WarSclerotic

Report: Syria deploys anti-aircraft missile batteries along Turkish border – Jerusalem Post.

“Syria is ready to deal with any hostile Turkish plane that enters Syria’s airspace,” Syrian army sources say.

By ARIEL BEN SOLOMON 03/31/2014 16:30

Syria deployed anti-aircraft missile batteries along the Turkish border in what seems to be a response to an incident last week when a Turkish fighter jet shot down a Syrian plane, a Kuwaiti newspaper reported.

Syria deployed the anti-aircraft weapons and “is ready to deal with any hostile Turkish plane that enters Syria’s airspace,” sources from the Syrian army and Hezbollah told Al-Rai on Monday.

Meanwhile, Syria’s Minister of Information, Omran al-Zoubi, criticized Turkey in an interview on Syrian TV Sunday evening, saying that the country is facilitating the continual entry of armed terrorist groups into the Kassab area in Latakia, the Syrian Arab News Agency SANA reported on Monday.

Latakia is a stronghold of Bashar Assad’s regime.

Zoubi accused some Arab countries such as Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Turkey of backing terrorism.

Syrian air defense systems have “harassed” Turkish F-16 fighter jets patrolling their own airspace by repeatedly putting them under “radar lock”, suggesting they were about to be fired at, the Turkish military said on Thursday.

The incident, which took place on Wednesday, comes only days after Turkey downed a Syrian warplane that Ankara said had violated its airspace, in an area where Syrian rebels have been battling President Bashar Assad’s forces.

Reuters contributed to this report.

PM: No new prisoner release without something of value in exchange – The Times of Israel.

Netanyahu says any further deal would need government approval; issue likely to be resolved in days

By Gavriel Fiske March 30, 2014, 12:07 pm

Israel won’t release additional Palestinian prisoners without receiving something of value in return, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Sunday, addressing a weekend report that Jerusalem had offered to free up to 400 additional long-serving prisoners in exchange for Palestinians agreeing to continue talks past their April 29 deadline.
The prisoner issue will be resolved within a few days, when it “will be closed or it will blow up,” Netanyahu said, addressing a meeting of lawmakers, many of whom are opposed to releasing prisoners, held before the regular weekly cabinet meeting.
“In any case, there won’t be any deal without receiving something of clear value [in return],” the prime minister added.

Any deal involving a further prisoner release would be brought to the government for approval, Netanyahu added, and said the deliberations around the prisoners release could go on for several days.

President Shimon Peres said Sunday that in his estimation there would be developments in the peace talks by Sunday evening or Monday morning, and added that both sides were working hard to overcome the obstacles. Peres addressed the controversy from Vienna, where he was beginning a three-day state visit in Austria.

On Saturday, Jerusalem refused to release a batch of about 26 Palestinian inmates who were supposed to be set free at the end of March as per an original understanding between Jerusalem and Ramallah at the start of peace talks in August.

The release was to include 14 Israeli-Arab citizens, which has caused consternation among some members of the government. Israel has refused to release the 26 unless talks, which are due to end in April, are extended.

On Saturday, it was reported by The Times of Israel that Israel had offered to release up to 400 prisoners, to be chosen by Israel, in exchange for an extension of the talks and a pledge by the Palestinians not to take unilateral action at the UN.

With the talks teetering on the brink of collapse, Washington has been fighting an uphill battle to coax the two sides into accepting a framework proposal which would extend the negotiations beyond April to the end of the year.

But the matter has become tied up with the fate of the veteran Palestinian prisoners whom Israel was to have freed this weekend under terms of an agreement which brought about a resumption of talks.

Israel on Friday informed the Palestinians via a US mediator that it would not release the fourth and final batch of prisoners, with the US State Department confirming it was working “intensively” to resolve the dispute.

The Palestinians say they will not even consider extending the talks without the prisoners being freed, but Israel has refused to release them without a Palestinian commitment to continue the talks, prompting a fresh crisis of confidence between the parties.

Issa Karawe, the Palestinian prisoners minister, on Saturday told AFP that the crisis was likely to be resolved quickly.

“There are efforts to solve the crisis and I believe that in 24 hours everything will be clearer,” he said.

Under a deal that relaunched peace talks last July, Israel agreed to release 104 prisoners held since before the 1993 Oslo peace accords in exchange for the Palestinians freezing all efforts to seek further international recognition.

So far, Israel has freed 78 of them in three batches, and the last group was to have been released on March 29.

Obama tells Saudi king U.S. will not agree bad deal with Iran – Chicago Tribune.

(More political comedy. – Artaxes)

Syrian Rebels Deny Bid to Thwart Chemical-Arms Removal – Global Security Newswire.

A Syrian opposition fighter takes part in a training exercise in the city of Deir Ezzor last week. A Syrian rebel group reportedly denied a Russian assertion that opposition forces are seizing coastal territory in a bid to thwart the removal of warfare chemicals from the country. (Ahmad Aboud/AFP/Getty Images)

Syrian rebels rejected a Russian claim that they are seizing coastal territory to disrupt their country’s chemical disarmament, Turkey’s Anadolu Agency reports.

The Russian Foreign Ministry reportedly issued the accusation after Syrian opposition forces fought for control of areas in the embattled country’s Latakia province, the news service indicated on Saturday. Danish and Norwegian cargo vessels have been picking up government warfare chemicals arriving at the provincial capital — a port city of the same name — in an effort to remove and destroy the regime’s entire stockpile before July.

Hisham Marwah, legal committee head for the opposition’s Syrian National Council, said Moscow’s assertions are intended to excuse any failure by its Damascus ally to eliminate the “chemical weapons within the allotted deadline.”

Marwah asserted that Russia’s comments throw doubt on Moscow’s commitment to eliminating the lethal materials stockpiled by Syrian President Bashar Assad’s government.

Meanwhile, a former British military officer said he believed that rebel forces have attacked “every single” chemical-arms shipment to the port city to date, ABC News reported on Saturday.

Hamish de Bretton-Gordon added that Damascus “has put massive military resources into these convoys, supporting them with tanks and air protection. They also put forces down the road before the convoys, almost blasting through to Latakia.”

Faisal Mekdad, Assad’s deputy foreign minister, voiced concerns about rebel threats to the disarmament effort in a Sunday meeting with Sigrid Kaag, the special coordinator of a U.N.-OPCW mission overseeing the project, according to the state-run Syrian Arab News Agency.

The discussion of possible threats to the chemical-arms shipments came as President Obama considered whether to supply certain Syrian rebel groups with portable anti-air missiles, the Australian Associated Press reported.

John Kerry’s departure from reality – Washington Post.

Iran Names 1979 U.S. Embassy Hostage-Taker Its UN Envoy – Bloomberg.

(This very fitting representative of the criminal regime in Iran has been chosen by, drumroll please … , the wonderfully ‘moderate’ Hassan Rouhani. – Artaxes)

By Kambiz Foroohar       Mar 30, 2014 6:00 AM GMT+0200

Bandar Is Back – The Weekly Standardk.

And in Friday’s meeting between Obama and King Abdullah, he’s poised to stand against Obama administration policy on Iran and Syria.

2:38 PM, Mar 27, 2014 • By HUSSAIN ABDUL-HUSSAIN

Kuwait City
Friday’s meeting in Riyadh between King Abdullah and President Obama is likely to be a tense one. First, there’s the fact that the Saudis and the White House differ on a host of regional issues, from Egypt and Bahrain to Syria and Iran. Moreover, there are also the secondary players likely to be in attendance, one of which from each side the other considers a nuisance.  The Saudis think that newly named National Security Council staffer Robert Malley is an irritant, and the White House doesn’t like Prince Bandar bin Sultan, the Saudi intelligence chief and formerly longtime ambassador to Washington.

For the Saudis’ taste, Malley, who worked on the Arab-Israeli peace process in the Clinton administration, got too close with Syrian regime officials when he was program director for Middle East and North Africa at the International Crisis Group. From Riyadh’s perspective, Malley’s appointment merely confirms their worst fears about Obama’s regional strategy—U.S. rapprochement with a host of figures it considers deadly adversaries, from Assad to Iran and Hezbollah, and at the expense of the Saudis and other longtime U.S. allies in the Persian Gulf.

For the Obama administration, Bandar, a former Washington power player and Bush family confidante, is a thorn in its side. First, he’s been publicly critical of White House policy, frequently leaking anti-Obama tidbits to the U.S. press. He’s also reached out to Vladimir Putin in an effort to buy arms from the Russians—and show up the White House. Speculation in Saudi circles is that the last straw was when Secretary of State John Kerry requested a meeting with him during a trip to Riyadh only to be told that since Bandar was on his way out of town that they meet at the airport. From the administration’s perspective, the problem with US-Saudi relations isn’t the White House’s and Riyadh’s diverging regional policies, but Bandar himself. The White House allegedly pushed to have Bandar put on administrative leave, and suddenly the man who had revived Riyadh’s Syria policy was out of the headlines. While Saudi spokesmen repeatedly explained that the prince was on travel for health reasons, in Marrakesh most recently for shoulder surgery, rumor was that the kingdom had succumbed to U.S. pressure by sidelining its top spy.

Now that Bandar appears to be back, perhaps Friday he’ll ask the American side why it compelled Jordan to shut down its border to arms shipments going to rebels in southern Syria. This action may have tipped the balance of power against the rebels and on behalf of Bashar al-Assad’s allied forces in the battle for Yabroud.

The Syrian opposition had believed that opening a southern front might distract Assad from his siege of Yabroud, a town northwest of Damascus, and force him to redeploy some of his assets. Rebels therefore launched an offensive from areas they control around the town of Quneitra and scored some successes. When they sought rearmament through a cross point they control on the Syrian border with Jordan, Amman shut down the arms route, and the Quneitra front faltered as Assad managed to retake control without having to reinforce his own troops. Less than two weeks later, the joint Assad-Hezbollah-Iraqi forces swept through Yabroud.  

Even if Jordan takes its orders from Washington to shut down its borders, Turkey might be a different story. Gulf sources believe that Turkey has an interest in preventing a linkup between the Alawis of northern Syria and those in its southern province of Hatay, and thus has facilitated a rebel advance to the strategic border crossing of Kasab, which overlooks the coast. Sources also argue that the Syrian MiG shot down earlier this week was brought down not by Turkish ground fire but an F-16—moreover, Gulf sources say, the Syrian jet was targeted not in Turkish airspace, but Syrian and when the pilot ejected he went down in Syrian territory. In other words, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan seems to be eager to revive his pro-Syrian revolution credentials and play a more active role in the crisis—to cut Turkey’s Alawi community off from their Syrian brethren, and perhaps in order to deflect attention away from corruption scandals that are hitting him hard at home.

Way Off Topic: Valerie Jarrett to Hollywood to Get Obamacare in Movie, TV Scripts – The Weekly Standard.

(Disgusting! Shows you how the totalitarian mindset works. You’re just too stupid to know what’s good for you. That’s why you have to be brainwashed until you do what they want. – Artaxes)

‘I’m a really good nag.’

11:46 AM, Mar 28, 2014 • By DANIEL HALPER

A top of advisor to President Barack Obama is in Los Angeles to try to get Obamacare written into scripts of TV shows and movies. Valerie Jarrett explained in an appearance on Top That! on PopSugar.com:

“That’s the cool thing,” a host said to the presidential advisor. “You’ve been reaching out to people that are, you know, outside of the norm of what the president might work with. Who else are you working with? Like celebrities, personalities, things like that?”

“You name it,” said Jarrett. “That’s part of why I’m in L.A. I’m meeting with writers of various TV shows and movies to try to get it into the scripts.” When Jarrett says “it into the scripts,” she’s referring to getting references to Obamacare, the president’s signature legislation, into the scripts of TV shows and movies.

She continued: “We’re talking to celebrities. We’re talking to athletes, because obviously they get injured a lot and many of them are the same age as the market we’re going after. And what they can say is, ‘Look, you never know when life is going to throw you a curve ball. You’re walking down the street, you’re a little clumsy, you trip, you fall — where do you end up? Emergency room. A couple grand just to walk in the door.”

“Right,” said the host.

“Who can afford that?” asked Jarrett.

“Nobody,” said a host.”

Jarrett would explain that mothers are really good at nagging — which is why mothers have been promoting the health care bill. “What do moms do?” asked Jarrett. “We try to take care of our children. Even when they’re grown. And what we want to do here is like nag. We’re really good at nagging. I’m a mom so I know. I’m a really good nag. And I can come at the same issue like 20 different ways until my daughter goes, ‘Ok, I’m cool, I’ll just do it.'”

The Supreme Leader is getting the gang back together – American Enterprise Institute.

Opinion: Tehran and the temptation of a power grab in Lebanon – Asharq Al Awsat.