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NY Times photo shows Clinton at an artificial-limb center, visiting with a nineteen year old, who lost his forearms and sight from a blast of an unexploded bomb, dropped by the US Air Force during the Vietnam War. The bomb, unexploded for decades, finally blew up three years ago. The young man gesticulated with his arm stumps – US has not signed ban on cluster bombs. US Dropped 250 million bombs, 80 million failed to explode

Feature article in New York Times, 7/11/2012 Vietnam War’s Legacy Is Vivid as Clinton Visits Laos by Jane Perlez:

Accompanying photo shows Mrs. Clinton at an artificial-limb center, visiting with a nineteen year old, who lost his forearms and sight from a blast of an unexploded bomb, dropped by the United States Air Force during the Vietnam War. The bomb, unexploded for decades, finally blew up three years ago.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/12/world/asia/on-visit-to-laos-clinton-is-reminded-of-vietnam-war.html

Clinton’s brief four hour stop-over in Laos was the first visit by an American secretary of state since President Eisenhower’s Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles, came here in 1955, and tried to persuade the Lao royal family to drop its neutrality in the cold war and join the American camp. (But already from 1953 on President Ike had had the CIA, not so covertly, operating on the side of the French colonal army in the First Indochinese war both in Laos and in Vietnam – just as he had the CIA overthrowing democratically eleccted, but insuffiently pro-American governments, in the Congo and Guatemala.)

“The young man, Phongsavath Sonilya, gesticulated with his arm stumps as he explained to Mrs. Clinton that more than three decades after the end of the war, not enough had been done to stop the use of cluster bombs and to support those who may be injured in the future by bombs still lying unexploded in the countryside. The United States has not signed the Convention on Cluster Bombs.”

Laos was hit by an average of one B-52 bombload every eight minutes, 24 hours a day. Between 1964 and 1973, US Bombers dropped more ordnance on Laos in this period that was dropped during the whole of the Second World War. Of the 260 Million bombs rainded down, some 80 million failed to explode, leaving a deadly legacy. Laos is the most heavily-bombed country, per capita, in the world. Because it was particularly heavily affected by cluster bombs during this war, Laos was, Laos was a strong advocate of the Convention on Cluster Munitions to Ban the Weapons and assist victimes, and hosted the first meeting of states parties to the convention in November 2010.(The US has consistently opposed the ban.) [The Guardian, UK]

“The government of Laos is run by the Communist Party, and five of the nine members of the Politburo, including the prime minister, … are veterans of the Pathet Lao guerrilla group that supported North Vietnam against the United States. … After Saigon fell, more than 1,200 Americans were evacuated from Laos.” In 1975, with the withdrawal of the massive US Army, Navy and Air Force from Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, the Pathet Lao, an intellectual Marxist nationalist independence movement born to fight against the US backed French restoration of brutal colonialism in 1949, that had bravely withstood all the inexpressively horrific US bombings, became the government of all Laos. This historic crime against humanity of bombing a tiny agricultural colonial population mercilessly flowed forward from Eisenhower dutifully preaching, in the name of the miltary-industrial-complex, that retaining control of Laos was the key to retaining control of all South-East Asia.

[The Guardian, UK]

Now Laos is closely aligned with China. The Chinese built many of the main buildings in this relaxed tropical capital and are now constructing a new convention center … for a European-Asian summit meeting in November, a meeting that does not include the United States.

There was no news conference with the prime minister but a carefully worded statement negotiated by both sides that noted the coming entry of Laos into the World Trade Organization, and cooperation between the United States and Laos on environmental protection.

At the center that provides artificial limbs, … Mrs. Clinton viewed a map embedded with red dots that showed where bombs were dropped along the Ho Chi Minh Trail and on the Plain of Jars. There were more than 580,000 bombing missions by the United States Air Force, making Laos the most heavily bombed country on a per-person basis, the text said.

At the end of the war, more than 30 percent of the bombs remained unexploded, leaving Laos with a deadly problem in rural areas that persists today.

Each bomb contained about 600 bomblets, and in recent years about 100 people have been killed by unexploded ordnance, 40 percent of them children.”

… As she toured the center, … There was evidence, too, of the low-cost nature of some of the homemade limbs that farmers put together using bamboo, metal tubes from bombs and wood, while they awaited more professional limbs.

After the visit to the center, Mrs. Clinton said it was “a painful reminder of the Vietnam War era. “The international community will join us in our efforts to bring this legacy of the Vietnam War to a safe end.”

Reading this NY Times article, what immediately jumps up in one’s mind, is ‘boy if the “war’s legacy” had been millions of unexploded bombs in the soil of New Jersey, for instance, they would have been all cleaned up right away.

The article incredulously, reports that Mrs. Clinton “as she toured the center, asked several times “why more sophisticated technology could not be used to find the bombs”

Why indeed, “the international community” is busy in Afghanistan, in Syria and just about everywhere in the Middle East. Busy, not cleaning up, but laying down unexploded bombs that the locals will, as in Laos and elsewhere, eventually be trying to find and explode the unexploded that the US and other Colonial powers leave behind.

By Jay Janson

13 July, 2012

Countercurrents.org

Jay Janson is an archival research peoples historian activist, musician and writer; has lived and worked on all continents; articles on media published in China, Italy, UK, India and the US; now resides in NYC; First effort was a series of article on deadly cultural pollution endangering seven areas of life emanating from Western corporate owned commercial media published in Hong Kong’s Window Magazine 1993. During his last years, Howard Zinn lent his name to various projects of his; Global Research; Information Clearing House; Counter Currents, Kerala, India; Minority Perspective, UK; Dissident Voice, OpEdNews; HistoryNews Network; Vermont Citizen News and others have published his articles, 250 of which are available at: clickhttp://www.opednews.com/author/author1723.html Weekly column, South China Morning Post, 1986-87; reviews for Ta Kung Bao; articles China Daily, 1989. Is coordinator and founder of the King Condemned US Wars International Awareness Campaign click: (King Condemned US Wars)http://kingcondemneduswars.blogspot.com/and originator of Prosecute US Crimes Against Humanity Now Campaign click: http://prosecuteuscrimesagainsthumanitynow.blogspot.com/ with a country by country history of US crimes. Studied history at CCNY, Columbia U., U. Puerto Rico, Dolmetscher Institut München, Germany;

Diplomatic attempts to solve the Syrian crisis have been rejected by both members of the Syrian government and the opposition. As Ankara laments bold rhetoric and militarizes its border with Syria, this article attempts to foresee three possible outcomes to the ongoing crisis.

From the start of the crisis in Syria, the possibility of open foreign military intervention has loomed uncomfortably over the series of diplomatic measures taken in an attempt to diffuse the situation. While earlier attempts to implement the Peace Plan have failed to materialize, Kofi Annan has proposed a new Syrian solution, mandating the creation of a transitional national unity government consisting of both representatives of Assad’s administration and members of the opposition, insinuating that Assad would not have a place in the new government [1]. Although Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov would categorically oppose the idea of foreign powers dictating the future of Syria, stating, “We will not support and cannot support any meddling from outside or any imposition of recipes. This also concerns the fate of the president of the country, Bashar al-Assad,” a recent meeting of the “Syrian Action Group” (excluding Riyadh, Tehran and Damascus) in Geneva saw world powers agree to a basic roadmap for a Syrian-led power transition.

On June 28, 2012, two large bomb explosions targeting a government building rocked Damascus, prompting President Assad to reassert the Syrian government’s duty to “annihilate terrorists in any corner of the country,” adding, “We will not accept any non-Syrian, non-national model, whether it comes from big countries or friendly countries. No one knows how to solve Syria’s problems as well as we do” [2]. In response to the meeting, both Syrian state media and opposition groups condemned the UN-brokered peace plan for the formation of a unity government, amid ceaseless violence across the country. Burhan Ghalioun, a senior member and former head of the opposition Syrian National Council, offered, “this is the worst international statement yet to emerge from talks on Syria”. Ghalioun would call the UN-backed transitional plan a “mockery,” insinuating that Syrians should not have to negotiate with “their executioner, who has not stopped killing, torturing… and raping women for 16 months” [3].

From the imposition of the ceasefire, the Syrian government would claim that rebel fighters regularly ignored the Kofi Annan Peace Plan by committing various ceasefire violations, employing the use of bombing, kidnapping, murder, and arson as corroborated by Reuters in their article, “Outgunned Syria rebels make shift to bombs,” confirming that rebels had adopted tactics of suicide bombing, car bombing and the use of roadside explosions [4]. While outside elements provided arms and assistance to the militant Syrian opposition in full violation of the proposed ceasefire, the mainstream media would disproportionately lay the blame on the Syrian government for failing to meet its obligations as it attempted to restore order. On June 21, 2012, The New York Times would confirm what alternative media outlets and numerous geopolitical analysts had been reporting since the first months of the uprising in 2011, that outside forces, including the American CIA, were supplying Syria’s rebels with weapons and material assistance from Southern Turkey. In their article, “C.I.A. Said to Aid in Steering Arms to Syrian Opposition,” the New York Times would state:

“A small number of C.I.A. officers are operating secretly in southern Turkey, helping allies decide which Syrian opposition fighters across the border will receive arms to fight the Syrian government, according to American officials and Arab intelligence officers. The weapons, including automatic rifles, rocket-propelled grenades, ammunition and some antitank weapons, are being funneled mostly across the Turkish border by way of a shadowy network of intermediaries including Syria’s Muslim Brotherhood and paid for by Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar, the officials said. The C.I.A. officers have been in southern Turkey for several weeks, in part to help keep weapons out of the hands of fighters allied with Al Qaeda or other terrorist groups, one senior American official said. The Obama administration has said it is not providing arms to the rebels, but it has also acknowledged that Syria’s neighbors would do so.

By helping to vet rebel groups, American intelligence operatives in Turkey hope to learn more about a growing, changing opposition network inside of Syria and to establish new ties. ‘C.I.A. officers are there and they are trying to make new sources and recruit people,’ said one Arab intelligence official who is briefed regularly by American counterparts. American officials and retired C.I.A. officials said the administration was also weighing additional assistance to rebels, like providing satellite imagery and other detailed intelligence on Syrian troop locations and movements. The administration is also considering whether to help the opposition set up a rudimentary intelligence service. But no decisions have been made on those measures or even more aggressive steps, like sending C.I.A. officers into Syria itself, they said” [5].

Undeniably, this confirms that the West, led by the US and its Gulf State proxies, has been undermining the Kofi Annan Peace Plan by arming insurgent fighters, particularly those of the Muslim Brotherhood, while concurrently berating the Syrian government for “violating” a UN mandated cease-fire and for “failing to protect” its population. The implications of these mainstream admissions of state sponsored terrorism and illicit arms smuggling cast shadows of doubt over any serious implementation of the Kofi Annan Peace Plan coming to fruition. The Brookings Institution, a US think-tank noted for its influence on American foreign policy, would release a publication in March 2012 titled, “Saving Syria: Assessing Options for Regime Change,” which called for using the UN-brokered ceasefire and the Kofi Annan Peace Plan to rearm the militant opposition to secure the toppling of the Syrian government in a bid to further Washington’s geopolitical objectives in the region [6]. Additionally, TIME Magazine’s June 25, 2012 article “A War on Two Fronts,” would describe how the US State Department budgeted over $72 million to train armed Syrian dissidents in encryption, hacking, and video production:

“Washington has said it will not actively support the Syrian opposition in its bid to oust Assad. Officially, the U.S. says it abides by the U.N process led by Kofi Annan and does not condone arms sales to opposition groups as long as there are U.N. Observers in Syria. Nevertheless, as U.S. officials have revealed to TIME, the Obama Administration has been providing media-technology training and support to Syrian dissidents by way of small nonprofits like the Institute for War & Peace Reporting and Freedom House. Viral videos of alleged atrocities, like the footage Abu Ghassan produced, have made Assad one of the most reviled men on the planet, helping turn the Arab League against him and embarrassing his few remaining allies almost daily. ‘If the [U.S.] government is involved in Syria, the government isn’t going to take direct responsibility for it,’ says Lawrence Lessig, director of Harvard’s Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics. ‘The tools that you deploy in Internet freedom interfere with tools deployed by an existing government, and that can be perceived as an act of aggression.’

The program actually began four years ago with a different target: China. In 2008, Michael Horowitz, a longtime religious-liberty advocate, went to his friend Representative Frank Wolf, a Virginia Republican, and suggested setting aside funds to help Falun Gong, a religious group that Beijing has labeled a dangerous cult. The money was supposed to help the dissident distribute software to jump China’s massive firewall and organize online as well as communicate freely with the outside world. Wolf succeeded in appropriating $15 million. But U.S. diplomats feared that move would derail relations with Beijing, and little money was spent. Then in 2009 – 10 Iranian protests and last year’s Arab Spring made Internet freedom a much more fashionable term in Washington. Congress soon forked over an additional $57 million to State to spend in the next three years. The money is spilt among three areas: education and training; anonymization, which masks users’ identities, usually through encryption; and circumvention technology, which allows users to overcome government censors so that their work – and that of repressive regimes – can be see worldwide.

An ongoing challenge is that the flow of software goes to both sides. The regime has imported technology from the U.S. to track people online. ‘A lot of these technologies can be used for great good,’ says Sascha Meinrath, who is leading the Internet-in-a-suitcase project, ‘but they are also a Faustian bargain.’ The Obama Administration last month issued an Executive Order imposing sanctions on any company helping Syrian or Iran commit human-rights abuses. Washington’s high-tech campaign will not dethrone Assad. But is has given Syrian dissidents a measure of confidence as they face the regime’s advantage in firepower. In the months since finishing his training, Abu Ghassan has shot dozens of videos. Asked whether his AK-47 or his video camera is the more powerful weapon, Abu Ghassan laughs. ‘My AK!’ he says. He pauses for a few seconds. ‘Actually if there is an Internet connection, my camera is more powerful’” [7].

TIME’s report reflects the seemingly limitless degree of outside interference in the Syrian conflict, with foreign entities attempting to meticulously cultivate and shape every dimension of the situation to the detriment of the legitimate government in Syria. TIME’s report also mentions the Obama administration’s executive order imposing sanctions on any company “helping Syria or Iran commit human-rights abuses.” Unsurprisingly, this would not include the American companies that sold the Syrian government the internet technology it uses to filter its internet services – the very services the US government has allotted substantial public funds towards to train dissidents to bypass. The downing of a Turkish F-4 jet in late June further enflamed the situation, prompting Turkish Prime Minister Recep Erdogan to vow “proportionate” retaliation for its downed jet, pledging “all possible support to liberate the Syrians from dictatorship” of Bashar al-Assad’s government by offering support for Syrian rebels, while warning that any Syrian troops approaching Turkish borders would be considered a threat and dealt with as a military target [8].

On June 27th, 2012, Turkey sent a heavily guarded convoy of 15 long-distance guns and other military vehicles to the Syrian border, amid belligerent threats of retaliation [9]. While the situation on the Turkish-Syrian border remains tense as Turkish officials deploy 30 anti-aircraft batteries, the Turkish Defense Procurement Agency has recently announced its plans to seek a $4 billion contract for a long-range air-defense missile system [10]. Documents released by The Brookings Institution and The Council on Foreign Relations indicate that Turkey is the nation elected to lead the charge against Assad if the situation continues to deteriorate, ostensibly to annex regions of northern Syria to establish a series of long proposed “humanitarian corridors,” from which Syria’s militant opposition fighters would base their operations [11]. In reflection of the current situation, several scenarios can be proposed in an attempt to foresee how the crisis can be either diffused, or further enflamed:

• Assad ignores UN calls for an interim government and attempts to quell the insurgency by force, reflecting the conduct of nations such as Algeria, who have successfully suppressed insurgents affiliated with AQIM. This course of action may work to further enflame the situation if outside forces increase their use of foreign mercenaries and continue to provide rebel fighters with more dangerous armaments, including chemical or biological weapons. If Syrian security forces were unable to immediately restore order and crush the insurgency, any authentic or manufactured atrocity or incursion into Turkish territory may be enough to tip the scale in favor of open military intervention (with or without the approval of the UNSC). If that occurred, the Turkish-Syrian border would see open exchanges of fire, with Ankara attempting to capture territory in northern Syria. Russia, Iran, and China would condemn Turkey and other allied NATO member states, with the potential of those nations opposed to regime change in Damascus offering military support to Assad. From that point, the potential for a wider regional conflict is plausible.

• Assad ignores UN calls for an interim government and succeeds in quelling the insurgency by force, causing rebel militants to disperse, surrender and take refuge in rural areas and neighboring countries. Syrian security forces would increase their operations and attempt to maintain order in population centers. The military would secure tense areas and some form of normality would resume, although bombings and other attacks could persist on a smaller scale. Assad would step up internal security, and be portrayed as an international pariah in the international media. Syria would continue suffering under heavy economic sanctions. If Assad continues to hold onto power, failing to deliver reforms and political pluralism, internal dissent could again become problematic, potentially shifting moderates to embrace factions of the opposition. Political turmoil would ensue, but the security situation could be stabilized if insurgent activity is successfully subdued.

• Assad accepts the interim government solution and submits his resignation, potentially encouraging insurgents to take advantage of the sensitive transitional period by increasing their operations against security forces, continuing the months of belligerent violence and killing. If insurgents pushed forward with their campaign and were able to maintain an upper hand amid political transition, rebels would attempt to capture territory in and around population centers. Armed gangs would persecute Assad loyalists, Alawites, Shi’a, and other religious minorities such as Christians and Druze if they successfully captured territory, reflecting the conduct of Libyan LIFG fighters toward ethnic minorities and loyalists. The interim government would struggle to maintain the security situation and likely be unable to implement coherent policy amid divisions in leadership. Political turmoil would ensue, and armed gangs could continue their campaign, amid increasing sectarian tensions.

Civilian casualties could inevitably result from all these potential scenarios, as an unintended consequence of infighting between Syrian security forces and militants in populated areas, or as an intentional act of sectarian belligerence as demonstrated by extremists in Houla and elsewhere. The ongoing perpetuation of violence in Syria is not attributable to the dominant media narrative of Assad “butchering his own people,” but to the calculated and meticulous formation of a violent Salafist-front, directed by foreign powers to overwhelm and topple the government of Syria. Journalist Seymour Hersh’s 2007 exposé published in the New Yorker titled, “The Redirection,” exposed a joint US-Israeli-Saudi operation to create a violent extremist Sunni-front to direct at the Shi’a leadership of Hezbollah in Lebanon, President Bashar al-Assad in Syria, and the Iranian government, using extremist forces with direct ties to Al Qaeda in proxy. The New Yorker would report the testimony of a former senior intelligence official and US government consultant:

“We are in a program to enhance the Sunni capability to resist Shiite influence, and we’re spreading the money around as much as we can,” the former senior intelligence official said. The problem was that such money “always gets in more pockets than you think it will,” he said. “In this process, we’re financing a lot of bad guys with some serious potential unintended consequences. We don’t have the ability to determine and get pay vouchers signed by the people we like and avoid the people we don’t like. It’s a very high-risk venture” [12].

While Kofi Annan’s original Peace Plan – if honestly implemented with both sides respecting the cease-fire – would have defused the situation, it is Annan and the member nations of NATO and the Gulf Cooperation Council that disproportionately laid the blame for increasing violence solely on the Syrian government, while those nations took every measure possible to further enflame the situation by providing material assistance to sectarian extremists. Considering the level of subversion and deceit demonstrated by foreign powers operating in Syria, Bashar al-Assad’s ambitions to crush sectarian fighters by force may well be warranted. As with many other Western-backed uprisings operating under the cover of “democratic” jargon, the use of violence, snipers, mercenaries, and other armed provocateurs is part of a long established pattern of national destabilization through the barrel of a gun. Undoubtedly, there will come a time when those responsible individuals answer for their crimes against the nation of Syria, and it’s people.

Notes

[1] Kofi Annan proposes Syria ‘unity government,’ Al Jazeera, June 28, 2012

[2] Annan ‘optimistic’ about Syria talks, Tehran Times, June 29, 2012

[3] Syria transition plan denounced by both sides, Al Jazeera, July 1, 2012

[4] Outgunned Syria rebels make shift to bombs, Reuters, April 30, 2012

[5] C.I.A. Said to Aid in Steering Arms to Syrian Opposition, The New York Times, June 21, 2012

[6] Saving Syria: Assessing Options for Regime Change, The Brookings Institution, March 2012

[7] Hillary’s Little Startup: How the U.S. Is Using Technology to Aid Syria’s Rebels, TIME Magazine, June 13, 2012

[8] Turkish PM vows to help ‘liberate Syria from dictatorship,’ Russia Today, June 26, 2012

[9] Ankara deploys military convoy to Syrian border: Turkish media, PressTV, June 28, 2012

[10] Missile shopping: Turkey to buy long-range missile system, Russia Today, June 29, 2012

[11] U.S.-Turkey Relations: A New Partnership, The Council on Foreign Relations, May 9, 2012

[12] The Redirection, The New Yorker, March 5, 2007

By Nile Bowie

Exclusive: Command centre in Turkey organising weapon supply to opposition

Free Syria Army fighters are to be paid by Saudi Arabia in an attempt to encourage pro-Assad troops to defect. Photograph: AFP/Getty Images

Saudi officials are preparing to pay the salaries of the Free Syria Army as a means of encouraging mass defections from the military and increasing pressure on the Assad regime, the Guardian has learned.

The move, which has been discussed between Riyadh and senior officials in the US and Arab world, is believed to be gaining momentum as a recent flush of weapons sent to rebel forces by Saudi Arabia and Qatar starts to make an impact on battlefields in Syria.

Officials in the Saudi capital embraced the idea when it was put to them by Arab officials in May, according to sources in three Arab states, around the same time that weapons started to flow across the southern Turkish border into the hands of Free Syria Army leaders.

Turkey has also allowed the establishment of a command centre in Istanbul which is co-ordinating supply lines in consultation with FSA leaders inside Syria. The centre is believed to be staffed by up to 22 people, most of them Syrian nationals.

The Guardian witnessed the transfer of weapons in early June near the Turkish frontier. Five men dressed in the style of Gulf Arabs arrived in a police station in the border village of Altima in Syria and finalised a transfer from the Turkish town of Reyhanli of around 50 boxes of rifles and ammunition, as well as a large shipment of medicines.

The men were treated with deference by local FSA leaders and were carrying large bundles of cash. They also received two prisoners held by rebels, who were allegedly members of the pro-regime militia, the Shabiha.

The influx of weapons has reinvigorated the insurrection in northern Syria, which less than six weeks ago was on the verge of being crushed.

The move to pay the guerrilla forces’ salaries is seen as a chance to capitalise on the sense of renewed confidence, as well as provide a strong incentive for soldiers and officers to defect. The value of the Syrian pound has fallen sharply in value since the anti-regime revolt started 16 months ago, leading to a dramatic fall in purchasing power.

The plan centres on paying the FSA in either US dollars or euros, meaning their salaries would be restored to their pre-revolution levels, or possibly increased.

The US senator Joe Lieberman, who is actively supporting the Syrian opposition, discussed the issue of FSA salaries during a recent trip to Lebanon and Saudi Arabia.

His spokesman, Whitney Phillips, said: “Senator Lieberman has called for the US to provide robust and comprehensive support to the armed Syrian opposition, in co-ordination with our partners in the Middle East and Europe. He has specifically called for the US to work with our partners to provide the armed Syrian opposition with weapons, training, tactical intelligence, secure communications and other forms of support to change the military balance of power inside Syria.

“Senator Lieberman also supports the idea of ensuring that the armed opposition fighters receive regular and sufficient pay, although he does not believe it is necessary for the United States to provide this funding itself directly.”

US defence secretary Leon Panetta said this week Washington was not playing a direct role in gun-running into northern Syria. “We made a decision not to provide lethal assistance at this point. I know others have made their own decisions.”

Earlier this week the New York Times reported the CIA was operating in southern Turkey, helping allies decide which opposition fighters would get weapons.

Diplomatic sources have told the Guardian two US intelligence officers were in Syria’s third city of Homs between December and early February, trying to establish command and control within rebel ranks.

Interviews with officials in three states reveal the influx of weapons – which includes kalashnikovs, rocket propelled grenades and anti-tank missiles – started in mid-May, when Saudi Arabia and Qatar finally moved on pledges they had made in February and March to arm rebel forces.

The officials, who insisted on anonymity, said the final agreement to move weapons from storage points inside Turkey into rebel hands was hard won, with Ankara first insisting on diplomatic cover from the Arab states and the US.

Turkey is understood to view the weapons supply lines as integral to the protection of its southern border, which is coming under increasing pressure as regime forces edge closer in an attempt to stop the gun-running and attack FSA units.

Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar were all allies of Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad until several months into the uprising, which now poses a serious threat to his family’s 42-year rule over the country.

All three states have become increasingly hostile as the revolt has continued, with Saudi Arabia in February describing the suggestion to arm rebel groups as an “excellent idea” and Qatar having offered exile to Assad and his family.

For the first few months of this year the three states were waiting for the US to take a proactive role in intervening in Syria, something Washington has so far not seriously considered.

With a presidential election later this year, and weighed down by the troubled legacy of Iraq, Barack Obama has shown no enthusiasm for a major foreign policy play. Polling in the US has consistently shown that voters have little appetite for intervention in Syria, while officials from Washington to London and Brussels have warned of grave risks to the region which may follow the fall of Damascus.

Assad continues to cast his regime’s battle for survival as an existential threat from radical Sunni Islamists, who he says are backed by foreign states.

The Free Syria Army says its members are almost exclusively Syrian nationalists who disavow the world view of jihadists who flocked to neighbouring Iraq from 2004-07. It acknowledges that some foreign Arab fighters have travelled to Syria to join its ranks, particularly in Homs and in Douma near Damascus, but claims they do not play a decisive role.

Intelligence officials say a power vacuum would provide an attractive environment for militants who espouse a global jihad world view. “The next three to six months are crucial in Syria,” one official said. “The ingredients are right for them [jihadists] to turn up and start acting decisively. That would not be a good outcome.”

By  in Beirut, Ewen MacAskill in Washington, John Densky in Idlib province

22 June 2012

@ The Guardian

Salil SARKAR

Phone (cell): +33 6 83 22 12 20

Skype ID: Salil SARKAR

Many people are concerned about wars being fought in various parts of the world. Others are motivated by images of poverty and starvation locally or in distant parts of the world. Increasing numbers of people are inclined to take action in response to the ongoing climate catastrophe. And for some people, the issue that concerns them is violence against women, or refugees, or nuclear power, or species extinctions, or the occupation of Palestine or Tibet, or …The list of issues is endless. And yet, something connects them all. They are all manifestations of human violence. But human violence, in itself, is not an issue about which groups campaign. That is, until now.

On 11 November 2011, a new movement to end human violence was launched around the world. Simultaneous launches took place in Australia, Malaysia, the Philippines and the USA. This worldwide movement, which invites individuals and organisations to sign a pledge to work to end human violence in all of its manifestations, has already attracted individual signatories in 40 countries and organizational endorsements in 15 countries.

‘The People’s Charter to Create a Nonviolent World’ was conceived and launched by three Australians – Anita McKone, Anahata Giri and myself – based on several decades of research and nonviolent action. Tired of all of the violence we have experienced, witnessed and resisted throughout our lives, we decided to prepare and launch the Nonviolence Charter worldwide.

So what is unique about ‘The People’s Charter to Create a Nonviolent World’? The Nonviolence Charter is an attempt to put the focus on human violence as the pre-eminent problem faced by our species, to truthfully identify all of the major manifestations of this violence, and to identify ways to tackle all of these manifestations of violence in a systematic and strategic manner. It is an attempt to put the focus on the fundamental cause – the violence we adults inflict on children – and to stress the

importance of dealing with that cause. (See ‘Why Violence?’ http://tinyurl.com/whyviolence) It is an attempt to focus on what you and I – that is, ordinary people – can do to end human violence and the

Nonviolence Charter invites us to pledge to make that effort. And it is an attempt to provide a focal point around which we can mobilise with a sense of shared commitment with people from all over the world.

In essence then, one aim of the Nonviolence Charter is to give every individual and organisation on planet Earth the chance to deeply consider where they stand on the fundamental issue of human violence. Will you publicly declare your commitment to work to end human violence? Or are you going to leave it to others? And what, precisely, do you want to do? And with whom? The Charter includes suggestions for action in a wide variety of areas; for example, by inviting people to participate in ‘The Flame Tree Project to Save Life on Earth’ – http://tinyurl.com/flametree – which is a simple yet comprehensive strategy for individuals and organisations to deal with the full range of environmental problems. It also provides an opportunity to identify and contact others, both locally and internationally, with whom we can work in locally relevant ways, whatever our preferred focus for action. In that sense, each participating individual and organization becomes part of a worldwide community working to end human violence for all time.

Since being initiated, the Nonviolence Charter has attracted considerable support from people in many countries and some of these have notable records of achievement for peace and justice already. Professor Chandra Muzaffar, Helen Ng and Nurul Haida Dzulkifli are key figures at the International Movement for a Just World (JUST) based in Malaysia, Dr Tess Ramiro heads Aksyon para sa Kapayapaan at Katarungan – Center for Active Non-Violence at the Pius XII Catholic Centre in the Philippines, and Tom Shea and Leonard Eiger have lengthy records as effective nonviolent activists, organisers and networkers at the Ground Zero Center for Nonviolent Action in the USA. Tom Shea co-organised the Charter launch in the USA

Other signatories include 1976 Nobel Peace Laureate Mairead Maguire, Nobel Peace Prize nominees such as nonviolent activists Kathy Kelly (USA), Father John Dear (USA) and Angie Zelter (UK); significant community leaders such as Ade Adenekan of the Pan-African Reconciliation Centre in Nigeria; the prominent human rights lawyer and consultant, Salma Yusuf, in Sri Lanka; religious figures such as Rev. Brian Burch of Canada and Rev. Nathaniel W. Pierce of the USA; prominent nonviolent activists like S. Brian Willson (USA); anti-war author/activist David Swanson (USA); as well as professors including Glenn D. Paige, founder of the Center for Global Nonkilling in the USA; Dietrich Fischer, Academic Director of the World Peace Academy in Switzerland; Raafat Misak, professor of desert geomorphology and head of the Kuwait Campaign to Ban Landmines in Kuwait; Mazin Qumsiyeh, Chairperson of the Palestinian Center for Rapprochment between People in Palestine; Bradley Olson and Marc Pilisuk of the Program on Violence, War, and their Alternatives with Psychologists for Social Responsibility in the USA; and Kevin P. Clements and Richard Jackson, Director and Director of Research respectively at the The National Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies at the University of Otago in New Zealand.

How long will this worldwide campaign take? It will undoubtedly take many years: ending human violence is no easy task. But the alternative – to tolerate human violence until we precipitate our own extinction is, surely, unthinkable. The Nonviolence Charter acknowledges our many differences, including the different issues on which we choose to work. But it also offers us a chance to see the unity of our overarching aim within this diversity. Hence, whatever our differences, we are given the chance to see that ending human violence is our compelling and unifying dream.

Would you like to consider joining the worldwide movement to end human violence? If so, you can read and, if you wish, sign ‘The People’s Charter to Create a Nonviolent World’ online at http://thepeoplesnonviolencecharter.wordpress.com

By Robert J. Burrowes

09 August, 2012

Countercurrents.org

Robert J. Burrowes has a lifetime commitment to understanding and ending human violence. He has done extensive research since 1966 in an effort to understand why human beings are violent and has been a nonviolent activist since 1981. He is the author of ‘The Strategy of Nonviolent Defense: A Gandhian Approach’, State University of New York Press, 1996. His email address is flametree@riseup.net and his personal website is at http://robertjburrowes.wordpress.com

In the 1980s, the U.S. government began funneling aid to mujahedeen rebels in Afghanistan as part of an American proxy war against the Soviet Union. It was, in the minds of America’s Cold War leaders, a rare chance to bloody the Soviets, to give them a taste of the sort of defeat the Vietnamese, with Soviet help, had inflicted on Washington the decade before. In 1989, after years of bloody combat, the Red Army did indeed limp out of Afghanistan in defeat. Since late 2001, the United States has been fighting its former Afghan proxies and their progeny. Now, after years of bloody combat, it’s the U.S. that’s looking to withdraw the bulk of its forces and once again employ proxies to secure its interests there.

From Asia and Africa to the Middle East and the Americas, the Obama administration is increasingly embracing a multifaceted, light-footprint brand of warfare. Gone, for the moment at least, are the days of full-scale invasions of the Eurasian mainland. Instead, Washington is now planning to rely ever more heavily on drones and special operations forces to fight scattered global enemies on the cheap. A centerpiece of this new American way of war is the outsourcing of fighting duties to local proxies around the world.

While the United States is currently engaged in just one outright proxy war, backing a multi-nation African force to battle Islamist militants in Somalia, it’s laying the groundwork for the extensive use of surrogate forces in the future, training “native” troops to carry out missions — up to and including outright warfare. With this in mind and under the auspices of the Pentagon and the State Department, U.S. military personnel now take part in near-constant joint exercises and training missions around the world aimed at fostering alliances, building coalitions, and whipping surrogate forces into shape to support U.S. national security objectives.

While using slightly different methods in different regions, the basic strategy is a global one in which the U.S. will train, equip, and advise indigenous forces — generally from poor, underdeveloped nations — to do the fighting (and dying) it doesn’t want to do. In the process, as small an American force as possible, including special forces operatives and air support, will be brought to bear to aid those surrogates. Like drones, proxy warfare appears to offer an easy solution to complex problems. But as Washington’s 30-year debacle in Afghanistan indicates, the ultimate costs may prove both unimaginable and unimaginably high.

Start with Afghanistan itself. For more than a decade, the U.S. and its coalition partners have been training Afghan security forces in the hopes that they would take over the war there, defending U.S. and allied interests as the American-led international force draws down. Yet despite an expenditure of almost $50 billion on bringing it up to speed, the Afghan National Army and other security forces have drastically underperformed any and all expectations, year after year.

One track of the U.S. plan has been a little-talked-about proxy army run by the CIA. For years, the Agency has trained and employed six clandestine militias that operate near the cities of Kandahar, Kabul, and Jalalabad as well as in Khost, Kunar, and Paktika provinces. Working with U.S. Special Forces and controlled by Americans, these “Counterterror Pursuit Teams” evidently operate free of any Afghan governmental supervision and have reportedly carried out cross-border raids into Pakistan, offering their American patrons a classic benefit of proxy warfare: plausible deniability.

This clandestine effort has also been supplemented by the creation of a massive, conventional indigenous security force. While officially under Afghan government control, these military and police forces are almost entirely dependent on the financial support of the U.S. and allied governments for their continued existence.

Today, the Afghan National Security Forces officially number more than 343,000, but only 7% of its army units and 9% of its police units are rated at the highest level of effectiveness. By contrast, even after more than a decade of large-scale Western aid, 95% of its recruits are still functionally illiterate.

Not surprisingly, this massive force, trained by high-priced private contractors, Western European militaries, and the United States, and backed by U.S. and coalition forces and their advanced weapons systems, has been unable to stamp out a lightly-armed, modest-sized, less-than-popular, rag-tag insurgency. One of the few tasks this proxy force seems skilled at is shooting American and allied forces, quite often their own trainers, in increasingly common “green-on-blue” attacks.

Adding insult to injury, this poor-performing, coalition-killing force is expensive. Bought and paid for by the United States and its coalition partners, it costs between $10 billion and $12 billion each year to sustain in a country whose gross domestic product is just $18 billion. Over the long term, such a situation is untenable.

Back to the Future

Utilizing foreign surrogates is nothing new. Since ancient times, empires and nation-states have employed foreign troops and indigenous forces to wage war or have backed them when it suited their policy aims. By the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the tactic had become de rigueur for colonial powers like the French who employed Senegalese, Moroccans, and other African forces in Indochina and elsewhere, and the British who regularly used Nepalese Gurkhas to wage counterinsurgencies in places ranging from Iraq and Malaya to Borneo.

By the time the United States began backing the mujahedeen in Afghanistan, it already had significant experience with proxy warfare and its perils. After World War II, the U.S. eagerly embraced foreign surrogates, generally in poor and underdeveloped countries, in the name of the Cold War. These efforts included the attempt to overthrow Fidel Castro via a proxy Cuban force that crashed and burned at the Bay of Pigs; the building of a Hmong army in Laos which ultimately lost to Communist forces there; and the bankrolling of a French war in Vietnam that failed in 1954 and then the creation of a massive army in South Vietnam that crumbled in 1975, to name just a few unsuccessful efforts.

A more recent proxy failure occurred in Iraq. For years after the 2003 invasion, American policy-makers uttered a standard mantra: “As Iraqis stand up, we will stand down.” Last year, those Iraqis basically walked off.

Between 2003 and 2011, the United States pumped tens of billions of dollars into “reconstructing” the country with around $20 billion of it going to build the Iraqi security forces. This mega-force of hundreds of thousands of soldiers and police was created from scratch to prop up the successors to the government that the United States overthrew. It was trained by and fought with the Americans and their coalition partners, but that all came to an end in December 2011.

Despite Obama administration efforts to base thousands or tens of thousands of troops in Iraq for years to come, the Iraqi government spurned Washington’s overtures and sent the U.S. military packing. Today, the Iraqi government supports the Assad regime in Syria, and has a warm and increasingly close relationship with long-time U.S. enemy Iran. According to Iran’s semiofficial Fars News Agency, the two countries have even discussed expanding their military ties.

African Shadow Wars

Despite a history of sinking billions into proxy armies that collapsed, walked away, or morphed into enemies, Washington is currently pursuing plans for proxy warfare across the globe, perhaps nowhere more aggressively than in Africa.

Under President Obama, operations in Africa have accelerated far beyond the more limited interventions of the Bush years. These include last year’s war in Libya; the expansion of a growing network of supply depots, small camps, and airfields; a regional drone campaign with missions run out of Djibouti, Ethiopia, and the Indian Ocean archipelago nation of Seychelles; a flotilla of 30 ships in that ocean supporting regional operations; a massive influx of cash for counterterrorism operations across East Africa; a possible old-fashioned air war, carried out on the sly in the region using manned aircraft; and a special ops expeditionary force (bolstered by State Department experts) dispatched to help capture or kill Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) leader Joseph Kony and his senior commanders. (This mission against Kony is seen by some experts as a cover for a developing proxy war between the U.S. and the Islamist government of Sudan — which is accused of helping to support the LRA — and Islamists more generally.) And this only begins to scratch the surface of Washington’s fast-expanding plans and activities in the region.

In Somalia, Washington has already involved itself in a multi-pronged military and CIA campaign against Islamist al-Shabaab militants that includes intelligence operations, training for Somali agents, a secret prison, helicopter attacks, and commando raids. Now, it is also backing a classic proxy war using African surrogates. The United States has become, as the Los Angeles Times put it recently, “the driving force behind the fighting in Somalia,” as it trains and equips African foot soldiers to battle Shabaab militants, so U.S. forces won’t have to. In a country where more than 90 Americans were killed and wounded in a 1993 debacle now known by the shorthand “Black Hawk Down,” today’s fighting and dying has been outsourced to African soldiers.

Earlier this year, for example, elite Force Recon Marines from the Special Purpose Marine Air Ground Task Force 12 (or, as a mouthful of an acronym, SPMAGTF-12) trained soldiers from the Uganda People’s Defense Force. It, in turn, supplies the majority of the troops to the African Union Mission in Somalia (AMISOM) currently protecting the U.S.-supported government in that country’s capital, Mogadishu.

This spring, Marines from SPMAGTF-12 also trained soldiers from the Burundi National Defense Force (BNDF), the second-largest contingent in Somalia. In April and May, members of Task Force Raptor, 3rd Squadron, 124th Cavalry Regiment of the Texas National Guard, took part in a separate training mission with the BNDF in Mudubugu, Burundi. SPMAGTF-12 has also sent its trainers to Djibouti, another nation involved in the Somali mission, to work with an elite army unit there.

At the same time, U.S. Army troops have taken part in training members of Sierra Leone’s military in preparation for their deployment to Somalia later this year. In June, U.S. Army Africa commander Major General David Hogg spoke encouragingly of the future of Sierra Leone’s forces in conjunction with another U.S. ally, Kenya, which invaded Somalia last fall (and just recently joined the African Union mission there). “You will join the Kenyan forces in southern Somalia to continue to push al Shabaab and other miscreants from Somalia so it can be free of tyranny and terrorism and all the evil that comes with it,” he said. “We know that you are ready and trained. You will be equipped and you will accomplish this mission with honor and dignity.”

Readying allied militaries for deployment to Somalia is, however, just a fraction of the story when it comes to training indigenous forces in Africa. This year, for example, Marines traveled to Liberia to focus on teaching riot-control techniques to that country’s military as part of what is otherwise a State Department-directed effort to rebuild its security forces.

In fact, Colonel Tom Davis of U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM) recently told TomDispatch that his command has held or has planned 14 major joint training exercises for 2012 and a similar number are scheduled for 2013. This year’s efforts include operations in Morocco, Cameroon, Gabon, Botswana, South Africa, Lesotho, Senegal, and Nigeria, including, for example, Western Accord 2012, a multilateral exercise involving the armed forces of Senegal, Burkina Faso, Guinea, Gambia, and France.

Even this, however, doesn’t encompass the full breadth of U.S. training and advising missions in Africa. “We… conduct some type of military training or military-to-military engagement or activity with nearly every country on the African continent,” wrote Davis.

Our American Proxies

Africa may, at present, be the prime location for the development of proxy warfare, American-style, but it’s hardly the only locale where the United States is training indigenous forces to aid U.S. foreign policy aims. This year, the Pentagon has also ramped up operations in Central and South America as well as the Caribbean.

In Honduras, for example, small teams of U.S. troops are working with local forces to escalate the drug war there. Working out of Forward Operating Base Mocoron and other remote camps, the U.S. military is supporting Honduran operations by way of the methods it honed in Iraq and Afghanistan. U.S. forces have also taken part in joint operations with Honduran troops as part of a training mission dubbed Beyond the Horizon 2012, while Green Berets have been assisting Honduran Special Operations forces in anti-smuggling operations. Additionally, an increasingly militarized Drug Enforcement Administration sent a Foreign-deployed Advisory Support Team, originally created to disrupt the poppy trade in Afghanistan, to aid Honduras’s Tactical Response Team, that country’s elite counternarcotics unit.

The militarization and foreign deployment of U.S. law enforcement operatives was also evident in Tradewinds 2012, a training exercise held in Barbados in June. There, members of the U.S. military and civilian law enforcement agencies joined with counterparts from Antigua and Barbuda, Bahamas, Barbados, Belize, Canada, Dominica, the Dominican Republic, Grenada, Guyana, Haiti, Jamaica, St. Kitts and Nevis, St. Lucia, St. Vincent and the Grenadines, and Suriname, as well as Trinidad and Tobago, to improve cooperation for “complex multinational security operations.”

Far less visible have been training efforts by U.S. Special Operations Forces in Guyana, Uruguay, and Paraguay. In June, special ops troops also took part in Fuerzas Comando, an eight-day “competition” in which the elite forces from 21 countries, including the Bahamas, Belize, Brazil, Canada, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Guyana, Honduras, Jamaica, Mexico, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Trinidad and Tobago, and Uruguay, faced-off in tests of physical fitness, marksmanship, and tactical capabilities.

This year, the U.S. military has also conducted training exercises in Guatemala, sponsored “partnership-building” missions in the Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Peru, and Panama, and reached an agreement to carry out 19 “activities” with the Colombian army over the next year, including joint military exercises.

The Proxy Pivot

Coverage of the Obama administration’s much-publicized strategic “pivot” to Asia has focused on the creation of yet more bases and new naval deployments to the region. The military (which has dropped the word pivot for “rebalancing”) is, however, also planning and carrying out numerous exercises and training missions with regional allies. In fact, the Navy and Marines alone already reportedly engage in more than 170 bilateral and multilateral exercises with Asia-Pacific nations each year.

One of the largest of these efforts took place in and around the Hawaiian Islands from late June through early August. Dubbed RIMPAC 2012, the exercise brought together more than 40 ships and submarines, more than 200 aircraft, and 25,000 personnel from 22 nations, including Australia, India, Indonesia, Japan, Malaysia, New Zealand, Philippines, Singapore, South Korea, Thailand, and Tonga.

Almost 7,000 American troops also joined around 3,400 Thai forces, as well as military personnel from Indonesia, Japan, Malaysia, Singapore, and South Korea as part of Cobra Gold 2012. In addition, U.S. Marines took part in Hamel 2012, a multinational training exercise involving members of the Australian and New Zealand militaries, while other American troops joined the Armed Forces of the Philippines for Exercise Balikatan.

The effects of the “pivot” are also evident in the fact that once neutralist India now holds more than 50 military exercises with the United States each year — more than any other country in the world. “Our partnership with India is a key part of our rebalance to the Asia-Pacific and, we believe, to the broader security and prosperity of the 21st century,” said Deputy Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter on a recent trip to the subcontinent. Just how broad is evident in the fact that India is taking part in America’s proxy effort in Somalia. In recent years, the Indian Navy has emerged as an “important contributor” to the international counter-piracy effort off that African country’s coast, according to Andrew Shapiro of the State Department’s Bureau of Political-Military Affairs.

Peace by Proxy

India’s neighbor Bangladesh offers a further window into U.S. efforts to build proxy forces to serve American interests.

Earlier this year, U.S. and Bangladeshi forces took part in an exercise focused on logistics, planning, and tactical training, codenamed Shanti Doot-3. The mission was notable in that it was part of a State Department program, supported and executed by the Pentagon, known as the Global Peace Operations Initiative (GPOI).

First implemented under George W. Bush, GPOI provides cash-strapped nations funds, equipment, logistical assistance and training to enable their militaries to become “peacekeepers” around the world. Under Bush, from the time the program was established in 2004 through 2008, more than $374 million was spent to train and equip foreign troops. Under President Obama, Congress has funded the program to the tune of $393 million, according to figures provided to TomDispatch by the State Department.

In a speech earlier this year, the State Department’s Andrew Shapiro told a Washington, D.C., audience that “GPOI is particularly focusing a great deal of its efforts to support the training and equipping of peacekeepers deploying to… Somalia” and had provided “tens of millions of dollars worth of equipment for countries deploying [there].” In a blog post he went into more detail, lauding U.S. efforts to train Djiboutian troops to serve as peacekeepers in Somalia and noting that the U.S. had also provided impoverished Djibouti with radar equipment and patrol boats for offshore activities. “Djibouti is also central to our efforts to combat piracy,” he wrote, “as it is on the front line of maritime threats including piracy in the Gulf of Aden and surrounding waters.”

Djibouti and Bangladesh are hardly unique. Under the auspices of the Global Peace Operations Initiative, the U.S. has partnered with 62 nations around the globe, according to statistics provided by the State Department. These proxies-in-training are, not surprisingly, some of the poorest nations in their respective regions, if not the entire planet. They include Benin, Ethiopia, Malawi, and Togo in Africa, Nepal and Pakistan in Asia, and Guatemala and Nicaragua in the Americas.

The Changing Face of Empire

With ongoing military operations in Asia, Africa, the Middle East and Latin America, the Obama administration has embraced a six-point program for light-footprint warfare relying heavily on special operations forces, drones, spies, civilian partners, cyber warfare, and proxy fighters. Of all the facets of this new way of war, the training and employment of proxies has generally been the least noticed, even though reliance on foreign forces is considered one of its prime selling points. As the State Department’s Andrew Shapiro put it in a speech earlier this year: “[T]he importance of these missions to the security of the United States is often little appreciated… To put it clearly: When these peacekeepers deploy it means that U.S. forces are less likely to be called on to intervene.” In other words, to put it even more clearly, more dead locals, fewer dead Americans.

The evidence for this conventional wisdom, however, is lacking. And failures to learn from history in this regard have been ruinous. The training, advising, and outfitting of a proxy force in Vietnam drew the United States deeper and deeper into that doomed conflict, leading to tens of thousands of dead Americans and millions of dead Vietnamese. Support for Afghan proxies during their decade-long battle against the Soviet Union led directly to the current disastrous decade-plus American War in Afghanistan.

Right now, the U.S. is once again training, advising, and conducting joint exercises all over the world with proxy war on its mind and the concept of “unintended consequences” nowhere in sight in Washington. Whether today’s proxies end up working for or against Washington’s interests or even become tomorrow’s enemies remains to be seen. But with so much training going on in so many destabilized regions, and so many proxy forces being armed in so many places, the chances of blowback grow greater by the day.

By Nick Turse

09 August, 2012

@ TomDispatch.com

Nick Turse is the associate editor of TomDispatch.com. An award-winning journalist, his work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, the Nation, and regularly at TomDispatch. He is the author/editor of several books, including the recently published Terminator Planet: The First History of Drone Warfare, 2001-2050 (with Tom Engelhardt). This piece is the latest article in his new series on the changing face of American empire, which is being underwritten by Lannan Foundation. You can follow him on Tumblr.

Copyright 2012 Nick Turse

Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood government has launched a crackdown after an armed raid at the Rafah checkpoint near the border with Gaza and Israel killed 16 Egyptian soldiers and wounded eight more. The action testifies to how closely the Brotherhood now works with Israel and the United States.

While both Egyptian and Israeli intelligence had been warned of an attack in Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula, Egyptian security forces apparently took no additional precautions. On Sunday evening, 35 masked gunmen launched an armed raid at Rafah. Several of the gunmen then seized two armoured vehicles and crossed into Israel. One of the vehicles exploded, apparently booby- trapped.

Israeli security forces, alerted by the Egyptian forces, then gave chase to the other, killing six men with aerial missiles. Most were found to be wearing explosive belts. Egyptian security forces killed and wounded a number of others who tried to escape into Gaza.

The raid follows an increasing number of attacks in the northern Sinai since the ouster of President Hosni Mubarak. There have been at least 15 attacks on the pipeline taking gas to Israel and Jordan, disrupting supplies. A few weeks ago, two Egyptian soldiers were killed.

Israeli intelligence chief Aviv Kochavi announced that the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) had stopped nearly a dozen recent attacks from the Sinai Peninsula.

Last August, Islamist militants crossed Egypt’s border into Eilat, in southern Israel, killing eight people, including two security personnel, and injured dozens more. Israeli forces chased the attackers across the border and kill at least seven people, including several Egyptian policemen.

Sinai’s 23,000 square miles is home to 600,000 Bedouin, many of whom are not registered as Egyptian citizens. Since the fall of Mubarak, some of the impoverished Bedouin tribes have begun to protest the tribal leaders and the Egyptian authorities. Others are believed to be making a good living through the smuggling of arms from Libya and Sudan for jihadist groups operating in the Sinai Peninsula, which is now awash with weaponry.

For some time, Israel has been ramping up the pressure on Egypt to mount a clamp down. A few weeks ago, Israel sent an official letter to the UN Security Council complaining about the security situation in Sinai. Last week, both Israel and the US warned their citizens not to travel to Sinai.

No group has claimed responsibility for the Rafah attack. Egyptian state TV said that the raid was carried out by foreign Islamic militants from a global jihad network with the help of Bedouins in the northern Sinai, who had entered from Egypt and Gaza.

Two leading officials in Fatah, the Palestinian ruling clique in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, accused its rival Hamas, which controls Gaza, of being responsible for the attack.

Hamas, a Palestinian offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood, accused Fatah of using the attack to create divisions between Egypt and Gaza. It denied any responsibility for the attack and, along with its Egyptian parent and Hezbollah in Lebanon, condemned it.

Hamas also condemned the Egyptian authorities for not taking pre-emptive action in the light of the warnings and also blamed Mossad, Israel’s intelligence agency, who they said were trying to undermine the Egyptian government and worsen relations between Egypt and Gaza.

In recent weeks, Egypt’s President Mohamed Mursi of the Brotherhood has received both Khaled Meshaal, the exiled Hamas leader who has left Damascus and is now living in Dubai, and Ismail Haniyeh, the Hamas prime minister in Gaza. He promised them that he would ease the tight restrictions at the Rafah crossing, the only one not under Israeli control. The tiny enclave of 1.7 million Palestinians has been blockaded by Israel for more than five years.

Aware of the deep anger of the Egyptian people at the role Mubarak played in sustaining the Israeli blockade, Mursi initially wanted to be seen as effecting some change in this regard.

Mursi responded to the raid on the Egyptian soldiers by calling it a “vicious attack” and vowed “those behind the attacks will pay a high price as well as those who have been co-operating with those attackers, be it those inside or anywhere in Egypt.”

He promised that the security forces would take “full control” over Sinai.

Additional pressure on Mursi was that he and Hisham Qandil, the newly installed prime minister, face accusations at home of involvement in the raid. Both attended the funeral prayers for the slain soldiers, where angry protestors chased Qandil, shouting, “You killed them you dogs” and chanted against the Brotherhood and Mursi. Neither man attended the military funeral on the advice of intelligence staff, who said they could not guarantee their safety.

Israel’s Defense Minister Ehud Barak said the raid should be a “wake up call” for Egypt and demanded that Cairo take action. “The militants’ attack methods again raise the need for determined Egyptian action to enforce security and prevent terror in the Sinai,” he said.

Sources at Egypt’s presidential palace told Egypt Independent that the palace had received calls expressing concern about the security vacuum in Sinai, including one that suggested that Israeli “constraint” in the event of any further attacks emanating from Sinai could not be guaranteed.

Cairo dutifully fell in line, with Mursi allying himself in a joint offensive with Egypt’s Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) and with Israel.

Mursi sent in the security forces to close down its border with Hamas-controlled Gaza, the only one not under Israeli control, completely isolating the Gaza enclave. Heavy machinery was sent in to seal entrances to tunnels–believed to number 1,000– used to smuggle goods, fuel and weapons into Gaza.

Military forces launched a massive security crackdown, raiding hundreds of homes in northern Sinai to search for suspects, arresting several people, and deploying helicopter gunships to search out militants in their desert hideouts. After a number of armed clashes, the military launched aerial attacks on towns and villages in northern Sinai, killing at least 20 people. This was the first time Egypt has fired missiles in Sinai since the 1973 war with Israel.

Hours later, Mursi sacked Egypt’s intelligence chief and the head of the North Sinai governorate. General Mohamed Murad Mowafi was quoted in the Egyptian media as confirming that the intelligence services had received warning of Sunday’s attack. He had apparently only passed the information on, saying that the intelligence services’ job was only to collect information. Mursi also dismissed the commander of the presidential guard and several other top security officials.

These actions were taken in close co-ordination with Israel, who agreed to the deployment of additional troops in Sinai over and above that set up in the 1978 and 1979 Camp David Accords. Danny Ayalon, Israel’s deputy foreign minister, said that Israel and Egypt would increase security cooperation.

By Jean Shaoul

09 August, 2012

@ WSWS.org

The neoconservatives are back with a vengeance. While popular uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen and other Arab countries had briefly rendered them irrelevant in the region, Western intervention in Libya signaled a new opportunity. Now Syria promises to usher a full return of neoconservatives into the Middle East fray.

“Washington must stop subcontracting Syria policy to the Turks, Saudis and Qataris. They are clearly part of the anti-Assad effort, but the United States cannot tolerate Syria becoming a proxy state for yet another regional power,” wrote Danielle Pletka, vice president of foreign and defense policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute (Washington Post, July 20).

Pletka, like many of her peers from neoconservative, pro-Israeli ‘think tanks’, should be a familiar name among Arab reporters, who are also well aware of the level of destruction brought to the Middle East as a result of neoconservative wisdom and policies. Rarely though are such infamous names evoked when the ongoing conflict in Syria is reported – as if the main powers responsible for redrawing the geopolitical maps of the region are suddenly insignificant.

Pletka was the biggest supporter of Ahmad Chalabi, the once exiled Iraqi, who she once described as “a trusted associate of the Central Intelligence Agency (and) the key player in a unsuccessful coup to overthrow Saddam Hussein” in the 1990s (LA Times, June 4, 2004). Chalabi led the Iraqi National Congress, which was falsely slated as an authentic Iraqi national initiative. Eventually, members of the council, composed mostly of Iraqi exiles with links to the CIA and other Western intelligences, managed to sway the pendulum their way, and Iraq was destroyed.

Although the destruction of an Arab country is not a moral issue as far as the neocons are concerned, the chaos and subsequent violence that followed the US war in 2003 made it impossible for warring ‘intellectuals’ to promote their ideas with the same language of old. Some reinvention was now necessary. Discredited organizations were shut down and new ones were hastily founded. One such platform was the Foreign Policy Initiative, which was founded by neoconservatives who cleverly reworded old slogans. Matt Duss, wrote in ThinkProgress.org about the Foreign Policy Initiative inaugural conference on Afghanistan in March 2009: “I was struck by how very little that was said was controversial,” he wrote. “And that’s really the point — in the wake of Iraq debacle, for which the neocons are widely and rightly held responsible, it simply won’t do to bang the drum for American military maximalism. One has to be a bit slicker than that. And these guys are nothing if not slick.”

Slick, indeed, as neoconservatives are now trying to weasel in their version of an endgame in Syria. Their efforts are extremely focused and well-coordinated, making impressive use of their direct ties with the Israeli lobby, major US media and Syrian leaders in exile. They are being referred to as ‘foreign policy experts’, although their ‘expertise’ is merely confined to their ability to destroy and remake countries to their own liking – and even these are unmitigated failures.

Writing in CNN online, Elise Labott reported on a recent neoconservative push to upgrade American involvement in Syria: “Foreign policy experts on Wednesday (August 1) urged the Obama administration to increase its support of the armed opposition.” The ‘experts’ included Andrew Tabler of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP), another pro-Israel conduit in Washington. It was established in 1985 as a research department for the influential Israeli lobby group, AIPAC, yet since then it managed to rebrand itself as an American organization concerned with advancing “a balanced and realistic understanding of American interests in the Middle East.”

Obama, of course, obliged under pressure from the ‘experts’. According to CNN, he signed a secret order “referred to as an intelligence ‘finding,’ allow[ing] for clandestine support by the CIA and other agencies.”

Still, the neocons want much more. The bloodbath in Syria has devastated not only Syrian society, it also brought to a halt the collective campaigns in Arab societies which called for democracy on their own terms. The protracted conflict in Syria, and the involvement of various regional players made it unbearable for the neoconservatives to hide behind their new brand and slowly plot a comeback. For them, it was now or never.

On July 31, AIPAC wrote all members of Congress urging them to sign on a bill introduced by Ileana Ros-Lehtinen and Howard Berman. Entitled ‘The Iran Threat Reduction and Syria Human Rights Act (H.R.1905)’, the bill, if passed, “will establish virtual state of war with Iran,” according to the Council for the National Interest. The old neoconservative wisdom arguing for an unavoidable link between Syria, Iran and their allies in the region is now being exploited to the maximum.

A few days earlier, on July 27, fifty-six leading ‘conservative foreign-policy experts’ had urged Obama to intervene directly in Syria. “Unless the United States takes the lead and acts, either individually or in concert with like-minded nations, thousands of additional Syrian civilians will likely die, and the emerging civil war in Syria will likely ignite wider instability in the Middle East.”

The timing of the letter, partly organized by the Foreign Policy Initiative, was hardly random. It was published one day before the first ‘Friends of Syria’ contact-group meeting in Tunisia, which suggests that it was aimed to help define the American agenda regarding Syria. Signatories included familiar names associated with the Iraq war narrative – Paul Bremer, Elizabeth Cheney, Eric Edelman, William Kristol, and, of course, Danielle Pletka.

With the absence of a clear US strategy regarding Syria, the ever-organized neoconservatives seem to be the only ones with a clear plan, however damaging. In her Washington Post piece, Pletka’s argument for intervention, bridging countries, peoples, sects and groups of all kinds – as if the Middle East is but a chess game governed by delusional but persistent ambitions. In one single paragraph, she made mention of Iran, Hezbollah, Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, terrorists aimed at destabilizing Iraq, “puppet governments in Beirut” and “Palestinian terror groups dedicated to Israel’s destruction.”

Yet, it is this sort of ‘political expertise’ that governed US foreign policy in the Middle East for nearly two decades. Now that the short respite is over, the neoconservatives are back with their bizarre maps, bleak visions, and a fail-proof recipe for perpetual conflict.

By Ramzy Baroud

09 August, 2012

Countercurrents.org

– Ramzy Baroud (www.ramzybaroud.net) is an internationally-syndicated columnist and the editor of PalestineChronicle.com. His latest book is My Father Was a Freedom Fighter: Gaza’s Untold Story (Pluto Press, London.)

There is a horrible speculation that the insurgents in Syria may have seized hold of chemical weapons.

Apart from the catastrophically unthinkable havoc the rebels can wreak in Syria and in the region with the WMDs, the rhetorical question which remains is how these weapons of mass destruction have fallen into the hands of the insurgents who are chiefly composed of Wahhabi al-Qaeda mercenaries of different nationalities including Afghans, Iraqis, Turkish, Yemenis, Jordanians, Pakistanis, and Saudis.

The situation in Syria is assuming Orwellian ramifications and the possibility to clearly understand or dissect the situation in the country is not an easy task.

In addition to the active role the Saudi-backed Wahhabis, CIA and some western intelligence organizations are playing in Syria , there is one entity, namely Israel which is stealthily espying every single development in Syria .

For the first time, an Israeli spy official clearly stated that Israel supports regime change in Syria and that it really demands an end to the government of President Bashar Assad.

“I hope it will happen, even though I don’t know when or how,” Intelligence Agencies Minister Dan Meridor said on Tuesday.

The top spy chief implicated why Assad should go and how it would damage the Islamic Republic of Iran.

“I am not going to try to calculate when Assad’s end will come, but when it happens, Iran ‘s biggest ally will be gone.”

Taking it for granted that Assad is doomed to go, he said, “I hope the new Syria will understand that joining Iran is a mistake that brings isolation from the Western world.”

Such a feeble perception of the Syrian situation is indicative of one who is either too optimistic or one who is well aware of what is going on behind the scene and that which is not visible to the ordinary people with no intelligence savvy.

Furthermore, Dan Meridor does not seem to understand that the situation in Israel is spiraling out of control with people protesting against social injustice almost on a daily basis. Since last month, four Israelis have set themselves ablaze from an extremity of despair.

On August 5, John McCain and Lindsey O. Graham, both Republicans, who represent Arizona and South Carolina in the Senate, respectively and Joseph I. Lieberman, an independent, who represents Connecticut in the Senate advised the US government to directly and openly provide assistance, including weapons, intelligence and training, to the insurgents in Syria as they claim President’s Assad’s ‘brutality’ is no longer to be tolerated.

“It is not too late for the United States to shift course. First, we can and should directly and openly provide robust assistance to the armed opposition, including weapons, intelligence and training. Whatever the risks of our doing so, they are far outweighed by the risks of continuing to sit on our hands, hoping for the best.”

Another part of this sabotage axis against Syria is Turkey which plays a very treacherous role in snowballing the Syrian crisis. Turkey has supplied the rebels with dozens of man-portable air defense systems (MANPADS).

According to NBC, the missile supplies might have been provided by Turkey , Saudi Kingdom and Qatar monarchy, the three countries which have made strenuous and costly efforts to overthrow the government of Bashar Assad.

In a press conference at the United Nations in New York City , a Syrian UN representative announced that Turkey shipped US-made Stinger anti-aircraft missiles to rebels via Turkey , saying that Turkey was pleased with Kofi Annan’s resignation because Ankara and Washington were initially opposed to his six point peace plan.

In fact, Turkey should be grateful to Syria what it has done for it in the past. It is acknowledged by many pundits that it was Bashar’s father Hafiz Assad who made peace between Turkey and the Kurds living on both sides of the country, thereby vaccinating Turkey for years against any attacks on the part of the Kurds.

The antagonistic policies of Turkey have left President Bashar Assad with no choice but to grant autonomy to the Kurds in Syria who can foment dilemma for the Ankara government and get Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan into hot water.

The ongoing Kurdish insurgency has reportedly claimed the lives of at least 48000 over the past two decades.

Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan is sharply aware of what a deep impact this decision can exercise on the security of Turkey .

He claimed the two groups had built a “structure in northern Syria ” that for Turkey means “a structure of terror.”

Turkey is making a tactical mistake by supporting terrorism in Syria and supplying them with weapons, military training and human resources. Turkey will certainly fall into the pitfall it has dug for Syria and the insecurity it envisages for Syria will ultimately recoil against the government itself.

As for Washington and NATO, they are making a selfsame mistake.

The two are fondling terrorism and extremism by throwing support behind the insurgents in Syria . They know that a popular uprising in the true sense of the word is not clearly discernible in Syria and that what has been taking place in Syria is a string of militancy and terrorist operations funded by the Saudis and the Qataris and some western countries who are waiting to reap the benefits of their atrocities in case Bashar Assad’s government collapses. Such a day, if it comes, will open a new chapter of horror in the Middle East with no end in sight.

The unfurling reality is that the hostile states and powers antagonizing Bashar Assad are gradually getting caught up in the labyrinthine Orwellian pitfall of their own folly and that they are consciously or unconsciously working in the best interests of the Zionist regime.

By Dr. Ismail Salami

09 August, 2012

Countercurrents.org

Dr. Ismail Salami is an Iranian writer, Middle East expert, Iranologist and lexicographer. He writes extensively on the US and Middle East issues and his articles have been translated into a number of languages.

Western and Gulf regime support for rebel fighters isn’t bringing freedom to Syrians but escalating sectarian conflict and war

Syrian women cooking in a school where they have taken refuge after fleeing their homes in the town of Kafr Hamra, six miles north of Aleppo. Photograph: Khalil Hamra/AP

The destruction of Syria is now in full flow. What began as a popular uprising 17 months ago is now an all-out civil war fuelled by regional and global powers that threatens to engulf the entire Middle East. As the battle for the ancient city of Aleppo grinds on and atrocities on both sides multiply, the danger of the conflict spilling over Syria’s borders is growing.

The defection by Syria’s prime minister is the most high-profile coup yet in a well-funded programme, though unlikely to signal any imminent regime collapse. But the capture of 48 Iranian pilgrims – or undercover Revolutionary Guards, depending who you believe – along with the increasing risk of a Turkish attack on Kurdish areas in Syria and an influx of jihadist fighters gives a taste of what is now at stake.

Driving the escalation of the conflict has been western and regional intervention. This isn’t Iraq, of course, with hundreds of thousands of troops on the ground, or Libya, with a devastating bombardment from the air. But the sharp increase in arms supplies, funding and technical support from the US, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Turkey and others in recent months has dramatically boosted the rebels’ fortunes, as well as the death toll.

Barack Obama has so far resisted the demands of liberal hawks and neoconservatives for a direct military assault. Instead he’s authorised more traditional forms of CIA covert military backing, Nicaragua-style, for the Syrian rebels.

The US, which backed its first Syrian coup in 1949, has long funded opposition groups. But earlier this year Obama gave a secret order authorising covert (as well as overt financial and diplomatic) support to the armed opposition. That includes CIA paramilitaries on the ground, “command and control” and communications assistance, and the funnelling of Gulf arms supplies to favoured Syrian groups across the Turkish border. After Russia and China blocked its last attempt to win UN backing for forced regime change last month, the US administration let it be known it would now step up support for the rebels and co-ordinate “transition” plans for Syria with Israel and Turkey.

“You’ll notice in the last couple of months, the opposition has been strengthened,” a senior US official told the New York Times last Friday. “Now we’re ready to accelerate that.” Not to be outdone, William Hague boasted that Britain was also increasing “non-lethal” support for the rebels. Autocratic Saudi Arabia and Qatar are providing the cash and weapons, as the western-backed Syrian National Council acknowledged this week, while Nato member Turkey has set up a logistics and training base for the Free Syrian Army in or near the Incirlik US air base.

For Syrians who want dignity and democracy in a free country, the rapidly mushrooming dependence of their uprising on foreign support is a disaster – even more than was the case in Libya. After all, it is now officials of the dictatorial and sectarian Saudi regime who choose which armed groups get funding, not Syrians. And it is intelligence officials from the US, which sponsors the Israeli occupation of Syrian territory and dictatorships across the region, who decide which rebel units get weapons.

Opposition activists insist they will maintain their autonomy, based on deep-rooted popular support. But the dynamic of external backing clearly risks turning groups dependent on it into instruments of their sponsors, rather than the people they seek to represent. Gulf funding has already sharpened religious sectarianism in the rebel camp, while reports of public alienation from rebel fighters in Aleppo this week testifies to the dangers of armed groups relying on outsiders instead of their own communities.

The Syrian regime is of course backed by Iran and Russia, as it has been for decades. But a better analogy for western and Gulf involvement in the Syrian insurrection would be Iranian and Russian sponsorship of an armed revolt in, say, Saudi Arabia. For the western media, which has largely reported the Syrian uprising as a one-dimensional fight for freedom, the now unavoidable evidence of rebel torture and prisoner executions– along with kidnappings by al-Qaida-style groups, who once again find themselves in alliance with the US – seems to have come as a bit of a shock.

In reality, the Syrian crisis always had multiple dimensions that crossed the region’s most sensitive fault lines. It was from the start a genuine uprising against an authoritarian regime. But it has also increasingly morphed into a sectarian conflict, in which the Alawite-dominated Assad government has been able to portray itself as the protector of minorities – Alawite, Christian and Kurdish – against a Sunni-dominated opposition tide.

The intervention of Saudi Arabia and other Gulf autocracies, which have tried to protect themselves from the wider Arab upheaval by playing the anti-Shia card, is transparently aimed at a sectarian, not a democratic, outcome. But it is the third dimension – Syria’s alliance with Tehran and Lebanon’s Shia resistance movement, Hezbollah – that has turned the Syrian struggle into a proxy war against Iran and a global conflict.

Many in the Syrian opposition would counter that they had no choice but to accept foreign support if they were to defend themselves against the regime’s brutality. But as the independent opposition leader Haytham Manna argues, the militarisation of the uprising weakened its popular and democratic base – while also dramatically increasing the death toll.

There is every chance the war could now spread outside Syria. Turkey, with a large Alawite population of its own as well as a long repressed Kurdish minority, claimed the right to intervene against Kurdish rebels in Syria after Damascus pulled its troops out of Kurdish towns. Clashes triggered by the Syrian war have intensified in Lebanon. If Syria were to fragment, the entire system of post-Ottoman Middle East states and borders could be thrown into question with it.

That could now happen regardless of how long Assad and his regime survive. But intervention in Syria is prolonging the conflict, rather than delivering a knockout blow. Only pressure for a negotiated settlement, which the west and its friends have so strenuously blocked, can now give Syrians the chance to determine their own future – and halt the country’s descent into darkness

Seumas Milne

guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 7 August 2012 22.20 BST

Armed Forces Take Control of Salah Eddin Neighborhood in Aleppo, Terrorists Crossing Border from Lebanon Repelled

Aug 08, 2012

PROVINCES, (SANA) – The Armed forces assumed full control of Salah Eddin neighborhood in Aleppo on Wednesday and inflicted heavy losses upon the armed terrorist groups there, killing and wounding a large number of their members.

An official source told SANA reported that a large number of terrorists were killed, some of them of Arab and foreign nationalities, and that tens of terrorists were arrested while others surrendered and turned in their weapons.

The source said that large amounts of weapons were seized from the terrorists, and that the armed forces are still pursuing vanquished terrorists in the neighborhood and Saif al-Dawla and al-Sukari areas to which some terrorists fled.

In Bustan al-Basha area, an armed forces unit confronted a terrorist group, killing and wounding many terrorists, while another armed forces unit clashed with terrorists in Bab al-Nasr area and inflicted heavy losses upon them.

An armed forces unit also carried out an operation targeting a large weapon storehouse used by terrorists in Mayer area, destroying it completely along with seven trucks full of weapons and ammo which militants were unloading. Many terrorists were wounded or killed in this operation.

Tens of Terrorists Killed, Cars Equipped with Machineguns Destroyed in Aleppo

In Aleppo, the authorities carried out a “qualitative operation” against the armed terrorist groups in the area of Aghiour roundabout and al-Sighn street in the city of Aleppo.

SANA reporter cited a source in the province as saying that the operation resulted in the death and injury of tens of terrorists and the destruction of 3 SUV cars equipped with DShk machineguns.

Three Pickup Trucks  Equipped with DShK machineguns in Bab al-Neirab neighborhood in Aleppo

Authorities pursued an armed terrorist group riding three pickup trucks equipped with DShK machineguns in Bab al-Neirab neighborhood in Aleppo.

A source in the province told SANA correspondent that the authorities destroyed the three cars and killed the terrorists.

Authorities Repel Terrorist Infiltration Attempt from Lebanon

The authorities and the border guards on Wednesday repelled two terrorist groups as they were attempting to cross the border from Lebanon at the sites of Edlin and al-Ghaideh in the Talkalakh city in the countryside of Homs.

A source in the province told SANA reporter that the authorities inflicted heavy losses on the terrorist groups’ members killing and injuring most of them while other managed to flee back into the Lebanese territories.

The source also mentioned that the authorities last night ambushed an armed terrorist group that had attacked citizens blocked roads in the area between the towns of al-Shayahat and al-Zirae’ in the countryside of al-Qseir city.

According to the source, 10 terrorists were killed while others were arrested.

Authorities Inflict Heavy Losses on Terrorist Group in Lattakia Countryside

The authorities pursued an armed terrorist group which had been carrying out armed robberies and opening fire on passing cars at Mazyan junction near al-Qasatel village in Lattakia countryside.

The authorities inflicted heavy losses on the terrorists, destroyed a number of cars they had been using, and secured the road.

Authorities Storm a Terrorist Hideout in Salma Town, Lattakia Countryside

Authorities stormed a terrorist hideout in Salma town in Lattakia countryside which was used as a media and command center by terrorists.

An official source in the province told SANA reporter that the operation resulted in killing a number of terrorists and arresting the rest.

Terrorists Killed, Four explosive devices Dismantled in Homs

Armed forces clashed with a terrorist group in Jouret al-Shayah in Homs, eliminating its members and leader, the terrorist Obeida al-Naq.

Military engineering units dismantled 4 explosive devices planted by terrorists along the road linking the town of al-Houz abd Modan in al-Qseir countryside in Homs.

SANA reporter quoted a source in the province as saying that four barrels filled with explosives weighing between 50 to 60 kg were linked to each other with a primer and a wire and they were prepared to blow up all at once.

Meanwhile in Homs countryside, the authorities ambushed an armed terrorist group in al-Qseir.

A source in the province told SANA correspondent that clashes between the authorities and the armed terrorist group led to killing and injuring several terrorists.

Syrian Journalists Organize Solidarity Stand, Condemn Terrorist Act against Syrian TV

Aug 09, 2012

DAMASCUS, (SANA) – In condemnation of the terrorism targeting the national media, journalists from various Syrian media outlets organized on Wednesday a solidarity stand outside the General Organization of Radio and TV building which was targeted by a sabotage act on the sixth of the current month.

Journalists waved placards condemning the terrorist acts targeting the national media and stressing that any attack against the media is a direct attack against the society.

In a statement to journalists, Minister of Information Omran al-Zoubi expressed appreciation of the wide participation of journalists in this solidarity stand which expresses the feelings of free people who reject the sabotage act which targeted the General Organization of Radio and TV building.

He added that the sabotage act is aimed at silencing the Syrian national media which is broadcasting the complete truth to the people.

The Minister pointed out that the Syrian leadership has decision supported by the Syrian people to restore security and stability to all Syrian territories.

on August 6, An explosive device exploded inside the the third floor of the building of the General Organization of the Radio and Television in Damascus and caused a number of injuries.

Al-Zoubi said there is a real external aggression on Syria, adding that field military hospitals are sent from France to Jordan and gunmen from different nationalities to Turkey and South Lebanon, and recruitment offices are opened for what they call ”Jihad” in Syria.

He added that the issue has never been about reforms or change, but has been directly linked with the others’ desire to deprive Syria of its regional and international role.

Head of the Syrian Journalists’ Union, Elias Murad, said that these terrorist acts are attempts to silence national media, hoping that the kidnapped journalists would return to their families safe and sound.

Murad said that the Syrian Journalists’ Union and the Arab Journalists’ Union condemn such illogical terrorist acts, adding that the Union has sent messages to the Arab Journalists’ Union and international organizations concerned to condemn these acts.

He added that the Syrian journalists will continue their work in national media that represents the Syrian society and is open to all opinions.

Director of the General Organization of Radio&TV, Ramez Torjoman, said that the crime committed against the Syrian TV was plotted by some Western countries and funded by Arab countries involved in the hostile project against Syria, in a desperate attempt to silence the truth.

”We vow to remain at the front lines in defense of Syria under the leadership of President Bashar al-Assad,” he added.

Director of the Syrian TV, Maan Saleh, said that the morale of TV workers are higher than ever, adding that they are determined to continue their work as it is well known that the Syrian government and people are targeted.

Director-General of the Syrian Arab News Agency (SANA), Ahmad Dawwa, said that the terrorist acts targeting the Syrian national media are attempts to deviate it from its national role, especially at a time when Syria is facing an all-out war, adding that terrorism won’t weaken the Syrian journalists and media. Dawwa added that there have been several attempts to hack SANA website from several Arab and foreign countries, including Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, Jordan, Israel, France, Belgium and Canada, adding that SANA has a qualified cadre that is capable of foiling these attempts.

Editor-in-Chief of al-Thawra newspaper, Ali al-Qasem said that the Syrian media has been a target for these armed terrorist groups as it succeeded in exposing lies and fabrications by satellite channels which became  proficient in shedding Syrian blood, in addition to revealing the schemes hatched to topple the Syrian state.

News anchor Ghadir Hassan from the Syrian al-Ikhbariya TV channel said that the response of the Syrian journalists to those killers is that they will continue their work despite the terrorists’ killing and kidnapping acts.

Political, social and cultural figures and youth groups participated in the sit-in. Director of Top News Media network, Former Lebanese MP Nasser Qandil said that the attack against the Syrian media came as an implementation of the Arab League political decisions and those taken on an internationallevel by countries which claimed to call for freedom and democracy.

Qandil said that Syria proved that it possesses an army qualified to face wars and showed that brain washing failed in destroying the Syrian people’s vision of their future and homeland. He added that they thought that Syrian media is dead and they were surprised at its strength and capability for confrontation.

The youth Shebli Roumiyeh, from Damascus voluntary youth team, said that the Syrian media is free and honest and these terrorist acts will not undermine its determination to convey the truth.

In Tartous, journalists and workers in the media institutions in the province staged a sit-in in front of Tishreen newspaper office in the province to condemn the terrorist attack which hit the building of the General Organization of Radio &TV on August 6th.

The participants stressed that the criminal sabotage acts which serve the West’s interests and schemes to fragment the region will consolidate the Syrians’ strength and steadfastness in the face of the conspiracy.

Head of Tishreen newspaper office in Tartous, Mohammad Omran said that targeting the Syrian media reflects the bankruptcy of the western powers in their war against Syria.

In Lattakia, journalists and workers in the media institutions denounced the terrorist attack against the Radio &TV Center in Damascus, stressing  their determination to reveal misleading claims circulated by satellite channels to shed Syrian blood.

They stressed that this terrorist act will not dissuade the Syrian journalists from performing their duties to overcome the attack launched by Arab and western powers to undermine Syria’s people, state and stance.

Chief of the Journalists Union branch in Lattakia and Tartous, Dawood Abbas, said that these terrorist acts aim at silencing the voice of truth and hiding the reality of events taking place. R. Raslan/M. Ismael/F.Allafi/al-Ibrahim

Turkey’s Republican People’s Party Leader: Erdogan Responsible for Situation in Syria

Aug 08, 2012

ANKARA, (SANA)_Leader of the Turkish Republican People’s Party, Kemal Kilicdaroglu, held the Turkish Prime Minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, responsible for the situation in Syria, urging him to respond to the accusations against his government of arming the opposition and sending gunmen to Syria.

Kilicdaroglu said that the Turkish people who waged the first national liberation war in the region cannot accept their government’s interference in the internal affairs of other countries, indicating that his party will hold Erdogan’s government responsible by the constitution even if he doesn’t attend the emergency meeting to discuss the situation in Syria and south east Turkey, where fighting rages between the Turkish army and the Kurdish Workers’ Party (PKK) members.

The Turkish authorities have denied media access to the area where the Turkish army is using F-16 warplanes and heavy artillery against the PKK members

Ahmadinejad: Only Way out of Crisis in Syria is Through Political Solutions Based on Syrian People’s Interests

Aug 08, 2012

TEHRAN, (SANA) – Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad stressed the need to resolve the crisis in Syria through political solutions based on the interests of the Syrian People.

During his meeting in Tehran on Wednesday with Special Envoy of the Pakistani President, Sughra Imam, Ahmadinejad criticized the interference of some regional countries in the Syrian countries which further complicates the situation.

He affirmed that earning people’s freedom and the right to vote isn’t achieved through war, and that the upcoming meetings of the foreign ministers in Tehran and of the leaders of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation in Mecca represent an opportunity to adopt political and local solution to the Syrian crisis rather than armed conflicts.

Salehi: Consultative Meeting on Syria will Discuss Ending Violence

Iranian Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Salehi said that the consultative meeting on Syria will be held on Thursday, attended by 12 or 13 countries from Asia, Africa and Latin America, adding that the number of participating countries might reach 15.

In a statement to the Iranian News Agency on Wednesday, Salehi said ”The main topic of Tehran meeting will be ending violence and national dialogue in Syria,” adding that Iran is focused on putting an end to violence as soon as possible and the importance of starting national dialogue.

On the 48 Iranian visitors kidnapped by armed terrorist groups in Syria, Salehi said that efforts are underway to release them.

Iranian Assistant Foreign Minister: Consultative Meeting in Tehran on Syria Aims to Help Syrian People Overcome the Crisis

Iranian Assistant Foreign Minister for Arab and African Affairs Hossein Amir Abdullahian said that the consultative meeting in Tehran on the situation in Syria aims to help the Syrian people overcome the current crisis.

Mehr News Agency quoted Abdullahian as saying that the meeting is due to be held in Tehran on Thursday, with the participation of a big number of influential Arab and regional countries.

”The participants in the meeting aim to stress rejection of violence as a means to settle disputes,” Abdullahian said, indicating that Tehran meeting will be held for enhancing regional and international efforts to help the Syrian people overcome the current crisis.

He said that the participants in the meeting believe that national dialogue is the best way to restore stability to Syria and pave the way for reaching a solution that is satisfactory to both sides.

Abdullahian said his country sees that the political solutions put forward by the UN envoy to Syria, Kofi Annan, pave the way for ending violence in Syria, adding that the meeting embodies the political will of the participating countries to solve the crisis peacefully.

Russian Defense Ministry Refutes News on Assassinating Russian General in Syria

Aug 08, 2012

MOSCOW, (SANA) – Russian Defense Ministry and a security source on Wednesday said that Gen. Vladimir Cugiev, claimed by Syrian opposition to have been Killed in Syria, is safe and sound and lives, since he retired, in Moscow with his family.

The Ministry described the allegation of the so-called ‘Syrian opposition’ as flagrant lies, adding that such reports are aimed at provoking the Russian military personnel.

In the same context, a source at the Russian security forces said that Cugiev had worked as a consultant to the Defense Minister but he has not visited Syria since his retirement in 2010.

Gen. Cugiev: I am Safe and Sound, Rumors Provoke My Homeland

For his part, Gen. Cugiev told Russia Today Channel that these rumors are not only personal provocations, but also provocations against his homeland.

He stressed that he is in good health, and he lives in Moscow , expressing resentment over the rumors of his killing which have frightened his friends and relatives who started to call him asking about his health.

Russian Embassy in Damascus Refutes News on Assassinating Russian General in Syria

The Russian Embassy in Syrian on Wednesday dismissed media reports alleging that a Russian General was assassinated in Syria.

Novosti News Agency quoted a diplomat at the Embassy as saying that these reports are baseless.

In the same context, a Russian security source said that the retired Gen. Cugiev, claimed by Syrian opposition to be Killed in Syria, is safe and sound in Moscow.

Archbishop Hanna: Syria will come out of the Crisis Victorious

Aug 08, 2012

Qunaitera, (SANA)- Archbishop THEODOSIOS Attalla Hanna, Archbishop of Sebastia of the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate of the occupied Jerusalem underlined that Syria will come out of the crisis victorious, and will remain the Arab compass as it represents history and civilization.

During a visit to the Occupied Syrian Majdal Shams town to congratulate on the release of prisoner Yousef Shams on Wednesday, Archbishop Hanna called on the Syrians to engage in a constructive dialogue to realize a solution that prevents the Homeland form destruction and chaos.

He reiterated the Palestinians and the occupied Golan citizens’ support to Syria, as leadership and people, to overcome this crisis.

The liberated prisoner Yousef Shams and Sheikh Naseeb Farhat appreciated the support of Archbishop Hanna and the Palestinian people for Syria, stressing that the citizens of Golan will remain the faithful soldiers for the Homeland in the face of foreign plots.

Iranian Foreign Ministry Denies News on Connection between Kidnapped Iranian Visitors in Syria and Iran’s Revolution Guards

Aug 08, 2012

TEHRAN, (SANA) – Senior source at the Iranian Foreign Ministry denied news that claim connection between the Iranian visitors kidnapped by the armed terrorist groups in Syria and the Iranian Revolution Guards.

The source dismissed news on the killing of a number of the kidnapped Iranian visitors as completely baseless.

In the same context, Iranian Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Salehi called for exerting more efforts to release the kidnapped Iranians in Syria and Libya.

In a letter addressing the UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, Salehi drew attention to the abduction of 48 Iranian visitors by terrorist gangs, which call themselves “the free army”, on Damascus International Airport road.

Salehi added that unknown gunmen kidnapped 7 members of Iranian Red Crescent visiting Benghazi upon invitation from the Libyan Red Crescent on July 31st.

He expressed the concerns of the Iranian government and families of the kidnapped over the health and security conditions of the Iranian nationals.

He called upon the UN Secretary General to cooperate to release the kidnapped Iranians, considering that the use of these people as human shield violates all international conventions and the human rights.

Iranian Official Affirms that All the Iranians Abducted in Syria are Alive

Director of the Middle East Department at the Iranian Foreign Ministry, Mojtaba Ferdoussipour, affirmed that all the Iranian hostages abducted in Syria are alive, and that Tehran is working to release them.

Ferdoussipour told al-Alam TV that communiqués regarding the fate of the hostages confirm that they are all alive and that there is nothing to confirm that any of them died, saying that news being reported in this regard are incorrect and inaccurate.

He said that intense efforts are being made by countries involved to release them and return them to Iran and that Iran began making contact to this end since the abduction took place, which includes exchange of letters with the US administration, in addition to the visit of Iranian Foreign Minister to Turkey and his meeting with his Turkish counterpart .

He added that due to the relation between the armed groups in Syria and Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkey, Iran demands that these countries exert efforts to release the abductees.

Syria, China Review Boosting Electrical Cooperation

Aug 08, 2012

DAMASCUS, (SANA) – Minister of Electricity Imad Khamis reviewed with the Chinese Ambassador in Damascus Zhang Xun means of boosting future electrical cooperation between Syria and China.

The two sides discussed standing cooperation projects, contracts and memos of understanding with a number of Chinese companies in the field of electricity generating, importing electrical equipment and enhancing electrical system in Syria.

Minister Khamis and the Chinese ambassador discussed the two sides’ vision to enhance bilateral cooperation and overcome potential difficulties.

The minister expressed the Syrian government’s desire to boost cooperation in electricity and renewable energy investment projects.

Minister Khamis called for finding a mechanism to communicate with Chinese companies to present their bids for establishing investment projects in Syria.

For his part, Ambassador Zhang Xun stressed the deep Syrian-Chinese relations, particularly in the field of electricity, adding that the Export-Import Bank of China, the main funder of the Chinese economic investments and projects, is studying possibility of investment in renewable energy in Syria.

He reiterated China’s commitment to contracts signed between the two countries and following up on implementing projects in Syria.

The ambassador added that the Embassy is organizing a visit for businessmen and companies specialized in electrical energy to Syria to discuss available investment opportunities and enhancing bilateral cooperation

Primakov: Russia’s Position on Syrian Crisis is Moral

Aug 08, 2012

MOSCOW, (SANA) – Veteran Russian politician Yevgeny Primakov said that Russia’s position regarding the crisis in Syria is a moral one, the essence of which is preserving the lives of millions and guaranteeing the stability of an important region, warning than any external interference in Syria’s internal affairs will increase violence.

In an interview with Russkaya Gazeta  newspaper, Primakov said that Russia’s position is based on political interests and gains and that this position is the only valid one in this situation.

He also affirmed that external forces are taking part in the events by supporting the armed opposition and facilitating the entry of mercenaries and training and arming them to fight the Syrian state, noting that Saudi Arabia and Qatar are funding militants while Turkey provides them with great support.

Primakov said that the orders given by US President Barack Obama to the CIA to support the Syrian opposition is blatant interference in the internal affairs of a sovereign country that poses no threat in any way to the United States or other countries.

He said that the west’s claims of supporting the Syrian opposition because of its desire to achieve democracy and stability in the region are completely false, because the toppling of the Syrian state will not result in democracy nor stability, adding that Al Qaeda’s involvement in the events in Syria alongside the opposition reveals the west’s intentions towards Syria.