The Syria Thread 2011 - Present

[AlicetheKurious]

[kool maudit]

The War nerd on Syria:

https://pando.com/2015/10/19/bombed-stu ... c1bf58b4c/

The War Nerd: Bombed Stupid

I stole that headline from an Ernest movie, Scared Stupid. Always loved that title. “Scared Straight”? I’ve never seen fear make anybody smarter. When people get scared, they get stupid.

And at the moment, the Anglo media is all scared about the Russian air strikes in Syria. So they’ve started a counter-bombardment of their own, dumping tons of stupid on us helpless civilians.

It’s not even a consistent brand of stupid. It’s all over the map: the Russian air strikes are bad because they’re helping Islamic State, or because they’re brutal, or because they’ve failed.

That last claim, that the Russian campaign has already failed, is the most ridiculous of all. Take this headline from the Daily Telegraph: “Russia Reducing Air Strikes against Syrian Rebels as Intervention Fails.”

“Fails,” huh? Already? After—well, lemme take my shoes off so I can count up the days since Russia started bombing Syria. Comes to 17 days, by my finger-and-toe reckoning. Who knew that an air bombardment campaign could be called a failure after slightly more than two weeks? Somebody should tell the USAF about this rule, because if memory serves, they’ve run a few bombing campaigns that went on a little longer than 17 days before getting their reckoning.

Buried deep in that story is the Russian command’s actual statement:

"The intensity of our military aviation operations decreased slightly in the last 24 hours….a result of active offensive operations by the Syrian armed forces, the front line/front-line [sic] with the terrorists is changing."
That’s a plausible account. The first rule of close air support is, “Don’t bomb your own people.” And that’s a tricky job when Russian-speaking pilots and air controllers are working with what’s left of the Syrian Arab Army, a disorganized lot at the best of times. So the Russian claim may be the simple truth. Or not; who knows? All you can say for sure is that claiming a dip in sorties on Day 17 means the air campaign has failed is laughable BS.

US Secretary of Defense Ash Carter joined the chorus, predicting “the Russian campaign in Syria is doomed to fail.” Doomed, yet!

And why, Mr. Carter, are those Russkies so doomed? Carter explained,

"Fighting ISIL without pursuing a parallel political transition only risks escalating civil war in Syria… There is a logical contradiction in the Russian position and now its actions in Syria.”

It just goes to show there’s only one man named Ash you should listen to, and he’s too busy chainsawing evil dead to talk nonsense like this. Actually, Russia’s campaign is much more simple and logical than the USAF’s messed-up mission in Syria. Russia is using its air force to try to blast out a viable territory for an Alawite/Shia state along the Syrian coastal hills. Assad’s people are longtime Russian clients and allies, and the Russian air force is helping them maintain their key turf against a much more numerous enemy. It may fail, but at least that’s a reasonable plan.

At the moment, Russia’s planes are focusing on a triangle of Sunni-held territory north of Homs, trying to blast a path for Assad’s weak infantry. If you look at these very good graphics put together (it pains me to admit) by the New York Times, you can see what a sensible, traditional military move that is. Scroll down to the two maps captioned “Many of the Initial Airstrikes Were Near the Boundaries Between Government and Rebel Zones” and go to the second map. You’ll see a T-shaped yellow zone marking Sunni-held territory due north of Homs, along the key road to Hama and Aleppo.

That’s where the Russian strikes have been hitting hardest lately, in Sunni-held crossroads towns like Ter Maela, right on the M5 highway that runs north to Hama and Aleppo, south to Damascus. That highway is the key to Syria, a kind of spinal cord like the big vein down a shrimp’s back. If the Russians can obliterate Ter Maela’s defenders thoroughly enough to let Assad’s weak infantry (or maybe his much better Hezbollah or Iranian ringers) take and hold these villages, then the Alawites have the makings of a viable state.

Maybe our Secretary of Defense knows something I don’t know—I mean beyond the best place for prime rib in Georgetown—but it seems to me that the Russian air campaign makes very straightforward military sense.

If there’s an air force whose mission in Syria really does have “a logical contradiction at its core,” it’s a little group called the USAF. Not that it’s the USAF’s fault; they do their jobs very well. But what job, exactly, what mission, were they given?

If you were to sum it up, it’d go something like this: “Hit Sunni targets east of the coastal hills, but ignore everything to the west; help the Kurds in the north, but grudgingly, as little as possible, for fear you’ll offend Turkey; and while you’re attacking Assad’s enemies, keep reassuring the Israelis that you’re just as anti-Assad as you are anti-Islamic State.”

Sound stupid? It is. It’s a ridiculous compromise adopted to please the Israelis and Saudis, based on the dumb-ass notion that Sunni fighters in eastern Syria are evil sectarian bastards, but the Sunni fighters facing off against the SAA in the west are “moderates.”

It’s true that Islamic State is uncommonly vile, but let’s not lie; the only faction in Syria that even tries to rise above sectarian hatred are the young Kurdish commies of YPG/J. Every other group is sectarian, and militias that start out sectarian only get meaner as they go, by the iron logic of primitive war, where massacre is the norm. And this sectarian taint isn’t new. Syria’s Sunni were chanting “Christians to Beirut, Alawites to the graveyard” long before the fighting started. For once, Robert Fisk got it right, in an article called “Syria’s Moderates Have Disappeared, and There Are No Good Guys”:

“The Russian air force in Syria has flown straight into the West’s fantasy air space. The Russians, we are now informed, are bombing the “moderates” in Syria – “moderates” whom even the Americans admitted two months ago, no longer existed.”
The crazy US policy of ignoring Sunni militias in the west made for some fat, soft targets. No wonder the Russian air force jumped at the chance to intervene. They must’ve spent months drooling over drone and satellite photos from the west, between Homs and Aleppo—targets totally untouched by the USAF.

Until the Russians jumped in, Sunni militias in the west only had to deal with the incompetents in Assad’s rump of an air force. Those guys aren’t good for anything but dropping barrel bombs on crowded tenement neighborhoods; any decently dug-in troops could laugh at their attacks.

Then the Russians decided it was time to show, Gulf War style, that they had some fancy shock-and-awe munitions of their own. These belated colonial wars are, among other things, great sales videos for arms exporters like the US and Russia.

To see a typical Russian sales video, check out this clip of a Russian attack on a defensive line, mixing bombers, CAS, and rocket launchers scattering cluster bombs. Watch it and see if it looks like a “failure.” Because me, I personally would not want to be anywhere within five km of the target zone.

That MLRS barrage in the second half of the video is terrifying. Worst of all, not all of the missiles’ cluster munitions will detonate. If you survive the barrage and try to run off, you’re likely to set off one of the duds.

Notice how the guy filming it keeps saying, “Allahu Akbar”? That seemed odd to me. It’s a Salafist battle cry as a rule. You never hear Alawites from the SAA shouting it in their battle videos. So I asked around, and apparently it marks the narrator as Sunni, a pretty slick, cinematic way of implying that the Russian/Iranian/Hezbollah/Alawite side has some Sunni allies.

So…failure? No. Any advance will probably be slow; the lines don’t change much in Syria, because the level of combat power across the board is very low. These are forces who’d rather bombard each other than engage. Only Hezbollah has real combat power, and they’re spending it thriftily.

But there are already signs the Russian air strikes are allowing some advances.

That doesn’t mean the Russian campaign will succeed; like Gandalf used to say, “All courses may run ill.” But at least they have a sane, comprehensible, achievable goal, unlike the US in Syria.

Now for the next accusation, that the Russian strikes are brutal.

Well, yeah, they are. That’s the general idea. I don’t mean to be flippant here, but air strikes only look neat when you stay up there and watch from the pilot’s angle. On the ground, even the supposedly “surgical” strikes are nightmarish. Which, again, is the whole idea. And if we’re going to be honest about it, we can stop pretending there are any neat, clean surgical strikes. A new report just came out showing that nine out of ten people hit by those targeted drone assassinations are civilians who happen to be in the vicinity.

As a rule, you can tell when the media approve of air strikes by the angle. If it’s all nice clean pilot’s-view of distant explosions, it’s a good strike. If they show you funerals, weeping relatives, blasted apartments, it’s a bad strike. So you can tell, just from the headline—“This Is What the Russian Air Strikes in Syria Look Like from the Ground”—that it’s a bad strike. For example, ground-angle stories on Israeli airstrikes only started hitting the US media in the past few years. Now they’re fairly common but for most of my lifetime you just didn’t see those weeping Palestinians. When the strike is done by our own airforce, you still don’t see them unless you go to foreign or marginal leftist sites. But boy do they start popping up when it’s the Russians playing their air-to-ground video games.

There are a total of 29 photographs here, and three-quarters of them are of the pity-inspiring variety. First photo, a ruined neighborhood; second, column of smoke; third, weeping old woman; fourth, civilian car covered with rubble; fifth, horrible scythe-shaped cluster munitions; sixth, a wounded civilian being carried to hospital…

It’s not that there’s anything false about these images. They’re a pretty good montage of the horror of an air strike. These raids are bad, for Reuters and most Western media, because they’re Russian raids, not because they’re any more brutal than any others.

The Russians are bombing more or less the way all the other foreign air forces in Syria are bombing. They’re having a more powerful effect because they’re hitting targets that haven’t been hit by first-world CAS til now. That’s the only difference.

Now for the wildest accusation of all: Russia’s air strikes are helping Islamic State, or as Michael Weiss of the Daily Beast said, “giving IS an air force.”

One thing you need to keep in mind here: Michael Weiss is an idiot. No, I mean even by the standards of American punditry. Weiss has been writing Russia-baiting crap for years, stories with comic headlines like “Ireland Bows to Russia’s Intimidation.” When he’s not bashing Russia, Weiss’ job is gulping up some stinking, fishy gobs of CIA/Pentagon/Likud disinformation, then vomiting it back onto the pages of the Beast like a dutiful penguin dad. Weiss never sees anything, or even tries to; he hears things, always whispered in his ear by some quasi-spook shill whose motives he never questions. And what he hears about Syria is that the Russians are paving the way for Islamic State:

Last June, the U.S. embassy in Damascus accused Bashar al-Assad’s air force of clearing a path for an ISIS advance on Syrian rebels in the Aleppo town of Azaz. “Reports indicate that the regime is making air strikes in support of [ISIS’s] advance on Aleppo, aiding extremists against Syrian population,” the embassy account tweeted, following up with a broader accusation: “We have long seen that the regime avoids [ISIS] lines, in complete contradiction to the regime’s claims to be fighting [ISIS].”
Now Russia seems to have inherited Assad’s role as the unacknowledged air force of ISIS.

It’s for prose like this that the acronym “FFS” was invented. FFS, you’re taking the US Embassy as your source of Syrian news? FFS, you quote their tweets—their tweets—like gospel? FFS, you talk about Russia “taking over” Assad’s role as “the unacknowledged air force of ISIS” when your only source for that claim is the US defense establishment that’s been trying to overthrow Assad for decades?

The only truth to this claim is that Islamic State is a ruthless, treacherous militia that has no qualms at all about jumping other Sunni militias that are weakened in combat. So if a rival militia gets hit hard by Assad’s forces, or Russian planes, IS will move in and grab its turf, weapons, and fighters. This has happened over and over. It’s one of IS’s best moves, and there usually isn’t much trouble doing it, because IS is generous with money, equipment, and sex slaves, and the men they coopt aren’t friggin’ moderates but plain old Sunni sectarian fighters who have no trouble signing on to IS’s no-prisoners policies.

So when the Russian strikes blasted Ahrar-as-Sham positions near Aleppo from the West in the first week of October 2015, IS waited for the smoke to clear, then attacked from the East, mopping up before the other militia could regroup. Very simple, very ruthless, very IS.

But how exactly is that the Russians’ fault (if “fault” is a word you can even use in a weasel-fight like this)? Ahrar-as-Sham is fighting Russia’s client, Assad; Russian planes blast Ahrar-as-Sham; Islamic State betrays its fellow Sunni while they’re dazed and hurt.

Truth is, Russia and Islamic State have different projects going in Syria, projects that don’t even overlap much. Syria is more full of bad projects than the ninth-grade Metal Shop class where they set my jacket on fire with a soldering iron (while I was wearing it). That place was full of projects thought up by adolescent psychopaths, all designed to kill or maim, and mostly ineffective.

Which, come to think of it, is not a bad description of Syria at the moment. For a smallish country, Syria has more theaters of war going than a multiplex doing a Private Ryan marathon. The Kurds of YPG/PKK have their own project going in the north, along the Turkish border. The Alawites are trying to survive and carve a rump state for themselves in the coastal hills. The Christians have executed a simple plan: “get the Hell out of here while we can.” Hezbollah’s project could be summed up as, “Ugh, I guess we gotta help these weak-ass Alawites after all, damn it.” Israel’s project is “Attack Hezbollah nonstop, but never touch the Sunni militias because they’re not a real threat.” Jabhat-an-Nusra, Ahrar-as-Sham, and the other Sunni militias are competing for ownership of the inland Sunni state they hope will come out of this chaos.

But Islamic State? Their project isn’t really about Syria at all. IS is an Iraqi outfit. Yeah, they have all these noisy foreign volunteers, the whole C-minus demographic of Birmingham, Dusseldorf, and Marseille, but that’s not their real power. IS inherited Saddam’s officer class, and their goal is to regain Baghdad. Syria is a side bet, one of the vacuums they’re so good at occupying. Eastern Syria—a flat dry place with few people except along the Euphrates—was mostly abandoned by both the Alawites and the other Sunni militias, who focused on trying to win the more valuable real estate to the West. That’s when Islamic State moved in from its Iraqi base and started a Syrian franchise.

So the war Russia has joined isn’t even really the same war that Islamic State is fighting. IS wants to embiggen its Iraq-based “caliphate”; Russia wants to drive the other Sunni militias off that key highway, M5, so the Alawites can start a mini-state along the coast.

Meanwhile, the “moderate” Sunni militias are getting hit hard for the first time. As that happens, IS will push from the east, and the SAA/Hezbollah/Revolutionary Guards from the west. At some point, Russia’s air power may meet IS head-on. But a lot of other dumb, bloodthirsty rival projects will have to get ground away in this multi-faction, multi-loon war before that happens.

Gary Brecher writes The War Nerd column for PandoDaily, and co-hosts the Radio War Nerd podcast show.

[AlicetheKurious]

Interesting article. Like so many posted here at RI, on the surface it is informative and appropriately contemptuous of the US/Zionist propaganda. This attracts a 'progressive' readership and gets them to lower their guard. They're receptive, trusting. You've established a rapport. And now, you can gently insert your poison.

What is that poison? It's a message, a very Zionist message: there are no Arabs. None. Only "Sunnis", "Shi'ites", "Alawites", "Christians", etc.

The Syrian Arab Republic is populated by Arabs. These Arabs worship in different ways. But around 75% of Syria's population, and similarly Syria's national army, are Sunni Muslims. The Syrian people overwhelmingly support their government and their army and their president, Bashar Al-Assad. How do we know this? For one thing, because if they didn't, then the West wouldn't have had to recruit so many non-Syrian mercenaries to attack Syria. The US and France and Britain and a whole bunch of other foreign states wouldn't have had to send so many weapons and spend so much of Saudi Arabia's and Qatar's and Turkey's money to try to collapse the Syrian state.

If the Syrians who are Sunni had turned against their government, they could have collapsed the state and the army all by themselves. In days. But here we are, after nearly five years of the most vicious war of aggression against one relatively small country by a conspiracy that includes some of the wealthiest and most powerful countries on Earth, and Syria is battered and bruised but still standing, and the Syrian Army is still fighting strong, and President Bashar Al-Assad is still the legitimate, elected president of the Syrian Arab Republic.

So most of the Syrian soldiers and officers defending their country against foreign-backed mercenaries and an arsenal of foreign weapons are actually Sunni Muslim Syrians, and the Syrian population is mostly Sunni Muslims, but the writer misrepresents the two sides as "Sunni" vs "Alawite".

Also, the author, not content to hammer away at this very Zionist theme, inserts a major whopper, an outright lie. He writes, and then repeats, that the objective of the Syrian president, and also of Russia, is to carve a "Alawite" state out of Syria. Maybe the Zionist/Wahhabist sectarian trash talk could have been excused as ignorance, but this is a deliberate falsehood. The number-one objective of the Syrian president and of the Syrian Army and of the Syrian people is to save Syria from the Zionist plan to fragment it into ethnic/sectarian mini-states, and to keep it whole, and unified, and Arab. Everything the Syrian president has said and done since the beginning of this disgusting international conspiracy has been directed toward this all-important goal. The writer cites the revolting chant, “Christians to Beirut, Alawites to the graveyard” as evidence that "Syria's Sunnis" are motivated by sectarian hate, when in fact this was the chant of all those lovely foreign-backed "democracy demonstrators" that the Western media was fawning over. Syria's Sunnis, like Syria's Christians, and Syria's Alawites, and Syria's Shi'ites, and all the rest of the actual Syrians were appalled and frightened, and that's why the "revolution" never caught on, outside the West's propaganda factories.

The Russian president, Vladimir Putin, has also been very, very explicit about this crucial priority. My own Egyptian government has even fallen out with its close Saudi allies because keeping Syria unified, Arab and strong is an urgent priority for Egypt, but not Saudi Arabia.

This writer can barely disguise his racist contempt for the Syrian people, the Syrian Army, and the Syrian president, but clearly he knows his readers won't notice. He knows which buttons to push to get them to eat out of his hand.

Beware of wolves in sheep's clothing.

Russia is using its air force to try to blast out a viable territory for an Alawite/Shia state along the Syrian coastal hills.

...At the moment, Russia’s planes are focusing on a triangle of Sunni-held territory north of Homs, trying to blast a path for Assad’s weak infantry.

...You’ll see a T-shaped yellow zone marking Sunni-held territory due north of Homs, along the key road to Hama and Aleppo.

That’s where the Russian strikes have been hitting hardest lately, in Sunni-held crossroads towns like Ter Maela, right on the M5 highway that runs north to Hama and Aleppo, south to Damascus. That highway is the key to Syria, a kind of spinal cord like the big vein down a shrimp’s back. If the Russians can obliterate Ter Maela’s defenders thoroughly enough to let Assad’s weak infantry (or maybe his much better Hezbollah or Iranian ringers) take and hold these villages, then the Alawites have the makings of a viable state.

... It’s true that Islamic State is uncommonly vile, but let’s not lie; the only faction in Syria that even tries to rise above sectarian hatred are the young Kurdish commies of YPG/J. Every other group is sectarian, and militias that start out sectarian only get meaner as they go, by the iron logic of primitive war, where massacre is the norm. And this sectarian taint isn’t new. Syria’s Sunni were chanting “Christians to Beirut, Alawites to the graveyard” long before the fighting started. For once, Robert Fisk got it right, in an article called “Syria’s Moderates Have Disappeared, and There Are No Good Guys”:

“The Russian air force in Syria has flown straight into the West’s fantasy air space. The Russians, we are now informed, are bombing the “moderates” in Syria – “moderates” whom even the Americans admitted two months ago, no longer existed.”

The crazy US policy of ignoring Sunni militias in the west made for some fat, soft targets.

...Until the Russians jumped in, Sunni militias in the west only had to deal with the incompetents in Assad’s rump of an air force. Those guys aren’t good for anything but dropping barrel bombs on crowded tenement neighborhoods; any decently dug-in troops could laugh at their attacks.

...Notice how the guy filming it keeps saying, “Allahu Akbar”? That seemed odd to me. It’s a Salafist battle cry as a rule. You never hear Alawites from the SAA shouting it in their battle videos. So I asked around, and apparently it marks the narrator as Sunni, a pretty slick, cinematic way of implying that the Russian/Iranian/Hezbollah/Alawite side has some Sunni allies.

...The Alawites are trying to survive and carve a rump state for themselves in the coastal hills. The Christians have executed a simple plan: “get the Hell out of here while we can.” Hezbollah’s project could be summed up as, “Ugh, I guess we gotta help these weak-ass Alawites after all, damn it.” Israel’s project is “Attack Hezbollah nonstop, but never touch the Sunni militias because they’re not a real threat.” Jabhat-an-Nusra, Ahrar-as-Sham, and the other Sunni militias are competing for ownership of the inland Sunni state they hope will come out of this chaos.

...So the war Russia has joined isn’t even really the same war that Islamic State is fighting. IS wants to embiggen its Iraq-based “caliphate”; Russia wants to drive the other Sunni militias off that key highway, M5, so the Alawites can start a mini-state along the coast.

[IanEye]

The War nerd on Syria:

https://pando.com/2015/10/19/bombed-stu ... c1bf58b4c/


sectarian taint

"sectarian taint" made me laugh though.

[km artlu]

Thank you for this Alice:

Or, as the saying goes, "for every action, there's a reaction." It could very well further fuel the rise of the Right in Europe. In fact, it already is. That, in turn, will create its own backlash, a sure recipe for instability and division, within the EU and possibly even within individual member states, some of which already have secession movements. Many European countries seem to be waking up to this.

Any degree of effective or potential autonomy, anywhere on earth, is the enemy. "Full spectrum dominance. Total information awareness".

[kool maudit]

That's interesting, Alice. I was also confused by this writer's talk regarding an Alawite state.

I think, having read much of this guy's work, that he tends to overstate the importance of "tribes" or sectarian identities at the expense of larger blocs. he does this within the "West", as well, often pitting the Anglo against the Franco, the Celtic against the Saxon — this sort of tribal analysis seems to be one of his stock-in-trade sort of tools.

[backtoiam]

Breaking Story: Israeli General Captured in Iraq Confesses to Israel-Isis Coalition

By Nahed Al-Husaini on October 21, 2015

“There is a strong cooperation between MOSSAD and ISIS top military commanders...Israeli advisors helping the Organization on laying out strategic and military plans, and guiding them in the battlefield”



[ Editor’s note: General Shahak was captured by Shiite militia and is still being held in Iraq. His captors are keeping DESI informed, a European security organization with close ties to VT. The article below is based on questions we submitted to his captors this morning. We also inquired as to the conditions under which he is being held... GD ]

…by Nahed Al Husaini, VT Bureau Chief Damascus

EXCLUSIVE -VETERANS TODAY

______________

USA Parliament (Intr) Foreign Minister and European Department for Security and Information Secretary General Ambassador Dr Haissam Bou Said exclusively confirms to VT that the Israeli Brigadier Yussi Elon Shahak captured by the Iraqi popular army confessed during the investigation that…

“There is a strong cooperation between MOSSAD and ISIS top military commanders,” asserting that “there are Israeli advisors helping the Organization on laying out strategic and military plans, and guiding them in the battlefield.”

The terrorist organization also has military consultants from Saudi Arabia, Qatar, United Arab Emirates and Jordan. Saudi Arabia has so far provided ISIS with 30,000 vehicles, while Jordan rendered 4500 vehicles. Qatar and United Arab Emirates delivered funds for covering ISIS overall expenditure.

The planes belonging to the aforesaid countries are still landing in the Mosel airport, carrying military aid and fighters, especially via the Jordanian borders.

The Parliament and the DESI also confirm the Death of ISIS leader Abu Baker al Baghdadi, who received two bullets: one in the head and the other in the shoulder in a fire exchange. Two of his top aides were killed as well. It is believed that the CIA and MOSSAD are behind his death as he becomes a wasted commodity.

Furthermore, Eight ISIS top commanders were killed in “Haith” in an Iraqi airstrike after two weeks of surveillance by the Iraqi military service.

The report concluded that ISIS terrorist group recently arrested in Moscow came from Syria and Iraq through Ukraine. The perpetrators were planning to carry out subversive operations in railways and bus stations. The bombers are from Chechen, Caucasus, Iraqi, Syrian and Saudi nationalities.

Ukraine became the hotbed of embracing terrorist activities in complicity with Putin’s arch enemies who want to break up Russia and then absorb it in revenge of his military intervention in Syria.

http://www.veteranstoday.com/2015/10/21 ... coalition/

[backtoiam]

Secret US Attack, Cited by Putin Part of Pentagon BioWarfare Plan (UPDATED)

By Gordon Duff, Senior Editor on October 18, 2015

US Plan to Spread Cholera Across Syria and Turkey May be Failing


By Gordon Duff, Senior Editor
Update: America has launched a second attack on the Aleppo power plants (read below)
They say an animal is most dangerous when cornered

Last week two American F-16s attacked the city of Aleppo in Syria, a city of 2.5 million people, one of the oldest inhabited cities on earth. Russia’s President Putin called the attack “strange” and questioned America’s motives. In the aftermath of the attack, the reasoning behind the seemingly bizarre assault has become clear, America is trying to bring down the Assad government using germ warfare.

Syria’s natural water supply, the Euphrates River, carries cholera of course, but also dozens of waterborne illnesses totally resistant to antibiotics where even the best palliative care is unlikely to guarantee a favorable outcome.

Back in 2013, Aleppo was under a similar assault, Sarin gas, blamed on the Damascus government, a “red line” that nearly brought on an American air assault against Syria. When it was discovered that the Sarin gas had been produced by an American research facility in Tbilisi, Georgia, later subject of a Russia Today documentary banned in the US, and smuggled into Syria witnessed by a Press TV film crew headed by Serena Shim (murdered in Turkey), America stood down.

The current attack, coinciding with both the refugee crisis in Europe and the large scale military operations that are cleansing Aleppo Province of coalition backed “moderate terrorists,” is in all probability what brought the Pentagon to the point of taking out Aleppo’s water purification facilities. America’s goal was to start a cholera epidemic in one of the largest cities in the Middle East, driving tens of thousands of refugees into the middle of a massive military operation against terror groups the Pentagon has been playing with for some time.

Thus far, however, the Pentagon plan has been a failure. Were it more successful, up to 100,000 refugees may have fled into Hatay Province, Turkey, infecting up to a million more there in a region clogged with refugees.

You see, cholera is a “gift that keeps on giving,” a massively infectious disease. A dozen cholera patients can overburden any clinic or even regional hospital. A dozen cholera carriers can, within days and under the right conditions, war and refugees for instance, recreate conditions not seen since the Middle Ages.

Coinciding with the America attack has been a total blackout of all reports from the region, including Twitter and Facebook postings, a total cleansing of all reports of the American bombing with the exception of Veterans Today, TASS and Russia Today. Even the statements of President Putin, and he mentions the American attack on 3 occasions, are banned from all western press and cleansed from the internet.

The Pentagon plan is specifically biological warfare and not the first time it has been used in Syria. The Free Syrian Army, with both Israeli and American special operations advisors with every unit, has targeted water supplies across Syria, particularly Damascus.

From EMedicine on biological warfare:

Cholera

Cholera is an acute and potentially severe gastrointestinal disease (stomach andintestines) caused by the bacteria Vibrio cholerae. This agent has been investigated in the past as a biological weapon. Cholera does not spread easily from human to human, so it appears that major drinking water supplies would have to be profusely contaminated for this agent to be effective as a biological weapon.

Cholera normally can infect water or food that becomes contaminated by human bowel waste. The organism can survive for up to 24 hours in sewage and as long as six weeks in certain types of relatively impure water containing organic matter. It can withstand freezing for three to four days, but it is killed readily by dry heat, steam, boiling, short-term exposure to ordinary disinfectants, and chlorination of water.

The toxin causes a person’s intestines to create massive amounts of fluid that then produces thin, grayish brown diarrhea.

We know of the Pentagon plan to destroy Aleppo’s chlorination facility. The Euphrates River with its endless supply of human waste would do the rest.

Anyone who doesn’t believe the Pentagon and CIA are capable of this is a fool.

____________

Update: Warplanes of US-led alliance attack power plant in Aleppo
Aleppo, SANA – In blatant violation of international law, warplanes of the US-led alliance violated Syrian airspace and attacked a power plant that feeds Aleppo city, causing a blackout in the city.

A military source told SANA that warplanes of the Washington alliance violated Syrian airspace and attacked civilian infrastructure in Mare’a, Tal Sha’er, and al-Bab in Aleppo countryside on Sunday.

The source added that the warplanes attacked the biggest electric power plant that feeds Aleppo city, which resulted in cutting off power from most neighborhoods in Aleppo city.

This transgression comes only 8 days after two F-16 warplanes belonging to the alliance targeted two power plants in al-Radwaniye area east of Aleppo city, cutting off power from the area.

Hazem Sabbagh
http://www.veteranstoday.com/2015/10/18 ... fare-plan/

[backtoiam]

They are turning this place into a Mad Max wasteland.

[conniption]

RT

US Special Forces deployed as ‘human shields’ to salvage terror assets in Syria

Finian Cunningham

Published time: 1 Nov, 2015

Obama’s decision to send Special Forces into Syria is being widely viewed as a US military escalation in the country. The troop dispatch also signals that the US trying to forestall Russian successes in wiping out Washington’s regime-change assets in Syria.

In short, the US Special Forces are being used as “human shields” to curb Russian air strikes against anti-government mercenaries, many of whom are instrumental in Washington’s regime-change objective in Syria.

First of all, we need to view a host of developments, including the hastily convened “peace talks” in Vienna, as a response by the US and its allies to the game-changing military intervention by Russia. That intervention, beginning on September 30, has not only dealt massive blows to militants, it has completely changed the balance of forces to give the Assad government the upper hand in the war against foreign-backed extremists. That, in turn, has sent the US-led powers trying to topple Damascus into disarray.

Recall the scattered reactions from Washington and its allies, including Britain, France, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar. At first, Washington tried to rubbish Vladimir Putin’s order to aid his Syrian ally with airstrikes as “doomed to fail”.

Then there were overblown, unverified, claims of civilian casualties from Russian strikes, plus there were American claims that Russian cruise missiles had gone wildly astray, hitting Iran. There was also much angst over Russia striking “moderate rebels” instead of the Islamic State terror network. All such accusations, encouraged with Western media amplification, were designed to undermine Russia’s military operation.

Then there were threats from Saudi Arabia and Qatar that they would launch direct military action in Syria to “protect” the populace from the joint firepower of Assad and Putin. That idea was quickly shelved (one wonders by whom?).

Another seeming knee-jerk response came from Turkey and rightwing politicians and pundits in the US which revived talks about the creation of “safe havens” in northern Syria, ostensibly to protect civilian refugees, but also tacitly and more importantly, to give cover to “rebel” groups from Russian air strikes and Syrian government ground troops.

None of these reactions have gained credibility despite Western media hype. On the contrary, it soon became clear that Russia’s military intervention in Syria was a masterstroke by Putin, wiping out large swathes of the anti-government mercenaries, stabilizing the Assad government, and winning much popular support both within Syria and across the Middle East, and indeed around the world.

Last week, America’s top military official, General Joseph F Dunford, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told a Senate committee that Russia’s air support had changed everything. “The balance of forces right now are in Assad's advantage,” he said.

This is the context in which to interpret the latest, surprise move by Obama to send Special Forces into Syria. It is more about inhibiting Russian success in destroying the sundry anti-regime forces on the ground than about either “helping the fight against Islamic State” as claimed, or about misgivings of a large-scale American invasion.

The troop contingent that Obama has ordered amounts to 50 Special Forces personnel. That is hardly going to be a decisive blow to Islamic State militants, even if we believe the official rationale for their deployment.

The White House, in its announcement, was at pains to emphasize that the troops would not be in a combat role and would only be acting to “advise and train” Kurdish fighters and others belonging to the little-known Syrian Arab Coalition.

But here is perhaps the significant part of the story. “The move could potentially put the American troops in the cross hairs of Russia,” reports the New York Times. Significantly, too, the Pentagon will not be informing the Russian military of the exact whereabouts of its ground personnel.

That suggests that the real purpose for Obama sending in the troops is to restrict Russian offensive operations by introducing the risk of bombing American forces. In effect, the US Special Forces are being used as human shields to protect American regime-change assets on the ground.

These assets include an array of jihadist mercenary brigades, which the US and its allies have invested billions of dollars in for the objective of regime change in Syria. The misnomer of “moderate rebels” belies abundant evidence that the mercenaries include Al Qaeda-linked terror groups, including Islamic State. CIA supplies of anti-tank TOW missiles as well as Toyota jeeps are just a glimpse of the foreign covert-sponsorship.

Russia’s devastating air campaign over the past month – over 1,600 targets destroyed according to Moscow – has no doubt caused apoplexy in Washington, London, Paris, Ankara, Riyadh and Doha. An urgent stop to their “losses” had to be invoked. But the foreign sponsors can’t say it openly otherwise that gives the game away about their criminal involvement in Syria’s war.

This perspective most likely explains the hastily convened “peace conference” in Vienna. US Secretary of State John Kerry’s apparent concern to “stop the bloodshed” does not seem credible as the primary motive. Why the concern now after nearly five years of bloodshed?

It is not about a “quest for peace” as the BBC reported. The move is more credibly about Washington and its allies maneuvering to give their regime-change assets in Syria a reprieve from Russia’s firepower. One of the main points agreed in Vienna this weekend is the implementation of a “nation-wide ceasefire”.

Another indicator of what is really going on are reports this week of the large-scale airlifting of jihadist mercenary groups out of Syria. According to senior Syrian army intelligence, up to 500 mercenaries were flown to Yemen onboard Turkish, Qatari and Emirati planes. The fighters were brought to Yemen’s southern city of Aden from where they were dispatched to battle zones inside Yemen by the American-coordinated Saudi coalition. The US-Saudi coalition is waging war in Yemen to reinstall the regime of exiled President Abed Rabbo Mansour Hadi ousted by Houthi rebels earlier this year.

Aden is under the military control of Saudi and Emirati forces and Yemen’s airspace has been closed off by the coalition coordinated by US and British military planners based in Saudi capital Riyadh. It is inconceivable that plane loads of jihadists could be flown into southern Yemen without the knowledge of Washington.

So what we are seeing here is a concerted effort by Washington and its allies to stem their covert military losses in Syria. Sending in American Special Forces – a seemingly dramatic U-turn by Obama to put boots on the ground in Syria – is just one part of a wider effort to forestall Russian success in stabilizing Syria. These US forces are not about a “deepening of American involvement in a war [Obama] has tried to avoid”, as the New York Times would have us believe. They are being sent in to act as human shields against Russian airstrikes.

The putative ceasefire under a so-called peace process is another element of the US-led salvage operation. The real agenda is about giving Western, Turk and Arab-sponsored jihadists a space to regroup, and if needs be flown out of the Syrian theatre to resume their imperialist function in Yemen and, no doubt, elsewhere when required.
_______
The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RT.

Finian Cunningham (born 1963) has written extensively on international affairs, with articles published in several languages. Originally from Belfast, Ireland, he is a Master’s graduate in Agricultural Chemistry and worked as a scientific editor for the Royal Society of Chemistry, Cambridge, England, before pursuing a career in newspaper journalism. For over 20 years he worked as an editor and writer in major news media organizations, including The Mirror, Irish Times and Independent. Now a freelance journalist based in East Africa, his columns appear on RT, Sputnik, Strategic Culture Foundation and Press TV.

[82_28]

What happened to our "pre-war" days of Human Shields before Shock and Y'all? The US .gov didn't give a fuck and bombed, maimed, occupied, terrorized anyway. Now suddenly this is a thing? Unbelievable.

All too believable.

[82_28]

[backtoiam]

Remember Vietnam footage? You could fill up several Walmart buildings with all that footage. What we get now is a stage production. I remain dubious. These people are not risking nuclear war. I might be wrong, but I think we are watching a play...

[82_28]

To what end do you think? I ask sincerely. If it is but a play there has to be a long game.

[backtoiam]

82 this is just my opinion. Opinions are like assholes, we all have one, and sometimes they don't function perfectly. But this is how I see it.

The game of King Of The Hill is won by the man with the most money. Even stronger, the man that determines what money is, and who shall have some.

This is a game of Monopoly for the people that run the game board. The man with the most money is not a mystery. Every bank/country, on the planet that would be capable of being true resistance has already been captured.

Russia got their ass handed to them in World War 2 in a massive awesome defeat, tens of millions slaughtered. Bank captured. Putin calls for a one world currency like a bitch in heat on a regular basis. This fact, is like a weather vane. It is what it is.

If Russia were seriously trying to "turn the tables over", we would know. Mushroom clouds would already be in the sky. Samson option would have gone down in a heartbeat.

These mother fuckers are not going to lose. Fact is, there is nobody left to beat. What we are watching is a reshuffling of the Monopoly board pieces and it must be this way to keep the slaves from revolting while all this takes place because if the slaves stampede the gates it would fuck up the game.

I honestly think its that simple.

Remember that picture on the front page of The Economist, with Putin standing front and center with an eye shaded? You know who The Economist is don't you? Cameron had a pig flying out of his dick too on the same picture.

That magazine, is not a fucking joke bro...