A Mediterranean Battlefield - Syria

[Magda Hassan]

Check. The Russians saw the next obvious board move and planned ahead.

Next move Uncle & Israel?

Gen Idriss made an emotional appeal to Western powers on the BBC World Service's Newshour programme, saying: "We are dying. Please come and help us."
He appealed for more weapons "to defend our citizens".


Gen Salim Idriss makes an appeal on the BBC's World Service: "We are dying, we are suffering, many, many people are now waiting to be killed"

Gen Idriss said the FSA was fielding fewer than 1,500 fighters in the fight for Qusair, armed only with light weapons.
More than 50,000 residents were trapped in the town and a "massacre" would occur if it fell, he added.

Guess those 50,000 residents just don't want to join the FSA do they? Assad regime would be all over if they did. So much for the popular uprising....The 1,500 fighters are all probably imported disposable mercenaries.

[Magda Hassan]

Not everyone in the US military is so keen for another war it seems

Pentagon pushes back against Syria no-fly zone report

By Jeremy Herb - 05/28/13 05:09 PM ET


The Pentagon is pushing back against a report that the White House has asked the Pentagon this month to draw up plans for a no-fly zone inside Syria.
Pentagon press secretary George Little said in a statement there "is no new military planning effort underway with regard to Syria."
"The Joint Staff, along with the relevant combatant commanders, continue to conduct prudent planning for a range of possible military options," Little said.
The Pentagon statement came after The Daily Beast reportedTuesday that the White House had asked the military to plan for a no-fly zoneahead of Secretary of State John Kerry's trip last week to the Middle East.








"The White House is still in contemplation mode but theplanning is moving forward and it's more advanced than it's ever been," anunnamed administration official told The Daily Beast.Pentagon officials have said they are providing a range ofoptions to the White House on Syria that would be ready to be carried out ifPresident Obama decided to move forward with them.
Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel has said the administration isre-considering whether to provide arms to the Syrian opposition, but thus farthe Obama administration has resisted calls for further steps, includingcreating a no-fly zone.


Read more: http://thehill.com/blogs/defcon-hill/ope...z2UmAlHUKY

[Magda Hassan]

Noticed the UN has black listed Al Nushra today. About time. http://www.aljazeera.com/news/americas/2...99298.html

Were American Nicole Lynn Mansfield and a British Man Part of a "Gladio" Style Stay Behind Terrorist Force in Syria?

Posted on May 31, 2013 by willyloman
by Scott Creighton

"A car containing 3 members of Al-Nushra, a British citizen, an American woman and another foreign national of unknown origin was struck by a Syrian Rocket. Nicole Lynn Mansfield of Flint Michigan was killed. Also in the car was weapons, computers and maps of military positions." Gateway Pundit

Isn't that special. Americans and Brits are being called martyrs by al-Nusra when they die fighting alongside the terrorist organization. At least that's what an NBC News correspondent in England says. My, has the worm turned.

Keir Simmons @KeirSimmons

American woman and British man martyred in Syria' according to militant jihadist group Jabhat al-Nusra.
2:28 PM 30 May 2013

SANA news agency out of Syria was first to report that an American, Nicole Lynn Mansfield, has been killed in Idlib while fighting alongside our State Department's mercenary terrorists. According to reports, she was killed with a British national who was also apparently a merc as well.
Were they part of a new Gladio type operation in Syria? Were they "stay behind" terrorists, there conceal themselves in the general population in order to continue the terrorist destabilization campaign on a slightly smaller scale? Were they employed directly by the State Department to this end? And did she ultimately take this job because her employment options in Flint were next to none?

"The American government has not directly confirmed that Mansfield was killed in Syria, but her mother and cousin told the Detroit Free Press that the FBI did indeed confirm the news to them on Thursday afternoon.
Her cousin, David Speelman of Flint, told The Associated Press that FBI agents visited family members Thursday and informed them of Mansfield's death" JDLC

CBS News reports that the State Department is going to have to provide final confirmation of her death and that they are having to go through Czech Republic to get it.

"When last contacted by CBS News, Speelman said the FBI had reports that her niece was killed in Syria, but that official confirmation of her death would have to come from the State Department. The State Department has said it is aware of the reports and is working with the Czech Republic mission to obtain more information. With no diplomatic staff in Syria, the U.S. works through the Czech Republic on diplomatic matters." CBS News

The State Department is working through the Czech Republic mission in Syria? That's too bad. If the State Department still practiced diplomacy these days instead of just blackmail and terrorism, they wouldn't have to do that, would they?
The city she where she was killed used to be a stronghold of our mercenaries but recently it and several others were retaken by the Syrian army. A stay behind force, much like those created after WWII under the Gladio program, remained hiding in the shadows of the city, setting off car bombs and other terrorist attacks when they could.

"Idlib is a city in northwestern Syria. Idlib had been an opposition stronghold during the Syrian civil war against the government of Bashar al- Assad. The city and nearby town have been targeted for hosting large numbers of armed groups such as the Free Syrian Army and other opponents of the government. In March, Syria's armed forces began shelling parts of Idlib and on the 13th, the government captured the city following a three-day operation.Many security buildings in the center of Idlib have become targets of many car bombs placed by anti- government groups…
… SANA reported that the three were killed after they were found "snooping" around a military base. Field sources told Syrian TV news that the three foreigners were near a military base and that one of them "threw a grenade"which prompted protective sources to open fire.
… The soldiers reportedly found drawings of security installations in the area as well as firearms and a laptop" Heavy

It would certainly fit the pattern of these NATO imperialists. Rather than concede defeat they set up what basically amounts to terror cells in Syria striking at soft targets in order to maintain the effort and the body count until NATO can start the bombing campaign.
According to reports, Mansfield is yet another "Muslim convert". Go figure yet another convert ends up fighting alongside terrorists in a country we are trying to destabilize. Anyone else see a pattern developing here?
And there is another pattern.
It just so happens that Mansfield is from Flint, Michigan, one of the hardest hit cities in the engineered financial collapse of 2008. The crappy little apartment she had was just served an eviction notice. Apparently she had been subletting illegally while she was off on her new job.
Abject poverty breeds a very special kind of desperation. Whether or not she actually believed in her new religion or not is beside the point. Chicken hawks always flock to desperate people whether they are LEOs looking to cultivate a snitch in order to entrap dupes in honeypot schemes or whether they are looking to offer a few thousand bucks and a way out to hopelessly poor "converted Muslims", it's all pretty much the same. The economic crisis they created also creates other opportunities for the strong to feed on the weak.

"She had a heart of gold, but she was weak-minded," her grandmother said. "I think she could have been brainwashed." Foreign Policy

Another dupe like the half-wits the FBI seeks out for their annual "we saved you from the terrorists" show?
If this young woman, Nicole Lynn Mansfield, got tangled up with the wrong headhunters, you almost have to feel sorry for her. Almost. The fact is, she was willing to go abroad and wage terrorist attacks in a new Syrian Gladio operation. And poverty doesn't excuse that. Desperate people will do desperate things, but moral people will not.
Over at Foreign Policy, they just can't seem to wrap their heads around this one:

"…the central question being asked about her today: Why would she suddenly leave the United States to join the Syrian revolt? To solve that mystery, we're going to need more than a scattered set of photographs."Foreign Policy

It's only a big mystery if you avoid considering the obvious and our history since WWII. Otherwise, it's pretty obvious.

http://willyloman.wordpress.com/2013/05/...more-25354

[Bill Kelly]

[URL="http://remembertheintrepid.blogspot.com/2013/05/who-killed-chris-stevens-and-why-it.html"]

Remember the Intrepid: Who Killed Chris Stevens and Why It Doesn't Matter[/URL]

[Magda Hassan]

Syrian Opposition Fighters Arrested with Chemical Weapons

By Bill Van Auken

June 01, 2013 "Information Clearing House" - In a series of raids in the capital of Istanbul and in the southern provinces of Mersin, Adana and Hatay near the Syrian border, Turkish police rounded up 12 members of Syria's Al Qaeda-affiliated Al Nusra Front along with chemical weapons materials.

The Turkish media initially reported that police recovered four and a half pounds of sarin, the deadly nerve gas which had earlier been linked to chemical weapons attacks inside Syria.

While widely reported in the Turkish press, the arrests Wednesday have been virtually blacked out by the corporate media in the US. Newspapers like the New York Times, which have openly promoted a US intervention in Syria, citing alleged chemical weapons use by the regime of Bashar al-Assad as a pretext, have posted not a word about the raids in Turkey.

The daily newspaper Zaman reported that "the al-Nusra members had been planning a bomb attack for Thursday in [the Turkish city of] Adana but that the attack was averted when the police caught the suspects. Along with the sarin gas, the police seized a number of handguns, grenades, bullets and documents during their search."

The city of Adana, approximately 60 miles from the Syrian border, has a sizable Alawite Arab population that is sympathetic to the Syrian government and hostile to the Sunni Islamist forces that have waged the US-backed war for regime change on the ground in Syria.

The Al Nusra Front, which has formally declared its allegiance to Al Qaeda, was declared a foreign terrorist organization by the US State Department last December. The United Nations Security Council added the group to the body's Al Qaeda sanctions blacklist Friday.

The Syrian government had requested that the group be subjected to sanctions as a terrorist organization last month, but the action was initially blocked by Britain and France. Finally, an agreement was reached to declare Al Nusra an alias for Al Qaeda in Iraq.

The Al Nusra Front has been universally acknowledged as the most effective fighting force of the so-called rebels seeking the Assad government's overthrow. Both Britain and France recently succeeded in overturning a European Union ban on arms exports to Syria, clearing the way for them to ship weapons to the "rebels."

None of the arrested suspects have been identified. Turkish media reported that five of them were released late Thursday, and seven are still being held for questioning. The government of Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, which has provided extensive material support for the Syrian opposition, has given no public explanation of the police actions.

Adana provincial governor Huseyin Avni Cos denied on Thursday that sarin had been recovered in the raids but did allow that unknown chemicals had been found and were being analyzed.

The arrests come little more than two weeks after twin terrorist car bombings claimed the lives of 52 people in the Turkish city of Reyhanli in southern Hatay province near the border with Syria. The Erdogan government seized upon the incident to blame the Syrian government and call for international intervention to topple Assad. It simultaneously imposed an unprecedented gag order on the Turkish press to prevent reporting on the extensive evidence that the attacks were the work of Syrian opposition groups, which use Reyhanli as a supply base and who have free movement across the Turkish-Syrian border.

Subsequently, authorities arrested an army private on charges of "crimes against the state" for allegedly leaking top secret cables that indicated the government's prior knowledge that the bombings were being planned by the Al Qaeda-linked forces in Syria. RedHack, the Turkish hacker group which made the cables public last week, denied that it had any contact with the arrested private, who was identified as Utku Kali.

The Adana daily Taraf reported Thursday that police are mounting road blocks and conducting searches in the area for a vehicle loaded with explosives that is believed to have been sent to the area by the US-backed anti-Assad forces.

The discovery of sarin or some other lethal chemical weapons materials in the hands of Al Nusra Front operatives in Turkey prompted calls by Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov for an immediate investigation. He condemned the continuing failure to send a United Nations inspection team to Syria to investigate a chemical weapons incident last March outside of the city of Aleppo.

"We are highly disappointed that because of the political games, the UN Secretariat failed to respond to that request swiftly," Lavrov told reporters.

These "political games" refer to demands by Washington and its allies that any UN team be given carte blanche to inspect any and all Syrian facilities and interrogate anyone it chooses, along the lines of the inspection regime created in Iraq in the run-up to the US invasion of 2003.

The Assad government has charged that the March attack, which killed 26 people, 16 of them government soldiers, was carried out by the Western-backed forces.

The Obama administration has repeatedly declared the use of chemical weapons by the Syrian government to be a "red line" or "game changer" that would trigger unspecified US intervention. At the same time, Washington and its European NATO allies have turned a blind eye to evidence of chemical weapons use by the Islamist militias.

There have been repeated claims by the Syrian opposition groups, as well as by the British and French governments, of chemical weapons use by the regime. Last month, however, Carla del Ponte, a leading member of the UN commission of inquiry on Syria, stated that the bulk of the evidence indicated chemical weapons use by the rebels.

The latest development in Turkey suggests that the Western-backed Islamist militias were preparing to launch another chemical weapons attack, apparently against a Turkish civilian population, with the aim of producing mass casualties that would be blamed on the Syrian regime and create the conditions for a US-led intervention.

The silence of the US media on the incident only demonstrates that it is prepared to play the same role that it did in Iraq, working to sell a war based upon lies to the American public. The experience of the past decade of unending war, however, has made this task more difficult.

A Gallup poll released on Friday found that more than two out of three Americans (68 percent) oppose any US military intervention in Syria if "diplomatic efforts fail to end the civil war in Syria."

Copyright © 1998-2013 World Socialist Web Site - All rights reserved

Iraq Smashes Al Qaeda 'Poison Gas Cell': Mohamed al Askari, spokesman for Iraq's defence ministry, said five suspects had been detained over the construction of two facilities in the capital to produce sarin and mustard gas, using instructions from another al Qaeda group.
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info...e35150.htm

See also this for the same thing in Iraq...just over the border.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-22742201

[David Guyatt]

Your move...

3 June 2013 Last updated at 22:27 ET

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Syria conflict: US may leave F-16s and missiles in Jordan

Nato states sent Patriot missile batteries to Turkey earlier this year
Continue reading the main story

Syria conflict

• Massacre 'proof'
  
• Qusair's importance
  
• Chemical attacks
  
• 'Chemical attack' town
  

The US says it will send a Patriot missile battery and F-16 fighters to Jordan for military exercises and might keep them there to help deal with the threat from the conflict in Syria.
A US official said the arms may be kept there in light of "escalating violence along Jordan's borders".
Secretary of State John Kerry said Syria was at risk of "total implosion".
Meanwhile, the UN is due to publish its latest report into human rights violations in Syria.
The report, the fifth of its kind, is widely expected to contain more evidence of atrocities amounting to war crimes and crimes against humanity.
It comes amid diplomatic efforts, led by the US and Russia, to organise peace talks later this month. So far diplomats have been unable to set a date for the meeting.
'Late'US Department of State spokeswoman Jen Psaki said no decision had yet been made over whether to keep the missile launcher and F-16s in Jordan.
"Given our strong alliance with Jordan and in light of circumstances in the region and escalating violence along Jordan's borders, if requested some [weapons] may remain beyond the conclusion of the exercise to assist the Jordanian armed forces," she said.
It was not clear how many F-16s would be sent. Nato already positioned Patriot missile batteries near Turkey's border with Syria earlier this year.
The batteries are designed to intercept Scud missiles, but could also potentially be employed to enforce a no-fly zone.
US President Barack Obama's administration has been coming under pressure at home and abroad to take more forceful action over Syria.
Speaking of the attempt to organise a peace conference, Mr Kerry said: "This is a very difficult process, which we come to late.
"We are trying to prevent the sectarian violence from dragging Syria down into a complete and total implosion where it has broken up into enclaves and the institutions of the state have been destroyed," he said.
The conference aims to bring representatives of the government and rebel groups together to negotiate over a plan published last year that provides for a ceasefire and a transitional government.
Mr Kerry said the conference was dependent on "events on the ground and the participants themselves".
"The Unites States can push and cajole... but in the end, the people on the ground, are going to have to decide that that's something they are prepared to engage in," he said.
At least 80,000 people have been killed and 1.5 million have fled Syria since the uprising against President Bashar al-Assad's government began in 2011.

[Jan Klimkowski]

Fixed the quote:

Speaking of the attempt to organise a peace conference, Mr Kerry said: "This is a very difficult process, which we come to late.
"We are trying to ensure the externally sponsored violence will drag Syria down into a complete and total implosion where it has broken up into enclaves and the institutions of the state have been destroyed," he said.
The conference aims to bring representatives of the government and rebel groups together to impose a plan published last year that provides for a ceasefire and a puppet government, similar to the KLA criminal regime in Kosovo.

[David Guyatt]

Fixed the quote:

Speaking of the attempt to organise a peace conference, Mr Kerry said: "This is a very difficult process, which we come to late.
"We are trying to ensure the externally sponsored violence will drag Syria down into a complete and total implosion where it has broken up into enclaves and the institutions of the state have been destroyed," he said.
The conference aims to bring representatives of the government and rebel groups together to impose a plan published last year that provides for a ceasefire and a puppet government, similar to the KLA criminal regime in Kosovo.

Aah! That's better.

[Lauren Johnson]

according to CNN. Now all we have to do is talk about options.

http://www.cnn.com/2013/06/04/world/meas...?hpt=wo_c2

[Magda Hassan]

Did an Israel lobby front group organize McCain's trip to Syria?

By Maidhc Ó Cathail

June 05, 2013 "Information Clearing House - In an attempt to dispel embarrassing reports that Senator John McCain's "surprise" trip to Syria featured a meeting with kidnappers including Mohammad Nour of the Northern Storm rebel group behind the 2012 abduction of 11 Lebanese religious pilgrims, The Daily Beast's Josh Rogin cited Mouaz Moustafa, the executive director of a little-known organization called The Syrian Emergency Task Force:

"Nobody self-identified as Nour, and none of the guys who were standing outside were in the meeting with McCain," said Mouaz Moustafa, executive director of the Syrian Emergency Task Force, an American nonprofit that helped organize the McCain trip. Moustafa is in the picture and was also inside McCain's meeting with the rebel commanders, along with Task Force political director Elizabeth O'Bagy.

Rogin's defense of McCain, of course, rests on the perceived independence of Moustafa's "NGO." The Syrian Emergency Task Force, however, appears to have close ties to one foreign government and its powerful American lobby. Not only is Mouaz Moustafa listed as one of the Washington Institute's "experts," he recently addressed the AIPAC-created think tank's annual Soref symposium on the theme of "Inside Syria: The Battle Against Assad's Regime."

Even more intriguingly, one of the web addresses for Moustafa's nonprofit is "syriantaskforce.torahacademybr.org." The "torahacademybr.org" URL belongs to the Torah Academy of Boca Raton, Florida whose academic goals notably include "inspiring a love and commitment to Eretz Yisroel."

Of course, none of this will come as any surprise to those familiar with John McCain's lifelong service to the Land of Israel, a commitment that has invariably been at the expense of U.S. interests.

Update: Asked by a social media friend for his thoughts on my piece, Moustafa tweeted:

"utter BS I was born in a refugee camp denied entry to Palestinian territories by Israel even with American passport"

Perhaps his friends in the lobby can put in a good word for him.

After all, he helped organize their leading American asset's trip to Syria; he's a contributor to WINEP's forum for Arab democrats; and for a dispossessed Palestinian refugee bears remarkably few grudges. "The Jewish American community here has always supported humanitarian causes and has always stood by the right thing," he recently told the Jewish Daily Forward, "and I hope they'll continue to do so."

Maidhc Ó Cathail is an investigative journalist and Middle East analyst. He is also the creator and editor of The Passionate Attachment blog, which focuses primarily on the U.S.-Israeli relationship.