Coming on the heels of the terrorist attack in Paris, the mass shooting and siege at the Radisson Blu Hotel in Bamako, the capital of the African nation of Mali, is still further evidence of the…
Category: France
Russia’s and Turkey’s objectives in fighting the Islamic State group are diametrically opposed. It’s absolutely impossible to understand why the Turkish government would engage in the suicidal strategy of downing a Russian Su-24 over Syrian territory – technically a NATO declaration of war on Russia – without putting in context the Turkish power play in northern Syria. President Vladmir Putin said the downing of the Russian fighter jet was a “stab in the back.” So let’s see how facts on the ground allowed it to happen. Ankara uses, finances, and weaponizes a basket case of extremist outfits across northern Syria, and needs by all means to keep supply line corridors from southern Turkey open for them; after all they need to conquer Aleppo, which would open the way for Ankara’s Holy Grail: regime change in Damascus. At the same time Ankara is terrified of the YPG – the Syrian Kurd People’s Protection Units – a sister organization of the leftist PKK. These must be contained at all costs. So the Islamic State group – against which the United Nations has declared war – is a mere detail in the overall Ankara strategy, which is essentially to fight, contain or even bomb Kurds; support all manner of Takfiris and Salafi-jihadis, including the Islamic State group; and get regime change in Damascus
Turkey’s shooting down of a Russian fighter jet this week was likely aimed at a bigger political target – to deal a blow to the proposal of a grand anti-terror coalition between the West and…
Turkey’s shooting down of a Russian jet shows the utter desperation currently sweeping through the regime change camp as Russia closes in on the death squads in Syria. At 9:30am, a Russian SU-24 jet was shot down by a Turkish fighter plane. The pilots were then allegedly killed by Syrian Turkmen anti-government militias, with the body of one being paraded on camera in a video that was immediately posted to YouTube. Turkey claimed the jet had encroached on Turkish airspace, but Russia maintains the plane was shot down inside Syrian territory, 4km from the Turkish border.
Russian Warplane Down: NATO’s Act of War Despite blatant provocation, Russia must continue toward the finish line. With cameras rolling, Turkey has claimed it has shot down a Russian Sukhoi Su-24 attack aircraft. The New York Times in its article, “Turkey Shoots Down Russian Warplane Near Syria Border,” reports that: Turkish fighter jets on patrol near the Syrian border shot down a Russian warplane on Tuesday after it violated Turkey’s airspace, a long-feared escalation that could further strain relations between Russia and the West. The escalation is “long feared” not because the Turkish government actually fears that Russian warplanes crossing their border pose a threat to it or its people, but because Russia has ended NATO’s proxy war, a proxy war spearheaded in part by Turkey itself, amid Russia’s joint military operations with Syria against the self-proclaimed “Islamic State” (ISIS) and supporting terrorist factions.
U.S. Congresswoman Introduces Bill to Stop “illegal” War on Assad U.S. Congresswoman: CIA Must Stop Illegal, Counterproductive War to Overthrow Assad Last month, US Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard went on CNN and laid bare Washington’s…
Europe is in free fall. Nobody can doubt that any more. In fact, the is EU simultaneous suffering from several crucial problems and any one of them could potentially become catastrophic. Let’s look at them one by one. The 28 member EU makes no economic sense The most obvious problem for the EU is that it makes absolutely no economic sense. Initially, in the early 1950s, there was a small group of not too dissimilar nations which decided to integrate their economies, these were the so-called Inner Six who founded the European Community (EC): Belgium , France , West Germany , Italy, Luxembourg and the Netherlands. In 1960 this “core group” was joined by seven more countries, the Outer Seven, who were unwilling to join the EC but wanted to join a European Free Trade Association (EFTA).
French President Francois Hollande is pushing for a grand coalition to defeat the self-styled Islamic State terror group. Hollande wants the United States and Russia to join forces in a united fight. Russian President Vladimir Putin was quick to welcome the French proposal, saying that such a grand alliance is what Moscow has been advocating for months. Putin has even ordered his naval forces to begin liaising with the French aircraft carrier Charles de Gaulle to coordinate aerial bombing operations in Syria against the Islamic State network. Hollande is due to fly to Washington next week to discuss with American President Barack Obama how this proposed military coalition could be organised.
Washington has learned that threats and coercion do not work against Russia. All the threats have done is to build Putin’s public support to astronomical levels and to unify Russia against the West’s assault. This is a failed policy that Washington is abandoning as Washington sees a new opportunity in Russia’s desire for Western cooperation, not only against ISIL but also on a wide range of other issues. Realizing that guile can be more effective than the stick, the West is moving toward drawing Russia into the Western system by offering a coalition against ISIL. Once Russia is in a coalition against ISIL, Russia will lose control. This is Washington’s strategy for counteracting the initiative that Russia seized in Syria.
This can’t be published in Western major ‘news’ media: it is samizdat, in the Western dictatorships, but it is all demonstrably true, nonetheless. Here is how it started — the original sin of the post-Cold-War West, which has produced the problems of today and the future:
Let’s start with the results of a 2009 investigation by Germany’s Spiegel, or Mirror, magazine, which is a mainstream German news site, that’s a bit more honest than America’s equivalents: They headlined, very directly: «NATO’s Eastward Expansion: Did the West Break Its Promise to Moscow?»