Congress has tasked defense officials to report on #NATO countries that allow #Russia's warships to use their ports ie...Spain
http://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/sp...deb19c7ed59996 …
NOW it truly appears that the UN is on a "vodka high".......
"Staffan de Mistura praised Damascus for their efforts to deliver aid to parts of the country"
Still no humanitarian aid has been delivered to over 350,000 besieged Sunni's...besieged by Assad , IRGC and Hezbollah.......
Congress has tasked defense officials to report on #NATO countries that allow #Russia's warships to use their ports ie...Spain
http://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/sp...deb19c7ed59996 …
News
8 free Syrian settlements were captured by #ISIS today and more than 20 bombed by #Assad and possibly #Russia.
The world's reaction:
Crickets hard at work..............
CrowBat....as always the Obama WH and CENTCOM is a tad to late..........
After Turkey complains, the Pentagon's @OIRSpox says US troops wearing badges of the Kurdish YPG was "unauthorized" & "inappropriate".
Orient News English
@OrientNewsEn
#BREAKING: Rocket fire from #Syria kills 1 in southeastern #Turkey province of #Kilis - HD News
I suggest Mr. @OIRSpox to put a nice big US flag on his chest - and go fighting Daesh in Syria. Right now.Originally Posted by OUTLAW 09
Russia’s MoD lies again: Evidence of destroyed Russian helicopters found
http://en.censor.net.ua/n390604
CrowBat....by the way did you see this comment coming in.....are you sure both the IS attack on Azaz and the YPG fake Raqqa attack are not both coordinated??
YPG now use the momentum of #IslamicState-assault on #Azaz pocket & try to storm Sheikh Isa west of #Mare
http://wikimapia.org/#lang=de&lat=36...48294&z=14&m=b …
No they can't,they would be outfkanked by bla bla"
YPG north of Aleppo fights the Syrian opposition.
Not ISIS.
Simple Fact
Last edited by OUTLAW 09; 05-27-2016 at 06:14 PM.
Aleppo #FSA destroyed #IS-technical at Tatiyah near border crossing to #Turkey TOW hit
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wdkHlP-cO30 …
http://wikimapia.org/#lang=de&lat=36...16365&z=14&m=b …
Syria al-Sakhour powerstation in #Aleppo has been completely shutdown after being targeted by #Russia|n airstrikes today
Station said to also feed water pumping stations in Sulieman Halabi, #Russia achieves a 2 in 1 hit on infrastructure
Hama : #Russian warplanes cluster bomb the village of #Talf damaging homes.
Damascus : Warplanes make more than twenty airstrikes on the West Ghouta town of #Derkhabia along with fierce mortar and artillery shelling.
Ghouta: Assad regime fighters captured by rebels in Deir Khobya.
Iran supreme leader Ali Khamenei meet the family of hezballah military commander Mustafa Badreddine killed in #Syria
Last edited by OUTLAW 09; 05-27-2016 at 06:26 PM.
http://www.alaraby.co.uk/english/com...es-in-the-west
Shawn Carri
Assad's allies in the West
Pro-Assad pundits and media outlets in the West have established ties with Assad
If there's one thing everyone can agree on about Syria, it's that nobody can agree on anything.
After five years of constantly evolving strife, the world still looks on in occasional waves of horror, pity, outrage and apathy - before returning to the stoic conclusion that the conflict is just too complicated to understand.
The laws of war, human rights and geopolitics have gone out the window. With them, regrettably, the rules of responsible journalism seem to have gone, too.
At one time, open-source activists and "Facebook revolutionaries" made the Arab Spring history's most documented tectonic societal shift. Today, Syria's war is a dangerously polarised nebula of partisans, as much in the media as on the battlegrounds.
Few non-aligned journalists remain to report unbiased and trustworthy news. Without credible information, it's hard to understand anything that happens in Syria, contributing to a political and public consensus of apathy. What's left is a news landscape driven less by actual events than by a narrow set of available perspectives.
"The Syrian conflict involves a public relations war with a level of sophistication weve never seen before," American writer Patrick Henningsen said in an report published by Russia Today. Ironically, it's an accurate assessment of a reality which Russia had a primary role in fostering.
In areas where Russian intervention hasn't decisively turned the tide militarily in favour of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, the allies' powerful public relations machine has been working to pick up the slack.
The alliance with Putin has availed Assad of the full gauntlet of Moscow's superior state-controlled media apparatus. The result: a highly efficient and centralised narrative spread throughout the international press. For every report, a favourable counter-narrative filters down from the regime megaphone to a wide network of smaller websites and blogs.
An example: Last month, when reports of 27 people killed in an airstrike that destroyed Aleppo's Quds hospital pointed blame towards the Syrian Army, it sparked a rare outrage that briefly put the conflict back on the international agenda.
Regime media arm SANA denied there was never a hospital hit. Russia Today then commandeered video footage shot by Aleppo journalist Hadi Al-Abdallah from a separate incident and re-edited it to remove dialogue mentioning the bombs came from an airstrike, before broadcasting it on its Arabic channel with a headline blaming the hospital attack on rebel groups.
A host of blogs followed suit, aiming to discredit the initial reports, attacking the NGOs and rescue workers and the #AleppoIsBurning campaign as all being part of some sinister Western conspiracy.
They are the type of reports that wouldn't get a second glance in mainstream news outlets, but that's just the point
However, many of the stories weren't produced by propaganda agencies run by the Russian or Syrian government - they were written in English by young bloggers who have positioned themselves as Assad's allies in the West.
They are the type of reports that wouldn't get a second glance in mainstream news outlets, but that's just the point. Publishing coverage that is more activist than journalistic, they have formed a network of "independent" and "alternative" news websites aiming to challenge the mainstream media.
One such outlet, The Anti-Media, has more than 1.6 million Facebook followers. Many such groups make their bread and butter from blogging and tweeting articles about environmentalism, mass surveillance and policebrutality, with a general affinity for protests and distaste for global capitalism - with the occasional exception.
Courting an engaged, young and progressive audience concerned about global inequality and social injustices, wary of mainstream media and weary of foreign wars - they offer simple answers to complex problems. Among them, examples abound, running the gamut from hagiography of Muammar Gaddafi and singing praises of President Assad, to comfortably wading in the realm of conspiracy theory.
When there was starvation in besieged Madaya, Eva Bartlett, a Canadian writer for Russia Today,trumpeted reports claiming that the images of severely malnourished children were either fake or propaganda.
The White Helmets? Those guys who regularly pull bodies out from the rubble of airstrikes? According to Vanessa Beeley, a writer for 21st Century Newswire, their their life-saving work is "propaganda designed to reinforce Washington's policy of 'regime change' in Syria".
MintPress Newsrepublished that article, and later followed up with another stating "[The White Helmets] are nothing more than a terrorist rescue organization, funded, directed and promoted by Western governments, intelligence agencies and foundations aimed at assisting Western-backed terrorists in the destruction of secular Syria".
Rick Sterling, writing in the long-running political newsletter CounterPunch, scoffs at the suggestion that a no-fly zone in Syria would save lives or stop the carnage of regime airstrikes - the same airstrikes which multi-year surveys show cause the majority of civilian deaths, according to the Syrian Network for Human Rights.
Echoing Sterling in the same publication, writer Paul Larudee ventures that NGOs such as Amnesty International and Physicians for Human Rights - in league with NATO's warmongers - exaggerate the Syrian Air Force's use of barrel bombs, which are notorious for their crude technology and imprecise targeting, resulting in disproportionate civilian casualties.
Continued.....
The peremptory agendas of such independent outlets have in the past raised questions as to their credibility and funding sources.
In a lengthy response to allegations that MintPress is "on the payroll of the regime of President Assad of Syria", its chief editor Mnar Muhawesh denied the publication's editorial positions had been influenced by outside actors, while doubling down on those positions, such as the belief that Syria's 2011 uprising was "instigated by the CIA and planned out as early as 2006".
Some writers in this milieu share ties more significant than their dissenting opinions: Bartlett, Beeley, Larudee and Sterling are all steering committee members of an organisation named the "Syria Solidarity Movement" - an activist group and registered nonprofit which has collected more than $1,545,000 in gross receipts from donors since its founding in 2007.
SSM has organised demonstrations "in support of the Syrian government", and two group trips to Syria on official visas arranged by an Iranian NGO.
In June 2014, the group sponsored a delegation to travel to Syria to observe presidential elections dismissed as a "stage-managed sham" by many in the international community, with Bashar Al-Assad receiving 89 percent of votes.
On the morning of the election, the delegation published an endorsement, stating: "The poll is about to demonstrate the real scale of public support President Assad is enjoying inside the country, heroically resisting foreign-sponsored aggression for more than three years."
One delegation member, however, acknowledged in an email that the process was "not without flaws", including voters being intimidated, possibly paid off, and that the delegation was under constant watch by government chaperones.
During the visit, Larudee and Bartlett appeared in an interview on Syrian state television, met with government officials, and were even granted a sit-down meeting with Ali Haidar, head of the Ministry of National Reconciliation. Created in 2012, it is responsible for negotiating surrenders of rebel groups in efforts to win hearts and minds and facilitate reinsertion for who wish to return to the state.
SSM has continued to promote the ministry's efforts and has organised similar trips for Syrians to visit the United States.
Interviewed for this report, Paul Larduee, SSM's treasurer, acknowledged his group's opinions were unpopular, but offered a calculated rationale. "It's easy for us to come off as apologists for Assad when were working to correct the false information in the hostile Western media," Larudee said.
"What we see is a long-term intention to overthrow the government of Syria and replace it with a puppet. If you compare Assad's Syria with the US, you can see how rigged the system is not to allow any kind of real change - just look at Bernie Sanders' election campaign."
Indeed, US presidential candidate Bernie Sanders today represents a faultline among the American left.
"I worry too much that Secretary Clinton is too much into regime change," Sanders said of his opponent, signalling a sensitivity to the views of his base, which recent survey data show to be highly concerned about US military involvement in Syria.
In an interview, Syrian-British writer Robin Yassin-Kassab bluntly criticised what he termed the left's nave allurement with anti-establishment rhetoric.
"They see it in silly binary terms - 'I'm against American imperialism; therefore I support President Putin's "anti-imperialism",' which is insane because that's also, or even moreso, a savage imperialist power, and at the moment a very worrying one," said Yassin-Kassab.
Continued........
But any media outlet that eschews established standards of responsible journalism, fact-checking and editorial neutrality to pursue a partisan agenda doesn't advance public understanding - it only polarises it. And in a war that has killed hundreds of thousands, expatriated millions, and confused everyone else, more polemic is the last thing we need.
.@OIRSpox says US SOF wearing YPG insignia "unauthorized & inappropriate," yesterday @PentagonPresSec portrayed it as routine solidarity.
Indicative of ‘adapt as we go’ counter-#ISIS strategy.
Politics seen as minimally important until after mistakes.
Another photo.......
Syria Another #US-soldiers with patch of kurdish #YPG-forces at northern #Raqqa front
What type of weapon is that?
Last edited by OUTLAW 09; 05-27-2016 at 06:48 PM.
Hassan Hassan @hxhassan
Important lecture by Ahrar al-Sham's deputy general director on the place of Ahrar in the Islamist landscape
Ali al-Omar lays out four main 'schools' that emerged after the collapse of the Ottoman caliphate, including MB and Jihadism
He faults all of the four schools, and say Ahrar combines all of them, including jihadism, and "prioritize" according to context & needs.
Great talk -- @NoahBonsey & @AbuJamajem disagreed with me once about whether the group can be labelled Salafi-jihadist, I believe it must.
Just another day of Assad,ISIS,YPG&Russia attacking the Syrian opposition.
Reaction: Don't defend, stay moderate and don't exit the country.
Remember #SDF/#YPG seized Tel Rifaat with help of #Russia
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4pweWuBj9ew …
Msg left on a school door in #Homs: "we can replace God, bt never replace Bashar... Best regards, the Special Forces"
IslamicState shelling villages inside #Turkey with rockets from
N-#Aleppo -army respond with artillery
http://wikimapia.org/#lang=de&lat=36...45612&z=14&m=b …
Last edited by OUTLAW 09; 05-27-2016 at 07:34 PM.
Foreign Policy
✔ @ForeignPolicy Turkey to U.S. troops: You clearly support terrorists, so maybe you should start wearing ISIS and Boko Haram flags.
http://atfp.co/1WpZBpA .
JUST IN: The Pentagon has banned troops in Syria from wearing these Kurdish militia patchesTurkish officials are so furious that American special forces troops accompanying Kurdish militants in Syria are wearing their partners’ insignia on their uniforms that Ankara’s top diplomat suggested Friday that U.S. soldiers add Islamic State flags to their sleeves next.
Speaking at a press conference in Antalya, Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlüt Cavusoglu said that “wearing an insignia of a terrorist organization by U.S. soldiers, who are our ally and are assertive about fighting against terrorism, is unacceptable.”
"Our suggestion to them is that they should also wear Daesh, al-Nusra and al-Qaeda insignias during their operations in other regions of Syria,” Cavusoglu said, using an alternative name for the Islamic State. “They can also wear the Boko Haram insignia when they go to Africa.”
Turkey believes the U.S.-backed Kurdish People’s Protection Unit, or the YPG, is an armed wing of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK, which both Ankara and Washington have labeled as a terrorist organization. But the United States supports the YPG, claiming it is Washington’s best chance of beating back Islamic State militants in Syria. The photos that emerged Thursday show U.S. commandos on patrol in the village of Fatisah, near the Islamic State’s stronghold in Raqqa, wearing YPG insignia on their sleeves. Cavusoglu said Friday that the YPG is responsible for two recently bombings in Ankara that left dozens dead.
After the photos were released, Maj. Tiffany Bowens, spokesperson for U.S. Special Forces Command in the Middle East, told Foreign Policy in an e-mail that “this practice is officially against uniform regulations,” but “U.S. Special Operations Forces and their counterparts typically swap unit patches as a method to build trust.” The patch swap is intended to signal cooperation, and has been “employed in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Jordan,” she said. “This is a tactical decision and not a reflection of U.S. government policy.”
She would not specifically elaborate on what the American forces are doing on the ground.
http://militari.ly/1VlZXwg
"We realize our President has asked you to defeat an enemy by helping our allies enemy, but we don't need to brag"
https://twitter.com/adegrandpre/stat...71626795405312 …
“Wearing those YPG patches was unauthorized, and it was inappropriate and corrective action has been taken,” Army Col. Steve Warren, a Baghdad-based spokesman, told reporters Friday. “And we have communicated as much to our military partners and our military allies in the region.”
Warren’s condemnation of the patch Friday ran counter to Pentagon statements Thursday, when Defense Department spokesman Peter Cook said it was normal for special operations troops to try to “blend in with the community to enhance their own protection.”
Last edited by OUTLAW 09; 05-27-2016 at 07:46 PM.
FSA recaptures Niyara from #ISIS -
After "liberation" of Tel Rifaat by #SDF/#YPG from #FSA the former residents still live in tents near #Azaz
What an Islamic State Offensive in Aleppo near Azaz means for US Policy
http://bit.ly/1qPxCSl
Some how many seem to be not seeing the FSA as a fighting force that can deal with IS......why is that......On May 26 the Islamic State (ISIS or ISIL) launched a successful westward offensive in Syria’s northern Aleppo countryside. ISIS effectively encircled thousands of insurgent fighters in the town of Marea and is now less than 2 miles from the critical opposition-held city of Azaz. Although ISIS only seized six villages and may yet lose them, that does not reveal the full extent of the danger this attack poses. Aleppo province is where multiple axes of the Syrian war intersect: the regime-opposition conflict; Kurdish-insurgent competition; Russia’s military role; US policy toward the rebellion (and therefore the regime); Turkey’s critical geopolitical interests; and of course, the multi-front war on ISIS. The real significance of military developments in Aleppo usually goes beyond territorial changes. For the insurgency and its Turkish patron in particular, the margin for error in a critical part of Syria is now vanishingly thin. The implications for the US war on ISIS are alarming.
In recent weeks, US and Turkish-backed rebel groups have repeatedly fought ISIS, in an attempt to drive the group out of Aleppo province. The insurgents captured territory but were unable to hold it against ISIS counterattacks. Over the weeks, Russian-backed regime operations, ISIS attacks, and Kurdish PYD offensives further squeezed the insurgency in Aleppo, eventually confining it to the narrow “Azaz corridor” and a single critical but vulnerable supply line running through it from Turkey. Surrounded by hostile PYD forces to the west, ISIS to the east, and the regime to the south, the insurgents in the corridor were already in danger before the recent ISIS offensive. With all these actors positioned to make land grabs in the area, and rebels exhausted by months of fighting, the corridor is now on the verge of collapse.
A number of scenarios could destroy the corridor and, with it, the rebel presence in Aleppo province (with the exception of soon-to-be-encircled Aleppo city). First, the PYD could move on opposition territory, under the pretext of defending it from ISIS. The PYD could grant these insurgents safe passage through Kurdish-dominated territory instead of attacking them, but that seems unlikely given mutual hostility. ISIS may also continue its westward offensive in a race with the PYD for the corridor, and would likely execute any rebel prisoners. Regime and Russian air strikes on the insurgents would facilitate either ISIS or PYD movement. That would be consistent with a regime policy of prioritizing the war on the insurgency.
If the Azaz corridor collapses, the most obvious loser (apart from the opposition of course) will be Turkey. It would no longer have proxy capability in northern Syria’s most strategic province, in a war where critical national security interests are at stake. These interests include, but are not limited to, containing expansion by the PYD - a group closely linked to Turkey’s historical enemy the PKK - in part through Turkey’s rebel allies in Aleppo. With Kurdish-led forces, ISIS, the Al Qaeda affiliate Jabhat al-Nusra, and the regime controlling most of northern Syria, Turkey would be nearly out of allies in Syria.
US policy in Syria is more narrowly defined and largely focused on defeating ISIS, and the collapse of the Azaz corridor would significantly complicate that fight. Presently, the United States and Turkey have a two-pronged approach to fighting ISIS. East of the Euphrates river, the United States supports a largely-Kurdish military effort against ISIS, the PYD-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF). This ethnic imbalance has strained Kurdish-Arab relations in areas liberated from the group, amid reports of ethnic cleansing of Arabs by the PYD. The United States however, unwilling to get more deeply involved in the Syrian conflict, calculates that this is a risk worth taking. West of the Euphrates however, and under strong Turkish insistence, there is an Arab opposition-led anti-ISIS effort. The so-called Hiwar Kilis Operations Room includes Turkish-backed Islamists and US-backed nationalist insurgents and has enjoyed Turkish artillery and US aerial support.
The United States needs local Arab partners against ISIS, such as the Hiwar Kilis Operations Room. It also needs Turkish cooperation against ISIS which is essentially contingent on keeping Kurdish forces east of the Euphrates. Without a significant Arab force in northern Aleppo, and in the absence of a broader more ambitious policy to end the civil war, the United States will be tempted if not compelled to rely completely on the PYD and allow it to expand westward into Arab territory. That would be catastrophic for US-Turkish relations and the related anti-ISIS effort. An exclusively Kurdish war on ISIS would deepen Sunni extremism among an aggrieved Arab population, deprive the United States and its allies of Arab partners in a crucial geography, and eliminate the moderate opposition in northern Syria.
US military planners recognize the tension between beating ISIS and the limited local tools available to them. Much of the Arab population in Raqqa and Deir al Zour is disorganized, disoriented and, understandably, fearful of ISIS and resentful of the PYD. The United States is trying to address that by augmenting the Arab component of the PYD-led SDF. This same logic ought to apply doubly in Aleppo, where local fighters with experience and commitment have fought ISIS for years. At the moment, overwhelming Turkish artillery and US airpower are needed to help them push ISIS back, and expand the eastern boundaries of the Azaz corridor. In the longer run, if the corridor survives, this crisis only highlights how much the United States needs a well-armed, well-trained Arab insurgent partner in Aleppo.
Last edited by OUTLAW 09; 05-27-2016 at 07:54 PM.
Michael Weiss
✔ @michaeldweiss How the Kurds’ neighbors play games to block the expansion of ‘Greater Kurdistan’:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs...dish-factions/ …
Lebanese Hezbollah ministers, MPs could be hit by U.S. law: U.S. official http://reut.rs/27WaIdV
They were not coordinated, but the YPG is a PKK, and so it quickly exploited the opportunity to attack Sheikh Issa (which was never a Kurdish-populated area). Fighting there is still going on.
Of course, they didn't attack the Daesh...
From battle btw #Assad-forces & #IslamicState at
Panorama roundabout in #DeirEzzor
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J4rZk_Rsggg …
http://wikimapia.org/#lang=de&lat=35...85056&z=16&m=b …
Last edited by OUTLAW 09; 05-28-2016 at 08:07 AM.
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