Syrian Regime Says it Has Taken Full Control of Aleppo
Posted: December 22, 2016 Filed under: Global, Mediasphere, Politics, Russia, Terrorism, War Room | Tags: Aleppo, Bashar al-Assad, Council of Ministers (Syria), Syria, Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, Syrian opposition, United Nations, United Nations Security Council, United States 1 CommentThe Syrian regime says it has taken full control of Aleppo, marking a major turning point in the nation’s five-year civil war. Syrian government forces and their allies are now in control of eastern Aleppo, ending more than four years of rebel rule in the area. The government made significant territorial gains in eastern Aleppo after forces backed by airstrikes entered rebel-held areas in late November. An estimated 400,000 Syrians have been killed and more than 4.81 million have fled the country since the war began in 2011, according to the United Nations….(developing)
Russian Ambassador Gunned Down in Turkey; Shooter Ali Hashem Shouts ‘Allahu Akhbar’
Posted: December 19, 2016 Filed under: Breaking News, Crime & Corruption, Russia, Terrorism, War Room | Tags: Al-Bab, Aleppo, Bashar al-Assad, Council of Ministers (Syria), Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, John Kerry, Michele J. Sison, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, RUSSIA, Syria, Syrian civil war, Syrian opposition, Turkey, United Nations Security Council, Vitaly Churkin, Vladimir Putin Leave a commentDavid French writes: The world just got more dangerous. A gunman shot and killed the Russian ambassador to Turkey and then stood over his body, shouted “Allahu Akhbar” and began ranting about Syria and Aleppo. I won’t embed video of the shooting, but you can see the entire thing here. Warning, the footage is extremely disturbing.
[Read the full story here, at National Review]
Early reports are often wrong, but it appears the shooter was a Turkish police officer:
According to reports the assasin of the Russian ambassador is indeed a security personnel and his name is Mert Altintas pic.twitter.com/lBezzoIMWV
— Ali Hashem علي هاشم (@alihashem_tv) December 19, 2016
We can’t forget that this incident comes just a little more than a year after Turkish forces shot down a Russian jet, and it comes after Erodgan has comprehensively purged Turkish security forces to allegedly leave only his loyalists on staff. Read the rest of this entry »
Russia Steps Up Bombing Campaign in Syria
Posted: October 12, 2015 Filed under: Diplomacy, Russia, Space & Aviation, War Room | Tags: Al-Zabadani, Associated Press, Bashar al-Assad, BBC, European Union, Islamic state, Moscow, President of Syria, RUSSIA, Russian language, Soviet Union, Syria, Syrian opposition, United States, Vladimir Putin Leave a comment
Russian President Vladimir Putin defends decision to send warplanes as aimed at political solution.
MOSCOW— Thomas Grove reports: Russia stepped up its bombing campaign in Syria over the weekend, more than doubling the rate of strikes seen at the beginning of the operation.
“The Kremlin’s air campaign in Syria has exacerbated tensions between Moscow and Washington, which has led a separate campaign of strikes against Islamic State fighters in Syria and Iraq.”
The Russian Ministry of Defense said Monday its jet fighters had carried out 55 sorties over the past 24 hours, hitting targets in the provinces of Homs, Hama, Latakia, Idlib and Raqqa. The daily number had been around two dozen last week.
“U.S. and Western officials say Russia’s airstrikes have largely targeted Syrian opposition groups other than Islamic State in a bid to shore up Mr. Assad’s government.”
Russian warplanes are backing an offensive launched last week by troops loyal to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. The Russian military said Su-34, Su-24 and Su-25 fighters hit Islamic State field headquarters, training camps and weapons arsenals in the latest bombing runs.

“Our task is to stabilize the legal government and create the right conditions for reaching a political compromise. We have no desire to recreate an empire and resurrect the Soviet Union.”
— Vladimir Putin
The Kremlin’s air campaign in Syria has exacerbated tensions between Moscow and Washington, which has led a separate campaign of strikes against Islamic State fighters in Syria and Iraq. U.S. and Western officials say Russia’s airstrikes have largely targeted Syrian opposition groups other than Islamic State in a bid to shore up Mr. Assad’s government.
[Read the full text here, at WSJ]
The Russian government depicts Islamic State as a direct threat to its citizens. On Monday, Russia’s Federal Security Service told the state news agency Interfax that law-enforcement officials had foiled a plot to carry out an attack on public transportation in Moscow—and that some of the individuals arrested in the case had trained at Islamic State camps in Syria.
In an interview aired Sunday, Russian President Vladimir Putin defended his decision to send warplanes to Syria, saying the air war was aimed at spurring a political solution to the conflict in Syria. Read the rest of this entry »
The White House Portrait of a Crumbling Terror Group is Contradicted by Documents Seized in the Bin Laden Raid
Posted: March 5, 2015 Filed under: Think Tank, War Room, White House | Tags: Abbottabad, Afghanistan, Al Farouq training camp, al Qaeda, Al-Nusra Front, Amnesty International, Central Intelligence Agency, Iran, Islam, Osama bin Laden, Syria, Syrian opposition, Taliban, The Pentagon, The Wall Street Journal Leave a commentHow America Was Misled on al Qaeda’s Demise
Stephen Hayes and Tomas Joscelyn write: In the early-morning hours of May 2, 2011, a small team of American military and intelligence professionals landed inside the high white walls of a mysterious compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan. The team’s mission, code-named Operation Neptune Spear, had two primary objectives: capture or kill Osama bin Laden and gather as much intelligence as possible about the al Qaeda leader and his network. A bullet to bin Laden’s head accomplished the first; the quick work of the Sensitive Site Exploitation team accomplished the second.
“The leadership down at Central Command wanted to know what were we learning from these documents. We were still facing a growing al Qaeda threat. And it was not just Pakistan and Afghanistan and Iraq. But we saw it growing in Yemen. We clearly saw it growing still in East Africa…The threat wasn’t going away, and we wanted to know: What can we learn from these documents?”
— Lt. Gen. Mike Flynn, the former director of the Defense Intelligence Agency
It was quite a haul: 10 hard drives, nearly 100 thumb drives and a dozen cellphones. There were DVDs, audio and video tapes, data cards, reams of handwritten materials, newspapers and magazines. At a Pentagon briefing days after the raid, a senior military intelligence official described it as “the single largest collection of senior terrorist materials ever.”
[Also see – Stephen F. Hayes: Why Haven’t We Seen the Documents Retrieved in the Bin Laden Raid?]
The United States had gotten its hands on al Qaeda’s playbook—its recent history, its current operations, its future plans. An interagency team led by the Central Intelligence Agency got the first look at the cache. They performed a hasty scrub—a “triage”—on a small sliver of the document collection, looking for actionable intelligence. According to Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, the team produced more than 400 separate reports based on information in the documents.
But it is what happened next that is truly stunning: nothing. The analysis of the materials—the “document exploitation,” in the parlance of intelligence professionals—came to an abrupt stop. According to five senior U.S. intelligence officials, the documents sat largely untouched for months—perhaps as long as a year.
[More – NYT: Despite our assurances, it turns out Benghazi was an al-Qaeda-linked attack – hotair.com]
In spring 2012, a year after the raid that killed bin Laden and six months before the 2012 presidential election, the Obama administration launched a concerted campaign to persuade the American people that the long war with al Qaeda was ending.
“At precisely the time Mr. Obama was campaigning on the imminent death of al Qaeda, those with access to the bin Laden documents were seeing, in bin Laden’s own words, that the opposite was true. Says Lt. Gen. Flynn: ‘By that time, they probably had grown by about—I’d say close to doubling by that time. And we knew that.’”
In a speech commemorating the anniversary of the raid, John Brennan , Mr. Obama’s top counterterrorism adviser and later his CIA director, predicted the imminent demise of al Qaeda. The next day, on May 1, 2012, Mr. Obama made a bold claim: “The goal that I set—to defeat al Qaeda and deny it a chance to rebuild—is now within our reach.”
The White House provided 17 handpicked documents to the Combatting Terror Center at the West Point military academy, where a team of analysts reached the conclusion the Obama administration wanted. Bin Laden, they found, had been isolated and relatively powerless, a sad and lonely man sitting atop a crumbling terror network.
“This wasn’t what the Obama White House wanted to hear. So the administration cut off DIA access to the documents and instructed DIA officials to stop producing analyses based on them.”
It was a reassuring portrayal. It was also wrong. And those responsible for winning the war—as opposed to an election—couldn’t afford to engage in such dangerous self-delusion. Read the rest of this entry »
Turkey, U.S. Warn Syrian City Will Soon Fall
Posted: October 7, 2014 Filed under: Breaking News, War Room | Tags: Ayn al-Arab, Bashar al-Assad, Iraq, Islamic state, Kobani, Kurds in Syria, President of Turkey, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Syria, Syrian opposition, Turkey 1 CommentBoth Countries Urge the Other to Halt ISIS Advance on Kobani
Turkey and the U.S. warned that a major Syrian border city was in imminent danger of falling to Islamic State, with the two countries putting the onus on the other to halt the extremist group’s advance.
“You can’t end this terrorism just by airstrikes. If you don’t support them on the ground by cooperating with those who take up a ground operation, the airstrikes won’t do it.”
— Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan pressed the U.S.-led coalition on Tuesday to move ahead with plans to arm and train Syrian and Iraqi ground forces to battle Islamic State, saying airstrikes alone weren’t enough.
An American military official said the U.S. believes the situation in the predominantly Kurdish city of Kobani is increasingly dire, and that the city is likely to fall shortly if Turkey doesn’t intervene.
The complications for Turkey stemming from the advance on Kobani were mounting rapidly. Beyond U.S. pressure to step in, protests by the country’s restive Kurds were spreading quickly. At least a dozen people were killed in clashes with security forces in several Kurdish-majority cities, local media reported. The demonstrations reached Istanbul.
Airstrikes Tuesday by the coalition fighting Islamic State hit positions near Kobani, also known as Ayn al-Arab. But Kurdish officials and Syrian opposition members said the militants were still advancing against Syrian Kurdish fighters.
Mr. Erdogan declared Kobani was “about to fall” while he was visiting a refugee camp in the border province of Gaziantep.
“You can’t end this terrorism just by airstrikes,” he said. “If you don’t support them on the ground by cooperating with those who take up a ground operation, the airstrikes won’t do it.”
The U.S. and its partners have conducted hundreds of airstrikes in Iraq and Syria against Islamic State in recent weeks. But they have so far ruled out the deployment of their own ground forces, opting instead to train and support local forces.

U.S. defense officials reiterated Tuesday that they are not going to directly coordinate operations with any force on the ground in Syria until at least some of the vetted moderate rebels have been through upcoming military training and are ready to enter the fight. Read the rest of this entry »
[VIDEO] Table-Wrecking Ass-Whooping Good Time: Journalists in Jordan Fight on Live TV
Posted: May 8, 2014 Filed under: Entertainment, Global, Mediasphere | Tags: Associated Press, Bashar al-Assad, Jordan, Journalist, Satellite television, Syria, Syrian opposition 2 CommentsTwo journalists in Jordan having a televised debate about the civil war in neighboring Syria literally turned — and overturned — the table on each other during an on-air brawl.
The program aired on Tuesday on the “Seven Stars” satellite television channel.
It featured journalists Shaker al-Johari and Mohammad al-Jayousi talking about the 3-year-old war pitting rebels against President Bashar Assad‘s government, a conflict that activists say has killed more than 150,000 people. Read the rest of this entry »
Egyptian TV: Simpsons Episode Proof Arab Spring Was Foreign Plot
Posted: May 7, 2014 Filed under: Global, Mediasphere, War Room | Tags: Al Tahrir, Bashar al-Assad, Middle East Media Research Institute, New York Times, Syria, Syrian opposition, Television in Egypt, YouTube Leave a commentA copy of a recent report from the Egyptian channel Al Tahrir, subtitled by the Middle East Media Research Institute, a neoconservative group in Washington that monitors the news media in Muslim countries and draws attention to offensive or ridiculous remarks.
For The New York Times, Robert Mackey reports: During a recent broadcast on the Egyptian television channel Al Tahrir, the anchor Rania Badawy alerted viewers to what she called video evidence which “suggests that what is happening in Syria today was premeditated.” She then presented an 80-second clip from an episode of “The Simpsons” first broadcast in early 2001 and later dubbed into French and posted on YouTube.
After screening the animated clip — a parody of a music video that includes images of bombs being dropped on fighters in Middle Eastern dress — the anchor pointed out that the cartoon soldiers drawn in 2001 were pictured in a jeep decorated with a version of the Syrian flag that opposition protesters and rebels started waving in 2011. “The flag was created before the events took place,” Ms. Badawy asserted. “That’s why people are saying on Facebook that this is a conspiracy — in 2001, there was no such thing as the flag of the Syrian opposition.”
While the anchor called the inclusion of the flag in an episode of the cartoon a mystery — “How it reached this animated video nobody knows, and this has aroused a debate on the social networks” — she insisted that the image “raises many question marks about what happened in the Arab Spring revolutions and about when this global conspiracy began.” Read the rest of this entry »
Report: Starving Syrian Rebels Eat Lion from Damascus Zoo
Posted: November 30, 2013 Filed under: Global, War Room | Tags: Al-Qarya al-Shama, Big cat, Damascus, Famine, Ghouta, Middle East, Syria, Syrian opposition 2 CommentsA shocking picture has emerged which seemingly shows the extent food shortages and desperation have gripped the Syrian rebels and their communities – so much so that a zoo’s lion was butchered for its meat.
The men – possibly rebel fighters – are seen carving pieces from the big cat believed to have been taken from Al-Qarya al-Shama Zoo.