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Su-34 and Su-35S warplanes of the Russian Aerospace Forces have destroyed a warehouse of portable anti-aircraft missiles and a workshop where Idlib militants were making armed unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and kept explosives in store, Russian Defense Ministry spokesman Igor Konashenkov announced on September 5. According to him, the strikes were delivered on September 4, away from populated areas. Konashenkov noted that over the past month 47 UAVs launched by militants have been eliminated near Russia’s Khmeimim Air Base.
Earlier, pro-militant sources once again accused the Russian Aerospace Forces of striking civilian targets in the province of Idlib. While some civilian casualties as a result of any kind of fully-fledged operations against well-armed terrorist groups can hardly be avoided, pro-militant sources and mainstream media outlets are often exploiting this narrative in their propaganda campaigns against the Syrian-Iranian-Russian alliance. Most of reports appearing from pro-militant “media activists” in Idlib describe any destroyed militant position, HQ or warehouse as a bakery, a medical point or a civilian house.
Fearing a full-scale ground advance by the Syrian Army against Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (formerly Jabhat al-Nusra, the Syrian branch of al-Qaeda) and its allies in the Idlib de-escalation zone, militants are destroying bridges in the al-Ghab Plains area. According to available data, at least four bridges were blown up during the past 10 days.
Hayat Tahrir al-Sham-led forces have also built additional fortifications and deployed reinforcements at the contact line with pro-government forces as well as have carried out a series of arrests of public persons and political activists supporting a reconciliation with the Damascus government.
On September 5, the Syrian military deployed another batch of troops and heavy equipment near the province of Idlib. This force belongs to the 1st Division, which is set to participate in the upcoming offensive alongside with the Tiger Forces, the 5th Assault Corps, the 4th Armoured Division and other pro-government factions.
In the area of al-Safa, the Syrian Army continued its operation against ISIS cells. According to pro-government sources, artillery units and warplanes are actively striking the remaining ISIS positions. However, no final offensive has been launched yet because Damascus still hopes to save multiple civilian hostages kept by the terrorist group in the area.
On September 4, the White House once again threatened the Syrian government with a military action.
“The United States is closely monitoring the situation in Idlib province, Syria, where millions of innocent civilians are under threat of an imminent Assad regime attack, backed by Russia and Iran,” the statement said. “Let us be clear, it remains our firm stance that if President Bashar al-Assad chooses to again use chemical weapons, the United States and its Allies will respond swiftly and appropriately.”
Considering multiple US threats to use military force against Damascus in case of new reports on chemical attack in Syria, it will be strange if no such reports appear when the battle of Idlib finally starts.
Meanwhile in israHell:
https://www.rt.com/news/437719-jerusalem-post-idf-censor/
It has been known for a long time that reports from Israel are cleared by a military censor. I believe I’ve heard it true for foreign correspondents as well as Israeli ones. The only surprise about this incident is that the story made it to the public and had to be pulled afterwards, instead of the normal which would be a military censor spiking a story and thus we never know about it.
http://russia-insider.com/en/politics/russia-walked-straight-washingtons-trap-syria/ri17178
Russia Walked Straight Into Washington’s Trap In Syria
Helped by Russia’s fifth column Atlanticist Integrationists, Washington intends to use Russia’s military assistance to Syria to convict Russia in world public opinion of war crimes, thereby advancing regime change in Moscow
By paul Robert craig.
Quote “
Russia’s air assault on ISIS in Syria caught Washington off guard and quickly rolled up the Washington-supported ISIS forces, completely reversing the tide of war. Had Russia finished the job, Syria would have been cleared of hostile forces before Washington could catch its breath.
Instead, pressured by the Atlanticist Integrationist element in the Russian elite, the Russian government withdrew, announcing mission accomplished and relying on the Syrian Army to complete the job. This strategic error allowed Washington not merely to replenish the ISIS munitions that had been destroyed and to muster more mercenaries, but more importantly to come up with a plan for Russia’s and Assad’s undoing.
And your point is exactly? Sowing discontent, lowering morale? RI as a (trusted) news source – it’s rubbish.
A
What you have stated is not correct. Russia never withdrew from Syria, as it has both a Naval and Air Force base. It withdrew some units and rotated others. Both Russia and Syria are finishing the job in Syria. Idlib is the last stronghold of ISIS in Syria. After it falls, the US will have a tough time explaining it’s presence in northern Syria.
I presume you were quoting Dr Paul Craig Roberts. He is an excellent analyst as far as Washington and NATO’s policies go. However, when it comes to Russia, he relies on questionable sources, being prone to exaggerations, especially when it comes to Russian liberals and NGO’s operating in Russia.
How exactly was Russia supposed to “finish the job?”
The Saker has written several times how the Syria deployment was always a small force. They were never intended to ‘finish the job’ and never had that capability.
Phrase like ‘finish the job’ are usually a bunch of hot air. The right-wing nutcakes in America used it towards Bush Sr and his administration claiming that they didn’t finish the job during the Kuwait war and thus campaiging for a bigger war in Iraq. Bush Sr. had enough sense to see that going on to Baghdad would have been a disaster. His son however decided to ‘finish the job’ and thus he’s responsible for the deaths of over a million people and for events like the rise of ISIS in Iraq as all of that stemmed from that silly notion of trying to ‘finish the job’.
Anonymous
You obviously have not been following the situation closely. Yes, the Russian Air Force in Syria is small in number, but highly trained. It is backed by the Russian Navy in the Mediterranean and in the Caspian. It is also backed by the Russian Air Force inside Russia. We have here considerable fire power. On the ground the Syrian Army is backed by Russian commando troops, while Syrian AA units have Russian technical advisors. The Russian military presence in Syria is more powerful than appears at first glance.
Explain to me your plan to finish the job? Especially since Syria and Russia are currently with their allies in the process of finishing the job, then obviously people mean that back when Putin made his campaign announcement of withdrawing some forces from Syria he should have instead in some magic act instead struck to ‘finish the job’. I want to hear exactly what this looks like. How was Russia supposed to wipe out every terrorist enclave in Syria all at the same time in one fell swoop? Explain exactly what weapons were to be used against what targets. And of course if the job is really to be finished, at the same time the existing terrorists are wiped out in Syria, then you also need to wipe out their support structures and the logistics that have been supplying them, otherwise they just send in the next wave of martyrs and then it turns out the job wasn’t really finished after all.
I don’t see it. Yet this what’s lacking from people who make vague statements like ‘finishing the job.’ Sounds great in a soundbite, or in a tweet, but it doesn’t exist in reality. No one explains how the job was to be finished in any detail. No one explains what the situation would be like after the attempt. But it is oh so easy to make soundbites about finishing the job and how awful it is that someone didn’t take this simplistic advice.
A fifth or sixth grader like Trump might easily fall for such a soundbite. An experienced adult like Putin would start asking detailed questions and want a plan on how the job was to be finished so magically. Which of course can’t be provided, not unless one hires some Brits to fix the intelligence so it looks like it can be finished in their imaginary world that they make up whole cloth to get a policy that they desire.
The US/UK can throw a lot of hot air and some missiles but it won’t save their assets in Idlib.
If you had gone to senior Syrian officials three years ago and told them…….
You can clean out each and every terrorist pocket, but each time you have to take one night of cruise missile attacks that will attack targets like an empty airbase and civilian buildings that used to be chem weapons labs but which are now classrooms.
When things were looking dark and they were wondering if they could survive the US-Israeli-Saudi onslaught, the Syrian government would probably have gladly taken that deal.
re.: “Most of reports … describe any destroyed militant position, HQ or warehouse as a bakery, a medical point or a civilian house”
Interesting.. I still recall the almost word-to-word correspondence with Soviet propaganda of 1960-70th about “American and Israeli militarists” destroying arabs’ schools and hospitals on every corner. It looks like (almost) complete role reversal. Just declare “world revolution” as stated goal of a struggle and reversal would be complete.
The jihadists have declared their own version of ‘world revolution’ quite some time ago.
Stomp your feet and bang your head, READER! What is the USA doing way over there in Afghanistan, Syria and Iraq? Think for a change! They occupied Iran from 1953 to 1978 (25 years, with Shah Reza Pahlavi as their man), but the Iranian people took it back. (In addition to punishing Iran for this), they wish to re-establish themselves in this prime position for regional hegemony over the vast natural resources of the Middle East and Central Asia. Not to mention their demented ambition to subdue Russia and China! Anglo-zionist USA is a dying animal, pathetically struggling to remain the world bully – or to take the world down with it.
As for the jews and the Rothchilds – they are – as always – deeply implicated in this simply because the USA has become their “Pit-bull” defending them from global retribution……which is hopeless.
Israel Evacuated Islamist Commanders From Syria Alongside White Helmets
https://sputniknews.com/middleeast/201809071067819544-Israel-Islamist-Commanders-Syria-White-Helmets/
“A new report gets dirty on the details of Israeli funding and weapons shipments to 12 anti-government extremist groups in Syria. Buried in the end of the piece is the revelation that Israel helped evacuate so-called “rebel commanders” as they also flew out members of the self-proclaimed “impartial” White Helmets organization.
On August 22, Israel evacuated some 800 members of the White Helmets, a group funded by the United States, United Kingdom, Germany and other Western countries, that claims to be an impartial civil defense organization but has been accused by Syria and Russia of terrorism. Its members have been caught on video grinning wildly as a child nearby was being beheaded in addition to other atrocities, while a high-budget film about the group won the 2017 Academy Award for best documentary.
But as the White Helmets and members of their immediate families were evacuated from southern Syria as the government was liberating it from jihadists, so too were “rebel commanders” and their families, according to Foreign Policy.
Those commanders’ whereabouts are unknown. For the article, Foreign Policy spoke with “more than two dozen commanders and rank-and-file” members of the groups funded and evacuated by Tel Aviv. Some people in Syria say the evacuees are in Israel, and others say they are in Jordan. “One former commander informed his subordinates that he had arrived in Turkey,” the outlet reported.
According to the deleted article, Israeli officials admitted to supporting seven anti-government groups in the Golan Heights with light weapons and munitions. But a new investigative report by Foreign Policy ups the number of groups getting lethal support from Israel to 12.
Sources informed the news outlet that military transfers included assault rifles, machine guns, mortar launchers and transport vehicles. At one point, Israel started supplying weapons seized from Iran in place of US-made weapons to throw off investigators, according to Foreign Policy.
That’s in addition to the IDF paying each fighter $75 a month and additional cash for buying weapons on the black market. It isn’t clear how much funding Israel provided to that end, but the Jerusalem Post article noted that one of the groups consisting of just 400 fighters got $5,000 a month.
That group is Fursan al-Joulan (Knights of the Golan). According to the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, al-Joulan “prepared the final coordination for the rescue.” Abu Rateb, a commander of the group, was also evacuated by Israel, according to Al Masdar News, which reported that three other group commanders were also shipped out. A commander of Saif al-Sham, a group which condemned al-Nusra then later joined a Nusra-organized coalition, was also evacuated.
While Israel has treated fighters of Jabhat al-Nusra, an al-Qaeda affiliate, in its hospitals, many of the rebel groups in the Golan and Syria’s Quneitra province are believed to be working closely with al-Nusra. Al-Joulan “undoubtedly has an affiliation with a larger Islamist group like al-Nusra or al-Qaeda, but I haven’t been able to determine that,” Israel analyst Richard Silverstein wrote in Middle East Eye.
“Israel stood by our side in a heroic way,” al-Joulan spokesman Moatasem al-Golani told The Wall Street Journal in 2017. “We wouldn’t have survived without Israel’s assistance.”
The Wall Street Journal interview “makes clear that it isn’t affiliated with the Free Syrian Army, which increases the likelihood that Fursan al-Joulan is an Islamist group,” Silverstein added.
Meanwhile, “everyone” in the in the Syrian village of Hader in the Golan believes that Israel and the West “tacitly” support Al-Nusra, according to a May report from the UK news organization Channel 4. One villager called them “proxies.”
Now, it appears that some of the group’s members have reversed their opinions on the country. After Israel kept out of the way of the Syrian army and Russian airpower during the liberation of southern Syria earlier this summer, one fighter told Foreign Policy, “This is a lesson we will not forget about Israel. It does not care about… the people. It does not care about humanity. All it cares about it its own interest.” Reportedly, many of the members begged for asylum but did not get it. Some joined the Syrian Arab Army instead.”
Trump Does 180 Shift On Syria: Regime Change Back On The Table.
Will the war in Syria never end? Will the international proxy war and stand-off between Russia, the United States, Iran, and Israel simply continue to drift on, fueling Syria’s fires for yet more years to come? It appears so according to an exclusive Washington Post report which says that President Trump has expressed a desire for complete 180 policy shift on Syria.
Only months ago the president expressed a desire “to get out” and pull the over 2,000 publicly acknowledged American military personnel from the country; but now, the new report finds, Trump has approved “an indefinite military and diplomatic effort in Syria”.
https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-09-06/syrian-regime-change-table-trump-does-180-shift-syria-wapo-sources
UK accusation of Russians in Skripal case ‘cocktail of lies’ timed with Idlib false flag op – Moscow
https://www.rt.com/news/437798-skripal-security-council-meeting/
“Russia has denied allegations that its military intelligence officers were behind the Skripal poisoning in Britain and suggested that the UK government timed its accusations to a potential upcoming false flag attack in Syria.
Her Russian counterpart, Vasily Nebenzya, called the allegations “a cocktail of lies” and denied any involvement of the Russian state in the Skripal saga. The Russian diplomat said the promised breakthrough in the case turned out to be disappointing for Russia and simply followed a pattern of baseless accusations against Moscow by the British side.
He said the British site itself stated that the two suspects most likely used aliases when entering Britain, which begs the question why they were called Russian nationals, yet alone agents of the Russian government. The British authorities, he added, refused to hand over to Russia the information they have on the suspects, including their fingerprints, which they must have provided to get a visa. The fingerprints, obviously, would have made identifying those individuals much easier, Nebenzya said, adding that apparently London is not interested in finding out who the suspects are.
“We have a joke in Russia about a ‘Joe-never-caught’, called so because nobody is trying to catch him. It seems that what we have been offered is two Joes-never-caught,” the diplomat said.”
Somewhere in one of these articles about this, I saw some highly-likely Brit saying that they had fingerprints and iris scans thus they could do biometrical identification to soon unmask the suspects.
Unmentioned in the media of course is that they’ve had this information for months and haven’t yet been able to do this. The story is that these two incompetent assasins flew in, did the dirty deed, then immediately flew out. So any biometric information they have was collected then, not last week. They’ve had it for months.
Assuming of course that all of this isn’t just a Wag the Dog fiction filmed in front of a green screen on which is later projected Gatway airport or Salisbury. Which is something I still consider Highly Likely.
US Representative for Syria Says Possible Idlib Offensive Would Be ‘Reckless’
https://sputniknews.com/middleeast/201809071067818079-usa-syria-idlib-escalation-warning/
The zionazi-gays continue to propagandize their planned falseflag according to their now well worn script as if they are programmed androids.
Russia Calls on US to Release Targets in Syria Tied to Alleged Chemical Weapons
https://sputniknews.com/middleeast/201809061067816452-russia-urges-usa-release-syria-targets/
“We have a specific proposal to our American colleagues. Could you please voice the list of targets that as is being said the Pentagon has determined for the strikes of the Troika,” Nebenzia said. “If in your view they are related to the stockpiling and use of chemical weapons, then show respect for the UN charter and convey them to OPCW to carry out the inspections.”
And more sanctions and bs from israel’s quislings at the u.s. treasury looting dept.
US Treasury Sanctions Target Syrian Government’s Petroleum Procurement Network
https://sputniknews.com/us/201809061067816928-usa-sanctions-syria-fuel-trade/
Yup, netanyahoo’s boy toy trump sure meant what he said about ending the u.s. war against Syria…
Israel paid its Takfiri mercenaries operating in twelve different terrorist outfits in Southern Syria 75 $ per month and some extra cash for buying weapons on the black market. This deal made everyone happy, apparently, until, of course, Israel failed to come to the help of its ‘friends’, when the SAA decided that enough is enough.
Whines Y., a Forsan al-Jolan professional killer:
“ This is a lesson we will not forget about Israel. It does not care about … the people. It does not care about humanity. All it cares about it its own interest.”
You don’t say, Y. Do you have any other pearls of wisdom to share before we wrap this interview up?
https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/09/06/in-secret-program-israel-armed-and-funded-rebel-groups-in-southern-syria/
Hmmm. Maybe we should ask these islamist jihadists if Russia always turns the other cheek?
Idlib finals kick off Mon10th or Tue11th Sept 2018. Syrian Army vs ISIS, boots on the ground. Russia, air cover to prevent invasion of the pitch (see link).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LrRBDL-t0hg
NATZO, boos and bottle throwing (possible bottles of sarin, chlorine or Novijoke).