Syrian students and teachers of one of the country’s biggest universities gathered in the centre of Homs, Wednesday, to thank Russia for its role in the Syrian conflict. You can hear them chanting Bashar al-Assad and they are carrying banners featuring Assad and Putin’s faces.
If the US-led CDO were really committed to fighting ISIS/ISIL/Daesh, they would be working side by side with the Syrian Arab Army (SAA), not bombing it or trying to stall it.
And they would be actively trying to shut down the key Turkey-Syria crossroads – the Jarablus corridor which is in fact a 24/7 Jihadi Highway.
What Putin is doing here is warning Turkey and, really all of NATO and the Empire that next time Russia will shoot back, immediately. This also shows that the authority shoot back has now been given to the Russian forces in Syria and that no top-level decision will have to be requested to return fire.
Would you be willing to defend your country against a foreign invasion? That’s all Putin is doing in Syria. He’s just preempting the tidal wave of jihadis that’ll be coming his way once the current fracas is over. He figures it’s better to exterminate these US-backed maniacs in Syria now than face them in Chechnya, St Petersburg and Moscow sometime in the future. Can you blame him? […]
Suppose a respectable opinion poll found that Bashar al-Assad has more support than the Western-backed opposition. Would that not be major news?
In the view of Syrians, the country’s president, Bashar al Assad, and his ally, Iran, have more support than do the forces arrayed against him, according to a public opinion poll taken last summer by a research firm that is working with the US and British governments.
The idea that prominent western media like the New York Times and the Washington Post would take these Saudi-led meetings seriously is simply mindboggling. Does anyone need to be reminded that 15 of the 19 hijackers on 9-11 were from Saudi Arabia, or that Saudi royals have been arming and funding terrorist organizations for the last 30 years or that Riyadh is presently backing many of the Sunni militants now prosecuting the proxy war in Syria today?
It should go without saying that the internal political processes of a sovereign country belongs to the people of that country, and no-one else. Nevertheless, as Washington insists on a prerogative to determine who can or cannot lead another country, some background on Bashar al Assad and the political reform process in Syria might be useful.
Western mythology relies on the idea of imperial prerogatives, asking what must ‘we’ do about the problems of another people; an approach which has no basis in international law or human rights. The next steps involve a series of fabrications about the pretexts, character and events of the war. The first pretext over Syria was that the NATO states and the Gulf monarchies were supporting a secular and democratic revolution. When that seemed implausible the second story was that they were saving the oppressed majority ‘Sunni Muslim’ population from a sectarian ‘Alawite regime’. Then, when sectarian atrocities by anti-government forces attracted greater public attention, the pretext became a claim that there was a shadow war: ‘moderate rebels’ were said to be actually fighting the extremist groups. Western intervention was therefore needed to bolster these ‘moderate rebels’ against the ‘new’ extremist group that had mysteriously arisen and posed a threat to the world.
I overheard one of my colleagues at work the other day. He was listening to a news report about the prospect of British jets bombing Isis targets in Syria. “Let’s bomb them,” he said. I often hear him saying such things. He’s not a right wing bigot or a racist, although he might be Islamophobic. Many people are Islamophobic these […]
The elements presented during a Press conference in Moscow by General Viktor Bondarev, chief of staff of the Russian Air Force, leave no doubt – the Turkish aviation, which had been informed of the flight plan of the Russian Sukhoï, in accordance with the agreements on military co-ordination, had already recieved prior instructions to assume attack position. These elements invalidate […]
Oliver Stone has said in a new 10-part documentary that the real threat to the world is America, and not ISIS. His new book and TV series “The Untold History of the United States” suggests that the U.S. governments destabilising influence in the world far predates ISIS. His new series pinpoints moments of American intrusion in the region as far […]
As France, the UK and now Germany obediently line up for war with Russia, feel free to send these to anyone who asks you “but do you think we should just let ISIS keep beheading people?” 1. Bashar al Assad’s secular government in Syria is a major obstacle to US/NATO ambitions to fragment the Middle East, exploit its resources and […]
