Yesterday 3 U.S. troops were killed and 34 wounded due to an attack that allegedly hit on a place known as Tower 22. This is part of the Al Tanf area where U.S. troops illegally occupy parts of Syria to control the traffic on the main road between Iraq and Syria.
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The reporting so far does not answer many arising questions.
Tower 22 is on the Jordanian side of the boarder but Jordan insists that no attack had happened on its grounds.
Another anomaly are the high rate of wounded from the alleged drone strike. Drones are used in mass in the Ukraine war but the casualties they cause are usually less than a handful per drone.
The highly automated short and medium range air-defenses (C-RAMs, the equivalent of naval Phalanx guns) at the base should be able to shoot down any drone. Why didn’t they work?
The U.S. has also used Al Tanf base and the Rukban camp to house and train ISIS splinter groups so they are able to attack perceived U.S. enemies. Were any of those folks around?
The U.S. claims that an Iraqi resistance group, allegedly supported by Iran, is responsible for the strike. There are several such groups allied with Iran in Syria and Iraq. Which one of them did this? Does the U.S. know this at all?
Iran denies any involvement in the attack.
The attack is certainly an escalation over previous ones. President Biden has said that he will respond to it.
The question in then to where to respond (Syria, Iraq, Iran) and to what grade. Most likely the U.S. will escalate from its previous bombing of this or that Iraq resistance group. Should the U.S. attack any state related institutions or position, the situation will escalate further.
The resistance camp would then try even harder to damage more U.S. assets. Since the U.S. assassination of General Quassam Suleimani its overall aim is to remove the U.S. from the Middle East.
The U.S. immediate response to the hit was the activation of long range tanker planes:
OSINTdefender @sentdefender – 0:21 UTC · Jan 29, 2024
At least 6 U.S. Air Force KC-135 Aerial-Refueling Tankers, most from March Air Reserve Base in Southern California, are heading Northeast across the United States and preparing to Transit the Atlantic towards the U.K. and Europe. I wonder what kind of Aircraft they are Refueling? 🤔
Aerial-refueling tankers are used to keep fighter jets in the air for several hours. The reasons to keep jets in the air may not necessarily be to attack someone, but to prevent them from being destroyed by an attack on ones own airports.
The U.S. has plenty of bases in the Middle East which house a lot of expensive jets.
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If the U.S. suspects that those bases will come under attack it will need lots of air-tanker capability to save the jets currently stationed on them.
One could conclude from this that the U.S. will attack a target so important that it has to prepare for an all out response attack on its own Middle East bases.
There are several other possibilities but this seems to be the most likely conclusion.
Now let’s take a step back to take a look at the larger picture.
The current escalation in the Middle East is happening because the Zionist attempt to ethnically cleanse Gaza, the West Bank and south Lebanon. The U.S active support for this aim has led to more U.S. wars in Yemen, Iraq and now in Syria. While the U.S. has claimed that it did not want an all out war in the Middle East it has done its best to further one.
The dystopian decision by the U.S. and its European vassals to deny all support for UNRWA as response for the International Court of Justice decision against Israel’s genocide of Palestinians was a further escalation. That a dozen or less of the 30,000 UNRWA worker were probably involved in the October 7 events was known for weeks. To roll this out just after the ICJ dictum happened is a clear act of revenge against the whole UN system.
This is the rule based order, where the U.S. makes and discards all rules at will, fighting against long established international and humanitarian law.
Sam Husseini @samhusseini – 18:58 UTC · Jan 27, 2024
Francis Boyle states that with States (including US and UK govs) cutting off funding to UNRWA, it is “no longer the case of these States aiding and abetting Israeli Genocide against the Palestinians in violation of Genocide Convention article 3(e) criminalizing ‘complicity’ in genocide. These States are now also directly violating Genocide Convention article 2(c) by themselves: ‘Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part…'”
ICJ is the highest independent court humanity has. The U.S. and its proxies decided to fight against the standing law of the world.
It is the rules based order against anyone not following it. This is the unilateral past fighting the rising multilateral future. A dangerous time.
As Arnaud Bertrand quotes:
“The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters.”
Antonio Gramsci