Free Republic

Don't believe everything you read in the media: The moderate rebels of Syria are not finished. They have gained ground in different parts of the country and have broken publicly with both the al Qaeda affiliate operating there and the jihadists of the Islamic State. Meanwhile, President Bashar al-Assad's regime is showing new signs of weakness. The death of moderate armed opposition elements has been greatly exaggerated. These groups -- whom I define as fighters who are not seeking to impose an Islamic state, but rather leaving that to a popular decision after the war ends -- have recently gained...

Western intelligence agencies have been assisting the Syrian government of Bashar al Assad fight militants of Isis (now called the 'Islamic State'), by providing details on the location of militant leaders for targeted air strikes. The information was passed to Assad's government by German intelligence service Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND), which acted as an intermediary, a source told the Independent... In recent weeks, Syrian forces have launched a series of airstrikes against Islamic State commanders and headquarters, as they battle to halt the advance of jihadist forces from their stronghold in the east of the country. The Assad regime has been accused...

BEIRUT (Reuters) - Syria is wagering that Islamic State's push to reshape the Middle East will eventually force a hostile West to deal with President Bashar al-Assad as the only way to tackle the threat. While Assad's forces escalate their fight with Islamic State militants in the Syrian civil war, the United States is staging air strikes on the same group across the frontier in Iraq. This, along with United Nations sanctions targeting the Sunni Muslim militants in both Syria and Iraq, has strengthened Assad's belief that the United States and Europe are coming around to his way of viewing...

After 162 days with no information about his whereabouts, GlobalPost announced Friday that James Foley, an American journalist who went missing on November 22 in Syria, is almost certainly being held by the Syrian government in a detention center near the capital city of Damascus.... ...GlobalPost CEO and President Philip Balboni said: "With a very high degree of confidence, we now believe that Jim was most likely abducted by a pro-regime militia group commonly referred to as the Shabiha and subsequently turned over to Syrian government forces. We have obtained multiple independent reports from very credible confidential sources who have...

The first installment of a five-part documentary by Vice News on the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) was released online Thursday, offering Westerners a rare glimpse into the inner workings of the terror group that now controls large swathes of Iraq and Syria. For three weeks, VICE News reporter Medyan Dairieh interviewed and recorded members of ISIL in the Syrian city of Raqqa, even capturing gruesome footage of an ISIL victory over the Syrian army’s 17th division. The terrorist group overran a position held by 50 soldiers belonging to the regime of Bashar al-Assad, decapitated them and...

Iraqi Al Qaeda's entry into Syria's civil war caused "a political disaster" for Islamist militants there, the movement's global leader Ayman al-Zawahri said in a video message, urging the faction to redouble its efforts in Iraq instead. Zawahri has repeatedly tried to end infighting between the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) and another Al Qaeda-aligned group, the Nusra Front. He said on May 2 in a message translated by SITE Monitoring that if ISIL had accepted his decision not to get involved in Syria and had instead worked to "busy itself with Iraq, which needs double its...

Basically a car-bomb stuffed into an disused oil barrel (NH₄NO₃ and fertilizer w/nails, bolts, and other improvised shrapnel) then dropped from high altitude -out of the range of small arms fire- the government has already killed 20,000 with the crude-yet-effective device... They started tossing them out of Russian-made Hind helicopter gunships over a year ago, and to especially devastating effect in the government's pounding of Allepo a couple months back. Though just a barrel full of stuff that blows up and spews nails/etc all around, part of it's effectiveness in the government terror campaign has been how indiscriminatethe barrels are in...

Almost the entire Syrian side of the Golan Heights is now under the control of rebel forces, including radical Islamist groups, a senior Israeli military commander in the area said Friday. Only the Quneitra border area is still in the hands of forces loyal to President Bashar Assad, Lt.-Col. Anan Abbas, deputy commander of the Golan Brigade, told Israel’s Channel 10. About 95 percent of the Syrian side of the Golan is in the hands of anti-Assad rebels, including radical Islamic groups such as the Al-Nusra Front, affiliated with al-Qaeda, a rival of the burgeoning Islamic State of Iraq and...

Doesn’t Obama know that the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) has bulldozed the part of the Syria/Iraq border that it controls? Doesn’t he know that there are no significant forces in Syria that want a secular state, but only various bands of pro-Sharia Islamic supremacists? Doesn’t it occur to him how incoherent it is to want to arm these people in Syria and fight against them in Iraq? For there is no significant difference between the “rebels” fighting Assad and the “extremists” fighting Maliki.“Obama seeks $500 million from Congress to help moderate Syrian rebels,” Reuters, June 26,...

Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) said Sunday that the Sunni militants taking over Iraq have quickly gained power because the United States has armed their group in Syria. “I think we have to understand first how we got here,” he said on CNN’s “State of the Union.” “We have been arming [the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria] ISIS in Syria.” ISIS, an al Qaeda offshoot, has been collaborating with the Syrian rebels whom the Obama administration has been arming in their efforts to overthrow Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, Paul explained. The administration has reportedly assisted the moderate opposition in Syria,...

Talk along the lines of Hillary, Hillary, Hillary dominated the network news shows Sunday, as hosts and their guests mulled Hillary Clinton’s tenure as secretary of state, excerpts from her forthcoming memoir Hard Choices and her potential 2016 presidential bid. Fox News Sunday host Chris Wallace countered praise of Clinton from Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo., by listing some of Clinton’s troubles as President Barack Obama’s top diplomat. Wallace singled out developments in U.S. relations during Obama’s first term with Russia, Iran and Syria."She defended Syria’s President Assad as a possible reformer at the start of that country’s civil war," he...

BEIRUT -- Carrying their rifles and small bags of belongings, hundreds of exhausted Syrian rebels withdrew Wednesday from their last remaining strongholds in the heart of Homs, surrendering to President Bashar Assad a bloodstained city that was once the centre of the revolt against him. For Assad, it is a powerful victory ahead of presidential elections. For the rebels, the dramatic exit after two years of enduring grueling assaults and siege captures their sense of abandonment amid world reluctance to help shift the balance of power on the ground. "We ate grass and leaves until there was nothing left for...

Concerns are growing among Western intelligence services that Syria still has a significant and undeclared arsenal of chemical weapons, including crude chlorine-filled bombs, secret stockpiles of sophisticated nerve gasses or their components—and the scientific know-how to rebuild a larger-scale, higher-grade chemical weapons effort once the Bashar al-Assad regime has escaped the international spotlight. “A ghost of CW [chemical weapons] program in a place riven with conflict—that’s a real concern,” one American intelligence official tells The Daily Beast. But it’s not the only worry. Within the U.S. intelligence community, there’s also lingering unease about the Assad regime’s biological weapons program that...

A growing number of Syrian Christian leaders are traveling to the United States to plead with lawmakers to stop sending arms to the rebels. The most recent visitor is the Patriarch of the Church of Antioch, His Beatitude Gregorios III, who is based in Damascus. For the first three years of the civil war, Syria’s Christian leaders have not been frequent visitors to the U.S., in part fearing reprisals when they return to Syria, but also because they have been reluctant to engage in what they see as political issues. But with the civil war now in its fourth year,...

BEIRUT (AP) — Syria's president marked Easter with a tour Sunday of an ancient Christian village recently recaptured by his forces, state media said, as the country's Greek Orthodox Patriarch vowed that country's Christians "will not submit and yield" to extremists. Syrian state TV and the country's official SANA news agency said President Bashar Assad visited the hilltop hamlet of Maaloula, inspecting the damage done in recent fighting to its monasteries and churches. Rebels, including fighters from the al-Qaida-affiliated Nusra Front, seized Maaloula several times late last year, most recently in December. Government troops swept through the village on Monday,...

BEIRUT - Syria´s embattled president marked Easter with a tour Sunday of an ancient Christian village recently recaptured by his forces, an important symbolic prize for his government ahead of coming presidential elections he appears poised to contest. President Bashar Assad´s visit to Maaloula, some 40 miles northeast of Damascus, serves a propaganda victory for his government in its quest to be seen as protector of religious minorities as its civil war grinds on. (Snip) Rebels, including fighters from the al Qaeda-affiliated Nusra Front, seized Maaloula several times late last year, most recently in December.

Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu initiated a phone call with Russian President Vladimir Putin on Tuesday to discuss bilateral issues, Iran and Ukraine, the Kremlin said in a statement. ... Netanyahu does speak to Putin by phone from time to time, so Tuesday night's conversation - though not a regular occurence - is by no means unprecedented. Russia is a major player in three areas of major concern to Israel: Iran, Syria and arms sales to the Middle East. ... On Monday, US State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki denied a Haaretz report last week...

Russia and Israel seem to have a growing affinity for each other. A few weeks ago, Israel abstained from a vote in the UN censuring Russia for its invasion of Ukraine. The Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported [link at URL] that this is a sore spot for the White House and a diplomatic novum on the world scene. A senior Israeli official said that Israel's absence from the United Nations vote was viewed around the world as an extremely irregular measure, a departure from a long-standing Israeli policy of voting with the United States in the UN. While the Americans viewed...

The government of Syrian President Bashar Assad has accused the United States, Turkey, Israel, Saudi Arabia, and the rebels fighting to overthrow it, of being responsible for chemical weapons attacks in the country, Syria’s state news agency SANA reported on Tuesday. In letters to the UN Security Council as well as UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, the Assad regime cited “reports, studies and documented researches” that allegedly implicate the US and Turkish administrations, as well as several other countries, “whether directly or indirectly in these appalling carnage in Syria, including Khad al-Assal on March 15, 2013.” …

Obama waited too long to help the Syrian FSA against the monstrous Assad regime. When some sort of intervention was talked about: (bombing, indirect support, arms, etc) it was TOO late to help, and it would most likely have helped (either directly or indirectly) terroristic elements and possibly Al Qaeda elements which had taken the lead in Syria against Assad. NO WAY ON DOING THAT. PERIOD. And, once again, it is too late to help the Ukrainians against the thug Putin. (strike one against helping them). And as long as the Ukrainian gov't hasn't ran Svoboda and Right Sector and...