Israeli soldiers stand atop tanks overlooking the border between Israel and Syria. (photo credit:RONEN ZVULUN / REUTERS)
Kuwaiti newspaper Al Jarida revealed on Sunday that an Israeli source disclosed a promise from Jerusalem to destroy all Iranian facilities within 40 kilometers (25 miles) of Israel’s Golan Heights.
This is likely the very first time it’s been reported that Russia is launching ballistic missiles into Syria from its own territory. Using war as a playground for new toys is not new, however.
An Israeli F-16I fighter jet during an exercise in the United States in 2009. (Master Sgt. Kevin J. Gruenwald/US Department of Defense/Wikimedia)
Senior official gives military’s view of Syrian civil war, and how Israeli jets navigate the dangerously full skies next door
For years, Israel was without rival in the skies over the Middle East, but with the Russian military placing an advanced anti-aircraft system — the S-400 — in Syria, that dynamic has changed and turned the once open skies into a far more difficult space to navigate, according to a senior Israeli Air Force official.
“We’re living in interesting times,” the officer told reporters Sunday night, speaking on condition of anonymity. Continue reading
BEIRUT — Russian forces are working to expand the tarmac of a major airport in Syria’s coastal province of Latakia, a stronghold of President Bashar Assad and his minority Alawite sect, a prominent Syrian monitoring group said Sunday.
The report comes amid rising concern among US officials of increased Russian military activity in Syria. President Barack Obama cast the buildup as an effort to prop up the embattled leader, warning Moscow against doubling down on Assad. Continue reading
- Today, instead of the free movement of labor and capital, there is, around the border area, the free movement of bombs and bullets.
- Ankara considers the real security threat from Syria as not the jihadists, but the secular Kurds who fight the jihadists.
- Turkey has worked so hard to create a “Peshawar” (Afghanistan) across its border with Syria — hoping instead to create a Muslim Brotherhood zone.
It was supposed to be Turkish gambit: Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s days in power were numbered; the Nusayri (Alawite) man would be toppled by Syria’s Sunni majority in a popular revolt. The Sunni majority would set up in Damascus a Muslim Brotherhood type of regime that would be subservient to Ankara, and Turkey’s southern border with Syria would be now be a borderless Sunni “Schengen” zone; cross border trade would flourish with the free movement of labor and capital. Peace would prevail along the 900-km border, and Turkish and Syrian Sunni supremacists would advance their agenda in the not-always-so-Sunni lands of the Middle East. Continue reading
Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi wasn’t joking when he said “I’ll see you in New York“, either.
A former NATO commander warned Monday that it was “only a matter of time” before a Sunni insurgent group that has captured parts of Iraq and Syria turns its attention to attacks in Europe.
Retired Navy Adm. James Stavridis urged U.S. and European allies to do more to prevent jihadists with western passports from returning home to stage terror attacks.
“As [the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria] ISIS consolidates its position across the Syrian and Iraqi divide, NATO must realize that it is only a matter of time before a wave of EU-passport-bearing jihadists will be headed back home to wreak havoc,” Stavridis said in an op-ed for the Atlantic Council.”Those AK-toting fundamentalists are a bit busy at the moment destroying two Shiite/Alawite regimes in Iraq and Syria, respectively, but the eye of Sunni extremism will inevitably turn its attention to the capitals of Europe,” he wrote. Continue reading
Embattled Syrian leader Bashar Assad is stockpiling weapons of mass destruction rather than handing over them as agreed last summer, the Sunday Times reported, quoting Israeli and Russian sources.
The report cites the sources as saying that the WMDs, which include chemical and biological weapons, are being upgraded with North Korean and Iranian assistance, and are believed by the Israelis to be located in Western Syria, in “the heartland of his Alawite sect”. They are to serve, the paper said, “as an insurance policy in case (Assad’s) country is eventually partitioned.” Continue reading
Know the enemy behind the enemy:
Photos of militants from the “Slavic Corps”, who are fighting in Syria on the side of the Assad regime, have been distributed in social networks.
Some sources claim that only retired officers of airborne and special forces, dismissed members of special task police, riot police and other security gangs of Russia, are allegedly included in the “Slavic Corps”. Continue reading
BEIRUT, Lebanon (UPI) — Western intelligence services have made much of Hezbollah’s military support for the embattled Damascus regime in Syria’s civil war, but there’s another, less well-known threat emerging there.
That’s the growing force of Iraqi Shiite fighters who’re also fighting to keep Syrian President Bashar Assad in power.
Many of them were trained by Hezbollah and Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps to fight the Americans in Iraq, and now form a major element in Iran’s new “foreign legion,” intelligence officers and military experts say. Continue reading
Signs of advanced readiness at likely hub of air campaign as UN inspection team comes under fire near site of alleged chemical attack
Warplanes and military transporters have begun arriving at Britain’s Akrotiri airbase on Cyprus, less than 100 miles from the Syrian coast, in a sign of increasing preparations for a military strike against the Assad regime in Syria. Continue reading
President allays injury suspicions with TV appearance to swear in Defence Minister
Rumours about the location of the royal couple were rife yesterday with unverified reports claiming that President Bashar al-Assad had fled to safety in the coastal province of Latakia while his glamorous British-born wife left for Russia.
Although the president made a brief appearance on state television yesterday to swear in his new Defence Minister, Fahad Jassim al-Freij, whose predecessor was killed in the Damascus blast that took out several top regime officials, state television did not say where or when the footage was filmed.
The president’s first public appearance since the attack will, however, allay suspicions that the president was himself injured.
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Opposition sources and a Western diplomat told Reuters that the president was directing the official response to the assassinations from Latakia, the heartland for the Alawite sect to which the ruling family belongs. The Assad clan hails from the provincial town of Qardaha which perches on a hill above Latakia city.
Assad’s mother Anisa Makhlouf and his newly widowed sister Bushra travelled with the body of his brother-in-law Assef Shawkat to Latakia last night on a private jet, according to a Free Syrian Army source who said the group had “insiders” informing them of the ruling family’s movements.
The same source said that Assad had been injured – but in an attack earlier on Wednesday and not the blast at the national security centre.
“The president was in Al Shaab Palace in Damascus and there was a warning at 3.30am and they decided to move him,” the source said. “As they moved, the Free Syrian Army was striking the area with mortars and one hit the cars. He only had small injuries.”
The Syrian ambassador to Moscow, Riyad Haddad, told Russian news agency Interfax that reports that the First Lady Asma al-Assad, had fled there were “completely false”.
Full article: Hunt for Assad is on amid claims of wife Asma’s exit to Russia (The Independant)
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