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Syria Tag

President Donald Trump received major backlash on Monday morning after the White House announced late Sunday night it will remove troops in northern Syria. This will allow Turkey to start its offensive, effectively leaving the Kurds unprotected. Officials told Fox News that Trump's decision "completely blindsided" those at the Pentagon. Others said the move betrayed the Kurds because Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan does not hide his hatred of the Kurds.

There were news reports recently that during Benjamin Netanyahu's upcoming trip to D.C., during which he will meet with Trump, the United States would recognize Israel's sovereignty over the Golan Heights. The Heights had only been Syrian territory since 1948, after the end of the French Mandate, Syrian independence, and the Arab attempt to destroy Israel.  Syria used the Golan Heights to aim artillery and sniper fire on Israel. Israel captured the Golan Heights during the 1967 war, and almost lost it during the surprise attack in the 1973 Yom Kippur War.

The Senate passed a bill that denounces the Boycott, Divest, and Sanction (BDS) movement 77-23 on Tuesday. The bill "allows state and local governments to boycott companies that boycott the country of Israel." The bill also contains a resolution that opposes President Donald Trump's vow to withdraw American soldiers from Syria and Afghanistan.

The Wall Street Journal has reported that the US military has started preparations to remove all of its forces from northeastern Syria:
U.S. officials began informing partners in northeastern Syria of their plans to begin immediately pulling American forces out of the region where they have been trying to wrap up the campaign against Islamic State, the people said.

Turkey is preparing a military offensive against the U.S.-backed Syrian Kurds, Turkish state-run media sources say. "We will start our operation in a few days to liberate areas east of the Euphrates River from terrorist organizations," President Recep Tayyip Erdogan declared in a speech in Ankara Wednesday, referring to the presence of Kurdish forces in neighboring Syria. Kurds, fighting alongside the Assyrian Christians, had played a key role in liberating large parts of Syrian and Iraqi territories from the Islamic State.

The U.S. Treasury has sanctioned an illicit Iranian-Russian network supplying oil to the Syrian regime. The elaborate oil scheme was used to finance the Islamic terror groups Hamas and Hezbollah, a department press release said Tuesday. The covert shipment of Iranian oil was run by the aid of the Russian state-owned company Promsyrioimport. The network delivered millions of barrels of oil to Syrian dictator Bashar Assad's regime and hundreds of millions of dollars to Islamic terrorist groups, the Treasury Department disclosed.

Israel repeatedly has bombed Iranian missile and weapons depots in Syria, along with other Iranian assets. In most of the cases Syria is quick to blame Israel, and Israel is silent. When Iranian Revolutionary Guard fighters fired dozens of rockets at Israel recently, Israel wiped out 50 or so Iranian targets and was public in claiming credit.

Two Iraqi officials announced that an operation between U.S. and Iraqi forces led to the capture of five top ISIS members. From The New York Times:
The three-month operation, which tracked a group of senior Islamic State leaders who had been hiding in Syria and Turkey, represents a significant intelligence victory for the American-led coalition fighting the extremist group and underscores the strengthening relationship between Washington and Baghdad.