ISIS/ISIL conflict in Syria/Iraq (No OpEd, No Politics)

From BBC:
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Preparations for the next false flag?

That former colonial powers the UK and France eagerly jumped on the bandwagon without anyone presenting any actual evidence doesn't bode well. But with the Trump administration's propensity for changing tack at any moment, as well as big differences between what they say and what they do, I will reserve comment for now.
 

taxiya

Brigadier
Registered Member
Three stages of the "Emperor" running naked.
  1. Wearing sort of clothes. <= Bill Clinton, (dead bodies in Yugoslavia)
  2. Pretending to wear clothes. <= Bush Jr. (washing detergent from Iraq)
  3. "I will have clothes". <= Trump. (future chemical attack)
  4. "I don't need clothes". <= next POTUS
Who still believe the slogan "defend human rights and peace"?:rolleyes:
 

flyzies

Junior Member
The latest map on the situation in Syria. Note the increasing tide of red in the middle sweeping eastwards.

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In the meantime:
1. SDF is increasingly being bogged down in Raqqa, ala Iraqi army in Mosul. This means they'll be unable to conduct any additional operations in south eastern Syria during this time.
2. Turkey and its backed groups are beating the war drums against the SDF and Kurds in Afrin pocket.
3. It is in neither SAA or Russia's interest for the Kurds to fall in Afrin, as this would see the joining of Idlib rebel territory.
 
Supposed game plan for the northwest.

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Turkey plans to establish buffer zone in Idlib with Russian co-operation in co-ordination with Syrian government offensive

Ege Seckin - IHS Jane's Intelligence Weekly
07 July 2017

Key Points
Turkey is likely to seek a leading role in enforcing a future de-escalation zone in Idlib province to ensure its Syrian proxies are represented in Syria's post-war governance, albeit as part of a broader agreement with the Syrian government, mediated by Russia.
The de-escalation zone is likely to come in conjunction with an eventual offensive by the Syrian government in Idlib province, aimed at destroying the Al-Qaeda-affiliated jihadist opposition coalition, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), although this is likely only after pro-Syrian government forces have stabilised other higher priority fronts, including Deir al-Zour, on the River Euphrates.
A Turkish Idlib intervention would probably avoid directly targeting HTS, given the risk of this triggering a jihadist insurgency inside Turkey.
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(142 of 982 words)
 

delft

Brigadier
A lot is going on about the war against Daesh but this article by Robert Fisk is worthy of notice:
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As Syria's army – with Russia's help – advances through the desert, Isis propaganda comes across the radio waves
Two officers tell me a creepy story, which might – given the nature of the Isis mind – have some pathetic truth. Several suicide bombers, they say, were found with women’s underclothes in their pockets, for the virgins they would meet in paradise


This is the third instalment in Robert Fisk’s series from Syria

For 60 miles across the vast desert of eastern Syria, far beyond the trashed Roman ruins of Palmyra, the army of Syria is moving through the hot grey sands towards the besieged garrison city of Deir ez-Zour. For 60 miles, tanks and heavy artillery – and brand new Russian Army multiple missile launchers – line the narrow, melting highway through the oilfields, pale tents flourishing in the dry wadis of distant hills which belonged to Isis only a month ago, gun batteries thumping amid the sand dunes.

We’ve been through this before, of course: Syrian army advances that turned sour in northern Syria, the long siege of eastern Aleppo, Isis retreats that transformed themselves into new and savage suicide attacks out of the desert and into Palmyra. But the Russian army foot patrols in the wrecked modern city of Palmyra – I even saw Russian Army Chechen troops in the city, a vital Muslim component to Moscow’s military alliance with Damascus – suggest that this time the Syrian army has its enemies on the run.

So enormous is the landscape – harsh, lined with green desert grass and baked sand hills – and so intense is the 47-degree heat, that images do greater credit to this desert war than dry essays on the strategy of an army that plans to free 10,000 of its soldiers still holding out further east, surrounded by Isis for three years in the ancient city of Deir ez-Zour, along with 400,000 civilians in two pockets of land in the valley of the Euphrates.

Sixty miles beyond Palmyra I travelled eastwards, the only western journalist to reach this far front line in a convoy of Syrian vehicles until we stopped just five miles short of the crossroad town of al-Sukhnah.

“Sukhnah” means heat. It is the right name. Isis is still there. The desert mirages turn empty sand beds into waterless rivers, but the Syrian encampments and the 122- and 130mm guns are real enough. So are the tanks heading east: some loaded with infantry, thrashing up the tarmac, truckloads of green-painted ammunition boxes crammed on top, soldiers clinging to the tailboards.

The wreckage of war – a bombed-out Isis truck, a shattered army lorry, carbonised buses pushed off the road – is everywhere. A bearded Syrian officer – many of them have grown these big bushy Isis-style beards over the past two years, perhaps to mock their enemies – shouts that the gun line have been ordered to fire, and then the desert shakes ever so slightly and long lines of sand streak in front of the artillery.

They look like those big wheeled guns on the old silent Somme newsreels and they are almost as quiet in the desert. The fine dust absorbs the thumping detonations.

When we stop at a military post beside the highway, a sergeant emerges holding two tiny drones, just shot down at a height of 350 feet by a soldier with a Kalashnikov, the machine stinking of burned plastic. A beady camera glass hangs from one wire, the little rotors still rotating at the touch of a finger.

Isis, through the heat haze, is watching us through these sinister little lenses. Someone with a fully working brain in al-Suknah, ready to retreat no doubt, is looking for targets.

Only when we pass the batteries of Russian army BM-30 SMERTCH “Whirlwind” multiple rocket launchers, their Russian crews beside them, magenta and blue camouflage amid the sand, does a Syrian officer ask us not to take pictures. No problem with Syria’s weapons. We can shoot photographs of as many guns as we like, as many mortar batteries, although they appear dwarfed by the immensity of the landscape.

There’s an operational battle map in General Mohamed Khadour’s air-conditioned headquarters. It shows a black patch for al-Sukhnah, and just to the left a grim series of blood-red circles. These are the gun lines. And Khadour, the senior army commander for this huge area of desert and remote cities – tall, head shaped like a bullet, thinning hair, face darkened by the sun; a 58-year-old graduate of the Aleppo military college with an infantry training degree – coldly reads off a set of coordinates to open fire.

Beside him on a sofa leans a heavy black six-chamber 46mm rocket gun that his men captured up north in Hassakeh – “RPG-6, GLV-HEF [stock number] 4348” for those who can trace its foreign manufacturers – and the general looks contemptuously at it.

“However many weapons they got from the West, Isis is finished,” he says. “They are like a banana that has fallen out of its skin. Only the skin is left.”

I’m not so sure about this. There’s a small truck park in Palmyra filled with the big black iron suicide trucks that Isis manufactured in its caliphate, identical to the massive killer cars captured by the Iraqi army in distant Mosul, far to to the east. General Khadour reports that in one month his soldiers have faced seven suicide trucks and 20 individual Isis suicide fighters, all of whom had blown themselves to pieces.

And I ask the same old question I put to everyone who fights Isis: who are they really? And I get the same reply from the general. “Animals,” he says. “But even animals are not evil.”

Curiously, the brain inside the Isis “animal” does not interest these soldiers. They regard the al-Nusrah / al-Qaeda fighters as far better trained – and with far more sophisticated Western weapons and anti-aircraft missiles – than Isis. For Nusrah, still fighting on in Idlib province, they have a curiosity rather than respect. But for Isis, they have contempt.

There is a creepy story which two officers tell me, which might – given the nature of the Isis mind – have some pathetic truth. Several suicide bombers, they say, were found with women’s underclothes in their pockets – for the virgins they would meet in paradise.

Some generals only speculate on dates – a sound precaution in the Syrian war – but General Khadour does not hesitate to tell me that he will reach and “liberate” Deir ez-Zour by the end of August, just 30 days away. Why not? He was head of the security and military headquarters in the eastern region of Syria – including the surrounded city – until he was flown north to fight Isis and Nusrah around Hassakeh. He will, no doubt, resume his duties there when his army breaks the siege.

“Sukhnah” means heat. It is the right name. Isis is still there. The desert mirages turn empty sand beds into waterless rivers, but the Syrian encampments and the 122- and 130mm guns are real enough. So are the tanks heading east: some loaded with infantry, thrashing up the tarmac, truckloads of green-painted ammunition boxes crammed on top, soldiers clinging to the tailboards.

The wreckage of war – a bombed-out Isis truck, a shattered army lorry, carbonised buses pushed off the road – is everywhere. A bearded Syrian officer – many of them have grown these big bushy Isis-style beards over the past two years, perhaps to mock their enemies – shouts that the gun line have been ordered to fire, and then the desert shakes ever so slightly and long lines of sand streak in front of the artillery.

They look like those big wheeled guns on the old silent Somme newsreels and they are almost as quiet in the desert. The fine dust absorbs the thumping detonations.

When we stop at a military post beside the highway, a sergeant emerges holding two tiny drones, just shot down at a height of 350 feet by a soldier with a Kalashnikov, the machine stinking of burned plastic. A beady camera glass hangs from one wire, the little rotors still rotating at the touch of a finger.

Isis, through the heat haze, is watching us through these sinister little lenses. Someone with a fully working brain in al-Suknah, ready to retreat no doubt, is looking for targets.

Only when we pass the batteries of Russian army BM-30 SMERTCH “Whirlwind” multiple rocket launchers, their Russian crews beside them, magenta and blue camouflage amid the sand, does a Syrian officer ask us not to take pictures. No problem with Syria’s weapons. We can shoot photographs of as many guns as we like, as many mortar batteries, although they appear dwarfed by the immensity of the landscape.

There’s an operational battle map in General Mohamed Khadour’s air-conditioned headquarters. It shows a black patch for al-Sukhnah, and just to the left a grim series of blood-red circles. These are the gun lines. And Khadour, the senior army commander for this huge area of desert and remote cities – tall, head shaped like a bullet, thinning hair, face darkened by the sun; a 58-year-old graduate of the Aleppo military college with an infantry training degree – coldly reads off a set of coordinates to open fire.

Beside him on a sofa leans a heavy black six-chamber 46mm rocket gun that his men captured up north in Hassakeh – “RPG-6, GLV-HEF [stock number] 4348” for those who can trace its foreign manufacturers – and the general looks contemptuously at it.

“However many weapons they got from the West, Isis is finished,” he says. “They are like a banana that has fallen out of its skin. Only the skin is left.”
 

delft

Brigadier
Continued:
I’m not so sure about this. There’s a small truck park in Palmyra filled with the big black iron suicide trucks that Isis manufactured in its caliphate, identical to the massive killer cars captured by the Iraqi army in distant Mosul, far to to the east. General Khadour reports that in one month his soldiers have faced seven suicide trucks and 20 individual Isis suicide fighters, all of whom had blown themselves to pieces.

And I ask the same old question I put to everyone who fights Isis: who are they really? And I get the same reply from the general. “Animals,” he says. “But even animals are not evil.”

Curiously, the brain inside the Isis “animal” does not interest these soldiers. They regard the al-Nusrah / al-Qaeda fighters as far better trained – and with far more sophisticated Western weapons and anti-aircraft missiles – than Isis. For Nusrah, still fighting on in Idlib province, they have a curiosity rather than respect. But for Isis, they have contempt.

There is a creepy story which two officers tell me, which might – given the nature of the Isis mind – have some pathetic truth. Several suicide bombers, they say, were found with women’s underclothes in their pockets – for the virgins they would meet in paradise.

Some generals only speculate on dates – a sound precaution in the Syrian war – but General Khadour does not hesitate to tell me that he will reach and “liberate” Deir ez-Zour by the end of August, just 30 days away. Why not? He was head of the security and military headquarters in the eastern region of Syria – including the surrounded city – until he was flown north to fight Isis and Nusrah around Hassakeh. He will, no doubt, resume his duties there when his army breaks the siege.

“I and General Mohamed Sbeh here,” he says – Sbeh, Khadour’s subordinate officer, sits, rotund and narrow-eyed, listening like a fox to his left – “told the people of Deir ez-Zour we would come back for them, and we shall. That is what I am doing. We have got a third of the way. We have just 130 kilometres to reach Deir ez-Zour.”

An Isis radio station went on the air a few days ago and many of the soldiers heard it. “They said they were still winning and our soldiers in the desert heard it,” General Khadour said. “Isis said: ‘We have captured a major in the army and destroyed a tank of the regime and killed a lot of ‘pigs’ [soldiers].’ We all laughed. It was a lie. We have no one captured; we have not lost a tank. We are winning.”

But the Syrians are of course taking casualties. On a small hill captured only 24 hours earlier, General Sbeh told me he had two soldiers “martyred”, one of them an officer, and others wounded. But he said that Isis was now retreating to Mayadeen, along with some of their families.

These Syrian officers are dismissive of American power – their army has certainly advanced in the desert faster than the US-supported and largely Kurdish “Syrian Democratic Forces” east of the Euphrates when they approached Raqqa – and dismissively list the American airbases on Syrian soil.

“We know their bases are outside Hasakeh, and at Al-Ermeilan, Al-Shedadeh and Ein al-Arab [Kobani] and other places – but these are temporary,” Khadour says. “They cannot stay there.”

The general says he will never retire – like many soldiers, I suspect he likes fighting too much – and he says he will never give up till the end of his life. We first met in Aleppo five years ago when he was defending the middle-class Saef al-Dawla district. “We did not know whom we were fighting then,” he says.

“They had no tactics and we had much to learn. Then they would start getting sophisticated equipment from the West and we had to adopt our tactics. Now we are fighting in the desert.”

And therein runs a tale. For the Syrian Army was trained – always – to fight Israel on the Golan Heights, to go to war in cooler climates, to head south. But now it is fighting its way east in arid lands that resemble those of the Iran-Iraq war – indeed, of the Second World War in Egypt and Libya – and it has become a desert army.

Khadour ponders this for some time and then looks across the destroyed modern metropolis of Palmyra. In Roman antiquity, Queen Zenobia ruled this ancient city, infuriating the empire with her arrogance and independence. No civilian has returned to Palmyra. The general gazes across the smashed hotels and villas and shops and laughs mirthlessly. “Why did Zenobia ever come here?” he asks.
 

delft

Brigadier
From the BBC website, a not very reliable source, but in this case:
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Syria war: US says coalition partners must only fight IS
  • 27 July 2017
The US has warned its coalition partners in Syria to focus exclusively on the fight against so-called Islamic State (IS) and not regime forces.

A Pentagon spokesman told reporters the US's aim in Syria and Iraq was to "fight ISIS, and fight ISIS only".

One rebel group has left a joint base after clashing with the regime.

It comes after President Donald Trump
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to provide weapons and supplies to Syrian rebel groups.

That decision to end the programme, which started under the Obama administration in 2013 in an attempt to put pressure on President Bashar al-Assad to stand down, was made more than a month ago as part of an effort to improve ties with Russia, officials said last week.

Russia's military support has helped Mr Assad hold on to power during the six-year civil war that has left more than 300,000 people dead and displaced 11 million others.

Whether this latest announcement is related is unclear but on Thursday, a spokesman confirmed a group known as Shohada Al Quartyan, which was part of the US-led coalition in southern Syria, had split off after being told to focus on IS and not fighting against Mr Assad's government forces.

Coalition spokesman Colonel Ryan Dillon said they "unilaterally, without US or coalition permission or coordination" conducted patrols outside a specified zone and engaged in "activities not focused on fighting ISIS".

According to
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, the group was part of the "vetted Syrian forces" - made up of opposition fighters - being trained and equipped by the coalition.

However, Col Dillon told reporters in Washington: "We have made it very clear time and again our goal in Syria and Iraq is to fight ISIS and fight ISIS only [and] we've asked [our partner forces] to be committed to that same mission.

"We had a partner force we were working with who wanted to pursue other objectives, and those objectives were not consistent with defeating ISIS. So we have since talked with them and made them know that we cannot support them if they want to pursue objectives other than defeating ISIS.

"We are no longer going to support this particular group because that is what they want to do."

He said they would try to get back the equipment the group, which operates in the Al-Tanf area, near the Jordanian border, was given.
 

Equation

Lieutenant General
From the BBC website, a not very reliable source, but in this case:
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How soon will one of the US coalition forces will lose focus and gets angry and take their anger on the US as a new terrorist group? Remember Osama Bin Laden Mujahidin forces was a US ally once over the war in Afghanistan against the Soviet Union.o_O
 

delft

Brigadier
This is the sixth piece in Fisk’s series from Aleppo.

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Woe betide the Kurds of northern Syria when the war is over
One Syrian told me, ‘These Kurdish groups are liars. We gave them weapons to fight the terrorists – now we no longer give them weapons to protect themselves. We did not give them weapons so that they could make states. Now they are fully supplied by the Americans’

It was a tree-lined street – the white acacias are blooming in
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at this time of year – and the apartment block was, as we journalists used to say, unassuming. But on an upper floor, the Syrian men sitting round the air-conditioned room were deadly serious until a voice shouted on the recording which was being played to them from a desk opposite the door. Then they laughed very loudly indeed.

“Al-Nusrah has brought dishonour on the head of my son and children,” the voice wailed, angry and frightened. “Just tell Nusrah to stop fighting – they must obey the teaching of God and not harm people. The have attacked my family, bullets have destroyed my home and my car.” The voice belonged to an official of Ahrar al-Sham, a Salafist militia once allied to al-Nusrah-al-Qaeda, the fiercest armed opponent of Bashar al-Assad’s regime and the same organisation which, in its original form, perpetrated the 9/11 crimes against humanity. But for the past four days, Ahrar al-Sham and Nusrah are fighting and killing each other. That is why the Syrians in the Aleppo room are laughing.

There are more recordings from cell phones now, of men trying to arrange ceasefires across Idlib province, the vast dumping ground into which the Syrian regime is sending its Wahabi enemies when they agree to abandon their city enclaves. But the local truces between these groups do not work and there is now inter-guerrilla fighting across the triangle formed by the provinces of Hama, Idlib and Aleppo. As the voices continue, an official enters the room carrying a CD disk in a transparent plastic bag with two pages stapled to it, one of which appears to carry a photograph of a man. The pages are signed and left on the desk.

You do not need a PhD in intelligence to understand what is happening. Ahrar al-Sham, largely supported by Qatar and Turkey, is at war with al-Nusrah whose support has come from Saudi Arabia (and Qatar in the past) and, so far as the Syrians are concerned, from the United States. For the Syrians, the Qatar-Saudi dispute is now being fought out on the ground between the two sides’ proxies in the Syrian war. The first battles broke out in Tel Torgan in Aleppo province and then expanded to Saragib in the countryside round Idlib. In Saragib, it appears, Nusrah killed every Ahrar man they found. Now Ahrar al-Sham have an alliance with the Turkmani groups and the gloriously named ‘Nureddin Zinki’, local fighters who once played a role in the capture of eastern Aleppo. The real Nureddin al-Zinki – or Zengi as he would have been called at the time – was a 12th century Seljuk emir of Damascus and Aleppo who fought the Crusaders but who, ironically, was also trapped in a series of internecine battle with regional Arab rivals.

All of this makes the Syrian regime – and the army which is watching its enemies fighting each other – quite content. Another recording, another voice, this time a Facebook audio – the militias are obliging enough to give away their secrets since they are obsessed with technology – which announces that 2,500 fighters have now deployed on the Turkish border to fight Nusrah. Prominent local civilian and tribal leaders who have appealed for an end to the fighting are being ignored. The western side of the Aleppo governorate is peaceful – but is not under government control. Isis and Nusrah are maintaining an alliance.

The men in the room treat this more like vaudeville than tragedy. They have followed the slippery loyalties of the armed groups for months and know that the names of their enemies change as quickly as the trust which these groups demonstrate towards their supposed allies, how al-Qaeda became Nusrah and then – after its leadership staged a propaganda interview on al-Jazeera to display their ‘moderation’ towards minorities – to Fateh al-Sham. Isis still has a small pocket of territory in the desert north of Khanaseer – I know this to be true because I travel the Khanaseer desert road to Aleppo and can see on each trip the burned out oil tankers and occasional army tanks which Isis has wrecked during its raids. But elsewhere, Isis have been driven at least 70 miles from the desert highways which lead to eastern Syria.

There are intriguing historical observations made in the room, which are – as tourist guidebooks might say – worthy of note. During the 1973 Arab-Israeli war, the men in the room agree, the local Arab population on Golan had supported the Syrian army and many Israeli soldiers were killed. But now these people did not support the army and instead killed many Syrian soldiers. “In 1973,” one man says, “the enemy were at our borders. Now they are inside.”

There is also much talk of weapons, especially the American TOW anti-armour rockets which Nusrah brought into Syria in large numbers. The Syrian army had paid a heavy cost in these battles, until they received new Russian weapons. The Syrian 11th Brigade at the Syrian-Turkish border had been repeatedly attacked. There are still Muslim Brotherhood units near Dera’a in the south. If Syria was fighting just one state, there would be a quick victory, “but it is fighting states from all around the world”, one man says. This statement might smack of propaganda – even self- pity – if it did not bear an element of truth. One rebel unit calling itself Jund Mohamed was led by an Egyptian army officer – since fired by his commanders – and the Syrians eventually targeted the man in an ambush after information from a source inside the rebels. Their first rocket attack killed their own source. The second wounded the Egyptian and 35 others.

Then came a quite remarkable comment from one of the men which – whatever its veracity – should be recorded if only because it is believed in Syria. “The most criminal fighters are the Tunisians,” he said. “The reason is that [the late] President Bourguiba gave freedom to women and as a result, there were many Tunisian women who had illegitimate children. All of these children were taken to Islamic schools as orphans and taught Islamist teaching. They ‘converted’ them to their own extremist [Salafist] ideology and taught them to wear beards when they were teenagers, and to kill those who don’t obey their teachings.”

But it was the Kurdish fighters who enraged the men in the room almost as much as Isis and Nusrah. “The Kurds think they can form their own canton in northern Syria,” said the man beside the desk. “They are like the Israelis – they are telling the world that they are alone, surrounded by enemies and must be protected. But 80 per cent of the Kurdish people do not want to be separated from Syria. The Kurds like to think they can link up with the Americans, the Germans, the French, the Turks, with all of these big states.

“But Russia was betrayed by them. These Kurdish groups are liars. We gave them weapons to fight the terrorists – now we no longer give them weapons to protect themselves. We did not give them weapons so that they could make states. Now they are fully supplied by the Americans.”

Much nodding of heads around the room. The Kurds will clearly get no state in the north of the country if Syria has its way. “The Kurds are very afraid from Turkey,” the man beside the desk continued. “You know how the Kurds after the First World War lost everything. They did not get a state. They were the first losers, they were like a doll in the game of powers. They killed half the people of Cilicia, Armenians and Cilicians. Now they are trying to play the game again in the politics of the region – but they will lose.”

The rebels will surrender or die. This was the mood – hopelessly simplistic or true, depending on your point of view – in the air-conditioned room in that Aleppo apartment block. But woe betide the Kurds of northern Syria when the war is over.
 
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