Syria

Sheikh Nawaf al-Bashir, the highest figure in the western fabricated opposition in Syria, the chief of Baggara Tribe in northeast Syria, [has] returned to Damascus and declared his loyalty to the Syrian people, the Syrian leadership and praised the Syrian Arab Army and put himself under the command of the Syrian president Dr. Bashar Al-Assad. Original source of this article by Arabi Souri: http://www.syrianews.cc/top-opposition-figure-nawaf-al-bashir-repents-returns-syria/.

With 1.2 million tribesmen and women in his Der Ezzor base, he left them behind and joined the ranks of makeshift opposition individuals convinced by Qatari officials that the days of the ‘regime’ are numbered and if they defect now they’ll reserve a place for them in the future Syria. Some were bribed with tens of millions of dollars, others were seduced with leading post-Assad posts, and the vast majority who couldn’t be bought or deceived were intimidated, only few fell for any of those.

A parliament member 1990 – 1994, the 63 years old who heads his large tribe since he was 28 after his late father, had a very controversial political career, served as an ambassador to Iraq and yet was a member of the first ‘Arab Springing‘ of the Syrians the so-called ‘Damascus Declaration’.

Sheikh al-Bashir in a statement he personally read before a group of people who went to greet him at his home said: “I return to Syria and I publicly declare that we stand with our people, and with our homeland, and with its leadership against the obscurantist terrorism, which is represented by ISIS, Nusra and the Muslim Brotherhood and their supporters, and to restore the security of the country, its safety and its territorial integrity.”

He was an essential figure in the ‘regime’ he denounced and now returned to. Most of the leaders of the opposition who fled abroad were essential figures of the ‘regime’ but the ones who were mostly corrupt: Abdul Halim Khaddam, the long-serving vice president of Syria and the one with the worst record of corruption in the country when he was relieved from his office he became an opposition figure and sought refuge in France, like Rifaat Assad (president Bashar’s uncle and his father’s deputy and foe!!), Tlass and his sons Firas and Manaf, and so on.

When he joined the opposition in Turkey, they celebrated him being the most prominent person in the country to join and who leads a huge tribe, when he returned now and almost instantly he became in their eyes: ‘opportunist’, ‘dumb’, ‘thug’, ‘traitor’.. and all similar descriptions.

This could be a game-changer for many in his province Der Ezzor which borders the ISIS declared capital Ragga and borders the hotbed and birthplace of Al-Qaeda Levant and ISIS itself in Iraq Anbar province. Der Ezzor countryside and parts of the city itself is infested with herds of ISIS.

A U-turn in politics is not unusual when a power shift occurs and the traitor does not wish to remain a loser in exile. When this one realized he would not return to Syria on a parade float, he chose to offer an apology, hoping to get back some of what he forfeited.

The Liberation of Aleppo didn't stop the Opposition juggernaut and its propaganda machine - now its '100,000 civilians under siege' on the outskirts of the capital, and four million hostages in Damascus... Article first published on Russian InsiderJanuary 6, 2016. Republished here with author's permission.

The 'liberation of Aleppo' didn't just free tens of thousands of people from oppression and intimidation by violent militants and mercenaries; it also freed hundreds of thousands in Western Aleppo from a four-year long regime of terror. As the citizens of European countries become increasingly paralysed by the terrorist attacks on public gatherings in some cities, they might spare a thought for the millions of Syrians who have been living with this threat every day since the US and its allies launched the 'War OF Terror' on Syria in 2011.

But there may be another welcome change brought by Aleppo's liberation; that the Syrian Opposition and its supporters are now living on borrowed time. The propaganda juggernaut that was unleashed against the Syrian Army and its allies - Russia, Iran and Hezbollah - had gained so much momentum that it simply kept going, despite being mortally wounded. And even as the last militants were forced from their hold out in Aleppo's old city, a literal juggernaut of aid was being dispatched from Europe to help them stay there.

Barely pausing to acknowledge that Aleppo had indeed 'fallen' - as they described it - a new narrative was rapidly developed to sustain the 'Syrian Revolution' both in its supporters' minds and on the ground. As the real Syrian civilians in need of food and medical care streamed into reception centres set up by the Russian and Syrian governments in West Aleppo, the mythical 'quarter of a million civilians besieged by Assad's and Putin's bombs' in East Aleppo were urgently relocated to Idlib province, where they could again be used as human shields to protect the dwindling insurgent army.

They weren't actually relocated of course, as the evacuations showed quite dramatically that these masses of anti-Assad Syrian civilians had never been there in the first place. Even some of the fighters in the East deserted the fake revolution, bravely accepting the government's amnesty and re-joining their liberated fellow Syrians.

Adding insult to the injury of watching Syrians across the country celebrate the dramatic new gains in Syria's War on Terror, Russian and Turkish diplomats had talks with representatives of some Syrian armed groups and negotiated a nationwide ceasefire with them, later ratified by the UN Security Council. The jihadists who had just been bussed out of East Aleppo with their families into the remaining 'rebel-held' territory around Idlib evidently weren't party to the ceasefire agreement, having refused to cease firing in East Aleppo. But for the insistence of the UN, and the necessity to force an agreement to end the 'rebel' siege, those recalcitrant extremists would have been imprisoned or executed. Such punishment was certainly deemed reasonable by most Syrians, many of whom had lost relatives from their violent criminal attacks.

So what to do? How to sustain the fake 'revolution' when the revolutionaries have been so comprehensively exposed, not just as violent terrorists no different from those involved in attacks in European cities, but as mercenaries being assisted by the coalition of Syria's enemies in the West. For not only did the clearance of the last jihadists from East Aleppo allow people to go back and see what remained of their dear city - they also discovered what had really being going on there, particularly in the last few months.

Hospitals and schools had become military bases and weapons factories, and basements were used to torture prisoners and hostages and to store weapons and ammunition. Most extraordinarily, the 'rebels' had been forced to leave behind an arsenal of weapons that filled seven warehouses, as well as betraying the sponsors of the 'democratic revolution'. Truckloads of missiles and ammunition, and even tanks, all shipped in from the West via Turkey were brought out for display to the World's media...

And the 'World's' media? They lost interest a few days before the siege was ended. In a collective act of diversion, reminiscent of 'displacement activity', all those Western media organisations who had been so recently hysterical about 'saving Aleppo's children' suddenly found other urgent or trivial events to focus on. Having been prepared to support a full-scale military attack on Syrian Defence forces and their allies, if only leaders could be persuaded to launch one, the many foreign false 'Friends of Syria' could barely even admit to themselves what had just happened.

Not only had their concocted false narrative been exposed as criminally fraudulent, but their endless attacks on Russia, Syria and their allies for 'brutal carelessness' and 'war crimes' had also been betrayed by events on the ground. Unlike examples from recent history, where the breaking of sieges was accompanied by huge 'collateral damage' - one thinks of Fallujah in 2004 or Sirte in 2012 - the death toll of civilians sustained in the Syrian Army's operation in East Aleppo appears to have been minimal. Indeed the greatest number of casualties that could be claimed by supporters of the insurgency was less than 100, and most of those appear to have been prisoners or civilians trying to escape who were killed by the militants.

The widely broadcast warnings from the likes of Samantha Power, that this was going to be another 'Guernica' or 'Sbrenica', were revealed as merely desperate and grotesque attempts to save the West's fast-collapsing regime-change project.

But sadly that is not the end of it.

Even before the siege was over Al Jazeera was preparing to continue its daily 'Aleppo Onslaught' news broadcast with an 'Idlib Onslaught' one. We may remember how in the last days opposition armed groups refused to accept the agreed liberation of villages Foua and Kefraya, setting fire to 25 buses sent to bring out residents and holding the drivers hostage. This was an indication of the nature of the armed groups holding power west of Aleppo and around Idlib, and even Western commentators acknowledged they were dominated by Jabhat al Nusra. But Al Jazeera continued to provide global media support to their terrorist 'brothers under siege' in East Aleppo, and intended to follow them as they were finally expelled from their to Idlib province.

While Al Jazeera and its partner organisations have continued with this unconvincing theme - that 'civilians' and 'moderate rebels' in Idlib will be endangered by Syrian and Russian airstrikes against Al Qaeda linked militants not covered by the ceasefire agreement - support groups in the UK, and proabably elsewhere seem to have come up with a better scheme.

A group calling itself 'Syria Solidarity UK' claims to have received a statement from 'local community organisations' in Wadi Barada, which is a valley extending north-west from Damascus that contains the ancient spring of Ain al Fijeh that supplies 70% of the city's water.

Reliable Syrian sources reported that militants occupying the valley had poured diesel into the water, forcing authorities to cut off the supply to Damascus about ten days ago. The Syrian Army and Hezbollah allies ( the area is close to the Lebanese border) are now trying to kill the armed jihadists - Jabhat al Nusra - in the villages close to the spring, following the evacuation of remaining civilians in the area. Along with the nearby 'rebel' hold-outs of Madaya and Zabadani, Wadi Barada has been under opposition control since 2012, and attempts to negotiate ceasefire settlements in this area have so far failed. The success of such negotiations in many other towns and cities, including suburbs of Damascus, Homs and now Aleppo, mostly hinged upon an 'escape clause' for the Islamist extremist groups and their families, and it is imporant to understand how this bizarre policy could work and why it was necessary.

Most of the fighters in these liberated areas were prepared to accept the Government amnesty, which guaranteed that no punitive action would be taken against those who surrendered their arms. The determined jihadists who refused were given safe passage, with their families and even their weapons to Idlib province, which was and remains under 'rebel' control. This was a very hard pill to swallow for loyal Syrians, and particularly for Syrian soldiers who had seen their comrades slaughtered by suicide bombers and IEDs, or tortured and executed while trying to defend the community from the mostly foreign and foreign-armed terrorists.

But in Madaya, which became well-known in the West as a place 'under siege' where residents were alleged to be dying of starvation, no such evacuation agreement was reached, thanks mostly to the massive propaganda campaign supporting the extremist groups who controlled the town - Ahrar al Sham and Jabhat al Nusra. As in Aleppo, these militants were actually the ones responsible for the siege, taking control of UN-provided Food Aid and shooting civilians trying to escape.

When a UN aid convoy finally arrived in Madaya a year ago, many residents jumped at the opportunity to escape, but Ahrar al Sham survived with its remaining 'human shields'. Now that the scheme to protect their terrorist brothers in East Aleppo has failed, it is Ahrar and its allies around Madaya who are called on to carry the torch of the fake revolution forward.

This is the vital context, and the context missing from Western news and media, which is now reporting the exact narrative prepared by Al Jazeera, Syria Solidarity UK and other leaders of the propaganda war on Syria.

It is not the 'rebels' of Wadi Barada who are responsible for sabotaging Damascenes' drinking water, but Hezbollah and the Syrian Army. The Syrian Army is not targeting Jabhat al Nusra, who don't have a presence or support in Wadi Barada, but is trying to drive out the civilian population and its 'rebel' defenders. And the 'regime' in now holding 100,000 civilians under siege, cut off from food and water and essential supplies.

 But - say the 'defenders of Wadi Barada' - 'we will urgently seek to restore the water supply, and arrange for maintenance persons to come in, as soon as the Syrian Army and Hezbollah cease all their attacks on our citizens.'

 'And if they don't agree to this, then we can no longer recognise the ceasefire..'

   No doubt there will be many Syrians now saying 'why did you let the terrorists go to Idlib and not take them straight to prison?'

  (I have a 'disclaimer' - I work with the Syria Solidarity Movement, which rather like the REAL Syrian Civil Defence works to support Syrians in their fight against Western backed terrorists and their supportive propaganda. We are totally opposed to everything that 'Syria Solidarity UK' stands for and supports, which include the fake 'Syrian Civil Defence' or 'White Helmets', a No Fly Zone over Syria, and the removal of Syria's democratically elected and popular President by whatever means are necessary.)

There is a humanitarian catastrophe unfolding in Syria and the "western" media ignore it. On December 22 al-Qaeda aligned Takfiris in the Wadi Barada valley shut down the main water supply for the Syrian capital Damascus. Since then the city and some 5-6 million living in and around it have to survive on emergency water distributions by the Syrian government. That is barely enough for people to drink - no washing, no showers and no water dependent production is possible. Article originally published at Moon of Alabama. Sources of pictures and enlargements also available there.

This shut down is part of a wider, seemingly coordinated strategy to deprive all government held areas of utility supplies. Two days ago the Islamic State shut down a major water intake for Aleppo from the Euphrates. High voltage electricity masts on lines feeding Damascus have been destroyed and repair teams, unlike before, denied access. Gas supplies to parts of Damascus are also cut. A similar tactic was used by the Zionist terrorists of the Haganah who in 1947/48 poisoned and blew up the water mains and oil pipelines to Palestinian Haifa.

Wadi Barada is a river valley some 10 miles west of Damascus at the mountain range between Lebanon and Syria. It has been in the hands of local insurgents since 2012. The area was since loosely surrounded by Syrian government forces and their allies from Hizbullah.

Two springs in the area provide the water for Damascus which is treated locally and then pumped through pipelines into the city's distribution network. Since the early 1990s there is a low level conflict over the water diversion of the Barada river valley to the ever growing Damascus. The drought over the last years has intensified the problems. Local agriculture of the water rich valley had to cut back for lack of water as this was pumped into the city. But many families from the valley moved themselves into the city or have relatives living there.

The local rebels had kept the water running for the city. Al-Qaeda aligned groups have been in the area for some time. A propaganda video distributed by them and taken in the area showed (pic) the choreographed mass execution of Syrian government soldiers.

After the eastern part of the city of Aleppo was liberated by Syrian government forces, the local rebels and inhabitants in the Barada river valley were willing to reconcile with the Syrian government. But the al-Qaeda Takfiris disagreed and took over. The area is since under full al-Qaeda control and thereby outside of the recent ceasefire agreement.

On December 22 the water supply to Damascus was suddenly contaminated with diesel fuel and no longer consumable. A day later Syrian government forces started an operation to regain the area and to reconstitute the water supplies.

Photos and a video on social media (since inaccessible but I saw them when they appeared) showed the water treatment facility rigged with explosives. On Dec 27th the facility was blown up and partly destroyed.

Suddenly new organized "civil" media operations of, allegedly, locals in the area spread misinformation to "western" media. "There are 100,000 civilians under siege in Wadi Barada!" In reality the whole area once had, according to the last peacetime census, some 20,000 inhabitants. The White Helmets propaganda organization now also claims to be in the area. "The government had bombed the water treatment facility," the propaganda groups claimed.

That is a. not plausible and b. inconsistent with the pictures of the destroyed facility. These show a collapse of the main support booms of the roof but no shrapnel impact at all. A bomb breaking through the roof and exploding would surely have left pocket marks all over the place. The damage, in my judgement, occurred from well designed, controlled explosions inside the facility.

Some insurgents posted pictures of themselves proudly standing within the destroyed facility and making victory signs.

There is more such cheer-leading by insurgents on social media. Why when they claim that the government bombed the place?

On December 29 the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs issued an alarm about the water crisis:

The United Nations is alarmed that four million inhabitants in Damascus and surrounding areas have been cut off from the main water supply since 22 December. Two primary sources of drinking water- Wadi Barada and Ain-el-Fijah-which provide clean and safe water for 70 percent of the population in and around Damascus are not functioning, due to deliberate targeting resulting in the damaged infrastructure.

One of the two springs, Al-Feejeh, has now been retaken by the Syrian army. 1,300 civilians from Ain AlFeejeh, the nearby town with the treatment facility, have fled to the government held areas and were taken in by the Syrian Red Cross. The other spring and the treatment facility are still in Takfiri hands. The government has said that it will need some ten days to repair the system after the Syrian army has gained control of the facilities. That will still take some time.

Western media have hardly taken notice of the water crisis in Damascus and their coverage seems to actively avoid it. A search for Barada on the Washington Post website brings up one original piece from December 30 about the freshly negotiated ceasefire. The 6th paragraph says:

Airstrikes pounded opposition-held villages and towns in the strategically-important Barada Valley outside Damascus, activists said, prompting rebels to threaten to withdraw their compliance with a nationwide truce brokered by Russia and Turkey last week.

Then follow 16 paragraphs on other issues. Only at the very end of the piece comes this (mis-)information:

The Barada Valley is the primary source of water for the capital and its surrounding region. The government assault has coincided with a severe water shortage in Damascus since Dec. 22. Images from the valley’s Media Center indicate its Ain al-Fijeh spring and water processing facility have been destroyed in airstrikes. The government says rebels spoiled the water source with diesel fuel, forcing it to cut supplies to the capital.

On December 29 a piece  by main WaPo anti-Syria propagandist Liz Sly did not mention the water crisis or the Barada valley at all.

The New York Times links a Reuters pieces about the UN alarm about the water crisis. But I find nothing in its own reporting that even mentions the water crisis. One piece on December 31 refers shortly to attacks on Wadi Baradi by government forces at its very end.

A Guardian search for Barada only comes up with a piece from today mixed from agency reports. The headlines say "Hundreds of Syrians flee as Assad's forces bomb Barada valley rebels". The piece itself says that they flee to the government side.  In it the Syrian Observatory (MI-6) operation in Britain confirms that al-Qaeda rules the area which "Civil society organisations on the ground" deny. Only the very last of the 12 paragraph piece mentions the capital:

The Barada valley is the primary source of water for the capital and its surrounding region. The government assault has coincided with a severe water shortage in Damascus since 22 December. The government says rebels spoiled the water source with diesel fuel, forcing it to cut supplies to the capital.

Surely a few people "fleeing" (to the government side) "as Assad's forces bombs" are way more important than 5 million people in Damascus without access to water. That the treatment facility is destroyed seems also unimportant.

All the above papers have been extremely concerned about every scratch to any propaganda pimp who had claimed to be in then rebel held east-Aleppo. They now show no concern at all for 5 million Syrians in Damascus who have been without water for 10 days and will likely be so for the rest of the month.

Posted by b on January 2, 2017 at 02:42 PM | Permalink

Interviews with Syrians in Aleppo regarding how they perceive the defeat of the 'rebels', whom they call terrorists. They feel they have been liberated and they consider that France and its allies (US-NATO) were keeping them imprisoned by supporting the terrorists. Arabic, French and English, with French and English subtitles. A number of christian church officials are interviewed.

Good News: Washington Frozen Out of Syria Peace Plan

"As the US mainstream media obsessed last week about Russia's supposed “hacking” of the US elections and President Obama’s final round of Russia sanctions in response, something very important was taking place under the media radar. As a result of a meeting between foreign ministers of Russia, Iran, and Turkey last month, a ceasefire in Syria has been worked out and is being implemented. So far it appears to be holding, and after nearly six years of horrible warfare the people of Syria are finally facing the possibility of rebuilding their lives." [...]

"The fact is, it is often US involvement in “solving” these crises that actually perpetuates them. Consider the 60-plus year state of war between North and South Korea. Has US intervention done anything to solve the problem? How about our decades of meddling in the Israel-Palestine dispute? Are we any closer to peace between the Israelis and Palestinians despite the billions we have spent bribing and interfering?" Ron Paul. Read more here: Good News: Washington Frozen Out of Syria Peace Plan

The UN has concluded its investigation of the 19 September bombing of a UN aid convoy in Syria. UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon released the summary of the Board of Inquiry’s report on 21 December, but it received virtually no publicity, unlike the wall-to-wall reporting of the USA’s and UK’s hysterical accusations at the time that Russia deliberately bombed the convoy. The lack of publicity is doubtless because the report proves there was no evidence for the accusations against Russia.

Following is a chronology of the incident:

On 11 September, Russia and the USA agreed to a ceasefire in Syria, which Barack Obama insisted must last seven days before any further Russian-US cooperation in the five-year conflict. Senior officials in the Obama administration, including Defence Secretary Ash Carter, were known to be opposed to any cooperation with Russia.

On 17 September, US, Australian and other members of the US-led coalition in Syria bombed Syrian Arab Army soldiers holding a position against ISIS at Deir ez-Zor. More than 62 soldiers were killed in an attack that lasted more than an hour, and when a Russian officer called the US military’s emergency hotline to inform them they were attacking the Syrian army, the Russian officer was put on hold for 27 minutes! The USA later claimed the attack was an “accident”. (The CEC launched a petition demanding the Australian government withdraw its presence from Syria, as it was only assisting ISIS.)

On 19 September, a UN convoy transporting aid for Aleppo was bombed in an area controlled by rebels. The attack occurred at precisely the moment that the al-Qaeda-led rebels in Aleppo launched a furious offensive to break the Syrian Army lines. It was reported as a bombing, but the burnt out trucks remained intact, and there were no craters or other signs of aerial bombardment. The eyewitness reports that the attack was an aerial bombing came from the so-called White Helmets—British- and American-funded jihadists masquerading as civilian rescuers. The USA and Britain accused Russia of a war crime, and—ignoring the attack on the Syrian army two days earlier—of destroying the ceasefire!

Hysterical propaganda

A 20 September Guardian headline blared: “Russian planes dropped bombs that destroyed UN aid convoy, US officials say”. It cited a Reuters report: “Russian jets carried out strike on Syria aid convoy: U.S. officials”.

The most hysterical accusations came from the British government and Parliament, in an 11 October emergency debate. They were also the most hypocritical and cynical. Conservative MP Andrew Mitchell, who moved the debate, compared Russia’s actions in Syria to those of the Nazis in the Spanish Civil War.

Greens leader Caroline Lucas asked Mitchell: “Does he agree that our own Government should follow the example of the French in supporting a referral of Russia to the International Criminal Court?”

Blairite (a crony of disgraced former PM Tony Blair) Labour MP Ann Clwyd—the politician who first publicised the notorious Iraq war lie, that Saddam killed people in a human shredding machine, yet remains completely unapologetic for the illegal invasion of Iraq—called for the UK to take the same approach to Syria as it did to Iraq! “We do not have to wait for the International Criminal Court”, Clwyd urged. “Indict, an organisation that I chaired, collected evidence on Iraqi war crimes years before they were heard. That can be done again, for example through the Foreign Office.” (Emphasis added.)

When Labour’s Shadow Foreign Secretary Emily Thornberry at least attempted to inject into the debate the reality that the rebels were predominantly al-Qaeda jihadists, another shameless Blairite Labour MP, Ben Bradshaw, erupted in contrived outrage, and attacked his own colleague: “We had a ceasefire; it was brutally blown apart by Russian and Syrian air power. I still have not heard from my hon. Friend a clear and unequivocal condemnation of Russia’s and Assad’s action. I have not heard her call it out as it is—a war crime!” (Bradshaw is another with the blood of Iraqis on his hands, having aggressively prosecuted the fraudulent case for the invasion of Iraq in 2003, and later having voted against convening Sir John Chilcot’s Iraq inquiry into that criminal and disastrous decision.)

Yet another Blairite, John Woodcock, was the most unhinged in hurling wild accusations against Russia for the attack on the convoy: “There is no doubt as to who was the perpetrator of this grotesque war crime. It was President Putin of Russia. He was sticking two fingers up to the United Nations and the international community of which he still has the audacity to claim he is a working part.” (Woodcock is close to Britain’s biggest private defence contractor, BAE Systems—its al-Yamamah arms deal with the brutal Saudi dictatorship has been exposed as having generated a $100 billion slush fund that financed al-Qaeda and the 9/11 attack and the spread of al-Qaeda and ISIS terrorism generally.)

Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson said: “All the available evidence therefore points to Russian responsibility for the atrocity. I trust that the UN board of inquiry will establish exactly what happened, and we in the United Kingdom Government stand ready to help.” Johnson’s speech made headlines for his reiteration of Ann Clwyd’s call for anti-war protestors to demonstrate outside of the Russian embassy in London. It is worth noting that Johnson was interrupted by a question from Prince Charles’s close friend Sir Nicholas Soames, demanding war crime prosecutions for the attack. Another toady for the British arms industry, Soames is notorious for his threats against Princess Diana when she spearheaded the international campaign against land mines just before her death in 1997. (The inquest ruled Diana’s death an “unlawful killing”, which is effectively a verdict of murder, where the perpetrators are not identified.)

The only contributor to this House of Commons debate who emerged with any credibility intact was Labour Shadow Foreign Secretary Emily Thornberry, who exposed the self-righteous hypocrisy of the other contributors by insisting that the UK could not condemn the alleged crimes in Syria while simultaneously arming Saudi Arabia to bomb civilians in Yemen.

UN’s finding

Following are excerpts of numbered sections from the UN Headquarters Board of Inquiry Report summary that Ban Ki-moon released 21 December. While the report still assumes an aerial attack that many experts insist could not have been possible, nevertheless it absolves Russia of a war crime. The findings include:

The area where the convoy was attacked was under the control of Islamist jihadists:

“11. The SARC compound, the incident site, is located approximately 1.5 km east of the town of Urem al-Kubra.”

“13. On the date of the incident, Urem al-Kubra was under the control of armed opposition groups, with Jaish al-Mujahideen being the predominant group in the area. The Board was informed that other groups, including Nour al-Din al-Zenki also had a presence there. In addition, the Board received reports of a Jabhat al-Nusra presence in the area.”

Nour al-Din al-Zenki is one of the so-called “moderate” rebel groups backed by the US, members of which filmed themselves beheading a 12-year-old Palestinian boy in July (the same cameraman later took the staged photo of the five-year-old Aleppo boy in an ambulance that suckered the world media). Jabhat al-Nusra is the Syrian branch of al-Qaeda.

The White Helmets’ claim that a hospital was bombed was bogus:

“33. Despite initial reports that a medical clinic had been destroyed, the Board found no evidence of a medical clinic neighbouring the SARC compound.” (Emphasis added.)

This is an important finding, as the most oft-repeated accusation against Russia is that its aircraft deliberately targeted hospitals in Aleppo. The US and UK-financed White Helmets were the source of these claims, which were always baseless. Not only did they claim dozens of times that the “last hospital” in Aleppo had been destroyed, the recent liberation of Aleppo has proved that almost every site they called a hospital was just a jihadist stronghold.

If the Syrian Arab Air Force (SAAF) were responsible for the attack, given the convoy’s location in a jihadist-controlled area they most likely thought it was a military target:

“36. … The Board considered that the location of the SARC compound, on the outskirts of a populated area, in an industrial zone and astride one of the two primary roads leading to southwestern Aleppo, made it a realistic possibility that the buildings around it were used by armed opposition groups prior to the date of the incident. Therefore the Board considered that it had most likely been attacked by pro-Government forces.”

The UN found no evidence to prove that SAAF perpetrated the attack; an SAAF attack does not implicate Russia:

“39. The Board stated that it had received reports that information existed to the effect that the SAAF was highly likely to have perpetrated the attack, and even that the attack was carried out by three Syrian Mi-17 model helicopters, followed by three unnamed fixed-wing aircraft, with a single Russian aircraft also suspected of being involved. However, the Board did not have access to raw data to support these assertions and, in their absence, it was unable to draw a definitive conclusion.”

“40. The Board noted in this connection that there were technical issues pertaining to a hypothesis of the incident being a result of a joint Syrian Arab Air Force/Russian Federation strike. The Board had been informed that that the Russian Federation did not conduct joint strikes. A high degree of interoperability and co-ordination would also be required for two air forces to operate in the same airspace, targeting the same location.”

The UN found no evidence of a war crime:

“42. The Board stated that it did not have evidence to conclude that the incident was a deliberate attack on a humanitarian target.”

Since the US presidential election, the Anglo-American establishment and their corporate media lackeys have coined the term “fake news” for anything that contradicts their lies. In fact, many times since the genocidal fiasco of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, it is they who have been exposed as the real peddlers of fake news. The most extreme example is their litany of lies against Russia, but those lies are also the most dangerous, as they have pushed the world towards nuclear war. Thankfully, with Aleppo now liberated from the USA’s and UK’s terrorists, and a change of government in the USA, there is a chance to turn away from the policies of permanent war, and achieve a just international order based on respect for national sovereignty and a commitment to peace through cooperative economic development. As we approach 2017, all people of good will should resolve to ensure that it happens.

NOTES

Although candobetter.net's philosophy of land-use and population policy reform runs counter to that of the Citizens Electoral Council, we are pleased to publish this press release about Syria and Russia.

The source of this article was a press release dated 30 December 2016, from Craig Isherwood‚ National Secretary of the Citizens' Electoral Council
PO Box 376‚ COBURG‚ VIC 3058
Phone: 1800 636 432
Email: [email protected]
Website: http://www.cecaust.com.au

Syria is on the cusp of peace, but the propaganda war is still raging in the west. What about Bashar al-Assad's reputation in the west as a torturer? Does the evidence of this mean that the Syrian state has no right to defend Syria?

To paraphrase from the Russian Marxist Plekhanov who wrote about this kind of "moral" argument in 1901 in his essay "Cant Against Kant", it is one thing to morally object to violence, torture, etc. But it is another thing to use this objection to then say that someone attacked in the street should then be forced to fight with their hands tied behind their backs.

The point I am making is not to endorse torture but to say that whatever moral objections one might have to things done by many governments (and certainly Syria has nothing on the US with its Abu Ghraib and secret prisons all over the world and its invasion and occupation of one country after another) the important thing about what is happening in Syria is not whether there is torture or no torture but that the country is being attacked by terrorists in the interests of imperialism and so Syria has the right to fight back.

In terms of characterizing the Syrian government, torture has been used by both "good" and "bad" governments, as abhorrent as it may be, so that does not tell us very much about Syria. But Syria has many policies that many on the left in imperialist countries only dream about for their own countries. To list some:

- parliament seats are 50%+1 reserved for workers and peasants
- city council seats are 25% reserved for low-income residents
- retail prices are capped by popular committees
- the country's loan capital prioritized public infrastructure and investment so much that private businesses had to go to Europe for loans because they were lower in priority, compare this to crumbling underfunded infrastructure in the US
- university education has nominal (practically free) or low cost
- generally free health care for most people

These are things those in the US want for their "own" countries which Syria already has, so that should give us an idea that the US or the West has no moral superiority over Syria. Even with the Maher Arar case it was after all at the US's request, and as mentioned the US has tortured far worse.

About the Author

Saleh Waziruddin is an Indian/Pakistani (South Asian)-Canadian who grew up in Saudi Arabia. He is on the executive committees of the Canadian Peace Congress and also the Canadian Network on Cuba.

Published on Dec 13, 2016, "Syriennes" - "Syrians" is a beautiful documentary made in Syria by Julien Rochedy for TV Libertés, about how Syrian girls and women feel about the prospect of a 'rebel' win. It includes an interview with an Australian-Syrian woman who returned to Syria when the war began. Girls in Damascus and the regions not controlled by the US-NATO-backed rebels are currently free to study, to follow their passions and to exercise their professions, but they live in fear of a 'rebel' win in the Syrian conflict. We see how many women in Damascus wear western clothes and bare heads, walk freely down the street and eat in cafes alone, just like girls in Sydney or Brisbane. The film also interviews women in Damascus who have escaped the 'Free Syrian Army', Daesh/ISIS and Al Nusra. Their tales are chilling. It is obvious that no woman could benefit from a victory by the militia that the US and NATO support. Women are 50% of Syria's population, so why does Australia and the US NATO support the 'rebels', who are all 'takfiris', that is, Islamic fundamentalists? And what excuse does the west have for the crippling and illegal sanctions imposed on Syria for decades now. It is pointed out that Iraq was subject to similar sanctions for ten years before the US invasion, and that tens of thousands of children died because of this. This film about the most bloody conflict of the early 21st century permits us to understand a much more complex reality than the mainstream media paints.

President Bashar al-Assad : “[The ]West is telling Russia that Syrian Army went too far in defeating terrorists … Daesh could only attack Palmyra the way it did with supervision of U.S. alliance”. President Obama’s announcement of a waiver for arming unspecified rebel groups in Syria came shortly before the terrorist group Islamic State launched a massive attack on Palmyra. Syrian President Bashar Assad believes it was no coincidence, he told RussiaToday. In the interview, the Syrian leader explained how his approach to fighting terrorism differs from that of the US, why he believes the military success of his forces in Aleppo was taken so negatively in the West, and what he expects from US President-elect Donald Trump. [Full Video and Transcript]

“The announcement of the lifting of that embargo is related directly to the attack on Palmyra and to the support of other terrorists outside Aleppo, because when they are defeated in Aleppo, the United States and the West, they need to support their proxies somewhere else,” Bashar al-Assad said.

“The crux of that announcement is to create more chaos, because the United States creates chaos in order to manage this chaos,” Assad added.

He added that Islamic State (Daesh, IS, formerly ISIS/ISIL) forces “came with different and huge manpower and firepower that ISIS never had before during this attack, and they attacked on a huge front, tens of kilometers that could be a front of armies. ISIS could only have done that with the support of states. Not state; states.”

Russia Today (Maria Finoshina): Mr. President, thank you very much for agreeing to speak with us.

President Bashar al-Assad: You’re most welcome in Damascus.

RT: We start with Aleppo, of course. Aleppo is now seeing what is perhaps the most fierce fighting since the war started almost six years ago here in Syria, but the Western politicians and Western media have been largely negative about your army’s advance. Why you think this is happening? Do they take it as their own defeat?

B.A.: Actually, after they failed in Damascus, because the whole narrative was about “liberating Damascus from the state” during the first three years. When they failed, they moved to Homs, when they failed in Homs, they moved to Aleppo, they focused on Aleppo during the last three years, and for them this is the last most important card they could have played on the Syrian battlefield. Of course, they still have terrorists in different areas in Syria, but it’s not like talking about Aleppo as the second largest city which has the political, military, economic, and even moral sense when their terrorists are defeated. So, for them the defeat of the terrorists is the defeating of their proxies, to talk bluntly. These are their proxies, and for them the defeat of these terrorists is the defeat of the countries that supervised them, whether regional countries or Western countries like United States, first of all United States, and France, and UK.

RT: So, you think they take it as their own defeat, right?

B.A.: Exactly, that’s what I mean. The defeat of the terrorists, this is their own defeat because these are their real army on the ground. They didn’t interfere in Syria, or intervened, directly; they have intervened through these proxies. So, that’s how we have to look at it if we want to be realistic, regardless of their statements, of course.

RT: Palmyra is another troubled region now, and it’s now taken by ISIS or ISIL, but we don’t hear a lot of condemnation about it. Is that because of the same reason?

B.A.: Exactly, because if it was captured by the government, they will be worried about the heritage. If we liberate Aleppo from the terrorists, they would be – I mean, the Western officials and the mainstream media – they’re going to be worried about the civilians. They’re not worried when the opposite happens, when the terrorists are killing those civilians or attacking Palmyra and started destroying the human heritage, not only the Syrian heritage. Exactly, you are right, because ISIS, if you look at the timing of the attack, it’s related to what’s happening in Aleppo. This is the response to what’s happening in Aleppo, the advancement of the Syrian Arab Army, and they wanted to make this… or let’s say, to undermine the victory in Aleppo, and at the same time to distract the Syrian Army from Aleppo, to make it move toward Palmyra and stop the advancement, but of course it didn’t work.

‘ISIS could only attack Palmyra the way it did with supervision of US alliance’

RT: We also hear reports that Palmyra siege was not only related to Aleppo battle, but also to what was happening in Iraq, and there are reports that the US-led coalition – which is almost 70 countries – allowed ISIL fighters in Mosul in Iraq to leave, and that strengthened ISIL here in Syria. Do you think it could be the case?

B.A.: It could be, but this is only to wash the hand of the American politicians from their responsibility on the attack, when they say “just because of Mosul, of course, the Iraqi army attacked Mosul, and ISIS left Mosul to Syria.” That’s not the case. Why? Because they came with different and huge manpower and firepower that ISIS never had before during this attack, and they attacked on a huge front, tens of kilometers that could be a front of armies. ISIS could only have done that with the support of states. Not state; states. They came with different machineguns, cannons, artillery, everything is different. So, it could only happen when they come in this desert with the supervision of the American alliance that’s supposed to attack them in al-Raqqa and Mosul and Deir Ezzor, but it didn’t happen; they either turned a blind eye on what ISIS is going to do, and, or – and that’s what I believe – they pushed toward Palmyra. So, it’s not about Mosul. We don’t have to fall in that trap. It’s about al-Raqqa and Deir Ezzor. They are very close, only a few hundred kilometers, they could come under the supervision of the American satellites and the American drones and the American support.

RT: How strong ISIS is today?

B.A.: As strong as the support that they get from the West and regional powers. Actually, they’re not strong for… if you talk isolated case, ISIS as isolated case, they’re not strong, because they don’t have the natural social incubator. Without it, terrorists cannot be strong enough. But the real support they have, the money, the oil field investment, the support of the American allies’ aircrafts, that’s why they are strong. So, they are as strong as their supporters, or as their supervisors.

RT: In Aleppo, we heard that you allowed some of these terrorists to leave freely the battleground. Why would you do that? It’s clear that they can go back to, let’s say, Idleb, and get arms and get ready for further attacks, then maybe attack those liberating Aleppo.

B.A.: Exactly, exactly, that’s correct, and that’s been happening for the last few years, but you always have things to lose and things to gain, and when the gain is more than what you lose, you go for that gain. In that case, our priority is to protect the area from being destroyed because of the war, to protect the civilians who live there, to give the chance for those civilians to leave through the open gates, to leave that area to the areas under the control of the government, and to give the chance to those terrorists to change their minds, to join the government, to go back to their normal life, and to get amnesty. When they don’t, they can leave with their armaments, with the disadvantage that you mentioned, but this is not our priority, because if you fight them in any other area outside the city, you’re going to have less destruction and less civilian casualties, that’s why.

‘Fighting terrorists US-style cannot solve the problem’

RT: I feel that you call them terrorists, but at the same time you treat them as human beings, you tell them “you have a chance to go back to your normal life.”

B.A.: Exactly. They are terrorists because they are holding machineguns, they kill, they destroy, they commit vandalism, and so on, and that’s natural, everywhere in the world that’s called as terrorism. But at the same time, they are humans who committed terrorism. They could be something else. They joined the terrorists for different reasons, either out of fear, for the money, sometimes for the ideology. So, if you can bring them back to their normal life, to be natural citizens, that’s your job as a government. It’s not enough to say “we’re going to fight terrorists.” Fighting terrorists is like a videogame; you can destroy your enemy in the videogame, but the videogame will generate and regenerate thousands of enemies, so you cannot deal with it on the American way: just killing, just killing! This is not our goal; this is the last option you have. If you can change, this is a good option, and it succeeded. It succeeded because many of those terrorists, when you change their position, some of them living normal lives, and some of them joined the Syrian Army, they fought with the Syrian Army against the other terrorists. This is success, from our point of view.

RT: Mr. President, you just said that you gain and you lose. Do you feel you’ve done enough to minimize civilian casualties during this conflict?

B.A.: We do our utmost. What’s enough, this is subjective; each one could look at it in his own way. At the end, what’s enough is what you can do; my ability as a person, the ability of the government, the ability of Syria as a small country to face a war that’s been supported by tens of countries, mainstream media’s hundreds of channels, and other machines working against you. So, it depends on the definition of “enough,” so this is, as I said, very subjective, but I’m sure that we are doing our best. Nothing is enough at the end, and the human practice is always full of correct and flows, or mistakes, let’s say, and that’s the natural thing.

‘West’s cries for ceasefire meant to save terrorists’

RT: We hear Western powers asking Russia and Iran repeatedly to put pressure on you to, as they put it, “stop the violence,” and just recently, six Western nations, in an unprecedented message, they asked Russia and Iran again to put pressure on you, asking for a ceasefire in Aleppo.

B.A.: Yeah.

RT: Will you go for it? At the time when your army was progressing, they were asking for a ceasefire.

B.A.: Exactly. It’s always important in politics to read between the lines, not to be literal. It doesn’t matter what they ask; the translation of their statement is for Russia: “please stop the advancement of the Syrian Army against the terrorists.” That’s the meaning of that statement, forget about the rest. “You went too far in defeating the terrorists, that shouldn’t happen. You should tell the Syrians to stop this, we have to keep the terrorists and to save them.” This is in brief.

Second, Russia never – these days, I mean, during this war, before that war, during the Soviet Union – never tried to interfere in our decision. Whenever they had opinion or advice, doesn’t matter how we can look at it, they say at the end “this is your country, you know what the best decision you want to take; this is how we see it, but if you see it in a different way, you know, you are the Syrian.” They are realistic, and they respect our sovereignty, and they always defend the sovereignty that’s based on the international law and the Charter of the United Nations. So, it never happened that they made any pressure, and they will never do it. This is not their methodology.

RT: How strong is the Syrian Army today?

B.A.: It’s about the comparison, to two things: first of all, the war itself; second, to the size of Syria. Syria is not a great country, so it cannot have a great army in the numerical sense. The support of our allies was very important; mainly Russia, and Iran. After six years, or nearly six years of the war, which is longer than the first World War and the second World War, it’s definitely and self-evident that the Syrian Army is not to be as strong as it was before that. But what we have is determination to defend our country. This is the most important thing. We lost so many lives in our army, we have so many martyrs, so many disabled soldiers. Numerically, we lost a lot, but we still have this determination, and I can tell you this determination is much stronger than before the war. But of course, we cannot ignore the support from Russia, we cannot ignore the support from Iran, that make this determination more effective and efficient.

‘Stronger Russia, China make world a safer place’

RT: President Obama has lifted a ban on arming some Syrian rebels just recently. What impact you think could it have on the situation on the ground, and could it directly or indirectly provide a boost to terrorists?

B.A.: We’re not sure that he lifted that embargo when he announced it. Maybe he lifted it before, but announced it later just to give it the political legitimacy, let’s say. This is first. The second point, which is very important: the timing of the announcement and the timing of attacking Palmyra. There’s a direct link between these two, so the question is to whom those armaments are going to? In the hands of who? In the hands of ISIS and al-Nusra, and there’s coordination between ISIS and al-Nusra. So, the announcement of this lifting of that embargo is related directly to the attack on Palmyra and to the support of other terrorists outside Aleppo, because when they are defeated in Aleppo, the United States and the West, they need to support their proxies somewhere else, because they don’t have any interest in solving the conflict in Syria. So, the crux of that announcement is to create more chaos, because the United States creates chaos in order to manage this chaos, and when they manage it, they want to use the different factors in that chaos in order to exploit the different parties of the conflict, whether they are internal parties or external parties.

RT: Mr. President, how do you feel about being a small country in the middle of this tornado of countries not interested in ending the war here?

B.A.: Exactly. It’s something we’ve always felt before this war, but we felt it more of course today, because small countries feel safer when there’s international balance, and we felt the same, what you just mentioned, after the collapse of the Soviet Union when there was only American hegemony, and they wanted to implement whatever they want and to dictate all their policies on everyone. Small countries suffer the most. So, we feel it today, but at the same time, today there’s more balance with the Russian role. That’s why I think we always believe the more Russia is stronger – I’m not only talking about Syria, I’m talking about every small country in the world – whenever the stronger Russia, more rising China, we feel more secure. It’s painful, I would say it’s very painful, this situation that we’ve been living, on every level; humanitarian level, the feeling, the loss, everything. But at the end, it’s not about losing and winning; it’s about either winning or losing your country. It’s existential threat for Syria. It’s not about government losing against other government or army against army; either the country will win, or the country will disappear. That’s how we look at it. That’s why you don’t have time to feel that pain; you only have time to fight and defend and do something on the ground.

‘Mainstream media lost credibility along with moral compass’

RT: Let’s talk about media’s role in this conflict.

B.A.: Yeah

RT: All sides during this war have been accused of civilian casualties, but the Western media has been almost completely silent about the atrocities committed by the rebels… what role is the media playing here?

B.A.: First of all, the mainstream media with their fellow politicians, they are suffering during the last few decades from moral decay. So, they have no morals. Whatever they talk about, whatever they mention or they use as mask, human rights, civilians, children; they use all these just for their own political agenda in order to provoke the feelings of their public opinion to support them in their intervention in this region, whether militarily or politically. So, they don’t have any credibility regarding this. If you want to look at what’s happening in the United States is rebellion against the mainstream media, because they’ve been lying and they kept lying on their audiences. We can tell that, those, let’s say, the public opinion or the people in the West doesn’t know the real story in our region, but at least they know that the mainstream media and their politicians were laying to them for their own vested interests agenda and vested interests politicians. That’s why I don’t think the mainstream media could sell their stories anymore and that’s why they are fighting for their existence in the West, although they have huge experience and huge support and money and resources, but they don’t have something very important for them to survive, which is the credibility. They don’t have it, they lost it. They don’t have the transparency, that’s why they don’t have credibility. That’s why they are very coward today, they are afraid of your channel, of any statement that could tell the truth because it’s going to debunk their talks. That’s why.

RT: Reuters news agency have been quoting Amaq, ISIL’s mouthpiece, regarding the siege of Palmyra. Do you think they give legitimacy to extremists in such a way? They’re quoting their media.

B.A.: Even if they don’t mention their news agencies, they adopt their narrative anyway. But if you look at the technical side of the way ISIS presented itself from the very beginning through the videos and the news and the media in general and the PR, they use Western technique. Look at it, it’s very sophisticated. How could somebody who’s under siege, who’s despised all over the world, who’s under attack from the airplanes, who the whole world wants to liberate every city from him, could be that sophisticated unless he is not relaxed and has all the support? So, I don’t think it is about Amaq; it’s about the West adopting their stories, sometimes directly, sometimes indirectly.

RT: Donald Trump takes over as US President in a few weeks. You mentioned America many times today. What do you expect from America’s new administration?

B.A.: His rhetoric during the campaign was positive regarding the terrorism, which is our priority today. Anything else is not priority, so, I wouldn’t focus on anything else, the rest is American, let’s say, internal matters, I wouldn’t worry about. But the question whether Trump has the will or the ability to implement what he just mentioned. You know that most of the mainstream media and big corporate, the lobbies, the Congress, even some in his party were against him; they want to have more hegemony, more conflict with Russia, more interference in different countries, toppling governments, and so on. He said something in the other direction. Could he sustain against all those after he started next month? That’s the question. If he could, I think the world will be in a different place, because the most important thing is the relation between Russia and the Unites States. If he goes towards that relation, most of the tension around the world will be pacified. That’s very important for us in Syria, but I don’t think anyone has the answer to that. He wasn’t a politician, so, we don’t have any reference to judge him, first. Second, nobody can tell what kind of pattern is it going to be next month and after.

‘Western countries only sent aid to terrorists’

RT: The humanitarian situation in Syria is a disaster, and we hear from EU foreign policy chief, Madam Mogherini, that EU is the only entity to deliver humanitarian aid to Syria. Is that true?

B.A.: Actually, all the aid that any Western country sent was to the terrorists, to be very clear, blunt and very transparent. They never cared about a single Syrian human life. We have so many cities in Syria till today surrounded by and besieged by the terrorists; they prevented anything to reach them, food, water, anything, all the basic needs of life. Of course, they attack them on daily basis by mortars and try to kill them. What did the EU send to those? If they are worried about the human life, if they talk about the humanitarian aspect, because when you talk about the humanitarian aspect or issue, you don’t discriminate. All the Syrians are humans, all the people are humans. They don’t do that. So, this is the double standard, this is the lie that they keep telling, and it’s becoming a disgusting lie, no-one is selling their stories anymore. That’s not true, what she mentioned, not true.

RT: Some suggestions say that for Syria, the best solution would to split into separate countries governed by Sunni, Shi’a, Kurds. Is it any way possible?

B.A.: This is the Western – with some regional countries’ – hope or dream, and this is not new, not related to this war; that was before the war, and you have maps for this division and disintegration. But actually, if you look at the society today, the Syrian society is more unified than before the war. This is reality. I’m not saying anything to raise the morale of anyone, I’m not talking to Syrian audience anyway now, I’m talking about the reality. Because of the lessons of the war, the society became more realistic and pragmatic and many Syrians knew that being fanatic doesn’t help, being extreme in any idea, I’m not only talking about extremism in the religious meaning; politically, socially, culturally, doesn’t help Syria. Only when we accept each other, when we respect each other, we can live with each other and we can have one country. So, regarding the disintegration of Syria, if you don’t have this real disintegration among the society and different shades and spectrum of the Syrian society, Syrian fabric, you cannot have division. It’s not a map you draw, I mean, even if you have one country while the people are divided, you have disintegration. Look at Iraq, it’s one country, but it is disintegrated in reality. So, no, I’m not worried about this. There’s no way that Syrians will accept that. I’m talking now about the vast majority of the Syrians, because this is not new, this is not the subject of the last few weeks or the last few months. This is the subject of this war. So, after nearly six years, I can tell you the majority of the Syrians wouldn’t accept anything related to disintegration, they are going to live as one Syria.

RT: As a mother, I feel the pain of all Syrian mothers. I’m speaking about children in Syria, what does the future hold for them?

B.A.: This is the most dangerous aspect of our problem, not only in Syria; wherever you talk about this dark Wahhabi ideology, because many of those children who became young during the last decade, or more than one decade, who joined the terrorists on ideological basis, not for the like of money or anything else, or hope, let’s say, they came from open-minded families, educated families, intellectual families. So, you can imagine how strong the terrorism is.

‘Being secular doesn’t protect a nation from terrorist ideology’

RT: So, that happened because of their propaganda?

B.A.: Exactly, because the ideology is very dangerous; it knows no borders, no political borders, and the network, the worldwide web has helped those terrorists using fast and inexpensive tools in order to promote their ideology, and they could infiltrate any family anywhere in the world, whether in Europe, in your country, in my country, anywhere. You have secular society, I have secular society, but it didn’t protect the society from being infiltrated.

RT: Do you have any counter ideology for this?

B.A.: Exactly, because they built their ideology on the Islam, you have to use the same ideology, using the real Islam, the real moderate Islam, in order to counter their ideology. This is the fast way. If we want to talk about the mid-term and long-term, it’s about how much can you upgrade the society, the way the people analyze and think, because this ideology can only work when you cannot analyze, when you don’t think properly. So, it’s about the algorithm of the mind, if you have natural or healthy operating system, if you want to draw an analogy to the IT, if you have good operating systems in our mind, they cannot infiltrate it like a virus. So, it’s about the education, media and policy because sometimes when you have a cause, a national cause, and people lose hope, you can push those people towards being extremists, and this is one of the influences in our region since the seventies, after the war between the Arabs and the Israelis, and the peace failed in every aspect to recapture the land, to give the land and the rights to its people, you have more desperation, and that played into the hand of the extremists, and this is where the Wahhabi find fertile soil to promote its ideology.

RT: Mr. President, thank you very much for your time, and I wish your country peace and prosperity, and as soon as possible.

B.A.: Thank you very much for coming.

RT: This time has been very tough for you, so I wish it’s going to end soon.

B.A.: Thank you very much for coming to Syria. I’m very glad to receive you.

RT: Thank you.

Sources of this article and transcript were:

Videos by Syrian Presidency and Russia Today, Transcript by Russia Today and SyrianPatriots War Press Info Network at:
https://syrianfreepress.wordpress.com/2016/12/15/al-assad-to-rt/

Re-publications are welcome, but we kindly ask you, to facilitate the correct information's diffusion, to cite all these original links and sources.

Previously published (13/12/16) on Russia Insider. See also: Reports: Audio recording between ISIS and US before Deir Ezzor massacre found (26/9/16) | Ron Paul Forums, US attack on Syrian Army in Deir Ezzor was ‘coordinated’ (30/11//16) by Paul Antonopoulos | Al Masdar News, Australian jets participated in massacre of Syrian soldiers in Deir ez-Zor (18/9/16) by Paul Antonopoulos | Al Masdar News.

Four wounded Syrians who survived the bombardment of Deir ez-Zor by Aust­ralian, US, British and Danish aircraft on 17 Sep 2016. Sixty-two of their com­patriots perished that day. Whether they intended to bomb the Syrian Army, or ISIS as they claimed, any aerial attack on the territory of a sovereign country like Syria, without the consent of its government, is a violation of international law. ₁

A US investigation found the coalition 'botched' a strike in Deir ez-Zor, hitting the Syrian Army by mistake. Why did they not return to kill the IS fighters who moved in, or the IS fighters who just moved back to Palmyra?

Following a two-month investigation into the US coalition attack on a Syrian Army base in Deir al Zour in September, the Defence departments of the US and Australia concluded that the 'botched' strike was a result of poor information and human error, and no-one will face charges over the 'incident'.

Australia's chief of Joint Military Operations, David Johnston described it thus in a prepared statement:

"Although the identity of those killed or wounded could not be substantiated, the investigation found it was more likely than not that those struck were irregular forces aligned to the Syrian government.

"The situation on the ground in Syria is complex and dynamic. In many ways these forces looked and acted like Da'esh fighters the coalition has been targeting for the last two years. They were not wearing recognisable military uniforms, or displaying identifying flags or markings."

RAAF F-18 fighter bomber of the type which bombed Syria on 17 September

This conspicuously 'false news' from such a well-briefed source is deeply worrying, particularly as its release coincided with the Syrian Army's 'hour of glory' as it liberates Aleppo's trapped civilians from the four-year long insurgent siege.

Despite the lengthy 'investigation', carried out by the very same people who ordered and executed the murderous attack on the Syrian soldiers defending Deir al Zour from IS, the report's conclusions only confirm the false statements made to the press at the time, though embroidering them with an elaborate cover story. For the hundreds of Syrian victims of this dastardly attack and their families, any confidence in the statements and behaviour of their foreign attackers is now permanently destroyed.

How galling for those families, whose heroic husbands, sons and brothers had held their ground for two years against constant assaults from IS insurgents, to read that 'their identities could not be substantiated'. Or that these members of the Syrian Arab Army's 123rd Republican guard were mere 'irregulars aligned to the Syrian government'.

Never mind the testimony of some of the injured soldiers from hospital broadcast on Syrian state TV, describing the aggression and persistence of their attackers, or their still more incriminating statements that IS fighters moved in to take over the base before their comrades blood was even dry.

Although the US coalition's story is a complete travesty, it deserves closer scrutiny both for what it says and what it leaves out.

While novel unsubstantiated and false allegations are made about the nature of the target, the Australian Defence Forces have admitted responsibility for likely causing some of the deaths of Syrian soldiers - claiming that Australian war-planes had launched six laser-guided missiles, at what they identified as Da'esh fighters.

Since Australia 'joined the US coalition against Da'esh' two years ago, training soldiers in the Iraqi army, Australia's position on the fight against Da'esh in Syria has been obscure, and air-strikes within Syria notionally limited to preventing Da'esh from threatening Iraq. The silence of the Australian government, and the failure of the national broadcaster the ABC to ask questions about our actions against terrorist groups in Syria, contrasts sharply with the rhetoric from both sides of government here for the last five years, both against terrorism and against the Syrian government.

Not only has Australia been a central member of the 'Friends of Syria' group, and a vocal supporter of the Syrian external Opposition, but its anti-Russian and anti-Putin statements and actions have made it one of the most important partners in the NATO war on Syria. Some of that anti-Russian rhetoric is connected with Australia's support for Kiev's post-coup government, and reaction to the deaths of 38 Australians on board MH17. A recent agreement to supply Uranium to Ukraine hardly bodes for our future dealings with Moscow.

In the absence of any sensible discussion or analysis in the Australian media about the Deir al Zour attack and its actual consequences, or how the change in US leadership and likely direction in Syria could affect Australia's strategic position and military involvements in the region, some further investigation is now called for.

In the meantime, and as has happened repeatedly during the Syrian conflict, a resolution of that conflict in one area sees a resumption of it elsewhere. This 'two-steps forward, one back' - or three back - progress of the war is largely why it has taken the Syrian Army and its allies over two years to liberate Aleppo from its insurgent grip.

Of particular interest to those seeking to understand the objectives and allegiances of Syria's foreign invaders and their 'puppet-masters', is a surprising and disturbing development - the reappearance of IS forces in Palmyra.

Palmyra, like Deir al Zour, was stoically defended by the Syrian army until IS forces moved in, controversially crossing hundreds of kilometres of open desert without being noticed by the 'US coalition against IS'. (perhaps they were mistaken for Syrian troops?) In one of Russia's first acts demonstrating that it was serious about fighting and killing terrorist forces in Syria, Russian airpower helped the Syrian Army liberate the historic city and adjacent town of Tadmor ten months later.

But in a situation which is almost a mirror image of that existing today, terrorist groups including IS south of Aleppo took advantage of the Syrian Army's focus on Palmyra to seize control over the main highway linking Aleppo with Damascus, cutting off the Syrian Army contingent protecting Western Aleppo from the insurgents in the East.

As Oscar Wilde said: "to lose one parent may be regarded as misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness."

To strike the Syrian Army while targeting IS may be a 'blunder'; to fail to target IS as it again targets the Syrian Army looks like more than carelessness, and a lot like collusion. And we should ask, why did the US coalition forces not immediately return to kill those Da'esh fighters who moved into the Deir al Zour base that they had just inadvertently 'liberated' of its patriotic Syrian forces in September?

Vice Admiral David Johnston didn't answer that question - but neither was he asked it.

As a virtual postscript, and indication that things are really changing on the ground in Syria even while they remain stagnant in the minds of her foreign 'false friends', it appears that Palmyra has already be re-liberated, with many IS fighters killed in a joint Russian-Syrian operation.

And so we won't be subjected to another call to 'intervene to protect Syria's ancient heritage - from IS terrorists'.

1. ↑The images are from the abovementioned Reports: Audio recording between ISIS and US before Deir Ezzor massacre found
(26/9/16) by Ron Paul | Ron Paul Forums.

The momentum has shifted in Aleppo this week as the Syrian Army begin to advance, steadily driving out Western and Gulf-backed terrorist fighters under the command of Al Nusra Front – from their occupied enclaves in Eastern Aleppo. These images and videos will never see the light of day in the corporate media editing rooms because they expose their almost six year narrative on Syria as one of the most criminal propaganda projects ever deployed against a sovereign nation, its people, its state and its national army. This article was first published at http://21stcenturywire.com/2016/11/29/aleppo-updates-tears-hugs-and-smiles-the-relief-of-escaping-imprisonment-in-east-aleppo/ on November 29, 2016.

The prolonged dehumanization of the majority of the Syrian people, the exploitation of their children as cynical props to further the NATO & Gulf state geo-political objectives in the region, the overt and covert endorsement of NATO State-proxy terrorism, the tacit endorsement of economic terrorism via the illegal US/EU sanctions against Syria, all amount to crimes against Humanity and the Syrian people.

The #FakeNews “regime change” cohorts are seeing their pyramid of lies being dismantled stone by stone, by the very people they have been claiming to “protect” for almost six years.

The linked video shows the reactions of civilians, fleeing their four year imprisonment in East Aleppo, subjugated by various militant factions, funded by NATO states and led by Nusra Front aka Al Qaeda.  The first woman, collapses into tears, as she reaches the journalist.  These touching moments will be sullied by the corporate media reporting and accounting of events, as they desperately try to resuscitate their expiring Aleppo chronicles.

Translation of what is being said by Suleiman Milad

“They are saying God bless the army and they send their greetings to the army. They also said that there was no food and water where they were in eastern Aleppo between terrorist groups , they also said that terrorists treated them very bad and that the army helped them get out to safe areas. They also showed very big happiness seeing the interviewer who is a very famous war reporter in Syrian for Syrian official TV.”

The following images were taken of the fleeing civilians in the last 24 hours.

“Today, more civilians exited terrorists held areas, and reached to Hanano & Al-Sakhour which are under the control of the SAA in Aleppo.”

Sarah Abdallah, analyst and commentator, notes the following:

“Syrian Arab Army’s remarkable east Aleppo advancement continues:

Four more districts freed today, including the pivotal region of Sakhour. In the last 48 hours alone, 12 east Aleppo districts have been liberated. From one area to the next, the “moderate” terrorists are melting down. Most important news today though is the SAA’s recapture of the Suleiman al-Halabi Water Pumping Station. The Aleppo water crisis is over! Since 2012, Turkish-backed “jihadists” have withheld water from Aleppo’s residents as a means of blackmailing them into supporting the “revolution”. This has led to unprecedented levels of sickness and malnourishment. But now, the SAA has restored water to more than one million people as it moves ever-closer to freeing Aleppo entirely.

21st Century Wire will continue to post brief but informative updates as we receive them from known and verified sources on the ground in Aleppo and across Syria or the region.

Article by Prof. Marcello Ferrada de Noli, Chairman, Swedish Doctors for Human Rights –SWEDHR. First published at The Indicter Magazine Summary: Sweden did not succeed in getting Bob Dylan to come to Stockholm to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature. Nevertheless as a consolation the “White Helmets” did arrive to get the Right Livelihood Award. This article examines a likely geopolitical rationale that the Swedish elites had for selecting that organization. Facts suggest a congruence between the stances of those elites on Syria and the declared political aims of the organization White Helmets. The reviewing of the institutions involved in the award-decision and process can also result relevant in pondering the reason for the event. Finally, to inquire into the role of Carl Bildt, as member of the board of directors in the institution ultimately deciding, is interesting against the backdrop of his opposition regarding the participation of  Julian Assange and Edward Snowden in previous international events organized by the same institutions –all of them under the umbrella of the Swedish Foreign Office.

Late in the day, on Nov. 15, one week after the U.S. elections, the lame-duck Congress convened in special session with normal rules suspended so the House could pass House Resolution 5732, the “Caesar Syria Civilian Protection Act” calling for intensifying the already harsh sanctions on Syria, assessing the imposition of a “no fly zone” inside Syria (to prevent the Syrian government from flying) and escalating efforts to press criminal charges against Syrian officials.

HR5732 claims to promote a negotiated settlement in Syria but, as analyzed by Friends Committee for National Legislation, it imposes preconditions which would actually make a peace agreement more difficult.

There was 40 minutes of “debate” with six representatives (Ed Royce, R-California; Eliot Engel, D-New York; Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, R-Florida; Dan Kildee, D-Michigan; Chris Smith, R-New Jersey; and Carlos Curbelo, R-Florida) all speaking in favor of the resolution. There were few other representatives present, but the House Foreign Affairs Committee stated that the resolution was passed “unanimously” without mentioning these special conditions.

According to Wikipedia, “Suspension of the rules is a procedure generally used to quickly pass non-controversial bills in the United States House of Representatives … such as naming Post Offices…” In this case, however, the resolution could lead to a wider war in the Middle East and potentially World War III with nuclear-armed Russia.

Most strikingly, the resolution calls for evaluating and developing plans for the United States to impose a “no fly zone” inside Syria, a sovereign nation, an act of war that also would violate international law as an act of aggression. It also could put the U.S. military in the position of shooting down Russian aircraft.

To call this proposal “non-controversial” is absurd, although it may say a great deal about the “group think” of the U.S. Congress that an act of war would be so casually considered. Clearly, this resolution should have been debated under normal rules with a reasonable amount of Congressional presence and debate.

The motivation for bypassing normal rules and rushing the bill through without meaningful debate was articulated by the bill’s sponsor, Democrat Eliot Engel: “We cannot delay action on Syria any further. … If we don’t get this legislation across the finish line in the next few weeks, we are back to square one.”

The current urgency may be related to the election results since President-elect Donald Trump has spoken out against “regime change” foreign policy. As much as neoconservatives and their liberal-interventionist allies are critical of President Obama for not doing more in Syria, these Congressional hawks are even more concerned about the prospect of a President who might move toward peace and away from war.

Read more here.

The very moving video inside shows a soldier hug his family after 5 years of separation, as a major suburb of Aleppo is retaken by Syria from the terrorists. The fighting in Aleppo, Syria, has been particularly protracted as it has been one of the last bastions of the terrorist forces that are trying to take over Syria. These forces are backed by the United States and NATO and their allies, which, shamefully, include Australia. The Syrian Arab Army has lost about 80,000 soldiers trying to defend Syria, which has a secular government, from takeover by militant religious fundamentalists. Most remaining Syrians are sheltered behind lines held by the Syrian Arab Army, although Australia, NATO and the US view this army as the 'enemy'. The so-called 'Rebels' which Australia, NATO and the United States support, have used people in captive cities as human shields to stop the Syrian Arab Army and Russia from bombing these terrorists. US-NATO have turned this round as propaganda, pretending that the necessity of bombing the fundamentalist forces, is a gratuitous form of bombing civilians. US-NATO have maliciously failed to acknowledge that those civilians are being held against their will. President Elect Trump seems to want to change this and to help Syria to retain its sovereignty by cooperating with the Russian Army. To anyone who is not a crazed fundamentalist guerilla, this seems the only way to go. We congratulate the Syrian Arab Army on its hard-won gains in Aleppo and its surrounds and we wish that our government would cease its support for the terrorists by lifting sanctions imposed by Bob Carr under the pretext that the Syrian Government had massacred its own supporters at Hula.

Latest on the situation in Aleppo

"The Syrian army’s Tiger Forces and allied pro-government groups have fully liberated the key area of Hanano Housing in the northeastern part of Aleppo city (more about the miliary sutioation in general can be found here). The area had been controlled by Jaish al-Fatah militants. With liberation of the Hanano Housing, government forces can threat to split the eastern Aleppo pocket with capturing Sakhur and linking the frontline up in Suleiman Halabi. Another option that now becomes possible with the success in Hanano Housing is to encircle Jaish al-Fatah units between Hanano and Jabal Badro in southeastern Aleppo. Government forces advadnce in southeastern Aleppo is ongoing." Source: https://southfront.org/government-forces-take-control-of-hanano-housing/.

ALSO, dated yesterday: https://syrianfreepress.wordpress.com/2016/11/26/saa-25-villages/ :"SAA establishes control over 25 villages/farms in Aleppo countryside, Terrorist gangs kill civilians in Damascus Countryside and Idleb"

This article gives acknowledgement to the Russians as allies and shows the successful delivery of food aid. We republish the article from the Syrian Free Press.

SAA establishes control over 25 villages/farms in Aleppo countryside, Terrorist gangs kill civilians in Damascus Countryside and Idleb

Syrian Arab Army units, in cooperation with the allied forces, established control over an area of above 120 km2 in the northeastern countryside of Aleppo after eliminating the last terrorist gatherings there.

A field commander told reporters that army units, in cooperation with the allied forces, continued their progress in the area surrounding the Infantry School and engaged in fierce battles with terrorist groups, inflicting heavy losses on them in personnel and equipment.

He added that the army established control over 25 village and farms, including Tal Shaer, the farms surrounding it, al-Ta’ana, Harysa, al-Wardieh, Jobah and the farms surrounding it.

He pointed out that army units confronted attacks launched by ISIS and armed groups linked to the Turkish regime on the military points in the northeastern countryside of Aleppo.

The Commander noted that the terrorist groups which are supported by the Turkish regime falsely claim to be fighting ISIS in the direction of northeast of al-Bab, but it is the Syrian army and the allied forces who drove the terrorists of ISIS away from the entire area in 15 days.

Hama

The Syrian army repels terrorist attack on military posts in northern Hama.

Sweida

Syrian army unit targeted with artillery the movements of Daesh terrorists in al-Qasser village to the northeast of Sweida city, according to a military source.

The source added the ten Daesh members were killed due to the shelling and two of their vehicles were destroyed.

Terrorist attacks kill 7 civilians in Damascus and its countryside

Six civilians were killed due to a terrorist rocket attack on Harasta suburb in Damascus Countryside.

A source at Damascus Countryside Police Command told SANA reporter that the attack, which included several rocket shells, was launched by terrorists of the so-called “Jaish al-Islam” who are positioned in Eatsern Ghoutaby, adding that another person was injured due to the selling.

Colonel Sama’an killed in a terrorist attack on al-Faihaa Sports city in Damascus

Meanwhile, Director of al-Jaish football team, Colonel Nazih Sama’an was killed in a terrorist attack on al-Faihaa Sports city in Damascus.

A police source told SANA that terrorists of Jaish al-Islam targeted al-Faihaa sports city and al-Adawi Street with two rocket shells, killing the colonel and injuring player Ali Maryameh.

Eight persons injured in Aleppo 

ِA police source told SANA that terrorist organizations targeted with a rocket shell residential neighborhood of al-Masharka in Aleppo, injuring a woman and a child.

Later, the source added that 6 other persons were injured in a rocket shell launched by terrorists on a building in Baghdad station neighborhood in Aleppo.

Terrorist sniper shootings on locals in Idleb’s al-Fouaa injure one person

In the same context, another person was also injured when terrorist groups affiliated to Jabhat al-Nusra opened sniper rifle fire on the locals’ houses in the terrorist-besieged al-Fouaa town in the northern countryside of Idleb province.

Local sources told SANA that the sniper shootings came from Binnesh town, confirming that one person was injured in the attack.

Russian aid distributed to displaced families in al-Muallaqa village, Damascus Countryside

A new batch of Russian humanitarian aid was distributed on Thursday to displaced people in al-Muallaqa village in cooperation with Damascus Countryside Governorate.

Representative of the Russian Coordination Center in Hmeimim Alexei Ivanov said 200 food portions, containing rice, sugar and canned food, were distributed to the displaced families in the village as part of the aid provided by Russia to help alleviate the Syrian people’ suffering due to the terrorist crimes.

For his part, Abdul Rahman al-Khatib, the mayor of Harjalleh town in which al-Muallaqa village is located, hailed the Russian stance in support of Syria, pointing out that Damascus Countryside Governorate provides all services and the basic needs to the 800 displaced families currently residing in al-Muallaqa village.

SOURCES:
SANA Reports
Submitted by SyrianPatriot 
War Press Info Network at :
https://syrianfreepress.wordpress.com/2016/11/26/saa-25-villages/
~
Re-publications are welcome, but we kindly ask you,
to facilitate the correct information's diffusion,
to cite all these original links and sources.

Thirty people, including Donald Trump Jr., attended an event on October 11, 2016 at the Paris Ritz. The event was hosted by a French think tank, founded by Fabien Baussart,and his wife, Randa Kassis. Ms Kassis is Syrian born and the organisation has been trying, with Russia, to end the war in Syria. Baussart has described as "absurd" the political stance on Syria of the US and some countries in Europe.This meeting occurred prior to Donald Trump Sr.'s election to President of the United States. It gives support to many hopes that President Elect Trump meant business when he talked of cooperating with the Syrian Government and Russia to end the war in Syria over which he rightly accused the Hillary Clinton and Obama regime of incompetence. Unfortunately, Australia has assiduously followed the Clinton-Obama regime line, with the shameful support of most Australian mainstream media.

Kassis wrote on her facebook page, "Syria's opposition got hope that political process will move forward and Russia and the United States will reach accord on the issue of the Syrian crisis, because of Trump's victory. Such hope and belief is the result of my personal meeting with Donald Trump junior in Paris in October… I succeeded to pass Trump, through the talks with his son, the idea of how we can cooperate together to reach the agreement between Russia and the United States on Syria."

She was also quoted by Sputnik, saying, "I think Donald Trump’s vision of the Syrian settlement will be close to Russia’s approach. I think the conflict will stop. I hope that in practice this will happen as soon as Syrian radical Islamist groups are cut off from their financing sources."

She wrote on her facebook page, https://www.facebook.com/search/str/randa%2Bkassis/keywords_search?filters_rp_author=198576333514358

As the next US president, Donald Trump could show support for Moscow's approach to the Syrian settlement. His team includes people who are ready for dialogue with Russia, French analyst Fabien Baussart told Sputnik.

Sputnik also reports that Baussart said, "State Secretary John Kerry permanently told lies to his Russia colleagues, which created obstacles for a constructive dialogue." Sputnik says that Bausart noted that Trump’s team consists of "people who can launch constructive cooperation with Russia." It adds that "Baussart underscored that the "fight against radical Islamism serves the interests not only of Russia and the US, but also of Europe and Muslims peacefully practicing their religion." "However, Britain, France and even Germany embrace an absurd closed stance on any proposals on the Syrian crisis." Read more: https://sputniknews.com/world/201611141047422760-trump-russia-syria/

The suffering of the civilians of Madaya is terrible but it is the armed men who have infiltrated their town who bear the first responsibility for their plight. No government in the world could allow a situation to continue in which a terrorist group is holding a civilian population hostage. This is the reality of Madaya. Knowing the essential facts there is surely no Australian watching your ‘Australian Story’ who could regard a group like Ahrar al Sham with anything other than abhorrence yet in your report on Madaya this group is not even mentioned. Neither is there any attempt to question Mr Nanaa about his dealings with this group and possibly his affinity with its ideology. It is certain that he could not have operated in Madaya without its support and without at least appearing to support its aims, The outcome is a report that is superficially heart-warming but is by no means the true story of what lies behind the ‘siege’ of Madaya."

Letter to the ABC

Dear Sir/Ms,

I am writing with reference to the ‘Australian Story’ program, entitled ‘The Road from Damascus’, screened on November 21, 2016. The program dealt with the situation in the ‘rebel-held’ Syrian town of Madaya, not far from Damascus. The program succeeded in conveying the message of the suffering of civilians but even insofar as it went it lacked context and balance. The outside sources quoted included the Syrian American Medical Society and the Syria Campaign, both of which groups are aligned/embedded with ‘rebel’ forces in Syria. A third source was the US ambassador to the UN, Samantha Power, a person whose extreme views on Syria are too well known to need recounting here.

The frequent references in the program to the ‘regime’ are consistent with mainstream media mis/representation since the beginning of this conflict. Syria does not have a ‘regime’. It has a government with voter support in presidential and parliamentary elections in recent years surpassing the percentage of voters who turned out for the recent American elections. Outside monitors from many countries confirm that these elections have been held fairly and without government intervention. The anti-government demonstrations to which your program refers were vastly outnumbered in 2012/2013 by the masses of people turning out in support of the government. Far from anti-government protests only turning violent because of the violence of the ‘regime’, as your program suggests, they were violent from their beginning in the southern city of Dara'a. Many police and soldiers were killed in the first weeks of this ‘uprising’ and while I have no firm evidence, it is my belief that the snipers firing into demonstrators, as mentioned by James Sadri, of the Syria Campaign, by implication government security forces, were in fact agents-provocateurs.

Sophie McNeill admits developing a close personal relationship with the main character in this Australian ‘story’, Khalid Nanaa. This clearly affected her ability to tell this story as it should have been told according to the standards of objective journalism. Mr Nanaa is presented as a well-meaning naif driven by good intentions and ending up providing medical assistance in the 'rebel-held' town of Madaya. The viewers were informed that ‘only now’ is he telling his story of ‘everything that happened in Syria’, which clearly he could not do, seeing that he was living either in Damascus or Madaya. This was sheer hyperbole. At one stage Mr Nanaa (a nurse and not a doctor) says he decided to treat any patient who came to see him in Madaya. His patients clearly included many children, but what we needed to know is whether he also treated wounded ‘rebels.’ My guess would be that he did, given that the ‘rebels’ control Madaya and would frequently be in need of medical services, but this question was not even asked. There is immediate sympathy for suffering children but what would have been the effect on viewers of seeing heavily bearded jihadists being treated by Mr Nanaa? The propaganda effect would certainly have been spoiled.

Your viewers were entitled to know who these loosely defined ‘rebels’ actually are, but Sophie McNeill did not take up this issue any more than she asked Mr Nanaa about his relationship with them. The answer to the question she did not ask about the ‘rebels’ holding Madaya is that they are members of one of the most violent takfiri/jihadist groups in Syria, Ahrar al Sham.

There is no shortage of detail about the background, the intentions and methods of this group. Your researchers could have turned to Nafeez Ahmed’s article in Middle East Eye (October 16, 2015), ‘Ahrar al Sham’s Apocalyptic Vision for Syria and Beyond’. Ahrar al Sham maintains a close working relationship with the recently rebranded Jabhat al Nusra (Al Qaida in Syria) and the Islamic State and is a central pillar of the extreme jihadist fighting coalition known as Jaish al Islam (Army of Islam). It has a long record of shocking atrocities to its name including, in May 2016, the massacre of Alawis, including women, children and old men, in the Homs governorate village of Al Zara; including, in March, 2015, the massacre of Christians in Idlib; including, in August, 2013, participation in genocidal attacks on Alawi villagers in Latakia province, with an assortment of takfiri groups massacring upwards of 200 villagers and abducting dozens more.

While an estimated 20 groups took part in this slaughter, the US organisation, Human Rights Watch, named Ahrar al Sham as one of five groups, including Jabhat al Nusra and the Islamic State, that were the key fundraisers, organisers, planners and executors of the attack (see the HRW report, October 10, 2013, ‘You Can Still See Their Blood’. Executions, indiscriminate shootings and hostage-taking by opposition forces in Latakia’). On May 13, 2016, Amnesty International included Ahrar al Sham among takfiri/jihadist groups responsible for ‘repeated indiscriminate attacks’ that may amount to war crimes in northern Syria, along with allegations that it has used chemical weapons. Yet the head of Ahrar al Sham in Madaya believes that it is ‘the best group to bring justice to Syria.’

Ahrar al Sham has been accused of hoarding food and profiteering in Madaya. Whether or not these accusations are true, it is certainly not true, but in fact a slander, that the civilian population is being intentionally starved to death by the Syrian government, as one speaker in your program claims. The provision of supplies to Madaya has depended on the outcome of negotiations between the government, UN mediators and Ahrar al Sham and does not depend solely on decisions taken by the government in Damascus. It is the difficulty of getting all parties to agree on the opening of a humanitarian corridor that has repeatedly stalled the supply of food to the civilian population of Madaya.

Like eastern Aleppo, Madaya is held by a thoroughly murderous sectarian group armed and financed by outside governments, including the government of Saudi Arabia, one of the most reactionary regimes - a true regime - in the world, which is concurrently running another war, against the Shia population of Yemen. Ahrar al Sham’s enemy is not just the Syrian government or the Shia and Alawi it has massacred but Christians and Sunni Muslims who do not conform to its murderous ideology, which differs from the Islamic State’s only on minor points of theological detail.

The suffering of the civilians of Madaya is terrible but it is the armed men who have infiltrated their town who bear the first responsibility for their plight. No government in the world could allow a situation to continue in which a terrorist group is holding a civilian population hostage. This is the reality of Madaya. Knowing the essential facts there is surely no Australian watching your ‘Australian Story’ who could regard a group like Ahrar al Sham with anything other than abhorrence yet in your report on Madaya this group is not even mentioned. Neither is there any attempt to question Mr Nanaa about his dealings with this group and possibly his affinity with its ideology. It is certain that he could not have operated in Madaya without its support and without at least appearing to support its aims, The outcome is a report that is superficially heart-warming but is by no means the true story of what lies behind the ‘siege’ of Madaya.

Yours sincerely,

Jeremy Salt

[Candobetter.net Editor: Click here for more on Jeremy Salt.]

See also: Can Trump Recruit Tulsi Gabbard? (21/11/16) | PowerLine, Tulsi Gabbard: 5 Things To Know About Politician Considered For Trump’s Cabinet (21/11/16) | Hollywood Life, Democratic Rep. Tulsi Gabbard 'Under Serious Consideration' for Trump Cabinet (22/11/16) | ABC News, voteTulsi.com.

"President-elect Trump and I had a frank and positive conversation in which we discussed a variety of foreign policy issues in depth. I shared with him my grave concerns that escalating the war in Syria by implementing a so-called no fly/safe zone would be disastrous for the Syrian people, our country, and the world. It would lead to more death and suffering, exacerbate the refugee crisis, strengthen ISIS and al-Qaeda, and bring us into a direct conflict with Russia which could result in a nuclear war. We discussed my bill to end our country’s illegal war to overthrow the Syrian government, and the need to focus our precious resources on rebuilding our own country, and on defeating al-Qaeda, ISIS, and other terrorist groups who pose a threat to the American people. For years, the issue of ending interventionist, regime change warfare has been one of my top priorities. This was the major reason I ran for Congress—I saw firsthand the cost of war, and the lives lost due to the interventionist warmongering policies our country has pursued for far too long."

Tulsi Gabbard is a Hindu, a veteran of the Iraq war, an American politician and member of the Democratic Party who has been the United States Representative for Hawaii's 2nd congressional district since 2013.

November 21, 2016

New York, NY—U.S. Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard (HI-02) today released the following statement on her meeting with President-elect Donald Trump regarding Syria:

"President-elect Trump asked me to meet with him about our current policies regarding Syria, our fight against terrorist groups like al-Qaeda and ISIS, as well as other foreign policy challenges we face. I felt it important to take the opportunity to meet with the President-elect now before the drumbeats of war that neocons have been beating drag us into an escalation of the war to overthrow the Syrian government—a war which has already cost hundreds of thousands of lives and forced millions of refugees to flee their homes in search of safety for themselves and their families.

"While the rules of political expediency would say I should have refused to meet with President-elect Trump, I never have and never will play politics with American and Syrian lives.

"Serving the people of Hawaiʻi and our nation is an honor and responsibility that I do not take lightly. Representing the aloha spirit and diversity of the people of Hawaiʻi, I will continue to seek common ground to deliver results that best serve all Americans, as I have tried to do during my time in Congress.

"Where I disagree with President-elect Trump on issues, I will not hesitate to express that disagreement. However, I believe we can disagree, even strongly, but still come together on issues that matter to the American people and affect their daily lives. We cannot allow continued divisiveness to destroy our country.

"President-elect Trump and I had a frank and positive conversation in which we discussed a variety of foreign policy issues in depth. I shared with him my grave concerns that escalating the war in Syria by implementing a so-called no fly/safe zone would be disastrous for the Syrian people, our country, and the world. It would lead to more death and suffering, exacerbate the refugee crisis, strengthen ISIS and al-Qaeda, and bring us into a direct conflict with Russia which could result in a nuclear war. We discussed my bill to end our country’s illegal war to overthrow the Syrian government, and the need to focus our precious resources on rebuilding our own country, and on defeating al-Qaeda, ISIS, and other terrorist groups who pose a threat to the American people.

"For years, the issue of ending interventionist, regime change warfare has been one of my top priorities. This was the major reason I ran for Congress—I saw firsthand the cost of war, and the lives lost due to the interventionist warmongering policies our country has pursued for far too long.

"Let me be clear, I will never allow partisanship to undermine our national security when the lives of countless people lay in the balance."

Article below has been republished, 15 Nov 2016, on the (real) Syrian Free Press.

Francis A. Boyle, Gadaffi's international lawyer and author of Destroying Libya and World Order, today (11 November 2016) said, on Pravda TV, that Obama can be existentially dangerous between now and inauguration day. He reminded people that Bush Sr invaded Somalia right after he lost to Bill Clinton. And the US/NATO announced on Monday that they were putting 300,000 troops on high alert. Boyle urges people to move forward with an impeachment campaign against Obama during the lame duck session of Congress because we do not want a war with Russia over Ukraine or Syria."

This morning, hardly taking breath over the US election, again there is much talk in the MSM about the situation in Aleppo, while the situation in Mosul has been quite ignored, although the fight by various forces including US-NATO against ISIS there and refugee diaspora all continue.

There were multiple takes from Mr. Jan Egeland, Special Advisor to the United Nations Special Envoy for Syria's statement about the urgency of getting aid into East Aleppo, all incorporating various aspects of the whole false narrative, about who is there, and about the Syrian Arab Army (SAA) and Russian efforts to liberate the whole city.

Aspects of the false narrative were also presented by the Australian ABC’s M/E correspondent Matt Brown, who seems to be a single-minded supporter of the opposition forces and a purveyor of misinformation on their behalf. In this report his source was ‘Abu Laith’ – ‘Aleppo resident and member of the White Helmets’. Brown discussed the presence of the Russian aircraft carrier with Abu Laith, who threw off the threat and vowed to continue to support the people. See http://www.abc.net.au/am/content/2016/s4572965.htm

Egeland, who is also completely partial, claimed in his report that ‘some families had not received food rations for three weeks, and prices had risen sharply', and that ‘neither side wants to see a quarter of a million people starve’. Brown said the UN had done a survey of people in East Aleppo and found that 40% of them wanted to leave, but in portraying the recent efforts of the Syrian and Russian governments to get civilians out of the terrorist-occupied East, said that these had been unsuccessful because the ‘rebels oppose people leaving the city’. However he fails to say that the 'rebels' shoot people who try to leave.

The fact is that the UN should have cooperated with the Russian and Syrian government when there was the ceasefire to get people out. They should have put pressure on the rebel leaders, and the US-NATO by telling the media the real situation, which is that East Aleppo is being held under seige, not by the Syrian Gov, but by the 'rebels' who are using the East Aleppan citizens as human shields.

In another short news bulletin this morning, with different extracts from Egeland, it was suggested that the people could starve or bleed to death, [if we don’t act].

Emphasising the pervasive misinformation and disinformation coming from our corrupted media, the ABC also interviewed Australia’s defence minister, Maurice Payne, this morning. This might seem unsurprising if one didn’t know that neither the ABC nor the Australian government has shown the slightest interest in discussing Australia’s involvement, either in Iraq or Syria, for the last few months since the ‘Aleppo crisis’ has been dominating the narrative.

Even when Australian forces were allegedly involved in the US coalition attack on the SAA in Deir al Zour that ended the ‘ceasefire’, there was minimal discussion following the shockingly cursory apology.

That Australia was ‘involved’ in that strike, that supported IS terrorists directly, (though it has been suggested the fighter jets were only US ones, and that we were asked to share the responsibility), indicates that Australia’s strategic role as a primary partner in the US’ war on Syria is highly significant, as it is also highly significant in our region in the defence, not of Australian interests, but of US imperial interests against China.

This is what Australia’s defence minister, Marise Payne had to say this morning about our role in the ‘fight against ISIS’:

MICHAEL BRISSENDEN: "In the Middle East in particular, Trump's been positive about Russia's role in Syria. We certainly haven't been positive in that way. He's talked also about a more robust military response to ISIS. Do you expect a change?"

MARISE PAYNE: "Well, we will always deal with those discussions as they're presented to us. Overwhelmingly, our response in Iraq and in Syria is dictated by conditions on the ground: by the operational environment in which we find ourselves.

As you know, we've trained almost 14,000 soldiers who are engaging in the fight against Daesh in the Iraqi defence force. We have a special operations task group which is working side-by-side, not just with the Iraqis but members of the international coalition, which is led by the United States. We have changed, even in the last year, our contribution to both of those activities. We have worked as the operational environment has changed as well..."

Most significant here is that the ‘Iraqis’ – meaning Baghdad – are not on the same side as the US coalition if it includes Turkey. That is something that needs clarifying right now. Whether the ABC has any idea about the importance of this issue remains unknown. They don’t ask, and they aren’t told.

"Propaganda is most effective when our consent is engineered by those with a fine education - Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard, Columbia -- and with careers on the BBC, the Guardian, the New York Times, the Washington Post. These organisations are known as the liberal media. They present themselves as enlightened, progressive tribunes of the moral zeitgeist. They are anti-racist, pro-feminist and pro-LGBT. And they love war. While they speak up for feminism, they support rapacious wars that deny the rights of countless women, including the right to life." John Pilger.

This article is republished with permission from John Pilger. It was first published at http://johnpilger.com/articles/inside-the-invisible-government-war-propaganda-clinton-trump

The American journalist, Edward Bernays, is often described as the man who invented modern propaganda.

The nephew of Sigmund Freud, the pioneer of psycho-analysis, it was Bernays who coined the term "public relations" as a euphemism for spin and its deceptions.

In 1929, he persuaded feminists to promote cigarettes for women by smoking in the New York Easter Parade - behaviour then considered outlandish. One feminist, Ruth Booth, declared, "Women! Light another torch of freedom! Fight another sex taboo!"

Bernays' influence extended far beyond advertising. His greatest success was his role in convincing the American public to join the slaughter of the First World War. The secret, he said, was "engineering the consent" of people in order to "control and regiment [them] according to our will without their knowing about it".

He described this as "the true ruling power in our society" and called it an "invisible government".

Today, the invisible government has never been more powerful and less understood. In my career as a journalist and film-maker, I have never known propaganda to insinuate our lives and as it does now and to go unchallenged.

Imagine two cities. Both are under siege by the forces of the government of that country. Both cities are occupied by fanatics, who commit terrible atrocities, such as beheading people.

But there is a vital difference. In one siege, the government soldiers are described as liberators by Western reporters embedded with them, who enthusiastically report their battles and air strikes. There are front page pictures of these heroic soldiers giving a V-sign for victory. There is scant mention of civilian casualties.

In the second city - in another country nearby - almost exactly the same is happening. Government forces are laying siege to a city controlled by the same breed of fanatics.

The difference is that these fanatics are supported, supplied and armed by "us" - by the United States and Britain. They even have a media centre that is funded by Britain and America.

Another difference is that the government soldiers laying siege to this city are the bad guys, condemned for assaulting and bombing the city - which is exactly what the good soldiers do in the first city.

Confusing? Not really. Such is the basic double standard that is the essence of propaganda. I am referring, of course, to the current siege of the city of Mosul by the government forces of Iraq, who are backed by the United States and Britain and to the siege of Aleppo by the government forces of Syria, backed by Russia. One is good; the other is bad.

What is seldom reported is that both cities would not be occupied by fanatics and ravaged by war if Britain and the United States had not invaded Iraq in 2003. That criminal enterprise was launched on lies strikingly similar to the propaganda that now distorts our understanding of the civil war in Syria.

Without this drumbeat of propaganda dressed up as news, the monstrous ISIS and Al-Qaida and al-Nusra and the rest of the jihadist gang might not exist, and the people of Syria might not be fighting for their lives today.

Some may remember in 2003 a succession of BBC reporters turning to the camera and telling us that Blair was "vindicated" for what turned out to be the crime of the century. The US television networks produced the same validation for George W. Bush. Fox News brought on Henry Kissinger to effuse over Colin Powell's fabrications.

The same year, soon after the invasion, I filmed an interview in Washington with Charles Lewis, the renowned American investigative journalist. I asked him, "What would have happened if the freest media in the world had seriously challenged what turned out to be crude propaganda?"

He replied that if journalists had done their job, "there is a very, very good chance we would not have gone to war in Iraq".

It was a shocking statement, and one supported by other famous journalists to whom I put the same question -- Dan Rather of CBS, David Rose of the Observer and journalists and producers in the BBC, who wished to remain anonymous.

In other words, had journalists done their job, had they challenged and investigated the propaganda instead of amplifying it, hundreds of thousands of men, women and children would be alive today, and there would be no ISIS and no siege of Aleppo or Mosul.

There would have been no atrocity on the London Underground on 7th July 2005. There would have been no flight of millions of refugees; there would be no miserable camps.

When the terrorist atrocity happened in Paris last November, President Francoise Hollande immediately sent planes to bomb Syria - and more terrorism followed, predictably, the product of Hollande's bombast about France being "at war" and "showing no mercy". That state violence and jihadist violence feed off each other is the truth that no national leader has the courage to speak.

"When the truth is replaced by silence," said the Soviet dissident Yevtushenko, "the silence is a lie."

The attack on Iraq, the attack on Libya, the attack on Syria happened because the leader in each of these countries was not a puppet of the West. The human rights record of a Saddam or a Gaddafi was irrelevant. They did not obey orders and surrender control of their country.

The same fate awaited Slobodan Milosevic once he had refused to sign an "agreement" that demanded the occupation of Serbia and its conversion to a market economy. His people were bombed, and he was prosecuted in The Hague. Independence of this kind is intolerable.

As WikLeaks has revealed, it was only when the Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad in 2009 rejected an oil pipeline, running through his country from Qatar to Europe, that he was attacked.

From that moment, the CIA planned to destroy the government of Syria with jihadist fanatics - the same fanatics currently holding the people of Mosul and eastern Aleppo hostage.

Why is this not news? The former British Foreign Office official Carne Ross, who was responsible for operating sanctions against Iraq, told me: "We would feed journalists factoids of sanitised intelligence, or we would freeze them out. That is how it worked."

The West's medieval client, Saudi Arabia - to which the US and Britain sell billions of dollars' worth of arms - is at present destroying Yemen, a country so poor that in the best of times, half the children are malnourished.

Look on YouTube and you will see the kind of massive bombs - "our" bombs - that the Saudis use against dirt-poor villages, and against weddings, and funerals.

The explosions look like small atomic bombs. The bomb aimers in Saudi Arabia work side-by-side with British officers. This fact is not on the evening news.

Propaganda is most effective when our consent is engineered by those with a fine education - Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard, Columbia -- and with careers on the BBC, the Guardian, the New York Times, the Washington Post.

These organisations are known as the liberal media. They present themselves as enlightened, progressive tribunes of the moral zeitgeist. They are anti-racist, pro-feminist and pro-LGBT.

And they love war.

While they speak up for feminism, they support rapacious wars that deny the rights of countless women, including the right to life.

In 2011, Libya, then a modern state, was destroyed on the pretext that Muammar Gaddafi was about to commit genocide on his own people. That was the incessant news; and there was no evidence. It was a lie.

In fact, Britain, Europe and the United States wanted what they like to call "regime change" in Libya, the biggest oil producer in Africa. Gaddafi's influence in the continent and, above all, his independence were intolerable.

So he was murdered with a knife in his rear by fanatics, backed by America, Britain and France. Hillary Clinton cheered his gruesome death for the camera, declaring, "We came, we saw, he died!"

The destruction of Libya was a media triumph. As the war drums were beaten, Jonathan Freedland wrote in the Guardian: "Though the risks are very real, the case for intervention remains strong."

Intervention - what a polite, benign, Guardian word, whose real meaning, for Libya, was death and destruction.

According to its own records, Nato launched 9,700 "strike sorties" against Libya, of which more than a third were aimed at civilian targets. They included missiles with uranium warheads. Look at the photographs of the rubble of Misurata and Sirte, and the mass graves identified by the Red Cross. The Unicef report on the children killed says, "most [of them] under the age of ten".

As a direct consequence, Sirte became the capital of ISIS. Ukraine is another media triumph. Respectable liberal newspapers such as the New York Times, the Washington Post and the Guardian, and mainstream broadcasters such as the BBC, NBC, CBS, CNN have played a critical role in conditioning their viewers to accept a new and dangerous cold war.

All have misrepresented events in Ukraine as a malign act by Russia when, in fact, the coup in Ukraine in 2014 was the work of the United States, aided by Germany and Nato.

This inversion of reality is so pervasive that Washington's military intimidation of Russia is not news; it is suppressed behind a smear and scare campaign of the kind I grew up with during the first cold war. Once again, the Ruskies are coming to get us, led by another Stalin, whom The Economist depicts as the devil.

The suppression of the truth about Ukraine is one of the most complete news blackouts I can remember. The fascists who engineered the coup in Kiev are the same breed that backed the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941. Of all the scares about the rise of fascist anti-Semitism in Europe, no leader ever mentions the fascists in Ukraine - except Vladimir Putin, but he does not count.

Many in the Western media have worked hard to present the ethnic Russian-speaking population of Ukraine as outsiders in their own country, as agents of Moscow, almost never as Ukrainians seeking a federation within Ukraine and as Ukrainian citizens resisting a foreign-orchestrated coup against their elected government.

There is almost the joie d'esprit of a class reunion of warmongers. The drum-beaters of the Washington Post inciting war with Russia are the very same editorial writers who published the lie that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.

To most of us, the American presidential campaign is a media freak show, in which Donald Trump is the arch villain. But Trump is loathed by those with power in the United States for reasons that have little to do with his obnoxious behaviour and opinions. To the invisible government in Washington, the unpredictable Trump is an obstacle to America's design for the 21st century.

This is to maintain the dominance of the United States and to subjugate Russia, and, if possible, China.

To the militarists in Washington, the real problem with Trump is that, in his lucid moments, he seems not to want a war with Russia; he wants to talk with the Russian president, not fight him; he says he wants to talk with the president of China.

In the first debate with Hillary Clinton, Trump promised not to be the first to introduce nuclear weapons into a conflict. He said, "I would certainly not do first strike. Once the nuclear alternative happens, it's over." That was not news.

Did he really mean it? Who knows? He often contradicts himself. But what is clear is that Trump is considered a serious threat to the status quo maintained by the vast national security machine that runs the United States, regardless of who is in the White House.

The CIA wants him beaten. The Pentagon wants him beaten. The media wants him beaten. Even his own party wants him beaten. He is a threat to the rulers of the world - unlike Clinton who has left no doubt she is prepared to go to war with nuclear-armed Russia and China.

Clinton has the form, as she often boasts. Indeed, her record is proven. As a senator, she backed the bloodbath in Iraq. When she ran against Obama in 2008, she threatened to "totally obliterate" Iran. As Secretary of State, she colluded in the destruction of governments in Libya and Honduras and set in train the baiting of China.

She has now pledged to support a No Fly Zone in Syria - a direct provocation for war with Russia. Clinton may well become the most dangerous president of the United States in my lifetime - a distinction for which the competition is fierce.

Without a shred of evidence, she has accused Russia of supporting Trump and hacking her emails. Released by WikiLeaks, these emails tell us that what Clinton says in private, in speeches to the rich and powerful, is the opposite of what she says in public.

That is why silencing and threatening Julian Assange is so important. As the editor of WikiLeaks, Assange knows the truth. And let me assure those who are concerned, he is well, and WikiLeaks is operating on all cylinders.

Today, the greatest build-up of American-led forces since World War Two is under way - in the Caucasus and eastern Europe, on the border with Russia, and in Asia and the Pacific, where China is the target.

Keep that in mind when the presidential election circus reaches its finale on November 8th, If the winner is Clinton, a Greek chorus of witless commentators will celebrate her coronation as a great step forward for women. None will mention Clinton's victims: the women of Syria, the women of Iraq, the women of Libya. None will mention the civil defence drills being conducted in Russia. None will recall Edward Bernays' "torches of freedom".

George Bush's press spokesman once called the media "complicit enablers".

Coming from a senior official in an administration whose lies, enabled by the media, caused such suffering, that description is a warning from history.

In 1946, the Nuremberg Tribunal prosecutor said of the German media: "Before every major aggression, they initiated a press campaign calculated to weaken their victims and to prepare the German people psychologically for the attack. In the propaganda system, it was the daily press and the radio that were the most important weapons."

Follow John Pilger on twitter @johnpilger

Apparently, the US Left has yet to figure out that Washington doesn’t try to overthrow neoliberals. If Syrian President Bashar al-Assad were a devotee of the Washington Consensus–as Counterpunch’s Eric Draitser seems to believe–the United States government wouldn’t have been calling since 2003 for Assad to step down. Nor would it be overseeing the Islamist guerilla war against his government; it would be protecting him.

There is a shibboleth in some circles that, as Eric Draitser put it in a recent Counterpunch article, the uprising in Syria “began as a response to the Syrian government’s neoliberal policies and brutality,” and that “the revolutionary content of the rebel side in Syria has been sidelined by a hodgepodge of Saudi and Qatari-financed jihadists.” This theory appears, as far as I can tell, to be based on argument by assertion, not evidence.

This article was first published October 22, 2016 at https://gowans.wordpress.com/2016/10/22/the-revolutionary-distemper-in-syria-that-wasnt/?blogsub=confirming#subscribe-blog. Reproduced here in part. Readers are strongly encouraged to go to the original publication site and read the whole article.

A review of press reports in the weeks immediately preceding and following the mid-March 2011 outbreak of riots in Daraa—usually recognized as the beginning of the uprising—offers no indication that Syria was in the grips of a revolutionary distemper, whether anti-neo-liberal or otherwise. On the contrary, reporters representing Time magazine and the New York Times referred to the government as having broad support, of critics conceding that Assad was popular, and of Syrians exhibiting little interest in protest. At the same time, they described the unrest as a series of riots involving hundreds, and not thousands or tens of thousands of people, guided by a largely Islamist agenda and exhibiting a violent character.

Time magazine reported that two jihadist groups that would later play lead roles in the insurgency, Jabhat al-Nusra and Ahrar al-Sham, were already in operation on the eve of the riots, while a mere three months earlier, leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood voiced “their hope for a civil revolt in Syria.” The Muslim Brothers, who had decades earlier declared a blood feud with Syria’s ruling Ba’athist Party, objecting violently to the party’s secularism, had been embroiled in a life and death struggle with secular Arab nationalists since the 1960s, and had engaged in street battles with Ba’athist partisans from the late 1940s. (In one such battle, Hafez al-Assad, the current president’s father, who himself would serve as president from 1970 to 2000, was knifed by a Muslim Brother adversary.) The Brotherhood’s leaders, beginning in 2007, met frequently with the US State Department and the US National Security Council, as well as with the US government-funded Middle East Partnership Initiative, which had taken on the overt role of funding overseas overthrow organizations—a task the CIA had previously done covertly.

Washington had conspired to purge Arab nationalist influence from Syria as early as the mid-1950s, when Kermit Roosevelt, who engineered the overthrow of Iran’s prime minister Mohammad Mossadegh for nationalizing his country’s oil industry, plotted with British intelligence to stir up the Muslim Brothers to overthrow a triumvirate of Arab nationalist and communist leaders in Damascus who Washington and London perceived as threatening Western economic interests in the Middle East.

Washington funnelled arms to Brotherhood mujahedeen in the 1980s to wage urban guerrilla warfare against Hafez al-Assad, who hardliners in Washington called an “Arab communist.” His son, Bashar, continued the Arab nationalists’ commitment to unity (of the Arab nation), independence, and (Arab) socialism. These goals guided the Syrian state—as they had done the Arab nationalist states of Libya under Muammar Gaddafi and Iraq under Saddam. All three states were targeted by Washington for the same reason: their Arab nationalist commitments clashed fundamentally with the US imperialist agenda of US global leadership.

Bashar al-Assad’s refusal to renounce Arab nationalist ideology dismayed Washington, which complained about his socialism, the third part of the Ba’athists’ holy trinity of values. Plans to oust Assad—based in part on his failure to embrace Washington’s neo-liberalism—were already in preparation in Washington by 2003, if not earlier. If Assad was championing neo-liberalism, as Draitser and others contend, it somehow escaped the notice of Washington and Wall Street, which complained about “socialist” Syria and the country’s decidedly anti-neoliberal economic policies.

A Death Feud Heats Up With US Assistance

In late January 2011, a page was created on Facebook called The Syrian Revolution 2011. It announced that a “Day of Rage” would be held on February 4 and 5. [1] The protests “fizzled,” reported Time. The Day of Rage amounted to a Day of Indifference. Moreover, the connection to Syria was tenuous. Most of the chants shouted by the few protesters who attended were about Libya, demanding that Muammar Gaddafi—whose government was under siege by Islamist insurrectionists—step down. Plans were set for new protests on March 4 and March 5, but they too garnered little support. [2]

Time’s correspondent Rania Abouzeid attributed the failure of the protest organizers to draw significant support to the fact that most Syrians were not opposed to their government.

Read more at https://gowans.wordpress.com/2016/10/22/the-revolutionary-distemper-in-syria-that-wasnt/?blogsub=confirming#subscribe-blog

The absurdity of Australian news reporting on Syria would be funny if it were not for the disastrous consequences of such reporting for the people of Syria. I happened to see the end of a report from Matt Brown on 7.30 Report on the subject of chemical weapons in Syria. If it depresses me, think how the Syrians feel about our mindless repetition of war-crimes propaganda against Syria's army when that army is the only thing protecting most Syrians from foreign-backed terrorists.

"Diplomatic battle over Syria's chemical weapons program", Matt Brown, 7.30 Report, Australian Broadcasting Commission, 21 October 2016.

There was hardly a second in Brown’s dramatic production that was true or real. Even the supposed results of the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) investigation into Ghouta were misrepresented.

I’ve been shocked recently by the failure of the ABC, on radio at least, to even mention Syria other than briefly in news bulletins. I only watch SBS world news, which is of course just as bad. Instead of Sophie McNeill and Matt Brown, and Anne Barker, SBS has Nastasya Tay, whose propaganda wrap-ups are just stunning.

On October 23, for instance, reporting about the humanitarian pause in Aleppo, she showed the buses waiting to take residents from East Aleppo, but said, with what seemed like a sort of pleasure, that no-one took them, and that the Syrian army had fired on people trying to leave! Yet what happened was that the ‘rebels’ refused to give in, and fired on the relief route, forcing the buses to drive off at speed. Meanwhile they showed photos of people in the streets dancing and holding up Free Syrian Army (FSA) flags, and shopping at stalls of vegetables.

At the same time, over in Mosul, in Iraq, the boot is on the other foot, while the US claims to do just the same thing the Syrian Arab Army (SAA) is doing in Aleppo, with a slight difference. To be clear, in Iraq the US claims to be fighting terrorists in order to defend the Iraqi government, but in Syria it is defending terrorists (which it calls 'moderate rebels') in order to fight the Syrian government. Meanwhile, it isn't stopping ISIL from fleeing Mosul into Syria.

It’s the silence on what is really happening that drives me crazy! Did you hear any interviews with politicians about whether Australia supports more sanctions against Russia, or supports the Turkish army killing Kurds, or supports the Iranians fighting to liberate Mosul for Iraq – or anything!

Even when it was happening it wasn’t happening...

Once upon a time I would have tried to have put the ABC right, but to be honest, I think it has gone past the point of thoughtful analysis, with Brown’s propaganda, and that of Human Rights Watch (HRW) and the ‘doctors’ in Istanbul (!)

The fact is that the stories about ‘barrel bombs’ with chlorine are total fabrications, not because the Syrian Arab Army (SAA) didn’t use them, but because they would have absolutely no reason to use such a stupid weapon as ‘Chlorine’. After all, there is almost no evidence that Sarin was actually present and used in Ghouta, and I know of no evidence at all of Chlorine use other than some silly photos showing a cloud of Nitrogen oxides from a fertiliser bomb.

Note that in all such footage there are White Helmets present – so we may assume that these films are not true. President Bashar al Assad noted that the White Helmets are ‘Al Qaeda with a facelift’ in his interview on Swiss TV on the 19th of October, 2016..

Today, (22 October 2016) as the UNHRC report is released that claims proof Syria used Chlorine in March last year, the abandonment of any impartiality in this conflict by the UN is now complete.

Not only was the supposed use of Chlorine in an attack on Sarmin south of Idlib never established as fact with any real evidence, but its timing was completely suspect. It occurred just before or just after the launching by Saudi Arabia and Turkey of a force of thousands of militant jihadists, under the banner of the Army of Conquest – Jaish al Fatah – who swept south towards Lattakia and Hama and killed thousands of soldiers and civilians before they were finally fought all the way back by the Syrian Arab Army and Russian forces six months later.

So while our media carried on about this stupid story, in which supposedly a ‘grandmother’ and three children died, they completely ignored the rampages of the army of terrorists, for instance in their truck bomb assault on Jisr al Shughour hospital. This is just a pre-echo of what is happening now with Aleppo – that while the UN and Western leaders talk about the ‘slaughterhouse of Aleppo’ in the most extreme terms, the terrorists are on the rampage south of Idlib with their US supplied weapons, fighting the Syrian army and its allies.
If Matt Brown wants to see what ‘our allies’ are doing in Syria, like he does in Mosul, why doesn’t he get embedded with ‘Jabat Fatah al Sham’ – al Qaeda, south of Idlib?

And if Sophie McNeill is interested in the problems for children’s schooling in refugee camps in Erbil (reported on last night’s Lateline), why doesn’t she go to visit some suburbs of Lattakia or Damascus and see how all the refugees from the terrorists are managing there?

Not that the Syrian government would ever give her a visa...

I don’t know what to do about the ABC. When I hear their reports I get furious and think of phoning, but then I remember the last time and the time before, and how they have only got worse...

During an interview on 19 October 2016 with Swiss TV SRF 1 TV Live, President Bashar al-Assad stressed that protecting civilians in Aleppo necessitates getting rid of the terrorists. He said, “Of course, it’s our mission according to the constitution and the law. We have to protect the people, and we have to get rid of those terrorists in Aleppo. That’s how we can protect civilians.” He added that it goes without saying that the way to protect the civilians in Aleppo is to attack the terrorists who hold the civilians under their control and are killing them. Full transcript inside:

President al-Assad to Swiss SRF 1 TV channel: Fighting terrorists is the way to protect civilians in Aleppo

 Following is the full text of the interview:

Journalist: Mr. President, thank you very much for having welcomed Swiss Television and our program Rundschau here in Damascus.

President Assad: You are most welcome in Syria.

Question 1: First, please, allow me to clarify one thing: may I ask you every question?

President Assad: Every question, without exception.

Question 2: I’m asking because one of your conditions is that interview is being broadcast in its full version. Are you afraid that we might manipulate your statements?

President Assad: You should answer that question, but I think we should build this relation upon the trust, and I think you are worried about the trust of your audience, so I don’t think so. I think you have good reputation in conveying the truth in every subject you try to cover.

Question 3: Do you see it as a lie, that the world considers you as to be a war criminal?

President Assad: That depends on what the reference in defining that word. Is it the international law, or is it the Western agenda or the Western political mood, let’s say, that’s being defined by vested-interests politicians in the West? According to the international law, as a President and as government and as Syrian Army, we are defending our country against the terrorists that have been invading Syria as proxies to other countries. So, if you want to go back to that word, the “war criminal,” I think the first one who should be tried under that title are the Western officials; starting with George Bush who invaded Iraq without any mandate from the Security Council. Second, Cameron and Sarkozy who invaded and destroyed Libya without mandate from the Security Council. Third, the Western officials who are supporting the terrorists during the last five years in Syria, either by providing them with political umbrella, or supporting them directly with armaments, or implementing embargo on the Syrian people that has led to the killing of thousands of Syrian civilians.

Question 4: But we are here to talk about your role in this war, and the US

Secretary of State John Kerry called you “Adolf Hitler” and “Saddam Hussein” in the same breath. Does it bother you?

President Assad: No, because they don’t have credibility. This is first of all. Second, for me as President, what I care about first and foremost is how the Syrian people look at me; second, my friends around the world – not my personal friends as President, I mean our friends as Syrians, like Russia, like Iran, like China, like the rest of the world – not the West, the West always tried to personalize things, just to cover the real goals which is about deposing government and getting rid of a certain president just to bring puppets to suit their agenda. So, going back to the beginning, no I don’t care about what Kerry said, at all. It has no influence on me.

Question 5: You’re the President of a country whose citizens are fleeing, half of your fellow citizens. The people are not only fleeing because of the terrorists, of ISIS, or the rebels, but also because of you.

President Assad: What do you mean by me? I’m not asking people to leave Syria, I’m not attacking people; I’m defending the people. Actually, the people are leaving Syria for two reasons: first reason is the action of the terrorists, direct action in killing the people. The second one is the action of the terrorists in order to paralyze the life in Syria; attacking schools, destroying infrastructure in every sector. Third, the embargo of the West that pressed many Syrians to find their livelihood outside Syria. These are the main reasons. If you can see that the second factor and the third factor are related, I mean the role of the terrorists and the West in undermining and hurting the livelihoods of the Syrians, is one and, let’s say, is commonality between the terrorists and Europe.

Question 6: When you speak of terrorists, who do you mean by that? Surely ISIS, but also the “Free Syrian Army” or the Kurds?

President Assad: What I mean is like what you mean as a Swiss citizen, if you have anyone who carries machineguns or armaments and killing people under any titles, and committed vandalism, destroying public or private properties; this is a terrorist. Anyone who adopts a political way in order to make any change he wants, this is not a terrorist. You can call him opposition. But you cannot call somebody who is killing people or holding armaments, you cannot call him opposition, in your country, in my country as well.

Question 7: Well, you don’t have any free opposition in your country.

President Assad: Of course we have, of course we have. We have real opposition, we have people who live in Syria, whom their grassroots are the Syrian people, they’re not opposition who were forged in other countries like France or UK or Saudi Arabia or Turkey. We have them, and you can go and meet them and deal with them with your camera. You can do that yourself.

Question 8: How do you explain to your three children what is happening in

Aleppo? I’m sure that you are discussing about it at the family table.

President Assad: Yeah, of course if I’m going to explain to them, I’m going to explain about what is happening in Syria, not only in Aleppo, taking into consideration that my children are full-grown now, they understand what is going on Syria. But if you want to explain to them or to any other child what is happening, I’m going to explain about the role of the terrorists, about the role of Qatar, Turkey, Saudi Arabia in supporting those terrorists with money, with logistic support, and the role of the West in supporting those terrorists either through armament or through helping them with the propaganda and the publicity. I’m going to explain to them in full what’s going on.

Question 9: Do you, as a father, also say that you have nothing to do with the bombardments of the hospitals in Aleppo?

President Assad: Look, when they say that we are bombarding the hospitals, it means that we are killing civilians. That is the meaning of the word. The question is why would the government kill civilians, whether in hospitals or in streets or schools or anywhere? You are talking about killing Syrians. When we kill Syrians, as a government, or as army, the biggest part of the Syrian society will be against us. You cannot succeed in your war if you are killing civilians. So, this story, and this narrative, is a mendacious narrative, to be frank with you. Of course, unfortunately, every war is a bad war, in every war you have innocent victims, whether children, women, elderly, any other civilian, any other innocent who is not part of this war, he could pay the price, this is unfortunately. That’s why we have to fight terrorism. When we don’t say that, it’s like saying – according to that question or that narrative, that you may reflect in your question – that the terrorists, Al Qaeda, al-Nusra, ISIS, are protecting the civilians, and we as government are killing the civilians. Who can believe that story? No one.

Question 10: But who else got airplanes or bunker-busting bombs besides your army?

President Assad: It’s like you’re saying that everyone who is killed in Syria was killed by the airplanes or aircrafts, military aircrafts! The majority of the people were killed by mortars shelled by the terrorists on them while they’re at schools, in their hospitals, in the streets, anywhere. It’s not related to the aerial bombardment. Sometimes you have aerial bombardment against the terrorists, but that doesn’t mean that every bomb that fell somewhere was by airplane or by the Syrian Army. If you are talking about a specific incident, let’s say, we have to verify that specific incident, but I’m answering you in general now.

Question 11: But you have the power to change the situation also for the children in Aleppo.

President Assad: Of course, that’s why-

Journalist: Will you do that?

President Assad: Exactly, that’s our mission, according to the constitution, according to the law; that we have to protect the people, that we have to get rid of those terrorists from Aleppo. This is where we can protect the civilians. How can you protect them while they are under the control of the terrorists? They’ve been killed by them, and they’ve been controlled fully by the terrorists. Is it our role to sit aside and watch? Is that how we can protect the Syrian people? We need to attack the terrorists, that’s self-evident.

Question 12: May I show you a picture?

President Assad: Of course.

Journalist: This young boy has become the symbol of the war. I think that you know this picture.

President Assad: Of course I saw it.

Journalist: His name is Omran. Five years old.

President Assad: Yeah.

Journalist: Covered with blood, scared, traumatized. Is there anything you would like to say to Omran and his family?

President Assad: There’s something I would like to say to you first of all, because I want you to go back after my interview, and go to the internet to see the same picture of the same child, with his sister, both were rescued by what they call them in the West “White Helmets” which is a facelift of al-Nusra in Aleppo. They were rescued twice, each one in a different incident, and just as part of the publicity of those White Helmets. None of these incidents were true. You can have it manipulated, and it is manipulated. I’m going to send you those two pictures, and they are on the internet, just to see that this is a forged picture, not a real one. We have real pictures of children being harmed, but this one in specific is a forged one.

Question 13: But it’s true that innocent civilians are dying, in Aleppo.

President Assad: Of course, not only in Aleppo; in Syria. But now you are talking about Aleppo, because the whole hysteria in the West about Aleppo, for one reason; not because Aleppo is under siege, because Aleppo has been under siege for the last four years by the terrorists, and we haven’t heard a question by Western journalists about what’s happening in

Aleppo that time, and we haven’t heard a single statement by Western officials regarding the children of Aleppo. Now, they are talking about Aleppo recently just because the terrorists are in a bad shape. This is the only reason, because the Syrian Army are making advancement, and the Western countries – mainly the United States and its allies like UK and France – feeling that they are losing the last cards of terrorism in Syria, and the main bastion of that terrorism today is Aleppo.

Question 14: Everything is allowed in this war for you.

President Assad: No, of course, you have the international law, you have the human rights charter, you have to obey. But in every war, every war in the world during the history, you cannot make sure a hundred percent that you can control everything in that direction. You always have flaws, that’s why I said every war is a bad war. But there’s difference between individual mistakes and the policy of the government. The policy of the government, to say that we are attacking civilians, we are attacking hospitals, we are attacking schools, we are doing all these atrocities, that’s not possible, because you cannot work or go against your interests. You cannot go against your duty toward the people, otherwise you are going to lose the war as a government. You cannot withstand such a ferocious war for five years and a half while you are killing your own people. That’s impossible. But you always have mistakes, whether it’s about crossfire, it’s about individual mistakes… bring me a war, a single war in the recent history, that it was a clean war. You don’t have.

Question 15: Do you have made any mistakes too in this war?

President Assad: As President I define the policy of the country, according to our policy, the main pillars of this policy during the crisis is to fight terrorism, which I think is correct and we will not going to change it, of course, to make dialogue between the Syrians, and I think which is correct, the third one which is proven to be effective during the last two years is the reconciliations; local reconciliations with the militants who have been holding machineguns against the people and against the government and against the army, and this one has, again, proven that it’s a good step. So, these are the pillars of this policy. You cannot talk about mistakes in this policy. You can talk about mistakes in the implementation of the policy, that could be related to the individuals.

Question 16: You still believe in a diplomatic solution?

President Assad: Definitely, but you don’t have something called diplomatic solution or military solution; you have solution, but every conflict has many aspects, one of them is the security, like our situation, and the other one is in the political aspect of this solution. For example, if you ask me about how can you deal with Al Qaeda, with al-Nusra, with ISIS? Is it possible to make negotiations with them? They won’t make, they’re not ready to, they wouldn’t. They have their own ideology, repugnant ideology, so you cannot make political solution with this party; you have to fight them, you have to get rid of them. While if you talk about dialogue, you can make dialogue with two entities; the first one, political entities, any political entities, whether with or against or in the middle, and with every militant who is ready to give in his armament for the sake of the security or stability in Syria. Of course we believe in it.

Question 17: There are news from Russia about a short humanitarian pause in Aleppo on Thursday, what does it mean this humanitarian pause, can you explain?

President Assad: It’s a short halting of operations in order to allow the humanitarian supply to get into different areas in Aleppo, and at the same time to allow the civilians who wanted to leave the terrorist-held areas to move to the government-controlled area.

Question 18: This is really a step, an important step?

President Assad: Of course, it is an important step as a beginning, but it’s not enough. It’s about the continuation; how can you allow those civilians to leave. The majority of them wanted to leave the area held by the terrorists, but they won’t allow them. They either shoot them or they kill their families if they leave that area.

Question 19: Russia is on your side, what does it mean for you?

President Assad: No, it’s not on my side. It’s on the international law’s side.

It’s on the other side which is opposite to the terrorists’ side. This is the position of Russia, because they wanted to make sure that the international law prevails, not the Western agenda in toppling every government that doesn’t fit with their agendas. They wanted to make sure that the terrorism doesn’t prevail in that area, that would affect negatively the Russians themselves, Russia itself as a country, and Europe and the rest of the world. That’s what it means for Russia to stand beside the legitimate Syrian government and the Syrian people.

Question 20: Mr. President, you use chemical weapons and barrel bombs in Syria against your own population, these are UN reports, you can’t ignore it.

President Assad: You are talking about two different issues. The chemical issue, it was proven to be false, and they haven’t a shred of evidence about the Syrian Army using chemical weapons, particularly before we give up our arsenal in 2013, now we don’t have it anyway. Before that, it was fiction because if you want to use such mass destruction armaments, you’re going to kill thousands of people in one incident, and we didn’t have such incidents. Beside that, we wouldn’t use it because you’re going to kill your own people, and that’s against your interest. So, this is a false allegation. We don’t have to waste our time with it. You live in Syria, there is a traditional war, but there is nothing related to mass destruction armaments.

Journalist: But the UN report is not a fiction.

President Assad: The UN report never has been credible, never, and because they put reports based on allegations, based on other reports, on forged reports, and they say this is a report. Did they send a delegation to make investigation? They sent one in 2013, and it couldn’t prove at all that the Syrian Army used chemical weapons. This is first. The second, which is more important, the first incident happened at the beginning of 2013 in

Aleppo, when we said that the terrorists used chemical weapons against our army, and we invited the United Nations to send a delegation. We, we did, and at that time, the United States opposed that delegation because they already knew that this investigation – of course if it’s impartial – is going to prove that those terrorists, their proxies, used chemical armaments against the Syrian Army. Regarding the barrel bombs, I want to ask you: what is the definition of barrel bomb? If you go to our army, you don’t have in our records something called “barrel bomb,” so how do you understand – just to know how I can answer you – what a barrel bomb is? We have bombs.

Journalist: The destruction… it’s the destruction, and it is against humanitarian law.

President Assad: Every bomb can make destruction, every bomb, so you don’t have bomb to make nothing. So, this is a word that has been used in West as part of the Western narrative in order to show that there is an indiscriminate bomb that has been killing civilians indiscriminately and that opposes the Western narrative, I’ll show you the contradiction: in other areas they say that we are bombarding intentionally the hospitals, and you mentioned that, and they are targeting intentionally the schools, and we targeted intentionally the convoys to Aleppo last month, those targets need high-precision missiles. So, they have to choose which part of the narrative; we either have indiscriminate bombs or we have high-precision bombs. They keep contradicting in the same narrative, this is the Western reality now. So, which one to choose? I can answer you, but again, we don’t have any indiscriminate bombs. If we kill people indiscriminately, it means we are losing the war because people will be against us; I cannot kill the Syrian people, either morally or for my interest, because in that case I’m going to push the Syrian community and society towards the terrorists, not vice versa.

Question 21: I would like to mention the subject of torture prisons, Mr. President. Amnesty speaks of seventeen thousands dead. Regarding the prison of Saidnaya, there are still horrible reports. When will you allow an independent observer into that prison?

President Assad: Independent, and Amnesty International is not independent and it is not impartial.

Journalist: ICRC?

President Assad: We didn’t discuss it with the Red Cross, we didn’t discuss it. It should be discussed in our institutions, if you want to allow… if there is allegation, it could be discussed. We don’t say yes or no, but the report you have mentioned, it was a report made by Qatar, and financed by Qatar. You don’t know the source, you don’t know the names of those victims, nothing verified about that report. It was paid by Qatar directly in order to vilify and smear the Syrian government and the Syrian Army.

Journalist: But there are a lot of eyewitnesses.

President Assad: No one knows who are they. You don’t have anything clear about that. It’s not verified. So, no.

Journalist: Then open the door for organizations like Red Cross.

President Assad: It’s not my decision to tell you yes or no. We have institutions, if we need to discuss this part, we need to go back to the institutions before saying yes or no.

Question 22: Why are you sure that you are going to win this war?

President Assad: Because you have to defend your country, and you have to believe that you can win the war to defend your country. If you don’t have that belief, you will lose. You know, part of the war is what you believe in, so, it’s self-evident and very intuitive that you have to have that belief.

Question 23: If you walk through Damascus, your picture is everywhere, in every shop, in every restaurant, in every car, a symbol for a dictator, is this your way to fix your power?

President Assad: There is a difference between dictator and dictatorship.

Dictator is about the person. I didn’t ask anyone to put my picture in Syria, I never did it. This is first. Second, to describe someone as a dictator, you should ask his people, I mean only his people can say that he is a dictator or he is a good guy.

Journalist: Thank you Mr. President for having answered our questions for Swiss Television and the Rundschau.

President Assad: Thank you for coming to Syria.

Source of transcript: Syrian Arab Newsagency

People will be interested to see this interview with the Syrian president's wife, someone we do not often hear about in western media because she looks and sounds too good to suit its propaganda. In March 2011, Vogue magazine called Asma' al-Assad (née al-Akhras) "A Rose in the Desert". The same magazine smeared her years later as the wife of a war criminal. Asma' al-Assad has an English accent and British citizenship because she born and lived in England. Dr Bashar al Assad, now the president of Syria, met her when he was studying eye medicine in London in the 90's, and married her after he became the president. She was at the time contemplating going to Harvard as a post grad in banking finance. She drives alone in dangerous areas of Syria, meeting widows and orphans of the war, and the mothers of soldiers killed in action (known as 'martyrs' in Syria). She describes in detail the problems of injured soldiers and how she tries to assist. Her children attend school in Syria. She says she has received offers to leave Syria with her three children to a safer area (Gulf, Europe...) with her income guaranteed, but she did not think that would help Syria and she recognised these offers as a trick to undermine Syrian morale. Arabic MSM of the Gulf has carried many false rumors about the Assad family fleeing to Iran and Russia, meeting Russian submarines in the Mediterranean, that the Assads are divorcing, that their children hate them etc. Asma' al-Assad notes the biased treatment of displaced and wounded children in Syria in its almost exclusive reporting only of those who are in the areas occupied by the so-called 'rebels', ignoring the many deaths of soldiers in the Syrian Arab Army and that the majority of Syrians live in government held areas that the so-called 'rebels' constantly target.

Update: Above video has been deleted from YouTube - 18 August 2018

The interview of the Syrian First Lady, which 20 months ago, had been embedded above has since been deleted by YouTube. The interview embedded below was published on 18 October 2016, the day before this article was first published. It is possible that this is the same interview

Syria's First Lady Asma al-Assad's interview with Russia's Channel 24

Other videos of Asma al-Assad found on YouTube with the search terms "interview with asma al assad" (quotes omitted), include: Syria: Asma al-Assad gives first interview since start of Syrian conflict (1:57min - 1 year ago), Syria's First Lady on Gaza (5:48 min, 9 years ago), Asma al Assad full interview (23/10/16) - apparently the same interview, Syria's First Lady Asma al-Assad speech at the Paris Diplomatic Academy in 2010 (52:42 min, 14/9/16), Syrian president's wife slams Western media coverage of war - Daily Mail (1:47min, 15/3/18), …

Dr Marcus Papadopoulos was interviewed by BBC News about 'russophobia' in Britain and policy in Syria . Speaking very clearly, Papadopoulos gives a history of British resentment of Russia, dating from the Crimea and thinks that Britain is acting in part out of a feeling of being left-out in the region. Islamist terrorists in Aleppo and elsewhere in Syria are the only ones benefiting from this British ignorance and bias. It should be remembered that those Islamic terrorists that the west is backing, pose a huge threat to the people of Britain. The US-led coalition in Syria is not acting legally.

What's happening in Syria has been going on for over five years and it's not a civil war.

U.S. imperialism has been exporting disaster around the world for over a century now, but not since the "Cuban" missile crisis in 1962, has the U.S. put the world on the brink of such a disaster as we are witnessing today.

What's happening in Syria has been going on for over five years and it's not a civil war. The conflict began as a U.S.-funded effort to depose President Bashar Assad and install a puppet government in Damascus friendly to U.S. interests. I am sure there are some legitimate forces in Syria who oppose the government of Assad, but the U.S. does not care about democracy -- after-all, Assad was elected by his people.

Also in Syria, approximately one dozen militias are not only trying to overthrow the Assad government but they are also fighting among themselves. The ranking Democrat on the U.S. Congressional House Intelligence Committee, uber-Zionist Adam Schiff of California, said of the phenomena of CIA-funded militias fighting in places like Aleppo, "It's part of the three-dimensional chess game." This chess game, played by empires for millennia, profit the wealthy and as always, the people pay the heavy price.

Today we learned that China is contemplating joining Russia and Syria in their alliance to protect the sovereignty of Syria and for stabilization in the Middle East.

The U.S. has long invaded and provoked weaker countries like Afghanistan and Iraq which have little hope of retaliating but nonetheless use what resources they have to fight off U.S. imperialism. However, provoking Russia in places like Syria and Ukraine seems to be the height of arrogance and stupidity on the part of the U.S.

For many years, Russian President Vladimir Putin has been the rational actor in this insane U.S. provocation, but Russia is getting ready to fight back -- reportedly holding civil defense drills, warning Russians abroad, and even testing nuclear missiles.

Even though Russia has been invited into Syria by the government -- as rational people who are filled with apprehension over the reality of this danger -- we should be calling on all world leaders to pause in their rush to war. Some of us see no hope for the mis-leaders here in the U.S. to provide some sanity in its foreign policy. In the last U.S. presidential debate between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, the war criminal Clinton reaffirmed her hardcore stance to go to war with Russia, through Syria, if necessary. Clinton also declared her support for a "no fly zone" over Syria, which the chair of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff Joseph Dunford said would require 70,000 U.S. troops to maintain and would definitely mean war with Russia.

But the only thing that can really stop imperialist carnage is an international working-class force, refusing to be used as cannon-fodder for capitalism, and instead fighting for socialism.

Our very survival as a species depends on international solidarity.

Article by Cindy Sheehan.

An egregious example of western misreporting on Syria has been a rash of articles focusing on 'rebel' complaints about how few doctors there are in Aleppo, for instance: Hugh Naylor, "The last few doctors still in Aleppo sent a letter to Obama pleading for help", Washington Post, August 11, 2016. (Actually referring to eastern Aleppo, held by terrorists.) Journalist Eva Bartlett decided to verify the situation by going to Aleppo herself. She reports what she found in a Crosstalk interview, "White Helmets, really?". Inside this article is the text of her comments and the video. See also, Eva Bartlett: "Western corporate media 'disappears' over 1.5 million Syrians and 4,000 doctors"

EVA BARTLETT: [15:58-17:54min into the video:] "In my last visit to Syria, I went twice to Aleppo, mainly with the express intent of seeing what life was like in Aleppo, but also to speak with the Aleppo Medical Association. And this was an important factor because this association has over 4,160 registered doctors. And so, you know, when we talk about the talking points that are taken as fact by most corporate media and, unfortunately, some alternative media that is supposed to be representing the left, they will run these headlines.

We've seen it especially quite recently, 'the last doctor in Aleppo', 'the last pediatrician in Aleppo', 'the last hospitals in Aleppo'. And, so, you know, establishing that there are actually over 4000 registered doctors in Aleppo, including 800 specialists, is one important aspect. But also visiting: as a journalist, who went to visit the hospitals that have been attacked - actually attacked, and documented by these western-backed terrorists - for example the Dahbeet Maternity Hospital in Aleppo, which was attacked on May 3rd - this is important.

And this is something that these corporate media journalists could do if they were interested in telling the truth. They could have gone to Jableh, which, on May 23rd, on the same day that Tartous was attacked, Jableh suffered a series of massive terrorist suicide and car-bombing attacks. And you would think that this was important news.

One of these attacks was the suicide bomber that exploded himself in the Emergency Room - Ward of the Jableh Hospital, which was already treating people that had been injured in prior suicide attacks that day. So these are very key stories that didn't get any coverage in corporate media." [More on Jableh.

"Meanwhile you have outlets like Fox, showing the Kindi Hospital, which was a state hospital - the best in the Middle East for cancer treatment - that was destroyed. It was truck-bombed in December 2013 by Al-Nusra. And now you have Fox showing this hospital - this image - and saying that this is in eastern Aleppo and that the so-called 'government airplanes' have destroyed it. This is the level of propaganda that we are dealing with. And one day to the next you'll see, 'the last hospital', 'the last four hospitals', the last doctors', 'the last twenty doctors'. There's no consistency, even in their lies."

When it comes to hypocrisy, the pro-war Western ‘liberal’ is in a class of his own. While professing opposition to racism, the pro-war liberal is cheerleader for the most dangerous and deadly form of racism in the world today - contemporary US/Western imperialism. Article by Neil Clark, first published at https://www.rt.com/op-edge/362533-racism-war-west-imperialist/

A racism that is scarcely reported, but which has laid waste to entire countries and killed millions - and which now threatens to drag us into potentially catastrophic military confrontation with Russia.