Group items tagged

The Iraqi army started a large operation to liberate Mosul from Islamic State jihadists. But the forces, in total some 40,000, are still several dozen kilometers away from the city limits. They will have to capture several towns and villages and pass many IED obstacles before coming near to the center and house to house fighting. It might take many month to eliminated the last stay-behind ISIS cells in Mosul. About one million civilians live in Mosul. Many, many more than in east-Aleppo. Many of them were sympathetic with the new overlords when ISIS stormed in two years ago. French, American, Kurdish, Iraqi and Turkish artillery are pounding them now. Airstrikes attack even the smallest fighting position. When the city will be conquered it will likely be destroyed. The imminent fight over Mosul might be the reason why John Kerry dialed down his hypocritical howling over east-Aleppo in Syria which is under attack from Syrian and Russian forces. The attack on Mosul proceeds on three axes. From the north Kurdish Peshmerga under U.S. special force advisors lead the fighting. Iraqi forces attack from the east and south. The way to the west, towards Syria, is open. The intend of the U.S. is to let ISIS fighters, several thousand of them, flee to Deir Ezzor and Raqqa in Syria. They are needed there to further destroy the Syrian state.

We pointed out here that this move will create the "Salafist principality" the U.S. and its allies have striven to install in east-Syria since 2012. The "mistake" of the U.S. bombing of Syrian army positions in Deir Ezzor was in support of that plan. Other commentators finally catch up with that conclusion. The Turks are openly talking about such an escape plan for ISIS in Mosul. The Turkish news agency Anadolu published this "sensitive" operations plan. Point 4 says: An escape corridor into Syria will be left for Daesh so they can vacate Mosul

Two points in the Turkish plan will not come true. The Iraqi government has ordered that no Turkish troops take part in the Mosul operation and will designate them as enemies should they try. The Sunni "Nineveh Guard", trained by Turkey, paid by the Saudis and led by the former Anbar governor Atheel al-Nujaifi, will also be excluded. It was the Saudi proxy al-Nujaifi who practically handed Anbar over to ISIS by ordering his troops to flee when ISIS attacked. He and his Saudi and Turkish sponsors want to create an independent Sunni statelet in west Iraq just like the Kurds created their own entity within north Iraq. The U.S. hopes that the influx of ISIS fighters into Syria will keep the Russians and Iranians trapped in the "quagmire" Obama prescribed and finally destroy the Syrian state. It seems to have mostly given up on other plans. The U.S. military now acknowledges that fighting the Russian air defense in Syria would be a real challenge: "It’s not like we’ve had any shoot at an F-35,” the official said of the next-generation U.S. fighter jet. “We’re not sure if any of our aircraft can defeat the S-300.”

BBC reports that – in 1957 – the British and American leaders approved the use of Islamic extremists and false flag attacks to topple the Syrian government: Nearly 50 years before the war in Iraq, Britain and America sought a secretive “regime change” in another Arab country… by planning the invasion of Syria and the assassination of leading figures.   Newly discovered documents show how in 1957 [former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom] Harold Macmillan and President Dwight Eisenhower approved a CIA-MI6 plan to stage fake border incidents as an excuse for an invasion by Syria’s pro-western neighbours, and then to “eliminate” the most influential triumvirate in Damascus.   ***   Although historians know that intelligence services had sought to topple the Syrian regime in the autumn of 1957, this is the first time any document has been found showing that the assassination of three leading figures was at the heart of the scheme. In the document drawn up by a top secret and high-level working group that met in Washington in September 1957, Mr Macmillan and President Eisenhower were left in no doubt about the need to assassinate the top men in Damascus.

Kermit Roosevelt had a proven track record in this sort of thing.  According to the New York Times, he was the leader of the CIA’s coup in Iran in 1953, which – as subsequently admitted by the CIA - used false flag terror to topple the democratically elected leader or Iran. BBC continues: More importantly, Syria also had control of one of the main oil arteries of the Middle East, the pipeline which connected pro-western Iraq’s oilfields to Turkey.   ***   The report said that once the necessary degree of fear had been created, frontier incidents and border clashes would be staged to provide a pretext for Iraqi and Jordanian military intervention. Syria had to be “made to appear as the sponsor of plots, sabotage and violence directed against neighbouring governments,” the report says. “CIA and SIS should use their capabilities in both the psychological and action fields to augment tension.”   ***   The plan called for funding of a “Free Syria Committee” [hmmm ... sounds vaguely familiar], and the arming of “political factions with paramilitary or other actionist capabilities” within Syria. The CIA and MI6 would instigate internal uprisings, for instance by the Druze [a Shia Muslim sect] in the south, help to free political prisoners held in the Mezze prison, and stir up the Muslim Brotherhood in Damascus.

In 1982, a prominent Israeli journalist formerly attached to the Israeli Foreign Ministry allegedly wrote a book expressly calling for the break up of Syria: All the Arab states should be broken down, by Israel, into small units ….   Dissolution of Syria and Iraq later on into ethnically or religiously unique areas such as in Lebanon, is Israel’s primary target on the Eastern front in the long run. In any event, it is well-documented that – in 1996 – U.S. and Israeli Neocons advocated: Weakening, containing, and even rolling back Syria ….

The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia executed Shiite Muslim cleric Nimr al-Nimr on Saturday. Hours later, Iranian protestors set fire to the Saudi embassy in Tehran. On Sunday, the Saudi government, which considers itself the guardian of Sunni Islam, cut diplomatic ties with Iran, which is a Shiite Muslim theocracy. To explain what’s going on, the New York Times provided a primer on the difference between Sunni and Shiite Islam, informing us that “a schism emerged after the death of the Prophet Muhammad in 632” — i.e., 1,383 years ago. But to the degree that the current crisis has anything to do with religion, it’s much less about whether Abu Bakr or Ali was Muhammad’s rightful successor and much more about who’s going to control something more concrete right now: oil.

In fact, much of the conflict can be explained by a fascinating map created by M.R. Izady, a cartographer and adjunct master professor at the U.S. Air Force Special Operations School/Joint Special Operations University in Florida. What the map shows is that, due to a peculiar correlation of religious history and anaerobic decomposition of plankton, almost all the Persian Gulf’s fossil fuels are located underneath Shiites. This is true even in Sunni Saudi Arabia, where the major oil fields are in the Eastern Province, which has a majority Shiite population. As a result, one of the Saudi royal family’s deepest fears is that one day Saudi Shiites will secede, with their oil, and ally with Shiite Iran.

This fear has only grown since the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq overturned Saddam Hussein’s minority Sunni regime, and empowered the pro-Iranian Shiite majority. Nimr himself said in 2009 that Saudi Shiites would call for secession if the Saudi government didn’t improve its treatment of them.

(Reuters) - Saudi-owned al-Arabiya television said Saudi Arabia had deployed 30,000 soldiers to its border with Iraq on Thursday after Iraqi forces abandoned the area, but Baghdad denied pulling forces back and said it remained in full control of its frontier. Saudi Arabia, the world's top oil exporter, shares an 800-km (500-mile) desert border with Iraq, where Islamic State insurgents and other Sunni Muslim militant groups seized towns and cities in a lightning advance last month.

A Turkish official said anyone supporting the YPG militia will become "a target", a warning likely to rile the United States as its forces work alongside the Kurdish armed group on the ground in northern Syria. Deputy Prime Minister Bekir Bozdag's comments on Thursday came after Turkey threatened to attack the town of Manbij as part of its cross-border operation against the Afrin region, controlled by the Kurdish fighters. The US has about 2,000 soldiers based in Manbij - about 100km east of Afrin - who work with the YPG in fighting Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL, also known as ISIS). If the US wants to "avoid a confrontation with Turkey - which neither they nor Turkey want - the way to this is clear: they must cut support given to terrorists", Bozdag told Turkish broadcaster A Haber. "Those who support the terrorist organisation will become a target in this battle. The United States needs to review its soldiers and elements giving support to terrorists on the ground in such a way as to avoid a confrontation with Turkey," he said. There was no immediate response from the US to Bozdag's comments on Thursday.

A Turkish official said anyone supporting the YPG militia will become "a target", a warning likely to rile the United States as its forces work alongside the Kurdish armed group on the ground in northern Syria. Deputy Prime Minister Bekir Bozdag's comments on Thursday came after Turkey threatened to attack the town of Manbij as part of its cross-border operation against the Afrin region, controlled by the Kurdish fighters. The US has about 2,000 soldiers based in Manbij - about 100km east of Afrin - who work with the YPG in fighting Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL, also known as ISIS). If the US wants to "avoid a confrontation with Turkey - which neither they nor Turkey want - the way to this is clear: they must cut support given to terrorists", Bozdag told Turkish broadcaster A Haber. "Those who support the terrorist organisation will become a target in this battle. The United States needs to review its soldiers and elements giving support to terrorists on the ground in such a way as to avoid a confrontation with Turkey," he said. There was no immediate response from the US to Bozdag's comments on Thursday.

The US military coalition operating in Manbij on Wednesday said American soldiers there have the right to defend themselves against any attack. "The coalition forces that are in that area have an inherent right to defend themselves and will do so if necessary," spokesman Colonel Ryan Dillon said. 

Russian President Vladimir Putin on Friday offered Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki Moscow's total backing for the fight against jihadist fighters who have swept across the Middle East country."Putin confirmed Russia's complete support for the efforts of the Iraqi government to speedily liberate the territory of the republic from terrorists," the Kremlin said in a statement following a phone call between the two leaders.Maliki, increasingly under pressure at home and abroad, told Putin about steps the Iraqi government was taking to turn back a lightning offensive by the radical Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), that has overrun swathes of northern and central Iraq."It was noted that the activities of extremists conducting military operations on the territory of Syria has taken on a cross-border character and now threaten the security of the whole region," the statement said.

The conversation came after US President Barack Obama stopped short of acceding to Maliki's appeal for air strikes against the Sunni Muslim insurgents, prompting neighbouring Shiite Iran to charge that Washington lacked the "will" to fight terror.On Friday the Kremlin's top foreign policy advisor Yury Ushakov told journalists that Putin would soon hold phone talks with Obama, in part, about the situation in Iraq. Russia has blamed the latest violence sweeping Iraq on the 2003 US-led invasion of the country and said that any strikes on jihadist forces would have to be authorised by the United Nations. Russia is one of the staunchest allies of Syrian strongman Bashar al-Assad and has helped prop up his regime during three years of fighting against a hotchpotch of rebel groups, including the ISIL.

Iraq's foreign minister has asked the US to launch air attacks on Sunni rebels to put down a week-long rebellion by fighters led by the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant. Hoshyar Zebari told a news conference on Wednesday in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, that a request had been made "to break the morale" of ISIL fighters. The statement came as Iraqi security forces battled rebels at the country's main oil refinery and claimed to regain partial control of a city near the Syrian border. General Martin Dempsey, the top US military commander, confirmed the request during a Senate sub-committee hearing.

"We have a request from the Iraqi government for air power," said Dempsey. "It is in our national security interest to counter ISIL wherever we find them."  Meanwhile, US President Barack Obama told Congressional leaders he didn't not need congress' approval for any action in Iraq, a leading Senate Republican said. After a meeting between the president and senior members of Congress, Senator Mitch McConnell told reporters the president "indicated he didn't feel he had any need for authority from us for steps that he might take." White House officials have suggested Obama may be able to act on his own as the Iraq government has requested US military assistance.

Since June, the U.S. military has been slowly stockpiling massive amounts of its gear coming out of Afghanistan at a depot in Kuwait adjacent to a bustling commercial port, in preparation for ultimately shipping it across the border into Iraq for an allied offensive against the Islamic State group.

The gear, primarily from the Army, will be fixed up and held as top U.S. planners in Iraq determine what they’ll need to defeat the Islamic State group in the coming months, says Air Force Maj. Gen. Rowayne “Wayne” Schatz, the director of operations and plans for U.S. Transportation Command. “From June to December, we’ve worked a lot on moving items into Kuwait,” he says. “The Army is holding the gear there, and it has room to hold it, as the mission fleshes out.”

“I don’t want to disclose any timelines,” Lt. Gen. James Terry, commander of the Combined Joint Task Force-Operation Inherent Resolve, said during a news conference at the Pentagon. The task force is focusing on supporting, rebuilding and training Iraq's fractured military and National Guard forces to prepare them to take on the vicious extremist army. Terry cited Mosul and Anbar province, along with the cities of Ramadi and Baiji, as key areas his forces will try to wrest away from Islamic State group control.

And why did Islamic State, formerly ISIS, become winners? Because the "West" regimented, schooled, trained, logistically helped and weaponized most of IS's Takfiri goons with a mission at hand: to destroy Syria. The "West" lauded them as "Syrian rebels". Freedom fighters. Washington even promoted Jabhat al-Nusra (the official al-Qaeda franchise in Syria, and a "terrorist organization", according to the State Department) as "good" jihadis, as well as the preferred Saudi combo, the Islamic Front.

The House of Saud, directly and indirectly, and the proverbial wealthy Gulf Cooperation Council donors are the Mom and Dad of ISIS. All duly vetted/approved by the industrial-military-Orwellian-Panopticon complex. And yet "Assad must go" had other ideas for Syria. He didn't go. He and his army resisted and counter-attacked. So the original mission in Syria morphed across the (non-existent) desert border towards Iraq. ISIS kept expanding - via extortion, kidnapping, captured oil fields, tribal smuggling networks.

How convenient that IS strategy is totally divide and rule. Totally balkanization of Iraq. Totally mum on Israel's slow-motion ethnic cleansing of Gaza. Totally useful in wagging the (beheading) dog to make the world forget about Gaza. Moroever, IS/ISIS strategy, stripped to the bone, is Pentagon manual; clear, hold and build - then expand (to an area larger than Great Britain). It's even Pentagon manual redux - as in building "coalitions of the willing" (see the alliance with "remnants" - Rummy talk - of the Saddam regime propelling their northern Iraq summer offensive.) How convenient that the mighty Orwellian/Panopticon complex satellite maze could not identify a long convoy of gleaming white Toyotas crossing the desert towards their summer conquests. And how convenient that a Briton beheading an American - what a "special relationship" plot twist! - fully sanctions the Return of Iraq Bombing ("for months", in Obama's words); more strikes; more drones; perhaps more boots on the ground; perhaps, in the near future, a Syria extension. IS also took over Tikrit, the birthplace of Saddam, in their summer adventure. Now Baghdad's military are trying to take it back. IS welcomed them with minefields, booby-trapped buildings, an array of snipers and hardcore mortar fire. How convenient that Obama's "humanitarian" bombs are not involved in R2P ("responsibility to protect") Saddam's birthplace. What really matters is the US consulate in Erbil, scores of CIA operatives and vast Big Oil interests in Iraqi Kurdistan.

Turkey withdrew troops Monday from a north Iraq camp, a lawmaker and witnesses said, after a deployment which Baghdad said went ahead without its permission and that sparked a diplomatic row.It was not immediately clear how many soldiers were removed from the camp, where Ankara sent troops and tanks on a deployment last week it said was routine and necessary to protect Turkish trainers working with Iraqi forces battling the Islamic State jihadist group.Baghdad has sharply criticized the deployment, terming it an "incursion" that violated the country's sovereignty, repeatedly demanding the forces be withdrawn and complaining to the United Nations Security Council."The Turkish army withdrew from Camp Zilkan at dawn today, and according to our information, only the trainers remain to train Hashad al-Watani forces," MP Salem al-Shabaki said, referring to anti-IS forces and the site where they were being trained."Witnesses confirmed that they saw the Turkish army withdrawing from Camp Zilkan... toward the Turkish border," Shabaki said.

A senior Turkish official said last week that between 150 and 300 soldiers and 20 tanks were deployed to protect Turkish military trainers at a camp near Mosul, the main IS hub in Iraq.

Iraqi Prime Minister Haidar al-Abadi on Friday instructed the Foreign Ministry to lodge an official complaint to the UN Security Council over the deployment of Turkish troops in northern Iraq.A statement by Abadi's office said the incursion by Turkish troops "is blatant violation of the provisions and principles of the UN Charter and a violation to the sovereignty of the Iraqi state, which happened without the knowledge and consent of the Iraqi authorities."Iraq demands the UN Security Council "to shoulder its responsibilities and orders Turkey to withdraw its troops immediately, and to ensure unconditionally withdrawal to the internationally recognized border between the two countries," the statement said.

On Thursday, an Iraqi foreign ministry spokesman said that Iraq has contacted the five permanent member states of the UN Security Council for condemning Turkey's deployment of troops on Iraqi soil.He also said that Iraq demanded an Arab League extraordinary session to "discuss the consequences of the Turkish breach (to Iraqi sovereignty) and adopt an Arab stance against it."Iraq's latest move came a day after the Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said that withdrawing Turkish troops from Iraq is out of the question and that the Turkish soldiers are in Iraq as part of a training mission."Turkish troops in Mosul are not there as combatants; they are trainers. Their numbers may vary depending on the size of Kurdish Peshmerga troops. It is out of the question, for now, to pull them out," he said.The crisis between the two countries sparked last Friday when reports said a Turkish training battalion equipped with armored vehicles was deployed near the city of Mosul to train Iraqi paramilitary groups in fighting the ISIL terrorist group.Mosul, the capital of Nineveh province, has been under ISIL control since June 2014.

Baghdad has insisted that the Turkish troops had no authorization from the Iraqi government and thus demanded their withdrawal, while Ankara called the troops only a routine rotation of the trainers.

As US aircraft continued to pound the Islamist militants in northern Iraq, the Obama administration was studying a range of options for pressuring Isis in Syria, primarily through training "moderate" Syrian rebels as a proxy force, with air strikes as a possible backup.

The favoured option, according to two administration officials, is to press forward with a training mission, led by elite special operations forces, aimed at making non-jihadist Syrians an effective proxy force. But the rebels are outgunned and outnumbered by Isis and the administration still has not received $500m from Congress for its rebel training plans. Pentagon officials said they had yet to work out what the training program would actually look like, where it will be hosted, or if air strikes on Isis targets in Syria will support it. For all the internal administration focus on propping up moderate Syrian rebels, the US military would not be able to begin training them until October, the earliest that Congressional approval could be obtained for the required funding and authorisation. Kirby said he was unaware of any "plan to accelerate it". Nor have critical details for the training program been worked out, despite it being effectively the lynchpin of what the administration considers a long-term plan to defeat Isis. "I can't tell you where it would take place, or how many people would be trained, and there's still a vetting process that needs to be fully developed here," Kirby conceded.

the White House went further than before in its condemnation of Isis, describing the killing of Foley as an act of terrorism. "When we see somebody killed in such a horrific way, that represents a terrorist attack against our country and against an American citizen, Rhodes said, saying the US would do whatever necessary to protect Americans in future."We are actively considering what is necessary to deal with that threat and we are not going to be restricted by borders," said Rhodes, briefing reporters at Martha's Vineyard, where the president is on vacation.

The strategy that President Obama laid out Wednesday night to "degrade and ultimately destroy the terrorist group known as ISIL," is incoherent, inconsistent and, ultimately, non-credible. A year ago, Obama and John Kerry were straining at the leash to launch air strikes on Syrian President Bashar Assad for his alleged use of chemical weapons in "killing his own people." But when Americans rose as one to demand that we stay out of Syria, Obama hastily erased his "red line" and announced a new policy of not getting involved in "somebody else's civil war." Now, after videos of the beheadings of two U.S. journalists have set the nation on fire, the president, reading the polls, has flipped again. Now Obama wants to lead the West and the Arab world straight into Syria's civil war. Only this time we bomb ISIL, not Assad.

Who will provide the legions Obama will deploy to crush ISIL in Syria? The Free Syrian Army, the same rebels who have been routed again and again and whose chances of ousting Assad were derided by Obama himself in August as a "fantasy"? The FSA, the president mocked, is a force of "former doctors, farmers, pharmacists and so forth." Now Obama wants Congress to appropriate $500 million to train and arm those doctors and pharmacists and send them into battle against an army of jihadist terrorists who just bit off one-third of Iraq. Before Congress votes a dime, it should get some answers. Whom will this Free Syrian Army fight? ISIL alone? The al-Nusra Front? Hezbollah in Syria? Assad's army? How many years will it take to train, equip and build the FSA into a force that can crush both Assad and ISIL?

"Tell me how this thing ends," said Gen. David Petraeus on the road up to Baghdad in 2003. The president did not tell us how this new war ends. If Assad falls, do the Alawites and Christians survive? Does Syria disintegrate? Who will rule in Damascus? The United States spent seven years building an army to hold Iraq together. Yet when a few thousand ISIL fighters stormed in from Syria, that army broke and fled all the way to Baghdad. Even the Kurdish peshmerga broke and ran. What makes us think we can succeed in Syria where we failed in Iraq. If ISIL is our mortal enemy and Syria its sanctuary, there are two armies capable of crushing it together — the Syrian and Turkish armies. <a onClick="return adgo(5541,10783,this.href);" href="http://adserver.adtechus.com/adlink/3.0/5235/1297475/0/170/ADTECH;cookie=info;loc=300;key=key1+key2+key3+key4;grp=13579" target="_blank"><img src="http://adserver.adtechus.com/adserv/3.0/5235/1297475/0/170/ADTECH;cookie=info;loc=300;key=key1+key2+key3+key4;grp=13579" border="0" width="300" height="250"></a> But Turkey, a NATO ally, was not even mentioned in Obama's speech. Why? Because the Turks have been allowing jihadists to cross into Syria, as they have long sought the fall of Assad.

Iraq has sent military reinforcements to a highway linking its soil with Syria and Jordan, an army officer was quoted saying Sunday as the border regions witness an escalation of assaults by Islamic State militants. Jordan’s news agency Petra quoted Col. Ahmed al-Dulaimi, from the Iraqi army, saying that military and paramilitary reinforcements were sent to the international road extending from the city of Rutba, Anbar, to Jordan and Syria. He said the deployments seek to blocking sneaking attempts by the Islamic State members.

Germany's international broadcaster Deutsche Welle (DW) published a video report of immense implications - possibly the first national broadcaster in the West to admit that the so-called "Islamic State" (ISIS) is supplied not by "black market oil" or "hostage ransoms" but billions of dollars worth of supplies carried into Syria across NATO member Turkey's borders via hundreds of trucks a day. The report titled, "'IS' supply channels through Turkey," confirms what has been reported by geopolitical analysts since at least as early as 2011 - that NATO member Turkey has allowed a torrent in supplies, fighters, and weapons to cross its borders unopposed to resupply ISIS positions inside of Syria.

Local residents and merchants interviewed by Germany's DW admitted that commerce with Syria benefiting them had ended since the conflict began and that the supplies trucks carry as they stream across the border originates from "western Turkey." The DW report does not elaborate on what "western Turkey" means, but it most likely refers to Ankara, various ports used by NATO, and of course NATO's Incirlik Air Base. While DW's report claims no one knows who is arranging the shipments, it does reveal that the very torrent of trucks its film crew documented was officially denied by the Turkish government in Ankara. It is a certainty that Turkey is not only aware of this, but directly complicit, as is NATO who has feigned a desire to defeat ISIS but has failed to expose and uproot ISIS' multinational sponsorship and more importantly, has refused to cut its supply lines - an elementary prerequisite of any military strategy. 

SIS supply lines leading from NATO territory should be of no surprise. As reported since as early as 2007, the US and its regional accomplices conspired to use Al Qaeda and other armed extremists in a bid to reorder North Africa and the Middle East. It would be Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Seymour Hersh in his article, "The Redirection: Is the Administration’s new policy benefiting our enemies in the war on terrorism?" that explicitly stated (emphasis added): To undermine Iran, which is predominantly Shiite, the Bush Administration has decided, in effect, to reconfigure its priorities in the Middle East. In Lebanon, the Administration has coöperated with Saudi Arabia’s government, which is Sunni, in clandestine operations that are intended to weaken Hezbollah, the Shiite organization that is backed by Iran. The U.S. has also taken part in clandestine operations aimed at Iran and its ally Syria. A by-product of these activities has been the bolstering of Sunni extremist groups that espouse a militant vision of Islam and are hostile to America and sympathetic to Al Qaeda. 

As President Obama laid out his “strategy” last night for dealing with the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), and as bipartisan leadership in Congress pushes to approve as much as $4 billion to arm Syrian “rebels,” it should be noted that the keystone to his anti-Assad policy — the “vetted moderate” Free Syrian Army (FSA) — is now admitting that they, too, are working with the Islamic State. This confirms PJ Media’s reporting last week about the FSA’s alliances with Syrian terrorist groups. On Monday, the Daily Star in Lebanon quoted a FSA brigade commander saying that his forces were working with the Islamic State and Jabhat al-Nusra, al-Qaeda’s official Syrian affiliate — both U.S.-designated terrorist organizations — near the Syrian/Lebanon border. “We are collaborating with the Islamic State and the Nusra Front by attacking the Syrian Army’s gatherings in … Qalamoun,” said Bassel Idriss, the commander of an FSA-aligned rebel brigade. “We have reached a point where we have to collaborate with anyone against unfairness and injustice,” confirmed Abu Khaled, another FSA commander who lives in Arsal. “Let’s face it: The Nusra Front is the biggest power present right now in Qalamoun and we as FSA would collaborate on any mission they launch as long as it coincides with our values,” he added.

In my report last week I noted that buried in a New York Times article last month was a Syrian “rebel” commander quoted as saying that his forces were working with ISIS and Jabhat al-Nusra in raids along the border with Lebanon, including attacks on Lebanese forces. The Times article quickly tried to dismiss the commander’s statements, but the Daily Star article now confirms this alliance. Among the other pertinent points from that PJ Media article last week was that this time last year the bipartisan conventional wisdom amongst the foreign policy establishment was that the bulk of the Syrian rebel forces were moderates, a fiction refuted by a Rand Corporation study published last September that found nearly half of the Syrian “rebels” were jihadists or hard-core Islamists.

Another relevant phenomenon I noted was that multiple arms shipments from the U.S. to the “vetted moderate” FSA were suspiciously raided and confiscated by ISIS and Jabhat al-Nusra, prompting the Obama administration and the UK to suspend weapons shipments to the FSA last December. In April, the Obama administration again turned on the CIA weapons spigot to the FSA, and Obama began calling for an additional $500 million for the “vetted moderate rebels,” but by July the weapons provided to the FSA were yet again being raided and captured by ISIS and other terrorist groups. Remarkably, one Syrian dissident leader reportedly told Al-Quds al-Arabi that the FSA had lost $500 million worth of arms to rival “rebel” groups, much of which ended up being sold to unknown parties in Turkey and Iraq.

Turkey’s foreign minister is preparing to attend key talks involving the US and Arab countries willing to participate in a coalition against the self-proclaimed jihadist Islamic State (IS) group. Thursday’s gathering in Saudi Arabia, an attempt to organise efforts to tackle the IS in Iraq and Syria, is to take place two days after a visit by Chuck Hagel, the US defence secretary, to the Turkish capital, where he discussed Ankara’s commitment to the planned US-led coalition.

It also comes a day after a prime-time address US President Barack Obama delivered on Wednesday night ordering expanded air strikes against the group that has declared a "caliphate" in eastern Syria and northern Iraq. Turkey has been criticised by Western governments for turning a blind eye to the flow of fighters into Syria, indiscriminately keeping its borders open to armed groups fighting the Damascus regime, once a close ally of Ankara. Hordes of foreign fighters from Turkey, the US and Europe have joined the IS, according to analysts, diplomats and a senior IS member. The IS member recently spoke to The Washington Post in a Turkish border town, explaining how fighters used Turkish territory for hospital treatment, accommodation and securing supplies.

Turkey has over the summer been ramping up efforts to control its 850km Syrian border with stricter controls, and called for Western countries to stop the flow of potential fighters to the country. Fehim Tastekin, a veteran Turkish journalist who has extensively reported from the region, believes that despite stricter Turkish controls, IS fighters and weapons continue to cross the border - but to a lesser extent. "The planned American operation against the IS will push Turkey to implement an even stricter border regime as an ally," Tastekin said, adding that the Turkish-Syrian border was not as crucial before the arrival of the IS.

Following the gruesome beheading of James Foley, by a terrorist group called “The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria,” and the group’s threats to behead other captives in August 2014, The New York Times headline on page A19 reads, with Kafkaesque “logic”:  “U.S. Invokes Defense of Iraq in Legal Justification of Syria Strikes.”  US/NATO had failed, for three years, to get UN Security Council authorization for military action against Syria, and unilateral military action against Syria would be a violation of international law. However, the very visible emergence of ISIS, now defined as the most dangerous terrorist organization in the Middle East, or, perhaps, globally, and their widely publicized video beheadings of James Foley, Steve Sotloff and others, appeared to give some form of de facto justification for broader military action, including against Syria.  On August 22, 2014, The New York Times reported, page A6: “When the United States began airstrikes in Iraq this month, senior Obama administration officials went out of their way to underscore the limited nature of their action.  ‘This was not an authorization of a broad-based counterterrorism campaign,’ a senior Obama administration official told reporters at the time.  But the beheading of an American journalist and the possibility that more American citizens being held by the group might be slain has prompted outrage at the highest levels of the American government.”

In an interview with Anderson Cooper, Diane Foley stated that a military official forbade the family from going to the media and threatened to prosecute them for supporting terrorism if they attempted to raise the $1.32 million dollar ransom demanded by ISIS. “Three times he intimidated us with that message.  We were horrified he would say that.  He just told us we would be prosecuted.  We knew we had to save our son, we had to try,” Mrs. Foley told Anderson Cooper. Foley’s brother, Michael noted in an interview that he was ‘directly threatened with possible prosecution for violating anti-terrorism laws by a State Department official.”  Reporter Michael Isikoff states, in a September 12 article: “The parents of murdered journalist Steven Sotloff were told by a White House counterterrorism official at a meeting last May that they could face criminal prosecution if they paid ransom to try to free their son.”

Indeed, it can be asserted that these same administration officials who claimed “outrage” after the beheadings, inflicted the most extreme psychological torture upon the families of James Foley and Stephen Sotloff, who were desperately trying to save the lives of their sons and brother. On September 12, 2014, ABC news reported:  “Obama administration officials repeatedly threatened the family of murdered journalist James Foley that they might face criminal charges for supporting terrorism if they paid ransom to the ISIS killers who ultimately beheaded their son, his mother and brother said this week.  ‘We were told that several times and we took it as a threat and it was appalling,’ Foley’s mother Diane told ABC news in an interview.  She said the warnings over the summer came primarily from a highly decorated military officer serving on the White House National Security Council staff, which five outraged current and former officials with direct knowledge of the Foley case also recounted to ABC news in recent weeks.”

It’s spy thriller stuff; no one is talking. But there are indications Russia would not announce a partial withdrawal from Syria right before the Geneva negotiations ramp up unless a grand bargain with Washington had been struck.Some sort of bargain is in play, of which we still don’t know the details; that's what the CIA itself is basically saying through their multiple US Think Tankland mouthpieces. And that's the real meaning hidden under a carefully timed Barack Obama interview that, although inviting suspension of disbelief, reads like a major policy change document. Obama invests in proverbial whitewashing, now admitting US intel did not specifically identify the Bashar al-Assad government as responsible for the Ghouta chemical attack. And then there are nuggets, such as Ukraine seen as not a vital interest of the US – something that clashes head on with the Brzezinski doctrine. Or Saudi Arabia as freeloaders of US foreign policy – something that provoked a fierce response from former Osama bin Laden pal and Saudi intel supremo Prince Turki.

Tradeoffs seem to be imminent. And that would imply a power shift has taken place above Obama — who is essentially a messenger, a paperboy. Still that does not mean that the bellicose agendas of both the Pentagon and the CIA are now contained.

Russian intel cannot possibly trust a US administration infested with warmongering neocon cells. Moreover, the Brzezinski doctrine has failed – but it’s not dead. Part of the Brzezinski plan was to flood oil markets with shut-in capacity in OPEC to destroy Russia. That caused damage, but the second part, which was to lure Russia into an war in Ukraine for which Ukrainians were to be the cannon fodder in the name of “democracy”, failed miserably. Then there was the wishful thinking that Syria would suck Russia into a quagmire of Dubya in Iraq proportions – but that also failed miserably with the current Russian time out. 

The US and UK announced Wednesday the suspension of non-lethal military aid to the Syrian opposition in the northern part of the country after Free Syrian Army bases near the Turkish border were seized by a new Islamist front. debkafile reports that that was only part of the rationale for pulling the last rug from under the feet of the moderate Syrian rebel wing holding the border with Turkey.  debkafile’s military and intelligence sources report exclusively that Washington decided to switch its military support, such as it is, from the North to a pro-American security sector which is being carved out in the South by the US and Britain. The aid will be transferred to the Syrian rebels they trained in Jordan to man the sector, under the supervision of two US war rooms established in the northern Jordanian town of Irbid. The two war rooms fall under the head of the US Special Operations Command, Adm.  William Harry “Bill” McRaven, who is headquartered at MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa, Florida.

An American general, whose identity is kept secret, is posted on the spot. His job, supported by a team of US officers, is to operate the two war rooms and assign their tasks to the 11,000 American special forces and air force troops personnel posted in the Hashemite Kingdom. Their primary mission, as laid down by the White House in Washington in a directive to the Pentagon, is to run the rebel units charged with taking control of the security zone, which runs south of Damascus, west to the Syrian border with Lebanon, southwest to its border with Israel including the Syrian Golan, south to its border with Jordan and east to its border with Iraq. This wedge of land covers about one-tenth of Syrian territory. Washington has designed this zone to distance Al Qaeda’s Jabhat al-Nusra and ISIS (The Islamic State of Iraq and the Sham) from Syria’s borderlands with Jordan, Israel and Lebanon – and prevent them coming close to Damascus. By this security enclave, the US also contributes to shoring up Syrian central government in the capital, including that of Bashar Assad, against Al Qaeda encroachments from the east.