Southern #Aleppo: #Syria|n rebels hunting and killing fleeing pro-#Assad forces in #Khan_Touman.
https://www.youtube.com/embed/RrMrCrcS4NI …
Here's why Iran just threatened US shipping again — via @Commentary
http://read.bi/1T1hasf
Drones footage of JaN VBIED and Tanks/BMPs storming Khan Tuman south #Aleppo.
https://youtu.be/gKQhuf37PRQ
Jaish al-Fath coalition completely capture Khan Tuman village south Aleppo from IRGC and Assad.
IDs of Iraqi shia mercenaries recruited by IRGC to fight for #Assad south #Aleppo.
FSA blow #ISIS VBIED north Aleppo.
https://youtu.be/amC7btLEFjw
NOW after a major war crime has been committed by an SU24.....Russian BTW seen by observers near the camp before the bombs were dropped....Originally Posted by OUTLAW 09
Safe zones are hard but the worst refugee crisis since WWII, endless war crimes, a major uptick in CW attacks & endless slaughter are easy.
So check the Obama response......"not an excuse"......really again nothing but words as he really does not want to act even in the face of genocide and mass war crimes....
Sayf Al-Deen Halabi @seyfuddinq · 3h3 hours ago
we saw SU24 making circles above us before it dropped on the IDP camp. My location was close to Sarmada.
Last edited by OUTLAW 09; 05-06-2016 at 05:55 AM.
Russian Syrian Express on the return trip......
ВМФ #ЧФ BSF Tsezar Kunikov returned to Bosphorus from #Tartus in 10days &completed its 4th #Syria deployment in2016
After classic envelopment operation.........
How Jaysh al-Fateh managed to kill between 70 and 100 pro-#Assad forces in #KhanTuman.
Most of IRGC militiamen killed not far from thr pickups in Khan Tuman as they were obviously ready to flee if needed
They had been pleading for air strikes to cover their retreat but none came....
I remembered the TOW hit early this year in Khan Tuman that destroyed this IRGC technical.
https://youtu.be/8_gHH_uY1wg
South-West #Aleppo situation on May 6, 2016 / Rebels (JAN & JAF) launch powerful offensive in Khan Tuman axis
Some sort of a weapon seen for the 1st time used by Assad/Russia south Aleppo Anyone can ID?
https://youtu.be/VsxXuxZzFLw
Graphic: TOW fired from short distance Vs ISIL group north Aleppo turned them to pieces
https://youtu.be/WXVvecSiGG4
Unconfirmed reports Jaish al-Fath has taken Khalsa and Humayra, ambushed and killed several Iraqi and Afghani soldiers in Humayra.
Opposition #FSA retake Dudiyan town, and repelled #ISIS attempt to storm Qarah Mazrah. #Aleppo
Two Assad army soldiers captured by Jaish al-Fath south Aleppo, both Syrians from Aleppo for a change.
Reports: 100+ dead pro regime Shia militia members & 40+ dead from Jaish al Fatah in battle at southern outskirts of #Aleppo
JaF advance now on Al-Humayra in southern #Aleppo
-seized several hill tops north of it
http://wikimapia.org/#lang=de&lat=36...54224&z=14&m=b …
Syria army? Try Iranian 65th army brig & IRGC, Lebanese Hezbollah, Iraqi Nujaba, Afghani Fatemiyon & Assad NDF.
Update: Telat Aldababat (Tanks Hill) west of Khan Touman was also liberated securing the Khan Touman surroundings.
U.S. Embassy Syria @USEmbassySyria
Power: The regime & some of its supporters sometimes claim to be attacking al Nusra or #Daesh, but the sites hit in #Aleppo show otherwise.
USEmbassySyria
Amb Power: The regime has deliberately targeted first responders, health care workers, & medical facilities.
http://usun.state.gov/remarks/7263
I think that the US Embassy has virtually no creditability left as they have been watching this go on for over five years and this is about as much as they ever do...just words.......
Ahrar al-Sham (JaF) Kornet ATGM hits pro-#Assad forces ammo transport.
An inferno.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qFZC0KOrKKg …
The JaF push S of #Aleppo is backed by Ahrar al-Sham artillery
And they still get new rounds for their M-46
A war plane launched a raid on the center of Om Al Krameel, South of #Aleppo.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9CQn...has_verified=1 …
Normals children have playgrounds.
Syrian children (here in #Rastan) have destroyed tanks.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fI0h_rpxJiY …
Turkish-backed "Sultan Murad" #FSA brigade refurbished their T-62.
(left: January)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TJHUOPrSwAg …
Pro-#Assad forces are shelling civilians in al-Ghantu with artillery.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=37AY9pjF98Y …
Syria #FSA battle against #IslamicState in south western #Daraa provinve
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z2m_083WUTA …
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vdh-IqvazNs …
Charles Lister @Charles_Lister
Very concerning reports from #Hama Prison, where #Assad regime forces have launched a major military operation against revolting prisoners.
Assad-forces launch now crackdown of "#Hama Central Prison -revolte"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i0Qzhsv-o7Y …
Assad-forces storming now Prison with gas & gunfire
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XNWEXcqTT1Y …
Seems #Iran-backed forces took a big hit in southern Aleppo. Question is whether Iranians were among them too https://twitter.com/reuters/status/728473135675277312 …
Iranian journalist Hassan Shemshadi: Unfortunately number of Syrian & resistance [#Iran-backed] forces killed in Khan Touman, more captured
Rhodes suggests that Iran deal wasn't really about Iran. It was about helping the US disengage from Middle East
He doesn't just "suggest" it. It's straight-up the reason. And the journo/expert echo chamber dutifully hid it.
Obama wasn't trying to get a nuke deal, he was trying to change #Iran and the region. This was his Big Idea
Last edited by OUTLAW 09; 05-06-2016 at 07:22 PM.
http://www.theatlantic.com/internati...-islam/473148/
How Iraq Warped Obama’s Worldview
The president is certain he’s right. Is that what we want in a leader?
Shadi Hamid
Mar 11, 2016
Really worth reading the long article....On October 2, 2002, Barack Obama gave a speech opposing war in Iraq—perhaps, in retrospect, the most important speech he ever gave. He was right, of course, and the foreign-policy establishment was largely wrong. The problem is that politicians who were right about Iraq tend to overestimate what that says about their foreign-policy judgment. For Obama, the effects of being right are magnified. He became president, in part, because of Iraq and the considerable damage the conflict had done to the country. Obama offered the promise of a decisive correction and, for true believers, a kind of spiritual atonement.
It is unclear what being right on Iraq would mean for your likelihood of being right on Syria, since the contexts in question are, in a way, opposites: Civil war in Iraq began after the United States intervened. Civil war in Syria happened in the absence of intervention. History will have to judge, but it may actually be the case that being right on Iraq made you more likely to be wrong about subsequent interventions. The tragedy of Iraq, if you weren’t careful, was likely to distort your perception of everything that followed, for wholly understandable reasons.
Iraq’s dark shadow seems to be everywhere in Jeffrey Goldberg’s fascinating yet unsettling exchanges with Obama. “Multilateralism regulates hubris,” Obama says. And he is right: It does. What is left unsaid is why, exactly, regulating hubris should, seven years after the conclusion of the Bush era, remain a primary preoccupation. It is hard to imagine any world leader citing the hubris of overextension as the problem that the United States, today, must take extra care to correct for or guard against. Obama has already corrected for it, many times over.
It may actually be the case that being right on Iraq made you more likely to be wrong about subsequent interventions.
Elsewhere, there are straw men to be built. “Every time there is a problem, we send in our military to impose order,” Obama says, except that no one favoring intervention in Syria has called for Iraq-style military action. Obama says that “there are going to be times where the best that we can do is to shine a spotlight on something that’s terrible, but not believe that we can automatically solve it,” except that I’m not aware of a single critic of Obama’s Syria policy who believes intervening against Bashar al-Assad would “automatically solve” anything. The stated goal was always rather different: to diminish the Assad regime’s ability to kill and to provide clear incentives for Russia, Iran, and Assad to change their calculus and begin negotiating in something resembling good faith with Syrian rebel forces. Meanwhile, comments like “there is no way we should commit to governing the Middle East and North Africa” again present a wildly false choice.
Obama’s tendency to distort beyond recognition the positions of his critics goes hand in hand with an apparent disdain for those critics and, perhaps more worryingly, an unwillingness to even so much as question his own decisions after he’s made them. Over the course of his conversations with Goldberg, the only thing he really blames himself for is having “more faith” in the Europeans than they apparently deserved. Elsewhere, he faults himself for underappreciating “the value of theater in political communications.” Of course, what Obama is faulting himself for is not clearly appreciating the faults of others.
Continued.....
Michael Weiss
✔ @michaeldweiss I think I got this right two years ago:
https://now.mmedia.me/lb/en/commenta...all-presidency
An unbelievably small presidency
Does the White House even want its token Syrian efforts to succeed?
Sometime in 2010, as the United States was preparing for its withdrawal from Iraq, a senior military commander was approached in a White House hallway by a senior Obama administration official. The commander was deeply disturbed by what he saw as a total lack of commitment to securing the hard-won gains in a country not yet ready for a categorical American absence. Would the Sunni Awakening be put back to sleep? Would al-Qaeda return in force? Was the administration aware of Nouri al-Maliki’s true character and political tendency, not to mention the foreign country to which he was actually loyal? The administration official’s response is something that the military commander never forgot, and neither should anyone trying to understand the United States’ role in the world today. “If our policy succeeds,” the official said, “we’ll take credit for it. If it fails and Iraq descends into civil war again, we’ll just blame George W. Bush.”
I’ve argued before in this space that the Obama administration does not have a foreign policy of which to speak; it has a public relations policy. “Strategic communications” has taken the place of actual strategy, and what Vladimir Putin’s Kremlin refers to as “political technology” has taken the place of actual politics. The formula here is quite simple because it was invented by people in their late 20s or early 30s with little real-world experience beyond applying for Rhodes scholarships or crowdsourcing campaign donations. Whenever some part of the world falls to pieces, or some fresh humanitarian catastrophe ensues, the immediate response is twofold: First, the president gives a speech making him appear decisive and in command; second, all the president’s men leak stories to an accommodating press suggesting that he is indeed decisive and in command and about to take necessary action. Never mind the details – those will come later. Just focus on the headlines.
And so the press invariably does. US policy is now changed, or adjusted – sometimes dramatically so – to incorporate new facts and fresh disasters, the newspapers tell us. The New York Times dutifully praises this theatre of leadership in its editorial page, mistaking moral cretinism for “caution” and cowardice for “pragmatism.” Then weeks, if not months, go by and people forget about the part of the world falling to pieces or the humanitarian catastrophe because something else has grabbed their attention. But then, quietly, the true original purpose behind the strategic communications-concocted policy is laid bare in a lead-burying item tucked away in the middle section of a national newspaper.
In his West Point speech last May, the president announced that he was “calling on Congress to support a new counterterrorism partnerships fund of up to $5 billion,” to help allied countries and pro-American proxies combat jihadism in Yemen, Libya and Syria, which was now a “critical focus” of this subsidy. “I will work with Congress to ramp up support for those in the Syrian opposition who offer the best alternative to terrorists and brutal dictators,” he said, which some took to mean that the Defense Department taking over the training of rebels from the CIA would mean a significant investment in creating a Free Syrian Army that was both anti-Assad and anti-jihadist. It was soon thereafter established that of the proposed $5 billion, only $500 million – 10% – would be spent on the Syria crisis, which is by far the worst of all those Obama tallied off. A National Security Council spokesperson tried his or her best to elaborate that this money would “help defend the Syrian people, stabilize areas under opposition control, facilitate the provision of essential services, counter terrorist threats, and promote conditions for a negotiated settlement.”
Help, stabilize, facilitate, counter and promote are words that mean nothing to most human beings, for good reason. But they meant a great deal to Fareed Zakaria, or perhaps his research assistant. In the course of arguing that the Assad regime had been a historical foe of radical Islamists and jihadists – such as the ones it dispatched into Iraq to kill American servicemen, or the ones it has armed and subvented in Lebanon and Gaza – this most correct of correct-thinking pundits pronounced that Obama was “likely to throw fuel onto a raging fire” by adopting such a bold new military program. Alas, this was because Obama had finally succumbed to the “general consensus” on Syria. (Zakaria seems to believe that a consensus can be anything other than general. He will one day make an excellent strategic communicator for some lucky White House.)
But his panic was unjustified, as was obvious back at West Point, where gobbledygook masqueraded as a volte-face. The Wall Street Journal reported on July 16 that Obama’s seemingly large investment is already subject to diminishing returns, with sentences that read as if they were out of Evelyn Waugh’s Black Mischief: “Preliminary military estimates, presented by officials to key congressional committees in closed-door briefings last week, call for training a 2,300-man force – less than the size of a single brigade – over an 18-month period that probably won’t begin until next year, according to officials.”
In other words, half a billion dollars is being spent to possibly kinda make soldiers out of a contingent of a little more than 12% of the Islamic State’s estimated total fighting force. And it’s going to take a year and a half just to do that. The Pentagon explained that this absurd holdup – in 18 months, there may be no Syrian opposition left to train or arm – was due to the “vetting issue.” Here again comes a perennial US excuse, which former Ambassador to Syria Robert Ford wasted little time debunking once he lapsed into official retirement. Three years into the war, and the United States has trouble finding 2,000 credible proxies. Meanwhile, Iran’s Revolutionary Guard, which is running four different countries all at once in the midst of international sanctions, has no trouble finding 150,000 militiamen of its own to wage counterinsurgency operations in Syria and Iraq under the guise of “protecting Shia shrines.”
There are also new hiccups for rebel boot camp that had not existed before. Jordan allowed the CIA to train rebels on its soil for two years (how were they vetted? do they have friends they can refer to other agencies in the US government?), but now says it doesn’t want the Pentagon to train rebels on its soil. This is an objection that no one in the Obama administration appears to have anticipated, which is implausible given the heavy presence of the CIA on Jordanian soil. So now location has become yet another impediment to seeing Obama’s grand vision for Syria realized.
Most revealing, however, is what one defense official told the Journal about the lack of interest or support for this policy at the very top: “I get the sense no one really wants to do it.” How right he is.
Mohammed al-Ghanem, the government relations director at the Syrian American Council, told al-Arabiya’s Joyce Karam that the White House is not “lobbying aggressively” for Congress to accept the Syria provision in the 2015 Defense Appropriations Act, which cleared the Senate Appropriations Defense Subcommittee this week. The administration is “almost setting itself up for failure,” Ghanem said, although he might have added that it is doing so consciously because it does not want to succeed. This is the built-in trapdoor to all Obama policymaking. Executive torpor and lack of preparation in selling an executive-made policy ensures that failure becomes somebody else’s problem – George W. Bush’s, or a ####ty website provider, or the House and Senate.
Recall how the administration tried, not very convincingly, to convince Congress to authorize the president to wage “unbelievably small” airstrikes on the Assad regime after its deployment of sarin gas in Damascus last summer, which exceeded all the other “small-scale” chemical weapons attacks that the regime had already perpetrated. The administration deflected or parried arguments from legislators which it had invented to justify not attacking the Assad regime. Both the chairman of the Joints Chiefs of Staff and the defense secretary looked on that occasion like two dogs that had been put through a car wash. John Kerry, who had compared Assad to Hitler one week, then had to praise him as cooperative in the early stages of chemical disarmament the next.
I asked Hadi al-Bahra, the newly-elected president of the Syrian Opposition Council, what he thought of the fine print of the administration’s already-faltering plan to rescue Syria. “The delay in taking any decisions or pushing laws or budgets into Congress without also pushing for its success – it will not serve any purpose that will advance any change on the ground,” he told me from Istanbul. “We have painted for the administration the full picture of the situation in Syria now, and we have explained the regional risks that we will face if we don't take a strong stand to deal with it responsibly.”
Is Bahra surprised that attempts to “contain” this nightmare have instead yielded a caliphate? “The regime is an incubator for terrorist organizations. From the start of the revolution the regime created this scenario, announced it, and now is executing it under the eyes of the international community. And we don’t see the right reaction. We have told the administration that [the Islamic State] is working right under the noses of the Iranian and Syrian regimes. But they’re not doing the right thing to combat that.”
Continued...........
@RT_com Just like Kremlin claimed Nusra was behind another attack before they were forced to edit back to airstrike.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jpPH...ature=youtu.be …
Unconfirmed reports from #Aleppo on ~15 #IRGC fighters from Mazandaran killed in fighting in Khan Touman. https://twitter.com/alimat1979/statu...84149590757376 …
"No Iranians fighting in Khan Tuman." -@EjmAlrai (proAssad troll)
"Iranian IRGC Mohammad Balbasi killed in Khan Tuman." -@warreports
Iranian #IRGC Reza Hajizadeh killed in Khan Touman, southern Aleppo, Syria.
High casualties in IRGC's Mazandaran Unit and Fatemiun brigade due to the clashes in southern Aleppo, Syria. Will publish Names&Photos soon.
Another Afghani mercenary fighting for Assad captured by Jaish al-Fath south Aleppo.
Daraa ATGM from #IS hit #FSA tank & rebounded
IS stormed Tahtuh disctrict of #DeirEzzor city -close to airport
http://wikimapia.org/#lang=de&lat=35...63484&z=16&m=b …
Ahrar al-Sham fighter in southern #Aleppo seen with a Croatian RBG-6 multiple grenade launcher.
Al Qaeda Is About to Establish an Emirate in Northern Syria
http://foreignpolicy.com/2016/05/04/...orthern-syria/ …
important read from @Charles_Lister
This is really worth reading although a long long read......
https://kyleorton1991.wordpress.com/...-on-in-aleppo/
Whose Side is America on in Aleppo?
By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on May 6, 2016
Whatever pretence there was left in Syria’s “cessation of hostilities” (CoH)—which was never more than a reduction in hostilities—enacted at midnight on 26/27 February is now at an end. Russia and the regime of Bashar al-Assad have never ceased attempts to militarily weaken the armed opposition and escalated with a concerted campaign of aerial bombardment against Aleppo City on 22 April. The insurgency fully mobilized in response on 5 May with a major offensive south of the city. The dynamics set in place by Russia’s intervention—the bolstering of the Assad regime and the strengthening of extremist forces in the insurgency—have been in full view with this latest crisis, as has the longer-term trend of the United States moving toward the position of Assad, Russia, and especially Iran in Syria.
Jaysh al-Fatah and the Aleppo Offensive
The Jaysh al-Fatah (Army of Conquest) coalition that drove the regime from Idlib City in March 2015 and expelled it from Idlib Province in September was reconstituted on Monday. Faylaq al-Sham (The Syrian Legion/Corps) has rejoined Jaysh al-Fatah, having left over ideological disagreements with Jund al-Aqsa, a group that started as an al-Qaeda front and is now—after its al-Qaeda leadership left—trending into the Islamic State’s (IS’s) orbit. Probably for this reason, Jund al-Aqsa has been excluded from Jaysh al-Fatah this time around. Faylaq al-Sham is a moderate Islamist group that has been drawn closer to the West recently, including having been seen in the last few months operating TOW anti-tank missiles, while expanding its influence throughout Aleppo. The only other change is the addition of the largely-Uyghur al-Hizb al-Islami al-Turkistani fil Bilad al-Sham (The Turkistan Islamic Party in Syria, or TIP)*, a Jihadi-Salafist group that is heavily dependent on Jabhat al-Nusra, al-Qaeda’s Syrian branch.
Jaysh al-Fatah retains as its dominant forces al-Nusra and Ahrar al-Sham. Of the other components of the original Jaysh al-Fatah: the smaller Islamist groups Ajnad al-Sham (not to be confused with al-Ittihad al-Islami li-Ajnad al-Sham, the Sufi rebel group in East Ghouta that recently merged its forces in that area with Faylaq al-Rahman) and Liwa al-Haqq remain, as does Jaysh al-Sunna, a small, non-ideological faction that was absorbed by Ahrar in February.
When the offensive began in the early afternoon (British time) yesterday, it honed in on the regime-held Khan Tuman, south-west of Aleppo City, with reports of fighting in the adjacent district of al-Khalidiya and insurgent shelling against Barnah and Khalasa. It is likely that the intention is to clear the ground for a run at the important town of al-Hader further to the south and just east of al-Eis, which al-Nusra-led insurgents took over temporarily on 2 April and where a regime plane was shot down on 5 April. Iranian-led forces conquered al-Eis on 12 April, sapping the momentum of this insurgent push. The next attempt was not long in coming, however, when simultaneous offensives in southern Aleppo, Latakia, and Hama erupted on 18 April.
It was Ajnad that made the first formal announcement that Jaysh al-Fatah was moving in southern Aleppo and Ajnad and Jund al-Aqsa were the most visible for some time in terms of the social media and video output from Aleppo. Soon enough the centralized—effectively al-Nusra—output began. Al-Nusra deployed suicide bombers in Khan Tuman and the town appears to have fallen overnight. A video allegedly showing the capture of a member of the Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) was filmed from a drone. Later in the day, Jaysh al-Fatah disclosed their capture of a foreign Shi’a jihadist, very likely an Afghan Hazara of Liwa Fatemiyoun, one of the many IRGC-run militias on which the Assad regime is now dependent for any offensive capacity and increasingly for defence, too.
Concurrent with this, in Zahraa district and New Aleppo on the western edge of Aleppo City and near the nearby military base, mainstream rebels vetted by the West recommenced an assault they had begun on 3 May, when Jaysh al-Tahrir (which contains the U.S.-vetted Division 46), Liwa Suqour al-Jabal, Division Sixteen, and (less formally in the U.S.-supported camp) al-Jabhat al-Shamiya (The Levant Front) were seen using TOWs.
Russia, meanwhile, was in the middle of staging a concert in Palmyra, a city whose partially-choreographed exchange between the pro-Assad coalition and IS had been the cause of such misplaced optimism in March when the propaganda of Assad guarding the boundary for civilization was so credulously accepted by so many. The concert was evidently meant to reinforce that narrative, but the pro-regime coalition’s responding to the Aleppo offensive by bombing the Kamouna refugee camp in the far-north of Idlib Province, thirty miles away from Aleppo City, killing thirty people and burning down more than fifty tents, was surely a far better indication of what Vladimir Putin and his client mean by “modern civilization“.
Al-Qaeda and the United States
The waves of insurgent offensives in Aleppo certainly have been pushed by al-Nusra, which found that during the reduction of violence the moderate opposition was reinvigorated. Without extreme violence imposed on Sunni communities by the Assad regime and its enablers, al-Nusra’s tactical usefulness to the opposition was diminished. For the first time in more than three years it was possible to hold peaceful protests of the kind that began the uprising. The nationalist, revolutionary discourse re-asserted itself, and it wasn’t long before al-Nusra cracked down, in Maarat al-Numan on 11 March, leading to a counter-reaction that threatened its long-term durability in Syria.
Needing to undermine the CoH, al-Nusra met with armed opposition leaders on about 20 March, Charles Lister reports. “They presented some convincing arguments,” an opposition commander who attended one of the meetings said. The argument doubtless will have been that the pro-regime forces continued their war against the rebellion, albeit at a lower level and in a more localized fashion, while the rebels were restrained from responding. This kind of one-sided restraint was never going to last, so al-Nusra had plenty to work with. “But,” added the commander, “mostly, it seemed we were being threatened: If we didn’t join the operation, we would be seen as an enemy.”
The U.S. has in recent weeks put a renewed emphasis on getting the mainstream rebellion to separate itself militarily from al-Nusra. While a defensible (and ultimately necessary) goal, the method has not been. As one FSA commander put it to Lister: “Don’t you think we would prefer not to have al-Nusra in our trenches? They represent everything we are opposed to. Sometimes, they are the same as the regime. But what can we do when our supposed friends abroad give us nothing to assert ourselves?” But rather than—finally—empower the moderate armed opposition so that it is not dependent on al-Nusra, instead, the U.S. effectively leveraged the prospect of Russian atrocities against its own allies and in practice tried to have them surrender Aleppo City to the pro-Assad forces.
On 20 April 2016, as Russia was clearly building up to an attack on Aleppo City, Colonel Steve Warren, the spokesman for Operation INHERENT RESOLVE, came very close to saying that the U.S. position was one of support for Russia’s airstrikes against Aleppo City. While “concerned” about the Russian moves, said Col. Warren, “it’s primarily al-Nusra who holds Aleppo, and of course, al-Nusra is not part of the cessation of hostilities.”
But the eastern part of Aleppo City that is out of regime control is not held “primarily” by al-Nusra. The pro-regime coalition recently took control of parts of north-western Aleppo Province, cutting the final Aleppine supply-line for the rebellion into Turkey on 2 February. The pro-regime coalition broke the incomplete sieges on Nubl and Zahra the next day and began to move against the provincial capital after that. Al-Nusra had withdrawn from northern Aleppo in August 2015—and remains largely absent from that area, having no more than 100 fighters in the Azaz pocket—redeploying those forces from Aleppo to Idlib. On 26 January 2016, as the pro-regime forces were advancing in Aleppo, al-Nusra sent a convoy of up to two-hundred vehicles that by one estimate constituted 1,000 fighters to Aleppo City. This immediately provoked resistance, however, especially from the local, Free Syrian Army-style groups but also from Ahrar al-Sham, and by mid-February more than two-thirds of al-Nusra’s arrivals had been sent out of Aleppo City, either taking up residence in the south (and some in the west) of Aleppo Province or returning to Idlib Province, where al-Nusra is strongest.
Key: Red (regime), Green (rebels and Jabhat al-Nusra), Yellow-Green (Kurdish PYD), Black (Islamic State). [Original map by Thomas van Linge]
Key: Red (regime), Green (rebels and Jabhat al-Nusra), Yellow-Green (Kurdish PYD), Black (Islamic State). [Original map by Thomas van Linge]
So, al-Nusra has a presence in Aleppo City, and Ahrar al-Sham, too, is present, as is the Abu Amara Special Forces, a unit of 300 rebels led by Muhanna Jaffala, which joined Ahrar in October while remaining somewhat autonomous. But the rebel-held areas of Aleppo City are overwhelmingly under the control of Fatah Halab (Aleppo Conquest), an operations room that specifically excludes al-Nusra.
Continued.....
Putin's friend Sergei Roldugin, implicated in the "Panama Papers," performs in Palmyra, #Syria.
In the same exact location where IS beheaded 25 POWs.........
There had been proAssad commenters stating after Palmyra was taken they and the Russians would secure the close by gas fields important to the regime...BUT instead the Russians gave a performance and lost the gas fields....
AND this is the great Putin strategy.....fiddling while Rome burns.....
Col. Warren, spokesman for the CTJF-OIR, just explained that they have not provided 'technology to provide targets to the CTJF-OIR' to the insurgents in Azaz Pocket. His explanation are 'recent probelms between the rebels and the SDF in Northern Aleppo'.
Sorry, but BS reason: insurgents were there - and fighting Daesh - long before the USA moved the SDF from Ayn al-Arab/Kobane to Afrin enclave.
Overall, the CENTCOM is back to 'daily discussions on deconflicting airspace' (over Syria) with Russians, and that's it: Putler's heroes are free to keep on killing civilians and bombing the FSyA, just like the JAN is free to keep on growing and flourishing.
Everybody is free, just the Syrians - not.
Totally under the rubric of "too much vodka"....
Moscow suggest that "Nusra" is the one who attacked the IDP camp in rural #Idlib killed 30 ppl 2 days ago.
BUT WAIT..the last time I checked neither Nusra/AQ, nor IS nor for that matter the FSA.......NONE of them have an AF......sure a couple of drones but nothing capable of dropping 250/500 lb bombs......
NICE Russian flown SU24 bombs an IDP camp with a precision air strike THEN "false flags" it as Nusra/AQ.....
AND outside of the initial US response nothing more was said was it.....
Finally the USAF drops a bomb on an IS target in support of FSA.....
US-warplane took out #IS vehicle bomb before reach target near #Dudiyan in northern #Aleppo
Footage shows airstrike hitting Kamouna refugee camp as rescuers try to help survivors of previous attack.
MUST based on Moscow....MUST have been that Nusra/AQ AF again in action.......
I wonder if #Assad doesn't see or doesn't care how #Iran is transforming #Syria into a proxy entity.
https://twitter.com/tasnimnews_en/st...55012068233216 …
WOW...those Obama "Iranian moderates" hard at work again.......
Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei delivered one of his most anti-American speeches in years @TheIranPulse
http://almon.co/2nkm
A 220-mm 9M27K cluster rocket at the former ICARDA farm in South #Aleppo
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JIssXfMOj4g …
First confirmed Dehlavieh ATGM (Iranian Kornet) in Iraq. Distinctive DIO red band also used on Toofan ATGM.
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