Free Republic

urkish tanks and other vehicles have rolled across the Syrian border after heavy shelling of an area held by so-called Islamic State (IS). Military sources told Turkish media 70 targets in the Jarablus area had been destroyed by artillery and rocket strikes, and 12 by air strikes. Turkish-backed Syrian rebels who are following the advance say they have entered the town of Jarablus itself. The operation is aimed against both IS and Kurdish fighters. Turkey shelled Syrian Kurdish forces in the region this week, determined not to let them fill the vacuum if IS leaves. US Vice-President Joe Biden warned...

Syrian regime jets pounded US-backed Kurdish forces in northeastern Syria for a second day, even after the US-led coalition scrambled jets to protect its military advisers working on the ground. In another escalation of Syria's bloody conflict, warplanes from President Bashar al-Assad's regime were bombarding the city of Hasakeh -- targeting Kurdish forces that for months have worked closely with coalition military advisers helping local fighters combat the Islamic State group. On Thursday, the United States sent fighter jets to head off air strikes conducted by regime planes and to protect coalition advisers, but the Syrian planes had left by...

“DEVASTATING AND overwhelming.” Those are the conditions in the ancient and once-great metropolis of Aleppo, according to the head of delegation for the International Committee of the Red Cross, Marianne Gasser, who was in the Syrian city recently. “We hear that dozens of civilians are being killed every day and scores more injured from shells, mortars and rockets,” Ms. Gasser said. “The bombing is constant. The violence is threatening hundreds of thousands of people’s lives, homes and livelihoods.”

EVER since Russia entered the Syrian civil war on the side of the Syrian regime led by Bashar al-Assad, rebel groups in Aleppo have been progressively isolated and besieged. In February they lost their main access route to Turkey; and two weeks ago the fighters in the east of the city, with a population of perhaps 250,000, were cut off entirely. It threatened to become the biggest and nastiest siege in the five-year-long war. Despair, it seems, forced a show of unity by the disparate rebel groups, with striking effect. On the weekend of August 6th-7th, mainstream and jihadist groups...

Hillary Clinton will order a "full review" of the United States' strategy on Syria as a "first key task" of her presidency, resetting the policy to emphasise the "murderous" nature of the Assad regime, foreign policy adviser with her campaign has said. <-SNIP-> Speaking on the sidelines of the Democratic National Convention, Mr Bash, who is advising the party's presidential nominee, said a Clinton administration would seek to bring "moral clarity" to the US strategy on the Syrian crises. <-SNIP-> Mr Bash describes a foreign policy more hawkish than that of the current administration. He said there were a "lot...

US military confirms it is investigating what could be one of the worst incidents of civilian deaths by coalition forces At least 85 civilians, including almost a dozen children, have been killed after US air strikes targeted an area in northern Syria held by Islamic State (Isis/Daesh) fighters, a monitoring group has said. Some eight families were reportedly wiped out in the IS-controlled village of Tokhar near Manbij on Tuesday (19 July), in what could be one of the deadliest bombings of civilians by coalition forces since the start of operations in the country.

Weapons shipped into Jordan by the Central Intelligence Agency and Saudi Arabia intended for Syrian rebels have been systematically stolen by Jordanian intelligence operatives and sold to arms merchants on the black market, according to American and Jordanian officials. Some of the stolen weapons were used in a shooting in November that killed two Americans and three others at a police training facility in Amman, F.B.I. officials believe after months of investigating the attack. The Jordanian officers who were part of the scheme reaped a windfall from the weapons sales. The training program, which in 2013 began directly arming the...

Aleppo (Syria) (AFP) - Russian and Syrian warplanes pounded rebel-held areas of divided second city Aleppo on Saturday as government forces closed in on the rebels' sole remaining supply line, a monitoring group said. An AFP correspondent in the rebel-held east of the city said the air strikes lasted throughout the night into the morning. Aleppo, which was Syria's commercial and manufacturing hub before civil war broke out in 2011, has been a key battleground ever since rebels seized eastern neighbourhoods of the city the following year. A two-day truce brokered by Moscow and Washington earlier this month in a...

Late Thursday evening, the Wall Street Journal reported, 51 State Department officials signed a statement condemning U.S. policy in Syria in which they repeatedly call for “targeted military strikes against the Damascus government and urging regime change as the only way to defeat Islamic State.” “In other words,” as Zero Hedge summarized, “over 50 top ‘diplomats’ are urging to eliminate [Syrian Pres. Bashar al] Assad in order to ‘defeat ISIS’, the same ISIS which top US ‘diplomats’ had unleashed previously in order to … eliminate Assad.” This gordian knot created by United States foreign policy — and intensified by that...

The world leader of Syria's besieged Christians has issued a heartfelt plea to the West to "stop arming and supporting terrorist groups that are destroying our countries and massacring our people." The Patriarch of Antioch, Moran Mor Ignatius Aphrem II, said he was not asking the West for military intervention to defend Christians. If the West wants to do something about the present crisis, the most effective thing would be to support local governments, which need sufficient armies and forces to maintain security ...

We’re going to war — either hybrid in nature to break the Russian state back to its 1990s subordination, or a hot war (which will destroy our country). Our citizens should know this, but they don’t because our media is dumbed down in its “Pravda”-like support for our “respectable,” highly aggressive government. We are being led, as C. Wright Mills said in the 1950s, by a government full of “crackpot realists: in the name of realism they’ve constructed a paranoid reality all their own.” Our media has credited Hillary Clinton with wonderful foreign policy experience, unlike Trump, without really noting...

American and Russian fighter jets had a tense showdown in the skies above Syria as the Russians dropped bombs on U.S.-backed rebels. U.S. and Russian fighter jets bloodlessly tangled in the air over Syria on June 16 as the American pilots tried and failed to stop the Russians from bombing U.S.-backed rebels in southern Syria near the border with Jordan. The aerial close encounter underscores just how chaotic Syria’s skies have become as Russia and the U.S.-led coalition work at cross-purposes, each dropping bombs in support of separate factions in the five-year-old civil war. The near-clash also highlights the escalating...

his statement starts at about 1:20, but at about 1:50 he flat out states that "there was no moderate middle" save for some non-fighters like shopkeepers. He blames our allies for sending weapons and aid to terrorists. His comments certainly imply that the Free Syrian Army was not composed of moderates.

Russian warplanes bombed an elite force of US-trained Syrian rebels on Thursday in an attack apparently aimed at weakening the group’s ability to fight Isil. The New Syrian Army (NSA), which receives training and direction from British, American and Jordanian special forces, said their base had been struck with cluster bombs. The strike left two people dead and another 18 injured, appearing to incapacitate at least half of the force and drawing a furious reaction from Washington. "Russia's latest actions raise serious concern about Russian intentions," a US official told Reuters, speaking on condition of anonymity. "We will seek an...

WASHINGTON, DC — Hillary Clinton received a classified intelligence report stating that the Obama administration was actively supporting Al Qaeda in Iraq, the terrorist group that became the Islamic State. The memo made clear that Al Qaeda in Iraq was speaking through Muhammad Al Adnani, who is now the senior spokesman for the Islamic State, also known as ISIS. Western and Gulf states were supporting the terrorist group to try to overthrow Syrian dictator Bashar al Assad, who was being propped up by the Russians, Iranians, and Chinese. In August 2012, a “SECRET” classified memo was sent to various top...

Kurdish-led fighters completed their encirclement Friday of a key town held by the Islamic State group in northern Syria, part of a Western-backed offensive that could see a major strategic victory over the militants. The advance on Manbij, near the Turkish border, coincided with a Syrian army offensive supported by Russian airstrikes that brought troops closer to the city of Raqqa, the IS extremists’ de facto capital. Two years after their blitz across the Euphrates River valley, the IS militants are coming under increasing pressure on territory they control in Syria and Iraq, as well as on a stronghold in...

The American military is warning residents of ISIS’s Syrian capital to leave the city—suggesting that an offensive on Raqqa was imminent, two Pentagon officials told the Daily Beast. In the past day, residents of Raqqa have posted photos of the warnings on Twitter, saying they were airdropped on leaflets by the U.S.-led coalition. The defense officials were the first to confirm that the coalition had indeed issued the warnings.

Moscow on Friday proposed that Russia and United States, which have been flying separate bombing campaigns in Syria, launch joint air strikes against jihadists from next week, a proposal the Pentagon swiftly rejected. "We are proposing to the US, as the head of the International Syria Support Group, to take part as of May 25 in joint operations between the Russian air force and the air force of the coalition," Russian defence minister Sergei Shoigu said in televised comments. Shoigu said that the proposal included strikes against Jabhat al-Nusra and other illegal armed groups that do not support a frail...

Russian warplanes hit a key rebel supply route to Aleppo on Sunday in Moscow's first strikes on Syria's battleground second city since a February ceasefire, a monitoring group said. "The Russian and Syrian warplanes together carried out at least 40 air strikes on the Castello road," Syrian Observatory for Human Rights chief Rami Abdel Rahman said. "They are the heaviest air strikes there since February, and they are also the first confirmed Russian strikes since the truce began," Abdel Rahman said.(Snip)The Castello road is a key supply route for rebels leading north out of Aleppo.

ISTANBUL — They were used to stalk Russian helicopters in Afghanistan, and the United States has worked hard to keep them out of chaotic Syria. But now Kurdish guerrillas battling Turkey's security forces may now have shoulder-fired missiles — an acquisition analysts say will seriously challenge Turkish air power and potentially intensify fighting in the region. About four minutes into the video, the fighter, clad in camouflage fatigues, crouches on a verdant hillside with the weapons system on his shoulder. When the launcher locks on its target — a helicopter whirring noisily on the horizon — the fighter stands to...