Bashar al-Assad, Syria and the Armenian people

[Federate]

Re: Bashar al-Assad, Syria and the Armenian people

Any ideas?

It's a university review book belonging to a student. That video is taken at the Umayyad mosque in Aleppo. The dumbasses think it's a Russian ID.

[londontsi]

Re: Bashar al-Assad, Syria and the Armenian people

Unconfirmed reports from Syria saying Bashar Al Assad has been killed denied by family

by bodyguard.

http://fecktv.com/breaking-reports-from-syria-saying-bashar-al-assad-has-been-killed/

[Lernakan]

Re: Bashar al-Assad, Syria and the Armenian people

A little off-topic but since they are the ones who stirred up this conflict and have been supporting the rebels since the start I think this article belongs in this thread.

Crisis? What crisis? Let's hit Syria

By Pepe Escobar

PARIS - The heads of state and government of the European Union (EU) just got together in Brussels for their Spring fashion show, sorry, politico-economic summit. No Gucci/Prada glam here; instead, a stuffy Sartrean huis clos. No pesky, noisy citizens allowed; only these Masters of the (European) Universe. And this after three horrendous crisis years affecting the eurozone.

Welcome to the way "democracy" really works in Europe; all major decisions in economic policy, budget and finance, which directly affect over 500 million mostly disgruntled (and millions of unemployed) people, are taken in a cozy heart of darkness.

Former Belgian prime minister Guy Verhofstadt, now the head of the liberal group in the European Parliament, at least had the decency to remark, "Neither the European Parliament nor national Parliaments have a word to say about what the European Council and the European Commission decide."

Yes, compared to the EU behemoth, Kafka's castle is kindergarten stuff, so a run down of the cast of characters is in order.

The Council of Ministers - also known as European Council - is composed by heads of state and government and gets together at least twice a year to debate the EU's political priorities. It's currently presided by the spectacular non-entity Herman Van Rompuy. The council is composed of ministers from member-states; they are in charge of adopting legislation.

The European Commission (EC) is composed of 27 commissars (oh yes, shades of the good, ol' USSR). They are the EU's executive power - elected by the European Parliament.

The European Parliament is elected every five years by EU citizens (most of whom simply don't bother to vote). It shares legislative power with the Council of Ministers.

Then there's the European Central Bank (ECB), which (mis)manages the euro.

Welcome to "post-democratic autocracy"

So all these Masters of the (European) Universe have had three years to contain the eurozone fire. The balance so far; seven eurozone countries are in deep recession, and nine in stagnation.

At the fashion show, sorry, summit, there was a lot of talk about "policy mix"; that's EU jargon for stimulating demand in countries that are doing slightly better than others. There was also a lot of talk of "two-pack" and "six-pack". No, that's not beer-related. Or some fitness craze. It's more like a variation of Monopoly.

It all started with Germany intervening to "save" - sort of - the PIGS (Portugal, Ireland, Greece, Spain), side-by-side with France still under King Sarko The First (former president Nicolas Sarkozy); what they decided was that a bunch of technocrats, as in the EC and the so-called Eurogroup (the finance ministers in the eurozone) would be in charge of these countries' economic and budgetary policies.

First came the "six-pack"; countries had to subscribe to a shady concoction known as the Treaty on Stability, Coordination and Governance - as in don't do anything funny without telling everyone else about it.

Then came the so-called "two-pack", adopted last week by the European Parliament; two rules, according to which states must submit their budget estimates to the EC even before their national Parliaments. The bottom line; European "democracies" now have zero deciding power over policies concocted in Brussels. The ruling powers are a shady troika; the European Council, the Eurogroup and the EC. Not to mention the cosmically opaque European Central Bank.

And these people have the gall to criticize the National People's Congress in China.

For insiders though, everything is fine and dandy. Olli Rehn, the European Commissioner for Economic Affairs, said with a straight face that, "If the six-pack and the two-pack were in place when the euro was launched, we would have never reached such a crisis." So why didn't any Brussels technocrat with a fat salary for life think about it then?

On the other side of the divide, Daniel Cohn-Bendit, the formerly heroic Dany Le Rouge and current co-president of the Greens in the European Parliament, defined the racket as "technocratic austerity". Better yet; the great German philosopher and certified European federalist Jurgen Habermas dubbed it "post-democratic autocracy".

From Paris to Scandinavia, there have been howls of angst about Europe having fallen into a black hole. One just has to hit the streets - and listen to the noise - to see which way the wind is blowing; populism (as in the latest Italian elections), and fascism (in Denmark, for instance, a new poll shows that the extreme right-wing DF party, anti-immigration and anti-EU, is already more popular than the center-left coalition currently in power; horrible news for current Prime Minister Helle Thorning-Schmidt).

Facing this Armageddon, the best the technocrat-infested EC can come up with is that we must "reintroduce people" in "the machine". It won't do; the machine has already run amok.

Round up the usual Kalashnikovs

As with all matters EU, if it can get more pathetic, it will. Out of nowhere, right in the middle of the Spring fashion show, sorry, European Council summit, irrupt British Prime Minister David Cameron and French President Francois Hollande.

So what was this Napoleon/Duke of Wellington remix up to? No less than commanding an Anglo-French offensive to torpedo the agreed European arms embargo and fully weaponize Syrian "rebels".

Some member-states representatives actually fell off their chairs. It took Iron Fraulein and German chancellor Angela Merkel to come up with a forceful "Nein" - as in, "just the fact that two have changed their minds doesn't mean that the other 25 have to follow suit."

In a measure of how "democratic" is the EU, even Catherine Ashton, the astronomically mediocre EU commissioner in charge of foreign and security policy, only knew about the David and Francois of Arabia shenanigans by reading the papers.

When she finally mustered her sang froid she told the summit that the end result would be an arms race in Syria. And Iran - what else - would win. Ashton once again had the wrong intel; Qatar and Saudi Arabia are already winning this arms race.

The fact is, not even Cameron - true to character - knows what he's talking about: "I'm not saying that Britain would like to supply arms to rebel groups. We want to work with them and make sure they're doing the right thing."

So now everyone is faced with the very likely possibility that Paris and London will simply ignore yet one more EU policy - which, by the way, they are signed up to - and start "doing the right thing", as in merrily weaponizing the Syrian "rebels", al-Qaeda-style Salafi-jihadis included, by May or June. That's exactly what Paris and London did in the case of Libya in 2011. And that's exactly what Desert Storm Hollande - supported by David of Arabia - did recently in his invasion of Mali.

For David and Francois, the rest of the EU is just a bunch of wussies. Crisis? What crisis? Crisis is for suckers. Playing Liberator is much more fun.

Pepe Escobar is the author of Globalistan: How the Globalized World is Dissolving into Liquid War (Nimble Books, 2007) and Red Zone Blues: a snapshot of Baghdad during the surge. His new book, just out, is Obama does Globalistan (Nimble Books, 2009).

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/MID-03-180313.html

[Lernakan]

Re: Bashar al-Assad, Syria and the Armenian people

The CIA Is Training Syria's Rebels: Uh-Oh, Says a Top Iraqi Leader

A soldier waves the independence flag in a Damascus suburb in January. (Reuters/Ahmed Jadallah.)

The United States is slipping and sliding down that proverbial “slippery slope” in Syria toward something that looks increasingly like war.

Most worryingly, according to The New York Times, the CIA is training Syrian fighters in Jordan. Buried in its story today about Secretary of State John Kerry’s announcement that the United States will increase aid to the rebels, including medical supplies and those always tasty MREs (“Meals Ready to Eat”), was this previously unreported nugget:

"A covert program to train rebel fighters, which State Department officials here were not prepared to discuss, has also been under way. According to an official in Washington, who asked not to be identified, the CIA since last year has been training groups of Syrian rebels in Jordan.

The official did not provide details about the training or what difference it may have made on the battlefield, but said the CIA had not given weapons or ammunition to the rebels. An agency spokesman declined to comment."


Now, let us not be shocked, shocked that the CIA is doing this; in fact, it’s very likely that this is the tip of a very large iceberg. Undoubtedly, the CIA, and the Pentagon, is coordinating a regional effort involving the Sunni bloc involving Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Turkey and Qatar to topple the Assad government in Damascus. That, folks, is called “regime change.” And we’ve seen it before.

The additional $60 million in US aid to Syria’s rebels is headed to the coffers of the Syrian Opposition Coalition (SOC) and to the Syrian Military Council (SMC), a newly created body that purports to represent the so-called Syrian Free Army. Interestingly enough, although Egypt has pretty much stayed out of the fray in Syria officially, the SOC and the SMC are based in Cairo, Egypt, whose Muslim Brotherhood, a Sunni secret society, is backing the Muslim Brotherhood–led rebels in Syria. At a background briefing yesterday, a State Department official said this:

"The United States will be sending technical advisors through our implementing partners to support the SOC’s staff at their Cairo headquarters in the execution of this assistance. This will ensure that the assistance continues to comply with U.S. rules and regulations on the use of foreign assistance, including vetting, oversight, and monitoring. To remind that this additional $60 million for the SOC is in addition to the more than $50 million in nonlethal support we have already provided to help Syrian activists organize opposition efforts across the country and to amplify their message to Syrians and to the world through communications and broadcasting equipment."

There’s a long analysis of the Syrian Free Army and the SMC published by the Institute for the Study of War, a neoconservative think tank in Washington. Here’s an excerpt:

"The Supreme Military Council was created on the heels of a three day conference held in Antalya, Turkey, from December 5-7, 2012. During this conference, rebel leaders from across Syria announced the election of a new 30-member unified command structure called the Supreme Military Command (SMC). The SMC is led by Chief of Staff Major General Salim Idriss and includes 11 former officers and 19 civilian leaders.

The SMC differs from previous efforts to unify the military opposition because more groups and support networks are included. It could prove to be a more sustainable organization than its predecessors. The SMC includes all of Syria’s most important field commanders, and its authority is based on the power and influence of these rebel leaders including: Abdel Qadir Salah, head of the Tawhid Brigade in Aleppo; Mustafa Abdel Karim, head of the Dara al-Thawra Brigade; Ahmed Issa, head of Suqour al-Sham Brigade in Idlib; Jamal Marouf, head of the Syrian Martyrs Brigade in Idlib; Osama al-Jinidi, head of the Farouq Battalions; and General Ziad al-Fahd, head of the Damascus Military Council.

The SMC was organized to incorporate the supply chains and networks that already existed inside Syria and eventually channel them through the centralized units of the SMC. In order to achieve this goal, the command is divided into five geographic fronts with six elected members each: the Eastern front, the Western/Middle front, the Northern front, the Southern front, and the Homs front."


That all sounds organized enough, but on the ground, inside Syria, the lines of authority and the lines of command are less than clear, and many of the anti-Assad fighters are radical and extreme Islamists and Al Qaeda types. Although the United States would like to “vet” the recipients of its aid, and although the people that the CIA is training in Jordan are probably from the more-moderate rather than less-moderate part of the anti-Assad spectrum, there’s just no telling what Syria after the fall of Assad might look like.

One person who’s worried about exactly that is Faleh al-Fayyah, the national security adviser of Iraq, who spoke yesterday at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in Washington. In his talk, he was asked about recent comments from Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, who worried about Syria spinning out of control. Iraq, of course, ruled by a Shiite coalition, is petrified at the idea that a bunch of Sunni radicals and Muslim Brotherhood types might take over in Damascus, leading to civil war, partition and a spillover into Iraq. As Fayyah said:

"I believe that the statement by his excellency, Prime Minister al-Maliki, yesterday was an analysis for the potential and possible repercussions that would happen given the developments in Syria. And if it’s a bad, negative end to the – to the issue in Syria, then you will see the partition of the country, you would see a civil – a civil war, you would see a potentially a – (inaudible) – and also you would see – and also if the extremist factions come into power in a new regime, in a new order in Syria, then this will export an array of problems to Iraq."

He went on:

"We have also started to see that some of these problems started being shipped to Lebanon, exported to Lebanon, and the ripple effect is now being seen in Lebanon. The prime minister’s analysis is an accurate and correct one. And if the situation keeps going in that direction that it is taking today, we feel there might be a civil war, there might be a sectarian partition of the – of the country and also we feel that terrorist groups may try to get the upper hand in that environment. Therefore, we feel if the situation goes into that direction, the future of the Middle East will witness tension, will witness further problems, and in that effect, the analysis of his excellency the prime minister, Prime Minister Maliki, was accurate and correct."

So what are we looking at? The very regime that the United States installed in Baghdad, now closely aligned with Iran, is fearful that the regime we are now trying to install in Damascus might be a bitter enemy—which, naturally, will drive Baghdad into the waiting arms of Tehran.

http://www.thenation.com/blog/173149/cia-training-syrias-rebels-uh-oh-says-top-iraqi-leader#

[Vrej1915]

Re: Bashar al-Assad, Syria and the Armenian people

Unconfirmed reports from Syria saying Bashar Al Assad has been killed denied by family

by bodyguard.

http://fecktv.com/breaking-reports-f...s-been-killed/

http://blogs.mediapart.fr/blog/rachid-barbouch/240313/la-mort-de-bachar-al-assad

[Mher]

Re: Bashar al-Assad, Syria and the Armenian people

Russia slams end of EU arms embargo, calls S-300s ‘stabilizing factor’ in Syria

http://rt.com/news/eu-arms-syria-embargo-russia-870/

[retro]

Re: Bashar al-Assad, Syria and the Armenian people

Russia slams end of EU arms embargo, calls S-300s �stabilizing factor� in Syria

Russia can't have it's cake and eat it. The S-300 will worry Izzy and Turkey. As Syria can hit targets in either country with this system.

[Haykakan]

Re: Bashar al-Assad, Syria and the Armenian people

They put up patriot missiles in turkey despite Russia's protests so this seems like a fitting response. Pretty much takes bombing Syria out of the question. I love it when the new world order gets a reality check.

[retro]

Re: Bashar al-Assad, Syria and the Armenian people

They put up patriot missiles in turkey despite Russia's protests so this seems like a fitting response. Pretty much takes bombing Syria out of the question. I love it when the new world order gets a reality check.

Russia is also reported selling 10 MiG-29's.

The Turks don't seem to happy about Erdogan's "guests" camps in the Islamist Emirate of Turkey.

[Mher]

Re: Bashar al-Assad, Syria and the Armenian people

Syrian regime says it's taken over the key city of Qusayr

http://edition.cnn.com/2013/06/05/world/meast/syria-civil-war/index.html?hpt=hp_t1#cnn-disqus-area