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Syria Tag

Posted by Mary Chastain on April 07, 2017 33 Comments
On Thursday night, President Donald Trump ordered an airstrike against Syria near an airfield where President Bashar al-Assad's regime allegedly launched a chemical attack that killed over 60 people. The U.S. military attacked the Shayrat air base near Homs with 59 Tomahawk missiles from the Mediterranean Sea, which caused immense damage "to airfields, planes and fueling facilities allegedly used by the Assad regime."

Posted by William A. Jacobson on April 06, 2017 51 Comments
There is breaking news on all the major networks that approximately 50 Tomahawk missiles were launched against Syrian air bases and other bases at which chemical weapons were stored. The strikes come after what is believed to be Syrian Air Force chemical weapons attacks that killed dozens. https://twitter.com/PeterAlexander/status/850154945546518528 We will update as more details are known.

Posted by Leslie Eastman on April 06, 2017 9 Comments
While President Donald Trump was holding a joint news conference with Jordanian King Abdullah II bin Al-Hussein describing his new approach to Syria and Syrian president Bashar al-Assad after suspected chemical attacks killed dozens of civilians, United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley was at a Security Council meeting blasting Russia over its support of the regime. It was epic. The full video is a must-see:

Posted by Mary Chastain on April 05, 2017 13 Comments
On Tuesday, almost 60 people died in Syria after warplanes dropped bombs filled with chemicals. The number includes women and children. Many suspect President Bashar al-Assad's regime for the attack. President Donald Trump condemned the attack, but also ripped into former President Barack Obama for not sticking to his "red line" on Syria:
“Today’s chemical attack in Syria against innocent people including women and children is reprehensible and cannot be ignored by the civilized world,” Mr. Trump said in a statement.

Posted by Kemberlee Kaye on February 07, 2017 21 Comments
Over the last five years, more than 10,000 people were hanged at Syrian prison Saydnaya. A new report released by Amnesty International indicates that once, sometimes twice a week, 50 people at a time were taken out of their prison cells and hanged to death. The mass hangings aren't the only atrocity. Reportedly, detainees were tortured and kept in squalor. Pulled from their cells in the middle of the night. Prisoners were beaten and then transferred to another prison building before being hanged to death.

Posted by Mary Chastain on January 14, 2017 21 Comments
Trolls gonna troll and who owns the title as World's Biggest Troll? Russian President Vladimir Putin! And the troll strikes again. Russia has invited President-elect Donald Trump's administration to participate in Syrian peace talks with Turkey and Iran later this month. I can hear everyone's head explodes as they use this as more evidence of a cozy relationship between him and President-elect Donald Trump. Or Putin has simply just latched onto the hysteria and wants to cause even more problems.

Posted by Mark Finkelstein on December 15, 2016 12 Comments
This Insurrectionist has been monitoring Morning Joe since its inception. But perhaps never in the ensuing nine years has there been a segment quite so somber as the one that led Wednesday's show. The subject was Aleppo, the images were horrific, and the accusation laid at the feet of President Obama, the Western allies and the UN was that their inaction has led to the slaughter of countless thousands. The segment opened with a statement at the UN by US Ambassador Samantha Power condemning Assad, Russia and Iran. But as Joe Scarborough observed: "those were damning, damning words. But they were damning words of the Obama administration." Scarborough was referring to the fecklessness of the Unites States in the face of the slaughter. Scarborough chillingly reported that "you actually have mothers going to priests saying will God forgive me if I kill my child so ISIS doesn't torture them when they get them and kill them?"

Posted by Mary Chastain on November 20, 2016 4 Comments
Aleppo has run out of hospitals due to constant bombardment from the Syrian regime and Russia backed by Hezbollah, which means over 300,000 people have no access to medical care:
Three hospitals in the opposition-held east were destroyed early Friday, forcing doctors and nurses to scramble between medical facilities to treat the wounded, often operating out of basements, which are safer from bombardments. By late in the night, the four remaining hospitals in the area had also been bombed out of service, according to local doctors and the Aleppo Health Directorate.

Posted by Vijeta Uniyal on September 22, 2016 6 Comments
Obama administration will be allowing plane makers Airbus and Boeing to sell jetliners to Iran, clearing the way for one of the most high-profile business deals since the lifting of nuclear sanction on Islamic Republic earlier this year. The easing of commercial restrictions is part of President Obama-led initiative to reward Iran for signing a Nuclear Agreement in July last year. According to U.S. Treasury's own assessment, as early as March 2016, Iran's civilian airliners were being used to illegally transport terrorist combatants and arms shipment in conflict zones across the Middle East. Iran's state-controlled airlines are not regular commercial operations geared towards customer satisfaction, but are made to carry out regime-sanctioned covert operations to arm and replenish the ranks of Syrian army, Hezbollah and other terrorist outfits under the guise their commercial flights -- coordinated by Iran's mafia-like Shia-Islamist ‘Revolutionary Guards’.

Posted by Fuzzy Slippers on September 17, 2016 9 Comments
The Syrian army is claiming that the U. S. bombed them in support of ISIS, reportedly killing as many as 80 soldiers and wounding a hundred more. Reuters reports:
Syria's army general command said warplanes from the U.S.-led coalition bombed a Syrian army position at Jebel Tharda near Deir al-Zor airport on Saturday, paving the way for Islamic State fighters to overun it. The air strike killed Syrian soldiers and was "conclusive evidence" that the U.S. and its allies support the jihadist group, the Syrian army said in a statement, noting that the strike was "dangerous and blatant aggression". The U.S.-led coalition has been conducting air strikes against Islamic State since September 2014. In December Damascus accused the coalition of striking an army camp near Deir al-Zor, but Washington said it was done by Russian jets. A strike list issued by the U.S. on Saturday said it had carried out a strike at Deir al-Zor against five Islamic State supply routes, as well as strikes near Raqqa and elsewhere in Syria.

Posted by William A. Jacobson on August 23, 2016 4 Comments
In late May 2015, I wrote about my visit to Ziv Medical Center in Safed (Tsfat), northern Israel, which serves as a center for medical assistance given Syrians, Meet an Israeli Doctor Saving Syrian Lives and Limbs:
Ziv is only 30 kilometers, a 40 minute drive, from the Syrian border. Ziv has received some publicity the past two years for its treatment of Syrians. While some of the Syrians seeking help are not direct casualties of the fighting, such as expectant mothers, almost all have traumatic wounds as a result of the war.

Posted by Fuzzy Slippers on July 17, 2016 7 Comments
David Wolfe, a California resident, has created a video on his Facebook page showing the results of the Syrian civil war in "before" and "after" images has gone viral. Haaertz reports:

A video produced by Los Angeles resident David Wolfe showing the vast destruction since the outbreak of the civil war in Aleppo, Syria's largest city, has gone viral. Posted on Wolfe's Facebook fan page, it has been viewed more than 11 million times and shared around a quarter million times on Facebook.

The photos used to put the video together are from the Bored Panda website, which noted that vast toll in human lives and the physical damage in Aleppo since 2012, including the city's Old City, which is a UNESCO World Heritage site.

Posted by Mike LaChance on June 18, 2016 4 Comments
Over fifty members of the Obama administration have signed a memo urging the president to take a more aggressive approach to Syria. The signers, who are all diplomats, recommend an increase in airstrikes. The New York Times reports:
51 U.S. Diplomats Urge Strikes Against Assad in Syria More than 50 State Department diplomats have signed an internal memo sharply critical of the Obama administration’s policy in Syria, urging the United States to carry out military strikes against the government of President Bashar al-Assad to stop its persistent violations of a cease-fire in the country’s five-year-old civil war.

Posted by Vijeta Uniyal on May 24, 2016 9 Comments
Revolting details have come to light about Islamic State’s secret chemical weapons program. British newspaper The Telegraph reported that ISIS has been testing lethal chemical on humans, as well as setting up labs and moving chemical weapons stockpiles to residential areas of the Iraqi city of Mosul. The report claims that ISIS has been experimenting on captives held at a prison camp in Nineveh, Mosul. The residents near the prison have been reporting breathing difficulties and children were developing severe rashes -- side effects associated with chlorine and mustard gas. The residents of a former Christian neighbourhood in Mosul reported that ISIS moved their chemical labs after US airstrikes on the terrorist group's chemical facility at a local university. ISIS fighters moved in the locality with huge unmarked trucks and had been dumping dead dogs and rabbits in the nearby waste heap. The Telegraph corroborated the local eyewitness accounts with an ISIS informer who verified that animals dumped in the area had previously been tested with chemicals.

Posted by David Gerstman on May 22, 2016 5 Comments
In his testimony last week before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, concerning the grand Iran deal deception described in a recent New York Times article that was carried out by Obama and Deputy National Security Advisor Ben Rhodes, Michael Doran, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, laid out five areas where the White House deceived the American people. First, Doran in his testimony established that even before he became president, Obama had expressed an interest in rapprochement with Iran. He cited former CIA chief and Defense Secretary, Leon Panetta, from The New York Times expose on the echo chamber saying that the administration knew that "They’d have gotten “the [expletive] kicked out of them,” if they had been upfront about their intention to engage Iran. Doran summed it up:

Posted by William A. Jacobson on May 14, 2016 7 Comments
We reported on Friday that top Hezbollah commander Mustafa Badreddine was killed in an explosion in Syria, but that the circumstances were unclear, Another top Hezbollah commander killed – but who dunnit?. Badreddine was considered a master bomb maker, credited with developing that combination of explosives and gas that took down the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut and numerous American and other diplomatic facilities. Badreddine of late was commander of Hezbollah forces propping up the Assad regime, and was hated not only by Israeli but also by many Arab states. So he had plenty of enemies, and plenty of people who wanted him dead. But he also lived in the shadows, with few photos of him prior to his death (Hezbollah has released more photos after his death) and a life lived under assumed names. While pro-Hezbollah Lebanese media immediately blamed Israel. That made perfect sense in light of Israel's presumed assassinations of numerous Hezbollah leaders, including  Imad Mughniyeh (mastermind of almost all attacks on Israel and the U.S.), his son Imad Mughniyeh (who was killed along with several high level operatives and an Iranian general),Hassan Laqqis (key Hezbollah link to Iranian weapons procurement) and Samir Kuntar (who killed an Israeli girl by smashing her head against the rocks on a beach).

Posted by William A. Jacobson on May 13, 2016 4 Comments
There have been a series of assinations of top Hezbollah commanders in the recent past, including Imad Mughniyeh (mastermind of almost all attacks on Israel and the U.S.), his son Imad Mughniyeh (who was killed along with several high level operatives and an Iranian general), Hassan Laqqis (key Hezbollah link to Iranian weapons procurement) and Samir Kuntar (who killed an Israeli girl by smashing her head against the rocks on a beach). In some of the cases (Imad Mughniyeh) Israeli involvement was clear, in the others it's presumed. Hezbollah just lost another top commander, the brother-in-law of Imad Mughniyey, and its top commander in Syria, Mustafa Amine Badreddine. The BBC reports:

Posted by Fuzzy Slippers on May 01, 2016 9 Comments
Apparently, the White House is bowing to pressure from the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (yes, such a position actually exists) and is going to look for alternate ways to bring Syrian refugees into the country. Fox News reports:
The Obama administration appears to be bowing to international pressure and pursuing under-the-radar “alternative” ways to bring in more Syrian and other refugees -- as soon as this year. The latest indication that the administration is preparing to take in more than the 10,000 Syrians this year it already has committed to follows a March 30 “high-level meeting” on Syrian refugee admission in Geneva, Switzerland -- convened by the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. At the meeting, attended by State Department officials, U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees Filippo Grandi called for countries to pursue “alternative avenues” for refugees – such as student and work visas, and expanded family reunification programs.
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