Free Republic

Israel wasted no time after Bashar al-Assad’s fall to bomb all the Syrian military assets it wanted to keep out of the rebels’ hands – striking nearly 500 targets, destroying the navy, and taking out, it claims, 90% of Syria’s known surface-to-air missiles. But it is Israel’s capture of Syria’s highest peak, the Mount Hermon summit, that may prove among the most lasting prizes – though officials have insisted that its occupation is temporary. “This is the highest place in the region, looking upon Lebanon, upon Syria, Israel,” said Efraim Inbar, director of the Jerusalem Institute for Strategy and Security...

The Russian military lacks the manpower necessary to hold of a further Ukrainian advance into the Luhansk region, a correspondent embedded with the Russian military in the occupied city of Svatove said on Tuesday evening. “The Russian troops do not have enough manpower to stop the enemy attacks,” Alexander Kots, for Russian pro-government tabloid Komsomolskaya Pravda said in a video posted to Telegram. “The recent Russian losses are directly connected to that. It’s a very difficult period of time on the front line at the moment.” He said that “we expect a serious fighting here very soon,” and that “it...