Sirija

[Prospero]

Oko MiG-29 - Turci kažu da je možda sirijski, tj. nejasno im je:

 

Also Monday, Turkey’s armed forces said two of its F-16s were harassed by a MiG-29 warplane while on patrol along the Syrian border on Sunday. The MiG-29 is a Russian-made jet fighter also used by the Syrian air force, and Turkey said it wasn’t clear to what country the jet belonged.

[Marcus Wulffings]

 

Nato has urged Russia to end air strikes "on the Syrian opposition and civilians", days after Moscow began raids to support Syria's government.

Moscow says it is targeting Islamic State and other Islamist positions, but US-led allies and Turkey say government opponents are targeted.

Turkish F-16 fighter jets were scrambled after a Russian plane entered Turkey's air space on Saturday.

Russia said the incident was a "navigational error".

 

 

 

 

da vidimo kako će mustafa da izađe na megdan serjoži

[steins]

Глава комитета Госдумы по обороне адмирал Владимир Комоедов не исключил, что в составе сирийских правительственных войск, которые сражаются с международными террористами, включая боевиков ИГ (организация "Исламское государство", запрещена в России - ИФ), может появиться российская добровольческая бригада или батальон, в который войдут, в том числе люди, получившие боевой опыт в Донбассе.

 

ako sam dobro shvatio GT - mogući je formiranje dobrovoljačkih odreda koji bi se u Siriji borili protiv ISILa. 

 

 

Edited October 5, 2015 by steins

[Prospero]

Neka se spremi Počuča

[frn1782]

Ne gadjajte Rusi ako boga znate dobre teroriste.

Dajte shansu miru samo da rata ne bude.

[Marcus Wulffings]

zvučiš kao slobin pionir za vreme sankcija

[Lord Protector]

 

Sirijska armija je najavila ofanzivu na Rastan i Talbiseh koji se nalaze na putu između Homsa i Hame, bacani su leci iz aviona civilnom stanovništvu da se skloni od budućih ratnih dejstava

Edited October 5, 2015 by slow

[Marcus Wulffings]

hoće da unište tu enklavu, a isis je skoro pa netaknut

[Prospero]

Robert Fisk prilično oštar, decidan i pravo u glavu:
 

Syria’s ‘moderates’ have disappeared... and there are no good guys
Western confusion reigns while the Russians go for the jugular

Sunday 4 October 2015 20:08 BST


The Russian air force in Syria has flown straight into the West’s fantasy air space. The Russians, we are now informed, are bombing the “moderates” in Syria – “moderates” whom even the Americans admitted two months ago, no longer existed. 

 

It’s rather like the Isis fighters who left Europe to fight for the “Caliphate”.Remember them? Scarcely two months ago, our political leaders – and leader writers – were warning us all of the enormous danger posed by “home-grown” Islamists who were leaving Britain and other European countries and America to fight for the monsters of Isis. Then the hundreds of thousands of Muslim refugees began trekking up the Balkans towards Europe after risking death in the Mediterranean – and we were all told by the same political leaders to be fearful that Isis killers were among them.

It’s amazing how European Muslim fighters fly to Turkey to join Isis, and a few weeks later, they’re drowning in leaky boats or tramping back again and taking trains from Hungary to Germany. But if this nonsense was true, where did they get the time for all the terrorist training they need in order to attack us when they get back to Europe? 

It is possible, of course, that this was mere storytelling. By contrast, the chorus of horror that has accompanied Russia’s cruel air strikes this past week has gone beyond sanity. 

Let’s start with a reality check. The Russian military are killers who go for the jugular. They slaughtered the innocent of Chechnya to crush the Islamist uprising there, and they will cut down the innocent of Syria as they try to crush a new army of Islamists and save the ruthless regime of Bashar al-Assad. The Syrian army, some of whose members are war criminals, have struggled ferociously to preserve the state – and used barrel bombs to do it. They have also fought to the death. 

“American officials” – those creatures beloved of The New York Times – claim that the Syrian army does not fight Isis. If true, who on earth killed the 56,000 Syrian soldiers – the statistic an official secret, but nonetheless true – who have so far died in the Syrian war? The preposterous Free Syrian Army (FSA)?

This rubbish has reached its crescendo in the on-again off-again saga of the Syrian “moderates”.  These men were originally military defectors to the FSA, which America and European countries regarded as a possible pro-Western force to be used against the Syrian government army. But the FSA fell to pieces, corrupted, and the “moderates” defected all over again, this time to the Islamist Nusrah Front or to Isis, selling their American-supplied weapons to the highest bidder or merely retiring quietly – and wisely – to the countryside where they maintained a few scattered checkpoints.

Washington admitted their disappearance, bemoaned their fate, concluded that new “moderates” were required, persuaded the CIA to arm and train 70 fighters, and this summer packed them off across the Turkish border to fight – whereupon all but 10 were captured by Nusrah and at least two of them were executed by their captors. Just two weeks ago, I heard in person one of the most senior ex-US officers in Iraq – David Petraeus’s former No 2 in Baghdad – announce that the “moderates” had collapsed long ago. Now you see them – now you don’t.

But within hours of Russia’s air assaults last weekend, Washington, The New York Times, CNN, the poor old BBC and just about every newspaper in the Western world resurrected these ghosts and told us that the Russkies were bombing the brave “moderates” fighting Bashar’s army in Syria – the very “moderates” who, according to the same storyline from the very same sources a few weeks earlier, no longer existed. Our finest commentators and experts – always a dodgy phrase – joined in the same chorus line.  

So now a few harsh factoids. The Syrian army are drawing up the operational target lists for the Russian air force. But Vladimir Putin has his own enemies in Syria. 

The first strikes – far from being aimed at the “moderates” whom the US had long ago dismissed – were directed at the large number of Turkmen villages in the far north-west of Syria which have for many months been occupied by hundreds of Chechen fighters – the very same Chechens whom Putin had been trying to liquidate in Chechnya itself. These Chechen forces assaulted and destroyed Syria’s strategic hilltop military Position 451 north of Latakia last year. No wonder Bashar’s army put them on the target list.

Other strikes were directed not at Isis but at Islamist Jaish al-Shams force targets in the same area. But in the first 24 hours, Russian bombs were also dropped on the Isis supply line through the mountains above Palmyra. 

The Russians specifically attacked desert roads around the town of Salamia – the same tracks used by Isis suicide convoys to defeat Syrian troops in the ancient Roman city of Palmyra last May. 

They also bombed areas around Hassakeh and the Isis-held Raqqa air base where Syrian troops have fought Islamists over  the past year (and were beheaded when  they surrendered). 

Russian ground troops, however, are in Syria only to guard their bases. These are symbolic boots on the ground – but the idea that those boots are there to fight Isis is a lie. The Russians intend to let the Syrian ground troops do the dying for them.

No, there are no good guys and bad guys in the Syrian war. The Russians don’t care about the innocents they kill any more than do the Syrian army or Nato. Any movie of the Syrian war should be entitled War Criminals Galore! 

But for heaven’s sake, let’s stop fantasising. A few days ago, a White House spokesman even told us that Russian bombing “drives moderate elements… into the hands  of extremists”.  

Who’s writing this fiction? “Moderate elements” indeed…

 

[Gandalf]

“American officials” – those creatures beloved of The New York Times – claim that the Syrian army does not fight Isis. If true, who on earth killed the 56,000 Syrian soldiers – the statistic an official secret, but nonetheless true – who have so far died in the Syrian war? The preposterous Free Syrian Army (FSA)?

...

But the FSA fell to pieces, corrupted, and the “moderates” defected all over again, this time to the Islamist Nusrah Front or to Isis, selling their American-supplied weapons to the highest bidder or merely retiring quietly – and wisely – to the countryside where they maintained a few scattered checkpoints.

 

svi su ili raspala FSA, Nusra, ili ISIS, i niko vise. ignorisacemo cinjenicu da je Ahrar al Sham najmocnija (sirijska) pobunjenicka milicija, dok IS-om dominiraju stranci. ipak je ovako lakse, citalac ne mora nista da zna.

Edited October 5, 2015 by Gandalf

[Bane5]

Robert Fisk prilično oštar, decidan i pravo u glavu:

 

 

ostar?

pa on ovako pise sve vreme i latentno propagira asada i njegove i sve kontra je nistavno i uzasno.

[Gandalf]

ostar?

pa on ovako pise sve vreme i latentno propagira asada i njegove i sve kontra je nistavno i uzasno.

Ne propagira Asada, to nikako. Ali mnogo uproscava. Edited October 5, 2015 by Gandalf

[Lord Protector]

Syria, the Times and the Mystery of the "Moderate Rebels"

 

After a two-year absence from the international stage -- during which the mainstream media dispatched them to the realm of nonexistent entities -- on October 1 the "moderate rebels" of Syria were back. The New York Times said so. Russian attacks were targeting moderates rather than ISIS, a man with a camera was quoted saying; and the Times story by Anne Barnard appeared to confirm his suspicion; even as a companion report on Russian actions in Syria by Helene Cooper, Michael R. Gordon, and Neil MacFarquhar revealed that these are the same moderates who were carefully vetted by the CIA, and concerning whom little was heard ever after. Their numbers are put at 3,000 to 5,000, though the Cooper-Gordon-MacFarquhar article leaves uncertain if that is their original or their present strength. This illumination, after so long a blackout, will doubtless be a subject for inquiry in coming days. Why it would seem worthwhile for the Russians to attack so small a force, neither of the Timesstories bothered to say; nor did they explain why, if the moderate rebels are anti-Jihadist, they were allowed to garrison in the town of Talbiseh in a region north of Homs that (according to the veteran Middle East reporter Patrick Cockburn) has been "ruled" for the past two years "by Jabhat al-Nusra and associated extreme Islamist groups."

One cannot help being struck, in the Barnard story, by a disparity between the thinness of the evidence and the cocksure tone of the analysis. Consider the single piece of local testimony (generically confirmed by US sources) that is used to get us to take on trust a rebel's characterization of himself:

Among the areas hit was the base of a group that had been supported and supplied by the United States and its allies, said its leader, Jamil Saleh. He said the group's base had been hit severely in Hama Province, wounding eight of his men. Later on Wednesday, American officials confirmed that some groups supported by the United States had been hit.

"We are on the front lines with Bashar Al-Assad's army," said Mr. Saleh, whose group has recently posted videos of its fighters using sophisticated American-made TOW missiles to destroy government tanks. "We are moderate Syrian rebels and have no affiliation with ISIS. ISIS is at least 100 kilometers away from where we are."

 

 

But ISIS is not the only enemy of American interests in Syria and Iraq, and it is not the only terrorist entity the US government is pledged to defeat. How close are the moderate rebels to al-Nusra? Again, the Times story does not ask.

An editorial tailwind carried the paper's fascination with the moderate rebels into a second day of coverage on October 2. A story by Barnard and MacFarquhar, "Vladimir Putin Plunges into a Caldron in Syria," speculates that Putin's entry into the war will push "independent Islamists" to ally themselves with al-Nusra, and hence presumably will take them a degree closer to ISIS. "One previously independent Islamist brigade declared its allegiance to the Nusra Front, saying unity was necessary because America and Russia were allied against Muslims 'to blur the light of truth.'" Once more, there is a nagging hint of unasked questions. What exactly is an "independent Islamist"? How close was this brigade to the "democratic values" that America espouses? Indeed, how close could it have been if the allure of al-Nusra was just a bombing attack away? 

 

As it happens, the most damaging words ever spoken about the moderate rebels came from President Obama, in an interview with Thomas Friedman fourteen months ago. The president, displaying a candor that is intermittent with him but remarkable when it occurs, said the idea of a Syrian "moderate rebel" force was the sort of miracle cure that Americans dream up when we come to a section of the world we cannot manage:

 

It's always been a fantasy, this idea that we could provide some light arms, or even more sophisticated arms, to what was essentially an opposition made up of former doctors, farmers, pharmacists, and so forth, and that that they were going to be able to battle not only a well-armed state, but also a well-armed state backed by Russia, backed by Iran, a battle-hardened Hezbollah. That was never in the cards.

 

 

The "moderate rebels" are a good deal like the Third Force once dreamed of by the architects of the Vietnam War, as an alternative to the French colonial government and the communist Viet Minh. The US found an "independent" ally in the corrupt anti-communist Ngo Dinh Diem but eventually had him deposed and killed. The upright democratic allies on the ground only existed in numbers too weak to count politically or militarily; nor could the CIA in Vietnam conjure them out of thin air; and a failure of rational doubt set the United States on the long downward spiral of that war.

The truth is that Obama when he spoke those words confessed the self-contradiction of his own policy. For his administration continues to harbor enthusiasts of the Third Force idea like Susan Rice and Samantha Power, alongside persons of a less romantic temper such as Vice President Biden and Denis McDonough. When, in August 2011, Obama said that Assad must go and implied that he must go immediately, he was commanding beyond his power to enforce, and he had nobody in view to replace Assad. The same enthusiasts had already goaded him to commit US power and prestige to the destruction of the government of Libya, without any plan for what would succeed that government. The catastrophe that followed has been so complete that for two years now the word Libya has hardly been uttered by the president; but it must be part of what he thinks of, looking back, when he considers some new piece of high strategic advice on Syria.

During his recent encounter with Vladimir Putin at the UN, Obama conceded that America could approve a "managed transition" from the Assad government to an interim government -- that is, a transition with a middle phase to smooth the exit of the detested autocrat. This would be preferable, he meant, to the direct transition from despotic rule to violent anarchy, such as occurred in both Iraq and Libya. Yet a gradual transition had been offered (so long as immediate departure by Assad was not made a precondition) during John Kerry's visit to Moscow in May 2013; and Kerry's counterpart, the Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov, said at the time that Russia was not interested in the fate of Assad so much as that of Syria. Look at the distance between Moscow and Damascus, compare the distance between Washington and Damascus, and you can imagine why a Russian might see things that way. Russia is part of Asia; for us, an ocean intervenes. At any rate, shortly after the Kerry-Lavrov initiative all eyes were turned elsewhere by the second chemical attack and Obama's threat to bomb Syrian government forces -- a sequence of events that could not have scuttled the negotiations more neatly if it had been devised for the purpose.

Now it is 2015, and other regional powers are allied with Russia in the battle against the Islamists, but the New York Times is nostalgic for 2003. Michael Gordon has been writing some of the articles once again, and acting as a filter for the other pieces that he co-signs; and it is appropriate for readers to take him with exactly the trust that heearned by his discovery of nonexistent WMD in Iraq. An article on October 2 by Anne Barnard and Andrew E. Kramer -- the most honest of the four Times stories over the past two days -- levels with readers enough to permit a dry assessment of the Russian motives for entering the fight against ISIS and the Islamist insurgents. It speaks of the same group that the paper just five weeks earlier had called Ahrar al-Sham, under a new and more palatable name, "the Army of Conquest":

 

Often fighting alongside the Army of Conquest are relatively secular groups from what is left of the loose-knit Free Syrian Army, including some groups that have received United States training and advanced American-made antitank missiles. At least one group trained by the C.I.A. was among the targets hit on Wednesday, which drew an angry response from Washington.

 

 

Here, at last, one finds the beginning of a picture of the rebels in context, a picture that suggests the wildness of the American attempt to assert our will on this terrain. Barnard and Kramer continue:

 

But the Army of Conquest itself embodies the ambivalence of American policy. The United States considers the Nusra Front a terrorist organization, but other groups, including some that have received American funding, fight alongside the Nusra Front, saying that they have no choice if they want to unseat Mr. Assad.

 

 

The article closes with John Kerry's warning that Russia must not attack any fighting organization except ISIS. But how have we ever known exactly where ISIS is? ISIS stole a march on the US and its allies in both Iraq and Syria. Everything American authorities have said about their progress and their location has proved unreliable.

"Who Is Fighting Whom?" Such was the question posed by a Times analytic chart at the breaking of the first news of Russian entry into the Syrian war. The US, France, and Britain are said to support "More moderate elements among the rebel forces in Syria." That is one way of putting it; another way is "less extreme"; and these two phrases recur in the self-portraits of the Islamist commanders who want continued US support and subsidy. The ambivalence of the Times echoes the ambivalence of US policy as described by the Times. Both the government and the newspaper that sets the pattern for the mainstream media have taught us that al-Qaeda is the sworn enemy of US interests; that al-Nusra is the Syrian branch of al-Qaeda; and that a pact with either terrorist sect, even for the sake of fighting against ISIS, would be desperate and self-destructive. But we are urged at the same time to suppose -- the complicated relationships of Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Qatar, and Israel encourage it -- that al-Nusra is perhaps a milder version of al-Qaeda and that both are necessary allies in the titanic struggle to overthrow Assad and defeat ISIS in a single stroke. The sheer quantity of self-deception that is required to support this fantasy ought to be obvious; but the fantasy will tempt us until our leaders break once and for all with the dreamers of the Third Force.

 

David Bromwich teaches literature at Yale. He has written on politics and culture for The New Republic, The Nation, The New York Review of Books, and other magazines. He is editor of Edmund Burke's selected writings On Empire, Liberty, and Reform and co-editor of the Yale University Press edition of On Liberty..

 

Edited October 5, 2015 by slow

[Muwan]

svi su ili raspala FSA, Nusra, ili ISIS, i niko vise. ignorisacemo cinjenicu da je Ahrar al Sham najmocnija (sirijska) pobunjenicka milicija, dok IS-om dominiraju stranci. ipak je ovako lakse, citalac ne mora nista da zna.

A u šta se ta najmoćnija milicija ubraja, u one moderate™? Ili samo u vojno krilo Bratstva?

[Gandalf]

Ja niti jednu pobunjenicku miliciju ne bih nazvao umerenom. Da bi se neko latio ljevora, i dobrovoljno krenuo u fajt kontra bolje naoruzanih koljaca, taj po definiciji mora biti ekstremista ove ili one vrste.

Edited October 5, 2015 by Gandalf