Sirija

[Geo]

Zanimljiva mapa...

 

[theanswer]

Ispade da nema nijednog sirijca u Alepu sto bas i nije tacno

[Geo]

Ne nego je SAA izmesana sa svim tim dobrovoljcima sa strane , negde manje negde vise ... Njima je realno najpotrebnije ljudstvo i to otprilike objasnjava ova mapa ...

[Prospero]

 
Obama directs Pentagon to target al-Qaeda affiliate in Syria, one of the most formidable forces fighting Assad
 
 

President Obama has ordered the Pentagon to find and kill the leaders of an al-Qaeda-linked group in Syria that the administration had largely ignored until now and that has been at the vanguard of the fight against the Syrian government, U.S. officials said.

The decision to deploy more drones and intelligence assets against the militant group formerly known as Jabhat al-Nusra reflects Obama’s concern that it is turning parts of Syria into a new base of operations for al-Qaeda on Europe’s southern doorstep, the officials said.

The move underlines the extent to which Obama has come to prioritize the counter­terrorism mission in Syria over efforts to pressure President Bashar al-Assad to step aside, as al-Nusra is among the most effective forces­­ battling the Syrian government.

That shift is likely to accelerate once President-elect Donald Trump takes office. Trump has said he will be even more aggressive in going after militants than Obama, a stance that could lead to the expansion of the campaign against al-Nusra, possibly in direct cooperation with Moscow. The group now calls itself Jabhat Fatah al-Sham — or Front for the Conquest of Syria — and says it has broken with al-Qaeda, an assertion discounted by U.S. officials.

The United States has conducted sporadic strikes in the past against veteran al-Qaeda members who migrated to northwestern Syria from Afghanistan and Pakistan to join al-Nusra and whom U.S. officials suspected of plotting against the United States and its allies.

Obama’s new order gives the U.S. military’s Joint Special ­Operations Command, or JSOC, wider authority and additional intelligence-collection re­sources to go after al-Nusra’s broader leadership, not just al-Qaeda veterans or those directly involved in external plotting.

The White House and State Department led the charge within the Obama administration for prioritizing action against the group. Pentagon leaders were reluctant at first to pull resources away from the fight against the Islamic State.

But aides say Obama grew frustrated that more wasn’t being done by the Pentagon and the intelligence community to kill al-Nusra leaders given the warnings he had received from top counter­terrorism officials about the gathering threat they posed.

In the president’s Daily Brief, the most highly classified intelligence report produced by U.S. spy agencies, Obama was repeatedly told over the summer that the group was allowing al-Qaeda leaders in Pakistan and Afghanistan to create in northwest Syria the largest haven for the network since it was scattered after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. Officials also warned Obama that al-Nusra could try to fill the void as its rival, the Islamic State, lost ground.

Lisa Monaco, Obama’s White House homeland security and counter­terrorism adviser, said Obama’s decision “prioritized our fight against al-Qaeda in Syria, including through targeting their leaders and operatives, some of whom are legacy al-Qaeda members.”

“We have made clear to all parties in Syria that we will not allow al-Qaeda to grow its capacity to attack the U.S., our allies, and our interests,” she said in a statement. “We will continue to take action to deny these terrorists any safe haven in Syria.”

To support the expanded push against al-Nusra, the White House pressed the Pentagon to deploy additional armed drones and intelligence-collection assets in the airspace over northwestern Syria, an area that had been sparsely covered by the United States until now because of its proximity to advanced Russian air-defense systems and aircraft.

A bitterly divided Obama administration had tried over the summer to cut a deal with Moscow on a joint U.S.-Russian air campaign against al-Nusra, in exchange for a Russian commitment to ground Syrian government warplanes and to allow more humanitarian supplies into besieged areas. But the negotiations broke down in acrimony, with Moscow accusing the United States of failing to separate al-Nusra from more moderate rebel groups and Washington accusing the Russians of war crimes in Aleppo.

Armed drones controlled by JSOC stepped up operations in September, according to military officials.

Drone strikes by the U.S. military under the program began in October and have so far killed at least four high-value targets, including al-Nusra’s senior external planner. The Pentagon has disclosed two of the strikes so far. One of the most significant strikes — targeting a gathering of al-Nusra leaders on Nov. 2 — has yet to be disclosed, officials said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss operations.

So far, Russian air-defense systems and aircraft haven’t interfered with stepped-up U.S. operations against al-Nusra. Officials attributed Moscow’s acquiescence to the limited number of U.S. aircraft involved in the missions and to Russia’s interest in letting Washington combat one of the Assad regime’s most potent enemies within the insurgency. U.S. officials said they provided notifications to the Russians before the al-Nusra strikes to avoid misunderstandings.

Officials said the expanded al-Nusra campaign was similar to those that Obama has directed against al-Qaeda affiliates in Yemen, Somalia and Pakistan.

While al-Qaeda’s central leadership in Pakistan has been decimated, the United States now faces more threats involving more extremists from more places than at any time since 9/11, Nicholas J. Rasmussen, director of the National Counterterrorism Center, told a Senate committee in September.

The push into the province of Idlib and other parts of northwestern Syria coincides with ­Pentagon-backed offensives in and around Islamic State strongholds in eastern Syria and in Iraq, which have attracted the majority of U.S. military resources and public attention.

White House officials had considered launching a more systematic campaign to destroy al-Nusra from top to bottom, much like the Pentagon’s approach to the Islamic State. But that option was rejected as too resource-intensive. Many of al-Nusra’s fighters are Syrians who joined the group because of its ample supply of weapons and cash, and its commitment to defeating Assad, not to plot against the West.

Officials said the strikes on leadership targets were meant to send a message to more-moderate rebel units, including those backed by the CIA, to distance themselves from the al-Qaeda affiliate. At critical moments during the five-year-old civil war, moderate rebel units have fought alongside al-Nusra in ground operations against Assad’s forces. In fact, U.S. officials credit those rebel campaigns in the spring of 2015 with putting so much pressure on the Syrian government that Russia and Iran decided to double down militarily in support of Assad.

U.S. officials who opposed the decision to go after al-Nusra’s wider leadership warned that the United States would effectively be doing the Assad government's bidding by weakening a group on the front line of the counter-Assad fight. The strikes, these officials warned, could backfire on the United States by bolstering the group’s standing, helping it attract more recruits and resources.

Officials who supported the shift said the Obama administration could no longer tolerate what one of them described as “a deal with the devil,” whereby the United States largely held its fire against al-Nusra because the group was popular with Syrians in rebel-controlled areas and furthered the U.S. goal of putting military pressure on Assad. Russia had accused the United States of sheltering al-Nusra, a charge repeated Thursday in Moscow by Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov.

“The president doesn’t want this group to be what inherits the country if Assad ever does fall,” a senior U.S. official said. “This cannot be the viable Syrian opposition. It’s al-Qaeda.”

Officials said the administration’s hope is that more-moderate rebel factions will be able to gain ground as both the Islamic State and al-Nusra come under increased military pressure.

A growing number of White House and State Department officials, however, have privately voiced doubts about the wisdom of applying U.S. military power, even covertly, to pressure Assad to step aside, particularly since Russia’s military intervention in Syria last year.

U.S. intelligence officials say they aren’t sure what Trump’s approach to U.S.-backed rebel units will be once he gets briefed on the extent of the covert CIA program. Trump has voiced strong skepticism about arming Syrian rebels in the past, suggesting that U.S. intelligence agencies don’t have enough knowledge about rebel intentions to pick reliable allies.

Defense Secretary Ashton B. Carter and other Pentagon leaders initially resisted the idea of devoting more Pentagon surveillance aircraft and armed drones against al-Nusra. In White House Situation Room meetings, Carter and other top Pentagon officials argued that the military’s resources were needed to combat the Islamic State and that it would be difficult to operate in the airspace given Russia’s military presence, officials said.

While Obama, White House national security adviser Susan E. Rice, Secretary of State John F. Kerry and special presidential envoy Brett McGurk agreed with Carter on the need to keep the focus on the Islamic State, they favored shifting resources to try to prevent al-Nusra from becoming a bigger threat down the road.

A senior defense official said additional drone assets were assigned to the JSOC mission. Carter also made clear that the Pentagon’s goal would be to hit al-Nusra leadership targets, not take strikes to try to separate the moderate rebels from al-Nusra, officials said.

“If we wake up in five years from now, and Islamic State is dead but al-Qaeda in Syria has the equivalent of [the tribal areas of Pakistan] in northwest Syria, then we’ve got a problem,” a second senior U.S. official said.

[Meazza]

Odlicna vest.

[Geo]

Stanovnici "Apartmana 1070" navratili da vide sta je ostalo od njihovih domova posle odlaska demokratije™... Doduse to su oni civili kojima se savetuje(dozvoljava) da napuste borbenu zonu i koji nedozivljajvaju bradate bolesnike kao oslobodioce pa i nisu toliko intresantni za prozapadne medije

 

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vrAlapfuepQ

[Prospero]

U.S. Scraps Plan to Punish Syria for Using Chemical Weapons

 

With an assist from Moscow, Damascus could dodge sanctions for gassing its own people.
 

BY COLUM LYNCH NOVEMBER 11, 2016

 

 

 

The Obama administration has throttled back its diplomatic push to make Syria destroy all of its stockpiles of chlorine and barrel bombs on the premise that the Syrian regime used them in attacks against opposition-controlled towns, according to diplomatic sources.

For the past month, the United States has tried to muster support for a resolution condemning Syria’s use of chemical weapons before the executive council of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), an international watchdog. The United States sought to strip Damascus of its voting rights at the agency if it failed to permit greater international scrutiny of its suspected chemical weapons activities.

Faced with pushback from Russia and developing countries, however, Washington withdrew the measure this week, diplomatic sources say. In its place, the United States on Friday backed a watered-down, compromise measure put forward by Spain that condemns the use of chemical weapons by the Syrian government and the Islamic State, and instructs the chemical weapons watchdog to carry out inspections at sites, including Syrian airports, that are linked to chemical weapons activities. But the measure stops short of imposing any penalties on Damascus, or requiring it declare its stockpiles of chlorine and barrel bombs.

U.S. and European officials said they had hoped for a tougher response, but that today’s vote marked an important advance in efforts to hold perpetrators to account for using chemical weapons, especially given political straitjackets at U.N. headquarters in Turtle Bay.

Friday’s decision gives the chemical watchdog agency a mandate to conduct twice-yearly inspections at two facilities — in Barzah and Jamrayah — where the OPCW has found traces of undeclared nerve agents, including sarin and VX. Syria claims the labs played no role in Syria’s once-secret chemical weapons program. But the United States and the OPCW are convinced that they have.

“The United States supports the draft Spanish decision,” a State Department official told Foreign Policy. “While the United States would have preferred an even stronger statement against those responsible for chemical weapon use in Syria, the Spanish draft offers the best chance of being adopted in the executive council.”

Brits back it as well. “This decision confirms that the Assad regime and Daesh are responsible for using abhorrent chemical weapons against civilians,” British Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson said in a statement issued after the vote.

“There is a clear determination across the international community to hold those who have used these heinous weapons to account. The UK will continue to work with international partners to secure justice for victims, and to prevent the use of chemical weapons by anyone, anywhere.”

The setback is likely to pose an early test for President-elect Donald Trump over how forcefully his administration will uphold international norms regarding the use of chemical weapons by Syria, the only signatory to the 1997 Chemical Weapons Convention to have used chemical weapons since the treaty came into force.

During his campaign, Trump stressed the need to cooperate with Syria — and its Russian backers — to redouble the fight against the Islamic State, which has also been accused of using chemical weapons.

Syria has carried out chemical weapons attacks since 2012, the United States and Europe say, when government aircraft killed seven people in Homs with poisonous gas. Following the threat of retaliatory U.S. airstrikes in 2013, Syria agreed to dismantle its decades-old chemical weapons program under international supervision and join the Chemical Weapons Convention. Since then, the bulk of Syria’s declared chemical weapons program — including more than 1,300 metric tons of sulfur mustard and other chemical weapons precursors — have been destroyed.

But there is mounting evidence that Syria may have secretly preserved some elements of its weapons program, and that it has continued to weaponize chemicals like chlorine which are not prohibited under the nonproliferation pact. A team of experts from the U.N. and OPCW recently concluded that Syria has used chemical weapons in the opposition-held towns of Talmenes, Sarmin, and Qmenas in 2014 and 2015.

The United States has talked with Russia about expanding the inspectors’ mandate. Russia has questioned the utility of the investigations, and says it would like to see the team shift its focus to pursuing chemical weapons use by terrorist organizations in Syria and beyond. But Russia has made it clear it sees no need to impose sanctions on Syria in the U.N. Security Council. The Russian defense ministry, meanwhile, claims it has evidence that Syria terrorist groups have used chemical weapons in Aleppo.

Last month, the U.S. Ambassador to the OPCW, Kenneth Ward, argued that Syria’s confirmed use of chlorine bombs crossed a red line of sorts.

“Having been found to have used chlorine as a chemical weapon, Syria is now required under the [Chemical Weapons] Convention to declare and destroy all chlorine stocks and any other stocks of toxic chemicals,” he said. “Syria must also declare and destroy all associated munitions such as barrel bombs as well as the equipment and facilities used to produce these chemical weapons.”

He also pushed for the passage of a draft decision that would require Syria to submit to inspections of sites suspected of links to chemical weapons, including heliports, chemical facilities, and barrel bomb factories, or lose its voting rights and other privileges at the chemical weapons watchdog. The U.S. proposal would have also required Syria to declare all of its stocks of toxic industrial chemicals, including chlorine, or munitions capable of delivering chemical weapons, within 30 days.

Russia blocked the resolution from being adopted by consensus, forcing the Americans to put it to a vote. Russia, however, has signaled it will veto any effort in the Security Council to impose sanctions on Syria for using chemical weapons.

In The Hague, meanwhile, Washington encountered resistance from developing countries, which argue that the U.N. Security Council is the appropriate venue to levy penalties on a member state. In an effort to bridge the gap, Washington withdrew its draft and made way for a Spanish resolution that condemns Syria’s chemical weapons activities, but stops short of threatening penalties.

That resolution was adopted Friday by at least 28 votes in favor, according to diplomats. Russia, China, Sudan, and Iran voted against it, and nine countries abstained, according to Reuters.

Despite the blow to their initial plans, U.S. officials say they remain committed to holding all perpetrators of chemical weapons attacks accountable. But time may be running out for the Obama administration to secure support at the U.N. for tough punitive measures. In the meantime, U.S. officials say, they hope they can at least secure an extended term of life for the inspectors to keep doing their work.

The goal, a State Deptartment official said, is “to send a clear message that the use of chemical weapons will not be tolerated.”

[Prospero]

Although he wasn’t specific, Mr. Trump suggested a shift away from what he said was the current Obama administration policy of attempting to find moderate Syrian opposition groups to support in the civil war there. “I’ve had an opposite view of many people regarding Syria,” he said.

 

He suggested a sharper focus on fighting Islamic State, or ISIS, in Syria, rather than on ousting Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. “My attitude was you’re fighting Syria, Syria is fighting ISIS, and you have to get rid of ISIS. Russia is now totally aligned with Syria, and now you have Iran, which is becoming powerful, because of us, is aligned with Syria. … Now we’re backing rebels against Syria, and we have no idea who these people are.”

 

If the U.S. attacks Mr. Assad, Mr. Trump said, “we end up fighting Russia, fighting Syria.”

 

[Frank Pembleton]

I dobro jel se očekuje stvaaarno pojačano angažovanje USA u Siriji u ovom "međuprostoru" do januara?

 

....shit has hit the fan...

[apostata]

 

Although he wasn’t specific, Mr. Trump suggested a shift away from what he said was the current Obama administration policy of attempting to find moderate Syrian opposition groups to support in the civil war there. “I’ve had an opposite view of many people regarding Syria,” he said.

 

He suggested a sharper focus on fighting Islamic State, or ISIS, in Syria, rather than on ousting Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. “My attitude was you’re fighting Syria, Syria is fighting ISIS, and you have to get rid of ISIS. Russia is now totally aligned with Syria, and now you have Iran, which is becoming powerful, because of us, is aligned with Syria. … Now we’re backing rebels against Syria, and we have no idea who these people are.”

 

If the U.S. attacks Mr. Assad, Mr. Trump said, “we end up fighting Russia, fighting Syria.”

 

 

I to je izjavio samo dan nakon ovoga:

 

Secretary of Defense Ash Carter offers advice to the Trump administration

(...)

And so we have not been able to, and I have not been in favor, and I’m not recommending to the president that we associate ourselves with or work with the Russians until they start doing the right thing.

(...)

http://www.cbsnews.com/news/ash-carter-secretary-of-defense-trump-administration-advice-isis-fight/

 

[MNE]

a "right thing" po Karteru je da se od Sirije napravi isto što od Libije?!

[namenski]

Kontrolisani haos je 1 prava stvar, 1 ideal 

[frn1782]

the art of the deal

[Meazza]

Kontrolisani haos.

 

Genijalno.  

[theanswer]

I dobro jel se očekuje stvaaarno pojačano angažovanje USA u Siriji u ovom "međuprostoru" do januara?

 

....shit has hit the fan...

Ne