“O’ Master of Resistance, all of us are with you.”

Maliki Denounces Campaign against Sayyed Nasrallah: ISIL Evacuation Deal Right Decision

August 31, 2017

Iraqi Vice President Nouri Maliki

Iraqi Vice President and leader of the State of Law coalition Nouri al-Maliki denounced  on Wednesday “the hostile campaign of ignorance” against Hezbollah Secretary General Sayyed Hasan Nasrallah, as he commented on the deal to evacuate ISIL militants from Lebanese-Syrian border.

Maliki welcomed the recent Hezbollah-negotiated deal with ISIL as the right decision, and “part of the strategic battle against terrorism,” stressing that the issue is a Syrian and not Iraqi since it is implemented in a Syrian territory.

He denounced the “systematic campaign of ignorance and hatred against Sayyed Nasrallah.”

Some Iraqi officials slammed the deal, saying the terrorists are to be transferred to Deir Ezzor’s Al-Bukamal, an area adjacent to the Iraqi borders.

Earlier on Wednesday, Sayyed Nasarllah issued a statement stressing that the terrorists were transferred to a Syrian territory. The resistance leader meanwhile, hailed the Iraqi’s for confronting terrorism, assuring that Fraternity between Hezbollah and the Iraqi cannot be shaken up and that the joint victory against terrorism is historical.

Source: Agencies

Deputy Chief of Iraq’s Popular Forces to Sayyed Nasrallah: O’ Master of Resistance, All of Us Are with You

Deputy Chief of Iraq’s Popular Mobilization Forces Abu Mahdi Al-Mohandes on Thursday sent a letter to Hezbollah Secretary General Sayyed Hasan Nasrallah in which he stressed that the Islamic Resistance in Lebanon and Iraq’s Popular Mobilization Forces join the same front against the revetments of terrorism, extremism and Zionism.

Al-Mohandes hailed the role of Sayyed Nasrallah, describing him as the master and the spirit of the resistance which loses its value without his eminence, according to the letter.

The Deputy Chief of Iraq’s Popular Mobilization Forces added, “We learnt from you how follow this path and from Hezbollah martyrs which was mixed with that of the Iraqis.”

Over three decades ago was the spark, and now Hezbollah leads a freedom project, according to Al-Mohandes.

Al-Mohandes also stressed that the followers and supporters of Sayyed Nasrallah will not be prevented from following your path despite all the borders and threats.

Finally, Al-Mohandes stressed that Sayyed Nasrallah will keep the title of glory and the conscious rejection project.

“We have been part of your project which extends from heaven to earth.”

“O’ Master of Resistance, all of us are with you.”

Source: Al-Manar Website

Resistance Finds in Qalmoun Dangerous Video Revealing ISIL Intention to Attack Lebanese Towns

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Sayyed Nasrallah on 2nd Liberation: Lebanon Protected…US-’Israeli’ Scheme Falling Apart

Zeinab Essa

31-08-2017 | 20:13

Hezbollah Secretary General His Eminence Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah delivered Thursday a speech celebrating the 2nd Liberation, represented by liberating the Lebanese eastern borders from the terrorist groups.

Sayyed Nasrallah on 2nd Liberation: Lebanon Protected...US-’Israeli’ Scheme Falling Apart

Addressing a huge crowd of people in Baalbek, Sayyed Nasrallah apologized for not being able to be among them.

“I liked to be among you in Baalbek on this glorious day, the same as I went to Bint Jbeil on May 25, 2000, but the situation after 2006 war is different, especially that the “Israelis” are angry and the US scheme is being defeated in the region,” His Eminence said.

He further congratulated the people for this great victory: “This victory is that of the army, people and resistance against all terrorists, who were occupying our precious land.”

39 years on the kidnap of Imam Musa al-Sadr by the former toppled Libyan regime, Sayyed Nasrallah emphasized that Sayyed al-Sadr was a man in a nation. “His cause is dear to all of us,” he mentioned.

Meanwhile, His Eminence saluted Lebanese House Speaker Nabih Berri over his national stances. “He has always proven that he is the man of all challenges and the guarantee of national unity,” he added.

Back to title of celebration, Sayyed Nasrallah clarified that the terrorists’ control of the Lebanese-Syrian eastern border has formed a threat for both Lebanon and Syria.

As he hailed the fact that there are political forces in Lebanon that supported confrontation with terrorists on the eastern border, His Eminence unveiled that

“some Lebanese were neutral towards the terror on our northern and eastern borders, some were positive towards the terrorists and offered them assistance, as other political forces chose confrontation.”

“During the previous phase and because of the political division, the Lebanese state was unable to make a decisive decision regarding the military confrontation, but it did enter into a security confrontation with the terrorist cells,” Sayyed Nasrallah highlighted.

Meanwhile, the Resistance Leader uncovered some aspects of the Lebanese political scene upon dealing with the terrorist groups.

“Due to political divisions, the Lebanese state was unable to take a decisive decision to launch a military confrontation.”

However, His Eminence added:

” To be fair, the Lebanese state was engaged in a clear security confrontation with the terrorist cells and networks. The army, General Security and State Security scored very important achievements.”

He also unveiled that “there was information that Daesh [Arabic Acronym for the terrorist “ISIS”/”ISIL” group] was preparing to occupy two Lebanese towns.”

In this context, His Eminence went on to say “It is clear that terrorism was strongly reactivated with the beginning of spring and that the next summer will be a serious one.”

“When the victory was achieved in Arsal outskirts, the Americans sent the Lebanese state a message of anger. When the Lebanese state decided that the brave Lebanese army would liberate the remaining outskirts, the Americans returned and asked the Lebanese officials not to carry out this operation and threatened to cut off military aid to Lebanon,” Sayyed Nasrallah detailed.

Praising the sacrifices of the Lebanese army in defending and liberating the eastern borders, Hezbollah Secretary General stressed: “The Lebanese army and its leadership have done a great job and political confidence must be enhanced by the army’s ability to conduct accurate operations.”

However, he reiterated that Hezbollah had no problem if the Lebanese state decided to liberate Arsal’s outskirts in July.

“The Lebanese Army Command was ready to do the mission but there was political hesitation. So, we decided to head to liberate Arsal’s outskirts. The hesitation was not due to insufficient army capabilities but rather for political considerations veiled as humanitarian considerations. Meanwhile, the state’s decision to launch Operation Dawn of the Outskirts was a very significant development and represented a form of practicing a sovereign political decision.”

Sayyed Nasrallah viewed that

“the 2nd liberation is one of the achievements of the new presidential term represented by President Michel Aoun, the man whom I always described a brave, independent leader who does not bow or submit to any state, embassy, pressures or intimidation. President Aoun preserved the state’s prestige through taking a sovereign Lebanese decision to launch the border operation.”

He also thanked the Syrian leadership for its efforts in accomplishing this liberation, particularly that it bore embarrassment in sake of Lebanon.

On this level, he uncovered that he met with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in Damascus to over the deal with Daesh to uncover the fate of kidnapped Lebanese Army soldiers.

“I headed to meet President Bashar Assad in Levant and asked him for a settlement to move Daesh militants with the aim of unveiling the fate of the kidnapped servicemen,” Sayyed Nasrallah said .

Meanwhile, he urged the Lebanese state to take a sovereign decision to liberate occupied territories from “Israeli” occupation.

“We are waiting for another sovereign decision because there is Lebanese territory still under the “Israeli” occupation, the Shebaa farms and Kafrshuba hills. We call on the Lebanese state to plan for its liberation by a sovereign decision,” His Eminence said.

He further urged the Lebanese officials to take a sovereign decision to coordinate with Syria because this is a solution for us and we must hurry in this away from Western pressure

Sayyed Nasrallah also thanked the people and the government of the Islamic Republic for their continuous support to the resistance, Syria and Iraq. “I Congratulate Iraq for the liberation of Tal Afar and announcing Nineveh province free from terrorists.”On another level, Sayyed Nasrallah explained that “Israel” was disturbed by the liberation of the outskirts. “”Israel” is concerned by the coordination on both fronts and the performance of the Lebanese and Syrian armies. “Israel” is crying its orphans in Syria,” he said.

Sayyed Nasrallah also praised and thanked the Lebanese and Iranian Foreign Ministries’ efforts to block suggested major amendments to the mandate of UN peacekeepers in Lebanon following Wednesday evening’s vote at the Security Council.

“The British-American scheme sought to modify the UNIFIL’s mission in sake of “Israel” and to tighten the noose on Hezbollah,” he warned.

To the people in Bekaa, Sayyed Nasrallah sent a clear message:

“These borders and outskirts are the responsibility of the Lebanese army, and we never said that it’s our responsibility. Your eastern border with Syria is now under Army’s control. You must come together so that you mend your internal relations.”

Moving to the international scene, His Eminence also described the United States as the real threat to the international community, warning that the policies of the administration of President Donald Trump vis-à-vis North Korea were steering the world towards a nuclear war.

“We must know that the other scheme in the region is being toppled, and that the American-“Israeli” dreams that were built on Daesh and its sisters are falling apart. The world must know that Lebanon is protected and anyone who thinks of attacking its territory will have his hand cut off, thanks to the golden equation,” he concluded.

Source: Al-Ahed news 

Resistance Finds in Qalmoun Dangerous Video Revealing ISIL Intention to Attack Lebanese Towns

August 31, 2017

20-5

Hezbollah Military Media Center announced that while combing ISIL ex-posts in the outskirts of western Qalamoun, the mujahidin found an SD memory card in a wallet forgotten by one of ISIL terrorists before they left the area.

After examining the SD memory card, it ended up to include a video which shows one of ISIL commanders explaining his plan to attack and occupy Ras Baalbek and Al-Qaa towns in northeastern Lebanon.

In cooperation with the Lebanese and the Syrian armies, Hezbollah launched a major offensive against ISIL terrorists in Lebanon-Syria border outskirts, defeating them and eradicating all the plots.

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  تيار المستقبل وعلماء “السنة” في لبنان وحزب الله “المخادع

Iraqi “14 March Movement”

Flashback

 

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#Mission_Accomplished: Lebanon’s Second Liberation

Designed by: Nour Fakih 

31-08-2017 | 09:18

Lebanon's Second Liberation

الثلاثيّ الذهبيّ: عون وبري ونصرالله

 

الثلاثيّ الذهبيّ: عون وبري ونصرالله

ناصر قنديل

أغسطس 31, 2017

– في كلّ معضلة حطّت على لبنان وكانت خطة إسقاطه محققة منذ اغتيال الرئيس رفيق الحريري، وبعدها حرب تموز 2006، يظهر الثلاثي الذي يشكله الرئيس العماد ميشال عون والرئيس نبيه بري والسيد حسن نصرالله كبوليصة تأمين وطنية بوجه مخططات التخريب والإضعاف والتهوين والفتن، والتباينات أو التمايزات وحتى الخلافات بين الرئيسين عون وبري في محطات مختلفة من عمر السنوات العشر الماضية لم تستطع أن تجعلهما يبتعدان عن سلوك الخيارات الوطنية الكبرى ذاتها في اللحظات الصعبة والحرجة كلّها التي واجهها لبنان والمخاطر التي تعرّض لها.

– في حرب تموز كان حزب الله في خطوط القتال، والسيد حسن نصرالله يقود الحرب، وكان الرئيسان عون وبري جبهة الحماية السياسية والشعبية لظهر المقاومة، وكان بري لسان حالها في التفاوض، بينما كان عون محاميها الأول. وفي النصر الذي حققته المقاومة كان شريكا النصر، شريكين في صيغة التحالفات ما بعده، فكان الاعتصام الشعبي الممتدّ لعام ونصف العام تقريباً طلباً لحكومة وحدة وطنية يحميها الثلث الضامن، وصولاً لاتفاق الدوحة.

– في الاستحقاق الرئاسي ورغم ما باعدته الحسابات ظاهراً وشكلاً بقي الموقفان حتى الخواتيم السعيدة يحفظان التباينات تحت سقف الموقف الواحد، فلا يرد عند الرئيس بري خذلان حزب الله بالانفراد بخيار، ولا يرد في حساب حزب الله خيار رئاسي عنوان الإجماع الوطني في تظهيره، ولا في حساب العماد عون رئاسة تبدأ عهدها بالتصادم مع زعامة شعبية وسياسية وموقع دستوري، بمثل ما يمثل الرئيس بري.

– في العلاقة بسورية وقف أركان الثلاثي الذهبي متمسكاً بالدفاع عن دولتها المدنية الحامية للعيش المتعدّد، ومع رئيسها المتمسك بخيار الاستقلال الوطني وحماية المقاومة، وجيشها المواجه لخطر الإرهاب. وإذا كان حزب الله قد ترجم هذه المواقف بقتال وتضحيات كلفت نهراً جارياً من الشهداء، فإنّ كلاً من الرئيسين عون وبري بقيا ثابتين على الموقف نفسه في أحلك الظروف وأشدّها قسوة على سورية وصمدا بوجه الترهيب والترغيب اللذين استهدفا دفعهما لتغيير المواقف وتعديلها، وعلى ثباتهما سقطت أوهام كذبة النأي بالنفس المشؤومة، وحفظت معادلة الجيش والشعب والمقاومة.

– في الحرب على الإرهاب عندما دقّ باب لبنان، قدّم عون وبري الغطاء الشعبي والسياسي لمشاركة حزب الله في الحرب في سورية، وقدّماه كدفاع استباقي عن لبنان، وواصلا ذلك بقوة أشدّ عندما صار القتال في الأراضي اللبنانية، وفي الفصل الأخير من الحرب من جرود عرسال إلى جرود القاع ورأس بعلبك وصولاً للقلمون، كانا صوت المقاومة الصادح ودرعها الواقي بوجه حملات التشكيك ومحاولات الطعن.

– اليوم سيلتقي جمهور الثلاثيّ الذهبيّ في مهرجان النصر الذي دعا إليه السيد نصرالله، ومعهم جماهير حزب الله والمقاومة والأحزاب الحليفة والشريكة في خيار المقاومة، وسيكون هذا الاحتفال محطة تاريخية في حياة لبنان بحجم الحشود والتي سيشهدها وتنوّعها وتنوّع بيئاتها الاجتماعية والثقافية مقدّماً صورة عن لبنان المقاوم رغماً عن أنوف مدّعي تمثيل الإرادة اللبنانية، ومن خلفهم الخارج الذي سيرى بالعيون المفتوحة حجم الحشود، والذين سيُدهشهم جميعاً الحضور ويقفون بذهول أمام حجم التمثيل الذي يفتحون معركتهم السياسية معه.

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FIRST THEY CAME FOR THE NAZIS AND PEDOPHILES…

South Front

Written by The Saker; Originally appeared at The Unz Review

First they came for the Communists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Communist
Then they came for the Socialists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Socialist
Then they came for the trade unionists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a trade unionist
Then they came for the Jews
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Jew
Then they came for me
And there was no one left
To speak out for me

Martin Niemöller (1892–1984)

I have to begin this analysis by asking for your understanding for the fact that it will include a lot of full-length quotes.  Under normal circumstances, I would have simply provided links, but considering the topic I will be discussing, and how some things suddenly “disappear” on the Internet, full-length quotes is probably the best option.  The topic I want to deal with is the brutal crackdown on free speech by the AngloZionist Empire by means of its ‘loyal corporations’.

First they came for The Daily Stormer

I will begin this discussion by a summary of what recently happened to the Nazi website “The Daily Stormer” as described by Wikipedia.  The reason why I am using Wikipedia is because it is clearly hostile to The Daily Stormer, so it cannot be accused of sympathy or of exaggerating what happened.  Here is this account: (emphasis added)

The Daily Stormer helped organize the Unite the Right rally, a far-right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia on August 11 and 12, 2017, in which a counter-protester, Heather Heyer, was killed in a vehicular ramming. Weev also called for readers of The Daily Stormer to locate and attend Heyer’s funeral, calling her a “fat skank”.

On August 13, the website was informed by its domain registrar GoDaddy that it had violated the terms of service by mocking Heyer, and Anglin was given 24 hours to locate a new registrar for the site. The next day it moved to Google which almost immediately cancelled its registration for violation of terms, also terminating the website’s YouTube account.The following day, the website registered with Tucows, who canceled it hours later for regularly inciting violence. On August 15, it was announced by weev that the site had moved to the dark web, and that it was now only accessible via Tor, while Facebook banned links to the site and Discord banned its channel. On August 16, Cloudflare, the DNS provider and proxy service used to protect The Daily Stormer also terminated their service. Cloudflare had traditionally refused to terminate sites based on their content, but CEO Matthew Prince made an exception, posting a public announcement and explanation on the company blog. On August 17, after a relocation to dailystormer.ru, the Russian media watchdog Roskomnadzor requested a shutdown of the domain.

The Daily Stormer briefly returned to the clearnet with a .lol gTLD, dailystormer.lol, administered by Namecheap, but after two days, Namecheap canceled the domain. The company’s CEO Richard Kirkendall stated that “the quality and context of the material, paired with the support for violent groups and causes passes from protected free speech into incitement”, specifically quoting one published statement from The Daily Stormer: “It doesn’t take a Ph.D. in mathematics to understand that White men + pride + organization = Jews being stuffed into ovens.” The site returned to the web as punishedstormer.com on August 24, hosted by DreamHost, whose other far-right clients include National Vanguard and the North-West Front. DreamHost stated that they were “standing up for freedom and democracy”; denial-of-service attacks from Anonymouscaused all of their sites to go offline.

Next, and even more appallingly, it is the Swiss encrypted email provider Protonmail (yes, the one I recently recommended to our community) which shut down the account of The Daily Stormer.  This is how Lee Rogers, member of The Daily Stormer, describes what happened:

I Was Just Banned From ProtonMail
Lee Rogers
Daily Stormer
August 23, 2017

First They Came For The Nazis And Pedophiles…

ProtonMail just banned me from their email service claiming I committed abuse or fraud. 

Cross ProtonMail off the list of companies to do business with.

I signed up for an email account with them when the shutdown began. I needed a mechanism for people to contact me. A few folks suggested ProtonMail so I figured I’d give it a shot.

Fast forward a few days later and I find myself locked out of the account stating that it has been disabled due to abuse or fraud. How can one make such a determination in just a few days worth of time? They obviously banned me because a bunch of hate filled people complained to them.

As many folks already know, I like posting cute kitten photos and funny jokes on the Internet. Even though I get much enjoyment from those things, I get the most enjoyment out of providing financial support to the starving Jewish children in Israel. It is something that I am very passionate about. By banning me from their email service, it means I will have a more difficult time supporting those poor Jewish children. This upsets me greatly as I will no longer be able to email all the Christian donors I had lined up who wanted to support this very worthy cause.

By banning me from their email service, ProtonMail has proven that their hearts are filled with hatred towards Jewish children. They sure have lots of explaining to do! What should I tell those poor Jewish kids who go to bed hungry each and every day?

Curiously enough, they posted this tweet around the same time my account got banned. No idea if this means anything or not but I have never called for violence against anybody. I completely oppose such things.

First They Came For The Nazis And Pedophiles…

Besides Andrew Anglin, I think I’ve been banned from more Internet services than anybody in history. The only thing these tech companies haven’t done to me yet is refuse service on my registered domain names. I’m sure that’s the next step though!

Before I proceed any further, let’s get something immediately out of the way: I have no use for Nazis (or any other kind of racists or racialists) and I have absolutely zero interest in what The Daily Stormer might or might not publish.  In fact, until very recently, I had never heard of these people or their website.

Three question about Nazis which must be asked

However, there are many very good reasons to be appalled by what is taking place:

First, why was The Daily Stormer singled out for such crazy persecutions?  Okay, okay – they are racists and Nazis.  So?  Does that really make them worse than anybody else?  Last time I checked, none of the people involved with, or working for, The Daily Stormer had committed any personal crimes.  Furthermore, had they committed any such crimes, why not go after them individually instead of going after their website?  Why are the loyal corporations trying to shut down the speech of some individuals?  Because they are ‘inciting violence’?  That is ridiculous.  The entire body of Marxist ideology is one long and never-ending incitations to (revolutionary) violence, yet nobody has ever tried to shut down all Marxist websites!  Heck, the French national anthem is an incitation to violence!  Since when does “free speech” exclude the incitation to violence?!  Every single US President has made innumerable calls for violence (Trump recently against the DPRK), and yet nobody is censoring them?  Could it be that the only reason The Daily Stormer is singled out is because it is relatively/comparably weak/poor and unable to defend itself?

Next, let’s look at the insipid notion that the Nazis were some kind of “horror of horrors”, some exceptionally evil phenomenon in human history and that therefore they deserve some special and unique form of political persecution.  Here, again, let me get something immediately out of the way: I consider the Nazis of have been an abhorrent gang of arrogant genocidal racists maniacs.  I do, I really do.  I have *nothing* good to say about them.  But what I categorically reject is the notion that they were somehow worse than all the other participants in WWII.  Think of it, the Soviets?  Peuhleeze!  Just read Trotsky’s “Terrorism and Communism” or Lenin’s “Lessons of the Moscow Uprising” if you have any doubts about the fact that the Bolsheviks were genocidal maniacs!  The Anglos?  Need I remind everybody that the Anglos committed a butchery unique in world history: the genocidal extermination of all the ethnic groups of an entire continent (I call that a “pan-genocide”).  How about Hiroshima, Nagasaki or the genocidal bombings of civilians in Germany?  Yeah, I know, the Nazi genocide not only got a special name – the Holocaust, a misnomer by the way – but their genocide is the only one that has a mandatory casualty figure attached to it: 6 million (do you know of ANY other genocide which is always named along with an obligatory casualty figure? how about any other genocide whose exact number of victims cannot be legally investigated?).  For seven decades now (actually, less, but nevermind that) we are told to mantrically repeat “Holocaust 6 million, Holocaust 6 million, Holocaust 6 million”.  Why?  Could it be that the real crime of the Nazis was not that they were genocidal maniacs, but that they lost WWII and that their (no less genocidal) enemies got to write the history of that war?

Then, it is true that nowadays everybody hates Nazis.  Some for the right reasons (they were evil genocidal maniacs) and some for the wrong ones (the believe the anti-Nazi propaganda of the Ziomedia). But whether this is for the right or for the wrong reasons, most people hate Nazis.  Not only that, but the simply use of the words “Nazi” or “Hitler” immediately disconnects the (already generally poor) critical/analytics capabilities of the vast majority of the people and that makes Nazis ideal villains.  Could it be that the Nazis were singled out for repression by the AngloZionist Empire because they were ideal villains, “consensus villains” if you prefer?

I want to add here that even if we conclude that The Daily Stormer was singled out because it was weak and unable to defend itself, if we also conclude that the main crime of the Nazis was losing WWII and even if we conclude that the Nazis are perfect “consensus villains” this is no way implies that the Nazis were not every bit as bad as the imperial propaganda describes them.  If I say that a murderer is not a rapist, that in no way implies that this murderer is a fine upstanding citizen since he still is a murderer.  In the case of the Nazis this very much applies.  For example, even if the Nazis did not kill 6 million Jews in gas chambers, it is established beyond any reasonable doubt, and not only by propagandists, that the Nazi Einsatzgruppen murdered a huge number of civilians.  In fact, Raul Hilberg, probably the foremost expert on Nazi atrocities, estimates that these units killed over 2 million people.  So even if somebody could prove that gas chambers and crematoria were never used to kill anybody, this will not whitewash the Nazis from their atrocities.

[Sidebar: there is a paradox here.  Jewish propagandists very unwisely used the 6 million figure and the gas chambers + crematoria to show that Nazis were monsters.  Now the Nazi propagandists are flipping the argument around and they say that since there is pretty good evidence that 6 million did not die and that gas chambers and crematoria were never used for mass murder of people, Nazis were snow-white pure doves who never committed any kind of atrocities.  They are both lying of course.  There is, in reality absolutely no need to stubbornly stick to the 6 million + gas chambers + crematoria narrative, which are extremely dubious claims, to establish that Nazis were genocidal monsters.  After all, even if the Nazis murdered “only” 2-3 million civilians using bullets, disease, starvation and torture, that would still place them in the same league as Pol Pot.  But that is something which neither Jews nor Nazis are willing to even look into, they stick to to their own myths in spite of all factual evidence].

I would note that there is another “consensus villain” out there which the Empire loves to single out for fear and hatred: the pedophiles.  Okay, before somebody blows a coronary, let me also immediately and clearly state that I have nothing but disgust for pedophiles.  That is not the point.

The point is that the AngloZionist Empire designates “consensus villains” to develop tools of repression (legal, technological, political, social) which then can be used against everybody and anybody.

Creating consensus villains

Check out the little collage I did representing a “Nazi pedophile”:

First They Came For The Nazis And Pedophiles…

The Nazi pedophile: the ideal consensus villain

What I am trying to show with this image is how powerful the emotional response of each one of us is to an image combining a child in distress and Nazi Swastikas.  What this kind of image does is create an emotional tsunami which easily smashes through any critical, rational, skeptical or analytical barrier in the brain of the person exposed to it.  Though an image is probably stronger, the words “Nazi” and “pedophile” often have the same effect:  to make us stop thinking and agree to anything to stop the putative Nazi and/or pedophiles.  All that’s left is to give a name like “Protecting Our Children from Pedophile Nazis law” and you can pass anything, even laws justifying torture, arbitrary arrest or daily mandatory cavity searches for the entire population.

Still dubious?  Okay.

Then ask yourself the following question: how is it that in a society saturated by pornography and in which homosexuals are slowly achieving what can only be called a hero status, how is it that everybody is SO concerned by child pornography?  Seriously – do you *really* believe that anybody in our elites actually cares about children?  If yes, I have a collection of bridges to sell you at unbeatable prices!

Of course our rulers don’t give a damn about our kids: the only use they have for our kids is to use them in the pedophile sex rings, that’s it (oh yes, while pedophilia is a crime for the commoner, it is a universal status symbol for our masters and overlords; Pizzagate anybody?).  Ditto for pornography (the US porn industry is far bigger than Hollywood) or morals (we are in the “God is dead” post-Christian society, are we not?).

No, the pedophile has been singled out for the same reason as the Nazi: not because they are bad (which they, of course, are!) but because they are both easy, almost defenseless, targets and ideal ‘consensus villains’.  Let me repeat this: for the AngloZionist the function of pedophiles and Nazis is to provide an ideal defenseless villain and their purpose is to make it possible to create the tools used to oppress us all.

[Sidebar: To get a sense of how much Nazis have been demonized, just look at this Wikipedia list of organizations advocating pedophilia (this time I left the footnotes so you can check the source)

International

  • Ipce (formerly International Pedophile and Child Emancipation, changed its name in 1998 to disassociate with the full name). Founded in the early 1990s; in 2005, it had 79 members in 20 countries.[1][2][3] The organization has websites available in English,[4] French,[5]German,[6] and Spanish.[7]

Australia

  • Australian Man/Boy Love Association (AMBLA).[8]
  • Australian Paedophile Support Group (APSG). Founded in 1980 or 1983 according to other sources. It was succeeded by the Boy Lovers and Zucchini Eaters (BLAZE), another group dismantled by police.[9]

Belgium

  • Dokumentatiedienst Pedofilie.[10]
  • Centre de recherche et d’information sur l’enfance et la sexualité (fr), 1982–1986. Founded by Philippe Charpentier. The group published the magazine L’Espoir.[11]
  • Fach Und Selbsthilfegruppe Paedophilie. Founded at the early 1970s.[10]
  • Stiekum.[10]
  • Studiegroep Pedofilie.[10] Defunct.

Canada

  • Coalition Pédophile Québécois.[8]
  • Fondation Nouvelle. Defunct.[1]

Denmark

France

  • Groupe de Recherche pour une Enfance Différente (GRED), 1979–1987. The group published the bulletin Le Petit Gredin (The Little Rogue).[10]

Germany

  • AG-Pädo. Founded in 1991 by the association Arbeitsgruppe des Bundesverbandes Homosexualität.[8][13]
  • Aktion Freis Leben (AFL).[8]
  • Arbeitskreis Päderastie-Pädophilie (APF). Active in the early 1980s.[10]
  • Arbeitsgemeinschaft Humane Sexualität (de) (AHS).
  • Arbeitsgemeinschaft “Schwule, Päderasten und Transsexuelle” (“working group ‘gays, pederasts and transsexuals’”). Faction of the German Green Party involved in pro-pedophile activism.[14][15][16][17] See de:Pädophilie-Debatte (Bündnis 90/Die Grünen)(“Pedophilia Debate (Alliance ’90/The Greens”)
  • Deutsche Studien- und Arbeitsgemeinschaft Pädophilie (DSAP). 1979–1983.[8]
  • Fach und Selbsthilfegruppe Paedophilie.[8]
  • Indianerkommune. Active from the 1970s through the mid-1980s.[10] Self-defined as children’s liberation commune, strongly identifying as pedophile, active late 1970s-late 1980s; according to some authors there are several independent local groups active in Germany today.[18]
  • Kanalratten. Offshoot of the Indianerkommune but for female pedophiles.[19]
  • Kinderfrühling.[20]
  • Krumme 13 (K13), 1993– aktuell bis heute und im Internet präsent.[21][22]
  • Pädoguppe, Rat und Tat-Zentrum.[8]
  • Pädophile Selbsthilfe- und Emanzipationsgruppe München (SHG).[23] Founded in 1979.[24] Starting in 2003, police began raiding its members, resulting in more than half a million items of child pornography seized and multiple arrests.[25]
  • Verein für sexuelle Gleichberechtigung. Founded in Munich. 1973–1988[26]
  • Werkgruppe Pedophilie.[27]

Italy

  • Gruppo P. Founded in 1989 by Francesco Vallini.[28] Despite its legitimate status, Vallini spent three years in prison for running a criminal association. Despite this, the well-established gay magazine Babilonia continues to employ Vallini, and to support his ideas, although Gruppo P as such may be no more. The group published the bulletin Corriere del pedofili.[29]

Netherlands

  • Enclave Kring. Founded in the 1950s by the psychologist Frits Bernard.[30]
  • Jon. Founded in 1979 by the Dutch Society for Sexual Reform.[8]
  • Party for Neighbourly Love, Freedom, and Diversity, 2006–2008. Dutch political party that advocated lowering the legal age of consent to 12 years old and legalizing child pornography.[31]
  • Vereniging Martijn. Founded in 1982. The most important pedophile association in Europe. On 27 June 2012 a Dutch court ruled that the group was illegal and ordered it to disband immediately.[32] However this decision was overturned by a higher court in April 2013. The judge motivated his or her decision by stating that the club did not commit crimes and had the right of freedom of association.[33] Nevertheless, on 27 June 2012 a Dutch court ruled that the group was illegal and ordered it to disband immediately. This decision was overturned by a higher court, which itself was overturned by The Dutch Supreme Court on 18 April 2014, resulting in a final ban of the association. The association filed an appeal at the European Court of Human Rights but it was rejected. The group published the bulletin OK Magazine.[34]

Norway

  • Norwegian Pedophile Group.[27]
  • Amnesty for Child Sexuality.[27]

Switzerland

  • Schweizerische Arbeitsgemeinschaft Pädophile.[10]

United Kingdom

United States

Noticed something interesting?  These pedophile organizations ALL have their websites.  And yet nobody in the doubleplusgoodthinking community has even tried to shut them down, nevermind systematically persecuting them like The Daily Stormer!  Why is that?  Are Nazis so much worse than even pedophiles?]

There is also another particularly toxic side-effect for creating “consensus villains”: it makes it easy for non-consensus villains to hide.  Let’s take a very simple example: the so-called “Holocaust”.  It is often said that there is a need for, I kid you not, “Holocaust education” to make absolutely sure that “such an abomination does not happen again”.  Not happen again?!  It never stopped!!!  The decolonization of Africa was a bloodbath, US wars in Korea and Vietnam killed millions of people, as did the US sponsored civil war in Indonesia.  The Cambodian genocide, the Bangladesh war of Independence, Mozambican Civil War – all saw millions of people murdered.  More recently, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the genocide in Rwanda, the US occupation of Iraq, the 2nd Congo war – they all killed several million of people.  It is obscene, grotesque and outrageous to say “never again” if in reality it never stopped.  Or let’s take the example of pedophilia: I am absolutely convinced that the Empire publicly persecutes pedophiles only because it refuses to look at the horrors the porn industry generates, not only amongst its “performers”, but in the millions of individuals and families it affects (and if you think that these are the paranoid ravings on a prudish Christian fundamentalist, just read this article and wake up to the real world!  I also highly recommend the second chapter “The Illusion of Love” in Chris Hedges wonderful book “Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle” which I consider to be a “must read” to understand the United State’s society).

The horrible truth is that neither Nazis nor pedophiles are in any way exceptional.  They are just the typical products of a world gone mad with arrogance, hatred and maniacal perversion.  You don’t just do away with any and all forms of spirituality, with any sense of the sacred or absolute, and not pay the consequences of that kind of folly.  The condemnation of Nazis and pedophiles is just a particularly hypocritical form of virtue-signaling by forces and individuals which are every bit as evil and perverted as the Nazis and pedophiles which they so vehemently denounce and condemn.  We should not let the tree hide the forest, and neither should we allow one SOB to hide a multitude of other SOBs.

Subcontracting the repression of free speech to private contractors

What is taking place right now is that the Neocons have found a clever way to circumvent the constitutional guarantees (such as the First Amendment) by privatizing the repression of free speech.  This is really nothing new: the Pentagon has been waging illegal wars by using “private contractors” just as the “3 letter” agencies have been illegally spying on us by also using private intelligence companies.  Now the Neocons are using the private sector to crack down on our freedoms: ain’t capitalism just wonderful?!

Let’s take the example of the The Daily Stormer again: if the US government had barred The Daily Stormer from having a website or from using email, the ACLU would have been up in arms.  But since this is done by the private sector and not by the government, the ACLU has absolutely nothing to say.  Why?  Because the “terms of service” (which nobody ever reads) give IT companies practically limitless power to do what they want with your data and the power to deny you any and all of their services.  To use Google (or any other IT company’s services) is not a right.  That’s that simple.

The key problem here is that, taking the example of the The Daily Stormer, Godaddy+Google+YouTube+Facebook pretty much *is* the Internet.  Oh sure, right now The Daily Stormer is hiding in the “dark web” (at http://dstormer6em3i4km.onion/) and can only be accessed by using a Tor router and where it is not indexed by search engines (also, at the time of writing, it is also located here: https://dailystormer.al/ but God only knows for how long).  But this is irrelevant.  The Empire does not give a damn about what happens in some remote corner of the Internet, it only cares about being able to control what happens in about 90% of the Internet, and that 90% is controlled by a relatively short list of loyal corporations which are more than happy to do the Empire’s bidding even without a court order.

It now also appears that, at least according to the Wikipedia article above, Anonymous is willing to act as the Empire’s enforcer.  Of course, this might be the NSA pretending to be Anonymous. We will never know.

This was inevitable I would add.  The Founding Fathers crafted the US Constitution (and other legal instruments) to protect the people from government abuse.  They could never have imagined that the ruling elites would dismantle as much of the government as possible (mostly the most useful parts) and replace it with private corporations.  US civil right leaders were so obsessed with Uncle Sam that they never even noticed how the US corporate world quietly and legally enslaved them, on behalf of the ‘deep state’, of course, whose main component today are the Neocons.

So what must we do about this?

The liberation of our minds and of the technologies we use

I think that we must accept the Neocons’ conceptual challenge: they are literally daring us to oppose the persecution of Nazis and pedophiles.  We, therefore, must do exactly that – try to make it impossible for the Neocons to persecute the Nazis and the pedophiles. Not for their sake, of course, but for *ours*!  Because if the Empire can do this to the Nazis, then the Empire can do it to anybody next.  Truly, “first they came for the Nazis and pedophiles”…

[Sidebar: seventy two years after the end of WWII, the tables have been fully turned, and now the famous verses by Pastor Niemöller should begin by “First they came for the Nazis and pedophiles”.  I can imagine how absolutely appalled Pastor Niemöller would be if he found out that his famous anti-Nazis words are now being used to defend the freedoms of Nazis and pedophiles.  He would be appalled, yes, and saddened, but I am sure that he would also understand and agree.]

I submit that it is high time for all of us to refuse to be treated like laboratory rats who are trained by operant conditioning to worship X (Barack Obama) and loathe Y (Nazis).  Nazis and pedophiles fully deserve our disgust and rejection, but not because we have been brainwashed to hate them, not because they represent some kind of ‘super-evil’, but simply because they truly are abhorrent.  Those who want to brainwash us into hating them don’t trust us to come to that conclusion without brainwashing and that is, I submit, is very offensive and demeaning for us.  We need to tell those who would have us terminally brainwashed that we can come to our own conclusions, thank you very much, and that they can keep their brainwashing to themselves.

Besides liberating us for the ideological yoke imposed on us by the imperial propaganda machine, there are also technological issues which need to be looked into.  For example, having a website and using encrypted emails.  We all need this, right?  Except that now, this might be a very hard thing to find.  What if there was a corporation out there which would openly declare that this corporation’s services would not be denied to anybody for any reasons?  What if a corporation declared, on principle, that Nazis, pedophiles and terrorists accounts would never be closed or otherwise compromised?  Would that not be exactly the corporation you would want to open an account with?

First, let’s be realistic and not ask any service provider to ignore a court order.  In the abstract, that could be very noble, but not very realistic.  However, our first condition could be that the service provider would only close down or otherwise limit our account if given a legal court order.  Terms of service which would include that provision could, in theory, make even the United States a fairly safe jurisdiction.  Switzerland or Iceland would be even better.

I don’t know if this is technically feasible, but it would be even better if the service provider made it technically impossible for itself to shut down an account.  There have been some steps taken towards this kind of setup.  For example, Protonmail encrypts the user inbox in such a way that even if a Swiss court ordered Protonmail to produce a user’s inbox contents Protonmail would only be able to hand over highly encrypted files but not the plaintext.  This makes me wonder if it would be possible to have one authority (the service provider) deal with the creation of one account but that this account, once created, would be technically impossible to close down for the service provider.  What if that account was hosted on a P2P network or if the credentials to create an account were insufficient to close it down?  I don’t know, I am just thinking out loud here.  Any opinions?

Second, the corporate headquarters, financial assets and servers would have to be located in fairly safe jurisdictions.  Protonmail has it’s corporate headquarters and bank accounts in Switzerland (their servers are distributed, some are even in Israel, sigh…).  Maybe it would be better to separate them all in different jurisdictions?  Distributed jurisdictions maybe?

[Sidebar: here I have to admit to my great regret and shame that Russia under Putin is no better than the USA and, frankly, Russia is even worse in many aspects.  The sad reality is that the Russian government, under the pious pretext of anti-terrorism, has passed many freedom and privacy crushing laws and that the legal guarantees offered to free speech in Russia are close to zero.  Yeah, *right now* there is a good guy in power, but if tomorrow, God forbid, some kind of “Eltsinoid” comes to power there is nothing preventing the Russian government from totally banning encryption, shutting down “politically incorrect” websites, etc.  The sames goes for Iran and China, by the way.  I am personally lucky that my blog is not blocked in Iran – yes, I had this checked – but many others are.  China might be the worst offender of them all: they now want to introduce the mandatory registration of passport data for each person using any social media!  This is paradoxical, but the countries who are at the forefront of the resistance to the AngloZionist Empire have even less of a culture of freedom, especially on the Internet, than the USA or most EU countries.  This is very bad news for us because that means that we are probably more likely to find a solution to our problems in the West than we are in countries such as Russia, Iran or China.  It is quite telling (see above) that Roskomnadzor instead of providing a safe heaven in Russia for The Daily Stormer actually demanded (and obtain) that their Russian domain be shut down.  Shame on Russia, is all I can say!]

Will such a service provider ever be created?  I want to hope that yes.  I was tremendously encouraged by the reaction of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (see here for full text) which strongly condemned the actions of the loyal corporations and who clearly said:

Protecting free speech is not something we do because we agree with all of the speech that gets protected. We do it because we believe that no one—not the government and not private commercial enterprises—should decide who gets to speak and who doesn’t.

God bless their hearts!  I am proud to be a member of the EFF.

The Free Software Foundation (FSF), of which I am also a member, might have to come up with the technology to guarantee that nobody, including “consensus villains” is stripped form the right to present ideas or to securely communicate.

I can hear the objection “what about the terrorists?”  To this I would reply two things:

  1. As far as I know, all terrorists are state-sponsored.
  2. Terrorists can *easily* bypass any forms of state control (mostly by not revealing which email accounts they use).

So this “we will give the terrorists the means to communicate” is a total canard.

As a tool for freedom, the Internet has truly been fantastic.  But we also have to recognize that it has its weak points, especially its “points of entry” (the so-called Network Access Points or NAPs) and domain name registration mechanism (via ICANN).  Governments cannot shut down the Internet.  Government and the private sector together probably can.

And then there is the problem of search engines.  Right now Google reigns supreme, and the runner-up (Yandex) is very much is focusing on the Russian Internet.  There are plenty of other search engines, but none of them offer any guarantees of being a-political.  Yet again, this is a challenge for the free software community which will have to come up with a solution, but this will take time.

Preempting some inevitable accusations

Did you notice how many times in this article I had to go out of my way to preempt the accusation that I have some kind of sympathy for the Nazis?  Well, I am pretty sure that some dimwit will try to post a comment accusing me of being a Nazi anyway.  When that happens, please consider it an example of how easily the word “Nazi” turns brains into mush.  Some will also accuse me of being a crypto-Nazi (or something to the same effect) not because they really believe that, but because they will lack any logical and fact based arguments to dispute my points.  They will hope that the “Nazi” label will serve to simply remove my arguments from the awareness of the well-conditioned readers.  Finally, there will also be the inevitable “offended Nazis” who will be absolutely outraged that a guy who dares question the 6 million + gas chambers + crematoria ALSO calls Nazis evil racist genocidal maniacs (they also hate it when I speak of Ukronazis – apparently the fact that there are plenty of Jews in the Ukie leadership is evidence that the Ukronazis are not Nazis.  Makes me wonder if these guys realize how much Nazis and Zionists are alike or whether they don’t understand that the Israeli government is, ideologically speaking, simply a Jewish version National-Socialist ideas, policies and even methods).   That kind of arguments usually begin with “it sounds like” or “in other words” or “so what you are saying” etc.  My reply is simple: I wrote what I wrote.  If I wanted to write something different, I would have.  So, please, spare us the usual “creative paraphrasing” of what it actually says.

Conclusion: the last groups of resistance

The current hysteria around the Alt-Right, the Daily Stormer or Tump as the “KKK Candidate” are not just the result of the corporate media being controlled by sensationalist idiots.  This is a deliberate strategic psyop campaign whose aim is to topple Trump and crackdown on the legitimate aspirations of millions of Americans who simply want their country back.  It all began by a color revolution against Trump, followed by a successful coup and now the Neocons are turning their attention to us, the regular people.  In their sick minds, if we are not brainwashed Clintonbots then we are all neo-Nazis of some kind.  For them, the Daily Stormer or the Alt-Right are just the evidence and the pretext they need to crack-down on our civil liberties and human rights.  To make things worse, the so-called Left (I say “so-called” because, let me tell you, there is no real Left in the USA, only ignorant dumbasses would call Obama a Socialist!) has totally failed to understand that “first they came for the Alt-Right” and, instead, they participate in the “Trump is a racist” campaign.  Frankly, I find the US liberals beyond any hope, terminally brain-dead, and politically they are idiots at the service of the Neocons.  We all know where the Neocons stand.  So that leaves only two groups who are still capable of thought and these are the paleoconservatives and the libertarians.  They are not exactly my cup of tea with their economic ideas and myths, but that really is irrelevant at this point.  What matters is that they are the last ones standing for the following basic principles:

  1. Support for Constitutional freedoms and civil rights
  2. Opposition to empire and foreign wars
  3. Resistance against the social and political agenda of the “coalition of minorities

I think that by now most paleoconservatives and libertarians have understood that “the Trump presidency is over” as Bannon put it.  Trump is a crushed and neutered intellectual midget in the hands of the Neocons.  But what Trump stood for during his election still deserves to be fought for.  Forget the man, but remember the values, the ideas, the principles which got him elected.  These values are all that stands between us and a life of servitude to the Neocons and their AngloZionist Empire.  This is also all that stands between mankind and a possible world war.

[Sidebar: to my (real) Leftist friends: no, I am not endorsing the political views of the paleoconservatives or the libertarians.  But I am saying that in the US context these are the only two political forces left which are mentally capable of resistance.  As I said, there is no real organized Left north of the Rio Grande, sorry.  And, before you ask, the Antifa who are just dumb tools in the hands of the Neocons.  Yes, there are some real Leftist individuals in the USA, surprisingly many I would say, but nothing organized, no movement.  This is a disaster and a tragedy, but this is also the sad reality.]

What the Neocon propaganda machine has been doing is to try to place the paleoconservatives and the libertarians into either the category “Putin agent” (Ron Paul) or Nazi (Pat Buchanan).  If they succeed, then it’s really the end, folks.

SYRIAN WAR REPORT – AUGUST 30, 2017: SYRIAN ARMY ADVANCES NORTHEAST OF SUKHNA

South Front

Government forces, led by the Syrian Republican Guard, have overrun the ISIS defense north of Sukhna and liberated Al Khuwayliyah, Khan al-Baghala, the Subai’i Mount, the Daba Mount, the Khashm Baghal Mount and the nearby areas, according to pro-government sources.

If reports are confirmed, the Syrian Arab Army (SAA) and its allies are now in a striking distance from the ISIS-held village of Kabbajb located in only about 50km from Deir Ezzor.

East of Salamiyah, the SAA and the National Defense Forces (NDF) have captured Jawasiyat Janubi, Haddaj, Rasm Zaynab, Taybah, Tahmaz, Bir Ghazalah, Kherbet Amarah and Wadi Khullah taking control over the entire eastern flank of the ISIS-held town of Uqayribat.

ISIS is in a no win situation in the area and soon government forces will take control over the entire eastern countryside of Salamiyah.

The SAA and tribal forces have been repelling another large ISIS attack in southern Raqqah. Late on Monday, ISIS deployed its elite forces and launched another offensive against government forces near Maadan entering in the Wadi Ubayd oil field, Wadi al-Tarab, Rajm Sulayman, Nuzayzah, as-Salam Alaykum and the nearby areas. On Tuesday, government forces launched a counter-attack and reportedly regained the points lost to ISIS south of Ghanem Ali. However, on Wednesday, an intense fighting continued in the area.

ISIS was using manpower and military equipment that had been freed after the large retreat from central Syria.

According to ISIS, government forces lost at least 50 soldiers and 3 vehicles in the recent clashes. The group also claimed that it seized few artillery guns, at least 1 battle tank as well as other weapons and munitions during the clashes in the Ghanem Ali area.

The US-led coalition’s warplanes accidentally carried out airstrikes on the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) in the city of Raqqah, according to reports in the Arab media. The incident reportedly took place in al-Haramiyeh neighborhood and resulted in killing of 10 SDF fighters.

US-led coalition troops have engaged Turkish-backed militants in a firefight near the SDF-held town of Manbij in northern Syria, the coalition spokesman Colonel Ryan Dillon said on Tuesday. The firefight between US-led coalition troops and pro-Turkish militants was the recent in a series of tensions between Washington and Ankara over the US support to Kurdish militias remaining a core of the SDF. Ankara describes the US support to the Kurdish-dominated SDF as a threat to its security.

ISIS SUFFERS MORE SETBACKS UNDER SYRIAN ARMY PRESSURE IN UQAYRIBAT POCKET (MAP)

31.08.2017

ISIS has suffered more setbacks under a pressure of Syrian government forces in the Uqayribat pocket in the eastern countryside of the government-held city of Salamiyah.

The Syrian Arab Army (SAA) 5th Assault Corps, the National Defense Forces (NDF) and the Qalamoun Shield Forces(QSF) have captured  the villages of Mukaymen Janoubi and Mushayrifah, and reportedly entered in the ISIS-held village of Qambar encircling another ISIS-held village of al-Wastani.

If government troops secure Qambar, they will be able to clear al-Wastani and nearby points without significant ISIS resistance and to isolate the key ISIS strong point of Uqayribat from the northern, northeastern and eastern directions.

SOUTHERN RAQQAH ON AUGUST 31, 2017 (MAP UPDATE)

Military Situation In Southern Raqqah On August 31, 2017 (Map Update)

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JOURNALIST INTERROGATED, FIRED FOR STORY LINKING CIA AND SYRIA WEAPONS FLIGHTS

Journalist Interrogated, Fired For Story Linking CIA And Syria Weapons Flights

Dilyana Gaytandzhieva

Originally appeared at ZeroHedge

A months-long investigation which tracked and exposed a massive covert weapons shipment network to terror groups in Syria via diplomatic flights originating in the Caucuses and Eastern Europe under the watch of the CIA and other intelligence agencies has resulted in the interrogation and firing of the Bulgarian journalist who first broke the story. This comes as the original report is finally breaking into mainstream international coverage.

Investigative reporter Dilyana Gaytandzhieva authored a bombshell report for Trud Newspaper, based in Sofia, Bulgaria, which found that an Azerbaijan state airline company was regularly transporting tons of weaponry to Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates (UAE), and Turkey under diplomatic cover as part of the CIA covert program to supply anti-Assad fighters in Syria. Those weapons, Gaytandzhieva found, ended up in the hands of ISIS and al-Qaeda terrorists in Iraq and Syria.

While it’s long been understood that the US-Gulf-NATO coalition arming rebels inside Syria facilitated the rapid rise of the Islamic State as the group had steady access to a “jihadi Wal-Mart” of weapons (in the words of one former spy and British diplomat), the Trud Newspaper report is the first to provide exhaustive documentation detailing the precise logistical chain of the weapons as they flowed from their country of origin to the battlefield in Syria and Iraq. Gaytandzhieva even traveled to Aleppo where she filmed and examined labeled weapons shipping containers held in underground jihadist storehouses.

The Bulgaria-based journalist obtained and published dozens of secret internal memos which were leaked to her by an anonymous source as part of the report. The leaked documents appear to be internal communications between the Bulgarian government and Azerbaijan’s Embassy in Sofia detailing flight plans for Silk Way Airlines, which was essentially operating an “off the books” weapons transport service (not subject to inspections or tax under diplomatic cover) for the US Special Operations Command (USSOCOM), Saudi Arabia, Israel, Germany, Denmark, and Sweden. Silk Way Airlines has been the subject of other recent investigations involving weapons supplies for the Saudi war on Yemen. In addition, the military monitoring site Balkan Insight has exposed similar weapons cargo flights in and out of neighboring Serbia.

Journalist Interrogated, Fired For Story Linking CIA And Syria Weapons Flights

Silk Way Airlines flight over Birmingham (UK). Image source: Flickr

But perhaps the more explosive finding involves private American companies contracting with the US government to help train and equip militants in Syria. An investigative series by Buzzfeed – the first of which was published in 2015 – named military contractor Purple Shovel LLC as the recipient of two no-bid contracts totaling more $50 million as part of the US train and equip program for Syria. Gaytandzhieva’s report definitively links Purple Shovel and other private American military contractors to the Azerbaijan Silk Way Airlines shipments. One leaked memo includes a cargo manifest for multiple tons of anti-tank grenades purchased in Bulgaria by Purple Shovel which were ostensibly designated for the official consignee – the Ministry of Defense of Ajerbaijan – but which never made it to Ajerbaijan. The documents, however, reveal that the military cargo was offloaded at Turkey’s Incirlik air base, which is one of the US and NATO’s main command centers for covert operations in Syria.

Though Gaytandzhieva’s report is months old and began through a series of smaller investigations, it gained little traction in Western or international press, even though it was promoted on social media and discussed among some of the world’s foremost experts on Syria and the Middle East. However, on Sunday Qatar-based Al Jazeera featured the story while reporting the shocking news that Gaytandzhieva had been interrogated by Bulgarian authorities before being fired from her newspaper:

Gaytandzhieva said on Thursday in a tweet that she was fired from her job at Trud after she was interrogated by the Bulgarian national security which tried to find out her sources.

She said she first got suspicious of the weapons transferred to Syria when she found Bulgarian-made weapons at the hands “terrorists” in Aleppo while reporting on the Syrian war there.

She said that she then traced those weapons to its Bulgarian manufacturer only to find out that those weapons were legally exported to Saudi Arabia, which in turn supplied it to “terrorists” in Syria.

Photo published for 350 diplomatic flights carry weapons for terrorists

350 diplomatic flights carry weapons for terrorists

At least 350 diplomatic Silk Way Airlines (an Azerbaijani state-run company) flights transported weapons for war conflicts across the world over the last 3 years. The state aircrafts of Azerbaijan…

trud.bg

I’ve just got fired for telling the truth about weapons supplies for  in  on diplomatic flights https://trud.bg/350-diplomatic-flights-carry-weapons-for-terrorists/ 

Al Jazeera is now belatedly highlighting the story in the midst of the current Qatari-Saudi diplomatic war which has resulted in a general airing of dirty laundry as each side continues to accuse the other of supporting terrorism. Regardless, Al Jazeera’s coverage constitutes the first time this story has entered the mainstream. While we’ve reported the recent Trump decision to end the CIA covert program of regime change in Syria, it appears the apparatus for external weapons shipments to jihadists in Syria remains in place through the continuing Silk Way Airlines weapons pipeline. As Al Jazeera reports:

Speaking to Al Jazeera by phone on Sunday from Bulgaria, Gaytandzhieva said: “Saudi Arabia, UAE and the US must stop using the cover of Silk Way Airlines diplomatic flights to supply Eastern European weapons which end up in the hands of terrorists around the world. Diplomatic flights are exempt from checks and inspection.”


Tracking weapons from Eastern Europe to Syrian al-Qaeda: December 2016 Bulgarian news broadcast by Dilyana Gaytandzhieva. Brief English commentary begins at 1:00 mark. The report investigates Bulgarian origin rockets and weaponry said to have been in possession of Nusra Front (AQ in Syria). Leaked documents would later confirm Bulgarian weapons shipped to Saudi Arabia as part of the covert Syria program.

Journalist Interrogated, Fired For Story Linking CIA And Syria Weapons Flights

Balkan Investigative Reporting Network (BIRN) and the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) also carried out their own lengthy investigations which are consistent with Trud News journalist Gaytandzhieva’s findings. Infographic source: Balkan Insight

The CIA program relied heavily on US ally Saudi Arabia to arm anti-Assad jihadists, and while it appears that the White House recently ended the CIA side of things, there’s no evidence to suggest that Saudi Arabia or other participating allied countries ever ceased or even slowed their part of the operations. Also, given that both the CIA and Pentagon contract with private firms acting as middle men to get weapons to the Syrian battlefield, it is uncertain if all aspects of the CIA program have really been shut down. Historically, the CIA has sometimes farmed out legally questionable activities to private contractors for the sake of ‘plausible deniability’. Furthermore, the Pentagon side of the program, which supplies Kurdish and Arab groups in the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) appears to be ramping up of late.

Given the latest development of Trud Newspaper firing its own journalist and Bulgarian authorities attempting to locate her sources, it is entirely possible and likely that pressure is building for Trud to remove the story from its website. The new Al Jazeera story has brought fresh international attention to Gaytandzhieva’s findings, which is sure to increase the controversy.

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Below are excerpts from the original Trud report with images of select leaked documents. The original report contains dozens of downloadable leaked memos which were translated with contents summarized by Dilyana Gaytandzhieva.

Journalist Interrogated, Fired For Story Linking CIA And Syria Weapons Flights

Government docs leaked by hackers (“Anonymous Bulgaria”) reveal weapons pipeline to terrorists in Syria:

According to these documents, Silk Way Airlines offered diplomatic flights to private companies and arms manufacturers from the US, Balkans, and Israel, as well as to the militaries of Saudi Arabia, UAE, and US Special Operations Command (USSOCOM), and the military forces of Germany and Denmark in Afghanistan and of Sweden in Iraq. Diplomatic flights are exempt of checks, air bills, and taxes, meaning that Silk Way airplanes freely transported hundreds of tons of weapons to different locations around the world without regulation. They made technical landings with stays varying from a few hours to up to a day in intermediary locations without any logical reasons such as needing to refuel the planes.

U.S. sends $1 billion worth of weapons

Among the main customers of the “diplomatic flights for weapons” service provided by Silk Way Airlines are American companies, which supply weapons to the US army and US Special Operations Command. The common element in these cases is that they all supply non-US standard weapons; hence, the weapons are not used by the US forces.

According to the register of federal contracts, over the last 3 years American companies were awarded $1billion contracts it total under a special US government program for non-US standard weapon supplies. All of them used Silk Way Airlines for the transport of weapons. In some cases when Silk Way was short of aircrafts due to a busy schedule, Azerbaijan Air Force aircrafts transported the military cargo, although weapons never reached Azerbaijan.

The documents leaked from the Embassy include shocking examples of weapon transport. A case in point: on 12th May 2015 an aircraft of Azerbaijan Air Forces carried 7.9 tons of PG-7V and 10 tons of PG-9V the supposed destination via the route Burgas (Bulgaria)-Incirlik (Turkey)-Burgas-Nasosny (Azerbaijan). The consignor was the American company Purple Shovel, and the consignee – the Ministry of Defense of Azerbaijan. According to the documents, however, the military cargo was offloaded at Incirlik military base and never reached the consignee. The weapons were sold to Purple Shovel by Alguns, Bulgaria, and manufactured by Bulgaria’s VMZ military plant.

According to the federal contracts registry, in December of 2014 USSOCOM signed a $26.7 million contract with Purple Shovel. Bulgaria was indicated as the country of origin of the weapons.

US covert program sent Bulgarian weapons to Al Qaeda via private military contractor 

On 6 June 2015, a 41-year old American national Francis Norvello, an employee of Purple Shovel, was killed in a blast when a rocket-propelled grenade malfunctioned at a military range near the village of Anevo in Bulgaria. Two other Americans and two Bulgarians were also injured. The US Embassy to Bulgaria then released a statement announcing that the U.S. government contractors were working on a U.S. military program to train and equip moderate rebels in Syria. Which resulted in the U.S. Ambassador to Sofia to be immediately withdrawn from her post. They very same weapons as those supplied by Purple Shovel were not used by moderate rebels in Syria. In December of last year while reporting on the battle of Aleppo as a correspondent for Bulgarian media I found and filmed 9 underground warehoused full of heavy weapons with Bulgaria as their country of origin. They were used by Al Nusra Front (Al Qaeda affiliate in Syria designated as a terrorist organization by the UN).

Saudi Arabia – sponsor and arms distributor

Besides the USA, another country that has purchased huge quantities of Eastern-European weapons and exported them on Silk Way Airlines diplomatic flights is Saudi Arabia. In 2016 and 2017, there were 23 diplomatic flights carrying weapons from Bulgaria, Serbia and Azerbaijan to Jeddah and Riyadh. The consignees were VMZ military plant and Transmobile from Bulgaria, Yugoimport from Serbia, and CHIHAZ from Azerbaijan.

The Kingdom does not buy those weapons for itself, as the Saudi army used only western weapons and those weapons are not compatible with its military standard. Therefore, the weapons transported on diplomatic flights end up in the hands of the terrorist militants in Syria and Yemen that Saudi Arabia officially admits supporting.

Journalist Interrogated, Fired For Story Linking CIA And Syria Weapons Flights

Report links internationally transported weapons to ISIS

On 5 March 2016, an Azerbaijan Air Force aircraft carried 1700 pcs. RPG-7 (consignor: Ministry of Defense of Azerbaijan) and 2500 pcs. PG-7VM (consignor: Transmobile Ltd., Bulgaria) for the Defense Ministry of Saudi Arabia. Diplomatic flights from Burgas Airport to Prince Sultan Airport on 18 and 28 February 2017 each carried a further 5080 psc. 40 mm PG-7V for RPG-7 and 24 978 psc. RGD-5. The weapons were exported by Transmobile, Bulgaria to the Ministry of Defense of Saudi Arabia. Such munitions and RPG-7 originating in Bulgaria can often be seen in videos filmed and posted by the Islamic State on their propaganda channels.

Weapons on Silk Way flight manifests appear on the Syrian battlefield months after arrival in Turkey and Saudi Arabia

The 41.2-ton cargo from Baku and Belgrade included: 7.62 mm cartridges, 12 pcs. sniper rifles, 25 pcs. M12 “Black Spear” caliber 12.7x108mm, 25 psc. RBG 40×46 mm/6M11, and 25 pcs. Coyote machine gun 12.7×108 mm with tripods. The same heavy machine gun appeared in videos and photos posted online by militant groups in Idlib and the province of Hama in Syria a few months later. The aircraft also carried: 1999 psc. M70B1 7.62×39 mm and 25 psc. M69A 82 mm. On 26 February 2016, a video featuring same M69A 82 mm weapons was posted on YouTube by a militant group calling itself Division 13 and fighting north of Aleppo.

Journalist Interrogated, Fired For Story Linking CIA And Syria Weapons Flights

Interestingly, the aircraft that carried the same type of weapons landed in Diyarbakir (Turkey), 235 km away from the border with Syria. Another type of weapon, RBG 40 mm/6M11, which was from the same flight and supposedly destined for Congo too, appeared in a video of the Islamic Brigade of Al Safwa in Northern Aleppo.

After Turkey, the aircraft landed in Saudi Arabia and remained there for a day. Afterwards it landed in Congo and Burkina Faso. A week later, there was an attempted military coup in Burkina Faso.

Full report and downloadable copies of leaked documents are also available here.

Hamas to re-join the ‘Axis of Resistance’

Former prime minister of Gaza-ruling Islamic resistance Hamas, Ismail Haniyeh who replaced Khaled Meshaal as head of Hamas early this year, is showing his desire to re-join the Axis of Resistance (Iran-Syria-Hizbullah).

Relations with Iran are excellent and Iran is the largest supporter of the Izz El-Deen Al-Qassam Brigade (Hamas’ military wing) with money and arms,” Yahya Sinwar, Gaza Chief told reporters on Monday. Yahya Sinwar, 54, is one of the founding-commanders of Izz El-Deen Al-Qassam Brigade. He was freed in a prisoner swap in 2011 after spending more than 20 years in Israeli jail.

Sinwar, in his remarks, invited Israeli favorite Mahmoud Abbas , for talks on forming a new national unity government to administer both the Gaza Strip and the Israeli occupied West Bank. 

Khaled Meshaal abandoned his headquarter in Damascus in 2012, in order to avoid supporting Syrian president Bashar al-Assad against US-Israel sponsored insurgents. He found a new sponsor, the oil-rich tiny sheikhdom of Qatar. Since then the Jew York Times lead media have been spreading lies about Iran’s support for Hamas. Both Tehran and Lebanese Islamic resistance Hizbullah never stopped their support for Hamas – financially or otherwise.

Hamas leader statement reflects the latest developments in the region:

  1. The US-Israeli sponsored ISIS terrorists have been defeated in both Syria and Iraq – thanks to [ASSAD and] Assad’s foreign allies such as Iran, Russia, Hizbullah and Iraqi Shi’ite militia.
  2. Suadi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman is planning to withdraw its forces from Yemen.
  3. Qatar has re-established its diplomatic relations with Tehran. Its ambassador Ali bin Hamad Al-Sulaiti returned to Tehran on last Friday. Qatar recalled its ambassador two years ago to please Saudi ‘royals’.

Both Khaled Meshaal and Ismail Haniyeh have visited Iran frequently since 2009 Israeli attacks on Gaza Strip to thank Tehran’s support. In 2014, Meshaal met Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatullah Ali Khamenei, the greatest supporter of Palestinian people.

Hamas leaders have realized that Donald Trump with his Zionist Jew son-in-law Kushner as senior adviser on Israeli occupation, Hamas has no other alternative but to re-join the Axis of Resistance against the Zionist entity. They also know such entry must be blessed by Syrian government which would take time but could be achieved with help from Iran.

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More than 257k Civilians killed by Saudi Aggression and Siege on Yemen, Says Human Rights Ministry

More than 257k Civilians killed by Saudi Aggression and Siege on Yemen, Says Human Rights Ministry

Human Rights Minister Alia Faysal Abdul Latif 253a4

The Ministry of Human Rights confirmed that 10,373 citizens were killed by the direct bombing of the aggression alliance, while the number of those who died as a result of the aggression and the siege are 247 thousand citizens due to lack of medicines and the spread of epidemics and malnutrition and kidney failure.

“There is no legal loophole that allows Saudi Arabia to target civilian homes, close airports and prevent medical and relief assistance,” Human Rights Minister Alia Faysal Abdul Latif said in a news conference in Sanaa on the crime of targeting the Faj Atan neighborhood, yesterday.

“Saudi Arabia and its coalition cannot bomb the facilities and infrastructure that are indispensable for the survival of the civilian population,” she said, stressing that what the coalition of aggression is doing is a war crime and a violation of international humanitarian laws.

Under Secretary of the Ministry of Human Rights reviewed the statistics of the victims of the aggression on Yemen from 26 March 2015 to 28 August 2017, which amounted to ten thousand and 373 martyrs, including two thousand and 130 children and a thousand and 813 women.

The statistics show that the aggression and the unjust siege caused the death of 247 thousand citizens due to lack of medicines and the spread of epidemics such as measles, cholera, malnutrition and other diseases such as renal failure. It is also noted that the lives of 75 thousand patients are threatened to die for not being able to travel abroad for treatment due to the closure of airports.

As the Reuters has reported, more than half a million people in Yemen have been infected with cholera since the epidemic began four months ago and 1,975 people have died, the World Health Organization (WHO) said on Monday.

Each day there are more than 5,000 new cases of the waterborne disease, which causes acute diarrhoea and dehydration, in the country where the health system has collapsed after more than two years of war, it said.

“The total number of suspected cholera cases in Yemen this year hit the half a million mark on Sunday, and nearly 2,000 people have died since the outbreak began to spread rapidly at the end of April,” the WHO said in a statement on Monday.

“The spread of cholera has slowed significantly in some areas compared to peak levels but the disease is still spreading fast in more recently affected districts, which are recording large numbers of cases,” it said, reporting a total of 503,484 cases.

The country’s Health Ministry has already announced that 21 of a total 22 Yemeni provinces are threatened by the disease. On mid-May, it also declared a state of emergency in the capital Sana’a in connection with the epidemic.

Saudi Arabia has been striking Yemen since March 2015 to restore power to fugitive president Mansour Hadi, a close ally of Riyadh. The Saudi-led aggression has so far killed at least 14,000 Yemenis, including hundreds of women and children.

Despite Riyadh’s claims that it is bombing the positions of the Ansarullah fighters, Saudi bombers are flattening residential areas and civilian infrastructures.

According to several reports, the Saudi-led air campaign against Yemen has drove the impoverished country towards humanitarian disaster.

Nearly 3.3 million Yemeni people, including 2.1 million children, are currently suffering from acute malnutrition. The Al-Saud aggression has also taken a heavy toll on the country’s facilities and infrastructure, destroying many hospitals, schools, and factories.

The WHO now classifies Yemen as one of the worst humanitarian emergencies in the world alongside Syria, South Sudan, Nigeria and Iraq.

*(Human Rights Minister Alia Faysal Abdul Latif. Image courtesy of YouTube).

Tony Blair in Wonderland

Tony Blair in Wonderland

Photo by Chatham House | CC BY 2.0

Tony Blair is clearly a piece of work.  Incidentally, I’ve known about him for decades before he became well-known.

Blair went to Fettes, the Scottish equivalent of the elite English private school Eton (the former’s alumni include the composer Michael Tippett, the winner of the Nobel Prize in economics Angus Deaton, Churchill’s foreign secretary John Simon, the actress Tilda Swinton, the golfer Tommy Armour, the gay climber and child psychiatrist Menlove Edwards (who committed suicide after living a difficult personal life), and numerous legal figures and army generals).  Blair was at Fettes from 1966 to 1971.

A good friend of mine during my undergrad days in the late 60s/early 70s had the misfortune (his term) to attend Fettes the same time as Blair.

My Old Fettesian undergraduate friend, like me a future university teacher, moved in very different circles from Blair at Fettes (admittedly my friend was a couple of years older), who at that point had seeming thespian aspirations and gloried in the nickname “Emma”.

My friend was unable to tell me how this nickname came to be bestowed on the future prime minister.

The outlines of Blair’s career after he left Fettes and went to Oxford are well known.  His academic career at Oxford was just as undistinguished as his time at Fettes.  His main claim to fame at Oxford was playing in a band that did covers of hits by the Rolling Stones.

At Oxford, we’ve just been told by Blair himself, there was a brief flirtation with Trotskyism.  Blair is all veneer, so with supple convictions that drift effortlessly above this veneer, his time as a “Trot” did not last long.

It was now time to turn to religion, and he became a church-goer, Anglican at first but becoming converting to her faith when he married the Catholic Cherie Booth.  Mrs Blair combines her Catholicism with instruction and guidance from a New Age guru, and Blair has been known to join Cherie and her guru for the occasional session of ritualistic mumbo-jumbo.

Buoyed by the recent High Court decision blocking the bid by a former Iraqi army chief of staff to bring a private prosecution against him over the Iraq war, Blair decided he now has no need to lie low, and promptly made headlines by speaking of the need for a new anti-Brexit centrist party, uniting liberal Tories and right-wing Labour supporters.

Needless to say, Blair would be the leader, or the undefined ringmaster, of this political confection.

Blair apparently believes he can emulate the French president Emmanuel Macron in bringing about a “new” centrist realignment in his own country, perhaps not heedful of the fact that Macron is tanking in the polls (in part over spending large sums of money for make-up) and getting nowhere with his realignment “project”.

Such a UK centrist party already exists in the form of the Lib Dems– now largely discredited because they formed a coalition with the Tories from 2010-2015 with ruinous consequences for Brits (apart from the 1% of course) — so Blair’s new party would have to compete with the Lib Dems for the same somewhat limited electoral turf.

Blair’s pitch for a new party could probably be dismissed as a vainglorious attempt to signal he remains a “real and relevant” force in British politics.  We know he can still face prosecution for his role in the Iraq war if this is initiated from within the UK, or if he arrested in foreign country accepting the jurisdiction of the international court at The Hague.

Blair, like his partner in crime Dubya Bush, is still potentially a wanted man in certain parts of the world, so displaying his continued “importance” as the leader of a western political party with parliamentary seats is probably his main safeguard against those wanting him still to be accountable for war crimes in Iraq.

In itself, however, the notion of a new “centrist” party in the UK is asinine.

In addition to the Lib Dems there are “centrists” in both the Labour and Tory parties.

Labour’s “centrists” are Blair supporters determined to unseat Jeremy Corbyn as the party leader.

Corbyn, despite losing the recent election, nonetheless secured Labour’s largest share of the vote since its landslide in 1945 (Blair was unable to do this in his three election victories), and Blair’s willingness to form a new party may be a signal to his supporters that they have no foreseeable future as Blairites in a Labour party led by Corbyn.

Tories these days, apart from a tiny remnant of “One Nation” Tories such as Ken Clarke, do not signal themselves as “centrists”, but most Tory big donors are pro-EU corporate fat cats, and these one-percenters are at odds with the party’s xenophobic Little Englander base.

The Tory corporate fat-cat donors love globalization and the EU, the Tory Little Englander Tory base not so much.

The conjuring trick required of a Tory leader, and the US Republicans in an analogous way, is to take lots of money from pro-business fat cat donors, while conning their Little Englander/Middle America bases with largely symbolic gestures (typically involving immigration controls, subtle or not so subtle Islamophobia, getting rid of foreign aid, being tough on crime, pandering to the far-right on a largely cosmetic nationalism, and so on).

In the UK in 2017, all this has been nothing more than a repristination and modification of what Thatcher started in the late 70s:

Thatcherism Mk 1: Thatcher with her “Iron Lady” habitual snarl and handbag swinging.

Thatcherism Mk 2 (Blair/Brown): Thatcherism morphing into a seeming human face (Blair’s characteristic fake suntan and rictus smile).  Under Blair and Brown, the UK’s richest households – concentrated in London and the south-east – took an even greater share of national income than they did under Thatcher.

Thatcherism Mk 3 (Cameron/Osborne): Thatcherism, now called “austerity”, delivered with a posh-boy smirk and patronising tone.

(Wannabe) Thatcherism Mk 4 (Theresa May/Labour’s largely clueless neo-Blairites): Thatcherism must now be placed in the hands of pragmatic professional politicians like us, who will follow the dictates of focus groups and opinion polls.  Exemplum:  May has over time taken all three positions on Brexit.  Before the Brexit referendum she campaigned for the Remain side.  During the recent general election, May campaigned for a hard Brexit (i.e. a complete severance from the EU) hoping to prevent Tory voters from defecting to the far-right anti-EU UKIP.  When she lost her majority, May endorsed a soft Brexit (i.e. a break from the EU but hoping vaguely for a to-be-negotiated market arrangement with it).

No thanks to all the above embodiments of a pernicious dogma!

Tony/Emma in Wonderland is not going to reconfigure the terrain of British politics.  Emma will simply reshuffle the deckchairs on the Titanic that is today’s Ukania.

The journalist Paul Mason, who writes intelligently about UK politics and economics, has said that the creation of a new UK centrist party will be a magnet, not so much for Labour’s diminished Blairite remnant, but the neoliberal segment in the Conservative party.

This claim seems counterintuitive at first sight, but some reflection suggests that Mason could be right.

The driving force behind UK neoliberalism from Thatcher onwards has been the Tory party, with Blair/Brown’s New Labour falling in line with the appropriate adjustments here and there.

Brexit, however inchoate in its implementation and diverse in its underlying motivations, represents a repudiation of neoliberalism.

Culturally, Brexit seems to involve the rejection of a more cosmopolitan outlook, an endorsement of an insular Little Englanderism, but this is hardly the case– the people who voted for Brexit may have opted for Little Englanderism on the surface, but this is because they have been royally screwed in large numbers by neoliberalism, of which the EU, and the Tory party, have been unremitting proponents.

Since Thatcher, the Tory party has combined, or sought to combine, neoliberalism with a culturalist gloss on nationalism.  In essence, this has been an absolute bluff.

Blair’s “centrist” party, however inadvertently, will call this bluff.

Why put up with this Tory Little Englander pantomime, just to get votes from a xenophobic, and largely elderly and less educated, base, when you can have the option of voting for a flat-out neoliberal party, now unburdened by having jettisoned both Little Englanderism–  Conservatives belonging to the 1% view this confining xenophobia as a drag on wealth that has been parked offshore in places like Panama and on lucrative deals to be made with dictators from balmier climes), and also Corbyn’s Labour (which, dear oh dear, wants a return to all that outdated socialist stuff)?

A new neoliberal and resolutely post-socialist “centrist” party will probably cut the Tory Gordian Knot existing once Thatcher took office– i.e. purporting to be the party for “all” Brits while only benefitting the 1%– but also bypassing what neoliberal one-percenters and Blair himself believe to be a no longer relevant socialism (now represented by Labour under Corbyn).

“Utopia” for these neoliberal one-percenters, in essence, is for London to remain the money-laundering capital of the world.  And of course, the EU has allowed, and will allow, all of this to continue, if the UK did not/does not opt for Brexit.

Why my vague “did not/does not” formulation?  The Tories led by a thoroughly discredited Theresa May will have to face an election sooner rather than later.  Every indication so far points to a Labour victory.

Here then is a possible scenario.

With an election victory secured, Labour will now insist it needs its own mandate to implement Brexit.  Corbyn will sit on the fence this time, maintaining this must be a vote based on each person’s “conscience” (his own conscience as always being for a Lexit).

The pro-EU Ukanian plutocracy will be better organized for a referendum this time round, and in this second referendum Brexit will probably not pass.  Even the queen, supposedly “above” politics, wore a hat resembling the EU flag when she gave her recent speech at the opening of the new session of parliament.  The Ukanian plutocracy, from the land-owning aristocracy to the financial elites, will not have this “accident” repeated a second time.

Labour, now in power, will use this vote against Brexit to call for a more “democratic” EU.

Given that the neoliberal EU is constitutively undemocratic, Labour will need something akin to a revolution to succeed in any attempted “democratization” of this ghastly monstrosity.

A few cosmetic changes will in all probability then be thrown at Labour as a sop, to show how much the EU “loves” its repentant flip-flopping Ukanian member.

The old dictum therefore still applies in 21st century Ukania:  socialism or barbarism!

In the meantime, let’s continue to find ways to put Blair in the dock at The Hague. Emma genuinely needs to be given an extended opportunity to make his case for the Iraq war while contemplating the prospect of a long spell in a Dutch jail cell.

Sayyed Moussa Sadr: A Fighter for Rights and Freedom

BIOGRAPHY:

 

Sayyed Musa Sadr

 

Sayyed Moussa Sadr was born in the Holy Iranian City of Qum in the year 1928, to the Sadr family which was known to be a family of theologians. His father was Ayatollah Sadreddine Al Sadr, and Ayatollah Mohammad Baqir Al Sadr was his cousin.

Sayyed Moussa Sadr attended his primary school in Qum and later on moved to the Iranian Capital Tehran, where in the year 1956, he received a degree in Islamic Jurisprudence and Political Sciences from Tehran University.

After that, His Eminence moved back to Qum to study theology before leaving to Najaf in Iraq in the year 1954, to continue his theology studies under Ayatollah Sayyed Mohsen Al Hakim, and Ayatollah Sayyed Abdul Qassem Al Kouei.

In the year 1955, Sayyed Moussa Sadr came to his home country, Lebanon, for the first time, where he met his cousins and extended family members in Tyr and Shuhoor, and was the guest of honor at Ayatollah Sayyed Abed Al Hussein Sharafeddine’s house.

Ayatollah Sharafeddine saw the talents and skills of Sayyed Moussa Sadr, and started talking about them in all his meetings and seminars, which gave a glimpse that Sayyed Moussa would be his successor.

In this context, and in the end of the year 1957, after Sayyed Sharafeddine’s death, the city of Tyre sent for Sayyed Moussa Sadr from Qum, and by the end of the year 1959, Sayyed Sadr came back to Lebanon, and settled in the city of Tyre.

As he started to appear widely in social affairs, Sayyed Moussa started with religious and general activities, spreading their range through seminars, meetings, and visits, where he was able to relate religion to the social affairs.

His Eminence did not only step into his work in the city of Tyre, but he also went from and to most of the Lebanese areas, among different social ranks, or even religions or sects.

His major concern was the unity of all Lebanese, regardless of their religion or sect, for he believed that religion’s role is ethical stability, where Sayyed Moussa was the first to conduct the Muslim-Christian dialogue, later during the Lebanese civil war.

Sayyed Moussa worked on achieving a better society for the people of his city Tyre, and for other people, leading them to a better civilized way of living, helping them through establishing social and charitable associations to direct basic instructions.

Orphans and less fortunate people had a chance to know the generosity of Sayyed Moussa Sadr, and how much he worked on helping developing the society.

Sayyed Moussa was a prominent active figure in the Islamic and Arab world, where he participated in several international and regional conferences, in which he used to contribute and address people with his knowledge, checking on all Lebanese immigrant people to the world.

When he came to think about his own Muslim, Shiite, sect, Sayyed Moussa Sadr sought to organize his sect’s affairs, as the law allows each sect to have the right to form its own institutions.

A COUNCIL OF AFFAIRS:

Sayyed Musa Sadr

From this context, His Eminence started urging for establishing a council special for the Shiite Muslims’ affairs, which was rejected and opposed by some Shiite political figures, in addition to politicians of other sects.

Sayyed Moussa’s cause to establish a Shiite council took him years, until the year 1966, where he conducted a press conference, in which he presented the sorrows of the Shiites, based on statistics and surveys that he used to prove reasons for establishing a council.
By the end of the year 1967, a proposal was approved by the Lebanese Parliament and Lebanese President, resulting in the establishment of the “Islamic Shiite Higher Council”.
This council was considered to be the fruits of what Sayyed Moussa worked for, in order to present a better future for the people of his sect, and to try and stop sectarian racism.
As the council was established to be a legal council with no flaws, it was agreed that a board of members would be formed in order to organize the work as in any other organization.

In the year 1969, Sayyed Moussa was elected as the first Head of the Islamic Shiite Higher Council, where he pledged on his day of election, that he would do his responsibilities and duties as head of the council, in order to achieve all what could be done in the benefit of the Shiite people.

Yet Sayyed Moussa was not only a religious figure, he was also a political scientist who cared enough about political developments, in addition to patriotic campaign in defending their country.

FACING “ISRAEL”

Sayyed Musa Sadr

Sayyed Moussa of course did have interest in the Palestinian issue, where he called upon supporting the Palestinians, and strictly cooperate with Arab countries, in order to liberate the occupied territories.

And so it happened that as Imam Moussa Sadr started his way as a prominent, Lebanese, figure, the “Israeli” brutal aggressions and assaults in south Lebanon had have been taking place.

In this context, His Eminence started urging Lebanese authorities to help and protect southern villages, in addition to arming southerners and train them to defend their country.

Sayyed Moussa’s demands developed to become a campaign, which as a result, the Lebanese government approved on enhancing the situation on the Lebanese southern borders in the year 1970.

The year 1970 was a rich year in the accomplishments Sayyed Moussa achieved for the benefit of the Lebanese people, especially in light of the “Israeli” aggressions.

While the South was the most, or by the only damaged area as a result of the enemy aggression, Sayyed Moussa sought to establish the “South Council”, which mainly dealt with making up for all damage caused by “Israeli” assaults, in addition to agreeing upon some projects that aim at enhancing the social situation in the south.

Despite the “Israeli” constant attacks in the southern areas, Sayyed Moussa wouldn’t let the situation go unless he would fight or hold campaigns against the aggressions.

Although the Lebanese government cared less about Sayyed Moussa’s demands in protecting the people, the Lebanese Army Leadership was interested in demands, which led them to establish special joint committees in the year 1974, which would be set to study all demands. Many reports were published concerning demands and the importance of them to be conducted, yet there were no results, leading Sayyed Moussa and his followers to continue all sorts of campaigns.

In the memory of Ashura, in the year 1975, Sayyed Moussa Sadr called upon the Lebanese people to form a Lebanese resistance in order to confront all “Israeli” aggressions and conspiracies planed for Lebanon.

Sayyed Mousa said, “Defending the country is not only the duty of the authorities, and if the authorities let us down, that doesn’t exclude the people’s duty in defending”.

In a press conference His Eminence held on the 6th of July 1975, he announced the start of Lebanese resistance, under the name of “Amal” (hope).
“The youth of Amal are the ones who were with me in my demands for defending the country and the dignity of the nation, in these days where the “Israeli” assaults reached their climax, and the Lebanese authorities did not do its duty in defending its country and people”.

The Lebanese civil war was not any less important than the “Israeli” war against Lebanon, for all His Eminence cared for is the wellbeing of the people of his country.
For that, Sayyed Moussa exerted too much effort for this cause, traveling from one Arab country to another, aiming at coming up with an Arab resolution and decision to stop the civil war in Lebanon.

He finally was capable of imposing a decision after an Arab Summit in Cairo on the 25th of October 1976, which agreed on sending Arab troops to Lebanon, to stop all internal aggressions.

Although the civil war ended, but the “Israeli” assaults continued in southern Lebanon, to the extent that the Arab troops sent for internal Lebanese peace keeping were not able to enter the Lebanese southern territories.

From here and so, Sayyed Moussa’s main concern was to liberate south Lebanon and stop all forms of aggressions against Lebanese civilians.

DISAPPEARANCE:

Sayed Musa Sadr

The Story of Sayyed Moussa, or what is considered to be the most negotiable, yet confusing, would be in Libya, linked with his disappearance.

On the 25th of August 1978, Sayyed Moussa went on an official visit to the Arab country of Libya, accompanied with Sheikh Mohammad Yaakoub, and journalist Abbas Badreldien. The visit aimed at meeting with Moammar Al Qadafi.

For the first time, Sayyed Moussa Sadr did not conduct many phone calls, and surprisingly no one knew anything about him and his companions, were he didn’t call his family nor the council as he usually did in previous travels.

Noon, the 31st of August 1978, was the last day he was seen in Libyan territories, where after no one knew what happened to him and his companions; the whole world started questioning the situation.

As international demands started to become louder, the Libyan authorities announced that His Eminence and his companions left Libyan on the evening of 31st of August, and headed towards Italy.

It is true that Sayyed Moussa’s luggage, and his companions’ were found in a hotel in Rome, yet the Italian intelligence and court conducted a major investigation, which proved that the abducted did not leave the Libyan territories, and never passed through Rome in that time period.

The situation then was announced to be the abduction of Sayyed Moussa Sadr and his companions, where the Lebanese intelligence as well left to Libya in order to investigate the incident, yet the Libyan authorities did not allow any Lebanese entry for that reason.

The Lebanese intelligence were then only able to go to Rome, where Lebanese investigations also proved, that Sayyed Moussa did not leave Libya as was claimed.
The Islamic Shiite Higher Council published many statements, in which with the agreement of all Lebanese parties, and most of international incites, they accused Moammar Al Qaddafi, Libyan President, to be the abductor of Sayyed Moussa Sadr and his companions.

The story has not been forgotten or faded away, for Sayyed Moussa is still awaited in Lebanon, Iran, and most of the areas and sects who believe in his achievements before, and what he could do and achieve if it was destined for him to return.

Sayyed Moussa Sadr, a name of wisdom, faith, strength, nationalism, generosity, and most important, patriotism, would now and forever be a memory, a blessing on the whole world, until the truth is revealed.

Alive or not, a pure soul remains as helping as always in the presence of Hope.

Source: Al-Ahed News

31-08-2010 | 14:15

#BDS Jewish Terrorism: Palestinian Folk Singer Jailed for Songs

Palestinian Folk Singer Jailed for Songs

 

31 Aug
6:11 AM

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Perhaps the Palestinian folk singer Mohammad Barghouti, 23, did not know that he was going to end up in an Israeli jail because of his popular folk songs. But, he did along with two others from his band.

Israeli soldiers raided, early Wednesday, Barghouti’s home in the village of Kufr Ein, to the north of Ramallah, and abducted him. They also raided the home of his organ player Naji Rimawi and the owner of a local music studio and artist, Nazzal Barghouti, and took them into custody as well.

All this comes after Barghouti wrote and sang a folk song glorifying Palestinians for resisting the Israeli occupation of their homeland and its oppression of millions of Palestinians, according to WAFA.

The latest song that got him in trouble was dedicated to Omar al-Abed, from the neighboring village of Kobar, who recently stabbed and killed three Israeli settlers in the illegal settlement of Halamish, built on expropriated Palestinian land that belonged to his ancestors. Al-Abed was shot and injured and is now facing charges for the killings.

Israel has decided to wage a war against any Palestinian who glorifies, in any way, those whom Palestinians refer to as “martyrs,” if they were killed by Israelis, or freedom fighters, if they got captured.

For Palestinians, these are national heroes and are honored with songs and other means, regardless of what Israel or the rest of the world might think about their act.

Israeli soldiers, who have been terrorizing the village of Kobar and its 3,000 residents since the incident, in a revenge act, were not satisfied with only detaining the three musicians, but also seized hard discs and CDs of Barghouti’s songs that he normally sings in weddings or other local events. They also beat his father, who had to be transferred to hospital for treatment.

Syria: The Axis of Resistance Reduces Netanyahu Government to a Quivering Wreck

Syria: The Axis of Resistance Reduces Netanyahu Government to a Quivering Wreck

By 21st Century Wire,

Never before has a prime minister of the Zionist entity appeared so confused as did Benjamin Netanyahu in his meeting with President Vladimir Putin. Netanyahu was looking through a set of papers he was holding, as if he’s hoping to find a way out. This is the first time he relied on what was written in his notes in such an important summit meeting.

The viewer did not need to hear what he was saying, because Putin’s stern expressions expressed his suspicion of the repeated Israeli usual dull hyperbolic claims about the Iranian threat, and the Russian President refused Netanyahu’s aggressive schemes. In Pravda’s report on 25 August 2017, entitled “Netanyahu’s nightmare becomes a reality,” the newspaper reveals that Putin answered Netanyahu saying:

“Iran is a strategic ally of Russia in the Middle East.” And when the latter exaggerated in describing the Iranian threat, President Putin responded: “Unfortunately, I cannot help you here.”

Pravda reports that Netanyahu failed to convince Putin of the by-now-boring Israeli argument about “Iranian expansion in the Middle East.” Commenting on the Putin-Netanyahu summit, the Israeli newspaper Maariv said in its reports on 23 August 2017: “Israel has become isolated on the international scene.” It’s only friend now is the ruling Wahhabi families in the Gulf, whose media, representatives and hired mercenaries mindlessly repeat Netanyahu’s claims.

But what is behind this Israeli hysteria and the visits by its official to the US and Russia in order to promote these “threats” to Israeli’s security? And what has happened recently that provoked such a reaction from the Zionist entity’s leaders? Does Netanyahu and the ruling clique in Tel Aviv really think that world powers are as stupid and naive as the rulers of Gulf Sheikhdoms?

The main event the provoked these reactions is the change that occurred in the regional balance of power after the Syrian and Iraqi armies and the forces of resistance advanced in several areas, liberating Mosul and reaching an agreement in southern Syria, that gave neither Jordan nor Israel a role in monitoring the deescalation zone.

Both the announced and the unannounced coordination and cooperation between Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon, with the presence of Russia and Iran, in commanding this wide front from Iran to the Mediterranean have cost the Zionist entity its decade-long hegemony, which recently expanded to include the Saudi Kingdom and the Gulf States.

The Resistance has proven that breaking the backbone of this Israeli propaganda is not impossible, and that the enemy now needs to recalculate its position according to new realities on the battlefield, and on the regional and international levels. Another factor, no less important than the regional one, is the victory achieved by the forces of resistance and the Arab Army in Syria and Iraq, and in the Qalamoun region, and the rapid collapse of the terrorist groups across the board.

The capture of the strategic Qalamoun mountains, which connects Syria to Lebanon, has eliminated Israel’s terrorist mercenaries from that vital region, to the dismay of Israel’s rulers who reacted in a hysterical manner in front of the whole world. This victory has proven that Israel cannot hold an inch of our land through its terrorist mercenaries.

Also, the forces of resistance and the Arab Army in Syria and Iraq proved that they have reached unprecedented levels of military capabilities, a fact that frightens the Zionist enemy and leads it to alter its plans in any coming battle. The Zionist entity is not only concerned that its terrorist gangs are losing ground, but also it is worried about the future battle against those who seek to liberate the land from its despicable occupation.

No matter how much the Zionists train their army, it remains a theoretical training, as opposed to the filed experience of the battle-hardened forces of resistance and the Arab armies in Syria and Iraq. Also, the coordination between Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon is a nightmare that the Zionist enemy fears because its power is built on dividing the Arabs, because the Zionists know that when the Arab unite their strategies, plans, and actions, the Zionist entity would collapse as rapidly as its terrorist mercenaries.

Another important factor that concerns the Zionists is that their historic and strategic ally the United States is drowning in internal disputes, and has been losing its credibility as a Great Power both on the internal and international scenes, despite its looting of Saudi and Gulf wealth. So when their main partner couldn’t deliver assurances, the Zionists turned to Russia hoping to sway its decision makers, using the usual lies about their entity being under threat.

But in Russia, the Zionists were met by a strong leader who respects his words and commitments, and does not compromise his country’s fundamental principles. The Zionists realise that the Russian leader has the final word today in all issues in the Middle East, and the word of the United States, the West, and their Wahhabi mercenaries no longer counts.

It is a fact of life today that terrorism that hit Syria, Iraq, Libya, Yemen, destroying their civilisational heritage and killing millions of their citizens is a Zionist terrorism funded by the Saudi royals. Former MI6 chief Richard Dearlove admitted in a lecture in London that Saudi Arabia helped ISIS (Daesh) in capturing Mosul and the whole of northern Iraq, and by association eastern Syria, and that the coming days will reveal Saudi Arabia to be a tool in the hands of the Zionists, and that both Saudi Arabia and Qatar paid billions of dollars to destroy Arab countries.

Today, we are in a time in which Zionist tools are collapsing in Syria and Iraq, and the leaders of the Zionist entity are trembling because the unjust war they waged alongside their Saudi mercenaries against our people has only made our armies and our resistance stronger and more competent. So what can our enemies do?

May God have mercy on the souls of our martyred young men who gave their lives for this Nation, and we pray for the wounded, for all of them have given their blood to serve this noble cause, the cause of all Arabs and Muslims, the cause of Palestine and the occupied land, and the rights of our peoples to live freely on their land.

The hysteria that befell the Zionist entity and its poorly calculated actions will only help further reveal its true role and the role of its operatives in the systematic destruction of Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Libya, and Yemen. And history will also reveal the truth behind the events we experienced in the past few years. Netanyahu’s visit to Putin and his trembling body language is only the first sign, and there will be many more to come.

This article was originally published by 21st Century Wire.

Featured image is from RT.

Lebanon Speaker Hails Army-Resistance Victory over ISIL in Northeastern Outskirts

August 30, 2017

Speaker Berri-1

Lebanon Speaker Nabih Berri on Wednesday congratulated on all the Lebanese on the victory achieved by the Army and the Resistance in northeastern outskirts, hailing the sacrifices of the martyrs.

During a speech commemorating 39th anniversary of disappearance of Amal Movement founder Imam Sayyed Moussa al-Sadr, Berri said that “Imam al-Sadr taught us that every aggression requires resistance… He made us realize that Israel’s terrorism on the southern border is the other real face of takfiri terrorism.”

Speaker Nabih Berri also called on Amal movement’s followers to attend the ceremony held by Hezbollah in Bekaa to celebrate the victory over ISIL terrorists in the northeastern outskirts.

On Lebanon-Syria ties, Berri maintained that the two countries are a strategic need for each other… Syria represents Lebanon’s only land route to the world… and we’re still seeking its help as a source for electricity. We have treaties and agreements with it and we need to build a partnership the same as we did with Egypt.

On the abduction of Imam Sadr, Berri said that together with the media committee and the imam’s family, “we are mulling steps related to international law that are aimed at preserving the cause… The Imam and his two companions are still alive and should be liberated and there is no place for despair.”

“We call on the competent authorities in Lebanon, Libya and the Arab League to offer all the support needed to the committee following up on the case of Imam al-Sadr.”

Source: Al-Manar Website

Full

Iran, Again. Will israel Start a New War For Americans To Die In?

Iran, Again. Will Israel Start a New War?

By Philip Giraldi,

When politicians are feeling the heat, they start a war and their popularity goes up even if the war is unnecessary or completely ridiculous. Donald Trump, the presidential candidate who promised that he would not take the nation into another Middle Eastern war, did so when he launched a fifty-nine cruise missile barrage against a Syrian Air Base even before he knew for sure what had happened on the ground. It was totally stupid but proved to be popular, even among talking heads and Congressmen, some of whom described his action as “presidential” in the best sense of the word.

It’s the same in Israel. For those who have not been following developments there, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been under pressure due to an ongoing investigation for corruption. One of the truly great things about Israel is that while they have a lot of corrupt politicians, just like everywhere else, they actually investigate, indict, prosecute, convict and send them to jail. The betting is that Netanyahu will soon be in prison, so he has been responding in the time-honored fashion by threatening his neighbors and hinting at the possibility of increased military action and even war. If there is a war going on, he believes, probably correctly, that no one will want to remove him.

In an amicable recent meeting with Russia’s Vladimir Putin, Netanyahu stressed that there are some red lines that Israel will not allow to be crossed, while also suggesting that some of them have already been violated, most notably through the alleged construction of an Iranian military base inside Syria. Netanyahu provided Putin with “top secret intelligence” to make his point and told the Russian premier that “Iran is making an accelerated effort to entrench itself militarily in Syria. This poses a danger to Israel, the Middle East and in my opinion the world itself.”

Netanyahu characteristically depicted himself as restrained in his responses, telling Putin that Israel had taken only limited action in Syria against Hezbollah supply lines, but that was a lie as Israel has also hit Syrian army positions. Netanyahu described an Iran that is largely a fantasy creation of his own Foreign Ministry,

“We don’t for a second forget that Iran continues to threaten Israel’s destruction on a daily basis. It arms terrorist organizations and initiates terror itself. It is developing intercontinental ballistic missiles with the intention to equip them with nuclear warheads.”

He went on to claim that his strategic objective was to prevent the development of an Iranian controlled land bridge, described as “territorial continuity,” that would extend through Iraq, Syria and Lebanon to the Mediterranean Sea.

The reality is, however, somewhat different, that Israel has long preferred chaos in Syria since it eliminates any threat from a unified and powerful government in Damascus. But just as nature abhors a vacuum that policy had a considerable downside with Iranian supported militias and Revolutionary Guard units increasingly become part of the conflict, picking up the slack where the Syrian Army has been too overstretched to operate. Iranian influence over Syria, both overtly and covertly, will continue after Damascus eliminates the last vestiges of al-Qaeda affiliates and ISIS, not to mention the rag-tag “moderate rebels.” And Iran will have standing behind it the Syrian Army, Iraqi Shi’a militias, and Russian firepower. This has meant that the Israeli plan to have a chronically weak state across its border has backfired, bringing into the fighting and post-war reconfiguration Iran, which Tel Aviv fears most as a regional adversary.

So Israel has two strong motives to begin a war with Iran, one political and the other ostensibly linked to national security. Ironically, however, it also knows, and has even admitted, that Iran does not actually pose any threat against a nuclear armed Israel that has complete air superiority over any or even all of its neighbors. The often-cited land bridge threat is also a bit of a chimera, as whether it could potentially exist or not depends on effective interaction with Lebanon, Syria, and Iraq, all of which have their own political dynamics and are somewhat wary of Iranian involvement. If there is any actual threat against Israel it comes from Hezbollah in Lebanon, which is an independent player even though it has strong ties to Tehran, but even in that case the threat is not as serious as fearmongering government leaders have claimed.

All of which is not to suggest that Iran is toothless if Israel were to get really aggressive. Hezbollah would undoubtedly unleash its missile arsenal against Israeli cities, some of which would get through, and any attack on Iran using aircraft would be confronted by formidable air defenses. Iran could also strike back against Israel using its ballistic missiles, all of which means that attacking Iran would be far from cost-free.

From Netanyahu’s point of view, it is far better to stage an incident that brings in Washington and then allows Uncle Sam to do the heavy lifting. The U.S. has strategic military capabilities that Israel lacks, including heavy bombers and armaments that could penetrate Iranian defenses, but it also has vulnerabilities in terms of military bases within striking range and ships at sea that could be attacked by swarms of small boats and land launched missiles.

Israel believes that bringing Washington into the conflict is doable given that the U.S. media has heavily propagandized against Tehran and that inside-the-beltway groupthink largely perceives Iran as an enemy. Recently Henry Kissinger spelled out the new line of strategic thinking which Israel is already exploiting to make its case. Per Kissinger, the impending defeat of ISIS in Syria and Iraq will create a power vacuum which will open the door to the creation of an “Iranian radical empire,” a more evocative version of the “land bridge” warning, which he refers to as a “territorial belt reaching from Tehran to Beirut.” As Iran is also fighting ISIS, Kissinger warns against complacency, that “in the contemporary Middle East…the enemy of your enemy is also your enemy.”

Israel has been pushing hard on Washington, recently having sent a high-level combined intelligence and military delegation to confer with National Security Adviser H. R. McMaster and Special Mideast Envoy Jason Greenblatt to explain the alleged Iranian threat. And the neocon chorus is also signaling that it expects the Trump Administration to do something. Frederick Hof of the hardline Atlantic Council recently wrote that the fundamental mistake made by Washington consisted of not invading Syria and installing an acceptable government years ago, which would have kept Iran out.

Saudi Arabia, which is demonstrating some signs of political instability, would also welcome conflict with Iran, which means that there is an existing coming-together of parties who for various reasons would welcome the escape from other problems that war offers. Donald Trump himself was angry at the State Department in July because it had certified that Tehran was in compliance with the nuclear pact signed last year and Congress also vented its anger by initiating new sanctions against Iran. The next certification is due in October and the president would clearly like to have a good reason, contrived or actual, to break the agreement.

Speculation in Israel is that some kind of preemptive strike is being planned, possibly directed against an Iranian target inside Syria. The danger is that such a move could quickly escalate, with the U.S. Congress and White House quickly aligning themselves with Netanyahu. The United States has no real compelling interest to attack the Iranians and would again find itself in a conflict generated by feckless regional allies that are not allies at all. The results could prove catastrophic in practical terms as Iran is capable of striking back, and it could be devastating to actual American longer terms interests both regionally and worldwide. It is time to say “no” when Israel comes knocking.

 

The Islamic State as “Place-Setter” for the American Empire. ISIS is the Product of the US Military-Intelligence Complex

The Islamic State as “Place-Setter” for the American Empire. ISIS is the Product of the US Military-Intelligence Complex

By Mark Taliano

“ISIS” is a product of the US Military-Intelligence complex. The word itself connotes “ISlam”, and so from the very beginning the construct serves to create Islamophobia, which is a necessary pre-condition for the US Empire’s holocaust-creating footprint overseas[1]. War requires hatred and ISIS fits the bill. The fact that ISIS’ deeds are entirely anti-Islamic is of no importance.

Rita Katz[2] et al. beheading videos and domestic false flag terrorism all serve the necessary function of engineering consent for a War On Terror which features as its main star the West’s very own terror proxies – ISIS. ISIS itself is a false flag in the sense that whereas ISIS is the designated enemy, the psychological operation conceals the fact that ISIS is also us – they are the Empire’s foot soldiers.

In terms of military strategy, ISIS is used as a “place-setter”. Empire directs ISIS to areas that it wants to destroy – under the false pretext of going after its own assets (ISIS et al.) so that it can destroy the target area even as it relocates the “target”.

Consider, for the example, Mosul, Iraq. Prof Chossudovsky explains in “The Engineered Destruction and Political Fragmentation of Iraq”[3] that the US co-opted the Iraqi military to “allow” ISIS into Mosul in the first place — so that the city could then be destroyed, and civilians massacred, in the name of going after ISIS.  Subsequently, ISIS was relocated from Mosul to Syria.

ISIS is also being used as a “place-setter” in Syria. Similar military strategies have been deployed in the occupation and destruction of Raqqa, Syria.

ISIS convoy leaves Raqqa, Syria

Similarly, the U.S coalition is using ISIS as a “place-setter” for a proposed “Kurdistan” region.[4]

Even as Syria and its allies defeat NATO terrorism, ISIS will continue to make its presence felt in areas of the world that dare to resist the U.S Empire’s dictatorship.

Notes

[1] Gideon Polya, “Iraqi Holocaust, Iraqi Genocide and US Alliance holocaust denial.” December 13, 2009,       (https://sites.google.com/site/iraqiholocaustiraqigenocide/polya-gideon) Accessed August 29, 2017

[2] Mark Taliano, “Mainstream Media is corrupt to the core.” American Herald Tribune, November 04, 2015. (https://ahtribune.com/politics/73-mainstream-media-corrupt.html” Accessed August 29, 2017.

[3] Michel Chossudovsky, “The Engineered Destruction and Political Fragmentation of Iraq.” Global Research, July 14, 2017. (http://www.globalresearch.ca/the-destruction-and-political-fragmentation-of-iraq-towards-the-creation-of-a-us-sponsored-islamist-caliphate/5386998) Accessed August 29, 2017.

[4] Mark Taliano, “ ‘Creative Chaos’ and the War Against Humanity. US-NATO Supports ISIS.” Global Research. May 29, 2017. (http://www.globalresearch.ca/creative-chaos-and-the-war-against-humanity-us-nato-supports-isis/5592499) Accessed August 29, 2017.

All images, except the featured image, are from the author.

The Same Ol’ Afghan War Fallacies

The Same Ol’ Afghan War Fallacies

SEE ALSO

Pentagon on Afghanistan: USA ‘Can’t Really Leave’, of course not, leave all that oil, gas & pipelines behind? Posted on

NATO/USA will stay in Afghanistan for the same reasons it invaded in the first place, oil, gas, pipelines & opium Posted on

Don’t believe a word of it, the USA isn’t going to leave all that oil, gas, pipelines & opium behind in Afghanistan Posted on

The origins of the Afghanistan war, failed gas/oil pipelines agreements Posted on

MORE https://uprootedpalestinians.wordpress.com/?s=afghanistan+oil+gas

 

Unless President Trump can pull off a peace deal with the Taliban, his Afghan War policy is following the same bloody and futile path that his predecessors took, as ex-CIA analyst Paul R. Pillar describes.

By Paul R. Pillar

President Trump’s statement on Afghanistan has numerous shortcomings. It portrays as a “new strategy” what is instead a familiar kicking of a can down the road. It combines Trump’s habit of heaping blame on his predecessors with a warmed-over version of what those predecessors did in Afghanistan.

President Donald Trump describing his policy toward the Afghan War, at Fort Myer in Arlington, Virginia, on Aug. 21, 2017. (Screenshot from Whitehouse.gov)

It declares a determination to “win” while leaving one guessing as to exactly what a win would mean in Afghanistan. It fails to address underlying problems of governance in that country. It gives no basis for expecting or even hoping that the U.S. military expedition there will not go on forever.

Added to these features is a further notion that Trump shares with many others, including observers who in other respects are critical of his policy. This is the idea that there is a direct connection between extremists having a physical presence in a distant land and the United States facing a terrorist threat at home.

Trump used the term safe haven four times in his speech. He declared that the basic purpose of the military expedition in Afghanistan was, “We must stop the resurgence of safe havens that enable terrorists to threaten America.”

One hears this same idea over and over. The current U.S. military commander in Afghanistan, General John W. Nicholson, Jr., says, “The requirement to keep pressure on these terror groups to prevent another attack on our homeland .?.?. fundamentally, that is why we are here.” Such statements — and not only about Afghanistan — are minor rephrasing of the old notion of “fight them over there or else we’ll have to fight them at home.”

That notion is not valid, and never has been. The very physical distance involved works against the relevance of foreign havens to terrorist threats against the homeland. One cannot drive a truck bomb, or even the ingredients for one, across the Atlantic Ocean. To the extent any physical space is required to prepare a terrorist attack, a house or apartment in or near the city being targeted is — as a long history of terrorist incidents has demonstrated — much more useful to terrorists than a piece of real estate on another continent.

Very little safe space of any sort is required for high-impact terrorism. After the recently discovered terrorist cell in Spain suffered the mishap of accidentally blowing up the house they were using in a Catalonian village to prepare explosives, they turned to the no-space-required technique of renting vehicles and using them to run down people in the street — the most popular terrorist modus operandi in the West in recent months. As for the terrorist-related functions of recruitment and operational coordination, most of that occurs not in any physical space but in cyberspace.

The ‘Safe Haven’ Myth

Even if the idea of a foreign safe haven being critical to international terrorist operations were valid, it could not be a sound basis for justifying a military expedition in any one country. Havens are fungible, and extremists driven from one place can set up shop somewhere else. The focus on Afghanistan is a historical legacy of one group’s operations in the past, which in turn were a legacy of an anti-Soviet insurgency in the even more distant past.

President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney receive an Oval Office briefing from CIA Director George Tenet. Also present is Chief of Staff Andy Card (on right). (White House photo)

The current prime foes in Afghanistan, the Taliban, are not an international terrorist group and never have been one. The Taliban are instead narrowly focused on political power and the nature of the social order within Afghanistan.

It is true that a patch of foreign real estate may be required for more ambitious operations such as organizing and training a militia. But the world is full of militias that do not threaten the United States, and they certainly should not be equated with terrorist threats to the U.S. homeland.

The establishment of a mini-state on Iraqi and Syria territory by the so-called Islamic State or ISIS raises the further issue of how such a seizure of territory might inspire radicalized individuals elsewhere. But the inspiration depends more on ideology and grievances than on a territorial presence, as has been demonstrated by ISIS-inspired terrorism in the West that has continued and even increased while the mini-state has been getting crushed.

The persistence, especially in the minds of Americans, of the erroneous notion about safe havens and terrorism has much to do with 9/11, its searing effect on the American consciousness, and Al-Qaeda’s past residency in Afghanistan. But the notion is a misreading of that piece of history, even without getting into overlooked details about phases of the Afghan civil war and the nature of the relationship between Al-Qaeda and the Taliban. Most of the preparations for the 9/11 operation did not take place in Afghanistan; most took place in the West, including in apartments in Hamburg, hotels in Spain, and flight schools in the United States.

The safe haven notion also has become a convenient mantra to cite as a rationale for continuing U.S. military involvement in Afghanistan for other reasons. Those reasons may include fear that if a pullout from Afghanistan were followed by a major anti-U.S. terrorist attack, domestic political opponents would make a rhetorical connection between the two whether the connection were valid or not. And the more the mantra is recited, the more believable such alleged connections sound to the public.

Fearing a Backlash

More general habits of thought, especially American habits, are also in play. One is a tendency toward spatial thinking that associates good guys and bad guys with different places on a map. There is a tendency to imagine a Mordor whether one exists or not. A further American tendency is to equate solving a security problem with an overseas use of military force. Related to that is the American view of terrorism as primarily a foreign threat, notwithstanding the nature of most terrorist attacks within the United States since 9/11.

President Barack Obama concludes a National Security Council meeting in the Situation Room of the White House, April 19, 2016. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)

An unfortunate effect of the persistent notion about terrorist safe havens is not only costly and unnecessary military expeditions; the notion also worsens the terrorist threat itself. The overseas deployment of U.S. military forces provides a major motivation for anti-U.S. terrorism. The collateral casualties and damage that inevitably result from operations by those forces accentuate the grievances that underlie such terrorism.

A relevant reminder about this comes from an incomplete and misleading passage in Trump’s speech about Afghanistan. He referred to Iraq and asserted that “the vacuum we created by leaving too soon gave safe haven for ISIS to spread, to grow, recruit, and launch attacks.” What he did not mention was that ISIS did not exist before the United States invaded Iraq in 2003. The group arose, under a different name, as a direct result of the invasion and of the warfare within Iraq that the invasion ignited.

And lest we forget, a major part of the campaign to sell the invasion to the American public involved the fear of terrorism, the specter of dictators giving weapons of mass destruction to terrorists, and the idea that if we don’t fight the bad guys over there they will attack us at home.

Paul R. Pillar, in his 28 years at the Central Intelligence Agency, rose to be one of the agency’s top analysts. He is author most recently of Why America Misunderstands the World. (This article first appeared as a blog post at The National Interest’s Web site. Reprinted with author’s permission.)

‘Israel’ and Hezbollah Eye Their Next War

Local Editor

Looking back on the lessons of 2006, the problem for ‘Israel’ is that Hezbollah is even stronger and better prepared today than it was then, according to The Cipher Brief, a website specialized in intelligence, security and analytic affairs.

War

According to Tony Badran, Fellow at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, “Hezbollah was gaining military experience on the [Syrian] battlefield and via cooperation with Russia.”

Now the group’s 25,000 reservists receive more advanced training, the website added.

At the same time, the explosion in Hezbollah’s rocket arsenal since 2006 – now larger than the supply of most NATO countries – means that the group can launch salvoes of roughly 1,000 missiles per day, anywhere within ‘Israel’, during a future conflict.

Hezbollah’s anti-ship missile capabilities might also allow resistance movement to establish an effective naval blockade of ‘Israel.’

Finally, according to the website, most experts assume that Hezbollah maintains a vast network of tunnels under the border, allowing it to disgorge fighters into ‘Israeli’-occupied territory for raids behind the lines.

However, at the end of the day, a true war with Hezbollah will cost ‘Israel’ dearly. Even if the Iron Dome works as expected, many missiles will likely break through to military targets.

In turn, ‘Israel’ would need to launch a sustained ground invasion against well-trained and well-prepared Hezbollah.

David Schenker, Director of the Program on Arab Politics at the Washington Institute, notes that “while many people [in ‘Israel’] might support whacking Hezbollah, there is the basic fact that the last time this happened [in 2006], it took 34 days… this could drag on for some time and, like last time, it could not only cripple the economy throughout the north of ‘Israel,’ it could cripple the economy…”

In addition to the human toll of war, ‘Israeli’ leaders may not be willing to risk the political consequences of a major conflict. This is a problem for ‘Israel.’

Meanwhile, nowhere is this threat clearer than in Lebanon, where Hezbollah boasts thousands of soldiers, deep political influence, and an arsenal of up to 150,000 rockets, the website concluded.

Source: The Cipher Brief, Edited by website team

30-08-2017 | 14:35

طريق التحرير… من قلب طهران حتى البحر المتوسط

طريق التحرير… من قلب طهران حتى البحر المتوسط

توزع السيطرة الحالية للفصائل المسلحة داخل سوريا والعراق (تصميم: سنان عيسى) | للصورة المكبرة انقر هنا

ابراهيم الأمين

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الغارقون في بؤسهم اليوم هم المهزومون في الميدان، السياسي منه أو العسكري، وتالياً الشعبي. هؤلاء يتحوّل الخطأ عندهم إلى خطيئة قبل أن يصير ارتكابات شنيعة. هؤلاء لا يعترفون بالتاريخ، ولا يجيدون صناعة حاضرهم، ولا ترك شيء مفيد للمستقبل. وهؤلاء، في زمننا الحالي، هم الذين يسعون إلى تأبيد السيطرة على بلاد وعباد، وفق ما تركها الاستعمار قبل سبعين سنة لا أكثر.

لعقود كثيرة، كان العيب في مشاريع الثورات والمقاومات أنها لا تجيد التوفيق بين السيادة والاستقلال الوطنيين، وبين كرامة وتطور دولها، وبين سعادة شعوبها. وهي أزمة حقيقية ولا تزال قائمة إلى يومنا هذا. مع فارق لافت، هو أنّ ما نشهده منذ سنوات قليلة، يفتح الباب أمام فرصة جدية لإعادة صياغة المشهد برمته، وأمام محاولة إلزامية لمواءمة إلزامية بين معركتي التحرير والتغيير الداخلي.

التوزع التقريبي لسيطرة الفصائل المسلحة في ذروة انتشارها ضمن لبنان وسوريا والعراق (خلال فترات زمنية متفاوتة) (تصميم: سنان عيسى) | للصورة المكبرة انقر هنا

إذا كان الاستعمار ومؤامراته وفساد حكومات وسلطات وقيادات وخيانتها، ونزق أنظمة وجيوش وعنفها، قد جعلت الوحدة العربية كابوساً لا يرغب فيه مواطن حر، فإنّ الاستعمار نفسه سعى طوال الوقت لخلق كيانات تحتاج إليه للبقاء على قيد الحياة. هذا طُبّق بقوة في كثير من بلداننا خلال العقود السبعة الماضية. وهو حقيقة تتعرض اليوم لمحاولة تفكيك جدية، تفتح الباب أمام فرصة لتنظيم عملية توحد قابلة للحياة، ومستندة إلى فكرة وخطاب وهدف. وربما تتيح المعركة المفتوحة ضد الارهاب والاحتلال، من فلسطين إلى لبنان فسوريا والعراق، الفرصة لبرمجة الأولويات والنقاش بطريقة مختلفة.

صحيح أن في لبنان من يستمر هاجساً بشعار لبنان أولاً، علماً بأن شعار فلسطين أولاً لم يوقف تهجير الشعب الفلسطيني وتهويد أرضه.
ومحاولة بعض العراقيين تجاهل محيطهم العربي بحجة أن المحيط ناصَر الطاغية، جعل بلاد الرافدين تتفكّك بقسوة، وتجعل نكبة هذا البلد أشدّ إيلاماً من نكبة فلسطين. ومن باب الإنصاف، تبقى سوريا الدولة الوحيدة التي لم تغرق في انعزالية قاتلة. ولهذا السبب، تدفع اليوم ثمن تمسّكها بموقعها المتفاعل مع كل محيطها العربي.
ليس قدراً فقط أن تخرج من لبنان مقاومة، نمت وتعثرت وعادت فقامت، وناضلت وانتصرت على المحتل. لكنه تعبير عن قدرة حقيقية على تقديم نموذج قابل للحياة والتعميم في مقاومة الاحتلال، وفي ضرب الهيمنة على البلاد. وعندما لجأ الاستعمار إلى استخدام الحروب الأهلية سلاحاً في مواجهة المقاومين، كان لا بد من خوض معركة بأدوات وأفكار مختلفة، تجعل الحرب الأهلية تخمد وإن احتجنا إلى سنوات طويلة لإزالة أثارها، لكن هذه المقاومة أعطت الدليل على إمكانية توحد قوى منتشرة في كل هذا المشرق، متفقة على أولوية التحرير من الاستعمار والاحتلال، ومؤمنة بالحاجة إلى تغيير شامل. وهو تغيير لا يكون من دون تفاهم مع المحيط الأرحب. وهنا يقع دور إيران.

صحيح أن من حق الناس الخشية من عجز هذه القوى عن قيادة تغيير داخلي حقيقي. وصحيح أن معركة بناء الدول تتطلب مشاركة الجميع من أبنائها، لكن الصحيح أيضاً أن ما يحصل اليوم يمنحنا فرصة لأن نحفظ انتصاراتنا على الاحتلال وأعوانه من عملاء مدنيين أو عسكريين، علمانيين أو متطرفين. وحفظ هذه الانتصارات يكون بالتعامل بجدية واهتمام مع مرحلة مقبلة أكثر أهمية، لجهة توفير الترابط العضوي، عسكرياً وسياسياً واقتصادياً وثقافياً أيضاً، بين مساحات وشعوب وهويات باتت ملزمة بالبحث عن سبل العيش معاً بأفضل الممكن. وهنا التحدي الكبير.
ما يحصل منذ انطلاقة المعارك الكبرى في العراق وسوريا ولبنان لطرد المجموعات الارهابية على اختلاف مسمياتها، لن يكون مجرد جولة فقط، بل هو مدخل لتحويل التفاهمات والتوافقات مناسبة لتحقيق هدف بات أكثر واقعية من قبل، يخصّ استعادة فلسطين بكاملها من أيدي الاحتلال والاستعمار. وهو إنجاز سيكون نتيجة سلوك طريق التحرير.
إنه الطريق الذي لم يجد إيرانيون وعراقيون وسوريون ولبنانيون وفلسطينيون بداً من عبوره مجتمعين، لمحاربة الاحتلال وأدواته في كل هذه الدول، وهو طريق تم وصله بدماء هؤلاء وتضحياتهم، وهو الطريق الذي يحتاج، منّا، إلى حفظه بالدماء والتضحيات أيضاً.

وقائع ليست للنسيان

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هنا، موجز مع خرائط، لشرح واقع المواجهة، تُبيّن كيف تبقى سوريا مركز القلب في هذه البقعة من الأرض، وكيف يتشكّل المحور الذي يتقدم يوماً بعد يوم.

الحدود الغربيّة مع لبنان

فعليّاً، بدأت المجموعات المسلحة في الاستفادة من طرق التهريب، بدءاً بريف حمص منذ حزيران 2011 وبشكل تصاعدي شمل سريعاً ريف دمشق (قارة) منذ تموز 2011. وتوسعت في أيلول وتشرين الأول، وصولاً إلى السيطرة على القصير وتل كلخ قبل نهاية العام. بين شباط ونيسان 2012، كانت أجزاء واسعة من ريف حمص المتاخم للحدود اللبنانية قد تحوّلت إلى قبضة المجموعات المسلحة، تشابهها في ذلك مساحات كبيرة من القلمون. وقبل نهاية العام، كانت النسبة الأكبر من الحدود السورية اللبنانية في قبضة المجموعات.
بدءاً من أيار 2013، بدأت الأمور تتغير مع استرجاع القصير، ثم تل كلخ ومعظم المناطق الحدودية في ريف حمص. ثم حررت في عام 2014 مناطق مهمة في القلمون، على رأسها قارة والنبك ويبرود ورأس العين، ثم فليطة ورأس المعرة وعسال الورد ورنكوس. أواخر 2014، وضع «داعش» قدماً في القلمون الغربي مع حصوله على عدد من «البيعات»، ونجح في توسيع عديد مسلحيه هناك، قبل التحول الكبير الذي تمثل في معارك متزامنة على الجبهتين السورية واللبنانية.

الحدود الشرقية مع العراق

من محيط البوكمال، بدأت الحكاية في تموز 2011 مع بدء ظهور مسلحين على شكل عصابات. في النصف الثاني من العام 2012، سيطرت المجموعات المسلحة على معبر البوكمال الحدودي. وفي عام 2013 خرج معظم الشريط الحدودي بين دير الزور والعراق عن سيطرة الجيش السوري، وبشكل سريع انضمت إليه أجزاء من المناطق الحدودية في ريف الحسكة. كانت القبضة الأقوى لجبهة النصرة حتى حدوث الشقاق الكبير مع «داعش». دخل الأخير على خط الولاءات و«البيعات» بقوة، وبدأ في التمدد منذ تشرين الثاني 2013، مركزاً على الشريط الحدودي تحديداً بالاستفادة من سيطرته على المناطق المقابلة داخل الأراضي العراقية. بدءاً من آذار 2014، بدأ التنظيم في توسيع هوامش الشريط الحدودي تباعاً، إلى أن تمكن من ابتلاع المنطقة الحدودية بأكملها، وصولاً إلى إعلان «الخلافة» في حزيران عام 2014. أما «وحدات حماية الشعب» الكردية، فكانت قد بدأت بفرض حضورها في الحسكة في الأشهر الأولى من عام 2013، لتسيطر على مناطق الريف الشرقي المحاذية للحدود العراقية، قبل أن تبدأ في النصف الثاني من عام 2015 في توسيع تلك السيطرة على حساب «داعش» الذي بات حضوره الحدودي مقتصراً على دير الزور، بينما نجح الجيش السوري أخيراً في الوصول الى الحدود العراقية.

الحدود الجنوبية مع الأردن والجولان المحتل

لعبت الحدود الجنوبية مع الأردن دوراً مؤثراً لمصلحة المجموعات المسلحة، بداية عبر طرقات التهريب، ثم مع بدء المناطق الحدودية في ريف درعا الخروج عن سيطرة الدولة مع أواخر عام 2011. خلال عام 2012، حصلت معارك كر وفر كثيرة، تماثلها في ذلك محافظة القنيطرة. وفي نيسان 2015 على معبر نصيب، حضرت «جبهة النصرة» بقوة في المنطقة، رغم ظهور غرفة «الموك» في الأردن التي قيل إن الهدف منها دعم «الفصائل المعتدلة». وفي خلال عامَي 2015 و2016 سيطر المسلحون على أجزاء واسعة من الحدود بين محافظة السويداء والأردن. وخلال الشهر الحالي، برز تحول بارز مع استعادة الجيش السوري السيطرة على جميع المخافر الحدودية في محافظة السويداء.

الحدود الشمالية مع تركيا

بين أيلول وتشرين الأول 2011، بدأ مسلحو الريف الإدلبي في الظهور بشكل جماعات صغيرة استفادت من طرق التهريب على الحدود مع تركيا، وما لبثت الجماعات أن توسعت ونُظّمت وراحت تفرض سيطرة قوية على المناطق الحدودية في ريف إدلب الشمالي، بدءاً من مطلع عام 2012. وعلى نحو مماثل، تطور الأمر في ريف اللاذقية الشمالي، ثم في ريف حلب الشمالي وريف الرقة الشمالي. وفي النصف الثاني من العام، وقعت مناطق استراتيجية عدة في قبضة المسلحين مثل معبر باب الهوى (ريف إدلب)، معبر باب السلامة (ريف حلب) ومعبر تل أبيض (ريف الرقة). مع دخول عام 2013، كان الشريط الحدودي مع تركيا بأكمله مقسوماً إلى قسمين أساسيين، الأكبر تتوزع السيطرة عليه المجموعات المسلحة؛ على رأسها «النصرة» و«أحرار الشام» والمجموعات التركمانية، والثاني في قبضة الأكراد، وأبرز مناطقه: عفرين (ريف حلب الشمالي الغربي) وعين العرب (ريف حلب الشمالي الشرقي)، إضافة إلى ريف الحسكة الشمالي. في الربع الأخير من عام 2013، بدأ تنظيم «داعش» في الظهور شمالاً في أرياف اللاذقية وحلب والرقة. عام 2014، سيطر «داعش» على ريف الرقة الشمالي، وباتت الحدود مع تركيا بأكملها متقاسمة بينه وبين الأكراد وبين «النصرة» وشركائها. مع هزيمة «داعش» في معركة عين العرب، بدأت ملامح مرحلة جديدة، شهدت صعود «قوات سوريا الديموقراطية» تحت إشراف «التحالف الدولي»، وبدأت سيطرة «قسد» في التوسع تدريجاً لتصبح منافساً أساسياً على رقعة السيطرة على الحدود مع تركيا. ومع حلول آب 2016، أعلنت أنقرة «درع الفرات» وبدأت في التوسع سريعاً على حساب «داعش» لتتحول «درع الفرات» إلى قوة احتلال مقنّعة.

 

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Sayyed Nasrallah to the Iraqis: Our Battle, Fate is Common…Our Victory over Terrorists will be Historic

30-08-2017 | 20:56

Sayyed Nasrallah to the Iraqis: Our Battle, Fate is Common…Our Victory over Terrorists will be Historic

In His Name


Statement by Hezbollah’s Secretary-General Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah:

Today I have seen the statements from a number of our brotherly Iraqi officials regarding the course of the recent negotiations that took place in Syria’s Qalamoun region. I also read some comments made by different Iraqi figures and parties on the same subject. Speaking strictly from a brotherly and loving stance, I would like to comment on the following:

1- The agreement involved the transfer of a number of Daesh militants and their families from one Syrian territory to another – from Syria’s western Qalamoun to Syria’s Deir Ezzor – and not from Lebanese territory to Iraqi territory. Most of the fighters in Syria’s western Qalamoun are Syrians and only a few individuals remained on Lebanese territory.

2 – Those who have been transferred are not in large numbers. 310 defeated, broken, capitulated militants, who have lost the will to fight will not change anything in the equation of the battle in the province of Deir Ezzor, where tens of thousands of fighters are said to be present.

3 – The area they moved to is the front line in the Syrian Badia. Everyone knows that the Syrian army and its allies have been fighting fiercely for several months there, and that Hezbollah is at the forefront of the Syrian Badia attack on Daesh, sacrificing a high number of martyrs. Thus we are transferring these defeated militants from one front that we are fighting on to another where we are also fighting.

4- We had a national humanitarian issue in Lebanon which is the issue of the Lebanese soldiers who were kidnapped by Daesh a few years ago. The Lebanese consensus was demanding that their fate be revealed and they be released if they were alive or their bodies be recovered if they were martyred. The only and exclusive way in the end was to negotiate with these militants to resolve this national humanitarian issue. Daesh refused to reveal the soldiers’ fate, and after a very tough battle on both sides of the Lebanese-Syrian border and after Daesh lost most of its strength and territory it controlled, it bowed and submitted.
Resorting to a comprehensive military decisiveness was possible and easy, but it would have come at the cost of the cause of the Lebanese soldiers.

5. I would like to remind our dear brothers that Hezbollah entered – with full force – the fronts alongside the Syrian army in confronting the Takfiri organizations since the beginning of the war. It fought in many of these arenas alongside the Syrian army, which has always destroyed the Takfiri terrorists’ capabilities and never resorted to the containment strategy.
Our goal is to win over the Takfiris by fighting them. Regarding the tactics, every arena has its leadership, which knows the best path to achieving victory.

6. Hezbollah did not hesitate to fight Daesh in any place it was called to or required by duty. You know this well. Hezbollah’s intentions, background, courage or credibility cannot be questioned, especially in this battle.

It is also not right to point the finger at the Syrian leadership. This agreement is Hezbollah’s agreement which has been accepted by the Syrian leadership, whose army is fighting today along numerous fronts against Daesh – from east Hama to the east of Homs to the south of Raqqa to the west of Deir Ezzor to the Syrian Badia. And its soldiers are martyred daily.

7 – We are proud of the participation of our Iraqi Mujahideen brothers from the heroic Iraqi resistance factions who rushed – starting from the first days of the war in Syria – to participate in the Syrian arena. They were the ones with bright insights when some were still looking into the gender of the angels. We fought with them shoulder to shoulder and our blood merged in many of the fighting sites. These Iraqi heroes are still in the same trenches, fighting and changing the equations. While we are proud of them, we appreciate their constant presence and great sacrifices in defending the nation and the sanctities, and we thank them for that.

Finally, I congratulate all Iraqis on their great victories from Mosul to Tal Afar, which they made with their blessed blood, their heroic armed forces and their popular mobilization.

I tell them that our battle is one and that our fate is one and that our victory over the Takfiris, terrorists, their allies and their supporters from regional and international forces will be historic, and that our brothers will not be shaken by anything at all.

 

Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah

 

30 August 2017, corresponding to 8 Dhu al-Hijjah 1438

 

 

 

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