Posted on 02/16/2016 2:15:10 PM PST by MinorityRepublican
On Monday, Russia apparently bombed three Syrian hospitals and a school.
The Russians are denying it, blaming the strikes on the United States, but American planes aren't flying in the parts of northwest Syria where the bombings took place. ISIS has no real presence there, and the group is the sole target of America's airstrikes.
Russia, instead, is striking areas held by Syrian rebels — and recently it's been picking up the pace. The goal has been to help the Syrian government, which was until recently tottering, seize more territory in advance of the planned ceasefire (though it's far from clear that this ceasefire will actually materialize).
These bombings, in addition to being a humanitarian catastrophe, speak to Russia's growing offensive in Syria and the impact it is having on the war there.
This has, to a degree, worked. Bashar al-Assad's forces have reversed the war's momentum and even made real gains in some areas. But the gains, such as they are, are quite limited — and come at tremendous humanitarian cost.
(Excerpt) Read more at vox.com ...
Only brutality will get this mess over.
Go Assad.
Go Sov, er, Russians.
Geez, I hate saying that.
As I said when this war started, a weakened and humbled Assad in charge is better than the Saudis and Turks having a Sunni-puppet regime installed in Damascus, with the aid of ISIS and Al Qaeda in Syria.
The Russian onslaught is making a real difference on the battlefield. The below animated map shows gains by Assad's forces near Aleppo, Syria's largest city, in the first week of February.
The rebels (in green) are clearly losing ground to the government (in tan). ISIS (in black) is also losing territory, while the Kurds (in yellow) are taking advantage of real weakness to seize some of their nearby territory:
Kill! Destroy! Kill! Destroy! Kill! Isn’t that how to run a war?
Those evil evil Russians. Their priorities are all wrong as they should be aligned with important threats like global warming gays and females career paths. Our fearless Leaders especially our Trostsky Rino’s know what’s good for us all. We must fight the evil Putin and his minions and take all the Muslims for relocation here in the West especially flyover country. We must prove out worthiness by checking our white Western racist Christian privilege and bow before our betters. They have our best interests at heart and they know better and we should trust them with approbation as we raise the American flag for freedom and not question their patriotism. Any alternative views are pure conspiracy and are not tolerated except by the terrorists.
Waaaaaah! My side is loosing. Sniff. Snifff. Waaaaah, it’s not fair.
Trying to drive more refugees into the EU to destroy it since Merkel had the temerity to try to support efforts to get former satellite states into the EU.
Assad’s government gains are freeing millions of Syrians from misery and virtual enslavement in areas held by lslamist mobs - call them by whatever faction name they choose
If the majority of Syrians wanted to be free of Assad it would not have taken the “moderate rebels” and IS so much brutality and force to control them
Remember this brutal “civil” war (actually an ideological war of islam shrai vs secularism)started in 2011 with obama’s strategy of inciting “arab spring”
which has ruined every country it touched, except Egypt which pulled through it thanks to its military leadership
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/cdn0.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/6048221/3cc8d8f3-fc9a-4229-88b5-4c009b6f17b3.jpg)
"The term 'useful idiots' has been attributed to Lenin, as a description of those mindless people in the Western democracies who would always find ways to excuse whatever the Soviet Union did. Columnist Mona Charen's new book Useful Idiots shows that such people are still with us.
Long after the Soviet Union's horrors had become too widely known around the world for their sympathizers in the West to be able to get away with whitewashing the USSR, new Communist dictatorships arose to become the new objects of the affections of the Western intelligentsia and of like-minded people in the media and in politics. ..."
http://townhall.com/columnists/thomassowell/2003/05/20/useful_idiots
______________________________
Mr Putin, what do you think of your "useful idiot"
supporters in the United States?
-snip-
While today's left is more than willing to speak about perceived Western crimes, it is all too often caught up in a type of politics that not only makes a virtue out of not condemning crimes committed by powerful non-Western actors, namely Russia, China, and Iran, but that often explicitly or implicitly supports such crimes.
There is a gruesomely perfect example of this hypocrisy that has been visible this month relating to the U.S. war crime in Kunduz. Since Russia decided to directly intervene on behalf of the Assad regime primarily against not ISIS, as it had stated, but rather the moderate rebel forces that fight both the Assad regime and ISIS, it has carried out no less than four confirmed attacks on medical facilities, while it has also deliberately targeted ambulances.
The reaction of the left to Kunduz was one of near apoplectic outrage, but among none of the major organizations or individuals of the left will you find even a quotidian acknowledgement of the continued attacks by Russia on medical facilities in Syria.
-snip-
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/10/27/russia-bombs-hospitals-lefties-shrug.html
Sources say Moscow is also indiscriminately targeting civilians neighborhoods populated by Sunni Muslims, killing innocent women and children in the process.
Russia remains loyal to the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, which has also indiscriminately targeted non-Alawite civilians throughout the country and is estimated to have killed far more Syrians than the Islamic State terror group. Forces loyal to Assad have slaughtered over 85 percent of the 250,000-plus Syrians killed during the war, according to estimates.
A source with Raqqa is Being Slaughtered Silently, a citizen journalism network that was created to document the atrocities of the Islamic State, told Breitbart News that Russia is targeting almost the entirety of Raqqa with cluster bombs, munitions that carry explosives which on impact, disperse hundreds of deadly metal fragments. When these submunitions deploy, they spread out over hundreds of yards of territory, creating a situation where individuals far away from the target site are subject to being killed or seriously injured. A single cluster bomb may hold hundreds of submunitions.
The citizen journalist network posted photos of the Russian strikes on its social media pages.
Yesterday, they reported that Russian planes killed several civilians in an airstrike that hit a school in Syria.
-snip-
Are the Kurds fighting the rebels? I thought they were on the same side.
Even if the rebels/ISIS/Al-nusra were able to take down Assad, it is likely they would turn on each other the next day in order to see who gets to rule.
The place is going to be a mess for decades.
“You cannot qualify war in harsher terms than I will. War is cruelty, and you cannot refine it; and those who brought war into our country deserve all the curses and maledictions a people can pour out. I know I had no hand in making this war, and I know I will make more sacrifices to-day than any of you to secure peace.”
http://rjgeib.com/thoughts/sherman/sherman-to-burn-atlanta.html
Nah, the Kurds are allied with the government.
GO RUSSIA!
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