The Syrian battlefield is now witnessing an escalation of the war. This is despite the fact that it is supposed to be a time of cessation of hostilities brokered by the US and Russia.
The Syrian war has two major fronts. The first and most important is in southern Syria, on the borderline with Israel and the occupied territories of the Syrian Golan Heights. This area is divided into two areas: the liberated area of Al-Quneitra, and the occupied area of the Golan Heights where Jabhat Al-Nusra and Al-Qaeda’s base their fighters.
Israel has been attempting to drive the Syrian army out of Al-Quneitra. Israel’s objective is to join this part of the Golan Heights to the territory it controls, thereby creating a buffer zone like the one it once had in southern Lebanon. In order to achieve this objective Israel regularly bombs Syrian military positions in the area, including Syrian Arab Army artillery positions, radar stations, etc.
There is a UN Security Council Resolution (UNSC Resolution number 338) dated 22nd October 1973, which supposedly established a Syrian-Israeli ceasefire in this area. There is also a UN force – UNDOF – set up in 1974, which is supposed to supervise the ceasefire line. However, Israel has forced out most of UNDOF from the area, and in practice Israel simply ignores the terms of Resolution 338 and violates it at will.
By attacking the Syrian Army in Al-Quneitra Jabhat Al-Nusra – Al-Qaeda’s local franchise – is helping Israel. Al-Nusra and Al-Qaeda fighters are attacking Syrian military positions important for the defence of Syria and of the Arab nation from Israeli aggression.
These Al-Nusra and Al-Qaeda attacks would not be possible without air support from Israel. Indeed, Israel has admitted many times that it supports these terrorists, whom it calls “moderate rebels”.
Israeli hospitals actually treat Al-Nusra terrorists, and Israeli ambulances regularly enter Syria to evacuate injured Al-Nusra terrorists via the Jbata crossing in northern Al-Quneitra to the Occupied Palestinian territories. Many of the weapons seized by the Syrian army from the terrorists as they tried to cross into Sweda Province in southern Syria to surround Damascus were made in Israel.
Lately the Syrian Army has carried out a series of successful offensives in the area, defeating the Western and Arab Gulf-backed “rebels”. Over the last few months the position of these so-called “rebels” has become desperate.
For that reason Israel has recently stepped its attacks on Syrian positions inside liberated Al-Quneitra, launching missiles into Syrian territory from its positions in the Israeli occupied section of the Golan Heights.
The Syrian military reported these attacks to the Syrian government. A senior Syrian official visited the area. He ordered the Syrian military in the area act to defend Syrian territory from Israeli attack. The very next day Syrian Air Defence shot down an Israeli F-16 warplane and an Israeli drone. The F16 was brought down on the border line in a place called Bir Ajam, which is under al-Nusra control. The drone was brought down in a place called Sa’sa’, which is inside Syrian army controlled territory.
This action marked a dramatic shift of policy on the part of the Syrian government, decisively responding to the attacks by the Israelis. It represents a direct counter to Israel’s aggression on Syrian land.
At around this time the US and the Russians, after prolonged negotiations, announced a ceasefire, the terms of which are secret.
The general opinion in Syria is that the terms of the ceasefire are secret because the US has longstanding obligations to the “moderate rebels” – who are neither “moderate” nor “rebels” but are actually terrorists – but has had to accede to demands from the Russians that it separates and identifies those fighters it supports from those it does not.
Had the US announced the terms of the ceasefire, the the morale of the fighters would have collapsed, since they would have confirmed that they had in effect been defeated. They might even have rebelled against the US.
However, what followed next shows that the US – the true master of this war, and the one which confers immunity on its chosen terrorists by calling them “moderate rebels” – can never be trusted in any quest for a peaceful solution to the war against Syria. The U.S. broke the ceasefire by striking a Syrian military airbase in Deir Al-Zour, located in the Thardeh Mountains.
This is a tough target for ISIS to capture, and it requires coordination between the US led coalition and ISIS against the Syrian Arab Army to give them the chance to do so. The objective is for ISIS to capture the airbase there, which will give ISIS control of the city and ultimately over the whole province.
The US claims that despite its powerful satellites and other methods of surveillance it could not identify the Syrian Arab Army’s positions and that the attack was a “mistake”.
We – the Arab people of Syria and Iraq – have long become accustomed to such “mistakes”. After all we remember the US-led coalition using similar rhetoric to drop weapons for ISIS in their stronghold along the border with Iraq, which it just so happens is also, interestingly enough, the border of Deir Al-Zour province.
That was the US’s gift to the barbarians of ISIS. Over 100 brave Syrian soldiers were martyred, and Syrian military positions resisting ISIS were destroyed and overrun.
Maybe I have got it the wrong way round. Maybe I should say it another way: What a great gift the barbarians of ISIS have given to the US – giving them the pretext to bomb Syria – the main country of the Resistance Front, and the only Arab country which together with Hezbollah resists Israel!
Meanwhile, Israel bombed a Syrian site in the south of Syria, claiming the life of another Syrian soldier.
Are we to believe this is all just coincidence?
The good news is that the Syrian Arab Army with Russian air support has been able to stop ISIS taking over the airbase near Deir-ez-Zour. However in the fighting the terrorists, who have been given advanced anti-aircraft weapons, managed to down a Syrian airplane.
Syrians deserve the right to counter any aggression against their country and their army. They deserve the right to respond in the same way that they have recently responded to the aggression launched against them by Israel.
I have personally met a Syrian soldier who survived the US coalition bombing in Deir-ez-Zour. He told Syrian Formal TV that US drones were flying over the airbase for more than four and a half hours before the US aircraft made their “mistake”. He said that he originally thought they were scanning the area to help the fight against ISIS. However he gradually realised that the drones were actually undertaking surveillance of the base itself – of its equipment, tanks, ammunition, etc. Later, the US aircraft destroyed all this whilst the ISIS terrorists were screaming Allah Akbar!
That brought back memories of the US led coalition drone that flew over the Presidential Palace in Lattakia, which our air defenses shot down over a year ago.
Would any sovereign country accept foreign powers bombing its army in its own land?
Add to that the Turkish troops in northern Syria who are – under UN cover – wanting to send 40 trucks of who knows what into Syria!
The UN prevented the Syrian authorities from checking these trucks, but they were still labeled “humanitarian aid.” What kind of aid is it really and who is it heading to? “Moderate” suicide bombers? ISIS?
And why are so many areas in Syria that are being besieged by terrorists being ignored by the UN? After all no one asks the ‘international community’ (ie. the US and its friends) to lift the unjust sanctions on Syria to prevent starvation!
Syrians are wondering: is our war really with ISIS and Al-Qaeda or with the US and Israel – the true aggressors and puppet-masters – who have always wanted a long war against Syria in order to break and occupy us?
Originally published on 2016-09-21
About the author: Afraa Dagher is a Syrian journalist who regularly writes under the name Syrian Afra’a.
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Atrocities and war crimes are subjectively defined as acts of violence that exceed military necessity. All war includes atrocities. The stress of combat includes a build up of emotion during action that leads to vicious attacks on the enemy when the opportunity arises. American military units are trained and indoctrinated to avoid inhuman treatment of enemy combatants. Soldiers who violate the norms are prosecuted. This reduces but does not eliminate the problem.
Photo of Vietnamese civilians killed by an American unit
Atrocities During the Vietnam War
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A billboard at a construction site, with a photo of an Ottoman-style mosque with four minarets and the flag of Turkey, was erected recently in the center of Pristina, the capital of Kosovo. With less than 2 million people, Kosovo, which declared its independence from Serbia in 2008, is the home of over 800 mosques. Now the Islamic Community of Kosovo is building the “Central Mosque” at an estimated cost of $35- $40 million. Turkey’s Directorate of Religious Affairs (Diyanet) is financing the project.
The Diyanet also financed the building of a similar mosque on a 10,000-square-meter parcel of land on ...
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The United States collectively speaking lost its mind last week during a multi-day orgy of smug self-satisfaction centered on the obsequies culminating in the state funeral of Senator John McCain. McCain became the Everyman American-style, embodying virtues that all red-blooded lovers of freedom should aspire to, a hero who fought “for the life and liberty of other people’s in other lands.” He was a man, according to the media, of matchless nobility who endured torture for love of country, a war hero who put down his sword before starting a long career in government service where he selflessly defended liberty and justice worldwide.
Unfortunately, ...
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Harvard University has established a modern version of the Catholic Church’s Index Librorum Prohibitorum, a list of prohibited online publications which are tagged as “fake” and “false”, broadly following the politically tainted “List” of censored independent and alternative media. As we recall the Catholic Church’s Index was a list of books “deemed heretical, anti-clerical or lascivious”.1
Ex Cathedra, Harvard has decided in one fell swoop that virtually the entire US based “Alternative Media” pertaining to tens of thousands of authors would be categorized not only as fake news, but fake science, knowledge and analysis.
The Harvard Index however goes far beyond the Catholic Church’s Index which selectively banned books ...
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The US marines in the mission of democratization of the Afghan Talibans.
An authentic video clip.
No comment, except: Can you imagine reaction by the CNN in the case of the Russian marines are doing the same in Syria with the fighters of the ISIL?
Enjoy 38 sec. of the documentary clip on democratization of Afghanistan.
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Yom HaShoah/Holocaust Remembrance Day: A state-sponsored institution in Vilnius rewrites history to the delight of Europe’s new ultranationalists
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This article was published on Global Research April 29, 2013.
Global Research Editor’s Note:
The following document pertaining to the formation of “Greater Israel” constitutes the cornerstone of powerful Zionist factions within the current Netanyahu government (which has recently been re-elected), the Likud party, as well as within the Israeli military and intelligence establishment. The election was fought by Netanyahu on a political platform which denies Palestinian statehood.
According to the founding father of Zionism Theodore Herzl, “the area of the Jewish State stretches: “From the Brook of Egypt to the Euphrates.” According to Rabbi Fischmann, “The Promised Land extends from the River of Egypt ...
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A former U.S. President Bill Clinton's: Past, Present, Future:Origins of images: Facebook, Twitter, Wikimedia, Wikipedia, Flickr, Google, Imageinjection, Public Domain & Pinterest.Read our Disclaimer/Legal Statement!Donate to Support UsWe would like to ask you to consider a small donation to help our team keep working. We accept no advertising and rely only on you, our readers, to keep us digging the truth on history, global politics and international relations.
Originally, there were four parties involved in the Afghan conflict which are mainly responsible for the debacle in the Af-Pak region. Firstly, the former Soviet Union which invaded Afghanistan in December 1979. Secondly, Pakistan’s security agencies which nurtured the Afghan so-called “mujahideen” (freedom fighters) on the behest of Washington.Thirdly, Saudi Arabia and the rest of oil-rich Gulf states which generously funded the jihadists to promote their Wahhabi-Salafi ideology. And last but not the least, the Western capitals which funded, provided weapons and internationally legitimized the erstwhile ‘freedom fighters’ to use them against a competing ideology, global communism, which posed a ...
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Not satisfied with having sponsored the artificial creation of Kosovo, the United States has now decided to ram the mafia state through NATO and the European Union. A new member with such characteristics is the last thing that Europe needs right now. However, it should work wonders for the consolidation of U.S. political and military agenda in the region, not to speak of the flourishing heroin trade from Afghanistan…both of which, as Engdahl points out in this sharp analysis, pose a threat to Russia and may backfire in the end.In one of the more bizarre foreign policy announcements of a ...
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Americans are outraged by allegations that Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered an intelligence service to hack email accounts of the Democratic National Committee. How inexpressibly heinous that one country, Russia, would try to influence elections in another sovereign country, in this case the United States! How unprecedented! How diabolical! How uniquely Russian!
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Israel has been attempting to drive the Syrian army out of Al-Quneitra. Israel’s objective is to join this part of the Golan Heights to the territory it controls, thereby creating a buffer zone like the one it once had in southern Lebanon. In order to achieve this objective Israel regularly bombs Syrian military positions in the area, including Syrian Arab Army artillery positions, radar stations, etc.
