The ISIS offensive in Iraq

jking948 said:

My view isn't that Assad "technically" can't rule Syria. I think, short-term, we're headed that route. But most refugees will opt not to return to Syria, the institutions will remain depleted, and Assad's main support base in the pre-war regime -- the upper business class -- will need to re-gain their money. So he will be ruling over a country without nearly as many people, where he doesn't have a support base, and where ISIS still exists. It's a recipe for another war over a short period of time: i.e., something like Sudan or Yemen.

Click to expand...

The Human Q-Tip said:

If that is true, then for the West to accept large numbers of refugees permanently would actually destabilize Syria, and make the problems there worse.

Click to expand...

jking948 said:

No, because these refugees won't go back to Syria anyways for fear of their own life. The discussion is if we bring them to the West and attempt to assimilate them or let them live in Lebanon and Jordan and watch those countries go to shit.

Click to expand...

The Human Q-Tip said:

If the Russians, Iranians, and Assad manage to defeat ISIS, which I think is likely, why would returning refugees be killed?

Click to expand...

jking948 said:

Because most refugees started fleeing well before ISIS became a problem. The war is not about ISIS vs. Assad, at least it wasn't originally. It's about Assad and the wealthy elite versus everyone else.

Click to expand...

The Human Q-Tip said:

A lot of the refugees fleeing now are claiming they are from area controlled by ISIS, which actually seems to control more of Syria than do the "moderate" rebels. And there's no way those moderate rebels can hold against Assad, the Russians, and Iranians once ISIS goes down.

That war will end.

Click to expand...

The Human Q-Tip said:

A lot of the refugees fleeing now are claiming they are from area controlled by ISIS, which actually seems to control more of Syria than do the "moderate" rebels. And there's no way those moderate rebels can hold against Assad, the Russians, and Iranians once ISIS goes down.

That war will end.

Click to expand...

natedagg said:

So here we are, a melting pot that doesn't want any more ingredients. It's like we don't remember our 1st gen grandparents, or we do, but all we remember is that the house was smelly but not that the door was always open.

Click to expand...

Maximus said:

If we weren't facing an overpopulation problem and trillions in debt, I'd be open arms. But, we can't take care of the people already here and we are bankrupt. Need to fix home first or our kids are screwed. Sending them aid is fine, but saying we will take 350,000 in permanently is nuts in my opinion.

Click to expand...

The Human Q-Tip said:

A lot of the refugees fleeing now are claiming they are from area controlled by ISIS, which actually seems to control more of Syria than do the "moderate" rebels. And there's no way those moderate rebels can hold against Assad, the Russians, and Iranians once ISIS goes down.

That war will end.

Click to expand...

Just when you thought it couldn't get any worse for US foreign policy, or for the credibility of the US state department to slide further, it got much worse.

Less than a day after US ambassador to the UN, uber-warhawk Samantha Power informed Russia of the latest US foreign policy stance by tweeter, when she called "on Russia to immediately cease attacks on Syrian oppo[sition and] civilians" in the latest desperate attempt to halt the Russian campaign against US-created ISIS which may wipe out the terrorist threat in just a few short days, it was the US itself which admitted that early on Saturday the US airforce bombed an Afghan hospital run by the medical aid group Medecins Sans Frontieres, or Doctors without Borders, in the Afghan city of Kunduz in an air strike that killed at least nine people and wounded 37.

As the Executive Director, of Doctors without Borders Jason Cone tweeted, "all parties 2 conflict, including in Kabul & Washington, were clearly informed of precise GPS Coordinates of @MSF facilities in Kunduz" and that the "precise location of @MSF Kunduz hospital communicated to all parties on multiple occasions over past months, including on 9/29."

In other words, this morning's US bombing was nothing more than another example of the utter incompetence, carelessness and disregard for innocent civilian lives that has become a staple hallmark of US foreign policy, something we have already witnessed repeatedly in the past 6 years as a result of the thousands of innocent people dead as part of US drone attacks, also known as "collateral damage."

The attack, which started at 2:15am local time, took place when almost 200 patients and employees were in the hospital, the only one in the region that can deal with major injuries, Medecins Sans Frontieres said.

The aftermath of the US bombing:

At the aid group's bombed-out hospital, one wall of a building had collapsed, scattering fragments of glass and wooden door frames, and three rooms were ablaze, said Saad Mukhtar, director of public health in Kunduz.

A video of the aftermath was also released moments ago:


"Thick black smoke could be seen rising from some of the rooms," Mukhtar said after a visit to the hospital. "The fighting is still going on, so we had to leave."

"We are deeply shocked by the attack, the killing of our staff and patients and the heavy toll it has inflicted on healthcare in Kunduz," the aid group's operations director, Bart Janssens, said in a statement.

"I could hear sounds of heavy gunfire, explosions and airplanes throughout the night," said Khodaidad, who has only one name. "There were several huge explosions and it sounded like the roof was falling on me."

As expected, Doctors without Borders was furious after the attack:

Worse, as Cone adds, the US bombing raid "continued for >30 minutes after American & Afghan military officials in Kabul & Washington first informed of proximity to hospital." Not only was the US bombardment uncalled for, but it continued long after supervisors were made aware they should call it off.

Perhaps the only thing the US military got right was admitting it was responsible for this latest murder of innocent civilians, when it issued a statement acknowledging that it carried out airstrikes, claimed they were conducted "against individuals threatening the force," and conceded that "the strike may have resulted in collateral damage to a nearby medical facility."



Oh well, oops?

Meanwhile the drama at the hospital continues:

While the US tried to justify its latest murder of innocents by supposedly engaging the Taliban, a spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid said U.S. air strikes targeted the hospital, killing killed patients, doctors and nurses adding that "no militant fighter was a patient" the group said. The U.S. military has unleashed twelve air strikes this week in support of government forces in the city. Most airstrikes hit targets on the city's outskirts and the overnight strike was only the second in a central area, the military said.



MSF said it had treated almost 400 patients in the 150-bed hospital since fighting broke out, most for gunshot wounds.



So many patients have flooded in that the hospital has had to put them in offices and on mattresses on the floor. The International Committee of the Red Cross said it was "deeply shocked" by the incident.



"This is an appalling tragedy," said Jean-Nicolas Marti, head of the ICRC in Afghanistan. "Such attacks undermine the capacity of humanitarian organizations to assist the Afghan people at a time when they most urgently need it."

As Glenn Greenwald points out, "it’s impossible to fathom what the U.S. media would be saying and doing if Russia did something like this in Syria. By contrast, the reaction to this airstrike by their own government will be muted and filled with apologia, ironically quite similar to the widely vilified caricature of Jeb Bush’s comments about the Oregon shooting spree: stuff happens."

It's quite possible to "fathom" what the "objective" US media's reaction to this horrific tragedy will be: utter silence. Which, however will not be the reaction from the rest of the world, which with every passing day realizes that when it comes to Pax American, the only this that matters for the Obama administration is appeasing his generous backers from the US military industrial complex which just happen to arm all sides in the conflict. That and the banks who provide the loans, of course.

However, when it comes to the now four-year-long attempt by the US to pass a Qatar gas pipeline under Syria, even if it means crushing the nation, destroying its economy, and unleashing the worst refugee wave in European history, one thing is clear: the US has just lost any US credibility when it comes to criticizing Putin's or anyone else's "attacks on civilians."

Click to expand...

natedagg said:

Scruples. http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-...ivilians-injures-37-tosses-it-collateral-dama

Click to expand...

The Human Q-Tip said:

So what's your point? That we don't care whether or not we hit civilians?

Click to expand...

The Largest US Foreign Policy Blunder Since Vietnam Is Complete: Iran Readies Massive Syrian Ground Invasion


Submitted by Tyler Durden on 10/03/2015 10:04 -0400

• Iran
  
• Iraq
  
• Middle East
  
• Saudi Arabia
  
• Ukraine
  
• Vladimir Putin

Mid-East Coup: As Russia Pounds Militant Targets, Iran Readies Ground Invasions While Saudis Panic”, we attempted to cut through all of the Western and Russian media propaganda on the way to describing what Moscow’s involvement in Syria actually portends for the global balance of power. Here are a few excerpts that summarize what’s taking shape in the Middle East:



Putin looks to have viewed this as the ultimate geopolitical win-win. That is, Russia gets to i) expand its influence in the Middle East in defiance of Washington and its allies, a move that also helps to protect Russian energy interests and preserves the Mediterranean port at Tartus, and ii) support its allies in Tehran and Damascus thus preserving the counterbalance to the US-Saudi-Qatar alliance.



Meanwhile, Iran gets to enjoy the support of the Russian military juggernaut on the way to protecting the delicate regional nexus that is the source of Tehran’s Mid-East influence. It is absolutely critical for Iran to keep Assad in power, as the loss of Syria to the West would effectively cut the supply line between Iran and Hezbollah.



It would be difficult to overstate the significance of what appears to be going on here. This is nothing short of a Middle Eastern coup, as Iran looks to displace Saudi Arabia as the regional power broker and as Russia looks to supplant the US as the superpower puppet master.

In short, the Pentagon’s contention that Russia and Iran have formed a Mid-East “nexus” isn’t akin to the Bush administration’s hollow, largely bogus attempt to demonize America’s foreign policy critics in the eyes of the public by identifying an “axis of evil.” Rather, the Pentagon’s assessment was an attempt to come to grips with a very real effort on the part of Moscow and Tehran to tip the scales in the Mid-East away from Riyadh and Washington.

Solidifying the Assad regime in Syria serves to shore up Hezbollah and presents Tehran with an opportunity to assert itself in the name of combatting terror. The latter point there is critical. The West has long contended that Iran is the world’s foremost state sponsor of terror, and the Pentagon has variously accused the Quds Force of orchestrating attacks on US soldiers in Iraq after cooperation between Washington and Tehran broke down in the wake of Bush’s “axis of evil” comment.

Indeed, Iran was accused of masterminding a plot to kill the Saudi ambassador at a Washington DC restaurant in 2011.

Now, the tables have turned. It is the US, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar who stand accused of sponsoring Sunni extremists and it is Iran, and specifically the Revolutionary Guard, that gets to play hero.

Of course this would be largely impossible without Moscow’s stamp of superpower approval. The optics around the P5+1 nuclear deal were making it difficult for Tehran to be too public in its efforts to bolster Assad. That doesn’t mean Tehran’s support for the regime in Syria hasn’t been well documented for years, it simply means that Iran needed to observe some semblance of caution, lest its role in Syria should end up torpedoing the nuclear negotiations. Now that Moscow is officially involved, that caution is no longer obligatory and Iran is now moving to support Russian airstrikes with an outright ground incursion (just as we’ve been saying for weeks). Here’s WSJ:



Iran is expanding its already sizable role in Syria’s multisided war in the wake of Russia’s airstrikes, despite the risk of antagonizing the U.S. and its Persian Gulf allies who want to push aside President Bashar al-Assad.



Politicians in the region close to Tehran as well as analysts who have been closely following its role in Syria say a decision has been made, in close coordination with the Russians and the Assad regime, to increase the number of fighters on the ground through Iran’s network of local and foreign proxies.

The support also could involve more Iranian commanders, military advisers and expert fighters usually assigned to these units, these people said.



Wiam Wahhab, a former Lebanese minister allied to Iran and Mr. Assad, stressed that Iran wouldn’t be dispatching troops in the conventional sense. Instead, they were likely to be officers and advisers from the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, or IRGC, he said.



“I know there is a major battle upon us and everything needed for this battle will be made available,” said Mr. Wahhab, who has some members from his own political party fighting in Syria alongside the regime. “There is a plan to carry out offensive operations in more than one spot.”



Experts believe Iran has some 7,000 IRGC members and Iranian paramilitary volunteers operating in Syria already.



Separate from the regular army, the IRGC was founded in the aftermath of the 1979 revolution as an ideological “people’s army” reporting directly to the supreme leader, Iran’s top decision maker.



The more than 100,000-strong force controls a vast military, economic and security power structure in Iran and is in charge of proxies across the region. Its paramilitary organization, the Basij, was the lead force in the crackdown on pro-democracy demonstrators in 2009.



Since late 2012 Iran has played a lead role in organizing, training and funding local pro-regime militias in Syria, many of them members of Mr. Assad’s Alawite minority, a branch of Shiite Islam. Experts believe they number between 150,000 and 190,000—possibly more than what remains of Syria’s conventional army.



What’s more, some experts estimate 20,000 Shiite foreign fighters are on the ground, backed by both Shiite Iran and its main proxy in the region, the Lebanese Shiite militia Hezbollah.



About 5,000 of them are new arrivals from Iraq in July and August alone, said Phillip Smyth, a researcher at the University of Maryland. He said this figure was compiled through his own contacts with some of these fighters, flight data between Baghdad and Damascus as well as social media postings. “It looks like it was timed out to coincide with the Russian move,” Mr. Smyth said.

Yes, it certainly does "look like" that, and it wasn't hard to see this coming. Here's another excerpt from our recent analysis:

Back in June, the commander of Iran’s Quds Force, Qasem Soleimaini, visited a town north of Latakia on the frontlines of Syria’s protracted civil war. Following that visit, he promised that Tehran and Damascus were set to unveil a new strategy that would “surprise the world.”



Just a little over a month later, Soleimani - in violation of a UN travel ban - visited Russia and held meetings with The Kremlin.

Make no mistake, this is shaping up to be the most spectacular US foreign policy debacle since Vietnam - and we don't think that's an exaggeration.

The US, in conjunction with Saudi Arabia and Qatar, attempted to train and support Sunni extremists to overthrow the Assad regime. Some of those Sunni extremists ended up going crazy and declaring a Medeival caliphate putting the Pentagon and Langley in the hilarious position of being forced to classify al-Qaeda as "moderate." The situation spun out of control leading to hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths and when Washington finally decided to try and find real "moderates" to help contain the Frankenstein monster the CIA had created in ISIS (there were of course numerous other CIA efforts to arm and train anti-Assad fighters, see below for the fate of the most "successful" of those groups), the effort ended up being a complete embarrassment that culminated with the admission that only "four or five" remained and just days after that admission, those "four or five" were car jacked by al-Qaeda in what was perhaps the most under-reported piece of foreign policy comedy in history.

Meanwhile, Iran sensed an epic opportunity to capitalize on Washington's incompetence. Tehran then sent its most powerful general to Russia where a pitch was made to upend the Mid-East balance of power. The Kremlin loved the idea because after all, Moscow is stinging from Western economic sanctions and Vladimir Putin is keen on showing the West that, in the wake of the controversy surrounding the annexation of Crimea and the conflict in eastern Ukraine, Russia isn't set to back down. Thanks to the fact that the US chose extremists as its weapon of choice in Syria, Russia gets to frame its involvement as a "war on terror" and thanks to Russia's involvement, Iran gets to safely broadcast its military support for Assad just weeks after the nuclear deal was struck. Now, Russian airstrikes have debilitated the only group of CIA-backed fighters that had actually proven to be somewhat effective and Iran and Hezbollah are preparing a massive ground invasion under cover of Russian air support. Worse still, the entire on-the-ground effort is being coordinated by the Iranian general who is public enemy number one in Western intelligence circles and he's effectively operating at the behest of Putin, the man that Western media paints as the most dangerous person on the planet.

As incompetent as the US has proven to be throughout the entire debacle, it's still difficult to imagine that Washington, Riyadh, London, Doha, and Jerusalem are going to take this laying down and on that note, we close with our assessment from Thursday:

If Russia ends up bolstering Iran's position in Syria (by expanding Hezbollah's influence and capabilities) and if the Russian air force effectively takes control of Iraq thus allowing Iran to exert a greater influence over the government in Baghdad, the fragile balance of power that has existed in the region will be turned on its head and in the event this plays out, one should not expect Washington, Riyadh, Jerusalem, and London to simply go gentle into that good night.

​

Click to expand...

natedagg said:

Scruples.

Click to expand...

The Human Q-Tip said:

That's not a point - it's just a word.

So again - what is your point? That this bombing proves we have no scruples when it comes to how we wage war?

Click to expand...

Russia Claims ISIS Now On The Ropes As Fighters Desert After 60 Airstrikes In 72 Hours


Submitted by Tyler Durden on 10/03/2015 13:15 -0400

• White House

here), Islamic State fighters are in a state of “panic” and more than 600 have deserted.

Here's what happens when the Russians locate a terrorist "command center":


According to The Kremlin, the structure shown in the video is (or, more appropriately, "was") "an ISIS hardened command centre near Raqqah." Su-34s hit it with concrete-piercing BETAB-500s setting off a series of explosions and fires that "completely destroyed the object."

Here's RT:



Surgical airstrikes by Russian fighter jets have knocked out a number of Islamic State installations in Syria, including the battle headquarters of a jihadist group near Raqqa, according to the Russian Defense Ministry.



“Over the past 24 hours, Sukhoi Su-34 and Su-24M fighter jets have performed 20 sorties and hit nine Islamic State installations,” Igor Konashenkov, Russia’s Defense Ministry spokesman, reported.



Konashenkov added that yesterday evening Russian aircraft went on six sorties, inflicting strikes on three terrorist installations.



“A bunker-busting BETAB-500 air bomb dropped from a Sukhoi Su-34 bomber near Raqqa has eliminated the command post of one of the terror groups, together with an underground storage facility for explosives and munitions,” the spokesman said.



Commenting on the video filmed by a Russian UAV monitoring the assault near Raqqa, Konashenkov noted, “a powerful explosion inside the bunker indicates it was also used for storing a large quantity of munitions.



“As you can see, a direct hit on the installation resulted in the detonation of explosives and multiple fires. It was completely demolished,” the spokesman said.

And here's the Russian Defense Ministry taking a page out of the US Postal Service's "neither rain, sleet, snow, nor hail" book on the way to serving notice that nothing is going to stop the Russian air force from exterminating Assad's enemies in Syria:

Twenty-four hours a day #UAV's are monitoring the situation in the ISIS activity areas. All the detected targets are effectively engaged day and night in any weather conditions.

Now obviously one must consider the source here, but Kremlin spin tactics aside, one cannot help but be amazed with the pace at which this is apparently unfolding. If any of the above is even close to accurate, it means that Russia is on schedule to declare victory over ISIS (and everyone else it looks like) in a matter of weeks, which would not only be extremely embarrassing for Washington, but would also effectively prove that the US has never truly embarked on an honest effort to rid Syria of the extremist groups the Western media claims are the scourge of humanity.

​

Click to expand...