in northern Aleppo. Videos were published of the foreign militia’s triumphal entry into the towns as they were greeted by the local people.
On Wednesday a video was leaked showing Hezbollah complaining that a news channel was broadcasting the Syrian army advance in southern Aleppo when it was Hezbollah forces. However, once these militias take over an area, they rarely stay to secure the area. Twenty days ago, Abu Noor was leading an operation in Al Hoor village west of Selma. Previously this area had been hit by heavy Russian air strikes. His forces prepared well for the operation, expecting a heavy defence. But when they took over the area, they only found six Syrian soldiers and their captain guarding the area. The militia which had previously been involved in the operation had moved on, leaving only a handful of Syrian soldiers to guard the area. It was revealed on pro-regime pages that the captain had even tried to flee the area in his car but found his tyres had been taken by someone needing spares.
Al Reis commented: “The nature of regime forces now is that they use foreign militia to capture an area. But these militia don’t stay to guard the area, they want to move on to areas where they can gain more spoils, take more women. They are not interested in guarding these empty ones. And there are hardly any Syrians to stay behind to do this job.”
Sustainability of advances?
The characteristic of these regime advances begs questions about their sustainability: can ground be held sustainably with such weak ground forces, just under the rain of Russian strikes? “As long as Russian planes are in the sky, they can demolish everything underneath them,” said Yaman Ahmad. But if this changes they will always be vulnerable.
“Their aim is to terrify both civilians and opposition fighters,” said Abu Zeid. The regime doesn’t have the ground forces to secure the areas so fear is now their only weapon to encourage surrender of opposition areas. This fear is useful to gain concessions within negotiations.
Despite these losses there remained optimism: “Comparing the amount of firepower Russia is using to the amount of land the regime is regaining, it would take 200 years for Russia to reclaim the whole of Syria,” said Al Reis, also pointing out that Russia’s scorched earth policy is only useful in urban areas, while they face difficulties in rural terrain.
Watching the devastation unfold
These victories are not a demonstration of regime power, but an expression of Russian brute strength reducing Syria to rubble and labelling it a regime victory.
The destruction, casualty numbers and displacement from these recent gains chimes with a well known rumour about Maher al-Assad, Bashar’s younger brother, commander of the 4th Division in Damascus: he who was rumoured to say that when his father was in power the population of Syria was eight million, and if it means reducing the population of 24 million to this number in order to crush the uprising, that’s what he would do.
Whether this comment it true or not, the reality is shaping up as such and it seems that Russian military strategy in Syria is aiding such a sentiment. Meanwhile, similar to the Russian deployment of their scorched earth policy in Stalingrad in World War II, Western powers are acting like their allies, standing by and watching the devastation unfold.
Last edited by OUTLAW 09; 02-12-2016 at 02:28 PM.
Comments from the FSA Southern Front....concerning Munich....
We greet the #Munich agreement with tentative optimism. We fully support anything that moves towards full implementation of UNSCR2254
But we remain skeptical when #Russia continues even today to bomb civilians & our moderate forces while they say they target "terrorists"
We call for concerted international pressure on #Russia to adhere to this agreement. There have been too many unimplemented empty statements
We have no faith in words any longer, it’s only concrete action that will make a difference to Syrians' lives at this dark time
Turkish Foreign Minister: if Russia does not stop airstrikes in Syria then there's no such thing as a ceasefireOriginally Posted by OUTLAW 09
FSA rebels in #Quneitra use Yugoslavian 120 mm M74 mortars vs. the regime.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UtaRyLVm6LI …
Russia's "reduction of violence" in #Naemeh this morning
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DOVP2UeOTgE …
#Day1 after the #Munich ceasefire deal.
Russian-sponsored firework going up across #Syria!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JvBgMBPTGSY …
Slat armored T-72 / Mercedes LS2624 (March 2015).
pic.twitter.com/oR6H9hcSZo
Russian Syria Express on the move again.....
Dvinitsa50 (Ex-Alican Deval) seems to have a new coat of paint. Rain makes it hard to tell but not flaking anymore.
Dvinitsa50 took a full 18 days to return after the last southbound pass here
Michael Weiss ✔ @michaeldweiss
Before, during or after the "ceasefire"? "@GebeilyM:
AFP EXCLUSIVE: Assad vows to retake whole country, warns could 'take long time'"
BREAKING
AFP EXCLUSIVE: Syria's Assad sees risk of Saudi, Turkish intervention
AFP EXCLUSIVE: Assad says Europe must create conditions for refugees to return
Syria regime dropped leaflets on #Aleppo "...we will not stop before killed all terrorist" #Russia'n "ceasefire"
pic.twitter.com/wo551lDFwf
BLUF: Putin & his Syrian minion have so little respect for Obama+Kerry they didn't even wait 24 hours to drop this.
BREAKING: AFP EXCLUSIVE: Syria's Assad vows to retake whole country, warns could 'take long time'
Russian speak for "ceasefire....you cease I fire"......
Eliot Higgins @EliotHiggins
You have to wonder if Putin and Lavrov was aware of President Assad's stance, or is this a surprise for them? https://twitter.com/AFP/status/698156719164256256 …
Eliot Higgins @EliotHiggins
Ceasefires are now such short lived things in Syria they end before they even start.
Actually IMO Lavrov already knew this "Assad" statement was coming as he couched his statements with..."we will need the opposition and Assad to agree as well"......WELL we know have the Assad statement...there will be no ceasefire as he is going for a total military victory.
Now that everyone realizes the so called talks in Munich had nothing to really do with a ceasefire and that the bombings will continue until Assad "end the war".....
Riad Hijab "we feel great bitterness because we have been let down... particularly the leader of this world, the USA
Syria's Assad says he will regain control over the whole country — even if it comes at 'a heavy price'
http://read.bi/20sAboG
Last edited by OUTLAW 09; 02-12-2016 at 04:33 PM.
Why Assad's Army Has Not Defected - Thoughts?
From TNI:Kamal Alam is a Fellow at the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) in London and a Syrian Military Analyst advising several Damascus-based family offices.Four years ago, Turkey’s then prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan said that within in a few weeks he would be praying in Damascus’s Umayyad Mosque, as Assad was about to fall. Similarly, Israel’s most decorated soldier, former Defense Minister Ehud Barak, predicted that Assad and his military would be toppled within weeks. That was at the beginning of 2012, when there were no Iranian soldiers on the ground or Russian planes in the skies.
As another round of Geneva peace talks collapses and the world wonders what’s next for Syria, it is time to begin with the warnings of Henry Kissinger and Zbignew Brzezinski. Kissinger and Brzezinski, the most seasoned and influential U.S. policymakers on the Middle East since World War II, have gone against popular opinion#and stated that President Bashar al-Assad has more support than all the opposition groups combined.
It is no secret that the Saudis and Qataris, with full U.S. support, have tried to bribe some of Assad’s innermost circles to defect. The all-important professional military cadre of the Syrian Arab Army, however, has remained thoroughly loyal.
The Syrian Arab Army was mostly a conscript force with only about eighty thousand professionals in its ranks. At the start of the war, much was made of the “defections” of thousands of officers, but these were mere conscripts who never wanted to be in the army in the first place, and would also have done anything to escape conscription in peacetime.#The professional ranks, meanwhile,#are still very strong and religiously pluralistic. When the Syrian opposition talks about a future pluralistic Syria, they fail to realize that while they may theoretically be pluralists in Geneva, Washington and Vienna, their representatives on the ground are allied with the most sectarian terrorist groups the Middle East has ever seen.
The Syrian Arab Army has held its own for more than five years; its numbers might have been depleted, as is normal for any wartime military, but a close glance at its military reveals that its core, perhaps unexpectedly to many,#is Sunni. The current minister of defense, Fahd al-Freij, is one of the most decorated officers in Syrian military history and hails from the Sunni heartland of Hama. The two most powerful intelligence chiefs, Ali Mamlouk and Mohammad Dib Zaitoun, have remained loyal to the Syrian government—and are both Sunnis from influential families. The now-dead and dreaded strongman of Syrian intelligence, Rustom Ghazaleh, who ruled Lebanon with an iron fist, was a Sunni, and the head of the investigative branch of the political directorate, Mahmoud al-Khattib, is from an old Damascene Sunni family. Major General Ramadan Mahmoud Ramadan, commander of the Thirty-Fifth Special Forces Regiment, which is tasked with the protection of western Damascus, is another high-ranking Sunni, as is Brigadier General Jihad Mohamed Sultan, the commander of the Sixty-Fifth Brigade that guards Latakia.
The history of the Syrian Army that Hafez al-Assad built is instructive today. As president, the elder Assad#brought senior members of the Syrian Air Force into the military high command. Naji Jamil (another Sunni) served as air force chief from 1970 to 1978 and was promoted to the General Staff committee overseeing defenses on the Iraqi border. Another air force commander was Muhammad al-Khuli, who until 1993 held coveted logistical positions between Damascus and Lebanon. Other prominent officers above the rank of Brigadier in military and civil defense positions post-2000 were Sunnis, including Rustom Ghazaleh, Hazem al Khadra and Deeb Zaytoun. Since 1973, the strategic tank battalions of the Seventieth Armored Brigade, stationed near al-Kiswah near Damascus, have had rank-and-file Alawis under the command of Sunni officers.#As well, two of the most decorated officers who rose to be Chief of General Staff under Bashar al-Assad were Sunnis: Hassan Turkmani and Hikmat Shehabi.#
From the 1970s until the 1990s, the Syrian Arab Army had a mandate to stabilize Lebanon. During these years, it worked to outmaneuver both the IDF and the U.S. Marines by supporting various proxies in Lebanon. In post-Saddam Iraq, the Americans could never understand which elements of both the Sunni and Shia insurgencies were supported by Syrian military intelligence, much of this owing to the stealth with which the Syrian Army controlled various Iraqi agents dating back to the Lebanese civil war.
The Syrian Arab Army is also the only Arab army with multiple Christians serving as generals. The most famous of these was Daoud Rajha, the Greek Orthodox army chief of staff. The two most influential Lebanese Christian leaders, now on the verge of becoming the next president of Lebanon, are Michel Aoun and Suleiman Franjieh, who are also allies of the Syrian Arab Army and President Assad. Deir al-Zour is an entirely Sunni city which has held out against ISIS encirclement for two years—and is commanded by the Druze General Issam Zahreddine.
The fact remains: The moderate Syrian opposition only exists in fancy suits in Western hotel lobbies. It has little military backing on the ground. If you want to ask why Assad is still the president of Syria, the answer is not simply Russia or Iran, but the fact that his army remains resilient#and pluralistic, representing a Syria in which religion alone does not determine#who rises to the top. The military also represent as challenge against the spread of terrorism,#which is why#three of the top British generals of the last five years have openly called for the recognition that the Syrian Arab Army, loyal to President Assad, is the only force capable of defeating ISIS and Al Qaeda in the Levant.
Last edited by davidbfpo; 02-12-2016 at 05:59 PM. Reason: Fix quote
Saudi bluntness is getting harder in their tone towards the US..........
Orient News English @OrientNewsEn
#Saudi FM: #ISIS can not be defeated until #Assad is defeated
pic.twitter.com/3Dx1l3m98b
More air strike impacts in #EastGhouta today.
Not clear, who bombed here.
pic.twitter.com/v4m4jfdJLt
"There will come a moment when ISIS cyber-capability will catch up with their intent." UK Intel chief #MSC2016
BREAKING: Massive war drills involving 21 countries to take place in the north of Saudi-Arabia. Codenamed: Northern Thunder.
Last edited by OUTLAW 09; 02-12-2016 at 05:21 PM.
LISTEN: An expert's view on what the U.S. has done to give Russia the upper hand.
http://bit.ly/1os8ZdR
pic.twitter.com/XMGsCcFRn5
Footage
BRUTAL air strike on #Hamoryah, east of #Damascus, today.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oQoOf5WiS1M …
pic.twitter.com/i6awJLpgYc
Footage
Interesting "cluster container", being found in #KafrLaha (#Homs province) today.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HTnNuMyyQbY …
pic.twitter.com/3NJTQcpvfA
Footage
What activists say is a #Russian Su-24, bombing #Daraa city today.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ArTQUZZBj3Y …
pic.twitter.com/6xxEfYa0i6
Massive war drills involving 21 countries to take place in the north of Saudi-Arabia. Codenamed: Northern Thunder
Remember #Saudi bankrolled Saddam for eight years to try and defeat #Iran. It will be long before Saudi backs down in #Syria
When #Iran-#Iraq war ended, #IRGC leadership largely faulted Khomeini for ceasefire. Now they see #Syria as a "once and for all" showdown
For same reason, #Iran almost encourages #Saudi challenge in #Syria. Much of Iran's leadership fought in the front lines in Iran-Iraq war
Question is if #Iran's political leadership will once again step in. If they do, political solution in #Syria possible. If not, #IRGC all in
ВМФ BSF #ЧФ ropucha class LST Yamal 156 transits Bosphorus. This is Yamal's 3rd Syrian deployment in 2016
pic.twitter.com/RxTqhtn9Qu
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