WarSclerotic

Taking the US fight against IS into Syria would consolidate Assad and his Iranian-Hizballah allies.

Debka

British and German intelligence sources reported Saturday, Aug. 23, that US intelligence aid to the Assad regime, channeled through German BND intelligence, had enabled the Syrian air force to more precisely target al Qaeda units. These reports tie in with proliferating accounts from Washington that President Barack Obama is on the point of a decision to extend military strikes into Syria for targeting the Islamic State’s terrorist base.

He has been warned by some top US generals that IS poses a threat to the United States and cannot be seriously engaged without dealing with the group’s Syrian stronghold. “We’re not going to be restricted by borders,” said Ben Rhodes, Obama’s deputy national security adviser, in a comment Thursday.

debkafile’s military and intelligence sources report that there is no confirmation from the ground in Syria that Washington is indeed passing intelligence to Syria through Berlin to help the Syrian air force reach IS targets. The fact is that Syria is falling well short of arresting the IS advance on two critical fronts:

1. Aleppo. The Islamist threat looms grimly over an approaching Syrian-Hizballah military victory, under Iranian commanders, in Aleppo, Syria’s largest city. They have come close to dislodging rebel forces from their last footholds, only to be faced with a new enemy. In the last fortnight, al Qaeda forces armed with American weapons taken booty in Iraq have surged out of their northern Syrian stronghold of Raqqa to capture dozens of villages around the city. Syrian and Hizballah forces, after completing their takeover of Aleppo, will find themselves encircled by Islamist units.

2. Tabqa Air Base. IS forces have pinned down some 1,000 Syrian air force and military personnel in the Tabqa air base southwest of Raqqa. They are locked in fierce combat. Every attempt by the Syrian army in the last two weeks to break the siege has been repelled by the Islamists. The latest attempt by the new Syrian Republican Guard’s 124th Brigade to reverse the battle has not so far broken the extremists’ stranglehold.

The fall of Tabqa air base would represent the Islamic State’s next major victory after the capture of Iraq’s second city of Mosul in July. It would open the road to Hama, 480 km to the west, and the main highways to Syria’s most important ports and naval bases in Latakia and Tartus in the Assad clan’s heartland.

In a word, by taking Tabqa, IS would virtually roll back a year of advances made by the Hizballah-backed Syrian military against the insurgency, and replace the former threat to the Assad regime with a new one from the Islamic State.

So in any decision to extend US military action from Iraq to Syria, President Obama must take into consideration its likely collateral effect – if successful, which would be to rescue Assad’s rule in Damascus from the Islamist peril and relieve his Hizballah and Iranian allies of this pressure.

After declaring for nearly four years that Bashar Assad must go, the US president may end up sending a US aircraft carrier to save him.
This decision by the US president would bear heavily on the security of two of Syria’s neighbors, Israel and Jordan.

debkafile’s military and intelligence sources add that, in view of Egyptian president Abdel Fatteh El-Sisi’s recent clandestine contacts with President Assad, an American decision to strike al Qaeda in Syria may also influence El-Sisi’s calculations about hosting diplomacy for an accommodation of the Gaza conflict.

http://www.aljazeera.com/news/middleeast/2014/08/gaza-ceasefire-2014823124231314980.html

Look at the picture, they knew exactly where the bomb would hit !

And you can see the special explosives used by Israel to avoid as much as possible collateral damage, the bomb head is made from nano aluminum and has no shrapnel, just dust what is harmless after a couple of meters !

And they Know it !

And the pin point precision !

Iran refuses IAEA access to Parchin base | The Times of Israel.

Though not part of interim agreement with West, nuclear watchdog says access essential to ascertain Tehran’s nuclear intentions

Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency, IAEA, Yukiya Amano of Japan waits for the start of the IAEA board of governors meeting at the International Center in Vienna, Austria, Monday, June 2, 2014. (Photo credit: AP/Ronald Zak)

Iran will not give UN nuclear inspectors access to a military base outside Tehran that they have been seeking to visit since 2005, Defense Minister Hossein Dehgan said on Saturday.

Dehgan’s comments came just two days before a deadline for Iran to give its response to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) over historic allegations of a military dimension to its nuclear research.

“The agency carried out several visits to Parchin (before 2005), took samples and found nothing untoward,” Dehgan told the ISNA news agency. “There is therefore no reason for new access to Parchin as nothing new has come up since the last inspections.”

IAEA inspectors have been given access to a string of declared nuclear sites as part of an interim nuclear deal reached with the major powers last November. Access to Parchin was not agreed under the terms of that accord but the IAEA has been seeking to visit the base as part of its mission to answer all concerns about Iran’s nuclear program, past and present.

Addressing the allegations, long denied by Tehran, would be an important element in the comprehensive deal on Iran’s nuclear program that world powers are seeking to reach by November 24.

IAEA director Yukiya Amano, who visited Tehran earlier this month, said in June that access to Parchin was essential for the watchog to be able to certify Iran’s nuclear program as peaceful.

The base lies at the centre of allegations of past Iranian research into sophisticated explosives that can be used to detonate a nuclear warhead.

In his June report, Amano said satellite photographs suggested there had been fresh activity at the base this year.

“Since February this year, we again start to observe activities…these activities continue,” he said.

Iran has repeatedly refused the IAEA access to the base but “we keep on insisting to have access to that particular site in Parchin, to the people and to their documents,” Amano said in the report.

Dehgan also said that his country refused to give the agency information on its scientists in the defense industry.

US Considers Taking Fight Against Islamic State Into SyriaFriday, 22 Aug 2014 05:20 PMBy Todd Beamon

via US Considers Taking Fight Against Islamic State into Syria.

Pressure is mounting on President Barack Obama to take the fight against the Islamic State into Syria, with top Republicans calling for the move on Friday after days of attacks on the militants in Iraq and the beheading of American journalist James Foley this week.

“I don’t see how we can defeat ISIS without going into Syria,” New York Rep. Peter King, a member of the House Homeland Security Committee, told CNN. “I believe in massive airstrikes.

“This is not about Syria. This is not about Iraq,” King added. “It’s about our national security. The president has the obligation, if he is serious about going after ISIS, to go into Syria.”

Florida Rep. Ilena Ros-Lehtinen later told CNN that “I believe that the president should do that.

“He should have done it when he first announced it when he said Assad has crossed a red line in the use of chemical weapons,” she added, referring to Obama’s speech in June 2013 when it was confirmed that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad had used the arsenal against his own people. “In fact, they used chemical weapons twice and still we did not do what we said we would do.

“It was a mistake for us not to act then,” Ros-Lehtinen said. “We cannot let this cancer grow.”

The GOP House members added to the rising calls for bombing ISIS in Syria after Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Martin Dempsey said that it was critical to defeating the militants.

“This is an organization that has an apocalyptic, end-of-days strategic vision and which will eventually have to be defeated,” Dempsey said at a news briefing on Thursday with Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel. “Can they be defeated without addressing that part of their organization which resides in Syria? The answer is no.”

The White House signaled on Friday that taking the fight against ISIS into Syria is an option, as Obama nears the end of his two-week vacation on Martha’s Vineyard in Massachusetts. The option gained more credence after ISIS posted its video this week showing Foley’s brutal execution and threats to kill a second American journalist, Steve Sotloff.

“We will do what’s necessary to protect Americans and see that justice is done for what we saw with the barbaric killing of Jim Foley,” White House Deputy National Security Adviser Ben Rhodes said on Friday. “So we’re actively considering what’s going to be necessary to deal with that threat, and we’re not going to be restricted by borders.”

The U.S. has so far conducted slightly more than 90 airstrikes in Iraq to protect the Iraqi Yazidi religious minority and attack Islamic State positions around the Mosul Dam. Tens of thousands of Yazidis have fled their homelands since ISIS began seizing them last month.

The Pentagon said on Friday that U.S. warplanes made three more airstrikes against Islamic State targets near the Mosul Dam, including a machine gun position that was firing on Iraqi forces.

Extending the fight into Syria, however, would allow opportunities for disrupting the Islamic State’s supply lines.

Arizona GOP Sen. John McCain said this week that ISIS fighters have moved military equipment seized in the northern Iraqi city of Mosul into Syria and that they hold enclaves in Syrian territory that have been identified. The heavy artillery was left in Baghdad after the U.S. pulled out of Iraq in 2011.

Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, a prospective 2016 presidential candidate, said on Friday that attacking ISIS supply lines, command and control centers, and economic assets inside Syria was “at the crux of the decision” for Obama.

The risk of “getting sucked into a new war” is outweighed, Rubio said, by the risk of inaction.

A move into Syria, even only with air strikes, would be a reversal for Obama. He stepped back from a threat to launch airstrikes in Syria a year ago in response to a chemical weapons attack by Assad.

Obama has many times rejected greater involvement in the three-year-old Syrian civil war over the past year out of concern about getting entangled in a conflict with no clear positive outcome for the United States.

But officials say the situation now is different because Islamic State militants represent a direct threat to Americans and American interests. Hagel said underscored the importance of preventing ISIS from regrouping — even partly into Syria — and launching renewed attacks.

The Islamic State is also known as ISIL.

“The president, the chairman and I are all very clear-eyed about the challenges ahead,” Hagel said. “We are pursuing a long-term strategy against ISIL because ISIL clearly poses a long-term threat. We should expect ISIL to regroup and stage new offenses.”

Not going into Syria, essentially, puts the U.S. “back to where you were,” said Robert Ford, a former U.S. ambassador to Syria who quit in February in disillusionment over Obama’s unwillingness to arm moderate Syrian rebels in their battle against Assad.

“I don’t see how you can contain the Islamic State over the medium term if you don’t address their base of operations in Syria,” he said.

U.S. Special Forces have already had one direct ground battle with Islamic State militants in Syria. That was during the nighttime helicopter mission during the July Fourth Weekend when two dozen Delta Force commandos sought to rescue Foley, Sotloff, and several other Americans.

A number of militants were killed in the firefight, the White House said this week — and one U.S. soldier was wounded. The hostages were not at the location.

More broadly, however, the U.S. strong consideration of going into Syria reflects a more serious approach to ISIS than six months ago, when Obama told New Yorker magazine that they were the “JV team.”

The term is short for “junior varsity” — meaning that they are not the best players on the field.

King slammed Obama for the reference in the CNN interview.

“The president was wrong when he called them ‘junior varsity.’ This was no secret in the intelligence community,” he said. “This was no secret — and the president seemed content in saying that al-Qaida was defeated and that, basically, this was all behind us.

“I actually believe that, now, ISIS is more powerful now and more deadly than al-Qaida was on Sept. 11,” King said.

The Associated Press and Reuters contributed to this report.

Dutch Official Calls ISIS “A Zionist Plot” Gatestone Institute, Evelyn Markus, August 23, 2014

The charge of “Islamophobia” is being used to silence people, so that any opposition will be neutralized before it can even start.

The truly shocking part of this story is not that Ms. Haifi faithfully regurgitates all too familiar Islamist anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, but that someone with such radical, conspiratorial and anti-Semitic views can be employed by the National Coordinator for Security and Counterterrorism. Something is evidently seriously wrong there with the screening of employees. There is widespread concern that many others with equally radical views were employed there and elsewhere in the security apparatus.

****************

On Tuesday last week, Yasmina Haifi, an official at the National Coordinator for Security and Counterterrorism in the Netherlands, tweeted: “ISIS has nothing to do with Islam. It is a preconceived plan of Zionists who want to deliberately make Islam look bad.”

For the past ten years, Ms. Haifi has been a senior staff member at the human resources department of the Ministry of Security and Justice. For the past two years she has also worked as a project leader at two of the Ministry’s subsidiaries, the National Coordinator for Security and Counterterrorism and the National Cyber Security Center.

The outcry from the general public that followed her remarks initially did little to make her take back her words. The next day, however, she deleted the tweet, saying: “Realise the political sensitivity in relation to my work. This was never my intention.” The same day, Haifi told national broadcast Radio 1 that she had no idea her comments would cause such an upheaval. “I assumed I was living in a democratic country,” she said. “Apparently freedom of speech in the Netherlands applies to particular groups and not to others.”

Haifi said she had based the information on “multiple sources from the internet.” These consisted of a supposed statement by Edward Snowden, that the Mossad and the U.S. created ISIS. A simple background search would have shown this to be a firmly debunked hoax which was created by Iranian authorities. Even Snowden himself vehemently denies ever having said anything about ISIS.

The black flag of jihad — the flag of ISIS — is displayed by demonstrators in the Netherlands.

Nevertheless, when confronted by journalists with the true nature of the spurious Snowden report, Haifi persisted and maintained that there was ample evidence to prove that the link between ISIS and Zionists did exist.

Haifi was suspended on Wednesday. “She will not be coming back to this job. Never,” Dutch Security and Justice Minister Opstelten said on Friday, adding he was shocked by the content of the tweet. ‘What someone’s personal opinion is, is not my business,” the minister told Dutch media. “It is about what you make public when you are a civil servant.” Opstelten said that, “the ministry is looking into other measures.”

Yasmina Haifi

No firm statement, however, was made that Haifi would be excluded from all government positions. Vice Premier Asscher (from Haifi’s own Labor Party) said: “When I heard it, it made me sick to my stomach.” Asscher called the conspiracy theory “classically anti-Semitic” and “extremely shocking.” He added that “the stupidity of the comment was immeasurable.” Prime Minister Mark Rutte called her remarks “asinine”.

The truly shocking part of this story is not that Ms. Haifi faithfully regurgitates all too familiar Islamist anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, but that someone with such radical, conspiratorial and anti-Semitic views can be employed by the National Coordinator for Security and Counterterrorism. Something is evidently seriously wrong there with the screening of employees. There is widespread concern that many others with equally radical views were employed there and elsewhere in the security apparatus.

The defiant and self-assured tone of Haifi suggests that she was in no way apprehensive about the backlash from her words and the effect that could have on her career, and that she felt comfortable in her decision to utter them.

What is worrisome is what remarks such as those reveal about the social and professional climate at the Ministry. It is hard to believe that Haifi’s conspiratorial and anti-Semitic views were not to some degree common knowledge among her co-workers, and possibly shared by many.

In addition to her career within the executive, Haifi is also a prominent member of the Labor Party. She was a member of the city council of The Hague from 1994 to 1998, and since 2011 has served as a talent recruiter and talent coach for the party’s branch at The Hague. The city, which is also the seat of government in the Netherlands, has the country’s most sizeable population of immigrants from Islamic countries; and Haifi functioned as one of its most vocal representatives. It is not clear how many people of a similar mindset she recruited into the Dutch Labor Party.

As co-founder of the action committee “Herstel het Vertrouwen” [“Restore Trust”] against “ethnic profiling” by the police in The Hague, Haifi enjoys sizeable backing from the Islamic immigrant community there: within a matter of days 5,600 people “liked” a Facebook page supporting Haifi. Not surprisingly, this page too is filled with conspiratorial and anti-Semitic views while at the same time bemoaning the unfair and discriminatory treatment meted out to Haifi for speaking “the truth.”

Haifi’s comments come at a time when widespread anti-Semitism among Muslims has become painfully visible. In the past months in The Hague, three pro-Gaza rallies have taken place, all of which have featuring ISIS flags, along with signs in Arabic calling to “Kill all Jews,” and a quote from the hadith [the acts and sayings of Muhammad] that, “There is a Jew behind me, come and kill him.” The police were remarkably reluctant to arrest the protesters.

Despite the discriminatory and conspiratorial nature of Haifi’s statements, the leadership of the Labor party, which has always presented itself as the champion of the victims of discrimination, has not ousted or suspended her. They have only announced they will “talk with Ms. Haifi” about her tweet.

The reluctance thoroughly to screen Muslim security officials, the reluctance of the Dutch authorities to see the genocidal terrorist group ISIS for what it is, and the reluctance to fire Ms. Haifi from all her government and party positions, all illustrate how the charge of “Islamophobia” is being used as a political weapon — to silence people so that any opposition will be neutralized before it can even start.

Four-year-old killed in mortar attack named as Daniel Tregerman | The Times of Israel.

Israeli security source says fatal shell was fired from UNRWA school in Gaza; PM says Hamas will pay heavy price; over 110 projectiles launched at Israel

By Times of Israel staff and AP August 22, 2014, 10:45 pm