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Assad say military attacks will fail to weaken Syrian resolve in anti-terror fight

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President Bashar al-Assad says the missile strikes by the US, the UK, and France will only strengthen Syria’s resolve to keep its fight against terror groups and “crush terrorism in every inch of the nation.”

The Syrian leader made the comments in a phone conversation on Saturday with Iranian President Hassan Rouhani, his office said.

Rouhani, in turn, told Assad that Iran would continue to stand by Syria, expressing his confidence that this aggression would not weaken the determination of the Syrian people in its war against terrorism.”

In the early hours of Saturday, the three Western states launched a barrage of missile attacks against Syria in response to what they claim to be a chemical attack in the town by Damascus on April 7. Syria has no chemical arsenal and has rejected any role in the suspected gas attack.

Syrian air defenses, however, responded firmly, shooting down most of the missiles fired at the country.

Army goes ahead with operations

As the situation in Damascus and other towns and cities returned to normal, Syrian forces went ahead with their anti-terrorism campaign.

Syrian soldiers entered the Eastern Ghouta town of Douma for clean-up operations days after they fully retook the entire suburban area near Damascus from foreign-backed militants.

Thirty-eight dead in central Baghdad double suicide attack

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A double suicide attack killed 38 people in Baghdad on Monday, a health official said, the second such attack in the Iraqi capital in three days. Earlier reports by spokesmen from the Health Ministry and the Interior Ministry had 26 killed and at least 16 dead, respectively, and dozens wounded.

Dr Abdel Ghani al-Saadi, health chief for east Baghdad, reported “26 dead and 90 wounded”. “Two suicide bombers blew themselves up in al-Tayyaran square in central Baghdad,” said General Saad Maan, spokesman for the Joint Operations Command, which includes the army and the police. He said there had been 16 deaths.

According to an AP report, Iraq’s interior ministry said back-to-back suicide attacks in central Baghdad kill at least 16 people, wound 65.

Another report by Reuters, quoting Iraqi interior ministry, said that at least 16 people were killed and 65 wounded in the twin suicide bombing in central Baghdad.

Egypt mosque bombing: killing 85 people in Sinai attack

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Suspected militants have targeted a mosque in the north of Egypt’s Sinai peninsula, with reports of gunfire and explosions. Scores have been killed, according to state media.

Militants were reported to have set off a bomb and opened fire at a mosque in Egypt’s restive northern Sinai on Friday, apparently targeting supporters of the security forces attending prayers there.

State media said at least 85 people were killed in the attack on the Al Rawdah mosque, some 40 kilometers (25 miles) west of the provincial capital, Arish city.

Eyewitnesses reported seeing men in four off-road vehicles arrive at the scene to carry out the attack. They were seen to plant explosives around the mosque which were detonated as worshippers left. The attackers were then said to have opened fire at those who fled.

State television said President Abdel Fattah el-Sissi had convened an emergency security meeting soon after the attack.

Some 80 people people were wounded, according to Egypt’s MENA state news agency. The Egyptian government declared three days of mourning in the wake of the attack.

Egyptian security forces are fighting an Islamic State (IS) insurgency in northern Sinai, with militants having killed hundreds of police and soldiers over the past three years as fighting there intensified.

Militants in the area have also targeted the followers of the mystical Sufi branch of Sunni Islam, as well as Coptic Christians.

Investigation launched into Israeli drone maker suspected of bombing Armenia

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Police have opened a criminal investigation into an Israeli drone manufacturer that allegedly attempted to bomb the Armenian military on behalf of Azerbaijan during a demonstration of one of its unmanned kamikaze aerial vehicles earlier this year.

“An investigation is ongoing against Aeronautics Defense Systems Ltd. in regards to a deal with a significant customer,” police said in a statement Tuesday, The Times of Israel reports.

The Israel Police’s Unit of International Crime Investigations, known in Hebrew by its acronym Yahbal, is leading the investigation.

News of the investigation came out on Monday as an Israeli court approved a gag order for the case, limiting the information that can be published about it.

In a statement, Aeronautics said it would “fully cooperate with any examination on any issue and would work to the best of its capabilities so the investigation will be as swift as possible.”

The gag order shows that the company has been under investigation since at least September 4, a few weeks after the initial allegations came out regarding its live-fire demonstration against Armenia.

The company has also reportedly had dealings with the Myanmar military junta, which is accused of ethnic cleansing for its treatment of the country’s Muslim Rohingya minority.

In late August, the Defense Ministry Defense Export Controls Agency halted Aeronautics’ export license for its Orbiter 1K model UAV to a “significant customer,” which the company reported to the Israeli stock exchange, as required by law.

According to Aeronautics, the company was poised to make a NIS 71.5 million ($20 million) deal over the next two years with the “significant customer.”

“The company is working to clarify the issue with the Defense Ministry,” Aeronautics said in its statement at the time.

The company noted that the Defense Ministry’s decision only affected the sale of its drone to the “significant customer” and not to other foreign buyers.

 

As a rule, Israeli defense contractors refrain from naming their customers directly. However, it could be understood from the statement that the country in question was Azerbaijan.

The decision to halt the sale came approximately two weeks after a complaint was filed with the ministry saying that the company had, at the request of the Azeris, launched one of its Orbiter 1K model drones at Armenian forces in Nagorno-Karabakh.

Colonel Armen Gyozalian of the Armenian army said two soldiers were lightly wounded in the attack on July 7, according to the Armenian defense ministry’s “Hay Zinvor” news outlet.

A copy of the complaint was first leaked to the Maariv newspaper.

According to the report, the firm sent a team to the Azerbaijan capital Baku to demonstrate the unmanned aerial vehicle, which can be outfitted with a small explosive payload, 2.2 to 4.4 pounds (one to two kilograms), and flown into an enemy target on a “suicide” mission.

According to the complaint, while demonstrating the Orbiter 1K system to the Azerbaijani military sometime last month, the company was asked to carry out a live-fire test of the system against an Armenian military position.

Kurdish fighters PKK bombing kills 2 Turkish soldiers in Batman province

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At least two Turkish soldiers have been killed in a Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) bomb attack in the country’s southeastern province of Batman.

The Saturday blast took place as the PKK detonated a road bomb as a military convoy was passing through a rural area in the province’s Sason district.

The soldiers succumbed to their wounds after being moved to a local hospital.

Turkish security forces have launched a ground and air operation to hunt down the militants across the region.

A shaky ceasefire between the PKK and the Turkish government collapsed in July 2015. Attacks on Turkish security forces have soared ever since.

Over the past few months, Turkish ground and air forces have been carrying out operations against the PKK positions in the country’s southeastern border region as well as in northern Iraq and neighboring Syria.

Turkish warplanes bomb Iraqi Kurdistan for third day

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HEWLÊR-Erbil, Iraq’s Kurdistan region,— Turkish fighter jets bombarded the district of Amedi in Iraq’s Kurdistan Region on Sunday for the third consecutive day targeting suspected positions of the PKK.

Turkish warplanes have targeted several villages in Sangasar and Warte districts, about 130 kilometers east of Erbil.

Warte Mayor Muslih Zrar told Rudaw that Turkish fighter jets intensively bombed Bokriskiyan village on Sunday, adding that fortunately it did not result in the loss of lives or material.

Turkish warplanes had previously shelled a community in the district of Amedi in the Kurdistan Region on Saturday, wounding one person.

Another person was also wounded on Friday after military artillery bombarded the Kurazhari Mountains in Shiladze sub-district four times around 11 a.m.

The two districts are close to areas in Qandil Mountains under the control of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), which has been engaged in a three-decade-long war against the Turkish state.

Turkish fighter jets also on Friday bombed the Amedi area, injuring a 35-year-old woman in the aerial attacks.

The injured woman’s husband claimed that the Turkish army knows the locations of the PKK positions, but still targeted areas where civilians were.

The PKK has some 5,000 guerrilla fighters stationed mostly in the remote bordering areas of Iraq’s Kurdistan Region.

Since July 2015, Turkey initiated a controversial military campaign against the PKK in the country’s southeastern Kurdish region after Ankara ended a two-year ceasefire agreement. Since the beginning of the campaign, Ankara has imposed several round-the-clock curfews, preventing Kurdish civilians from fleeing regions where the military operations are being conducted.

In March 2017, the Turkish security forces accused by UN of committing serious abuses during operations against Kurdish militants in the nation’s southeast.

The PKK took up arms in 1984 against the Turkish state, which still denies the constitutional existence of Kurds, to push for greater autonomy for the Kurdish minority who make up around 22.5 million of the country’s 79-million population. Nearly 40,000 people have been killed in the resulting conflict since then.

A large Kurdish community in Turkey and worldwide openly sympathise with PKK rebels and Abdullah Ocalan, who founded the PKK group in 1974, and has a high symbolic value for most Kurds in Turkey and worldwide according to observers.

Source: eKurd.com

Trump confronts the contradictions of his foreign policy rhetoric

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By Dan Balz

President Trump found himself in unfamiliar territory Friday, generally praised by members of the political and foreign policy establishments but attacked from some quarters of Trump nation for seeming to betray the “America First” pledges that carried him to the White House.

Trump’s decision to fire cruise missiles at a Syrian air base in response to Tuesday’s chemical weapons attack against civilians won support from some people he had routinely disparaged over the past year, among them Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.). Hours before the U.S. attacks, Hillary Clinton had urged just such a response.

But some Trump loyalists saw the president as taking a potentially fateful turn away from what had made him so attractive to his anti-establishment, anti-globalist supporters. Radio talk show host Laura Ingraham tweeted, “Missiles flying. [Florida Sen. Marco] Rubio’s happy. McCain’s ecstatic. Hillary’s on board. A complete policy change in 48 hours.” Farther out on the nationalist fringe, Paul Joseph Watson, an editor at Infowars.com, tweeted, “It’s been fun, lads, but the fun is over.” Watson clarified that he was not turning on Trump completely but was off the train with regard to Syria.

There was always a contradiction in Trump’s campaign rhetoric on foreign policy. He was the get-tough leader who would “bomb the hell out of ISIS” and portrayed himself as a dramatic contrast to what he called the weak and ineffective leadership of Barack Obama. But he was also the reluctant interventionist and criticized rivals who advocated deeper military involvement in Syria.

In his speech to a joint session of Congress, Trump promised to be president of this country, not the rest of the world. On Thursday night, Trump ended his address announcing the missile strike with the traditional “God bless America,” and then, after a brief pause, “and the entire world.”

What the U.S. strike reveals about the president’s foreign policy remains unclear. Was this a one-off action, meant only to tell Syrian President Bashar ­
al-Assad not to use chemical weapons again? Or could the strike lead to deeper U.S. involvement in Syria, depending on reactions by the Syrian regime, Russia, Iran or Islamic State forces?

Trump’s sharp turn in a matter of days was so dramatic and unexpected that it produced whiplash among many foreign policy experts. That he could pivot so quickly is a reminder that Trump is a president without a deeply rooted national security philosophy or worldview, someone who was decisively swayed by the terrible images of dead and dying children that were broadcast around the world after the chemical attack.

Obama had drawn a famous “red line” in Syria in 2012, warning Assad against the use of chemical weapons. His failure to take military action after Syria launched a chemical attack in the summer of 2013 marked one of his greatest foreign policy failures and became a symbol of presidential equivocation and weakness.

Notably, Trump was not among those criticizing Obama at the time. Instead, he warned Obama not to take military action, even when chemical weapons had been used. This week, the chemical attack gave Trump an early opportunity to draw a distinction from his predecessor, even if it contradicted the view he stated in 2013.

Among Trump loyalists who had been sharply critical of Obama on this and other issues, the new president’s decision to attack was welcomed as a sign of how significantly things have changed. Conservative talk show host Bill Mitchell tweeted that Trump’s action “obliterated Obama’s eight years of [weakness] in one bold stroke.”

Source: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-confronts-the-contradictions-of-his-foreign-policy-rhetoric/2017/04/07/c1a32dfe-1bc4-11e7-855e-4824bbb5d748_story.html?utm_term=.e4075d878ce8

Falling Skies: Christian Serbian Children Recall the Horror of 1999 NATO, Turkey, Saudi Islamization of the Yugoslavia Bombing

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Eighteen years after the beginning of NATO’s aerial bombardment of Yugoslavia, Serbian children who were born during that troubled time still bear the emotional scars left by war.

In 1999, the United States and its NATO allies utilized the air power of the formerly defensive organization to conduct air strikes in support of an internal Yugoslav conflict between Belgrade and the breakaway region of Kosovo. Their actions took a toll on the lives of the young children of that generation, leaving scars they still wear today.

Andjela S. was born in Pec, a city located in the Serbian province of Kosovo and the former seat of the Serbian Orthodox Church. After the events of the 1999, however, all of the city’s Serbian residents had to abandon their homes and flee for their lives. According to Andjela, a great injustice was done to Serbia back then, when Western propaganda portrayed Serbians as the chief culprits behind the war.

“I know they blamed us for allegedly trying to exile all Albanians from Kosovo. That’s how it was portrayed, and then the airstrikes began. And even though they (NATO) said that they’re only going to bomb military targets, they didn’t care about the civilians who were dying and couldn’t understand what was going on,” Andjela told Sputnik.

She told how her parents and relatives were hiding in the basement while NATO warplanes were bombing the city.

“My grandfather was already old and sick back then. Due to all that colossal stress he ended up having a stroke,” the girl added.

According to Gavrilo M., the first thing that comes to his mind is the downing of a US F-177 stealth aircraft, which remains on display to this day near Belgrade’s airport.

“It proves that even high tech weapons can be defeated by military tactics and technology,” he said.

To him, the events of 1999 became “the end of the Yugoslavia’s break-up and the finale of one global geostrategic game that lasted two centuries.”

“My father wasn’t fighting, but he was keeping watch at the faculty building where he was working. They told me that mother was terrified by the airstrikes, that she panicked a lot; most of the time she was just lying down. But I do know that once when the sirens started wailing she hid under a table,” he said.

Uros C. was born in Lipljan, a city in the Serbian province of Kosovo, and lived there until 2004. While he was growing up, the boy learned from his parents about the Western media “orchestrating” the humanitarian disaster in Kosovo.

“My father was in the army when the airstrikes began. Mother told me that she was shocked, that none of them knew what was going on and that they were scared. Sometimes the airstrikes made night look like day, just how they show it in some movies. They told me that I was the only ray of light amid the darkness,” Uros said.

He lived in Kosovo until he turned six, but Uros still remembers buildings riddled with bullets, bomb craters and areas contaminated by the depleted uranium weapons used by NATO. And when the NATO-led KFOR mission came to Kosovo, the Serbians living there forgot what ‘the freedom of movement means’.

“I remember that I could only go to kindergarten and back home. Walking anywhere else was dangerous,” Uros recalls.

Uros’ family fled Lipljan on March 11, 2004, just a few days prior to a wave of anti-Serbian pogroms that swept across the city.

And while Serbian schools do not teach students much about the NATO airborne campaign, Uros believes that there’s no need to spend much time teaching about the events so recent.

“The conflict continues, and if the schools were teaching only the Serbian version of those events, that would’ve had a negative impact on the situation. But we will always regard these events as aggression, while the foreign aggressor will regard them as merely gaining access to Kosovo’s mineral resources, which is perfectly legitimate in the aggressor’s eyes,” Uros said.

Andjela S. also added that the paragraphs in history textbooks describing those events appear “too censored” and usually look like this: a few sentences from official releases, and then a few sentences describing the author’s point of view.

“Yes, they also contain fragments that describe our view of those events, but essentially the textbooks stick to what the US designated as the official opinion,” Andjela explained.

However, Biljana K., history teacher at the First Belgrade Gymnasium, told Sputnik that the school program adopts an unbiased approach to that particular time period, and that the Serbian society and expert community appear divided on those events.

“There are those who would say that it was good, and that the airstrikes marked the beginning of the end of Milosevic’s reign. But there are also those who would say that we were innocent, and that the whole world conspired against us for reasons unknown. The truth is somewhere in between, and it’s definitely not black-and-white,” she said.

Source: https://sputniknews.com/europe/201703241051935691-yugoslavia-nato-airstrikes-legacy/

Syrian Army warns Israel it will respond after military airport bombed near Damascus

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Syrian state news agency SANA says Israeli jets have bombed the Mezzeh military airport west of Damascus, accusing Tel Aviv of supporting terrorism. The airport was rocked by multiple explosions, with ambulances rushing to the scene.

The Syrian Arab Army has warned that there will be repercussions for Israel for the “flagrant attack” on the military base, state TV said, citing a Syrian army command spokesman. It also linked the alleged strike to Israel’s “support of terrorist groups.”

The army said several missiles were fired at the Mezzeh airport’s compounds from the Lake Tiberias area in northern Israel at about 12am Friday. The strike reportedly damaged one of the compounds of the crucial military facility.

The Mezzeh airport is located west of Damascus, just 5 kilometers from the Presidential Palace, the official residence of Syrian President Bashar Assad.

This is the second time in two months the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) has being accused by the Syrian government of targeting Syrian positions from Israeli territory.

On December 7, SANA reported that “several surface-to-surface missiles” were launched by the IDF from the Golan Heights. At the time, the source in the Syrian armed forces slammed the attack as a “desperate attempt” by Israel to endorse terrorists.

On Thursday, at least nine people were killed and several others injured as result of a suicide attack in the Kafr Sousa neighborhood in Damascus. The terrorist had reportedly detonated an explosive belt near the al-Muhafaza sports club, SANA reported. RT’s Lizzie Phelan reported, citing a National Defense Forces (NDF) commander on the ground, that allegedly as many as five perpetrators took part in the attack, out of which three managed to escape and one was killed by a sniper.

https://youtu.be/EwHHbFV_Ej4

Breaking News: As Syria defeating ISIS, Israeli jets bombing Syrian military airport near Damascus

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Syrian state news agency SANA says Israeli jets have bombed the Mezzeh military airport west of Damascus, accusing Tel Aviv of supporting terrorism. The airport was rocked by multiple explosions, with ambulances rushing to the scene.

The Syrian Arab Army has warned that there will be repercussions for Israel for the “flagrant attack” on the military base, state TV said, citing a Syrian army command spokesman. It also linked the alleged strike to Israel’s “support of terrorist groups.”