US sending 200 more special ops soldiers to Syria – Pentagon chief
FILE
PHOTO: U.S soldiers ride a military vehicle in al-Kherbeh village,
northern Aleppo province, Syria October 24, 2016 © Khalil Ashawi /
Reuters
RT,
10
December, 2016
The
US is sending 200 additional military personnel to Syria to help
drive Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS/ISIL) from Raqqa, US Defense
Secretary Ash Carter said on Saturday.
Speaking
in Bahrain at the Manama Dialogue conference on Middle East security,
Carter said the 200, including special forces trainers, advisers, and
explosive ordnance disposal teams, would join 300 US special forces
already in Syria.
“These
uniquely skilled operators will join the 300 US special operations
forces already in Syria, to continue organizing, training, equipping,
and otherwise enabling capable, motivated, local forces to take the
fight to ISIL,”
Carter said, as quoted by AP.
“By
combining our capabilities with those of our local partners, we've
been squeezing ISIL by applying simultaneous pressure from all sides
and across domains, through a series of deliberate actions to
continue to build momentum,”
he added.
The vanishing civilians of Aleppo
Gwynne
Dyer
9 Deceber, 2016
The
battles for Aleppo have been savage, but there now is a question of
whether all the stories about endangered or slaughtered civilians
were simply made up. (AFP photo)
Did
it cross your mind occasionally, in the past week, to wonder where
all of the "250,000 civilians trapped in eastern Aleppo"
have gone? As the area of the city under rebel control dwindled -- by
Wednesday morning the Syrian regime's troops had recaptured
three-quarters of it -- did you see massive columns of fleeing
civilians, or mounds of civilian dead?
If
several hundred thousand people were on the move, you would expect to
be seeing video images of it. If they were fleeing into the enclave
the rebels still hold (to escape the evil Syrian army), you would
expect the rebels to give us dramatic images of that. They certainly
gave us footage of every civilian killed by Russian bombing in
eastern Aleppo over the past three months.
And
if hundreds of thousands or even just tens of thousands of civilians
were fleeing for safety into government-held territory, you would
expect the regime's propagandists to be making equally striking
images available. "Look!" they would say. "The
civilians really loved President Bashar al-Assad all along."
Or
maybe the civilians are all dead. Stephen O'Brien, the UN's
Undersecretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs, warned just a week
ago that if Mr Assad's forces went on advancing, then "the
besieged parts of eastern Aleppo" would become "one giant
graveyard". So where are those quarter-million bodies? Or even a
few thousand bodies? That's kind of hard to hide.
Here's
a radical thought: Have most of those quarter-million people suddenly
become invisible because they were never really there in the first
place?
There
were certainly a significant number of civilians trapped with the
rebels: you saw them crying and shaking their fists every time the
Russians bombed another hospital. But even then, did you sometimes
think how strange it was that the Russian air force never seemed to
bomb anything but hospitals? Where's the strategic sense in that?
Well,
here's a clue. There were no foreign journalists in eastern Aleppo.
They were quite reasonably afraid of being kidnapped by one of the
many rebel groups in the city and held for ransom -- or accused of
being spies and ritually slaughtered by one of the more extreme
Islamist outfits.
All
the reporting out of eastern Aleppo for the past three months has
been what the rebel groups wanted us to see, and nothing else. And to
them, the presence of large numbers of "defenceless civilians",
the more the better, was their best protection against a full-scale
onslaught by the regime.
So
of course they gave us video of every civilian killed by a bomb, and
greatly exaggerated the number of civilians in their part of the
city, and almost never showed their own fighters.
There's
no crime in this. It's the way propaganda works, and nobody fighting
a war can afford to be too respectful of the truth. The real question
is this: Why did the international media fall for it?
For
months, what was obviously rebel propaganda has been shown by the
world's media as if it were the impartial truth. Was it just
laziness, or was it subservience to a political agenda set by the
West and its main allies in the Middle East? A bit of both, probably.
The
United States, Saudi Arabia and Turkey were all determined to see the
overthrow of Bashar al-Assad's regime, even if it did take six years
of civil war. And even though they didn't agree on what they wanted
to replace it with.
Washington
pursued the dream of a democratic, secular Syria. Riyadh and Ankara
wanted a decisive victory by the Sunni Arab majority (about 60-65% of
the population) and an authoritarian Islamic state. But they all
agreed on the need to overthrow Mr Assad, and left the rest for
later.
Syrians
from the start were much more ambivalent. Few loved the Assad regime,
which was repressive and brutal. But many Syrians -- including many
Sunni Muslims, especially in the cities -- saw the regime as their
only protection against the triumph of an even nastier Islamist
dictatorship.
There
was never a mass uprising in Aleppo against the regime. Various rebel
groups from the overwhelmingly Sunni rural areas around Aleppo
stormed into the city in 2012 and won control over the eastern half,
but it was never clear that the local residents were glad to see
them.
On
the other hand, it was not a good idea to look too unhappy about it,
so over the next four years a great many people left the rebel-held
part of the city, whose population gradually dwindled to -- well, we
don't know exactly how many remained by this year, but it was
certainly not a quarter-million or anywhere near it.
And
it would appear that when the Syrian army retook most of eastern
Aleppo in the past week, most of those people just stayed in their
homes and waited to be "liberated". Some of them will be
terrified of being arrested and tortured, especially if they
collaborated with the rebels even under duress. And others will
simply be relieved that it's over.
Free Syrian Army Enters al-Bab From North, East With Turkish Army Support
Free
Syrian Army troops entered the Syrian city of al-Bab in the Aleppo
Governorate from North and East with the support of the Turkish army
on Friday, according to the information received by Sputnik
correspondent from a source in the FSA
Aleppo: people dance with relief after being freed
Streets of Old Aleppo Covered in Hair as 'Moderate Rebels' Shave Their Beards and Run
Once
all the rage in Aleppo, jihad beards have suddenly become extremely
unpopular
Russia Insider,
9 December, 2016
A quick update from Aleppo, which is now 85% under Syrian control, according to all reliable reports.
As
Aleppo residents rush into government-controlled areas, Al-Qaeda
affiliates and other democratic groups encircled by Assad and his
allies are shaving their freedom beards and bouncing. Martyrdom will
just have to wait, we suppose:
And
as the "moderate rebels" (see: extremists who would gladly
slit your throat) are hightailing it out of Aleppo, religious
tolerance has once again returned to this ancient city:
Christian priest and a Muslim Imam pray together in #Aleppo #Syria following the #SAA recent victories pic.twitter.com/hUeGSPOOkx
— G (@SyrianLionesss)
December 9, 2016
A
simple but important aspect of Assad's "evil regime" in
Syria is that it is secular.
What a shocking concept, right?
Readers
with agile memories might also recall a similar,
hair-related story from October, 2015,
in which "moderate rebels", faced with Russian airstrikes,
shaved their beards and fled to Turkey:
See
all that hair? That's what victory looks like
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