Free Republic

<p>“Nobody believes in it. You’re like, ‘Fuck this,’” a former Green Beret says of America’s covert and clandestine programs to train and arm Syrian militias. “Everyone on the ground knows they are jihadis. No one on the ground believes in this mission or this effort, and they know they are just training the next generation of jihadis, so they are sabotaging it by saying, ‘Fuck it, who cares?’”</p>

<p>“Nobody believes in it. You’re like, ‘Fuck this,’” a former Green Beret says of America’s covert and clandestine programs to train and arm Syrian militias. “Everyone on the ground knows they are jihadis. No one on the ground believes in this mission or this effort, and they know they are just training the next generation of jihadis, so they are sabotaging it by saying, ‘Fuck it, who cares?’”</p>

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The initial seven days of the nationwide ceasefire in Syria have run their course, the Syrian Army has declared. It did not add whether the truce will be reinstated in the near future. The Syrian Army's statement blames “terrorist groups” for jeopardizing the cessation of hostilities, Reuters reports. "It was assumed that the ceasefire will present a real chance to end the bloodshed, but terrorist groups did not adhere to any of the points of the agreement on a ceasefire, the number of violations on their part has exceeded 300," reads the statement published by SANA news. DETAILS TO FOLLOW

U.S.-led coalition air strikes killed dozens of Syrian soldiers on Saturday, Russia and a monitoring group said, putting a U.S.-Russian brokered ceasefire in jeopardy and prompting Moscow to seek an emergency U.N. Security Council meeting. The United States military said the coalition stopped the air strike against what it had believed to be Islamic State positions in northeast Syria after Russia informed it that Syrian military personnel and vehicles may have been hit. A U.S. military official said he was "pretty sure" targets mistakenly hit in the coalition strikes were Syrian forces. Russia called for an emergency meeting of the...

BEIRUT (Reuters) - Syria's army general command said warplanes from the U.S.-led coalition bombed a Syrian army position at Jebel Tharda near Deir al-Zor airport on Saturday, paving the way for Islamic State fighters to overun it. The air strike killed Syrian soldiers and was "conclusive evidence" that the U.S. and its allies support the jihadist group, the Syrian army said in a statement, noting that the strike was "dangerous and blatant aggression". The U.S.-led coalition has been conducting air strikes against Islamic State since September 2014. In December Damascus accused the coalition of striking an army camp near Deir...

After Israel attacked the Assad regime's military positions in response to projectiles fired from Syria that exploded inside Israel, Russia called on Israel to show restraint and has allegedly given Syria permission to shoot down Israeli planes that cross into its territory. Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has called on Israel to "show restraint" and to "avoid any provocations" in the Syrian Golan Heights. "There is the need to show restraint and not to allow any provocations in the Golan Heights," Lavrov said commenting on an airstrike carried out by the Israeli jets in Syria's Golan Heights on Tuesday, according...

Russia's Defense Ministry said Thursday the United States was not fulfilling its obligations under the Syrian ceasefire agreement, as Moscow and Washington pointed fingers at each other for violating what had appeared to be a peaceful lull in fighting. In a statement, the Russian ministry said that US-led "moderate opposition forces" had increased the "number of attacks on residential neighborhoods," claiming that at the end of the third day of the current cessation "only the Syrian army observes silence mode."The current ceasefire was called so that desperately needed humanitarian aid could be delivered.

The bodies of the three soldiers killed last week were transferred to the US Consulate in the Iraqi city of Erbil to be flown to the US at a later time, the source said late on Tuesday. The source named the slain servicemen as Levi Johnson, Jordan Andrew and Will Savage adding that they had been assisting Kurdish forces for around a year in northern Syria.

Syrian militias armed by different parts of the U.S. war machine have begun to fight each other on the plains between the besieged city of Aleppo and the Turkish border, highlighting how little control U.S. intelligence officers and military planners have over the groups they have financed and trained in the bitter five-year-old civil war. The fighting has intensified over the last two months, as CIA-armed units and Pentagon-armed ones have repeatedly shot at each other while maneuvering through contested territory on the northern outskirts of Aleppo, U.S. officials and rebel leaders have confirmed. In mid-February, a CIA-armed militia called...

The U.S. on Monday urged Turkish troops and Kurdish forces in northern Syria to halt their fighting, saying it hinders efforts to defeat the Islamic State group. But Turkey's president vowed to press ahead with the military operation until the IS and Kurdish Syrian fighters no longer pose a security threat to Ankara. It was the first U.S. criticism of its NATO ally since it launched a U.S.-backed incursion into northern Syria to help Syrian rebels seize the town of Jarablus from the Islamic State group. They have been clashing with Kurdish Syrian forces around the town to try to...

The Turkish military and the U.S.-led coalition forces launched an operation in the Jarablus region of Syria to clear its borders from the Islamic State (IS) jihadist group early on Wednesday. The operation began at around 4 a.m. with the Turkish artillery launching intense fire on the region followed by Turkish warplanes bombing IS targets. The military operation aimed at clearing the Turkish border from "terrorist elements," halting the new wave of refugee flows and delivering humanitarian aid to civilians in the region, the last significant town held by the jihadist group on the border with Turkey.

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...