Posted on 10/01/2015 10:28:29 AM PDT by b4its2late
The Russians are still insisting their air campaign is targeting the Islamic State, but U.S. officials say the bombs have been dropping on CIA-backed rebel groups.
Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter called the Russian flights unprofessional and dangerous, while Secretary of State John Kerry expressed concerns about the choice of bombing targets to his opposite number, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov.
Russian Defense Ministry spokesman Igor Konoshenkov described the footage released on Wednesday as picturing strikes against “Islamic state military equipment, communication facilities, arms depots, ammunition and fuel supplies,” and claimed none of the bombs struck “civilian infrastructure or areas nearby,” according to Sputnik News.
Konoshenkov added the strikes were launched only after Russia “obtained detailed intelligence from the Syrian armed forces.”
It does not exactly look like precision ordnance in the videos released by the Defense Ministry:
U.S. officials countered that the actual targets of the Russian strikes had nothing to do with the Islamic State. They were hitting other enemies of the Assad regime, including “an area primarily held by rebels backed by the Central Intelligence Agency and allied spy services,” according to sources quoted by the Wall Street Journal.
(Excerpt) Read more at breitbart.com ...
The “rebels” lost any hope of broad US support (outside O’s regime) when they started massacring Christians and Yazidis.
It would have been expected and understandable had we told the Turks, the Saudis, and the “rebels” that we are a Christian nation, and our support hinges upon them treating Christians and minority civilians in their midst with the utmost of respect... touch not a hair on their heads if you don’t want to be cut off and hit with fuel air bombs all day long.
They would have respected us more had we made that position clear. But Obama doesn’t care about Christians, nor do the Turks. And his policy is self-destructing because he squandered the moral high ground. The same thing is happening in Afghanistan where we are again squandering the moral high ground; the people we are backing are as morally repugnant as the Taliban and we refuse to use our influence to insist on basic moral norms as the price of our help. So we will fail.
thanx
I hope Israel is way ahead of us on anti missile lasers.
No, Russia's combat operations against the Syrian rebels in defense of the Syrian government -- no matter who is sponsoring those rebels -- do not constitute an attack on the USA. But your question begs a bigger question: What are we doing backing rebels against a sovereign nation? That's what the Soviets used to do, and we used to defend the legitimate governments against the Soviet-backed revolutionaries. Now we are the ones sponsoring insurgents and the Russians are defending a legitimate government.
Our misguided foreign policy over the past 15 years has yielded nothing by chaos and destruction. We toppled three secular dictators in the Muslim world, bad guys all. The Egyptians rescued their nation from the abyss, but the vacuums in Iraq and Libya were filled by stone age Mohammedans who are now the Mediterranean world on fire. This is a mess of our making, and a monument to hubris and naivete on both sides of the aisle.
Of course they're bombing the freaking' rebels- that's what they said they were going to do.
Crimony, between the msm and the admin there ain't one functioning cerebellum
This is actually rather clever of the bear.
By attacking the psueudo moderates, they gain several advantages:
They kill bad guys who are opposed to their regional ally Assad (whom I will not claim is a good guy, in this thing it seems there are only bad guys and worse guys.)
They leave the worst guys (ISIS) at large, which gives them a two-fer. On the one hand, they save them ‘to be dealt with later’, and on the other hand, since the other ‘coalition’ nations in the area claim that they are there to strike a blow to ISIS, they can sit back and claim that they aren’t interfering with the ‘coalition’s goals in the area. (ahem) Hey, ‘coalition’, I thought your mission was to degrade and destroy ISIS - where’s the beef? That sort of thing.
Potentially the biggest thing, by attacking the CIA’s proxies in the area, they smoke out the fact that the west is indeed supporting this or that group of terrorists in the area.
Very clever indeed.
At this point, I’m just waiting for people to start inserting the classic Red October ‘this thing will get out of control and we’ll be lucky to survive it’ pic.
As for who to root for in this mess, I think that the true answer is that there are no good guys there. We should cut our losses, and if there’s any US presence left there, we should get the h-— out.
Where is Obama by the way , he’s disappeared
“What are we doing backing rebels against a sovereign nation? “
Because Obama wants an Iran clone where Syria used to be
Both claims can be true, but you'd need to have a room temperature or higher IQ to grasp that fact.
Our CIA is aiding the Islamic State. The question is if that aid is intentional or not.
Persecuting the real enemy of freedom
The extremist terrorist Kim Davis.
Nope. Assad *is* an Iranian lackey. Thus, all of your assumptions are incorrect in life. All of them.
Assad is allied with Iran, Russia, and terror groups like Hezbollah - who have actively been fighting alongside Syrian government forces to put down the uprising/rebellion against the Bashar al-Assad led Syrian regime.
It is kinda pathetic seeing so much defense of Russia’s actions here. Russia is not going to be directing many, if any, attacks at ISIS - instead they will hit other opposition groups opposed to Assad. Russia is not in Syria to fight radical Islam, they are there to protect a totalitarian and exceptionally brutal client state.
Lately there seems to be a lot of love for Putin here. Some of it has been around for awhile now, and I think the rest is some twisted defense of Donald Trump’s support of Russia’s actions in Syria (though perhaps Trump remains ignorant of the fact that Russia is not in Syria to attack ISIS).
I think you are correct. Obama is a Shia Muslim like his father's family, and Iran is engaged in a pincer envelopment of its Sunni rivals in Saudi Arabia. Iran's southern thrust is in Yemen, while the northern strategy is through Iraq, Syria and Lebanon. I have no favorite in any war between the Saudis and Persians.
The Russians aren’t differentiating between rebels and ISIS, to them they are the same.
The CIA really needs to be cleaned out top to bottom.
They support terrorists.
What’s Kerry and Obama going to do about it? Nothing.
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