Syria Shoots Down Turkish Fighter Jet

Bose

New Member
I hope this is the appropriate thread to post these.

These are two different videos, the first video is from a news coverage showing Syrian army fighting the terrorists on roof-tops and we see two of them getting send to heaven by the Syrian army. One probably escapes jumping off from the building.
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Below video is the second part which shows what actually was on top of that building. Video probably shot by Syrian army men after the operation to clear the building. What we see is three terrorists dead and scores of RPGs. These Turkish guys were anti-tank units positioned on roof-tops to take-out the advancing armor.
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Very graphic, including couple of beheadings by FSA
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Bose

New Member
A little unbiased article from the western side.

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Our writer was given exclusive access to the Assad Generals accused of war crimes as they seek to defeat the rebels in Aleppo

Robert Fisk
Aleppo, Tuesday 21 August 2012

Mortars crashed into the middle-class streets around us and a T-72 tank baked in the heat under a road viaduct, but Bashar al-Assad's most senior operational commander in Aleppo – a 53-year-old Major-General with 33 years in the military and two bullet wounds from last month's battles in Damascus – claims he can "clean" the whole province of Aleppo from "terrorists" in 20 days. Now that is quite a boast, especially in the Saif el-Dowla suburb of the city, where sniper fire snapped down leafy streets. For the battle of Aleppo is far from over.

But this was a strange sensation, to sit in a private house, commandeered by the Syrian army – 19th-century prints still on the walls, the carpet immaculate – and talk to the Generals accused by Western leaders of being war criminals. I was, so to speak, in "the lair of the enemy", but the immensely tall, balding General – his officers adding their own impressions whenever they were asked – had much to say about the war they are fighting and the contempt with which they regard their enemies. They were "mice", the General said – he would not give his name. "They snipe at us and then they run and hide and in the sewers. Foreigners, Turks, Chechens, Afghans, Libyans, Sudanese." And Syrians, I said. "Yes, Syrians too, but smugglers and criminals," he said.

I asked about the rebels' weapons and the clutch of conscripts staggered into the room under the weight of rockets, rifles, ammunition and explosives. "Take this," the General said, grinning as he handed me a two-way radio, a Hongda-made HD668 taken two days ago off a dead Turkish fighter in Saif al-Dowla a few hundred metres from where we were sitting. "Mohamed, do you hear me?" the radio demanded. "Abul Hassan, did you hear?" The Syrian officers roared with laughter at the disembodied voice of their enemy, perhaps in the same block of buildings. We took this ID from the "terrorist", the General said. "Citizen of the Turkish Republic" was printed on the card, above a photo of a man with a thin moustache. Born – Bingol (Turkey) 1 July 1974. Name: Remziye Idris Metin Ekince. Religion: Islam.

So, suddenly, we had a name for one of the mysterious "foreigners" who – at least in popular Baathist imagination – staff the "terrorist" army the Syrian military is fighting. And a lot of other names with far larger significance. As I prowled around the weapons – all captured within the past week, according to the Syrian officers – I found sticks of Swedish explosives in plastic covers, dated February 1999 and manufactured by Hammargrens, whose office address was printed as 434-24 Kingsbacka in Sweden; the words "made in USA" was also marked on each stick.

There was: a Belgian rifle, an FN from the town of Herstal, manufacturer's code 1473224; a set of hand grenades of uncertain provenance numbered HG 85, SM8-03 1; a Russian sniper scope; a 9mm Spanish-made pistol – model 28 1A – manufactured by a Star Echeverria SA Eibar Espana; an ancient automatic rifle; a Soviet sub-machine-gun of 1948 vintage; a mass of Russian rocket-propelled grenades and launchers; and box after box of medical supplies.

"Every unit of the terrorists has a field ambulance," an intelligence officer said. "They steal medicines from our pharmacies but bring other packets with them." True, it seems. There were painkillers from Lebanon, bandages from Pakistan, much of the stuff was from Turkey. Interesting to know who the Spanish, Swedish and Belgian manufacturers originally sold their guns and explosives to. The haul went on and on, a newly out-of-date Visa card under the name of Ahed Akrama, a Syrian ID card in the name of Widad Othman – "kidnapped by the terrorists," another officer muttered – and thousands of rounds of ammunition. The General agreed that weapons may have been taken from dead Syrian troops or soldiers who had been captured. Army defectors existed, he said, but they were "drop-outs, soldiers who had failed their basic tests who were motivated only by money". This is what they say under interrogation, he said.

It wasn't difficult to work out just how the fighting in Aleppo is developing. Walking the streets for more than an hour with a Syrian army patrol, individual snipers would shoot from houses and then disappear before government soldiers arrived. The army had shot dead one man with a sniper's rifle who fired from the minaret of the El-Houda mosque. The Salaheddine district had been "liberated", the Syrian officer said, and the Saif el-Dowla district was only two blocks from a similar "liberation".

At least a dozen civilians emerged from their homes, retirees in their 70s, shopkeepers and local businessmen with their families and, unaware that a foreign journalist was watching, put their arms round Syrian troops. One told me he had stayed in his home as "foreign" fighters used his courtyard to fire on government soldiers. "I speak Turkish and most were speaking Turkish but some of the men had long beards and short trousers like the Saudis wear, and had strange Arab accents."

So many Aleppo citizens talked to me, out of earshot of soldiers, about armed "foreigners" in their streets along with Syrians "from the countryside" that the presence of considerable numbers of non-Syrian gunmen appeared to be true. While much of the city continues its life under occasional mortar fire, tens of thousands of civilians displaced by the fighting between the Free Syrian Army and what the government always calls the "Syrian Arab Army" are now housed in vacant dormitories on the Aleppo University campus. And President Assad's enemies are never far away.

Returning to the city centre yesterday afternoon, I discovered five Syrian soldiers – exhausted, with sharp, tense eyes – walking back to their barracks with a civilian called Badriedin. He had alerted the soldiers when he saw "10 terrorists" in Al-Hattaf street and the government troops had killed several of them – their bodies taken away on motor scooters, Badriedin said – and the rest escaped. The soldiers were high on their story, how they had been outnumbered but fought off their enemies. Even the operational commander of all Aleppo told me that a major battle was beginning in an area containing a mosque and a Christian school where his men had surrounded a large number of "terrorists". "The Syrian army doesn't kill civilians – we came here to protect them, at their request," he said. "We tried to get civilians out of the area where we have to fight, with loudspeakers we give lots of warnings."

I prefer the words emblazoned on the T-shirt of young man who said he was trying to reach his apartment in the snipers' zone to see if it had survived. They read: "You see things and you say 'Why?' But I dream things that never were, and I say 'Why not?' – George Bernard Shaw." Not a bad motto for Aleppo these days.
 

Kurt

Junior Member
This really, this is pretty damn stupid, essentially if US is doing this, they are playing with fire, fire that they cannot hope to control or contain.
Firepower. Why else have almost 50% of worldwide military expenditure?

I doubt this is beyond control. Setting up such a thing includes knowing lots of dirty secrets for blackmail, like who is a homosexual and wants to be a Salafist and so on. There will always be some inside job capability and "you just need some money and trainers to start another revolution" - it can go wrong as many examples show, but overall the US is still the top dog and has quite a lot to earn from such games.
 

jackliu

Banned Idiot
Firepower. Why else have almost 50% of worldwide military expenditure?

I doubt this is beyond control. Setting up such a thing includes knowing lots of dirty secrets for blackmail, like who is a homosexual and wants to be a Salafist and so on. There will always be some inside job capability and "you just need some money and trainers to start another revolution" - it can go wrong as many examples show, but overall the US is still the top dog and has quite a lot to earn from such games.


Not really, US might control some of outcome sometimes, but they are far from certain, Bin Ladin and Saddam is classic example of blow back. So no, just because they think they can, just because they are confident they cant control it, does not mean it will control the outcome, and in situation like this, I say they will very likey to loose control than not.
 

Bose

New Member
found something interesting, but not surprising..

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Broadcaster attempts to hide clear evidence of war crimes

Paul Joseph Watson
Infowars.com
Thursday, August 23, 2012

The BBC has sensationally censored a news story and a video showing Syrian rebels forcing a prisoner to become a suicide bomber, a war crime under the Geneva Conventions, presumably because it reflected badly on establishment media efforts to portray the FSA as glorious freedom fighters.

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The video, a copy of which can be viewed above (the original BBC version was deleted), shows Free Syrian Army rebels preparing a bomb that is loaded onto the back of a truck to be detonated at a government checkpoint in the city of Aleppo.

The clip explains how the rebels have commandeered an apartment belonging to a Syrian police captain. The rebels are seen sneering at photos of the police captain’s family while they proclaim, “Look at their freedom, look how good it is,” while hypocritically enjoying the luxury of the man’s swimming pool.

The video then shows a prisoner who the rebels claim belonged to a pro-government militia. Bruises from torture on the prisoner’s body are explained away as having been metered out by the man’s previous captors. The BBC commentary emphasizes how well the rebels are treating the man, showing them handing him a cigarette.

However, the man has been tricked into thinking he is part of a prisoner exchange program when in reality he is being set up as an unwitting suicide bomber. The prisoner is blindfolded and told to drive the truck towards a government checkpoint.

“What he doesn’t know is that the truck is the one that’s been rigged with a 300 kilo bomb,” states the narrator.

The clip then shows rebels returning disappointed after it’s revealed that the remote detonator failed and the bomb did not explode.

The BBC narrator admits that forcing prisoners to become suicide bombers “would certainly be considered a war crime.”

New York Times reporters who shot the video claim they had no knowledge of the plot. A longer version of the clip is posted on the New York Times You Tube channel. The title of the clip glorifies the rebel fighters as “The Lions of Tawhid”.

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Within hours of the story being published, it was subsequently sent down the memory by the BBC. Attempts to reach the original article URL are greeted with a 404 Not Found page.

In addition, a You Tube version of the same video originally posted on the official BBC News 2012 channel was also removed. Although the You Tube page for the video states that it was removed after a “copyright claim by British Broadcasting Corporation” this is a bogus reason, because the video was not uploaded by a third party, it was posted on the official BBC channel, as the screenshot below proves.

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“Copyright claim” is a bogus reason for the video’s removal because it originally appeared on the official BBC News Channel, and was not uploaded by a third party.

It seems clear that the only reason for the video to be removed would be because senior BBC news editors felt the story reflected badly on the propaganda campaign to characterize the Syrian rebels as venerable and proud freedom fighters, when in reality as we have documented they have been guilty of massacres, kidnappings, torture and other acts of brutality.

This represents a clear effort to hide evidence of Syrian rebels, who the Obama administration recently pledged to support with taxpayer dollars, engaged in war crimes.

In addition, the fact that the rebels, under the direction of Al-Qaeda fighters, are building bombs and carrying out terrorist attacks is something the NATO-aligned media is keen not to emphasize.

This is by no means the first time the BBC has been caught manipulating the news in an effort to propagandize for western military involvement in Syria.

Back in May we exposed how the BBC has used a years-old photo of dead Iraqi children to depict victims of an alleged government assault in the town of Houla.

The photographer who took the original picture, Marco Di Lauro, posted on his Facebook page, “Somebody is using my images as a propaganda against the Syrian government to prove the massacre.” Di Lauro told the London Telegraph he was “astonished” the BBC had failed to check to authenticity of the image.

Should the copy at the top of this article also be deleted, an alternate version of the BBC video with added commentary under fair use is embedded below.

*********************

Paul Joseph Watson is the editor and writer for Prison Planet.com. He is the author of Order Out Of Chaos. Watson is also a regular fill-in host for The Alex Jones Show and Infowars Nightly News.

New York Time video
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Finn McCool

Captain
Registered Member
Hey guys, I would like to post a blog I wrote regarding the current situation in Syria. Here goes:

The Syrian War is entering what Mao called the second phase of people’s war. If you haven’t heard of Mao’s ideas about glorious people’s struggle, you should do a bit of reading because it’s very important to warfare in the 21st century (well, Mao didn’t actually come up with it, it’s a story as old as asymmetric war, but he named it and wrote a book about it so he gets credit). I’ll explain briefly:
So let’s say you’re an aspiring revolutionary who’s all set to liberate your precious ancestral clay from whoever is oppressing it. Mao gave you a basic roadmap to overthrowing your local dictator despite the fact that he has a more-or-less modern and professional army and you only have a few dozen of your buddies, some rusty AKs and homemade bombs. Step one is to choose an area that is remote and rough, which the government forces view as a low priority, and where the local population already doesn’t take a liking to the authorities. This will be your countryside base, where you can have something like safety from the government forces, and most importantly you can act like a little mini-government of your own, enforcing rough justice, feeding refugees, and generally doing stuff to win public support. The government could send its forces into this zone in a big armored column, but all they would find are empty fields, ambushes, mines and villagers trying to scurry out of sight whilst saying “Huh, gorillas? Nope, haven’t seen any of those around here, heard about ‘em once or twice, maybe you should check in Al-Village-down-the-road.” This is the classic guerrilla tactic of refusing to let the enemy come to grips with you. In Mao’s time he tried this in a few spots but settled on Yunnan province in North China.
In Syria, the rebels seem to have a few of these little spots going, but the biggest one is in northern Idlib province near Turkey, with a few little ones in Sunni countryside areas around the country. Pushing your zone up against the border of a friendly nation is always a bonus, and this is what the Free Syrian Army has done. Here’s the hard part: carving out your precious “liberated zone” is going to require getting your hands a bit dirty. You need to get popular support and you need to win a few small victories to establish your reputation as great strong defender of the people and capture a few less-rusty AKs. So that means you’ll have to attack isolated government checkpoints, outposts, convoys and the like. The idea is to hit, capture some weapons and shoot some video of burning enemy trucks and dead bodies for Youtube (remember, propaganda war = real war), and disappear into the countryside. Of course, the government is going to retaliate and when they don’t find you, they’ll probably just get a bit trigger happy on the nearest innocent, peaceful villagers. This is exactly what you want, and this is exactly what happened across rural Syria in the last 8 or so months. Small, pinprick attacks by the FSA and riotous protests followed by government sniping and shelling in retaliation, which just stirs up the local population and creates recruits and willing sympathizers for the rebels.
Now it’s time to move to phase two: expanding the zone where the rebel force can operate safely, and encircling and infiltrating the cities. The Free Syrian Army has done this masterfully in recent weeks. If you haven’t been keeping up, the FSA appeared out of nowhere to engage the Syrian Army all over Damascus. The government’s forces retook the entire city and claimed they had killed hundreds of FSA fighters. Then, beginning on 19 July, FSA fighters from the countryside suddenly occupied about half of Syria’s second city, Aleppo. Right now, the Syrian Army is engaged in slogging fight, trying to push them back and the outcome is far from clear. I have some ideas about how I think it might go, but that’s for another article. For now I’ll just make a sweeping generalization: no matter the outcome, these battles were strategic wins for the rebels. But, but how, you surely ask.
The answer is that the rebels are completing the second stage of Mao’s people’s war plan and moving into stage 3: surrounding and isolating the cities. By bringing the war into Damascus and Aleppo they have forced the government to concentrate their forces in what were previously safe zones, just to get them back under control. Meanwhile, in a story that the media has been missing, Assad outposts throughout the Sunni countryside in Idlib and Aleppo provinces are being surrounded and captured, in places like Marat al-Numaan, Atareb and Al Bab. This is means the FSA is expanding and solidifying the zone in which it can act like a government, which is what every dictator fears when he’s fighting an insurgency. Stage two completed. It also means that the FSA is forming a tightening noose around Aleppo, and making it harder for the regime’s power centers to support each other, the definition of stage three. Let’s look at a map.
The Assad government is based in Damascus and the area around Latakia and the Tartus Mountains in the Northwest is the most supportive in Syria of Assad. The port of Latakia is also a supply line for the regime to the outside world. To fight, Assad needs to be able to connect his forces to their bases in either Damascus or Latakia and Tartus Governates along the coast. To reach Aleppo from these places, regime forces must use the M4 motorway (from Latakia) or the M5 motorway (from Damascus). Now check the green zone on the map and remember: all across that area isolated Assad outposts have been or are being destroyed, and there are plenty of rebel held or rebel-friendly villages, towns and hilly rural areas that they pass through. So the question is…how much does Assad have to pay you to drive a truck and run the gauntlet to resupply his big concentration in Aleppo? Because this is what you’re going to have to deal with (insert Ahrar al Sham video). The rebels in that video aren’t actually FSA fighters, they’re from another outfit called the Ahrar al Sham, we’ll discuss them later when you’re not so Syria-stuffed. But you get the point: Assad is going to pay a tax to use those roads to resupply Aleppo, and they might be cut entirely. The M5 motorway still has some pretty commanding Assad positions around Hama and Rastan , Khan Sheikoun and some other places to defend it but M4 is looking pretty damn dangerous for the Brave Baathist Bus Driver Battalion.
There’s another reason why hitting Aleppo and Damascus were good moves regardless of the outcome. Both of them were relative bastions of support for the Assad regime. “But wait Jack,” you ask, “I thought guerrillas tried to fight on turf where the population supports them?” Yes. But, remember people’s war is all about capturing people’s loyalties and perceptions of events rather than capturing ground. By bringing the fight to the home turf of Assad supporters, the rebels signal to the supporters of the regime that they are not safe, and that Assad’s most loyal and brutal dogs will end up like the bullet-riddled Berri clan; executed by a Wily Coyote-style firing squad (video). Rebel supporters see this stuff and think “I’m backing the right horse”. This will prompt defections and the sort of self-preserving behavior by individual soldiers and bureaucrats that truly dooms dictatorships in their dying days. It also forces the government to turn communities that formerly supported them into swiss cheese and to turn their death squads on cities that are critical to functioning of their government.
And that’s what stage three of people’s war is all about: coiling like a snake around the conventional forces that can beat you in a stand-up fight after they’ve been spread thin, and forcing them to pay a tax in men and machines and the materials of war just to move, just to exist. You hold on and tighten the coils, which is what the FSA is doing by taking towns along the motorway. I once saw this nature documentary about anacondas. They love to eat these overgrown South American guinea pigs called capybaras (link). When the capybara is in its coils, the snake just sits there and lets it struggle to break free. The capybara’s own struggles tire it out and it weakens slowly, until finally it can’t resist when the anaconda snaps its neck, with not much more effort than it took to hold the capybara in place. When the government force struggles to break free of the third-stage people’s war encirclement, as Assad is doing right now in Aleppo, his struggles are like those of one of those of the capybara; to break free he has to wreck his own strategic position by abandoning the countryside and shelling his own supporters.
 

Kurt

Junior Member
The Assad clan survived a number of insurgencies. You highlight the general mechanism, but might miss some important differences. Perhaps you could write why several other uprisings against this rule failed despite the availability of Mao in print.
 

delft

Brigadier
Two rogue states combining to subvert Syria:
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Britain and US plan a Syrian revolution from an innocuous office block in Istanbul
An underground network of Syrian opposition activists is receiving training and supplies of vital equipment from a combined American and British effort to forge an effective alternative to the Damascus regime.

By Damien McElroy, Istanbul7:30PM BST 26 Aug 2012

Dozens of dissidents have been ferried out of Syria to be vetted for foreign backing. Recipients of the aid are given satellite communications and computers so that they can act as a local "hub" linking local activists and the outside world.
The training takes place in an Istanbul district where handsome apartment blocks line the steep slopes and rooftop terraces boast views over the Golden Horn waterway.
Behind closed doors the distractions of outdoor coffee shops and clothing boutiques gives way to power point displays charting the mayhem sweeping Syria.
"We are not 'king-making' in Syria. The UK and the US are moving cautiously to help what has been developing within Syria to improve the capabilities of the opposition," said a British consultant overseeing the programme. "What's going to come next? Who is going to control territory across Syria. We want to give civilians the skills to assert leadership."
Once up and running dissidents can expect help to deal with local shortages and troubleshooting advice from sympathisers.
But the activists also face two days of vetting designed to ensure that the programme does not fall into the trap of promoting sectarian agendas or the rise of al-Qaeda-style fundamentalists.
"Rather than being about promoting political platforms in Syria, it's about creating a patchwork of people who share common values," the consultant said.
The schemes are overseen by the US State Department's Office of Syrian Opposition Support (OSOS) and Foreign Office officials. America has set aside $25 million for political opponents of President Bashar al-Assad while Britain is granting £5 million to the cause of overthrowing the regime.
Mina al-Homsi (a pseudonym) is one of the first graduates of the training.
She now spends her days plotting how to spread seditious messages throughout her homeland through her own network, named Basma.
One of its main activities is to repackage video shot by amateurs into a format that can be used by broadcasters.
In addition to running online television and radio forums, the Basma team have had "tens of thousands" of satirical stickers depicting President Bashar al-Assad as a featherless duck for distribution as agitprop.
"It comes from the emails that his wife Asma sent to him calling him duckie and the cartoon duck is featherless to show that he is an emperor with no clothes," she said. "People will stick them on walls, on car doors, on dispensers in restaurants and those who have not yet joined the revolution will know that we are everywhere."
Foreign intervention in civil wars has proven to be a perilous undertaking since the end of the Cold War but in Syria where an invasion has proven unfeasible, diplomats have had to resort to creative thinking.
It was the legacy of non-intervention, however, that provided the spark for the schemes now backing Basma and others.
An initiative, proposed by Foreign Secretary William Hague, to document evidence of crimes committed in the fighting for use in potential International Criminal Court trials, has been transformed into the multinational project to build Syria's next governing class.
"This has been a generational coming of age," said the consultant, who spoke on condition of anonymity. "The Foreign Secretary started this as a way to make sure that people who committed crimes in Syria would be held to account. Those of us with experience of the Balkans have taken the lessons of that conflict very much as a formative experience."
With the entry of American funding for a much wider scheme, the need to avoid the mistakes of wars in Afghanistan and Iraq has also driven the planning.
"It's also not Iraq or Afghanistan – there are no bundles of cash being dropped on the problem without accountability," he said.
Jon Wilks, the Foreign Office diplomat who serves as envoy to the Syrian opposition, told the Arabic newspaper al Sharq al Aswat last week that Britain was already working to lay the foundations of democracy in a post-Assad Syria.
He said: "We must train activists on governing locally in villages and cities in Syria for the post-transitional phase."
Officials are adamant there will be no crossover between the civilian "non-lethal" assistance and the military campaign waged by the rebel fighters.
The scheme has, however, infuriated the exiled opposition body, the Syrian National Council. Its failure to provide a united and coherent front against the regime has led some western officials to brief privately that foreign governments were shifting support beyond the exiled body.
But in a barely furnished office in a tower block near Istanbul airport an SNC official decried the false promises of its allies. "We've heard a lot of promises from the very beginning of the SNC but none of those have been fulfilled," the SNC official said. "This has reflected absolutely negatively on our work. The opposition of Syria wants the world to provide humanitarian aid for the people in need and the Free Syria Army wants intervention to stop planes bombing their positions.
"Instead they go around behind our back undermining our role."
A Whitehall official said the effort was not about building an alternative to the SNC but a means to enhance the role of those dissidents still within Syria.
Victoria Nuland, the State Department spokesman, confirmed the OSOS programme last week and said its full effect would only be seen when President Assad leaves office.
"There are groups inside and outside Syria beginning to plan for that day-after and beginning to plan for how they might quickly stand up at least that first stage of transition so that we could move on when Assad goes, because he will go."
 

i.e.

Senior Member
ithink china and russia should come out and expose this as what this is. a Western backed revolution attempt funded with Gulf Despot Money and religious zealots.
 
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