FILE PHOTO. The Tabqa Dam in Syria. ©Claude Salhani / Sygma via Getty ImagesIn 2017, the US bombed a piece of strategic infrastructure in Syria, the Tabqa Dam on the Euphrates River, despite it being on a no-strike list, the New York Times reported.
In the occupied Golan Heights, the population of Settlers and Syrians is approximately equal, but experts fear that a new Israeli project will turn Syrians into a demographic minority on their own land.
by
Jessica Buxbaum
Issa Toumi [Photo courtesy of Issa Touma]
[Source: undark.org; Collage: Steve Brown]Welcome to MintCast, the official MintPress News podcast featuring dissenting voices the establishment would rather silence. Today MintCast host Mnar Adley is joined by Vanessa Beeley, an independent investigative journalist and war correspondent based in Damascus, Syria.
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After three years of a fragile ceasefire and a campaign of assassinations of Syrian government ‘loyalists’ by embedded fundamentalist armed groups, the Syrian flag has once more been raised in Daraa Al Balad.
Western media persists in portraying the emergence of extremist armed groups in Daraa, south of Damascus, as the “cradle of the revolution” to overthrow the Syrian government. The reality is that Daraa was the touchpaper lit by hardline Libyan mercenaries imported into the city prior to 2011.
The hostility of the U.S. against the resistance axis in Iran, Iraq, Syria and Lebanon has led to conflicting aims. While the U.S. wants to isolate the ‘resistance’ it also wants to keep its own dominating role in Lebanon. Those aims are now in conflict. The U.S. is thus in a situation where it will have to lift sanctions against Syria to be able to politically compete with Hizbullah in Lebanon.
Fencing of Durand Line is almost complete. Pakistani troops guarding the border with Afghanistan in KhyberThe Moscow daily Vedomosti with links to the establishment has reported that Russia will give “limited military support” to Uzbekistan and Tajikistan in the event of attacks from Afghanistan, including weapons supplies, air support and deployment of special forces, but there are “no plans to deploy major ground forces” to the region.
Author: Vladimir Platov
For a long time, Russia and Israel avoided clashes in Syria, where their interests overlap. After Moscow introduced its forces into Syrian territory in 2015, it took into account Israeli interests related to the security of the Jewish state. Israel appreciated Russia’s position and tried to make the best of the situation by avoiding clashes of Russian-Israeli interests in Syria. Moreover, Israel used Russia’s military intervention in Syria to reach military and political understanding with Moscow, knowing full well that Russia will play an influential role in the region only if it can find a balance between the interests of its allies on the one hand and Israel as a regional power on the other.
9 July 2021 — RT
By Kit Klarenberg, an investigative journalist exploring the role of intelligence services in shaping politics and perceptions. Follow him on Twitter @KitKlarenberg
Millions was spent clandestinely setting up and paying a network of ‘journalists’ to pump out anti-Assad, pro-opposition content as directed by a shadowy firm run by the UK foreign intelligence service’s counter-terrorism ex-head.
8 July 2021 — CovertAction Magazine
Syrians in Lebanon hold portrait of leader Bashar al-Assad as they head to the polls to vote for him in May 2014 elections; Assad won with 88% of the vote. [Source: csmonitor.com]
United States warmakers have become so skilled at propaganda that not only can they wage a war of aggression without arousing protest; they can also compel liberals to denounce peace activists using language reminiscent of the McCarthy era.
7 July 2021 — Moon of Alabama
As we wrote eight days ago:
On Sunday the U.S.bombed three positions of Iraqi Popular Mobilization Force at the Syrian-Iraqi border.
The U.S. had no right to do so. The legal reasoning the Biden administration provided for the attack is nonsense. As is the claimed rationale of establishing ‘deterrence’ against further attacks on U.S. troops by this or that Iraqi militia group. The last strike in that area in February was supposed to have fulfilled the same purpose but obviously did not deter anything. Sunday’s strike was immediately responded to with missiles fired against a U.S. position in Syria. More such incidents will follow.
2 July 2021 — GrayZone
Facing growing outcry, OPCW Director General Fernando Arias went before the UN and told new falsehoods about his organization’s Syria cover-up scandal — along with more disingenuous excuses to avoid addressing it.
In the two years since the censorship of a Syria chemical weapons investigation was exposed, the head of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), Fernando Arias, has vigorously resisted accountability.
22 May, 2021 — CovertAction Magazine
Man with Lebanese flag surveys wreckage from protests that gripped Beirut earlier this year. [Source: bbc.com]
Classified UK Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office (FCDO) documents released by hacktivist collective Anonymous raise serious questions about London’s cloak-and-dagger activities in Lebanon, and whether they may have led to the ouster of the country’s government.
10 May, 2021 — RT
Members of Syria’s Civil Defence service (White Helmets) look for wounded people in the rubble after a reported explosion in a depot close to a camp for the internally displaced near al-Fua, in the country’s northwestern Idlib province, on May 3, 2021. © AFP / Omar HAJ KADOUR
By Kit Klarenberg, an investigative journalist exploring the role of intelligence services in shaping politics and perceptions. Follow him on Twitter @KitKlarenberg
The epic establishment clean-up operation launched in the wake of James Le Mesurier’s apparent suicide was effective in the short term, but determined digging by critical journalists means the scandal definitely isn’t over yet.
18 April 2021 — The Grayzone
7 April 2021 — The Grayzone
White Helmets founder James Le Mesurier falling to his death from the top floor of his Istanbul home in uncertain circumstances in November 2019 created a myriad of extremely serious problems for a great many powerful people.
7 April 2021 — Consortium News
Pro-Western Syrian exiles have issued a diatribe against the most informative critics of U.S. war policy at a time when Washington’s aggressiveness is reaching new levels of intensity.
A protest placard in the Kafersousah neighborhood of Damascus, Syria, Dec. 26, 2012. (Freedom House, Flickr)
By Diana Johnstone
in Paris
Special to Consortium News
No promising event has more fully failed to keep its promise than the optimistically named Arab Spring. Ten years ago, massive protest demonstrations that began in Tunisia and moved quickly to Egypt were hailed as the harbinger of democracy overtaking the Middle East in one great swoop of history.
The New Dark Age 