Free Republic

BEIRUT (Reuters) - Syria’s army and its allies will keep fighting in Syria after the battle ends in Deir al-Zor province, where Islamic State has its last significant stronghold, President Bashar al-Assad said on Tuesday. snip Assad said in his meeting with Velayati that the battle would last “until the recovery of security and stability to all Syrian lands”, his office said.

Syria said on Friday that a United Nations report accusing it of using sarin gas in an attack on the town of Khan Sheikhun in April was a "falsification of the truth", AFP reports. The report, seen by AFP on Thursday, says that President Bashar Al-Assad's regime is responsible for the April 4 attack in which sarin gas projectiles were fired into Khan Sheikhun, a rebel-held town in the Idlib province of northwestern Syria. More than 87 people were killed in the attack, which was not the first time that sarin had been used during the civil war in Syria....

RAQQA, Syria — Mazlum Kobane is the chief commander of the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) and, as such, the chief interlocutor of the US-led coalition fighting the Islamic State (IS). The 45-year-old commander, widely known as Gen. Mazlum, is at the helm of the campaign to retake Raqqa, the self-styled capital of IS, which is in its final stages. Kobane, who displays an avid interest in politics beyond his military skills, has earned himself fame in Washington, where his name is frequently mentioned at various panels. Coalition officials who know Kobane are full of praise for the SDF commander, who...

Syrian President Bashar al-Assad has expressed his gratitude to the supreme leaders of Iran and North Korea in two recent letters thanking them for standing behind his government, which has been accused by the West of perpetrating human rights abuses throughout a six-year war against jihadists and other insurgent groups. In a letter sent Thursday to Iran's Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Assad thanked the leading Shiite Muslim cleric for providing crucial support to the Syrian military as it advanced against the Islamic State militant group (ISIS) toward the eastern city of Deir Ezzor, where a three-year siege by the militants was...

He said Syria will look east when it comes to political, economic and cultural relations. "The direct support of our friends, politically, economically and militarily, made our advance on the ground greater and the losses of war less. Therefore, they are our partners in these achievements on the road to crush terrorism," Assad said. "Let's be clear. There will be no security cooperation nor opening of embassies or even a role for some countries that say that they want to play a role in ending the crisis in Syria before they clearly and frankly cut their relations with terrorism," Assad...

President Trump has decided to end the CIA’s covert program to arm and train moderate Syrian rebels battling the government of Bashar al-Assad, a move long sought by Russia, according to U.S. officials. The program was a central plank of a policy begun by the Obama administration in 2013 to put pressure on Assad to step aside, but even its backers have questioned its efficacy since Russia deployed forces in Syria two years later. Officials said the phasing out of the secret program reflects Trump’s interest in finding ways to work with Russia, which saw the anti-Assad program as an...

The Obama administration has touted its negotiations to remove chemical weapons from Syria as a major diplomatic achievement. But a new report from the UN Security Council found that the regime of Syrian President Bashar Assad used chemical weapons against civilians in violation of the deal the Obama administration brokered with the help of Russia in 2013.[snip]"The Assad regime has learned over the past five years that the Obama administration will do absolutely nothing to protect Syrian civilians from mass homicide," Fred Hof, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council and a former special adviser for transition in Syria under...

The international chemical weapons watchdog confirmed Friday that sarin gas was used in the deadly April attack on a Syria town that left more than 80 people dead. The Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons said it deployed a team within 24 hours to collect samples, attend autopsies and interview witnesses. Due to security risks, the team was not able to be on the ground in the Khan Shaykhun area where the attack took place, but traveled to a "neighboring country" to conduct its work.

"Macron said Assad, who enjoys support from Russia and Iran, was not the enemy of France and that, with Russia’s support, French foreign policy in Syria would focus on targeting jihadist groups, whose supporters have killed hundreds in France...." " Interesting article. Headline says it all.

US aircraft shot down an Iranian-made drone that fired on coalition forces patrolling with partner forces in southern Syria, a coalition spokesman told reporters on Thursday. This is the first time that pro-Syrian regime forces -- which the US says includes Iranian-backed Shia militias -- have fired on the US-led coalition. A US official told CNN that a US F-15 jet shot down the Iranian-made Shahed 129 drone, which was being controlled from a location in Syria north of At Tanf. It was shot down after it dropped one of several weapons it was carrying near a position where coalition...

BEIRUT -- A Syrian military official said Friday that an airstrike by the U.S.-led coalition on a government military position near the border with Jordan had killed several soldiers and caused material damage. The unnamed official's comments were carried by Syrian state TV a day after the U.S.-led coalition said a U.S. airstrike had struck pro-Syrian government forces that the coalition said posed a threat to American troops and allied rebels operating near the border with Jordan....On Thursday, the U.S. sent aircraft to strike Syrian regime vehicles that violated a "deconfliction" zone set up around al-Tanf, an army base where...

The director of a top American spy agency said Tuesday that he believed that material from Iraq's illicit weapons program had been transported into Syria and perhaps other countries as part of an effort by the Iraqis to disperse and destroy evidence immediately before the recent war.The official, James R. Clapper Jr., a retired lieutenant general, said satellite imagery showing a heavy flow of traffic from Iraq into Syria, just before the American invasion in March, led him to believe that illicit weapons material ''unquestionably'' had been moved out of Iraq.''I think people below the Saddam Hussein-and-his-sons level saw what...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HjgnOz0qujU

A district court judge ruled the Syrian regime — and specifically its ruler, President Bashar al-Assad — are liable for the murders of three Americans by al-Qaeda because of the regime’s massive support for the terrorist group’s branch in Iraq. In addition to those three Americans, tens of thousands of U.S. soldiers, Iraqis and others have been killed or injured due to Assad’s sponsorship of al-Qaeda and other jihadists. The lawsuit was filed by the families of Laurence Michael Foley, a U.S. diplomat in Jordan assassinated by al-Qaeda in 2002; Staff Sgt. Keith Matthew Maupin, killed in Iraq in 2004...

Today the hot topic in the conservative blogsphere is the apparent return of Robert Malley. He was Obama’s senior foreign-policy adviser who had been caught meeting regularly with Hamas which Obama had pledged never to do and was subsequently thrown under the bus back in May of this year. Two days after the election he was dispatched by Obama to meet with Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. Other reports have him leaving for the Middle East just hours after the election results. There is no confirmation from the Obama campaign on Malley but many sources are...

The Islamic State group could inadvertently benefit from a situation in which Syrian government forces are considerably weakened on the ground, a London-based military analysis group said on Tuesday. The report, published by IHS Jane's Terrorism and Insurgency Centre, follows the United States bombing of a Syrian army base after a chemical weapons attack on April 4 killed nearly 90 people. The U.S. has accused the Syrian government of being behind the attack — charges that Syria denies. In Syria, the Islamic State group is battling both government forces and forces allied with the U.S.-led coalition.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FmxRddgpo-I

The schizophrenia is palpable. We get rid of Obozo, send Shrillary to the showers - probably forever - thus ensuring she doesn't drive the country right off a cliff in fifth gear, and somehow, someone straps a 2x4 to Bitch McConjob long enough for him to use the nuclear option, derail ChuckU Schumer, get Judge Gorsuch confirmed to SCOTUS, and pave the way for Trump to carpet the country with conservative judges in every district and circuit, undoing Leftist destructive judicial activism for decades. Pretty good, right? Then Trump drops a few dozen old Tomahawks onto one of the vilest...

The United States has concluded that Russia knew ahead of time that Syria would launch a chemical weapons attack last week, ... The official offered circumstantial elements ..., but no concrete proof. ... others in the Trump administration cautioned that final American determination had been made that Russia had advance knowledge of the attack, which killed more than 80 people and prompted retaliatory U.S. cruise missile strikes. The senior official said Monday that a drone operated by Russians was flying over a hospital as victims of the attack were rushing to get treatment. Hours after the drone left, a...

The Instagram account of Bashar Assad's wife is adorned with tender snapshots: Asma Assad reading to Syrian children; holding an infant inside a maternity hospital in Damascus; embracing the family of a Syrian who was killed in the nation's civil war – all with the affectionate hashtag #WeLoveYouAsma. It’s a stark contrast to the photos flooding news channels showing Syrian children lying dead in the streets after choking on poison gas that the U.S. and its allies said was unleashed by her dictator husband.