The Syria Thread 2011 - Present

[Elvis]

I'm now thinking that many of those "ISIS" guys, in those pickup trucks we see, are British SAS (or similar US/NATO-connected forces):

SAS dress as ISIS fighters in undercover war on jihadis

BRITISH Special Forces are mounting hit and run raids against Islamic State deep inside eastern Syria dressed as insurgent fighters, the Sunday Express can reveal.

By Marco Giannangeli and Josh Taylor
PUBLISHED: 00:00, Sat, Aug 1, 2015 | UPDATED: 11:54, Sun, Aug 2, 2015

The unorthodox tactic, which is seeing SAS units dressed in black and flying ISIS flags, has been likened to the methods used by the Long Range Desert Group against Rommel's forces during the Second World War.

More than 120 members belonging to the elite regiment are currently in the war-torn country on operation Shader, tasked with destroying IS equipment and munitions which insurgents constantly move to avoid Coalition air strikes.

It comes just days after David Cameron gave "carte blanche" for the SAS and SBS to target IS leaders as part of the Government's "broad spectrum" response to the murder of 30 British tourists by ISIS gunman Seifeddine Rezgui in the Tunisian beach resort of Sousse.

Though the Prime Minister is being kept informed, senior military sources last night told the Sunday Express that he would not be required to "green light" every mission.

Instead the teams, part of a force known as the Coalition Joint Special Operations Task Force, are under American command.

Dubbed "smash" the units, which travel in civilian pick-ups, can even launch their own unmanned aerial vehicles, or mini-drones, to scan terrain ahead of them and pinpoint IS forces.

Using a US-developed programme, the UAVs camera system can identify any known High Value Target, digitally transmitting the information as it happens to analysts on the ground.

They are being supported by more than 250 specialists, who provide additional communications support.

Operating in small groups, the units reveal their coordinates to RAF and coalition air forces and are assigned a "kill box" - an area which will not be attacked by air while they are operating there.

Last week an additional 20 SAS soldiers flew into Saudi Arabia to prepare a training system in which the UK will instruct hundreds of members of the Syrian Moderate Opposition, as part of efforts by David Cameron to seek a support by Labour and the SNP on air strikes over Syria.

In March, defence secretary Michael Fallon met with the US Commander of the Combined Joint Task Force Lt General James Terry and the UK Deputy Commander Major General Bob Bruce In Kuwait.

During talks, Mr. Fallon reaffirmed the UK's intention to contribute to a US-led programme to train the Syrian Moderate Opposition at training sites across the Middle East.

He said: "ISIL must be defeated in both Iraq and Syria. Our actions and surveillance capabilities are freeing up other countries to strike in Syria.
"I reiterated today that Britain intends to contribute to the coalition's training of moderate Syrian opposition".

Last week former head of the British Army General Lord Richards said he belived IS would not be vanquished without a concerted effort on the ground, adding "tanks will roll."

Speaking to the Sunday Express last night a senior military source said: "Essentially, this is what we call penny packet operations - small individual incursions which hopefully join up to create tangible results. The view here is long - it's about finding and engaging targets, yes, but it's also about assessing infrastructure and identifying where ISIS is hidings its equipment in order to set the conditions for a potentially larger, future engagement. "

http://www.express.co.uk/news/uk/595439 ... er-Jihadis

"It's about" the oil.

Published on August 5, 2015
British SAS Special Forces “Dressed Up as ISIS Rebels” Fighting Assad in Syria
by Stephen Lendman via Information Clearing House

On August 2, Britain’s Sunday Express newspaper headlined “SAS dress as ISIS fighters in undercover war on jihadis,” saying:

“More than 120 members belonging to the elite regiment are currently in the war-torn country” covertly “dressed in black and flying ISIS flags,” engaged in what’s called Operation Shader – attacking Syrian targets on the pretext of combatting ISIS.

Maybe covert US special forces and CIA elements are involved the same way. During Obama’s war on Libya, Britain deployed hundreds of Special Forces Support Group (SFSG) paratroopers – drawn from SAS (Special Air Service) and SBS (Special Boat Service) personnel.

Around 800 Royal Marines and 4,000 US counterparts were on standby to intervene on short notice if ordered.
...

A separate article discussed US airstrikes defending ISIS terrorists [or black-clad SAS operatives flying ISIS flags?] serving as US foot soldiers against Assad.

https://off-guardian.org/2015/08/05/bri ... -in-syria/

And "SITE" is always there to bring us the latest events:




on edit: It could also explain these "ISIS fighters" praying in different directions:

[American Dream]

In Defense of Amnesty International’s report on mass killings in the Saidnaya prison



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8rcLJz5qnjY

(A guest post by Brian Slocock)

The publication of Amnesty International’s recent report documenting the mass executions that are taking place in Saidnaya prison in Syria has generated a torrent of responses from the Syria Extermination-Denial band.

One of them, broadcast on the Russian Sputnik channel spin-off “Hard facts” has veteran Assad cheerleader John Wight interviewing former British ambassador to Syria Peter Ford, a figure whose credentials might appear to give him some credibility.

In the space of some 11 minutes, both parties managed to avoid engaging with the detailed analysis and evidence provided in the 48-page Report. Instead they produced a lot of flannel about the sins of Amnesty and the ominous “timing” of the Amnesty report ­ they don’t have the courage to openly assert that Amnesty released the report in order to sabotage the Syrian peace process – probably because it’s so patently absurd – but the dog whistles are there aplenty for their intended audience.) If we strip away all this padding we are left with four objections to the Amnesty case

All Amnesty’s witnesses are anonymised
Saidnaya could not possibly hold the number of prisoners Amnesty claim
The Amnesty report relies on the “discredited” Caesar torture documentation.
Some business about Amnesty getting the date of Saydnaya’s emergence as the country’s main political prison wrong

We can pass over the fourth ­ it’s trivial and more suggestive of clutching at straws than anything else (although it is useful to have Ford’s confirmation that the large Saydnaya complex has been Syria’s “main political prison” “for “many years” before 2006, acknowledging the long and continuous history of political repression in the country.

On the first of the remaining points: Of course the witnesses insist on being anonymous – if they weren’t they would face the prospect of themselves or family members joining the victims whose fate they are testifying to. Wight comments that the Amnesty report “would not stand scrutiny in a court of law”. But no one is in a court of law. Amnesty is aware of the identity of its witnesses, and has interviewed them, they have no obligation to expose them to mortal danger just to meet some spurious test of veracity set up by Wight.

On the second point, Ford says that “none of the authors of the report have actually been to Saydnaya, but I have – I had occasion to go to Saydnaya numerous times”. However, this dramatic claim to eyewitness authority quickly evaporates when he adds “I did not enter the prison”. (So what exactly he was doing there? It seems an unlikely sightseeing destination)

Despite his rather limited (if oft repeated) engagement with Saydnaya, Ford claims that his sighting of the building allows him to assert that it is “literally impossible” for it to hold the 10-20 000 prisoners that Amnesty claims. His assessment is that it could hold “only about one-tenth that number”.

It’s possible to test that assertion by calculating the dimensions of Saydnaya from satellite photos. The main Saydnaya “red building” comprises 3 wings, each of which is about 90 x 20 metres, with. 3 – 4 floors. giving it a total capacity of about 18 000 square metres. The second “white building” where both detentions and executions take place, seems to be on two levels, adding another 4000 square metres of capacity. After allowing for essential functional space – offices, torture chambers, staff canteens, gallows ­ it would seem reasonable to estimate that something like 20 000 square metres is available for detention facilities. If Ford’s estimate that Saydnaya only holds 1000-2000 prisoners were true, then that would make it a very comfortable place indeed (it would meet the British Certified Normal Accommodation standard – something very few British prisons do.) But Saydnaya is in Damascus not Wandsworth, and very different rules apply there.

Intense overcrowding is a well-known feature of political prisons, an integral part of breaking prisoners’ spirits. There is plenty of testimony from Syria, and from other counties, that densities of less than 1 square metre per prisoner are often imposed. Human Rights Watch has collected testimony of densities as high as 3 prisoners per square metre. That would allow Saydnaya to hold the numbers Amnesty suggests; and certainly their figures are far more realistic than Ford’s. As Ford says, “when you get this basic fact wrong, you have to question the veracity of the rest”.

Point three: Ford suggests that Amnesty’s case is seriously undermined by their reference to the well-known “Caesar” portfolio of torture photographs, commenting that they have been discredited by the work of “a very good investigative journalist by the name of Rick Sterling, and also by Human Rights Watch. Sterling, however, is not an “investigative journalist” of any standard but a pro- regime publicist, whose article on the Caesar portfolio is a clumsy set of misrepresentations of the evidence and its interpretation. Ford lifts his account of the HRW review of the Caesar material straight from Sterling, claiming that it established that “46% of the photos showed dead Syrian soldiers, victims of car bombs, and other jihadist violence, and there was no evidence that the others were the victims of any particular form of detention.” This is a rampant distortion of HRW’s finding: true, they discovered that as a forensic photographer for the Syrian military authorities, “Caesar” was assigned to take several types of photographs: detainees who died in custody; dead soldiers and others who died in violent attacks; and photographs of the sites of the attacks: 54% of his photos were of dead detainees; 46% fell into the other two categories. As HRW noted, the range of Caesar’s photographs confirmed him to be to be an official a forensic photographer, reinforcing his credibility.

Moreover, the different categories were clearly distinguishable, and HRW was able to carry out an analysis of the dead detainees which produced detailed evidence that they had either been killed or died of malnutrition. They documented 6786 detainee deaths, and were able to identify which branch of the security services was responsible for each case. They also managed to locate several relatives of the dead who were able to identify them, despite their physically degraded conditions. No one who has seen these photos – as I have – could doubt that they had died as “victims of a particular form of detention”. In short, the HRW analysis demonstrates almost the exact opposite of what Sterling (and Ford) claim.

If this feeble mish-mash is the best Assad’s “counsels for the defence” can muster, then no one with a functioning intellect is going to take them seriously.

[Sounder]

Actually, AD this thread is about; 'US troops surround Syria on the eve of invasion?' While I understand why you would prefer to talk about the evils of Assad, there must be some other dedicated thread for that. Still your shtick amounts to that same old refrain that we 'advanced' westerners are required to save the Syrians from themselves. Six decades of largely forgotten history, because loudmouths like you who so normalize the enemy as demons that most people for social conformity reasons willingly forget our role in this tragedy. Congratulations.


The U.S. Carried Out Regime Change In Syria In 1949 … and Tried Again In 1957, 1986, 1991 and 2011-Today
Posted on February 24, 2017 by WashingtonsBlog

The CIA backed a right-wing coup in Syria in 1949. Douglas Little, Professor, Department of Clark University History professor Douglas Little notes:

Recently declassified records… confirm that beginning on November 30, 1948, [CIA operative Stephen] Meade met secretly with Colonel Zaim at least six times to discuss the “possibility [of an] army supported dictatorship.” [“Cold War and Covert Action: The United States and Syria, 1945-1958,” Middle East Journal, Winter 1990, p. 55]

***

As early as 1949, this newly independent Arab republic was an important staging ground for the CIA’s earliest experiments in covert action.

The CIA secretly encouraged a right-wing military coup in 1949.

The reason the U.S. initiated the coup? Little explains:

In late 1945, the Arabian American Oil Company (ARAMCO) announced plans to construct the Trans-Arabian Pipe Line (TAPLINE) from Saudi Arabia to the Mediterra- nean. With U.S. help, ARAMCO secured rights-of-way from Lebanon, Jordan and Saudi Arabia. The Syrian right-of-way was stalled in parliament.

In other words, Syria was the sole holdout for the lucrative oil pipeline.

(Indeed, the CIA has carried out this type of covert action right from the start.)

In 1957, the American president and British prime minister agreed to launch regime change again in Syria. Historian Little notes that the coup plot was discovered and stopped:

On August 12, 1957, the Syrian army surrounded the U.S. embassy in Damascus. Claiming to have aborted a CIA plot to overthrow neutralist President Shukri Quwatly and install a pro-Western regime, Syrian chief of counterintelligence Abdul Hamid Sarraj expelled three U.S. diplomats ….

Syrian counterintelligence chief Sarraj reacted swiftly on August 12, expelling Stone and other CIA agents, arresting their accomplices and placing the U.S. embassy under surveillance.

***

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.

Newly-declassified CIA documents show that in 1986, the CIA drew up plans to overthrow Syria by provoking sectarian tensions.

Neoconservatives planned regime change in Syria once again in 1991.

And as Nafeez Ahmed notes:

According to former French foreign minister Roland Dumas, Britain had planned covert action in Syria as early as 2009: “I was in England two years before the violence in Syria on other business,” he told French television: “I met with top British officials, who confessed to me that they were preparing something in Syria. This was in Britain not in America. Britain was preparing gunmen to invade Syria.”

Leaked emails from the private intelligence firm Stratfor, including notes from a meeting with Pentagon officials, confirmed that as of 2011, US and UK special forces training of Syrian opposition forces was well underway. The goal was to elicit the “collapse” of Assad’s regime “from within.”

Indeed.

Indeed, the U.S. has carried out regime change in the Middle East and North Africa for six decades.

[American Dream]

That invasion never happened. The U.S. seemed to want the Baathist regime to continue somehow. In fact it was one of many scare narratives used to rally the far right troops together with the more vulnerable leftists.

Now that it looks more likely that Uncle Sam could be working side by side with the Russian Bear on attacks inside Syria, I wonder if the "loyal opposition" will be changing their tune...

[Nordic]

[American Dream]

Children’s trauma is a laughing matter—if you are Vanessa Beeley




The notorious Assad regime propagandist Vanessa Beeley has been recently on a speaking tour of the UK. She has been showing up at small venues in Bristol, Birmingham, and London to give a presentation entitled “Aleppo: Fall or Liberation”. These talks have been hosted by the Communist Party of Great Britain Marxist-Leninist (CPGB-ML), which openly supports and glorifies Josef Stalin. In Bristol, her talk was held at the Palestine Museum and attended by about 70 people.

The general gist of Beeley’s talk is similar to her published work on websites such as 21st Century Wire and Mint Press News. The rebels are non-Syrian terrorists from Al-Qaeda who commit atrocities against the population in the areas they hold; what is happening in Syria is part of a regime change conspiracy that has been in place since the 1980s involving the media, human rights organizations, and Western governments; Bashar Al-Assad’s army is the main humanitarian agent, providing Syrians in East Aleppo and other rebel-held areas it captured with relief and medical care.

...Beeley’s favourite targets are the rescue workers and medical staff who save the men, women, and children injured in the regime’s and Russia’s airstrikes which target homes, schools, and hospitals. Syria is probably the only conflict in the world where first responders have been singled out not only for actual military attack but also for a relentless propaganda onslaught.

She began her verbal attack on the medical staff of Aleppo by saying that there were only six hospitals in this part of the city. One of them had, according to Beeley, been converted into a sharia court, prison, and a headquarters for the Nusra Front. Another was taken over by the Nusra Front and used as a sniping post. Another was “operational but Nusra Front”. According to the UN, there were 150-200 Nusra Fighters in all of Eastern Aleppo; but they somehow managed to run half the hospitals Beeley said were operational in East Aleppo. Activists who were present in East Aleppo say that there were 13 hospitals and clinics in operation and this number probably does not include the makeshift field clinics operating there before the fall. Beeley also said that in the private “non-Nusra” hospitals there were less than 50 beds, apparently serving 300,000 people.

...Ever since she began pushing her conspiracy theories about Syria, Vanessa Beeley has found a willing audience on the fringes of the political spectrum – conspiracy theorists, the “anti-imperialist” far-left, and the far-right. She has been promoted endlessly by Russian and pro-Russian “alternative” media as an “independent investigative journalist” and has a very strong presence on the Internet. It would be easy however, to dismiss her as a crackpot conspiracy theorist like, for example, Alex Jones (Indeed, her preferred forum 21stcenturywire.com was founded by a former editor of Alex Jones’s Infowars). But what she represents is something much worse – an attempt to make atrocities acceptable and genocide normal while simultaneously denying their existence in a true Orwellian doublethink exercise.

More at: https://pulsemedia.org/2017/03/11/child ... sa-beeley/

[Elvis]

^^^^ contemptible propaganda hit piece on actual journalist, written by armchair propagandist, pretends to be about "the children."

When Amr Salahi — "journalist" or "activist" depending on who's saying — starts reporting directly and on camera from Syrian conflict zones, I might take him as seriously as I take Vanessa Beeley. That piece of his is so overwrought it's a joke.

[tapitsbo]

Uncle Sam and the Russian Bear might be co-operating in Syria to some extent, but there is clearly major dissonance.

The Syrian loyalists were supposed to provide the northern buffer zone between the Kurdish/SDF forces and the Turks according to an agreement brokered by Russia, but now US troops have deployed to the same region. Awkward.

It seems to me that many regional actors might potentially take an American/SDF occupation of Raqqa as a significant provocation.

[Sounder]

AD wrote...

Now that it looks more likely that Uncle Sam could be working side by side with the Russian Bear on attacks inside Syria, I wonder if the "loyal opposition" will be changing their tune...

How so, and why?

[American Dream]

Because there is a sentiment that "fightin' the Power" means supporting the Russian State and also Syria's ruling elite. The possibility of the Trump regime steering the ship of State towards overt collaboration would seem to be a game changer for those who traffic in binaries.

[Sounder]

AD wrote....

Because there is a sentiment that "fightin' the Power" means supporting the Russian State and also Syria's ruling elite. The possibility of the Trump regime steering the ship of State towards overt collaboration would seem to be a game changer for those who traffic in binaries.

It serves your purpose to frame ‘fighting the power’ by connecting it to ‘supporting the Russian State and also Syria's ruling elite’, but from my perspective Assad and the Russians have little to do with it, as people that think similar to my way consider that ‘fighting the power’, (if it must be put that way), means ridding Syria of head chopping jihadist proxy forces.

The second sentence makes little sense, as till now at least Americans more likely drop weapons and food to the jihadists rather than bombs. Any ‘collaboration’ is likely seen as opportunity to bomb Syrian infrastructure.

Besides, what could be problematic about collaboration to kill jihadists.

[tapitsbo]

Who's the "loyal opposition"? I think AD means the "opposition" or what some would call the "jihadists". These people are definitely proxies to some degree, but also have significant support among a certain demographic of native Syrians.

Or does AD mean the opposing side in the war and their sympathizers/allies around the world? If the point is to point out the incongruence of the "loyalist" and "resistance axis" rhetoric, it seems to me that the Syrian Arab Republic is weaker than the broader coalition it's part of. More importantly however, the targeted populations won't back down without massive ethnic cleansing and displacement, which is exactly what their adversaries (the friends of "activistis" like the White Helmets) have been threatening for the past few years, on a scale that would necessarily dwarf that perpetrated by the "regime".

The discourse of "Islamophobia" is delegitimized in the extreme by its application to sectarian conflict between Muslims.

Most people can see that Muslim populations fighting jihadists aren't "Islamophobes" like some of the articles pasted here have suggested...

It's true that the Americans have killed some of their leaders and cut off some of their supply lines, and the Turks haven't supported them as much anymore, at least Turkey seems to have abandoned objectives to overrun Syria (I feel if Clinton had won the US election the massive media blitz about Aleppo would have metastasized into a push to topple Assad's government and exacerbate the seemingly endless war encouraged by some parties...)

Of course, last time I checked, countries like Israel, and Saudi Arabia still support these forces... without support from foreign states these groups will continue to be defeated, the resentment sowed by their defeat won't be going away anytime soon, however.

The PR groups like the White Helmets are still doing the same old song and dance since Trump's election... where's the changed tune?

With more sabre-rattling about destroying the infrastructure of the Lebanese government and not just Hezbollah, I think consternation among Westerners isn't going to go away anytime soon - it will be hard to dismiss all of this as the toxic waste of the "far right" or "tankies".

How would the media spin the massive collateral in a largely Christian country? So many of the DC beltway natsec elites are nominally Catholic...

[seemslikeadream]

Civilian deaths from US-led airstrikes hit record high under Donald Trump
'These reported casualty levels are comparable with some of the worst periods of Russian activity in Syria,' says Airwars.org

Thomas Gibbons-Neff Saturday 25 March 2017 17:39


A non-profit organisation that tracks civilian casualties caused by airstrikes in the Middle East said it has shifted nearly all of its resources to track a surge of claims regarding US-led strikes in Syria and Iraq.

The group, called Airwars.org, had been tracking deaths caused by both Russian and US airstrikes but said in a statement Friday that it was suspending its work on "alleged Russian actions in Syria -- so as best to focus our limited resources on continuing to properly monitor and assess reported casualties from the US and its allies.

"Almost 1,000 civilian non-combatant deaths have already been alleged from coalition actions across Iraq and Syria in March - a record claim," the statement said. "These reported casualty levels are comparable with some of the worst periods of Russian activity in Syria."

In the last week, three mass casualty incidents have been attributed to US.-led forces in Iraq and Syria, making March one of the most lethal months for civilians in the the two-year-old war against the Islamic State.

Last week, US drones targeted what locals deemed a mosque in Aleppo province in a bid to target al-Qaida leaders. US officials said dozens of terrorists were killed, but those on the ground said at least 47 civilians also died in the strikes. The Pentagon denied that there were any civilian casualties but has launched a formal investigation into the incident.

On Monday, a conflict monitoring group, the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, said a strike near Raqqa targeted a school that was serving as a home for multiple families displaced by fighting in the area, killing at least 33. The Pentagon admitted US aircraft were operating in the vicinity but, according to Pentagon spokesman Eric Pahon, the military is having a hard time rectifying the location of the building that was targeted with what was shown as destroyed on social media.

On Thursday, Iraqi media reported that an airstrike in Mosul killed more than 200 people. The Pentagon is investigating the claims.


After the fall of Aleppo to Syrian and Russian forces in December and the recent escalation of the US-led campaigns against the Islamic State in Mosul and Raqqa, claims of civilian casualties caused by American-led forces have outstripped those caused by Damascus and the Kremlin, according to Airwars.

As Syrian forces advance into opposition-held Hama in central Syria, Airwars has recorded roughly 50 civilian casualty events caused by the joint Russian and Syrian air campaign in March.

Airwars uses varying methods to investigate and confirm civilian casualties, relying on a medley of local news outlets, NGOs, civilian volunteers and social media to determine if casualty reports are fair, weak, contested or disproved. For March, nearly half the alleged strikes are contested, according to Airwars data.

According to Airwars, more than 2,500 civilians have been killed by the US-led coalition, which has admitted to killing only roughly 220 civilians. In recent months, the Pentagon said it has taken strides to investigate a backlog of claims while starting to release monthly civilian casualty assessments.

"The decision to temporarily suspend our Russia strike assessments has been a very difficult one to take," Chris Woods, the director of Airwars, said in a statement. "Moscow is still reportedly killing hundreds of civilians in Syria every month. But with Coalition casualty claims escalating so steeply - and with very limited Airwars resources - we believe our key focus at present needs to be on the US-led alliance."
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world ... 49486.html

[seemslikeadream]

Congress Needs to Stop Trump’s Escalation of the War on Syria
The president’s plans will only fan the country’s flames.
By James CardenMARCH 23, 2017

During the 2016 GOP presidential primaries and on through to the end of last year’s general election campaign, candidate Donald J. Trump repeatedly derided the fact that the United States had spent upward of $6 trillion dollars on wars in the Middle East because we, in his words, “have nothing to show for it.” One might then have reasonably expected Trump to begin the process of unwinding our overstretched positions in the region when he became president.

But alas.

On March 9, The New York Times reported that the United States is sending 400 troops to Syria to bolster the small number of American troops that are already on the ground there. A week later, March 15, The Washington Post reported that the Pentagon has drawn up plans to send a 1,000 more troops within the coming weeks. Meanwhile, in anticipation of the coming (and perhaps final) stages of the operation against the Islamic State, the administration has decided to send “an additional 2,500 ground combat troops to a staging base in Kuwait from which they could be called upon to back up coalition forces battling the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria.”

The administration, in keeping with Obama and Bush administration policy, is still relying on the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) as legal justification for the use of force in Syria. But as Slate’s Joshua Keating has pointed out, the 2001 AUMF “specifically applied to the perpetrators of 9/11 (al-Qaida) and those that harbored them (the then-Taliban-controlled government of Afghanistan).” There is nothing in the language of the AUMF that authorizes military operations in Syria.

And once again, an administration is embarking on a military intervention in the absence of virtually any debate. Micah Zenko of the Council on Foreign Relations tweeted that he found it “Truly amazing that nobody in DC cares about the US troop increase and mission expansion in Syria.”

Well, not quite nobody.

On Tuesday afternoon, members of the House Progressive Caucus gathered on Capitol Hill to announce their support for HR 1473, the “Prohibit Expansion of US Combat Troops into Syria Act.” The bill, which was introduced by California Democrat Barbara Lee, seeks to “prohibit the deployment of members of the Armed Forces to Syria for purposes of engaging in ground combat operations, and for other purposes.”

According to Congresswoman Lee, “For over a decade, the executive branch has waged endless war in the Middle East with no meaningful oversight from Congress. President Trump’s decision to drag us deeper into this quagmire, without any debate or vote in Congress, endangers our troops and our long-term national security.”

California Democrat Ted Lieu, an Iraq war veteran, told reporters that the administration’s decision to send 400 combat troops in to Syria represents “an escalation of the mission.” Lieu, like Lee and the bill’s 25 co-sponsors, believes that “only Congress has the power to declare war” and, as Minnesota Congressman Richard Nolan pointed out, to allow this latest escalation of the “endless wars of choice in the Middle East” in the absence of congressional debate would represent “a failure of the Congress of the United States to honor its scared obligations.”

This is only too true. That Congress has abdicated its responsibilities over the fundamental questions of war and peace is, by now, an old story. One way to revitalize the congressional prerogative would be for Congress to pass a “No Presidential Wars” resolution such as that now being proposed by the bipartisan, anti-interventionist Committee for the Republic. Such a resolution would prohibit the president from “initiating wars against state or non-state actors without prior congressional declarations under Article I, section 8, clause 11 (Declare War Clause) by which Congress itself decides to take the United States from a condition of peace to a condition of war against an identified enemy.”

In addition, a pair of bills that are working their way through Congress deserve mention. In early March, Kentucky Senator Rand Paul introduced a bill into the Senate—S 532, the Stop Arming Terrorists Act, the companion bill to House member Tulsi Gabbard’s legislation—that would prohibit “the use of federal agency funds to provide covered assistance to: (1) Al Qaeda, Jabhat Fateh al-Sham, the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), or any individual or group that is affiliated with, associated with, cooperating with, or adherents to such groups.”

Taken together, these three bills represent a burgeoning congressional opposition to the reckless, needless, and counterproductive wars of choice the United States has been waging in the Middle East for much of the past 15 years. Progressives, anti-interventionist Republicans, independents, and Democrats should consider calling their congressional representatives and voice support for HR 1473, HR 608 and S 532 and oppose Trump’s escalation of the war on Syria.
https://www.thenation.com/article/congr ... -on-syria/

[seemslikeadream]

trump

http://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2016-el ... in-n604411

'Chemical attack' in Syria draws international outrage
http://www.aljazeera.com/news/2017/04/c ... 57304.html

Donald Trump administration stops disclosing troop deployments in Iraq and Syria
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world ... 62016.html