Free Republic

This past weekend we called Obama's latest failed attempt to replace Syria's president (after a comparable attempt in 2013 also ended in failure) for what it is: "Make no mistake, this is shaping up to be the most spectacular US foreign policy debacle since Vietnam - and we don't think that's an exaggeration." Some of our high level observations: The US, in conjunction with Saudi Arabia and Qatar, attempted to train and support Sunni extremists to overthrow the Assad regime. Some of those Sunni extremists ended up going crazy and declaring a Medeival caliphate putting the Pentagon and Langley in...

Israel will provide Russia with intelligence information about opposition sites in Syria to facilitate Moscow’s military operations, Channel 2TV has reported. The Israeli network said that a senior delegation of Russian army officials will arrive in Israel on Tuesday to coordinate the military cooperation. The delegation will be led by First Deputy Chief of General Staff General Nikolai Bogdanovsky, who will meet his Israeli counterpart, Major-General Yair Golan as well as senior officials in Israeli military intelligence, the air force and the Mossad. Channel 2 noted that the visit follows the meeting between Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Russian...

Over the last week, the world has once again looked on aghast as President Vladimir Putin has taken violent advantage of regional instability to re-establish Russia's influence, this time in the Middle East. Despite promises to join the United States in a counterterrorism effort against ISIS in Iraq and Syria, Putin is on a mission to protect Russian assets in the Mediterranean by propping up his client, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. Ted Cruz Ted Cruz Meanwhile, the Obama administration has been caught flat-footed as Putin's actions threaten to inflame and destabilize an already acute crisis. Enough already. We don't need...

ANKARA, Oct 9 (Reuters) - An Iranian Revolutionary Guards general has been killed near Aleppo, where he was advising the Syrian army on their battle against Islamic State fighters, the guards said in a statement on Friday. General Hussein Hamedani was killed late on Wednesday, the statement said. Iran is the main regional ally of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, and has provided military and economic support during Syria's four-year-old civil war.

Putin’s air campaign in Syria is not only supporting Assad, it’s giving cover to fighters from the so-called Islamic State. Last June, the U.S. embassy in Damascus accused Bashar al-Assad’s air force of clearing a path for an ISIS advance on Syrian rebels in the Aleppo town of Azaz. “Reports indicate that the regime is making air strikes in support of [ISIS’s] advance on Aleppo, aiding extremists against Syrian population,” the embassy account tweeted, following up with a broader accusation: “We have long seen that the regime avoids [ISIS] lines, in complete contradiction to the regime’s claims to be fighting...

TEHRAN - Iran has left the development of two oilfields to the energy giant British Petroleum (BP), an informed source told the Tasnim News Agency on the condition of anonymity. The announcement is a follow-up to the September meeting between Iranian Oil Ministry officials and BP top managers, where the Iranian side headed by Amir Hossein Zamani Nia, the deputy oil minister for international affairs and trade, agreed to transfer the development of two oilfields to BP based on the new model of Iranian oil contracts, known as Integrated Petroleum Contract (IPC), which is due to be unveiled soon. ---snip---...

ICYMI: CRUZ: We Have No Business Getting in the Middle of the Syrian Civil War; Goal Should be to Defeat ISIS Speaks with WRKO’s Jeff KuhnerHOUSTON, Texas – Today U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, spoke with The Kuhner Report regarding the Obama administration’s disastrous foreign policy, the 2016 presidential race and the President’s decision to politicize the tragedy in Oregon.Below is an excerpt. Listen to the full interview here:Ted Cruz on the Kuhner Report (Audio)“I think it would be a mistake to get involved in the Syrian civil war. There have been voices in Washington eager for us to send...

The official Washington line on Vladimir Putin’s military action is as follows: It is a mistake, demonstrating Russian weakness, sure to get the Russian military stuck in a “quagmire,” according to President Obama. Josh Earnest, the president’s press secretary, took that observation one further, comparing Putin’s policies to those of the Bush administration (the sickest of White House burns) by arguing the Russians “will not succeed in imposing a military solution” just as the U.S. did not succeed in imposing one in Iraq. Adopting the characteristic snark of his boss, at a later press conference Earnest assessed Putin not to...

When Russia started bombing in Syria last week, it said it was targeting ISIS — a claim it's stuck to pretty consistently in the past week. But this map of Russian airstrikes in Syria so far, put together by the Levantine Group, tells a very different story. The Levantine Group's analysts used a proprietary network of sources, cross-checked with open-source media and information released by the Russian Ministry of Defense, to determine the locations hit by Russian planes. This map shows those strikes overlaid on territory controlled by Bashar al-Assad's regime, by anti-Assad rebels, by ISIS, and by Kurdish forces....

28 Shares A Every day seems to bring an escalation of the Russian military involvement in Syria. First it was airstrikes from more than 30 warplanes that Russia has positioned in Syria. Now it’s cruise missile strikes from warships in the Caspian Sea. Soon, if hints from Moscow are to be believed, Russian “volunteers” — a.k.a. “Little Green Men” — will be showing up in Syria to engage in ground combat alongside Iranian and Assad forces. President Obama can pretend that this is no big deal and that Russia is getting sucked into a quagmire, but this is a serious...

<p>Contrary to the principles of American foreign policy of the last 70 years, President Barack Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry tacitly invited Russia to "help" monitor things in the Middle East. Now they are learning that there are lots of Middle East scenarios far worse than the relative quiet Iraq that the Obama administration inherited in January 2009 -- and soon abandoned.</p>

A State Department official closely involved in the Obama administration’s Iran push has been promoting publications from anti-Semitic conspiracy sites and other radical websites that demonize American Jewish groups and Israel, according to sources and documents obtained by the Washington Free Beacon.Alan Eyre, the State Department’s Persian-language spokesman and a member of the negotiating delegation that struck a nuclear deal with Iran earlier this year, has in recent months disseminated articles that linked American-Jewish skeptics of the deal to shadowy financial networks, sought to soften the image of Iranian terrorists with American blood on their hands, and linked deal criticism...

<p>NATO said it was prepared to send troops to Turkey to defend its ally after violations of Turkish airspace by Russian jets bombing Syria and Britain scolded Moscow for escalating a civil war that has already killed 250,000 people.</p> <p>Officials at the U.S.-led alliance are still smarting from Russia's weekend incursions into Turkey's airspace near northern Syria and NATO defense ministers are meeting in Brussels with the agenda likely to be dominated by the Syria crisis.</p>

CHISINAU – Over the pulsating beat at an exclusive nightclub, the arms smuggler made his pitch to a client: €2.5 million for enough radioactive cesium to contaminate several city blocks. It was earlier this year, and the two men were plotting their deal at an unlikely spot: the terrace of Cocos Prive, a dance club and sushi bar in Chisinau, the capital of Moldova. “You can make a dirty bomb, which would be perfect for the Islamic State,” the smuggler said. “If you have a connection with them, the business will go smoothly.” But the smuggler, Valentin Grossu, was not...

Why would they? And just think of the irony- Obama abandoned the (NATO member) Poles and Czechs to their own fate when he withdrew W's plans for missile-defense in central/eastern Europe... ostensibly to make nice with the Kremlin.  But NATO pledges of support 'within days'  mean little when you've already been turned to ash. Then they watched in horror as Putin shredded Ukraine and put more missiles in Kaliningrad, right in Europe's face. NOW the Russians -who we supposedly sold-out NATO members to befriend- are showing the entire world what a bunch of feckless, undependable, and downright dangerous 'friends' the United States can be... as...

Russian fighter jets shadowed U.S. predator drones on at least three separate occasions high above Syria since the start of Russia's air campaign last week, according to two U.S. officials briefed on this latest intelligence from the region. Meanwhile, U.S. Navy Captain Jeff Davis told reporters a U.S. aircraft flying over Syria had to be rerouted to avoid a Russian fighter jet at least once. "We have taken action to maintain safe separation," Davis said, adding that the U.S. aircraft "changed path a little bit." He did not disclose which type of U.S. aircraft was involved. U.S. officials tell Fox...

A Norwegian Arctic newspaper editor who has extensively covered oil drilling in the region was sacked at the behest of the Russian intelligence service, according to Norway’s public service broadcaster. ....snip.... In what could develop into a scandal in the European Arctic, Nilsen was last week controversially fired as editor of the Barents Observer for having “acted disloyally” to the newspaper’s owners. The title is owned by Norwegian Barents Secretariat (NBS), a local government body that promotes good relations with Russia in a region where the two nations cooperate and compete over fishing, oil and military strategy. Remaining Observer staff,...

Europe must live up to the challenge of an upheaval that has forced hundreds of thousands of refugees to flee Syria, where everyone including Iran, Russia and the West must seek a political solution, French President Francois Hollande said on Wednesday. Speaking alongside German Chancellor Angela Merkel to the European Parliament in Strasbourg, eastern France, Hollande said the risk of failure was "total war" and that Europe, if slow to grasp the scale of the refugee exodus, had now made a start. As for Syria, Hollande reiterated the Paris line that any solution for Syria had to be based on...

Saudi Arabia on Sunday made deep reductions to the prices it charges for its oil, hard on the heels of cuts last month by rival producers in the Gulf. With U.S. production still increasing despite lower oil prices, members of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries are battling to keep their share of the last growing markets in Asia. In a list of official prices sent to customers, state-oil company Saudi Aramco cut the price of its light-crude deliveries to Asia by $1.7 a barrel. As a result, it switched to a discount of $1.6 a barrel against the...

Peto Lucem ‏@PetoLucem 1h1 hour ago NEW MAP: Military situation in #Hama and #Idlib Governorates.#Syria #SAA #NDF #IF #FSA #Nusra #AlQaeda Peto Lucem ‏@PetoLucem 1h1 hour ago Loy. sources: #SAA forces have captured #KafrNabudah. #Syria Peto Lucem Retweeted Elijah J. Magnier ‏@EjmAlrai 2h2 hours ago Officers say the first wave of attack tested d fire response of the Syrian rebels & broke their line recovering hills & meeting objectives+ Peto Lucem Retweeted Elijah J. Magnier ‏@EjmAlrai 5h5 hours ago Straightforward from the @CIA:"Our support and weapon supply to Syrian rebels in #Syria was a mistake". ME Analysts don't agree. 39...