Arms Shipments Seen From Sudan to Syria Rebels
C J Chivers, Eric Schmitt, NYT, Aug 12 2013
This may be true or it may just be an attempt to get Omar al-Bashir into more trouble

Dempsey in Israel, Jordan, to tie last ends before
Obama decides finally on US military action in Syria
DEBKAfile, Aug 13 2013
This is certainly not true, because never in 1m years would the US put the Israeli Air Force in charge of air cover over a Syrian invasion!

Posted by: Rowan Berkeley | Aug 13 2013 15:53 utc | 1

As if anyone really wants to choke down all 19 pages of crap from Pollack at Saban/Brookings. The highlights give a good indication that they're still peddling disinformation about the insurgents and the government forces and that they have little new to offer as solutions:

Highlights include:

• The strengths and weaknesses of the opposition, including: greater numbers, a history of deprivation of political power, the aid of Islamist militias affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood and Salafist groups, and support from Arab and Western countries.

• The strengths and weaknesses of the regime, including: motivation to defend against a determined majority, a geographic advantage, the remnants of the Syrian armed forces, help of foreign contingents like Hizballah,[!!!] and the support of foreign countries like Iran[!!!] and reportedly Russia and China.

• Options for U.S. interventions to break the stalemate, including:
• Training and equipping the opposition.
• Stopping the resupply of the regime in order to diminish its ability to generate firepower.
• Attacking regime infrastructure targets, such as military bases, power-generation plants and transportation choke points like bridges.
• Establishing and maintaining a no-fly zone.
• Engaging in a tactical air campaign against regime ground forces.

The insurgents, with Western backing, have already been working on the first four points with varying levels of success (succeeding at destroying a lot of infrastucture; losing a lot of the hearts and minds of moderate Sunni Syrians). Neocons and neolibs have been trying hard to get a no-fly zone for the past few years, but only the most bellicose have continued to demand direct US attacks on the Syrian army as Brookings does here.

Posted by: Rusty Pipes | Aug 13 2013 23:40 utc | 2

Related to Syria, does anyone have any guesses about Gingrich's recent shift away from the PNAC agenda for the Middle East? While still claiming allegiance to neocon ideals, he is backing away from interventionism in Syria and elsewhere in the Middle East. Do people think that this is more closely related to the views of his favorite donors, like Adelson, or do people think that he's trying to broaden his appeal to a different pool of voters (since he never was the favorite among Christian Zionists)?

Posted by: Rusty Pipes | Aug 13 2013 23:57 utc | 3

Harf in Monday's State Dept presser:

Our position on Assad has not changed, that he has lost all legitimacy. He must go. It is inconceivable that the regime will be able to regain control over all of their territory. So we’ve made that clear and we’ll continue working towards that goal.

Inconceivable.

You keep using that word. I do not think that it means what you think that it means.

Posted by: Rusty Pipes | Aug 14 2013 0:51 utc | 4

"Options for U.S. interventions to break the stalemate, including:
• Training and equipping the opposition.
• Stopping the resupply of the regime in order to diminish its ability to generate firepower.
• Attacking regime infrastructure targets, such as military bases, power-generation plants and transportation choke points like bridges.
• Establishing and maintaining a no-fly zone.
• Engaging in a tactical air campaign against regime ground forces."

They wish...
Sounds like Happy Talk to me.

Happy talk, keep talkin' happy talk,
Talk about things you'd like to do.
You got to have a dream,
If you don't have a dream,
How you gonna have a dream come true?

Am I the only person who's not surprised that the weak as piss and twice as Yellow (mock-superpower) Yankees NEVER mention Russia's battle-ready offshore fleet?
At all?
Ever?

Imo the above is what prompted Obama's Putin tantrums.
If he/she had an honest bone in his/her body he/she would have said "How DARE those Russkies scare us into abandoning our plans to slaughter Syrian women & children from a safe distance?!"
The Yankees will soon be dreaming up deflections for their deflections, if they're not already.

Posted by: Hoarsewhisperer | Aug 14 2013 2:52 utc | 5

@Hoarsewhisperer 4 – Re: Yankees NEVER mention Russia's battle-ready offshore fleet?

My sources in Moscow tell me that Putin's secret standing orders to the fleet in the Mediterranean are:

1) Orders to sink the offending aircraft carrier, if any NATO ship launches an air attack against Syria without the explicit authorization of the UN Security Council.
2) Authorization for the use of tactical nuclear weapons for self defense against any counterattack by NATO forces.

Posted by: Petri Krohn | Aug 14 2013 7:32 utc | 6

HOW DO JIHADISTS INFILTRATE PALESTINIAN CAMPS IN SYRIA ?

HERE ARE A COUPLE OF STATEMENTS GIVEN BY RESIDENTS WHO FLED WITH THEIR LIVES FROM THE CAMPS THAT WERE INFILTRATED BY AL-QAEDA TERRORISTS, DESCRIBING THE INFESTATION OF THEIR CAMPS ..

How is it possible that more than half of the Palestinian camps in Syria not only fell, but did so, regrettably, without all that much resistance, to the point at which we see them now dominated by largely foreign jihadists who continue to impose their unwanted extremist religious beliefs on a largely progressive secular Palestinian community? It is a subject currently much discussed here.

This observer has deduced from a number of conversations—with former and current camp residents, as well as members of the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command, Palestinian NGO’s, and also with academics—that there is a ‘model of occupation’ metastasizing in Syria in a manner strikingly similar to what we saw six years ago at Nahr al Bared Palestinian camp near Tripoli Lebanon. The stories we hear today are quite similar to those from among the nearly 30,000 refugees at Nahr al Bared who were forced to flee to the nearby Badawi camp or to Lebanon’s ten other camps—reports related to this observer in visits to Nahr al Bared in May of 2007.

What we hear today in Syria bears an almost uncanny likeness. For instance one lady, whose family is from Safad in occupied Palestine explained: “First they (the intruders) appeared only a few in number. We noticed them and that some had ‘foreign’ accents and wore conservative clothes, most had beards. They were polite and friendly. Then more arrived, a few followed by women and children. They stayed to themselves at first and they began using the local mosque—even being welcomed at first by local sheiks who sometimes expressed admiration for the sincerity and devoutness. Then some of them began to preach their versions of the Koran, and at some point their gentle teaching became more strident, and soon these men were commenting on how some of the Palestinian women dressed in an un-Islamic fashion and even lectured young women about modesty and that they must change their ways, including stop smoking, and to leave public meetings if they were the only women present, and wear a full hijab.”
etc
https://www.facebook.com/me1311/posts/10151652949253773

Posted by: brian | Aug 14 2013 7:46 utc | 7

You know the Onion is a satire newspaper? Not everyone knows that. You should indicate that otherwise people may think it's for real.

Posted by: helpfull tip | Aug 14 2013 7:52 utc | 8

5) Doubt it, I guess the US and Russia have come to some kind of understanding on Syria a long time ago. The reset in relations with Russia is official US strategy, they would not risk that for something everybody in the US declares to have no national interest for.
The US has created a perfect mess in the Middle East for themselves - they have no party left to support without losing their allies.
Turkey seems to have got their proxies to fight the Kurds causing Barzani to threaten to intervene in Syria, Erdogan was supposed to have good relations with Barzani against the Baghdad governement. In Libya there is a official government dominated by the Muslim Brotherhood (no, people did not vote for that) supported by militias against the rudimentary national army that is supposed to be built. US drones are flying over Tripoli and Benghazi - will the US cooperate with the official Libyan government and their Muslim Brotherhood militias in eliminating their enemies in the likely new civil war? After having cooperated with the Muslim Brotherhood in Syria, to the annoyance of Saudi Arabia. Having been ousted in Egypt with consent of the US, where will the Muslim Brotherhood turn to? Iran? Presumably they already did in Gaza. How will the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood react to the new landscape? Whatever the US does now is lose lose.

Posted by: somebody | Aug 14 2013 8:04 utc | 9

My sources in Moscow .. Posted by: Petri Krohn | Aug 14, 2013 3:32:57 AM | 5

Posted by: Rowan Berkeley | Aug 14 2013 8:11 utc | 10

"My impression is that the whole Al-Qaida "conference call" story, the closure of embassies in the Middle East and Africa and the current drone killing orgy in Yemen are an artificial diversions from the NSA spying. They failed as diversion but created lots of new enemies."

woof woof woof

Posted by: jub | Aug 14 2013 8:53 utc | 11

The egyptian army keeps killing off its population with support by US, Israel and coup supporters worldwide.

Posted by: Anonymous | Aug 14 2013 9:14 utc | 12

Add to it: The Arab Spring is getting complicate (how will the MSM react)
http://english.ahram.org.eg/NewsContentP/1/79000/Egypt/Live-updates-Egyptian-police-attack-Muslim-Brother.aspx

Posted by: Mina | Aug 14 2013 10:26 utc | 13

The emerging NSA Panopticon isn't the only method the elites have at their disposal to regulate their captive citizenry (or, rather, to cause their captives to self-regulate.)

I'd say the elites have learned from the French Reign of Terror and the Russian Bolshevik Revolution. See, they are capable of learning if not changing.

Posted by: Monolycus | Aug 14 2013 10:29 utc | 14

Anonymous,

Sorry but usually when I talk to MBs or Salafis, everything is "God's will": no matter putting sugar in the tea if your uncle is diabetic, since it is God who decides when he dies.
So how is it that when they have problems, suddenly they don't understand it as "God's punishment"?
And why is it that they burn churches? It's like the Syrian story? The MSM wrote at the beginning to justify the uprising that it was the Sunnis being fed up with the control of the Alawites, although the Sunnis are everywhere in the governement.. so in Egypt they blame the Christians although there is almost zero Christian in the new authorities, the top heads of the army, and the people who are recently re-taking power?
" 11:20 A priest named as Ihab told Ahram’s Haggag El-Husseini that the Dalga church in Deir Mawat located in Upper Egypt’s Minya governorate is under attack.

The main Coptic Orthodox Church in Sohag city, also in Upper Egypt, has been set ablaze by pro-Morsi protesters, reports Aswat Masriya. It is located close to Thaqafa Square, where thousands are protesting against the sit-ins' disperal."

and here

http://arabist.net/blog/2013/8/12/the-brothers-and-the-copts
(they switched directly from the Shiites to the Copts after the dismissal of Morsi)

The main problem of the Islamists is coherence. Rumours and the blame game does not help rule a country. Get a brain and then try to enter into politics.

Posted by: Mina | Aug 14 2013 10:33 utc | 15

@15: "Get a brain and then try to enter into politics."

This is a meaningless generalization. Some people only need walnuts to enter politics.

Posted by: Yonatan | Aug 14 2013 11:06 utc | 16

15) yep. Someone has to raise standards, to start respecting human rights and stop killing people though. It clearly is not the Egyptian military, the Egyptian police or the US who are going to do that. Egypt won't be able to make the Muslim Brotherhood disappear. Part of them will go underground now feeling fully justified to do whatever.

Posted by: somebody | Aug 14 2013 11:24 utc | 17

Now the death toll is about 100 civilians killed by the egyptian dictatorship. Obama is nowhere to be found as usual. Same when ISrael bombed Gaza, no condemnations to be found..

Posted by: Anonymous | Aug 14 2013 11:25 utc | 18

Yonatan, I suspect what Mina means is the politics of the real, that is, the rational. Walnuts (McCain) is a stage performer in the politics of the spectacle, namely the fantastic US struggle to conquer the world for a Calvinist pseudo-Christ enslaved by Jewish finance capital, which latter, while seemingly rational in its own way, is really just the secular shell of a carefully nurtured religious elite psychosis. But your ironic detachment is perfectly legitimate.

Posted by: Rowan Berkeley | Aug 14 2013 11:39 utc | 19

Well, the leader of the Ummah is KSA, so why don't you wait for KSA's reaction, rather than Obama's?

Even "moderate clerics" can explain you that for practicig Muslims, demonstration against the rulers is strictly forbidden
(http://www.joshualandis.com/blog/sheikh-muhammad-al-yaqoubi-interviewed-by-syria-comment/)
and this is the legal ground why demos are forbidden in the Gulf.

Unless the Islamist's mind finds a way out its own contradictions, it will never be able to participate in politics.

Posted by: Mina | Aug 14 2013 11:43 utc | 20

By the way, from the Western point of view, whatever is happening in the Arab world these days is simply the result of a chemical process called "demographic explosion" and "women oppression".

Who is to blame for it?

Posted by: Mina | Aug 14 2013 11:45 utc | 21

20) Mina, it is no contradiction and I am no Islamist, nor Muslim, as Muslims chose the clerics they follow and those clerics come with rulers, therefore Muslims chose their rulers by proxy.
So when clerics declare Morsi the legitimate ruler, everybody is supposed to follow him not the illegitimate Egyptian army.

Posted by: somebody | Aug 14 2013 12:08 utc | 22

Headline -Global condemnation against Egypt violence
http://www.aljazeera.com/news/middleeast/2013/08/2013814114553219849.html

Actually only Iran, Qatar, Turkey have condemned the regime in Egypt for its massacaring.

Posted by: Anonymous | Aug 14 2013 12:36 utc | 23

The Syria articles have been fairly light recently. Of the links B provided on Syria, I think the last 2 are the most important. Barzani, the leader of Kurdish Iraq, saying he could send Peshmerga fighters to help Kurdish Syrians fight the Jihadists must be welcome news. The Peshmerga have 300,000 fighting men and women under arms and have experience fighting Jihadists from the Iraq civil war around 2006.

What appears to be happening with the recent massacre of 200 Kurds in Syria is that a second front is being opened up. The rebels are now fighting the Syrian Army in the West, and Kurdish militias in the East and North-East. Any help to the Kurdish militas by the Peshmerga could prove decisive.

The last link about Iraq PM Maliki launching a new operation on the Syrian border will also be good news. It will force groups like ISIS (Islamic State of Iraq and Syria) to divide there fighters between the Syrian army and the Iraq Army offensive and will deny them the opportunity to run over the Iraq border to rest.

Two other pieces of news:

Golani Vs Baghdadi Al Qaeda's Internal War a good summary of the two Jihadist groups in Syria slowly drifting to war. Al Nusra Front which is heaviest in the South of Syria (around Damascus) wants to focus solely on Syria. ISIS wants to merge to Syrian war with the Iraq war and is heaviest in the North (around Aleppo).

Jihadi sources report that ISIS has been making gains at the expense of Nusra, particularly after a number of sheikhs and Islamist brigades pledged their loyalty to Baghdadi. This was met with similar declarations by a smaller number of jihadi organizations in favor of Golani. These sources say that the mounting tensions led Zawahiri to intervene again, this time sending Golani a letter asking him to put an end to the infighting by dissolving his organization and merging it under Baghdadi’s command, but to no avail.

And of course the news of Hezbollah giving Israel a warning shot. Last week an Israel squad entered Lebanon over the Palestine border. What there mission was is unclear, but they were members of an elite brigade called Unit 269. Apparently 1000 metres over the border, 4 Israelis were wounded and the group withdrew back to occupied Palestine. Al Akhbar had an account of what happened published by Hezbollah's media arm Al Manar:

It was Tuesday midnight when an Israeli commando force which belongs to one of the elite army teams advanced towards the border fence with Lebanon and prepared itself to cross the borders in 20 minutes, according to Al-Akhbar newspaper.

"The enemy troops crossed a narrow way to escape the UN and the Lebanese army posts in the region; they crossed 1000 meters within few minutes before two explosives filled with iron balls were detonated Wednesday at 00:40," Al-Akhbar mentioned, "The explosion was enough to hit everything within a 30-meter-diameter circle."

"The military leadership decided to withdraw all the Israeli troops before removing the traces of the confront, shunning more losses,". After around 4 hours, the battlefield was deserted; the UN troops did not move yet called the Israelis who belittled what happened and attributed it to fireworks," Al-Akhbar clarified, "The Lebanese army later moved without finding any effect of the confront," it stressed, "The remnants of the iron balls and blood spots were seen to conclude that the Israeli army violated the 400-meter depth of the Lebanese territories."

This was probably a test of the Lebanon border to see if Hezbollah, distracted by the Syria war was still fully alert to Israel. Guess the Israeli's learned that they are.

Posted by: Colm O' Toole | Aug 14 2013 12:55 utc | 24

Al-Akhbar actually claims that this was an ambush the Israelis walked into, and that this proves that Hezbollah has intelligence sources inside Israeli military (or its Druze auxiliaries). But this may just be psychological warfare. It seems to me more likely the Israelis just stumbled into a minefield, which obviously extends all along the Lebanese side of the border, with pathways through it only Hezbollah and/or the Lebanese army know..

Posted by: Rowan Berkeley | Aug 14 2013 13:13 utc | 25

I am not sure this article has been posted here
http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/08/05/us-syria-crisis-refugees-idUSBRE9740V120130805

The most cynical part is here "A U.N. official told Reuters that there were suspicions that boys of 15 or 16 were often taken back to fight, chaperoned by an uncle, elder brother or other relative.
"It's a war crime," the official said.
The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said child recruitment had not been a major problem until now because the opposition forces did not have enough arms and ammunition."

The same week, we read that two teenagers came from Sweden to participate in djihad in Syria and made a suicide attack on a check-point!

When is the UN going to declare djihad and calls for djihad a crime against humanity? I would be delighted to see the Saudis withdraw their one-hundred million dollars donation for the UN counter-terrorism center because they cannot condemn djihad (even the moderate cleric i posted the interview of doesn't: this is what is called a taboo when you are a dogmatic).

Posted by: Mina | Aug 14 2013 14:13 utc | 26

bizarre!
American defense contractor CACI International has sued four former detainees in Abu Ghraib prison to compensate the legal expenses it paid over their dismissed lawsuit regarding the company’s role in torturing the plaintiffs in the notorious jail in Iraq.

The four Iraqi nationals had earlier filed a lawsuit in a District Court in Alexandria against the company accusing it of torturing, humiliating and dehumanizing them when they served time in the prison.
But in July, the judge dismissed the case, saying the court did not have jurisdiction to hear the lawsuit because the incidents happened overseas.
etc
http://www.presstv.ir/detail/2013/08/14/318762/abu-ghraib-torture-victims-sued-by-torturers/

US usually thinks it has jurisdiction everywhere!

Posted by: brian | Aug 15 2013 8:03 utc | 27

footage of snipers on roof in egypt

http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=e5a_1376505565

Posted by: brian | Aug 15 2013 8:30 utc | 28

so who is really behind the violence in egypt? dongt be fooled as so many are:

'The Egyptian police are quite capable of peacefully dispersing demonstrators, so long as there are no mysterious provocateurs shooting at them.

In Egypt, on 14 August 2013, "state television announced that a second demonstration site at Nadha Square, near Cairo University, had been cleared with relative ease before midday...

"ONTV news showed firearms and rounds of ammunition allegedly seized in the raid.

"The demonstrators fled while some skirmished with anti-Morsi mobs.

"Witnesses said the police held back as the two sides shot at each other with pistols."
http://aangirfan.blogspot.com.au/2013/08/mysterious-shooters-in-egypt.html

Posted by: brian | Aug 16 2013 9:16 utc | 29