An Ancient Cure for War-Torn Syria

As an American who has for the greater part of 50 years defended the US from enemies near and far under Presidents good and bad from both parties I now after watching a potential Trump presidency give up on my own country…..

I had hoped that a change in US leadership would lead to resolutions of the Russian non linear warfare in eastern Ukraine and that war is as well being directed against the Baltics and Poland…..would have some new solutions for Syria and reigning in Iran in the ME and on how to confront an ever increasingly hostile Russia…..NOT to mention a very serious Russian cyber war we find ourselves currently in…..

BUT a potential US President that alienates a religion of 3B individuals WHICH in turn actually supports the messaging narratives of both AQ and IS…….a President that thinks a “Wall” can resolve immigration……a President that does not even listen to his DNI intel briefings and assumes that the Russians did not hack the US……….a Presidnet that publicly belittled US Generals……a President that openly condones and will use torture…..a President that thinks he can be friends with Putin who has unleashed his non linear war directed against US global leadership….which is Putin’s stated goal……a President who had advisors tied directly to Russian black money and whatever the SVR has on Trump’s own weaknesses while he was often in Moscow…..a President that wants and states he will tear up existing trade agreements and does not believe in climate change…a President that does not believe in clean energy……...a President that states that he will not use Article 5 of NATO unless the attacked country has “paid up their dues” ………….AND a President that claimed he was against Iraq all the while publicly stating he was for it and a President that while I fought in VN for 18 very long months used a “bone spur” in his foot which he could never recall which foot four times to evade the draft…..AND a President who has never shown me his tax returns while I have been audited due to residing and working overseas…..

ALL of this leads me to the simple question…..can I continue to defend the US as an American from enemies near and far??……the answer I am really sorry to say is no……

I have for a number of reasons over the years had the ability to file for German citizenship and passport and never wanted to cut my ties to the US…..but if Trump is in fact the new President of the US I will drop off the citizenship request the second he is confirmed as the new US President…

It is time to let the US be what it wants to be which I think it does not even know itself…..and enjoy the rest of my remaining life in a country that does socially care about it’s society and it’s positon inside Europe…..

I will slowly disengage from the postings due to the simple fact that the new US President and his “best friend Putin” will resolve Syria an eastern Ukraine as well as the Baltics and Poland and all the commenting in the coming months will not change that…

Have enjoyed the posting simply because I have learned a lot about Ukraine and Syria that was never in the text books nor in MSM….and have learned an extremely valuable lesson in Russian non linear warfare that I use daily in my internet security company….

I have previously stated in a SWJ article comment……”people love populists until they take power”…

IRGC deputy chief Salami at Tehran rally: Geography of our Islamic Revolution reached Palestine, North Africa, Yemen & Mediterranean Sea

SO do we thank the Obama/Rhodes/Kerry do nothing stupid WH for this?????

Was the CSM editorial board bored one day and trawling through Wikipedia hyperlinks on Near Eastern civilization when they had this epiphany?

What "ancient cure" are they referring to?

Yes, it is lovely when different ethnicities, nations and religious sects can live harmoniously in a unified state, but the historical record on these types of "inclusive" arrangements is not very encouraging.

The authors gloss over the endemic warfare and political instability that gripped modern-day Syria throughout the ancient period.

If the authors truly want peace for Syria and truly want to save what remains of its antiquities, then they would do well to examine how the Lebanese and other similar civil wars were ended.

Lastly, the road to peace runs through Teheran, another ancient and once inclusive state...

Bill M.....we had recently an exchange about IS and insurgency inside Iraq and I had written that we the US unknowingly had walked into the middle of a Iraqi Sunni Salafist Mao phase two guerrilla war directed against Saddam........

Another ME SME researcher mentioned this the other day that caught my attention as the timeframe of the bombings was exactly that mentioned in a handwritten journal by the leader of the largest Iraqi Sunni Salafist insurgent group IAI.....QBJR then AQI and now IS had ties into the IAI already in 2003....

AQM/IS named the planner of two of the three bombings that began it all in AUG 2003: Thamir Mubarak, a former officer in Saddam's army.

Notice the tie in again to the Iraqi military....Mubarak though was not an officer in the Army ..he was an ISS officer.....notice the not so subtle shift....first an officer for awhile in the ISS and then a sudden shift into QJBR.....so why did QJBR trust him at all unless he was already "known" to them before 2003 as an underground member???

Bill...here is the key for what I have been saying...CENTCOM has no earthly idea what the heck they are doing......

IF one goes back to the Manbij operation against IS...CENTCOM stated there SDF was ALSO the lead element..BUT SDF Forces were exactly 265 Arabs and the rest of the force was Kurdish YPG.......

Manbij was and still remains an Arab Sunni town that the Kurdish YPG is attempting to ethnically cleanse and create instead a "Kurdish town" in order to expand their dream of a new Kurdish state in northern Aleppo....

Gen Dunford after meeting w/ Turkey's Hulusi Akar:
#SDF has 12K+ Arabs & Turkey will help add more for #RaqqaOps
http://www.defense.gov/News/Article/...ce=GovDelivery …

Dunford: a high ranking US officer + staff under @CENTCOM's Gen Votel will station in Ankara 2 coordinate w/ Turkey as part of @CJTFOIR

pts: bottom line, looks like the US just brokered a deal with Turkey to build a new joint Arab component 4 #RaqqaOps

The key words here are "just brokered" a deal with Turkey to "build" a new joint Arab component. After the shaping operation began, that is.

BTW...the SDF does not and never has had 12,000 Arab fighters...at the most 1,000 end of story and WHY CENTCOM has to lie is beyond me.....

Al Baghdadi’s speech sets a trap for the US
http://www.thenational.ae/opinion/co...rap-for-the-us
@hxhassan @TheNationalUAE

Quote:
An eerie feel is emerging from Iraq about how the government forces perceive the continuing battle to retake Mosul, which enters its fourth week today. More than two years after the American-led campaign against ISIL began, one expects that the ground forces battling the group now have a realistic grip of its capabilities. But that does not seem to be the case in the battle of Mosul. And there is a lesson to be learnt as the United States opens a new front in Raqqa.

Reports from the ground suggest that Iraqi forces feel they are facing a different ISIL and that Mosul is a much harder battle than they initially anticipated. "My views about Mosul have changed after what I saw in Kirkuk," Karwan Taha, a Kurdish fighter, told The Guardian after ISIL stormed Kirkuk a week into the anti-ISIL offensive in Nineveh.

The sentiment of fighters such as Mr Taha intensified even more over the past few days. A result of three poor assessments that came crashing down last week.

The first one was that Iraqi and American forces were uncertain about ISIL’s calculations for Mosul. With few exceptions, the militants typically withdrew from a losing battle even if they would initially resist before they wire the city with improvised explosive devices and flee. The IEDs would prove to be a massive challenge for the government forces sometimes months after the group withdrew. The costly pattern made their withdrawal from Mosul a possibility. The United States allowed them safe passage through the vast desert area west of Mosul, and officials even made public statements that fleeing was an option.

Second, the pattern of withdrawal also inflated the Iraqi forces’ confidence that the battle in Mosul, while it will certainly be more challenging given the large population and territory, would at least follow the same template. Statements along the lines that the battle would be over within days or weeks and that ISIL was done in Iraq were common.

Finally, disinformation about the internal situation within ISIL and Mosul portrayed ISIL as crumbling even before the government forces began the campaign. Officials cited – as yet unverified – incidents of internal or popular rebellions against ISIL and that ISIL leaders and fighters already fled the city. Such reports are understandable – as part of the psychological warfare to confuse the group amid difficulties for the militants to communicate inside and outside the city.

But the group’s intention to defend the city to the last man should not have been doubted. Disinformation about internal fracture speaks of poor understanding of a group that been preparing for the fight in Mosul since the first air strike in August 2014.

The assessments have been damaging to the Iraqi forces instead. It is now clear that the almost certain victory will come against the backdrop of significantly more destruction and human casualty. The federal police has already sustained heavy losses in Kirkuk and areas south of Mosul, and protracted fighting might burn out the elite forces that currently serve as the backbone of the operation.

The speech by Abu Bakr Al Baghdadi on Thursday left no room for doubts about what the group will do. In his first statement since December, Al Baghdadi ordered his followers to stand and fight – the first time an ISIL leader commanded followers not to flee. The order to fight until the end also indicates the group has chosen Mosul to be a long and ugly war, otherwise Al Baghdadi would not risk making such a rare order publicly.

Continued.....

Kyle W. Orton 
‏@KyleWOrton
My latest on the trouble in Mosul and Raqqa being the wrong focus right now in #Syria; more urgent is #Aleppo
http://henryjacksonsociety.org/2016/11/06/the-coalitions-flawed-endgame…

The Coalition’s Flawed Endgame Strategy for the Islamic State
by Kyle Orton

[QUOTE]After some (perhaps wilful) confusion over the timing, the operation to expel the Islamic State (IS) from Raqqa City, its Syrian capital, got underway this morning, running concurrent with the effort to evict IS from its Iraqi capital, Mosul. There are deep concerns about the methods adopted in both cases. The ground forces the U.S.-led Coalition has chosen to support in Raqqa cannot lead to sustainable stability in Syria, something that is essential to defeat IS. While the Mosul operation has proceeded generally to plan, there are increasing signs of trouble within the operation itself and the most troubling aspect—the aftermath—still appears to be unplanned. Beyond this is the continued assault on Aleppo City by Bashar al-Assad’s regime and its Russian and Iranian patrons that is systematically destroying the forces needed if there is to be any settlement to Syria’s war that ends the space given to international terrorists.

Mosul

Nearly exactly three weeks ago, the operation to restore the Iraqi government’s control over Mosul was launched, led on the ground by Iraqi security forces and Kurdish Peshmerga, with a role for the Iranian-run Shi’a militias, backed by air support from the U.S.-led Coalition. The offensive has proceeded roughly to plan but, as pointed out in this space a week ago, there have been problems. A lot of the early optimism and expectations have given way as the death toll has mounted, and this was only the beginning, a foretaste of the change of strategy as IS relinquishes overt control of its statelet and reverts to insurgency. Yesterday, IS added, to the major diversions in Kirkuk and Rutba, an attack in Shirqat, a key gateway to Mosul that was ostensibly manumitted from the hold of the takfiris in September, but which has remained a victim of harrying attacks ever since.

When faced with an overwhelming foe, IS often begins with a show of resistance, then draws the bulk of its forces out of cities quickly, leaving a skeleton crew of snipers, inghimasiyeen, and suiciders, behind layers of barriers, made up of everything from trenches and barbed wire to t-walls and embankments, and scattered with improvised explosive devices (IEDs). In this way, IS exercises strict force-preservation and inflicts so much harm on its foes over such a long period for such minimal gains that victories seem pyrrhic. This is why it was possible to predict that the attack against IS in Sirte, Libya, would not succeed as quickly as was believed six months ago.

In Mosul, however, IS’s operating method had seemed different. Anti-IS commanders on the ground spoke of a level of IS resistance heretofore unknown. IS claims to have carried out 120 suicide bombings in October, two-thirds of them around Mosul, which tallies with independent estimates. And there were reports of hundreds of IS jihadists moving into Mosul since this operation began. Now the caliph has confirmed it.

IS’s leader, Ibrahim al-Badri (Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi), released an audio message on Wednesday, the first since 26 December 2015. Eulogies were given for Taha Falaha (Abu Muhammad al-Adnani) and Wael al-Fayad (Abu Muhammad al-Furqan), two extremely senior IS figures killed two months ago, with assurances that their loss had only made the caliphate stronger. Saudi Arabia was, as usual, threatened, and internal terrorism incited. Ditto for Turkey. The foreign “provinces” were exhorted to continue on god’s path and Libya was singled out for praise—and as a destination, should jihadi-salafist volunteers to IS have difficulty getting to Syria and Iraq. Above all though, al-Badri’s message was simple: his troops were to stand firm in Mosul and fight to the last.

Estimates for IS jihadists in Mosul City run from 3,000 to 10,000 and the fight for the city itself has barely begun. Perhaps IS will expend all of these men, and it will certainly increase the diversionary raids to increase the cost even further for its enemies. Or perhaps at some point a retreat will be ordered. If IS manages to prolong the battle enough to wear down the professional Iraqi forces and draw the Shi’a militias into the city, for example, it might pocket the political victory and preserve its forces into the bargain. In either case, it will be IS’s decision and then comes the next phase of trying to uproot IS’s entrenched networks—or, as happened after the surge, not. There is still no agreed plan for the aftermath of IS’s rule in Mosul. If Western attention wanes after IS’s overt control is removed and its underground infrastructure is allowed to endure, in combination with the persistence—indeed worsening—of the political conditions that allowed IS’s rise in the first place, revival might be shorter than last time.

Raqqa

The Raqqa operation is currently in the shaping and isolation phase, with the anti-IS forces currently twenty-five miles away at their closest, in Ayn Issa, so the assault on Raqqa City itself is still a while away. But it is clear what the ground component of the Raqqa operation will be: the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), who claim to be devoting 30,000 troops to clearing IS’s spiritual headquarters.

Brett McGurk, the U.S. representative to the global anti-IS Coalition, recently explained: “The fundamental premise of this campaign against ISIL … is [for] locally-based forces to hold ground after ISIL is gone.” This is essential to long-term stability, and is the reason the Iranian-controlled sectarian Shi’a militias that dominate al-Hashd al-Shabi have been kept out of Mosul City and diverted to Tal Afar. On paper, the U.S. is replicating this strategy in Syria by attaching local Arab units who will be a “hold” force to the SDF, but the progress on this front is distinctly incomplete, and the nature of the SDF makes it questionable that this will improve.

The SDF is functionally controlled by the Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG), the armed wing of the Democratic Union Party (PYD), which is the Syrian branch of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK). The PKK has waged a decades-long insurgency against the Turkish state using tactics that have led to its designation as a terrorist entity by the U.S., E.U., and Turkey. The SDF already has Arab detachments, theoretically numerically significant, but the constant complaint is that these forces are kept deliberately weak and dependent on the PKK. Additionally, Ankara has begun training Arab rebels for the Raqqa operation, and there is some hope these will be meaningful by the time the operation for the Raqqa City itself begins. There is every reason to doubt this, though. The SDF’s formal platform might be democratic and liberal, but the PKK remains deeply authoritarian, exclusivist, and anti-Turkish, making it unlikely it will allow the SDF banner to become genuinely pluralist, least of all with forces aligned with Turkey.

The U.S. support for the PKK—under any of its guises—in Syria has caused serious tensions with NATO ally Turkey and the Syrian opposition. Turkey tried, in late 2015 and over the Minbij offensive earlier this year, to put some restraints on the PKK’s maximalist behaviour via diplomacy, and found that the U.S. would not even rhetorically condemn its favoured proxy when the PKK called in Russian airstrikes to attack U.S. and Turkish assets among the Syrian rebels. So Turkey intervened directly in Syria in August, clearing IS from its border and shutting down IS’s access to the outside world, while blocking the formation of a PKK statelet all along its border.

Turkey’s Operation EUPHRATES SHIELD (OES), involving its own troops and the Free Syrian Army (FSA)-branded rebels, pushed south with a stated goal to (ultimately) move on Raqqa City. Meanwhile, the PKK stated that it, too, was heading to Raqqa. In this race, Turkey was hampered by having to go through al-Bab, the last major urban stronghold IS has in eastern Aleppo Province, where the deeper roots of IS and some of the limitations of the OES rebels made (and make) it likely that there will be a costly and protracted fight. Still, the Turks were able to offer forces recognized as legitimate by the local population, while the PKK, which said Turkey could not be involved in an operation it was part of, is vehemently rejected by even the most sternly anti-IS actors in Arab-majority areas of eastern Syria. The U.S. sided with the PKK—again.

The U.S. itself acknowledges that the PKK cannot govern Raqqa in the aftermath. It might be that the U.S. has a program in place to produce an Arab force over the next six months that it has failed to come up with in five years of war. Given that eradicating IS fundamentally relies on out-governing it—something its enemies have frequently not managed—this would be most welcome. Assuming not, it leaves two options: (1) the PKK will not withdraw, and over time a feeling of occupation will allow IS a way back in; or (2) the PKK does withdraw and leaves in place a weak governing structure that allows IS a way back in.

The U.S. has clearly decided the Raqqa operation has to begin now, when it is true that only the PKK are positioned to act. One explanation for this is the reports of urgent threats to the West originating in the caliphal capital. It might even be true, as it surely has been for more than two years. Given that it is going to be months before U.S.-backed forces even reach Raqqa City limits, however, it is tempting to see this as an administration “try[ing] to shape their legacy,” as Daveed Gartenstein-Ross, a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, put it. IS will almost certainly be militarily defeated in Raqqa City, but IS will obtain a political victory from this setback, which in the model of revolutionary warfare it is waging is far more important.

Aleppo

At least since IS’s conquests in mid-2014 it has been painfully obvious that building up a rebel army in Syria was necessary, even in narrow counter-terrorism terms. To say that the PKK are the “only force that is capable” of attacking IS in Raqqa is not to justify sending the PKK in. It is to lay bare the calamitous failure of the West’s Syria policy that expended the energy necessary for building up alternatives on strategic messaging explaining why that wasn’t necessary or feasible, leaving only another terrorist organization as a viable option for immediate action to dislodge IS.

There are tens of thousands of U.S.-vetted, CIA-supported Syrian rebels in Syria, but they have never been supplied with support to make a qualitative difference on the battlefield. The Russian intervention picked up where the Assad regime left off by systematically trying to eliminate these workable rebels, so that the only forces left against Assad are al-Qaeda and IS. Moscow has been preparing for a final assault on the rebellion in Aleppo City, and on Friday its deadline for the population and rebels to quit the city ran out. Not a single person left, fearing arrest if they did so, knowing that ending up in Assad’s prisons death is the very least of the torments, and now Aleppo awaits a renewal of the unmerciful assault the pro-regime coalition has subjected it to on-and-off all year.

The West’s failure to do anything to even complicate the ability of the pro-Assad coalition to massacre civilians and destroy the moderate opposition in Aleppo is pushing opposition populations into greater dependence on al-Qaeda, which remains, despite the Western monomania about IS and al-Qaeda’s own efforts at rebranding, a serious threat to the West. Securing the mainstream rebels in Aleppo, bolstering this force to be able to defend itself and disentangle from al-Qaeda, is the urgent priority for Western policy in Syria. Altering the balance in this way would help de-escalate the atrocities and chaos in the short-term, and lay the groundwork for a Raqqa operation to be done properly later.[/QUOTE]

From a well known Syrian SME.......

Hassan Hassan ‏@hxhassan
Describing the SDF as a "Kurdish-Arab militia" is like saying Hashd al-Shaabi is a Shia-Sunni militia

NEW:
#Raqqa's Governorate Council & other opposition provincial bodies have condemned the SDF’s offensive on their city.

pt: In the statement, #Raqqa’s various opposition bodies warn the SDF's offensive could lead to an Arab-Kurd conflict “lasting decades."

US Army: "#YPG is not the solution for holding and governing #Raqqa."

U.S official:

"There is no available force capable of taking #Raqqa [from #ISIS] in the near future”
http://reut.rs/2eudway

I now wonder if Germany's foreign ministry is as collectively naive as the U.S. Dept of State. While thousands continue to die and suffer in Syria the West continues to meddle in a way that only prolongs the angony.

We have seemed to have given up on our original day dream of so called moderate Muslims defeating Assad's military and a stable democracy emerging. Now we're focused on partnering with the devil to try to defeat ISIL, fully realizing what that means to our longer term strategic interests in the region. We are strategically adrift, but tactically engaged.