Tag: Middle East

That ISIS Thing

We have not had much news about ISIS…as it should be because according to Trump he defeated them single handed….and yet they still exist….

Even before the recent raid that resulted in the death of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the erstwhile head of the Islamic State, Donald Trump had spoken of how he had single-handedly defeated the caliphate.

“Now, when I came, the caliphate was all over the place,” the president said apropos of nothing during a news conference with the Australian prime minister on September 20. “I defeated the caliphate — ISIS.”

At a press conference on October 21, after pulling troops out of Syria, Trump put himself even closer to the battle with the Islamic State: “I’m the one that did the capturing. I’m the one who that knows more about it than you people or the fake pundits.”

The Islamic State and Trump’s Delusion

A look at this ISIS thing through the eyes of a Neocon think tank……

Almost as soon as it became clear that ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi was dead, the revisionism began about whether this was actually a good thing.

Some analysts predicted that al-Baghdadi’s death as a “martyr” would inspire others, becoming a “propaganda bonanza” for the Islamic State, also known as ISIS.

We should not be so gloomy. The death of such a sadistic killer and serial rapist is unambiguously good news.

It was also the last thing that ISIS needed. Caliphate relinquished, the group’s operations inevitably will be disrupted by the death of its emir, especially with Abu Hassan al-Muhajir—a potential successor—killed in a U.S. airstrike just hours later.

5 Things to Watch in Tracking the Future of ISIS

The group has been diminished but not gone……and they have a new tactic of terror….FIRE

A media outlet affiliated with ISIS has been instructing the group’s radical adherents to set forest fires in the United States and Europe to cause mass ecological disasters, according to posts on an internet forum dedicated to the terror group.

At least four propaganda posters that have appeared on the pro-ISIS Quraysh media outlet have urged followers to “ignite fires” as part of an ongoing jihad against America and its allies.

https://freebeacon.com/national-security/isis-tells-followers-to-set-forest-fires-in-u-s-europe/

The caliphate is down but not out……

Just months after the Islamic State militant group lost the last of its territory in Syria, and days after its leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, was killed in a U.S.-led raid, the group has found safe haven in a remote, ungoverned space in Iraq, as foreign fighters move across the border from Syria, military officials tell NBC news.

“The fight against ISIS is continuous,” said U.S. Marine Corps Brig. Gen. William Seely, commander of Task Force-Iraq. “We’re seeing ISIS fighters move from Syria across hundreds of miles of desert.”

Their goal, Seely says, is to re-establish their physical caliphate in the region.

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/mideast/defeated-isis-has-found-safe-haven-ungoverned-part-iraq-n1076081

How many times must I say this….ISIS IS NOT DEFEATED!

It is only napping waiting for the day to return.

I Read, I Wrote, You Know

“Lego Ergo Scribo”

Please Explain Syria

We were told that our troops would be leaving Northern Syria and coming home….then they were going to a base in Northwest Iraq (Iraq said they could not stay)…then we were told that a small group of troops would go to Syria to protect the oil fields……..what is the deal here?

https://lobotero.com/2019/11/05/syria-the-confusion-and-the-chaos/

Apparently it is ‘official’ US troops to Eastern Syrian to take Syrian oil…..it must be important because we will build two new bases in Syria…

Reports out of eastern Syria, citing local sources, say that the US appears to be preparing to build two substantial military bases in the Soor area, near major oilfields which the Trump Administration intends to retain.

Since President Trump announced in October that his military goals in Syria were being entirely revised around the idea of keeping control over oilfeilds, and talked of extracting oil from the area, US military deployments have centered on oilfields in the east.

It makes some sense then that the US would be building bases in that area, since it’s where the troops are staying. If anything though, this rush of material shows both how hasty the oil-taking decision was, and how long the US is likely to end up stuck in Syria trying to get oil out of there.

Russian outlets have predicted the oil the US intends to appropriate will be worth around $30 million per month, though President Trump has claimed a much higher value of $45 million per month in his own comments.

Either way, the cost of keeping US troops in Syria exclusively to try to take the oil is not insubstantial, and the cost of building and operating entire new US bases is only going to add to that cost.

The assumption seems to be that the oil will pay for this in the end, though the legal basis for taking the oil simply does not exist, and so far no US company has indicated even a hint of interest in getting drawn into this difficult effort. 

(antiwar.com)

What happened to all the news reporting that Trump was betrayer everybody in the Middle East with his troop withdrawal…..it swas a false narrative that the MSM bought into hiok line and sinker….and they were WRONG!

That noise you can hear is Donald Trump flip–flopping in the sand. Last week, American troops and dozens of tanks and armoured vehicles moved to occupy oil fields in Syria. The escalation came just half an hour after Trump had tweeted that all US soldiers had left the country and would be coming home. As so often, the President says one thing, then orders the military to do the other. On Twitter, Trump is ending the endless wars. In the real world, he is perpetuating them.

Trump’s focus is not really Syria, of course. It is the presidential election next year, and his precious voter base. But he can’t seem to decide if his supporters are peaceniks or bloodthirsty chauvinists. His problem is that they are both and neither. He’s beginning to learn that the relationship between foreign policy and domestic politics is more complicated than perhaps he realised.

https://www.spectator.co.uk/2019/11/the-story-behind-donald-trumps-fake-withdrawal-from-syria/

The troops have returned gto Syria and in a big way…..

We now have troops once again in Syria….so what is their ‘directive on engagement’?

Well right now….there is NOT one!

United States troops stationed in Syria have yet to receive guidance on their mission, including the basic rules of engagement, according to a military official in a CNN report published Monday.

Some military commanders deployed to Eastern Syria were reportedly still waiting to receive their directives to guard oil fields in the region. For some of these troops, it was unclear where their destinations would be and how long they were expected to stay there, according to CNN.

https://www.insider.com/us-troops-guarding-oil-fields-syria-rules-of-engagement-2019-11

The more I read…the more I cannot see what the end game will be….as usual it is chaos nothing disciplined….and that is the foreign policy we get when the 3 Stooges run the policies……and I am not alone here….

Confusion has prevailed regarding the purposes of the U.S. troop presence in Syria, and whether the declared purposes are the actual ones. Originally the expedition was widely understood to be all about combating the Islamic State (ISIS) after the group had established a mini-state on a large portion of Syrian and Iraqi territory. Then hawks within the Trump administration and President Trump himself, in a classic case of mission creep, declared that the U.S. troops were also in Syria to “watch Iran”. Later variations of the creeped-up mission included not only watching Iran but also, through some unexplained mechanism, getting Iran and maybe Russia to abandon their positions in Syria.

https://nationalinterest.org/blog/paul-pillar/donald-trumps-take-oil-strategy-syria-mistake-92991

All this wrong on many levels….but other than that it will come back and bite the US in the ass…..PERIOD!

I Read, I Wrote, You Know

“Lego Ergo Scribo”

Syria: The Confusion and The Chaos

First US troops were ordered out of Northern Syrian and then before their vehicles had cooled down they were ordered into Eastern Syrian to protect the oil….

Now that our troops are guarding the oil ….but from whom?

The Pentagon isn’t operating based off Trump’s Twitter, however, and that’s unfortunate for commanders, as they have been scrambling around to oil fields without any actual orders or clear missions of what they’re supposed to be doing.

It’s a confusing time to be part of America’s war in Syria, as clearly the war is something about oil, and the presence of the US troops at oil reflects that. Troops aren’t even clear who they’re supposed to be protecting the oil from, or what the rules of engagement are with respect to protecting the oil.

Top officials aren’t clarifying that, either, sometimes presenting the US as keeping the oil from ISIS, or away from Iran, and other times flat out saying they are there to keep Syria’s oil from Syria. Trump is more specific about his ambitions to take the oil, than filling in the huge gaps in that plan.

Some defense officials are saying the lack of orders is because there haven’t been any decisions made yet on what the troops are going to do at the oilfields, beyond going there. They confirm that’s a big problem for commanders.

(antiwar.com)

The confusion and the chaos is not a coherent foreign policy….and my candidate has offered up a bill that would stabilize the Syrian situation…..

Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D-HI) introduced a resolution to the House of Representatives on October 31st titled, “Directing the President pursuant to section 5(c) of the War Powers Resolution to remove United States Armed Forces from hostilities in the Syrian Arab Republic that have not been authorized by Congress.”

The idea of the bill is to remove any troops in Syria that do not have Congressional approval to be there, which is all of them. The resolution says, “Congress has not declared war with respect to, or provided any specific statutory authorization for, United States military participation in any activity related to securing, guarding, possessing, profiting off of, or developing oil fields in northern Syria. All of these actions are unconstitutional.”

The resolution also points out that President Trump’s new plan to stay in Syria to “secure the oil” is a flagrant violation of international law. The resolution says, “Oil, natural resources, and land in Syria belong to the Syrian people, not the United States.”

Although the House was quick to condemn Trump’s withdrawal from northeast Syria to avoid a confrontation with Turkey, his new plan to “secure the oil” has not come under much scrutiny. The language in Gabbard’s bill would make it tough for any member of Congress to argue against it.

(antiwar.com)

Now we will see who wants the wars to end and who wants to make their paymasters happy and continue the killing and destruction.

My guess is that we will not hear about this bill from the MSM unless they want to smear Gabbard as they have been doing since she announced her run.

I Read, I Wrote, You Know

“Lego Ergo Scribo”

The Other Whistleblower

There has been a wealth of press given about those whistleblowers that keep coming forward in the impeachment saga..

All that makes for good copy for the MSM…I mean it helps drive the story they want to tell and any thing else will be put into the round file (file 13)……

Like the drama that the media wants to tell about the Assad government using CWs on their own people….and the horror and the desire for retaliation for justice for the Syrian people.

I have written and reported in the past on the different reports that contradict the “official” BS claim by the media and the US government…..and a new whistleblower has come forward that disputes the fantasy of the official line from DC…..

During a recent BBC radio interview, award-winning journalist Jonathan Steele said that he attended a briefing by a new whistleblower from the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) investigation into an alleged 2018 chemical attack in Douma, Syria, who claimed that the OPCW suppressed his findings which contradicted the organization’s official conclusion that a chlorine gas attack had taken place. This, according to Steele, is a second whistleblower coming forward on the OPCW’s Douma investigation, the first being the leaker of an Engineering Assessment document which surfaced in May contradicting the OPCW’s official ballistics report which the organization hid from the public.

I have archived an audio recording of Steele’s statement here for posterity, since the BBC removes its content after a month. I have also compiled a timeline of relevant events here so that people can properly appreciate the significance of these new revelations.

Steele made these comments unbidden by the show’s host Paul Henley. They read as follows (thanks to Tim Hayward of the Working Group on Syria, Propaganda and Media for the transcript):

Second Whistleblower Emerges from Investigation into Douma Chemical Attack

Typical US strategy…..use the MSM to sell chicken shit as sirloin to the masses….

I wrote about the possibility that past attacks were staged and not the result of an attack by Syrian military…..https://lobotero.com/2019/05/29/those-chemical-attacks/

AS usual the MSM is the tool of choice for the government to condition the American people to accept the ‘official’ story line.

I Read, I Wrote, You Know

“Lego Ergo Scribo”

That Armenian Genocide Thing

For over 100 years the Armenians have been trying to get the world to hold the Turks responsible for the deaths of thousands of Armenians during and after World War One….

And for that century the Armenians have been trying to get the world to recognize the genocide…….The US in the past has ignored the genocide because Turkey was a valued customer and ally…..

On the eve of World War I, there were two million Armenians in the declining Ottoman Empire. By 1922, there were fewer than 400,000. The others — some 1.5 million — were killed in what historians consider a genocide.

As David Fromkin put it in his widely praised history of World War I and its aftermath, “A Peace to End All Peace”: “Rape and beating were commonplace. Those who were not killed at once were driven through mountains and deserts without food, drink or shelter. Hundreds of thousands of Armenians eventually succumbed or were killed .”

The man who invented the word “genocide”— Raphael Lemkin, a lawyer of Polish-Jewish origin — was moved to investigate the attempt to eliminate an entire people by accounts of the massacres of Armenians. He did not, however, coin the word until 1943, applying it to Nazi Germany and the Jews in a book published a year later, “Axis Rule in Occupied Europe.”

https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/ref/timestopics/topics_armeniangenocide.html

Now that the Turks are on the new “shit list” it is time for the US to step up….

The U.S. House of Representatives voted overwhelmingly on Tuesday to recognize the mass killings of Armenians a century ago as a genocide, a symbolic but historic vote instantly denounced by Turkey.

The Democratic-controlled House voted 405-11 in favor of a resolution asserting that it is U.S. policy to commemorate as genocide the killing of 1.5 million Armenians by the Ottoman Empire from 1915 to 1923. The Ottoman Empire was centered in present-day Turkey.

The vote marked the first time in 35 years that such legislation was considered in the full House, underscoring widespread frustration in Congress with the Turkish government, from both Democrats and President Donald Trump’s fellow Republicans.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-turkey-armenia/u-s-house-recognizes-armenian-genocide-backs-turkey-sanctions-idUSKBN1X82LY

This vote does little but to make the Congress appear to actually give a crap about what Turkey is doing in Syria.

A little history in the region and it involves the Kurds (remember them?  They are those people that the media is so concerned about)….those same people also participated in the genocide of the Armenians…..

Not widely known in the United States, but very well known in the region, is that among the most enthusiastic participants in the Armenian massacres of 1915 were Kurdish Muslim tribesmen, who largely inhabited the same regions of Anatolia as Armenian Christian peasants. This fact also goes unmentioned in the New York Times piece, but can be found by a casual perusal of Wikipedia, and the associated footnotes.

The Ottoman government of World War I (whose most important leaders, such as Kemal Pasha and Enver Pasha, were actually Albanians by ethnicity) considered Armenians, Greeks, and Assyrians as a potential fifth column for the Russians, and made every effort to encourage Muslim attacks on them. The best parallel is with anti-Jewish pogroms in Czarist Russia of that same era, which were encouraged by government officials but mostly carried out by local Polish and Ukrainian peasants.

Kurdish Participation in the Armenian Genocide

It is all a game.

Sadly this is NOT the way to carry our foreign policy……it is childish and wimpy.

Turkey is pissed!

Turkey’s President Erdogan declared that he “strongly condemns” the House resolutions, calling them a “slander against our country,” and “the biggest insult toward our nation.” Turkey also summoned the US Ambassador to warn of a breakdown in US-Turkey relations.

This could indeed have long-term ramifications, because with all these US Representatives now having publicly voted to recognize the genocide, it’s going to be really hard for a future US government to unrecognize it to make Turkey happy.

Will greed replace outrage?

I Read, I Wrote, You Know

“Lego Ergo Scribo”

Whose Oil Is It?

As the US is leaving Northern Syria they have been detoured to the oil fields of Eastern Syrian….after I read this I wrote a post asking “Syrian? Whose Oil Is It?”……..https://lobotero.com/2019/10/21/syria-whose-oil-is-it/

The US controls the oil? Really? What does that mean?

A article that I read says that Trump wants Exxon to take on these oilfields…..

Having sent growing numbers of troops into eastern Syria explicitly to control the oil, President Trump now says he is seeking a deal with Exxon Mobil or “one of our great companies” to go into occupied Syria and take the oil.

Trump has long suggested that in his view, the US should be able to just take oil from countries it is involved in militarily, as a way to recover some of the costs of his various wars. Trump said on Sunday that the oil is valuable and “we should be able to take some also.”

That Trump is sold on this idea is one thing, but convincing a US Oil and Gas Major to go along with the operation is another thing. The legal basis, particularly internationally, of taking Syrian oil without Syrian permission, and keeping US military forces there to keep Syria from stopping them, is going to be complicated, to say the least.

Trump’s conviction that legally it’s probably fine, after all, doesn’t mean the US company, whichever it turns out to be, wouldn’t get sued in the US or internationally for looting Syria’s oil.

These huge multinational companies are notoriously risk-averse about conflict, and would likely be so about joining the president in an oil-taking scheme of this sort. That means while Trump continues to war to keep the oil, he’s going to face a big job selling the idea to any company.

Now as far as I know Syria is a sovereign nation….then any attempt to take this oil is an illegal act……since Assad is the leader of Syria, like him or not, this is a simple case of attempted theft by the US. 

Does the arrogance of this man know any boundaries?

I Read, I Wrote, You Know

“Lego Ergo Scribo”

Take Me To Your Leader

I can hear the Who in my head and think an episode of CSI is about to begin….but NO….I am wondering who will lead the leaderless ISIS now that Baghdadi is no longer among the living.

My intel files has several candidates to lead ISIS……

the most likely candidate to succeed Baghdadi is Abdullah Qardash, also known as Abu Omar Turkmani, a former Iraqi military officer under Saddam Hussein.

A former senior leader of al-Qaeda, Turkmani was detained in Camp Bucca along with other IS leaders, the paper said.

According to Iraqi sources quoted by the paper, “Qardash is characterised by cruelty, authoritarianism and militancy, and he was among the first people to welcome al-Baghdadi in Mosul in 2014.”

The second nominee for the group’s leadership is Haji Nasser, or Abd al-Nasser, who has been on the US terrorism list since the end of 2018. Haji Abd al-Nasser is known for belonging to the most radical trend within IS.

The third nominee is Mu’taz al-Jaburi, better known as Hajji Taysir. A senior IS leader, Washington has set a $3m reward for whoever gives information leading to him.

Sami al-Jaburi, the fourth candidate, is the former IS financial affairs director and was in charge of the group’s oil and gas sales, according to the paper.

The fifth candidate, according to Arabi21, is Abul Hassan al-Muhajir, IS’s official spokesman since the end of 2016 – but he was reported killed at the weekend in another US-led raid.

Muhajir is out…….so that leaves 4 candidates….who are you….who….who?

And now we have a winner!

Abdullah Qardash

ISIS already has a new leader — a feared former officer for Saddam Hussein known as “the Destroyer,” according to reports.

Abdullah Qardash was reportedly already running day-to-day operations and kill campaigns for the terror group and formally took over its leadership after Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi’s death on Saturday.

“Baghdadi was a figurehead. He was not involved in operations or day-to-day,” a regional intelligence official told Newsweek in confirming the successor. “All Baghdadi did was say yes or no — no planning.”

Qardash had been loyal to Baghdadi after they were held together at the Camp Bucca detention center in Basra after being jailed by US forces over their links to al Qaeda in 2003, the Times of London has said.

(NY Post)

You have your answer now let the hunt begin…..tic toc……

I Read, I Wrote, You Know

“Lego Ergo Scribo”