The Kurds have little choice but to deal with the Syrian government and support Russian mediation in northern Syria. From Pepe Escobar at asiatimes.com:
The Kurds have little choice but to deal with the Syrian government and support Russian mediation in northern Syria. From Pepe Escobar at asiatimes.com:
Posted in Energy, Eurasian Axis, Foreign Policy, Geopolitics, Governments, Military, Politics, War
Tagged Bashar al-Assad, Kurds, Oil, President Trump, Russia, Syria, Turkey
The US and its European vassals can no longer push the world around as they once did. From Raúl Ilargi Meijer at theautomaticearth.com:
How do you define terror? Perhaps, because of the way the term has evolved in the English language, one wouldn’t call the west ‘terrorists’ per se, but ‘we’ are certainly spreading terror and terrorizing very large groups of people. Yeah, bring on the tanks and parade them around town. Add a marching band that plays some war tunes.
The ‘official’ storyline : at the request of the US, Gibraltar police and UK marines have seized an oil tanker in Gibraltar. The super-tanker, 1000 feet (330 meters) long, carrying 2 million barrels, had stopped there after sailing all around the Cape of Good Hope instead of taking the Suez canal on its way, ostensibly, from Iran to Syria.
And, according to the storyline as presented to and in the western press, because the EU still has sanctions on Iran, the British seized the ship. Another little detail I really appreciate is that Spain’s acting foreign minister, Josep Borrell, said Madrid was looking into the seizure and how it may affect Spanish sovereignty since Spain does not recognize the waters around Gibraltar as British.
That Borrell guy is the newly picked EU foreign policy czar, and according to some sources he’s supportive of Iran and critical of Israel. Them’s the webs we weave. He’s certainly in favor of Palestinian statehood. But we’re wandering…
Why did the tanker take that giant detour along the African coastline? Because potential problems were anticipated in the Suez canal. But also: why dock in Gibraltar? Because no problems were anticipated there. However, the US had been following the ship all along, and set this up.
A trap, a set-up, give it a name. I would think this is about Iran, not about sanctions on Syria; that’s just a convenient excuse. Moreover, as people have been pointing out, there have been countless arms deliveries to Syrian rebels in the past years (yes, that’s illegal) which were not seized.
Posted in Foreign Policy, Geopolitics, Governments, History, Military, War
Tagged Bashar al-Assad, Russia, Syria
Syria may not have to, and may not, sit still for Israel’s bombs any longer. From Elijah J. Magnier at ejmagnier.com:
Israel has attacked Syria many times during the last seven years of war imposed on Syria. It has run red-lights and broken taboos in order to provoke the “Axis of the Resistance” inside Syria, but has refrained from infuriating Hezbollah in Lebanon. Nevertheless, the most recent Israeli attack has pushed Syria and its allies beyond tolerable limits. Thus, President Assad prepared himself for a battle against Israel between the wars, knowing that such a battle could last weeks. But the president of Syria won’t be alone: Assad and Hezbollah’s Secretary general Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah will both be running any future battle against any Israeli aggression when the decision to engage will be taken.
Most recently Israel bombed the Syrian army and destroyed the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) offices and bases in Syria without inflicting any human casualties. At the same time, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu put himself on the level of IRGC-Quds brigade General Qassem Soleimani, by challenging him on social media. In fact, Netanyahu fell right into the trap the Iranian general set for President Donald Trump.
Posted in Foreign Policy, Geopolitics, Governments, History, Military, Politics, War
Tagged Bashar al-Assad, Benjamin Netanyahu, Iran, Israel, Russia, Syria
Syria’s now the belle of the ball because now that Assad has survived regime change, it could serve as a counterweight to Turkey and Iran in the Middle East. From Middle East Eye at theantimedia.org:
Last week the United Arab Emirates announced it was negotiating the reopening of its embassy in Damascus and restoring full ties with Syria.
After the opening of the Nassib border crossing on the Jordan-Syria border, for the first time since the war began, Syria now has a through road linking Turkey to Jordan.
At the same time the Israelis have also handed over the Quneitra border crossing in the occupied Golan Heights to Damascus after four years of closure.
It is not just that all roads are leading to Damascus but also there is a quiet – but strategic – shift by the most powerful Arab actors in the region towards establishing a working relationship with the Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.
Posted in Foreign Policy, Geopolitics, Governments, History, Media, Politics
Tagged Bashar al-Assad, Egypt, Israel, Middle East, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Turkey, United Arab Emirates
One way to undermine support for Bashar al-Assad in Syria: concoct a story that he’s selling out to the Sunni jihadists—backed by the US, Israel, the Gulf States, and Saudi Arabia—that most Syrians fear and loath. From Ghassen Kadi at thesaker.is:
As the observers and analysts of events in the Middle East were busy looking at the aftermath of the downing of the IL-20 and the deployment of the S-300 in Syria, a great new danger is now looming.
President Assad issued a legislative decree (Decree No 16) and which is intended to reform the ministry of Awqaf (Religious Endowments). The “Awqaf” is a Sunni Muslim tradition that has been around for centuries, and its role is to manage the funds of family trusts. After the dismembering of the Ottoman Empire, the new states separated their own “Awqaf” and established their own religious bodies to manage these affairs and funds.
Posted in Geopolitics, Governments, History, Intelligence, Law, Politics
Tagged Bashar al-Assad, Secularization, Sunni Islam, Syria
If you’re making a prognostication about who is going to do something, would you predict the person that has the logical interest in doing that thing, or the person for whom it would make no sense to do it? From Caitlin Johnstone at caitlinjohnstone.com:

UN Ambassador and Clairvoyant Prognosticator of the Transmundane Nikki Haley has foreseen that, if there are any future chemical weapons attacks in the Syrian province of Idlib, it will most definitely be the Syrian government that is responsible and not the multiple terrorist factions in the area.
“If they want to continue to go the route of taking over Syria, they can do that,” said Nikki Haley at a UN press conference today, without explaining how a nation’s only recognized government can ‘take over’ the country it governs. “But they cannot do it with chemical weapons. They can’t do it assaulting their people. And we’re not gonna fall for it. If there are chemical weapons that are used, we know exactly who’s gonna use them.”
Posted in Foreign Policy, Geopolitics, Governments, History, Horseshit, War
Tagged Bashar al-Assad, Chemical warfare, Nikki Haley, Syria
Yes, we can leave Syria alone, although it might cost some defense contractors a few bucks. From Ron Paul at ronpaulinstitute.org:
Assad was supposed to be gone already. President Obama thought it would be just another “regime change” operation and perhaps Assad would end up like Saddam Hussein or Yanukovych. Or maybe even Gaddafi. But he was supposed to be gone. The US spent billions to get rid of him and even provided weapons and training to the kinds of radicals that attacked the United States on 9/11.
But with the help of his allies, Assad has nearly defeated this foreign-sponsored insurgency.
The US fought him every step of the way. Each time the Syrian military approached another occupied city or province, Washington and its obedient allies issued the usual warnings that Assad was not liberating territory but was actually seeking to kill more of his own people.
Posted in Foreign Policy, Geopolitics, Governments, History, Military, War
Tagged Bashar al-Assad, Iran, Russia, Syria
Imagine, somebody who never asked the US to enter his country now wants them out. From Tyler Durden at zerohedge.com:
Even the Washington Post now admits that Assad is “here to stay” —“The writing is now indisputably on the wall: The Syrian regime is going nowhere.”
In a newly published wide ranging sit-down interview with RT journalist Murad Gazdiev in Damascus, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad revealed his perspective of major recent events which have prolonged the war and taken it to new dangerous levels of escalation, including the Douma chemical attack claims in April and Russia’s thwarting the West’s objective of regime change.
“They told a story, they told a lie, and the public opinion around the world and in the West didn’t buy their story, but they couldn’t withdraw. So, they had to do something, even on a smaller scale,” Assad said of the April 14th massive airstrikes on Syria carried out by the US, UK, France, and Israel after videos purporting to show victims of a chlorine gas attack were released by the Saudi-financed Jaish al-Islam and the White Helmets.
Assad appeared to be indirectly referencing the stream of skeptical reporting which began emerging once Western correspondents physically entered the attack site for the first time, notably veteran Middle East reporter Robert Fisk among them, who stunned his British and world audience in concluding, “they were not gassed.” There were also skeptical television reports in American and European media by journalists walking around Douma.
Of Douma in particular, supposedly gassed by the Syrian Army in the very moments it stood poised to liberate the last 5% of East Ghouta, Assad questioned, “Is it in our interest? Why, and why now?” Assad noted that each time his forces were closest to achieving overwhelming battlefield victory, a major and inexplicable provocation happened to sway international opinion.
He said further that despite continued US interference, especially in Syria’s northeast, Damascus has nearly won the seven-year war with Russian military support, which thwarted Western attempts of an Iraq-style military intervention: “With every move forward for the Syrian Army, and for the political process, and for the whole situation, our enemies and our opponents, mainly the West led by the United States and their puppets in Europe and in our region, they try to make it farther – either by supporting more terrorism, bringing more terrorists to Syria, or by hindering the political process,” Assad told RT.
To continue reading: “Here To Stay” – Assad Declares It’s The Americans Who Must Leave Syria,
Posted in Foreign Policy, Geopolitics, Governments, War
Tagged Bashar al-Assad, Russia, Syria
Washington has tried for decades to depose first Bashar al-Assad’s father and then Bashar al-Assad. From Philip Giraldi at ronpaulinstitute.org:

The Donald Trump administration is planning to install a 30,000 strong armed “security force” in northern Syria along the borders with Turkey and Iraq. This presumably will tie together and support the remaining rag-tags of allegedly pro-democracy rebels and will fit in with existing and proposed US bases. The maneuver is part of a broader plan to restructure Syria to suit the usual crop of neocon geniuses in Washington that have slithered their way back into the White House and National Security Council, to include renewed demands that the country’s President Bashar al-Assad “must go,” reiterated by Secretary of State Rex Tillerson last Wednesday. He said “But let us be clear: The United States will maintain a military presence in Syria, focused on ensuring ISIS cannot re-emerge.” Tillerson also claimed that remaining in Syria would prevent Iran from “reinforcing” its position inside Syria and would enable the eventual ouster of al-Assad, but he has also denied that Washington was creating a border force at all, yet another indication of the dysfunction in the White House.
A plan pulled together in Washington by people who should know better but seemingly don’t is hardly a blueprint for success, particularly as there is no path to anything approximating “victory” and no exit strategy. The Syrians have not been asked if they approve of an arrangement that will be put in place in their sovereign territory and the Turks have already bombed targets and sent troops and allied militias into the Afrin region, also a US supported Kurdish enclave on the border. President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has indicated clearly that Ankara will disrupt any US devised border arrangement. From the Turkish point of view the border security force, which reportedly will largely consist of Kurdish militiamen, will inevitably work in cooperation with the Kurdish terrorist group PKK which is active on the Turkish side of the border, in seeking to create an autonomous Kurdish state, which Turkey reasonably enough regards as an existential threat.
To continue reading: Why Does Washington Hate Bashar al-Assad?
Posted in Foreign Policy, Geopolitics, Governments, Intelligence, Military, Uncategorized, War
Tagged Bashar al-Assad, Rex Tillerson, Syria