War in The Middle East

[Anonymouse]

Re: War in The Middle East

Have a look at this. This guy has some balls.

http://www.spikedhumor.com/articles/46227/George_Galloway_PWNING_Sky_News.html

[Armenian]

Re: War in The Middle East

Israeli reservists caught 'unprepared'

The tough fight Israel is facing in its campaign against Hezbollah comes in part from the lack of preparedness and poor equipment of its reservists, an Israeli daily has reported. Haaretz's English language edition on Monday said that most reserve units had complained about a lack of emergency supplies and even missing equipment. The fitness level of reserve soldiers was also cited as a problem. The paper quoted a soldier as saying: "For two days, we barely made any progress. The soldiers simply don't really know what the mission is". "You are mostly kept busy with protecting yourself," the reservist, named as "A", also said. A. said that the war in Lebanon bore no resemblance to that Israel has been waging in the Palestinian territories since the start of the second intifada, six years ago. "It is nothing like the territories. During daylight hours, you do not see a living soul. You barely see anything at night either. There are apparently people who pass Hezbollah information regarding the location of our forces and they fire mortar shells. The shells fall around you and that is frightening."

Al-Jazeera: http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exer...41F914844E.htm

"Oi vay, what ever happened the the good ol' days of the Palestinian intifada?"
















Ahhh... the good ol' days...

[Anonymouse]

Re: War in The Middle East

What if the joos were given half of Armenia for the creation of israel, would you still support israel's right to exist?

Still, I would really like to know why israel should have a right to exist (on other people's land) since most of the joos (95% or so) aren't even descendants of the israelites.

I have already stated that we are not supposed to discuss this issue. It is not relevant to the topic at hand. Please read the entire thread before posting.

[Fedayeen]

Re: War in The Middle East

yes junevar jan, he would support that too!

No doubt

[ARK]

Re: War in The Middle East

Nasrallah's Stature Grows as Hezbollah Presses War With Israel
July 28 (Bloomberg) -- ``Pride stands here,'' reads a white sheet adorned with black Arabic script hanging near the ruins of Hezbollah's Beirut headquarters. ``Submission is not an option.''

That message of defiance, flying above buildings flattened by Israeli air strikes, is enhancing the standing of Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah, Hezbollah's leader, among his Shiite Muslim followers at home and Islamic radicals elsewhere.

They don't blame Nasrallah for instigating fighting that has cost 400 Lebanese lives and forced 800,000 people to flee their homes. Instead, they see him as someone who deserves credit for making Israel end its 22-year occupation of southern Lebanon while suffering personal loss -- a son's death in a 1997 attack on Israeli forces -- in the struggle.

``What sets Nasrallah apart from other Lebanese and Arab politicians is that he won a war against Israel, and he lost one of his sons in the fight,'' said Walid Charara, co-author of the book ``Hezbollah, an Islamist-Nationalist Party.'' ``This gives him credibility that Arab leaders are bereft of.''

In a sign of his standing, he's commonly called ``Sayyid,'' a title given to people believed to be descendants of Prophet Muhammad's family. In June, riots broke out to protest a political comedy show on television that impersonated him.

Public Approval

About 70 percent of Lebanese approve of Hezbollah's capture of two Israeli soldiers in the July 12 raid that sparked Israel's offensive, according to a poll of 800 people published July 26 by the Beirut Center for Research and Information.

Nasrallah, 46, has spent his 14-year career as secretary general of Hezbollah juggling his role in Lebanon with his ties to Iran, the country that funds and arms his group, and to neighboring Syria, which controlled Lebanon for 29 years and backed Hezbollah's right to arms.

Trained in local Palestinian military camps, he studied theology in Iraq's Shiite holy city of Najaf and in Iran. He rose through Hezbollah's ranks by turning guerrilla fighters into a militia to battle the Israeli occupation.

Nasrallah has stage-managed Hezbollah's move into politics, making it a key player in ruling Lebanon, where decisions are taken by a cabinet made up of representatives of the various religious strands. The group's political arm has 14 members in the 128-seat parliament.

Charities and Hospitals

He has also built a network of charities and hospitals that ensures loyalty among Shiites, the largest and poorest of the 17 communities in the Mediterranean nation of 3.8 million people.

Nasrallah's opponents say he is disregarding the interests of the Lebanese people and has turned Lebanon into a battleground in the Iranian and Syrian confrontations with the U.S.

``It's sad to see Lebanon as a toy in the game of nations and made to pay the price with the blood of its children,'' Lebanese Christian leader Samir Geagea told reporters in Beirut on July 25.

The war that started July 12 has inflicted $2 billion in damage to Lebanese airports, ports, roads and bridges. Lebanon's economic losses from the aborted summer tourism season and stalled industrial production amount to an additional $2 billion, Riad Salameh, the governor of the Central Bank of Lebanon, said in an interview yesterday.

`Fighting for Lebanon'

Hezbollah denies taking orders from Iran and Syria, insisting its agenda is purely Lebanese. ``We say it loudly, we are with Syria, we are with Iran, but we are not fighting for them,'' Nawwar Sahili, a Hezbollah member of parliament, said in an interview this week. ``We are fighting for Lebanon, for our people. Our agenda is Lebanese.''

The abduction of the Israeli soldiers was meant to secure the release of three Lebanese held in Israeli jails and possibly thousands of other Palestinian and Arab prisoners, Nasrallah said on the first day of the war. Hezbollah has called for an immediate cease-fire and start of talks to release those jailed.

Nasrallah, in a video message aired by Hezbollah's Al-Manar television on July 26, said Israel and the U.S. were using the soldiers' capture as a pretext to launch a pre-prepared war aimed at ``controlling Lebanon.'' He said Hezbollah will extend its rocket attacks deeper into Israel. About 50 Israelis have been killed in the fighting.

Hezbollah was formed in 1982 after Israel's invasion of Lebanon. Its creation followed the 1979 Islamic revolution in Iran, which inspired many Shiites throughout the Muslim world. The poverty of Lebanon's Shiites has made the community receptive to revolutionary ideas.

`Steel-Structured Party'

Initially a loose gathering of groups sharing loyalty to the Iranian regime, Hezbollah became the ``steel-structured party that we know, with an agenda to fight Israel and support the Palestinians'' in 1988, said author Charara, the opinion editor at Lebanese newspaper Al-Akhbar. The organization gets about $100 million a year from Iran, according to the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.

Hezbollah's armed wing, called the Islamic Resistance, was the only militia allowed to keep weapons under the 1989 accord that ended Lebanon's 15-year civil war because of its role in fighting Israel. It is better-equipped than Lebanon's army, which lacks air-defense and anti-ship weapons, retired Brigadier General Walid Sukkarieh said.

The army's role has been ``to preserve the peace after the civil war, while Hezbollah developed into a well-trained fighting force,'' he said.

Terrorism

Hezbollah has claimed credit for or been linked to scores of attacks on Israelis and Americans, including rocket attacks on Israeli towns, the 1983 bombings that killed 241 U.S. soldiers in Beirut, and the 1994 attack that killed 95 at a xxxish community center in Buenos Aires. The U.S. and Israel have designated Hezbollah a terrorist organization.

While Israel pulled out of Lebanon six years ago, Hezbollah resisted calls by Lebanon's Christian political parties, as well as a United Nations Security Council resolution, to disarm. The group's explanation was that it still wanted to free the Shebaa Farms, a territory captured by Israel from Syria in 1967, and claimed by Lebanon with Syrian encouragement.

In March 2005, Nasrallah organized a demonstration in Beirut to support Syria and its leader Bashar al-Assad, whose regime was accused of assassinating Lebanese Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri.

Even in a Beirut school sheltering people displaced by the fighting, Hezbollah has support. ``When we need a doctor, medicine, we can count on Hezbollah's clinics,'' said Dalal Naanou, a 35-year-old widow, who fled her village in Tayr Diba, near the southern port of Tyre, with her two boys, 9 and 7.

Naanou, who shares a classroom in the Zareef secondary school with two families, gets about $75 a month from the Imam Khomeini Foundation, her only income. Her younger boy, Yasser, said he wants to join ``Hezbollah's army'' when he grows up.


this man is truly respectable.
Shame on arab nations!

[ARK]

Re: War in The Middle East

Armenia's humanitarian aid has reached Beirut
29.07.2006 15:25

The humanitarian aid of Armenia has already reached Beirut and Armenian Ambassador to Lebanon Vahan Ter-Ghevondyan has already submitted it to the Council coordinating the humanitarian aid. The Ambassador told “Armenpress” that the 509 boxes included medicines and medical necessities. To remind, RA Government took the decision on July 27 to provide 20 million drams for humanitarian aid to Lebanon. According to Vahan Ter-Ghevondyan this step of the Armenian Government received positive feedback on the part of the Lebanese people and was largely covered by Lebanese media.

[Janavar]

Re: War in The Middle East

Hasn't Israel been bending over backwards for the last decade or so to try to make peace with these war-mongers?

No it hasn't. israel is the one doing all the war mongering since they know they have the unconditional support of the USA. israel is the one that doesn't want peace since they know that would mean giving up the water that they are stealing, removing their squatters and letting the Palestinians return to their homes. A perfect example is that so-called roadmap to peace where the israelis dictated numerous unacceptable changes so that the Palestinians would never accept such a deal that gave everything to israel and nothing to the Palestinians.

[skhara]

Re: War in The Middle East

xxxs have a hayday with those salute photoes. They say look they are all NAZIs.

[skhara]

Re: War in The Middle East

I've a bunch more respect for Hezbollah. It is only recent that I learned about their vast social programs.

I definitly respect that these guys are not reckless with their lives, like the desperate Palestian gunment, and always talk in terms of reality.

[Armenian]

Re: War in The Middle East

A Disciplined Hezbollah Surprises Israel With Its Training, Tactics and Weapons

By STEVEN ERLANGER and RICHARD A. OPPEL Jr.

JERUSALEM, Aug. 6 — On Dec. 26, 2003, a powerful earthquake leveled most of Bam, in southeastern Iran, killing 35,000 people. Transport planes carrying aid poured in from everywhere, including Syria. According to Israeli military intelligence, the planes returned to Syria carrying sophisticated weapons, including long-range Zelzal missiles, which the Syrians passed on to Hezbollah, the Shiite militia group in southern Lebanon that Iran created and sponsors.

As the Israeli Army struggles for a fourth week to defeat Hezbollah before a cease-fire, the shipments are just one indication of how — with the help of its main sponsors, Iran and Syria — the militia has sharply improved its arsenal and strategies in the six years since Israel abruptly ended its occupation of southern Lebanon. Hezbollah is a militia trained like an army and equipped like a state, and its fighters “are nothing like Hamas or the Palestinians,” said a soldier who just returned from Lebanon. “They are trained and highly qualified,” he said, equipped with flak jackets, night-vision goggles, good communications and sometimes Israeli uniforms and ammunition. “All of us were kind of surprised.”

Much attention has been focused on Hezbollah’s astonishing stockpile of Syrian- and Iranian-made missiles, some 3,000 of which have already fallen on Israel. More than 48 Israelis have been killed in the attacks — including 12 reservist soldiers killed Sunday, who were gathered at a kibbutz at Kfar Giladi, in northern Israel, when rockets packed with antipersonnel ball bearings exploded among them, and 3 killed Sunday evening in another rocket barrage on Haifa.

But Iran and Syria also used those six years to provide satellite communications and some of the world’s best infantry weapons, including modern, Russian-made antitank weapons and Semtex plastic explosives, as well as the training required to use them effectively against Israeli armor. It is Hezbollah’s skillful use of those weapons — in particular, wire-guided and laser-guided antitank missiles, with double, phased explosive warheads and a range of about two miles — that has caused most of the casualties to Israeli forces.

Hezbollah’s Russian-made antitank missiles, designed to penetrate armor, have damaged or destroyed Israeli vehicles, including its most modern tank, the Merkava, on about 20 percent of their hits, Israeli tank commanders at the front said. Hezbollah has also used antitank missiles, including the less modern Sagger, to fire from a distance into houses in which Israeli troops are sheltered, with a first explosion cracking the typical concrete block wall and the second going off inside.

“They use them like artillery to hit houses,” said Brig. Gen. Yossi Kuperwasser, until recently the Israeli Army’s director of intelligence analysis. “They can use them accurately up to even three kilometers, and they go through a wall like through the armor of a tank.” Hezbollah fighters use tunnels to quickly emerge from the ground, fire a shoulder-held antitank missile, and then disappear again, much the way Chechen rebels used the sewer system of Grozny to attack Russian armored columns. “We know what they have and how they work,” General Kuperwasser said. “But we don’t know where all the tunnels are. So they can achieve tactical surprise.”

The antitank missiles are the “main fear” for Israeli troops, said David Ben-Nun, 24, an enlisted man in the Nahal brigade who just returned from a week in Lebanon. The troops do not linger long in any house because of hidden missile crews. “You can’t even see them,” he said. With modern communications and a network of tunnels, storage rooms, barracks and booby traps laid under the hilly landscape, Hezbollah’s training, tactics and modern weaponry explain, the Israelis say, why they are moving with caution. The Israelis say Hezbollah’s fighters number from 2,000 to 4,000, a small army that is aided by a larger circle of part-timers who provide logistics and storage of weapons in houses and civilian buildings.

Hezbollah operates like a revolutionary force within a civilian sea, making it hard to fight without occupying or bombing civilian areas. On orders, some fighters emerge to retrieve launchers, fire missiles and then melt away. Still, the numbers are small compared with the Israeli Army and are roughly the size of one Syrian division. The Iranian Revolutionary Guards have helped teach Hezbollah how to organize itself like an army, with special units for intelligence, antitank warfare, explosives, engineering, communications and rocket launching.

They have also taught Hezbollah how to aim rockets, make shaped “improvised explosive devices” — used to such devastating results against American armor in Iraq — and, the Israelis say, even how to fire the C-802, a ground-to-ship missile that Israel never knew Hezbollah possessed. Iranian Air Force officers have made repeated trips to Lebanon to train Hezbollah to aim and fire Iranian medium-range missiles, like the Fajr-3 and Fajr-5, according to intelligence officials in Washington. The Americans say they believe that a small number of Iranian operatives remain in Beirut, but say there is no evidence that they are directing Hezbollah’s attacks.

But Iran, so far, has not allowed Hezbollah to fire one of the Zelzal missiles, the Israelis say. The former Syrian president, Hafez al-Assad, was careful to restrict supplies to Hezbollah, but his son, Bashar, who took over in 2000 — the year Israel pulled out of Lebanon — has opened its warehouses. Syria has given Hezbollah 220-millimeter and 302-millimeter missiles, both equipped with large, anti-personnel warheads. Syria has also given Hezbollah its most sophisticated antitank weapons, sold to the Syrian Army by Russia.

Those, General Kuperwasser said, include the Russian Metis and RPG-29. The RPG-29 has both an antitank round to better penetrate armor and an anti-personnel round. The Metis is more modern yet, wire-guided with a longer range and a higher speed, and can fire up to four rounds a minute. Some Israelis say they believe that Syria has provided Hezbollah with the Russian-made Kornet, laser-guided, with a range of about three miles, which Hezbollah may be holding back, waiting for Israel to move farther into southern Lebanon and extend its supply lines. Despite Israeli complaints to Moscow, “Russia just decided to close its eyes,” a senior Israeli official said.

In its early years, Hezbollah specialized in suicide bombings and kidnappings. The United States blames it for the suicide attacks on the American Embassy in Beirut and a Marine barracks in 1983. The group became popular in the Shiite south and set up its mini-state there, as well as reserving to itself a section of southern Beirut, known as Security Square. Until 2003, Timur Goksel was the senior political adviser to Unifil, the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon, which monitors the border. He says he knows Hezbollah well and speaks with admiration of its commitment and organization.

After fighting the Israelis for 18 years, “they’re not afraid of the Israeli Army anymore,” he said in a telephone interview from Beirut. Hezbollah’s ability to harass the Israelis and study their flaws, like a tendency for regular patrols and for troop convoys on the eve of the Sabbath, gave Hezbollah confidence that the Israeli Army “is a normal human army, with normal vulnerabilities and follies,” he added. Now, however, “Hezbollah has much better weapons than before,” he said.

Mr. Goksel describes Hezbollah much as the Israelis do: careful, patient, attuned to gathering intelligence, scholars of guerrilla warfare from the American Revolution to Mao and the Vietcong, and respectful of Israeli firepower and mobility. “Hezbollah has studied asymmetrical warfare, and they have the advantage of fighting in their own landscape, among their people, where they’ve prepared for just what the Israelis are doing — entering behind armor on the ground,” Mr. Goksel said.

“They have staff work and they do long-term planning, something the Palestinians never do,” he said. “They watch for two months to note every detail of their enemy. They review their operations — what they did wrong, how the enemy responded. And they have flexible tactics, without a large hierarchical command structure.” That makes them very different from the Soviet-trained Arab armies the Israelis defeated in 1967 and 1973, which had a command structure that was too regimented.

In 1992, when Sheik Hassan Nasrallah took over, he organized Hezbollah into three regional commands with military autonomy. Beirut and the Hezbollah council made policy, but did not try to run the war. Sheik Nasrallah — said to have been advised by the secretive Imad Mugniyeh, a trained engineer wanted by the United States on terrorism charges — thereby improved Hezbollah’s security and limited its communications. It set up separate and largely autonomous units that live among civilians, with local reserve forces to provide support, supplies and logistics. Hezbollah commanders travel in old cars without bodyguards or escorts and wear no visible insignia, Mr. Goksel said, to keep their identities hidden.

Hezbollah began by setting up roadside bombs detonated by cables, which the Israelis learned to defeat with wire-cutting attachments to their vehicles. Then Hezbollah used radio detonators, which the Israelis also defeated, and then cellphone detonators, and then a double system of cellphones, and then a photocell detonator — like the beam that opens an automatic door. Now, Mr. Goksel said, Hezbollah is working with pressure detonators dug into the roads, even as the Israelis weld metal plates to the bottom of their tanks.

Hezbollah, Mr. Goksel says, has clear tactics, trying to draw Israeli ground troops farther into Lebanon. “They can’t take the Israelis in open battle,” he said, “so they want to draw them in to well-prepared battlefields,” like Aita al Shaab, where there has been fierce fighting. He added: “They know the Israelis depend too much on armor, which is a prime target for them. And they want Israeli supply lines to lengthen, so they’re easier to hit.” Israeli tanks have been struck by huge roadside bombs planted in expectation that Israeli armor would roll across the border, said one tank lieutenant, who in keeping with military policy would only give his first name, Ohad.

At least two soldiers from his unit have been wounded by snipers who are accurate at 600 yards. The Hezbollah fighters “are not just farmers who have been given weapons to fire,” he said. “They are persistent and well trained.” Another tank company commander, a captain who gave his name as Edan, said that about 20 percent of the missiles that have hit Israeli tanks penetrated the Merkava armor or otherwise caused causalities.

Col. Mordechai Kahane, the commander of the Golani brigade’s Egoz unit, first set up to fight Hezbollah, told the Israeli newspaper Yediot Aharonot of one of the worst early days, when his unit went into Marun al Ras in daylight, and lost a senior officer and a number of men. “Hezbollah put us to sleep” building up its fortifications, he said. “There’s no certainty that we knew that we were going to encounter what it is that we ultimately encountered. We said, ‘There is going to be a bunker here, a cave there,’ but the thoroughness surprised us all. A Hezbollah weapons storeroom is not just a natural cave. It’s a pit with concrete, ladders, emergency openings, escape routes. We didn’t know it was that well organized.”

General Kuperwasser, too, respects Hezbollah’s ability “to well prepare the battlefield,” but says, “We’re making progress and killing a lot of them, and more of them are giving up in battle now and becoming prisoners, which is a very important sign.”

Steven Erlanger reported from Jerusalem for this article, and Richard A. Oppel Jr. from Zarit, Israel. Mark Mazzetti contributed reporting from Washington.

New York Times - http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/07/wo...hezbollah.html