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Israeli officials have been holding talks in Jordan with Syrian opposition officials “in advance of a possible Israeli-U.S. operation in Syria to protect the Golan Heights,” Western intelligence sources reported Tuesday, Jan. 1. There was no further information about this operation or how rebel commanders were involved in military plans “to protect the Golan Heights.” Altogether, the goings-on on the Israeli and Jordanian borders with Syria are in deep hush. But European intelligence sources, some of them French and Russian, reveal nightly clashes taking place between US, Jordanian, Israeli special forces and Syrian rebels, on the one hand, and Syrian...

Hezbollah lost its most important supply route from Iran through Syria with the fall of dictator Bashar al-Assad, the group’s chief admitted Sunday. It was the first public acknowledgment of how upheaval in Syria had hurt the Iranian proxy, which had propped up Assad and is now fighting a war in Lebanon with Israel. Weapons to counter the Israeli campaign flowed from Iran through Syria and into Lebanon for Hezbollah. Assad’s ousting jeopardized Syria’s close ties to Iran. Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), the group that led the overthrow of Assad, had lamented that Syria had become a "playground for Iran."...

<p>The former number two official in Saddam Hussein's Iraqi air force claims the former Iraqi dictator moved weapons of mass destruction from Iraq to Syria in the months preceding the current Iraq war.</p>

The Syrian army has uncovered a clandestine plant in Eastern Ghouta that was used by the terrorists to produce military-grade agents, with equipment of Saudi origin and materials presumably made in Western countries having been found at the building, local media reported on Tuesday. The plant is located in al-Shefounieh town in the area of Duma. Among other toxic chemicals, chlorine was found at the site, the SANA news agency reported, adding that the papers of the Jaysh al-Islam militant group were also discovered. A Syrian field commander said that high-tech equipment was found at the plant, which indicates that...

In the early morning hours of Thursday, Syria’s al-Tala’i military research facility located in Masyaf was reduced to ash and flames. The Jerusalem Post reports that contemporaneous with the strike on al-Tala’I, a Hezbollah weapons convoy in the vicinity was also hit and destroyed. According to Western intelligence sources, al-Tala’i is a center for the production of chemical weapons. Syria blamed Israel and claimed that at least two regime soldiers were killed in the attack. The regime issued a banal and somewhat hypocritical warning of the “dangerous repercussions of this aggressive action to the security and stability of the region.”...

The coalition hit the Barzah Research and Development Center outside Damascus with 76 missiles, destroying the facility... The second and third targets were part of what the U.S. military described as the Him Shinshar chemical weapons complex outside the city of Homs. The military said the strikes “completely destroyed” the complex’s chemical weapons storage facility and “successfully hit and sustained damage” to the installation’s chemical weapons bunker.

WARNING! Today, the MO of France has published an interesting report on the subject of chemical weapons in Syria. The document is compiled on the basis of open information and declassified data of French intelligence services and dated April 14, 2018. The main point in the report is that the analysis of evidence of the use of chemical weapons in the city of Duma on April 7, 2018 shows the absence of traces of installation and forgery on the records. The analysis of the situation shows that, with a high degree of probability, chemical weapons against the civilian population were...

<p>CHICAGO (AP) -- Federal prosecutors accused a Syrian-born American of once leading a Muslim charity that the Treasury Department calls a terrorist group, and said he tried to help Osama bin Laden get a nuclear weapon.</p> <p>The government said Mohamed Loay Bayazid was president of the suburban Chicago-based Benevolence International Foundation in 1994, about the same time he is accused of trying to get uranium for al-Qaida.</p>

1735 HRs Local, Sunday, June 7, 1981. Al-Tuwaythah Nuclear Research Facility, outside Baghdad, Iraq. Iraqi Colonel Fakhri Hussein Jaber is in shock. His jaw drops, mouth gaping open as a strained moan leaves his throat. Despite the hot desert temperature his limbs feel cold. He cannot believe what he is seeing. Eight F-16s painted sand-colored desert camouflage flying in a single-file attack formation at rooftop level hurtles over the outskirts of Baghdad from the southwest. They bank hard left, slicing white tendrils of vapor from their missile-clad wingtips in the evening air. One at a time they light their afterburners...

Satellite Pics Suggest Iran, North Korea Cooperating on Nuclear Research by TheTower.org Staff | 12.29.16 4:28 pm The discovery of a working North Korean missile site that was previously thought to be inactive may suggest that the country is cooperating with Iran on ballistic missile and nuclear technology, Voice of America reported Wednesday. PRESS RELEASE: Strategic Sentinel Finds Previously Unknown North Korean Site Read more here: https://t.co/NJk9a9LBgd#NorthKorea #VOA @W7VOA pic.twitter.com/f3S24izQOn — Strategic Sentinel (@StratSentinel) December 28, 2016 Satellite images taken and analyzed by the intelligence firm Strategic Sentinel discovered a missile silo in Geumchang-ri, a mountainous area in North Pyongan...

The US military and intelligence community has intercepted communications featuring Syrian military and chemical experts talking about preparations for the sarin attack in Idlib last week, a senior US official tells CNN.

Full title: EXCLUSIVE: Deputy of banned suicide-bomb-endorsing cleric Yusuf al-Qaradawi had White House meeting with National Security Council staff --------------------------------------- The UK and U.S. have banned Yusuf al-Qaradawi, who leads the anti-Israel International Union of Muslim Scholars. The Obama administration invited that group's VP, Abdallah bin Bayyah, to a private meeting on the day it announced support for Syria's rebelsThe organization ended its December 2012 board meeting by calling for the end of Israel and the return of its lands to the PalestiniansHours after MailOnline began inquiring with the National Security Council about its meeting with bin Bayyah, the cleric's...

The Syrian military is prepared to use chemical weapons against its own people and is awaiting final orders from President Bashar Assad, U.S. officials told NBC News on Wednesday. The military has loaded the precursor chemicals for sarin, a deadly nerve gas, into aerial bombs that could be dropped onto the Syrian people from dozens of fighter-bombers, the officials said. As recently as Tuesday, officials had said there was as yet no evidence that the process of mixing the "precursor" chemicals had begun. But Wednesday, they said their worst fears had been confirmed: The nerve agents were locked and loaded...

Sunday's Der Spiegel had a massive expose on the continuing efforts of Bashar al-Assad to build a nuclear weapons plant, which included evidence that Iran is constructing such a plant for Syria in Qusayr, less than two kilometers from Syria's border with Lebanon. The issue came up in the State Department's Monday daily briefing. Disturbingly, spokeswoman Marie Harf said that the United States did not plan to raise the issue in the Iranian nuclear talks, claiming that those talks only deal with Iran's nuclear capabilities and not with Syria's. According to findings of Western intelligence agencies, however, the situation...

While the media is busy focusing on the troubling story of the two American soldiers detained at Guantanamo Bay for alleged espionage, both of whom had Syrian connections, another Syria story has passed them by. The names of Ahmad al Halabi, an American of Syrian descent, and Captain James Yee, a convert to Islam who spent four years in Damascus before returning to active service, are now well known. But the name of Nizar Nayouf, a Syrian journalist and human rights activist that was detained last week by French police in Paris, will most probably stay anonymous.   Nayouf?s only...

US Ambassador Robert Ford resigned from his State Department post a month ago, after a long and difficult time as the envoy to Syria. Ford showed great personal courage in his service while Bashar al-Assad instigated attacks on Western embassies and eventually provoked a massive civil war which has turned into a regional threat, thanks to the collapse of his power in large regions of Syria. The collapse of American policy in Syria over the past year was presumed to have prompted Ford’s departure, which he confirms with CNN’s Christiane Amanpour in an interview today.This is interesting for more...

Was UFO a Russian ballistic missile? Russian Defense Ministry says it successfully test-fired intercontinental ballistic missile Thursday; earlier, unidentified flying object reported in Israel, Lebanon, other states in region and Reports from the Syrian cities of Daraa, Hama and Dir al-Zur are claiming that Assad's forces are using unknown gas shells against civilians. http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4239820,00.htm

TOKYO -- North Korea provided about 45 tons of "yellowcake" uranium to Syria in September 2007 for production of fuel for an undeclared nuclear reactor, diplomatic and military sources knowledgeable on North Korean issues said Saturday. But the shipment was followed shortly by an Israeli air strike targeting the reactor and the uranium involved is believed to have been transferred to Iran around last summer, according to a Western diplomatic source.

German surveillance suggests chemical attack unauthorized, Assad also tells PBS's Charlie Rose that he did not gas his own people, as White House continues to press claim. Government forces in Syria may have launched the chemical weapons attack that reportedly killed more than a thousand civilians last month before receiving a go-ahead from President Bashar Assad. According to an article published on Sunday in the German newspaper Bild am Sonntag, a German spy ship intercepted repeated communications from forces loyal to Assad asking for permission to use chemical weapons; however, their requests were consistently denied. This latest report comes as...

Barack Obama did not tell the whole story this autumn when he tried to make the case that Bashar al-Assad was responsible for the chemical weapons attack near Damascus on 21 August. In some instances, he omitted important intelligence, and in others he presented assumptions as facts. Most significant, he failed to acknowledge something known to the US intelligence community: that the Syrian army is not the only party in the country’s civil war with access to sarin, the nerve agent that a UN study concluded – without assessing responsibility – had been used in the rocket attack. In the...