THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
"U.S. Weighs Leaving More Troops, Sending Battle Tanks to Syria"
Gordon Lubold, Nancy A. Youssef
25 OCTOBER 2019
WASHINGTON—The White House is considering options for leaving about 500 U.S. troops in northeast Syria and for sending dozens of battle tanks and other equipment, officials said Thursday, the latest in an array of scenarios following President Trump’s decision this month to remove all troops there.
The options, presented by military officials, would represent a reversal from the American withdrawal Mr. Trump wanted.
It also would modify U.S. objectives — from countering Islamic State extremists to also safeguarding oil fields in eastern Syria with additional troops and new military capability.
Washington sees the fields as potential leverage in future negotiations over Syria.
“We will NEVER let a reconstituted ISIS have those fields!” Mr. Trump said Thursday in a Twitter message, referring to Islamic State.
The options for tanks and troops, which hasn’t been decided, were being discussed in Washington as Defense Secretary Mark Esper, in Brussels, urged U.S. allies at a North Atlantic Treaty Organization meeting to respond to Turkey’s incursion into Syria earlier this month.
Mr. Esper’s request came amid fissures in the security bloc’s approach to the crisis and over the Trump administration’s policy shifts.
Mr. Trump earlier this month ordered all U.S. troops out of northern Syria, a move that was criticized by Kurdish fighters allied with the U.S. as an abandonment.
Critics say Turkey launched the mission because it believed Mr. Trump greenlighted the move during an Oct. 6 call with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
Mr. Trump said he didn’t give a go-ahead for the assault.
The U.S. leader then imposed sanctions on Turkey and threatened to destroy the NATO ally’s economy before lifting the sanctions when Turkey announced a cease-fire.
Mr. Esper said he supported a proposal this week by German Defense Minister Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer to create an international security zone in northern Syria with Russia and Turkey, which have already made their own deal to secure the region.
Ms. Kramp-Karrenbauer outlined her proposal at the NATO meeting, noting that the Russia-Turkey deal was insufficient to bring long-term peace.
“There are different views,” NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg told reporters Thursday evening.
“This was an open and frank discussion among friends and allies."
"There is strong support for a political solution.”
Mr. Trump, after ordering all U.S. forces out of northeastern Syria in early October, said later that he would agree to leave about 200 troops in northeast Syria to safeguard oil fields.
The move came after Sen. Lindsey Graham (R., S.C.) outlined the potential importance of the oil.
Mr. Graham suggested in remarks to reporters at the Capitol on Thursday that American troops would end up securing the oil fields.
He was among eight to 10 senators briefed by the White House on Thursday.
“There are some plans coming together from the Joint Chiefs that I think may work, that may give us what we need to prevent ISIS from coming back, Iran taking the oil, ISIS from taking the oil,” he said.
“I am somewhat encouraged that a plan is coming about that will meet our core objectives in Syria.”
The top U.S. envoy for Syria, James Jeffrey, said in testimony Wednesday before the House Foreign Affairs Committee that the U.S. also may hang onto a Syrian airfield.
“We do contemplate, I believe, maintaining one of our two airfields that are there,” Mr. Jeffrey said.
The option of sending tanks was earlier reported by Newsweek.
While the Trump administration’s plans for U.S. troops in Syria shifts, so do the plans for what to do with the approximately 1,000 U.S. troops, most of them special operations forces, following Mr. Trump’s order to withdraw.
Mr. Esper said over the weekend that most of the troops would go to neighboring Iraq, triggering a pointed reaction from Baghdad, where officials said those troops would only be able to remain for a period of four weeks.
Meeting at NATO headquarters, Mr. Esper criticized Ankara for its assault.
“Turkey’s unwarranted incursion into northern Syria jeopardizes the gains made there in recent years,” Mr. Esper said.
“Turkey put us all in a terrible situation,” he added later.
For NATO, disagreement over how to address Turkey’s actions strikes another blow to the unity of an alliance already rocked by Mr. Trump’s frequent broadsides over what he says is insufficient military spending by allies.
French President Emmanuel Macron — whose country has special forces in northern Syria — has responded with anger over the abrupt U.S. move to withdraw troops from Syria, which he said he learned about on Twitter.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has further exasperated NATO allies by deepening his relationship with President Vladimir Putin, including through the purchase of an air-defense system from Russia.
“The direction of Turkey with regard to the alliance is heading in the wrong direction,” Mr. Esper said.
Write to Gordon Lubold at Gordon.Lubold@wsj.com and Nancy A. Youssef at nancy.youssef@wsj.com
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RUSSIA
Re: RUSSIA
AFP
"15 dead in Syria clashes between pro-Turkish forces, Kurds: monitor"
afp.com
27 OCTOBER 2019
Clashes in northeast Syria between pro-Ankara fighters backed by the Turkish air force and a Damascus-backed force led by Syrian Kurds left 15 dead on Saturday, a monitor said.
Rami Abdel Rahman, head of the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, told AFP that nine pro-Turkish fighters and six members of the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) were killed in a zone between the towns of Tal Tamr and Ras al-Ain.
State news agency SANA said earlier Syrian government forces had entered the provincial borders of Ras al-Ain near Turkey's border on Saturday, an area that was taken by Turkish forces in the latter's weeks-long offensive against Syria's Kurds.
The Observatory said the Syrian government's deployment there was its largest in years.
Syrian government troops had also deployed along a road stretching some 30 kilometres (18 miles) south of the frontier, SANA said.
Turkey and its Syrian proxies on October 9 launched a cross-border attack against Kurdish-held areas, grabbing a 120-kilometre-long (70-mile) swathe of Syrian land along the frontier.
The incursion left hundreds dead and caused 300,000 people to flee their homes, in the latest humanitarian crisis in Syria's brutal eight-year war.
Turkey and Russia this week struck a deal in Sochi for more Kurdish forces to withdraw from the frontier on both sides of that Turkish-held area under the supervision of Russian and Syrian forces.
On Saturday, the Britain-based Observatory said some 2,000 Syrian troops and hundreds of military vehicles were deploying around what Turkey calls its "safe zone".
Government forces were being accompanied by Russian military police, the Observatory said.
Moscow has said 300 Russian military police had arrived in Syria to help ensure Kurdish forces withdraw to a line 30 kilometres (18 miles) from the border in keeping with Tuesday's agreement.
Under the Sochi deal, Kurdish forces have until late Tuesday to withdraw from border areas at either end of the Turkish-held area, before joint Turkish-Russian patrols start in a 10-kilometre (six-mile) strip there.
Ankara eventually wants to set up a buffer zone on Syrian soil along the entire length of its 440-kilometre-long border, including to resettle some of the 3.6 million Syrian refugees currently in Turkey.
The SDF has objected to some provisions of the Sochi agreement and it has so far maintained several border posts.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan warned Saturday that Ankara would "clear terrorists" on its border if the Kurdish forces, which his country view as an offshoot of its own banned insurgency, did not withdraw by the deadline.
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"15 dead in Syria clashes between pro-Turkish forces, Kurds: monitor"
afp.com
27 OCTOBER 2019
Clashes in northeast Syria between pro-Ankara fighters backed by the Turkish air force and a Damascus-backed force led by Syrian Kurds left 15 dead on Saturday, a monitor said.
Rami Abdel Rahman, head of the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, told AFP that nine pro-Turkish fighters and six members of the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) were killed in a zone between the towns of Tal Tamr and Ras al-Ain.
State news agency SANA said earlier Syrian government forces had entered the provincial borders of Ras al-Ain near Turkey's border on Saturday, an area that was taken by Turkish forces in the latter's weeks-long offensive against Syria's Kurds.
The Observatory said the Syrian government's deployment there was its largest in years.
Syrian government troops had also deployed along a road stretching some 30 kilometres (18 miles) south of the frontier, SANA said.
Turkey and its Syrian proxies on October 9 launched a cross-border attack against Kurdish-held areas, grabbing a 120-kilometre-long (70-mile) swathe of Syrian land along the frontier.
The incursion left hundreds dead and caused 300,000 people to flee their homes, in the latest humanitarian crisis in Syria's brutal eight-year war.
Turkey and Russia this week struck a deal in Sochi for more Kurdish forces to withdraw from the frontier on both sides of that Turkish-held area under the supervision of Russian and Syrian forces.
On Saturday, the Britain-based Observatory said some 2,000 Syrian troops and hundreds of military vehicles were deploying around what Turkey calls its "safe zone".
Government forces were being accompanied by Russian military police, the Observatory said.
Moscow has said 300 Russian military police had arrived in Syria to help ensure Kurdish forces withdraw to a line 30 kilometres (18 miles) from the border in keeping with Tuesday's agreement.
Under the Sochi deal, Kurdish forces have until late Tuesday to withdraw from border areas at either end of the Turkish-held area, before joint Turkish-Russian patrols start in a 10-kilometre (six-mile) strip there.
Ankara eventually wants to set up a buffer zone on Syrian soil along the entire length of its 440-kilometre-long border, including to resettle some of the 3.6 million Syrian refugees currently in Turkey.
The SDF has objected to some provisions of the Sochi agreement and it has so far maintained several border posts.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan warned Saturday that Ankara would "clear terrorists" on its border if the Kurdish forces, which his country view as an offshoot of its own banned insurgency, did not withdraw by the deadline.
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Re: RUSSIA
THE NEW YORK TIMES
"‘Keep the Oil’: Trump Revives Charged Slogan for New Syria Troop Mission"
Michael Crowley
27 OCTOBER 2019
WASHINGTON — President Trump has offered several justifications for an American withdrawal from Syria.
He has dismissed the country as nothing but “sand and death,” discounted its American-backed Kurdish fighters as “no angels,” and argued that he is winding down “endless wars.”
But in recent days, Mr. Trump has settled on Syria’s oil reserves as a new rationale for appearing to reverse course and deploy hundreds of additional troops to the war-ravaged country.
He has declared that the United States has “secured” oil fields in the country’s chaotic northeast and suggested that the seizure of the country’s main natural resource justifies America further extending its military presence there.
“We have taken it and secured it,” Mr. Trump said of Syria’s oil during remarks at the White House on Sunday, after announcing the killing of the Islamic State leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.
Mr. Trump went on to remind his audience of how, during the Iraq war, he called for selling off Iraq’s oil to defray the conflict’s enormous cost.
“I said keep the oil,” Mr. Trump recounted.
“If they are going into Iraq, keep the oil."
"They never did."
"They never did.”
Trump’s message is puzzling to former government officials and Middle East analysts who say that controlling Syria’s oil fields — which are the legal property of the Syrian government — poses numerous practical, legal and political obstacles.
They also warn that Mr. Trump’s discourse, which revives language he often used during the 2016 campaign to widespread condemnation, could confirm the world’s worst suspicions about American motives in the region.
A Russian Defense Ministry official on Saturday denounced Mr. Trump’s action as “state banditry.”
“He has a short notebook of old pledges, and this was one of the most frequently repeated pledges during the campaign: that we were going to take the oil,” said Bruce Riedel, a former C.I.A. official who served as a Middle East adviser to several presidents.
“And now he actually is in a position where he can quote, take some oil.”
Pentagon officials said on Friday that the United States would deploy several hundred troops to guard oil fields in eastern Syria, despite Mr. Trump’s repeated boasts that he is bringing American soldiers home from Syria.
Defense Secretary Mark T. Esper said that the United States would “maintain a reduced presence in Syria to deny ISIS access to oil revenue,” leaving what military officials said would be about 500 troops in the country, down from about 2,000 a year ago.
Mr. Trump first spoke approvingly about the United States seizing foreign oil in April 2011, when he complained about President Barack Obama’s troop withdrawal from Iraq.
“I would take the oil,” Mr. Trump told The Wall Street Journal.
“I would not leave Iraq and let Iran take the oil.”
He elaborated in an interview with ABC News a few days later.
“In the old days, you know, when you had a war, to the victor belong the spoils,” he said.
“You go in."
"You win the war and you take it.”
That year, Mr. Trump endorsed the United States seizing oil reserves not only in Iraq, but also in Libya, where Mr. Obama had recently intervened in the country’s civil war.
“I would just go in and take the oil,” he told Fox News.
“We’re a bunch of babies."
"We have wars and we leave."
"We go in, we have wars, we lose lives, we lose money, and we leave.”
Once he took office, Mr. Trump largely dropped the idea until recently, when it re-emerged after his widely criticized decision to remove American troops from northeastern Syria who had been helping Kurdish militias battle the remnants of the Islamic State in the region.
The move effectively gave Turkey a greenlight to invade the area and push back those Kurds, whom the Turks viewed as a threat to their security.
His change in thinking follows multiple conversations with Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, who talks frequently with the president and has long pushed for a greater American presence in Syria, for reasons like fighting the Islamic State in the region and checking the influence of Russia and Iran.
Mr. Trump has also consulted on the subject with the former Army vice chief of staff, Jack Keane, who visited the White House in mid-October and showed the president a map of Syria illustrating that 70 percent of the country’s oil fields are in areas in the northeast that have been under American control.
Mr. Keane, who declined to comment, has also warned that the oil fields risk falling into the hands of Iranian proxies in the region.
Mr. Graham, too, contends that American control of the oil fields would “deny Iran and Assad a monetary windfall,” as he put it in a statement last week.
But Mr. Graham has taken the argument a step further, to suggest that Syrian oil could go into American coffers, as Mr. Trump once implied for Iraq.
“We can also use some of the revenue from oil sales to pay for our military commitment in Syria,” Mr. Graham added.
Last week, Mr. Trump offered a variation on that idea, saying that “we’ll work something out with the Kurds so that they have some money, they have some cash flow.”
He added that he might “get one of our big oil companies to go in and do it properly.”
But energy and security experts say it is unlikely that any American companies would be interested in the enormous risks and limited profits such an arrangement would entail.
Even at its peak, Syrian oil production was modest.
And any short-term revenue potential is severely limited by logistical challenges posed by infrastructure damaged by war, pipelines that run into unfriendly areas and the unusually low grade of the oil itself.
Talk of monetizing the Syrian oil also diverges from the message of top Trump administration officials, including Mr. Esper, who said last week that the American mission in Syria was unchanged from its original purpose of defeating the Islamic State.
But the president has repeatedly boasted that the militant group has already been defeated.
And although ISIS currently controls no territory, and is little threat to the oil reserves, experts warn that it could regenerate.
Framing control of oil as part of the fight against ISIS, however, may provide cover for an action motivated, at least in part, for reasons that analysts say have no basis in domestic or international law.
“Esper is being very careful to say this is about ISIS."
"And that’s because the legality is being framed around ISIS,” said Aaron Stein, an expert on Syria and Turkey with the Foreign Policy Research Institute.
When the Obama administration sent troops to Syria to fight the Islamic State several years ago, it relied on the authorization of military force passed by Congress days after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, which gave the government broad authority to battle Al Qaeda and affiliated groups.
The Trump administration has invoked the same authorization for its own activities in Syria, despite many critics arguing that even the previous administration overreached in citing it to cover the battle against the Islamic State in Syria.
Then there is the basic question of the oil’s ownership.
“Oil, like it or not, is owned by the Syrian state,” Brett H. McGurk, Mr. Trump’s former envoy to the 70-nation coalition to defeat ISIS, said at a panel discussion on Syria hosted Monday by the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.
Mr. McGurk said that Mr. Trump’s first secretary of state, Rex W. Tillerson, had studied the issue and concluded there was no practical way for the United States to monetize its control over oil-rich areas.
“Maybe there are new lawyers now, but it was just illegal for an American company to go and seize and exploit these assets,” Mr. McGurk said.
Mr. McGurk said the only legal way to make money from the Syrian oil fields would be to work with Russia and the government of President Bashar al-Assad of Syria to place the revenue into an escrow account to help fund Syria’s postwar reconstruction.
But he said Russia had little interest in the idea, even before America assumed a diminished role in the country this month.
Nor has Mr. Trump expressed any public interest in using the oil to fund Syria’s reconstruction.
Mr. Stein said he believed the true goal of some Trump administration officials and advisers was to keep the oil fields not from ISIS but from Mr. Assad’s forces, to deny him funds to rebuild his country and thus ensure that Syria remained a financial burden on its ally, Iran.
In recent days, hostile foreign governments have seized on Mr. Trump’s commentary as evidence of America’s sinister motives.
On Saturday, a spokesman for Russia’s Defense Ministry, Maj. Gen. Igor Konashenkov, said that “what Washington is doing now, the seizure and control of oil fields in eastern Syria under its armed control, is, quite simply, international state banditry.”
And Iran’s state-controlled Fars News Agency wrote that while Washington “claims that the move is in the line with its alleged antiterror campaign in Syria, analysts see it no more than an excuse to impose control over Syria’s oil revenues.”
Mr. Riedel doubted that the president would wind up insisting on control of the oil fields.
Beyond the many military, technical and legal challenges, there are the optics to consider.
“Let’s say he does do it,” Mr. Riedel said.
“Let’s say we establish the precedent that we are in the Middle East to take the oil."
"The symbolism is really bad.”
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"‘Keep the Oil’: Trump Revives Charged Slogan for New Syria Troop Mission"
Michael Crowley
27 OCTOBER 2019
WASHINGTON — President Trump has offered several justifications for an American withdrawal from Syria.
He has dismissed the country as nothing but “sand and death,” discounted its American-backed Kurdish fighters as “no angels,” and argued that he is winding down “endless wars.”
But in recent days, Mr. Trump has settled on Syria’s oil reserves as a new rationale for appearing to reverse course and deploy hundreds of additional troops to the war-ravaged country.
He has declared that the United States has “secured” oil fields in the country’s chaotic northeast and suggested that the seizure of the country’s main natural resource justifies America further extending its military presence there.
“We have taken it and secured it,” Mr. Trump said of Syria’s oil during remarks at the White House on Sunday, after announcing the killing of the Islamic State leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.
Mr. Trump went on to remind his audience of how, during the Iraq war, he called for selling off Iraq’s oil to defray the conflict’s enormous cost.
“I said keep the oil,” Mr. Trump recounted.
“If they are going into Iraq, keep the oil."
"They never did."
"They never did.”
Trump’s message is puzzling to former government officials and Middle East analysts who say that controlling Syria’s oil fields — which are the legal property of the Syrian government — poses numerous practical, legal and political obstacles.
They also warn that Mr. Trump’s discourse, which revives language he often used during the 2016 campaign to widespread condemnation, could confirm the world’s worst suspicions about American motives in the region.
A Russian Defense Ministry official on Saturday denounced Mr. Trump’s action as “state banditry.”
“He has a short notebook of old pledges, and this was one of the most frequently repeated pledges during the campaign: that we were going to take the oil,” said Bruce Riedel, a former C.I.A. official who served as a Middle East adviser to several presidents.
“And now he actually is in a position where he can quote, take some oil.”
Pentagon officials said on Friday that the United States would deploy several hundred troops to guard oil fields in eastern Syria, despite Mr. Trump’s repeated boasts that he is bringing American soldiers home from Syria.
Defense Secretary Mark T. Esper said that the United States would “maintain a reduced presence in Syria to deny ISIS access to oil revenue,” leaving what military officials said would be about 500 troops in the country, down from about 2,000 a year ago.
Mr. Trump first spoke approvingly about the United States seizing foreign oil in April 2011, when he complained about President Barack Obama’s troop withdrawal from Iraq.
“I would take the oil,” Mr. Trump told The Wall Street Journal.
“I would not leave Iraq and let Iran take the oil.”
He elaborated in an interview with ABC News a few days later.
“In the old days, you know, when you had a war, to the victor belong the spoils,” he said.
“You go in."
"You win the war and you take it.”
That year, Mr. Trump endorsed the United States seizing oil reserves not only in Iraq, but also in Libya, where Mr. Obama had recently intervened in the country’s civil war.
“I would just go in and take the oil,” he told Fox News.
“We’re a bunch of babies."
"We have wars and we leave."
"We go in, we have wars, we lose lives, we lose money, and we leave.”
Once he took office, Mr. Trump largely dropped the idea until recently, when it re-emerged after his widely criticized decision to remove American troops from northeastern Syria who had been helping Kurdish militias battle the remnants of the Islamic State in the region.
The move effectively gave Turkey a greenlight to invade the area and push back those Kurds, whom the Turks viewed as a threat to their security.
His change in thinking follows multiple conversations with Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, who talks frequently with the president and has long pushed for a greater American presence in Syria, for reasons like fighting the Islamic State in the region and checking the influence of Russia and Iran.
Mr. Trump has also consulted on the subject with the former Army vice chief of staff, Jack Keane, who visited the White House in mid-October and showed the president a map of Syria illustrating that 70 percent of the country’s oil fields are in areas in the northeast that have been under American control.
Mr. Keane, who declined to comment, has also warned that the oil fields risk falling into the hands of Iranian proxies in the region.
Mr. Graham, too, contends that American control of the oil fields would “deny Iran and Assad a monetary windfall,” as he put it in a statement last week.
But Mr. Graham has taken the argument a step further, to suggest that Syrian oil could go into American coffers, as Mr. Trump once implied for Iraq.
“We can also use some of the revenue from oil sales to pay for our military commitment in Syria,” Mr. Graham added.
Last week, Mr. Trump offered a variation on that idea, saying that “we’ll work something out with the Kurds so that they have some money, they have some cash flow.”
He added that he might “get one of our big oil companies to go in and do it properly.”
But energy and security experts say it is unlikely that any American companies would be interested in the enormous risks and limited profits such an arrangement would entail.
Even at its peak, Syrian oil production was modest.
And any short-term revenue potential is severely limited by logistical challenges posed by infrastructure damaged by war, pipelines that run into unfriendly areas and the unusually low grade of the oil itself.
Talk of monetizing the Syrian oil also diverges from the message of top Trump administration officials, including Mr. Esper, who said last week that the American mission in Syria was unchanged from its original purpose of defeating the Islamic State.
But the president has repeatedly boasted that the militant group has already been defeated.
And although ISIS currently controls no territory, and is little threat to the oil reserves, experts warn that it could regenerate.
Framing control of oil as part of the fight against ISIS, however, may provide cover for an action motivated, at least in part, for reasons that analysts say have no basis in domestic or international law.
“Esper is being very careful to say this is about ISIS."
"And that’s because the legality is being framed around ISIS,” said Aaron Stein, an expert on Syria and Turkey with the Foreign Policy Research Institute.
When the Obama administration sent troops to Syria to fight the Islamic State several years ago, it relied on the authorization of military force passed by Congress days after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, which gave the government broad authority to battle Al Qaeda and affiliated groups.
The Trump administration has invoked the same authorization for its own activities in Syria, despite many critics arguing that even the previous administration overreached in citing it to cover the battle against the Islamic State in Syria.
Then there is the basic question of the oil’s ownership.
“Oil, like it or not, is owned by the Syrian state,” Brett H. McGurk, Mr. Trump’s former envoy to the 70-nation coalition to defeat ISIS, said at a panel discussion on Syria hosted Monday by the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.
Mr. McGurk said that Mr. Trump’s first secretary of state, Rex W. Tillerson, had studied the issue and concluded there was no practical way for the United States to monetize its control over oil-rich areas.
“Maybe there are new lawyers now, but it was just illegal for an American company to go and seize and exploit these assets,” Mr. McGurk said.
Mr. McGurk said the only legal way to make money from the Syrian oil fields would be to work with Russia and the government of President Bashar al-Assad of Syria to place the revenue into an escrow account to help fund Syria’s postwar reconstruction.
But he said Russia had little interest in the idea, even before America assumed a diminished role in the country this month.
Nor has Mr. Trump expressed any public interest in using the oil to fund Syria’s reconstruction.
Mr. Stein said he believed the true goal of some Trump administration officials and advisers was to keep the oil fields not from ISIS but from Mr. Assad’s forces, to deny him funds to rebuild his country and thus ensure that Syria remained a financial burden on its ally, Iran.
In recent days, hostile foreign governments have seized on Mr. Trump’s commentary as evidence of America’s sinister motives.
On Saturday, a spokesman for Russia’s Defense Ministry, Maj. Gen. Igor Konashenkov, said that “what Washington is doing now, the seizure and control of oil fields in eastern Syria under its armed control, is, quite simply, international state banditry.”
And Iran’s state-controlled Fars News Agency wrote that while Washington “claims that the move is in the line with its alleged antiterror campaign in Syria, analysts see it no more than an excuse to impose control over Syria’s oil revenues.”
Mr. Riedel doubted that the president would wind up insisting on control of the oil fields.
Beyond the many military, technical and legal challenges, there are the optics to consider.
“Let’s say he does do it,” Mr. Riedel said.
“Let’s say we establish the precedent that we are in the Middle East to take the oil."
"The symbolism is really bad.”
http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/kee ... li=BBnb7Kz
Re: RUSSIA
THE WASHINGTON POST
"Dread in northern Syria as U.S. troops withdraw and cease-fire ends"
Louisa Loveluck
30 OCTOBER 2019
DERIK, Syria —As the final hours of a cease-fire in northeastern Syria wound down on Tuesday, dread descended on a region once shielded by the United States.
In towns and cities, families debated, and sometimes fought, over whether, and where, to run.
Selling their houses to pay for the help of unpredictable smugglers was one option.
Moving closer to the Iraqi border, where thousands of refugees had already crossed, and then praying the violence wouldn’t follow, was another.
“How do you decide what to do?"
"Do we wait, do we leave?” asked a young student, Marwa, in the Syrian border town of Derik.
“There are no good options."
"None.”
The end of the 150-hour cease-fire brokered by Russia threatened to reignite fighting that erupted after President Trump decided earlier this month to withdraw U.S. troops from the area and leave their Kurdish allies to fend for themselves in the face of a Turkish military offensive.
The temporary pause in hostilities also gave the various belligerents time to redraw the map of northern Syria and confront its residents with new realities and new risks.
As the mostly Syrian Kurdish fighters pulled back from the Turkish border, the Turkish military and its militia allies advanced from the north and Syrian government forces advanced from the south, retaking territory that had changed hands during the eight-year civil war.
The largely Kurdish communities of northeastern Syria feared both: their longtime Turkish adversaries and Syrian government forces that could view the locals as turncoats.
“The men feel strong, the women and children are scared, and no one knows what is coming,” said Jawan, 34, standing in Derik’s clothing bazaar, holding his 9-month-old daughter.
“This is bigger than us, really."
"America was meant to protect us, but that’s done now."
"So I guess we’ll just wait.”
While U.S. troops withdrew to the south and out of the area where they’d long kept the peace, Russian military police moved in.
Under an agreement reached last week between Russian President Vladimir Putin and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the Russian forces would now patrol the border.
At times, American and Russian armored vehicles passed on the road, each with their own red, white and blue flags flapping in the wind.
Shortly before the cease-fire expired on Tuesday evening, Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu said that a “full implementation” of the Russian-Turkish deal — which called for the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces to retreat from the border area — had been achieved.
The Russian Defense Ministry, citing Major Gen. Yuri Borenkov, a senior military official working in Syria, said that 68 Kurdish units numbering 34,000 fighters had pulled back 19 miles from the border by Tuesday.
The only publicized withdrawal during the pause in Turkey’s offensive took place Sunday near the border town of Amuda, with the SDF waiting an hour for a Russian escort to arrive and lead the fighters south.
A group of children displaced from Ras al-Ayn, site of the worst fighting, had looked on.
And civilians stopped their cars to ask what might follow.
“Give us good news,” an old man implored Mustafa Bali, an SDF spokesman, clutching his hand.
Around the border towns of Ras al-Ayn and Tal Tamr, violence flared during the final hours of the cease-fire, suggesting that not all Kurdish fighters had withdrawn and that Turkish-backed troops were scrambling to seal control of the most contested areas.
Days earlier, as shells thudded in the background, a convoy of U.S. trucks moved along the roads of northern Syria, transporting troops, equipment and the paraphernalia of what had once been a busy military base.
U.S. Defense Secretary Mark T. Esper said Monday that the U.S. forces were being repositioned to secure oil fields in eastern Syria and make sure the Islamic State could not gain access to them.
This redeployment was a pivot from Trump’s earlier statement that U.S. troops were being sent home.
The shift in mission sowed confusion among the largely Kurdish forces and civilians.
“So they are leaving us for oil?” asked one man in a clinic Monday, speaking on the condition of anonymity because he said he now feared for his security if he spoke to American journalists.
“We heard for years that all America cared about was oil, but we didn’t believe it, and we thought the Americans were our friends."
"Now what do we have left?”
After Trump announced his decision to withdraw U.S. troops, clearing the way for Turkey’s military campaign, hundreds of fighters and civilians have been killed.
About 200,000 people have fled their homes, according to the United Nations.
Trump’s decision marked a watershed moment in a long American effort to hold sway over parts of a Syria racked by the eight-year conflict.
As a largely peaceful uprising gave way to civil war, Washington opposed President Bashar al-Assad’s brutal, repressive tactics and supported an array of rebel groups.
But as the Islamic State rose and nationwide violence accelerated, northeastern Syria’s Kurdish-led force had become Washington’s favored, and finally their only, partner.
Trump’s decision to pull U.S. troops away from the region has set the stage for a major shift in power here, with Russians ascendant and the Syrian Kurds turning to Assad’s forces for protection from Turkey.
In a sign of how marbled the battlefield has become, Syrian government forces have returned to fighting on the front lines in northeastern Syria, and they have suffered a stream of casualties in recent days.
The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said that at least six Syrian government troops had been killed near Assadiya, south of Ras al-Ayn.
There were also reports that the Turkish-backed force had kidnapped and executed another soldier.
At a medical facility in Hasakah, three soldiers lay wounded and riddled with shrapnel.
One was unconscious and on life support.
His facial features had almost been burned off, a doctor said.
Mostly young, local and poorly equipped, soldiers interviewed across two medical facilities said that they had been sitting ducks in the face of Turkey’s heavy weapons.
“And we don’t have heavy weapons, just these guns,” said one Syrian government soldier, clutching a battered rifle.
He paced the yard at a Kurdish Red Crescent clinic in Tal Tamr while his friend was being treated inside for a gunshot wound to the chest.
The soldier watched as the latest ambulance pulled through the gates and medics wrenched open the door.
It was another Syrian government soldier.
The young man froze, then bolted to help.
“My brother, my brother,” he cried.
“What happened?”
louisa.loveluck@washpost.com
Ossama Mohammed contributed to this report.
http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/dre ... li=BBnb7Kz
"Dread in northern Syria as U.S. troops withdraw and cease-fire ends"
Louisa Loveluck
30 OCTOBER 2019
DERIK, Syria —As the final hours of a cease-fire in northeastern Syria wound down on Tuesday, dread descended on a region once shielded by the United States.
In towns and cities, families debated, and sometimes fought, over whether, and where, to run.
Selling their houses to pay for the help of unpredictable smugglers was one option.
Moving closer to the Iraqi border, where thousands of refugees had already crossed, and then praying the violence wouldn’t follow, was another.
“How do you decide what to do?"
"Do we wait, do we leave?” asked a young student, Marwa, in the Syrian border town of Derik.
“There are no good options."
"None.”
The end of the 150-hour cease-fire brokered by Russia threatened to reignite fighting that erupted after President Trump decided earlier this month to withdraw U.S. troops from the area and leave their Kurdish allies to fend for themselves in the face of a Turkish military offensive.
The temporary pause in hostilities also gave the various belligerents time to redraw the map of northern Syria and confront its residents with new realities and new risks.
As the mostly Syrian Kurdish fighters pulled back from the Turkish border, the Turkish military and its militia allies advanced from the north and Syrian government forces advanced from the south, retaking territory that had changed hands during the eight-year civil war.
The largely Kurdish communities of northeastern Syria feared both: their longtime Turkish adversaries and Syrian government forces that could view the locals as turncoats.
“The men feel strong, the women and children are scared, and no one knows what is coming,” said Jawan, 34, standing in Derik’s clothing bazaar, holding his 9-month-old daughter.
“This is bigger than us, really."
"America was meant to protect us, but that’s done now."
"So I guess we’ll just wait.”
While U.S. troops withdrew to the south and out of the area where they’d long kept the peace, Russian military police moved in.
Under an agreement reached last week between Russian President Vladimir Putin and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the Russian forces would now patrol the border.
At times, American and Russian armored vehicles passed on the road, each with their own red, white and blue flags flapping in the wind.
Shortly before the cease-fire expired on Tuesday evening, Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu said that a “full implementation” of the Russian-Turkish deal — which called for the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces to retreat from the border area — had been achieved.
The Russian Defense Ministry, citing Major Gen. Yuri Borenkov, a senior military official working in Syria, said that 68 Kurdish units numbering 34,000 fighters had pulled back 19 miles from the border by Tuesday.
The only publicized withdrawal during the pause in Turkey’s offensive took place Sunday near the border town of Amuda, with the SDF waiting an hour for a Russian escort to arrive and lead the fighters south.
A group of children displaced from Ras al-Ayn, site of the worst fighting, had looked on.
And civilians stopped their cars to ask what might follow.
“Give us good news,” an old man implored Mustafa Bali, an SDF spokesman, clutching his hand.
Around the border towns of Ras al-Ayn and Tal Tamr, violence flared during the final hours of the cease-fire, suggesting that not all Kurdish fighters had withdrawn and that Turkish-backed troops were scrambling to seal control of the most contested areas.
Days earlier, as shells thudded in the background, a convoy of U.S. trucks moved along the roads of northern Syria, transporting troops, equipment and the paraphernalia of what had once been a busy military base.
U.S. Defense Secretary Mark T. Esper said Monday that the U.S. forces were being repositioned to secure oil fields in eastern Syria and make sure the Islamic State could not gain access to them.
This redeployment was a pivot from Trump’s earlier statement that U.S. troops were being sent home.
The shift in mission sowed confusion among the largely Kurdish forces and civilians.
“So they are leaving us for oil?” asked one man in a clinic Monday, speaking on the condition of anonymity because he said he now feared for his security if he spoke to American journalists.
“We heard for years that all America cared about was oil, but we didn’t believe it, and we thought the Americans were our friends."
"Now what do we have left?”
After Trump announced his decision to withdraw U.S. troops, clearing the way for Turkey’s military campaign, hundreds of fighters and civilians have been killed.
About 200,000 people have fled their homes, according to the United Nations.
Trump’s decision marked a watershed moment in a long American effort to hold sway over parts of a Syria racked by the eight-year conflict.
As a largely peaceful uprising gave way to civil war, Washington opposed President Bashar al-Assad’s brutal, repressive tactics and supported an array of rebel groups.
But as the Islamic State rose and nationwide violence accelerated, northeastern Syria’s Kurdish-led force had become Washington’s favored, and finally their only, partner.
Trump’s decision to pull U.S. troops away from the region has set the stage for a major shift in power here, with Russians ascendant and the Syrian Kurds turning to Assad’s forces for protection from Turkey.
In a sign of how marbled the battlefield has become, Syrian government forces have returned to fighting on the front lines in northeastern Syria, and they have suffered a stream of casualties in recent days.
The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said that at least six Syrian government troops had been killed near Assadiya, south of Ras al-Ayn.
There were also reports that the Turkish-backed force had kidnapped and executed another soldier.
At a medical facility in Hasakah, three soldiers lay wounded and riddled with shrapnel.
One was unconscious and on life support.
His facial features had almost been burned off, a doctor said.
Mostly young, local and poorly equipped, soldiers interviewed across two medical facilities said that they had been sitting ducks in the face of Turkey’s heavy weapons.
“And we don’t have heavy weapons, just these guns,” said one Syrian government soldier, clutching a battered rifle.
He paced the yard at a Kurdish Red Crescent clinic in Tal Tamr while his friend was being treated inside for a gunshot wound to the chest.
The soldier watched as the latest ambulance pulled through the gates and medics wrenched open the door.
It was another Syrian government soldier.
The young man froze, then bolted to help.
“My brother, my brother,” he cried.
“What happened?”
louisa.loveluck@washpost.com
Ossama Mohammed contributed to this report.
http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/dre ... li=BBnb7Kz
Re: RUSSIA
ABC NEWS
"Syrian Kurdish leader says Turkish attacks continue, contradicting US claims"
1 NOVEMBER 2019
The leader of the Syrian Kurds' civilian government accused Turkey and its forces of continuing its offensive into northern Syria using armed drones and heavy artillery, and conducting ethnic cleansing against the Syrian Kurds, despite ceasefire agreements.
The charge flies in the face of the Trump administration's characterization that its ceasefire with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has halted his operation and allowed U.S. and Syrian Kurdish forces to again focus on fighting the remnants of the Islamic State.
"If the U.S. is really serious about sustaining the operation against terrorism, they should stop the Turkish incursion," said Ilham Ehmed, president of the Syrian Democratic Council, the political wing of the Syrian Democratic Forces, which controls the territory in northeast Syria that they won back from ISIS with the U.S. and a global coalition.
While President Donald Trump has, for now, reversed his withdrawal and will now keep up to 900 troops in Syria, Ehmed said the administration's plans are unclear.
"The American map on Syria is not clear yet."
"We've just heard from our meetings here that they have the will to stay, but until when, why and for what, we have no clear answer yet," she said Thursday through a translator.
After fighting together, the SDF and SDC have accused the Trump administration of abandoning them when Trump moved U.S. forces back from the Turkish-Syrian border, effectively allowing Turkey to launch its offensive against the Syrian Kurds, which Ankara considers a terrorist organization because of its ties to Kurdish separatists in Turkey.
A U.S.-Turkish ceasefire halted that operation in return for the SDF departing the areas Turkey controlled.
U.S. officials said that will allow the fight against ISIS to resume, as U.S. forces remain behind to conduct joint operations against the terror group and protect oil fields from being exploited by it for revenue.
A senior State Department official told ABC News on Wednesday that there were "conflicting claims of who's where, whether people are still in the zone," but could not offer an update.
But Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said Wednesday that he was "pleased" with how the ceasefire has held.
Ehmed said that was not true, however, describing daily attacks by armed drones and heavy shelling by Turkish forces and their allied Syrian opposition forces.
"No, it did not stop at all."
"There was a media announcement."
"... But practically speaking, the military attacks have been carried out a daily basis, they did not stop at all," she said.
Turkey has accused Syrian Kurdish forces of not exiting the full buffer zone that Erdogan negotiated with Russian President Vladimir Putin, days after reaching the deal with Vice President Mike Pence.
Turkey and Russia began joint patrols on Wednesday to inspect the area and ensure its cleared of Syrian Kurdish forces.
Instead of those joint patrols, Ehmed called for a no-fly zone and an international force to monitor security in the Turkish-Syrian border area.
"We call on the Pentagon to not allow Turkey to use the Syrian airspace, and we hold the Pentagon responsible for all the crimes committed by Turkey if they block the airspace," Ehmed said.
Ehmed and others testified last week before the House that Turkey and its opposition forces committed war crimes, including the use of white phosphorus as a weapon, attacks on civilians and civilian infrastructure, and executing captured SDF fighters.
U.S. special envoy for Syria James Jeffrey said Wednesday that the U.S. had noted "several incidents which we consider war crimes" and was investigating how the white phosphorus was deployed.
Ehmed said the SDC had provided evidence and documentation to the U.S., but there were still American diplomatic and military personnel in the area who are "seeing the massacres in their naked eyes."
Since the Turkish operation began, Ehmed said that over 400,000 people were displaced, including 18,000 children; 412 SDF fighters had been killed and 419 injured; and 509 civilians had been killed and 2,733 injured.
ABC News could not independently verify those statistics.
Despite the anger and feelings of abandonment among Syrian Kurds, Ehmed said the SDF remains open to working with the U.S., but both sides need to rebuild "mutual trust."
"... We still hope that they are going to keep their promises and re-evaluate all the bad decisions that they're taking."
http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/syr ... 7Kz#page=2
"Syrian Kurdish leader says Turkish attacks continue, contradicting US claims"
1 NOVEMBER 2019
The leader of the Syrian Kurds' civilian government accused Turkey and its forces of continuing its offensive into northern Syria using armed drones and heavy artillery, and conducting ethnic cleansing against the Syrian Kurds, despite ceasefire agreements.
The charge flies in the face of the Trump administration's characterization that its ceasefire with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has halted his operation and allowed U.S. and Syrian Kurdish forces to again focus on fighting the remnants of the Islamic State.
"If the U.S. is really serious about sustaining the operation against terrorism, they should stop the Turkish incursion," said Ilham Ehmed, president of the Syrian Democratic Council, the political wing of the Syrian Democratic Forces, which controls the territory in northeast Syria that they won back from ISIS with the U.S. and a global coalition.
While President Donald Trump has, for now, reversed his withdrawal and will now keep up to 900 troops in Syria, Ehmed said the administration's plans are unclear.
"The American map on Syria is not clear yet."
"We've just heard from our meetings here that they have the will to stay, but until when, why and for what, we have no clear answer yet," she said Thursday through a translator.
After fighting together, the SDF and SDC have accused the Trump administration of abandoning them when Trump moved U.S. forces back from the Turkish-Syrian border, effectively allowing Turkey to launch its offensive against the Syrian Kurds, which Ankara considers a terrorist organization because of its ties to Kurdish separatists in Turkey.
A U.S.-Turkish ceasefire halted that operation in return for the SDF departing the areas Turkey controlled.
U.S. officials said that will allow the fight against ISIS to resume, as U.S. forces remain behind to conduct joint operations against the terror group and protect oil fields from being exploited by it for revenue.
A senior State Department official told ABC News on Wednesday that there were "conflicting claims of who's where, whether people are still in the zone," but could not offer an update.
But Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said Wednesday that he was "pleased" with how the ceasefire has held.
Ehmed said that was not true, however, describing daily attacks by armed drones and heavy shelling by Turkish forces and their allied Syrian opposition forces.
"No, it did not stop at all."
"There was a media announcement."
"... But practically speaking, the military attacks have been carried out a daily basis, they did not stop at all," she said.
Turkey has accused Syrian Kurdish forces of not exiting the full buffer zone that Erdogan negotiated with Russian President Vladimir Putin, days after reaching the deal with Vice President Mike Pence.
Turkey and Russia began joint patrols on Wednesday to inspect the area and ensure its cleared of Syrian Kurdish forces.
Instead of those joint patrols, Ehmed called for a no-fly zone and an international force to monitor security in the Turkish-Syrian border area.
"We call on the Pentagon to not allow Turkey to use the Syrian airspace, and we hold the Pentagon responsible for all the crimes committed by Turkey if they block the airspace," Ehmed said.
Ehmed and others testified last week before the House that Turkey and its opposition forces committed war crimes, including the use of white phosphorus as a weapon, attacks on civilians and civilian infrastructure, and executing captured SDF fighters.
U.S. special envoy for Syria James Jeffrey said Wednesday that the U.S. had noted "several incidents which we consider war crimes" and was investigating how the white phosphorus was deployed.
Ehmed said the SDC had provided evidence and documentation to the U.S., but there were still American diplomatic and military personnel in the area who are "seeing the massacres in their naked eyes."
Since the Turkish operation began, Ehmed said that over 400,000 people were displaced, including 18,000 children; 412 SDF fighters had been killed and 419 injured; and 509 civilians had been killed and 2,733 injured.
ABC News could not independently verify those statistics.
Despite the anger and feelings of abandonment among Syrian Kurds, Ehmed said the SDF remains open to working with the U.S., but both sides need to rebuild "mutual trust."
"... We still hope that they are going to keep their promises and re-evaluate all the bad decisions that they're taking."
http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/syr ... 7Kz#page=2
Re: RUSSIA
ASSOCIATED PRESS
"Putin says US ‘political dramas’ diverting focus from Russia"
20 NOVEMBER 2019
MOSCOW (AP) — Russian President Vladimir Putin says he’s pleased that the “political battles” in Washington have put on the back-burner accusations that Russia interfered in U.S. elections.
"Thank God,” he told an economic forum in the Russian capital on Wednesday, “no one is accusing us of interfering in the U.S. elections anymore; now they’re accusing Ukraine."
Some Republicans have used the public hearings to tout a discredited conspiracy theory that blames Ukraine, not Russia, for interfering in the U.S.’s 2016 presidential election.
In the impeachment hearings, Democrats in Congress say U.S. President Donald Trump pressured his Ukrainian counterpart, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, to investigate former U.S. Vice President Joe Biden while withholding U.S. military aid to Kyiv, and argue that may be grounds for removing Trump from office.
http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/put ... li=BBnb7Kz
"Putin says US ‘political dramas’ diverting focus from Russia"
20 NOVEMBER 2019
MOSCOW (AP) — Russian President Vladimir Putin says he’s pleased that the “political battles” in Washington have put on the back-burner accusations that Russia interfered in U.S. elections.
"Thank God,” he told an economic forum in the Russian capital on Wednesday, “no one is accusing us of interfering in the U.S. elections anymore; now they’re accusing Ukraine."
Some Republicans have used the public hearings to tout a discredited conspiracy theory that blames Ukraine, not Russia, for interfering in the U.S.’s 2016 presidential election.
In the impeachment hearings, Democrats in Congress say U.S. President Donald Trump pressured his Ukrainian counterpart, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, to investigate former U.S. Vice President Joe Biden while withholding U.S. military aid to Kyiv, and argue that may be grounds for removing Trump from office.
http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/put ... li=BBnb7Kz
Re: RUSSIA
THE CAPE CHARLES MIRROR December 3, 2019 at 7:28 pm
Paul Plante says :
A farce, people, is defined as a “comic dramatic work using buffoonery and horseplay and typically including crude characterization and ludicrously improbable situations,” and that is an apt description of this stupid show the smarmy and unctuous Hollywood, California Democrat Adam Schiff has been staging in Washington, D.C.
However, a more apt description would be SHOW TRIAL following the 19 November 2019 SCHIFF CHARADE starring Pence “go fetch girl” Jennifer Williams, who was clueless about pretty much everything relative to impeaching a sitting American president, but notwithstanding, was there ready and eager to tell the world how little she knew about anything, because she was not all that important as the appointment secretary for Pence, who himself is really not that important, at all, and Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, who in one of the high points of his riveting testimony against Trump was submitted to this intense questioning from high-powered Democrat lawyer Mr. Goldman, to wit:
GOLDMAN: Colonel Vindman, what languages do you speak?
VINDMAN: I speak Russian and Ukrainian and a little bit of English.
end quotes
Yes, people, I am not making that up – it’s from the transcript of the SHOW TRIAL, if you can believe that.
As to a show trial, it is a public trial in which the judicial authorities, in this case Adam Schiff, “Jumping Jerry” Nadler and the congressional Democrats to included Nancy Pelosi, have already determined the guilt of the defendant, in this case, the sitting president of the United States, Donald Trump, whose real crime is being president instead of Democrat Hillary Clinton, the woman scorned in this drama.
As Adam Schiff demonstrated to the world on 19 November 2019, the actual trial, in this case aired on the main-stream media here in the United States so the whole wide world including Putin in Russia could tune in to enjoy the show, especially Putin, has as its only goal the presentation of both the accusation and the verdict to the public so they will serve as both an impressive example and a warning to other would-be dissidents or transgressors.
As is the case here as Adam Schiff uses the old Soviet Union playbook to great advantage given the media coverage he is garnering, which in turn gives a boost to his fundraising efforts, which is really what it is all about for Adam, because for him to advance as a Democrat, he needs big buck$ to pave his way, show trials tend to be retributive rather than corrective and they are also conducted for propagandistic purposes.
With respect to the irony here, as well as where Adam Schiff is drawing his knowledge from as to how to stage the best show trial in the history of the world, as early as 1922, Lenin in Russia advocated staging several “model trials” in Soviet Russia and the Soviet Ukraine, so this horse**** show we are being treated to here in the United States of America is exactly the type of thing you would expect in some corrupt ****hole like our good friends and allies in the Ukraine, and if Putin in Russia wanted to bring America low, and make it seem weak and stupid, he could have picked no better person than the one he now has, the Hollywood, California Congressman Adam Schiff, Putin’s willing tool and “running dog” (a servile follower), to pull that off, which takes us back to the roots of Adam’s show trial to convict Trump. to wit:
Show trials were common during Joseph Stalin’s political repressions, such as the Moscow Trials of the Great Purge period (1937–38).
The Soviet authorities staged the actual trials meticulously, just as Adam Schiff has done here, with his well-coached witnesses against Trump.
Ands with respect to treatment the main-stream media in this country are giving this horse****, some solid public evidence of what really happened during the Moscow Trials came to the West through the Dewey Commission (1937), and after the collapse of the Soviet Union (1991), more information became available which in turn discredited the New York Times reporter Walter Duranty who claimed at the time that these trials were actually fair.
Never in my life have I seen something so absolutely COWARDLY as these hearings against Trump where he is publicly accused of all manner of crimes by the Democrats, his POLITICAL RIVALS who are out to destroy him any way they can.
Yes, COWARDLY, Adam Schiff, and distinctly un-American.
And Putin in Russia loves you for it!
http://www.capecharlesmirror.com/news/o ... ent-205803
Paul Plante says :
A farce, people, is defined as a “comic dramatic work using buffoonery and horseplay and typically including crude characterization and ludicrously improbable situations,” and that is an apt description of this stupid show the smarmy and unctuous Hollywood, California Democrat Adam Schiff has been staging in Washington, D.C.
However, a more apt description would be SHOW TRIAL following the 19 November 2019 SCHIFF CHARADE starring Pence “go fetch girl” Jennifer Williams, who was clueless about pretty much everything relative to impeaching a sitting American president, but notwithstanding, was there ready and eager to tell the world how little she knew about anything, because she was not all that important as the appointment secretary for Pence, who himself is really not that important, at all, and Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, who in one of the high points of his riveting testimony against Trump was submitted to this intense questioning from high-powered Democrat lawyer Mr. Goldman, to wit:
GOLDMAN: Colonel Vindman, what languages do you speak?
VINDMAN: I speak Russian and Ukrainian and a little bit of English.
end quotes
Yes, people, I am not making that up – it’s from the transcript of the SHOW TRIAL, if you can believe that.
As to a show trial, it is a public trial in which the judicial authorities, in this case Adam Schiff, “Jumping Jerry” Nadler and the congressional Democrats to included Nancy Pelosi, have already determined the guilt of the defendant, in this case, the sitting president of the United States, Donald Trump, whose real crime is being president instead of Democrat Hillary Clinton, the woman scorned in this drama.
As Adam Schiff demonstrated to the world on 19 November 2019, the actual trial, in this case aired on the main-stream media here in the United States so the whole wide world including Putin in Russia could tune in to enjoy the show, especially Putin, has as its only goal the presentation of both the accusation and the verdict to the public so they will serve as both an impressive example and a warning to other would-be dissidents or transgressors.
As is the case here as Adam Schiff uses the old Soviet Union playbook to great advantage given the media coverage he is garnering, which in turn gives a boost to his fundraising efforts, which is really what it is all about for Adam, because for him to advance as a Democrat, he needs big buck$ to pave his way, show trials tend to be retributive rather than corrective and they are also conducted for propagandistic purposes.
With respect to the irony here, as well as where Adam Schiff is drawing his knowledge from as to how to stage the best show trial in the history of the world, as early as 1922, Lenin in Russia advocated staging several “model trials” in Soviet Russia and the Soviet Ukraine, so this horse**** show we are being treated to here in the United States of America is exactly the type of thing you would expect in some corrupt ****hole like our good friends and allies in the Ukraine, and if Putin in Russia wanted to bring America low, and make it seem weak and stupid, he could have picked no better person than the one he now has, the Hollywood, California Congressman Adam Schiff, Putin’s willing tool and “running dog” (a servile follower), to pull that off, which takes us back to the roots of Adam’s show trial to convict Trump. to wit:
Show trials were common during Joseph Stalin’s political repressions, such as the Moscow Trials of the Great Purge period (1937–38).
The Soviet authorities staged the actual trials meticulously, just as Adam Schiff has done here, with his well-coached witnesses against Trump.
Ands with respect to treatment the main-stream media in this country are giving this horse****, some solid public evidence of what really happened during the Moscow Trials came to the West through the Dewey Commission (1937), and after the collapse of the Soviet Union (1991), more information became available which in turn discredited the New York Times reporter Walter Duranty who claimed at the time that these trials were actually fair.
Never in my life have I seen something so absolutely COWARDLY as these hearings against Trump where he is publicly accused of all manner of crimes by the Democrats, his POLITICAL RIVALS who are out to destroy him any way they can.
Yes, COWARDLY, Adam Schiff, and distinctly un-American.
And Putin in Russia loves you for it!
http://www.capecharlesmirror.com/news/o ... ent-205803
Re: RUSSIA
THE CAPE CHARLES MIRROR December 3, 2019 at 7:51 pm
Paul Plante says :
And while we are on the subject of cowardly and un-American acts by Putin’s pet poodle Adam Schiff intended to make America look small and stupid in the eyes of the world, the breaking news from the Washington Examiner just now is that while Trump is in Europe at a NATO meeting, Adam Schiff released his report on impeachment proceedings against President Trump today outlining the case for impeaching the president, whom Schiff and the Democrats accuse of withholding almost $400 million in military assistance to Ukraine in exchange for investigations into the 2016 presidential election and his 2020 rival Joe Biden.
BRING IT ON, Adam!
Impeach Trump for investigating an American citizen named Biden for alleged corrupt acts in the corrupt ****hole of Ukraine!
The world is waiting, Adam – get the impeachment show rolling!
We’re sick of all your endless cowardly accusations – now, stand up in the Senate as case manager as make them stick!
http://www.capecharlesmirror.com/news/o ... ent-205803
Paul Plante says :
And while we are on the subject of cowardly and un-American acts by Putin’s pet poodle Adam Schiff intended to make America look small and stupid in the eyes of the world, the breaking news from the Washington Examiner just now is that while Trump is in Europe at a NATO meeting, Adam Schiff released his report on impeachment proceedings against President Trump today outlining the case for impeaching the president, whom Schiff and the Democrats accuse of withholding almost $400 million in military assistance to Ukraine in exchange for investigations into the 2016 presidential election and his 2020 rival Joe Biden.
BRING IT ON, Adam!
Impeach Trump for investigating an American citizen named Biden for alleged corrupt acts in the corrupt ****hole of Ukraine!
The world is waiting, Adam – get the impeachment show rolling!
We’re sick of all your endless cowardly accusations – now, stand up in the Senate as case manager as make them stick!
http://www.capecharlesmirror.com/news/o ... ent-205803
Re: RUSSIA
MARKETWATCH
"Iraq says it’s discussing deeper military ties with Russia"
By Associated Press
Published: Feb 10, 2020 3:59 p.m. ET
The Iraqi government has told its military not to seek assistance from U.S.-led coalition forces in operations against the extremist group Islamic State, two senior Iraqi military officials said, as a crisis of mistrust mars U.S.-Iraq relations after the January strike that killed an Iraqi militia chief alongside the Iranian military commander Qassem Soleimani.
BAGHDAD (AP) — Iraq and Russia discussed prospects for deepening military coordination, Iraq’s Defense Ministry said Thursday, amid a strain in Baghdad-Washington relations after a U.S. airstrike killed a top Iranian general inside Iraq.
The ministry statement followed a meeting in Baghdad between the Iraqi army chief of staff, Lt. Gen. Othman Al-Ghanimi, and Russian Ambassador Maksim Maksimov, as well as a newly arrived defense attache.
The meeting comes during an uncertain moment in the future of Iraq-U.S. military relations, following the Jan. 3 U.S. drone strike that killed Iran’s most powerful military commander, Gen. Qassem Soleimani, and Iraqi senior militia leader Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis near the Baghdad airport.
The attack prompted powerful Shiite parties to call for an overhaul of the existing strategic set-up between Iraq and the U.S.-led coalition.
Al-Ghanimi praised Moscow’s role in the battle against the Islamic State group, saying it had provided “our armed forces with advanced and effective equipment and weapons that had a major role in resolving many battles,” according to the ministry statement.
The statement said the sides discussed prospects for “cooperation and coordination.”
Both parties emphasized the importance of exchanging information and coordination to prevent the resurgence of Islamic State.
Maksimov extended an invitation to al-Ghanimi to visit Russia and meet with his counterpart “within the framework of strengthening cooperation between the two sides,” the statement said.
There was no immediate comment from Moscow.
A senior Iraqi military intelligence official told the Associated Press that Russia, among other countries, has come forward to offer military support in the wake of fraught U.S.-Iraq relations following Soleimani’s killing.
“Iraq still needs aerial reconnaissance planes."
"There are countries that have given signals to Iraq to support us or equip us with reconnaissance planes such as Russia and Iran,” said the official, who requested anonymity because of the sensitive nature of the information.
In response to the drone strike that killed Soleimani, Iraq’s parliament passed a nonbinding resolution urging a U.S. troop withdrawal, and then caretaker Prime Minister Adel Abdul-Mahdi openly called for a troop withdrawal.
Since then, Iraqi leaders have scaled back the rhetoric.
Behind closed doors, the bitterness has poisoned the partnership.
Senior Iraqi military officials told AP this week that Iraq told its military not to seek assistance from the U.S.-led coalition in joint operations targeting the Islamic State group and to minimize cooperation.
Marine Gen. Frank McKenzie, the top U.S. commander in the Middle East, acknowledged recently that relations with Iraq were “in a period of turbulence.”
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/iraq- ... latestnews
"Iraq says it’s discussing deeper military ties with Russia"
By Associated Press
Published: Feb 10, 2020 3:59 p.m. ET
The Iraqi government has told its military not to seek assistance from U.S.-led coalition forces in operations against the extremist group Islamic State, two senior Iraqi military officials said, as a crisis of mistrust mars U.S.-Iraq relations after the January strike that killed an Iraqi militia chief alongside the Iranian military commander Qassem Soleimani.
BAGHDAD (AP) — Iraq and Russia discussed prospects for deepening military coordination, Iraq’s Defense Ministry said Thursday, amid a strain in Baghdad-Washington relations after a U.S. airstrike killed a top Iranian general inside Iraq.
The ministry statement followed a meeting in Baghdad between the Iraqi army chief of staff, Lt. Gen. Othman Al-Ghanimi, and Russian Ambassador Maksim Maksimov, as well as a newly arrived defense attache.
The meeting comes during an uncertain moment in the future of Iraq-U.S. military relations, following the Jan. 3 U.S. drone strike that killed Iran’s most powerful military commander, Gen. Qassem Soleimani, and Iraqi senior militia leader Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis near the Baghdad airport.
The attack prompted powerful Shiite parties to call for an overhaul of the existing strategic set-up between Iraq and the U.S.-led coalition.
Al-Ghanimi praised Moscow’s role in the battle against the Islamic State group, saying it had provided “our armed forces with advanced and effective equipment and weapons that had a major role in resolving many battles,” according to the ministry statement.
The statement said the sides discussed prospects for “cooperation and coordination.”
Both parties emphasized the importance of exchanging information and coordination to prevent the resurgence of Islamic State.
Maksimov extended an invitation to al-Ghanimi to visit Russia and meet with his counterpart “within the framework of strengthening cooperation between the two sides,” the statement said.
There was no immediate comment from Moscow.
A senior Iraqi military intelligence official told the Associated Press that Russia, among other countries, has come forward to offer military support in the wake of fraught U.S.-Iraq relations following Soleimani’s killing.
“Iraq still needs aerial reconnaissance planes."
"There are countries that have given signals to Iraq to support us or equip us with reconnaissance planes such as Russia and Iran,” said the official, who requested anonymity because of the sensitive nature of the information.
In response to the drone strike that killed Soleimani, Iraq’s parliament passed a nonbinding resolution urging a U.S. troop withdrawal, and then caretaker Prime Minister Adel Abdul-Mahdi openly called for a troop withdrawal.
Since then, Iraqi leaders have scaled back the rhetoric.
Behind closed doors, the bitterness has poisoned the partnership.
Senior Iraqi military officials told AP this week that Iraq told its military not to seek assistance from the U.S.-led coalition in joint operations targeting the Islamic State group and to minimize cooperation.
Marine Gen. Frank McKenzie, the top U.S. commander in the Middle East, acknowledged recently that relations with Iraq were “in a period of turbulence.”
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/iraq- ... latestnews
Re: RUSSIA
Good Morning America
"US forces come under fire while on patrol in Syria"
GUY DAVIES and CONOR FINNEGAN
February 12, 2020
US forces come under fire while on patrol in Syria originally appeared on abcnews.go.com
American Coalition forces on patrol in Syria exchanged small arms fire with pro-Syrian regime gunmen at a checkpoint while on patrol in north eastern Syria, with the situation now de-escalated, according to a U.S. military spokesperson and a U.S. military source.
The incident, which killed at least one Syrian and left an American with minor injuries, marks one of the most direct confrontations in the war-torn country between U.S. troops and President Bashar al-Assad's forces.
But it comes after Russian forces, backing Assad in his push to retake the country by force after nine years of war, have become increasingly aggressive with U.S. troops, according to a top U.S. diplomat.
Syria's northwest has seen a dangerous uptick in violence in recent months as Assad and Russian warplanes launched another assault into the last rebel stronghold, Idlib province, where jihadist groups and Syrian rebels are both backed by Turkey, which has deployed its own forces and clashed with the Syrian regime.
The U.S. troops were on patrol near Qamishli, by the Turkish-Syrian border, when they encountered the pro-regime checkpoint on Wednesday.
"After Coalition troops issued a series of warnings and de-escalation attempts, the patrol came under small arms fire from unknown individuals," Operation Inherent Resolve spokesperson Col. Myles B. Caggins III said in a statement.
"In self-defense, Coalition troops returned fire."
"The situation was de-escalated and is under investigation."
A military source told ABC News the patrol received fire from what they believed was a Syrian regime checkpoint, and that coalition forces returned fire as they attempted to leave.
The group then surrounded the convoy and took pictures of their vehicles, before another exchange of fire, the source said.
The U.S. also deployed low-flying F-15 fighter jets -- which did not engage in combat, but conducted a show of force -- as well as on-the-ground flares and flashbang grenades, the source added.
The coalition patrol has since returned to their base.
The group who opened fire on the U.S. were regime-supporting locals.
Syrian state media reported that a Syrian civilian was killed by U.S. troops in the exchange, according to the Associated Press.
The exchange of fire highlights the tense and complex situation for the remaining U.S. forces in northeastern Syria where Russian and Syrian government forces occupy various checkpoints.
Ambassador James Jeffrey, the U.S. special envoy for Syria engagement, said Russian forces had become increasingly "aggressive" toward U.S. troops out on patrol, calling "upon the Russians to adhere fully to the de-confliction agreements we’ve made with them."
President Donald Trump moved to pull U.S. troops out of the country in the fall, prompting a wave of bipartisan backlash in Washington that had led to him reversing course.
Instead, some troops left the region, but about 500 service members were left behind to protect key oil fields, according to Trump.
Coalition troops also continue to conduct missions against Islamic State in Syria, where the terror group has pockets of fighters looking to reconstitute.
Fighting in the war-torn country has intensified in recent weeks as regime forces, backed by Iranian proxies and Russian air power, have closed in on reclaiming Idlib.
More than half a million Syrians are believed to have been displaced by the conflict in the last two months, and U.S. officials are concerned about a refugee crisis.
To complicate the situation further, the assault on Idlib has seen Russian-backed Syrian forces clash with Turkish forces and Turkish-backed militias, who have crossed into various points in northern Syria as part of military incursion against the Kurds and set up 12 observation posts as part of a ceasefire deal with Moscow that has steadily fallen apart.
At least 12 Turkish soldiers have been killed by Syrian regime elements, while Turkey's Defense Ministry said Wednesday that its forces killed 55 pro-Syrian government forces in Idlib.
Jeffrey, who last week said the U.S. offered assistance to Turkey, met with Turkish officials Wednesday in Ankara, including President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's top adviser Ibrahim Kalin.
Erdogan vowed on Tuesday that the Assad regime would pay a "very heavy price" for the offensive into Idlib and the death of Turkish soldiers -- adding in a speech to his political party Wednesday that Turkey will push Syrian forces back out of Idlib and "do what is necessary via land and air without hesitation," according to Turkish state media.
But while the U.S. has vocalized support for Turkey and stepped up its condemnation of the Syrian and Russian assault on Idlib, national security adviser Robert O'Brien said Tuesday that U.S. won't act as the "world's policeman."
"What are we supposed to do to stop that?" he said at the Atlantic Council Tuesday.
"We're supposed to parachute in as a global policeman and hold up a stop sign and say, 'Stop this Turkey, stop this Russia, stop this Iran, stop this Syria'?"
That seemed to undermine Jeffrey's message last Wednesday when he told reporters in Washington the administration was "looking at the various things we can do" to halt the offensive, including more sanctions on the regime and its supporters.
ABC News's James Longman contributed to this report from Syria.
https://www.yahoo.com/gma/us-forces-com ... ories.html
"US forces come under fire while on patrol in Syria"
GUY DAVIES and CONOR FINNEGAN
February 12, 2020
US forces come under fire while on patrol in Syria originally appeared on abcnews.go.com
American Coalition forces on patrol in Syria exchanged small arms fire with pro-Syrian regime gunmen at a checkpoint while on patrol in north eastern Syria, with the situation now de-escalated, according to a U.S. military spokesperson and a U.S. military source.
The incident, which killed at least one Syrian and left an American with minor injuries, marks one of the most direct confrontations in the war-torn country between U.S. troops and President Bashar al-Assad's forces.
But it comes after Russian forces, backing Assad in his push to retake the country by force after nine years of war, have become increasingly aggressive with U.S. troops, according to a top U.S. diplomat.
Syria's northwest has seen a dangerous uptick in violence in recent months as Assad and Russian warplanes launched another assault into the last rebel stronghold, Idlib province, where jihadist groups and Syrian rebels are both backed by Turkey, which has deployed its own forces and clashed with the Syrian regime.
The U.S. troops were on patrol near Qamishli, by the Turkish-Syrian border, when they encountered the pro-regime checkpoint on Wednesday.
"After Coalition troops issued a series of warnings and de-escalation attempts, the patrol came under small arms fire from unknown individuals," Operation Inherent Resolve spokesperson Col. Myles B. Caggins III said in a statement.
"In self-defense, Coalition troops returned fire."
"The situation was de-escalated and is under investigation."
A military source told ABC News the patrol received fire from what they believed was a Syrian regime checkpoint, and that coalition forces returned fire as they attempted to leave.
The group then surrounded the convoy and took pictures of their vehicles, before another exchange of fire, the source said.
The U.S. also deployed low-flying F-15 fighter jets -- which did not engage in combat, but conducted a show of force -- as well as on-the-ground flares and flashbang grenades, the source added.
The coalition patrol has since returned to their base.
The group who opened fire on the U.S. were regime-supporting locals.
Syrian state media reported that a Syrian civilian was killed by U.S. troops in the exchange, according to the Associated Press.
The exchange of fire highlights the tense and complex situation for the remaining U.S. forces in northeastern Syria where Russian and Syrian government forces occupy various checkpoints.
Ambassador James Jeffrey, the U.S. special envoy for Syria engagement, said Russian forces had become increasingly "aggressive" toward U.S. troops out on patrol, calling "upon the Russians to adhere fully to the de-confliction agreements we’ve made with them."
President Donald Trump moved to pull U.S. troops out of the country in the fall, prompting a wave of bipartisan backlash in Washington that had led to him reversing course.
Instead, some troops left the region, but about 500 service members were left behind to protect key oil fields, according to Trump.
Coalition troops also continue to conduct missions against Islamic State in Syria, where the terror group has pockets of fighters looking to reconstitute.
Fighting in the war-torn country has intensified in recent weeks as regime forces, backed by Iranian proxies and Russian air power, have closed in on reclaiming Idlib.
More than half a million Syrians are believed to have been displaced by the conflict in the last two months, and U.S. officials are concerned about a refugee crisis.
To complicate the situation further, the assault on Idlib has seen Russian-backed Syrian forces clash with Turkish forces and Turkish-backed militias, who have crossed into various points in northern Syria as part of military incursion against the Kurds and set up 12 observation posts as part of a ceasefire deal with Moscow that has steadily fallen apart.
At least 12 Turkish soldiers have been killed by Syrian regime elements, while Turkey's Defense Ministry said Wednesday that its forces killed 55 pro-Syrian government forces in Idlib.
Jeffrey, who last week said the U.S. offered assistance to Turkey, met with Turkish officials Wednesday in Ankara, including President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's top adviser Ibrahim Kalin.
Erdogan vowed on Tuesday that the Assad regime would pay a "very heavy price" for the offensive into Idlib and the death of Turkish soldiers -- adding in a speech to his political party Wednesday that Turkey will push Syrian forces back out of Idlib and "do what is necessary via land and air without hesitation," according to Turkish state media.
But while the U.S. has vocalized support for Turkey and stepped up its condemnation of the Syrian and Russian assault on Idlib, national security adviser Robert O'Brien said Tuesday that U.S. won't act as the "world's policeman."
"What are we supposed to do to stop that?" he said at the Atlantic Council Tuesday.
"We're supposed to parachute in as a global policeman and hold up a stop sign and say, 'Stop this Turkey, stop this Russia, stop this Iran, stop this Syria'?"
That seemed to undermine Jeffrey's message last Wednesday when he told reporters in Washington the administration was "looking at the various things we can do" to halt the offensive, including more sanctions on the regime and its supporters.
ABC News's James Longman contributed to this report from Syria.
https://www.yahoo.com/gma/us-forces-com ... ories.html