Open Letter 26th November, 2019 from
29 members of the European council on foreign relations (ECFR) Members They urge European governments to immediately begin a programme of managed repatriation of ISIS foreign fighters in Syria.
A weekly review of world politics by one of the world’s sharpest and most outspoken political analysts. Tariq Ali is the author of numerous books, both ficti... Tariq Ali and Patrick Coburn talk about ISIS in Sept 2014; ca 30 min.
Gilbert D. 30 Nov :
Europeans can take pleasure in the rare phenomenon these days of diametrically opposed narratives on major international issues being laid out...
"the switch at Euronews was very obviously flicked in time for President Hollande’s visit to Moscow on Thursday, 26 November to agree on the terms of Russian-French military cooperation. In its coverage of the press conference which followed, Euronews gave equal time to the French and Russian presidents and chose the most important assertion from Putin’s statements for airing, his answer to a French journalist on why Assad’s remaining in power is not an impediment to combatting the Daesh, but is rather an essential precondition: as Putin explained, the Islamic State forces in Syria can only be defeated on the ground, and there is only one military force in existence today, the regular Syrian Army of President Assad. This very reasonable logic just happens to fly in the face of everything Washington, and official France as well, has been saying about the Syrian civil war."
Ian Fisher, NYT 18 Nov 2015: "No report or event can stand in hindsight as the single missed key to the now terrifyingly complex puzzle of the Islamic State. "
Justin Raimondo, antiwar.com 16 nov 2015: "former Israeli ambassador to Washington Michael Oren has brazenly stated that ISIS is the "lesser evil." They’re all "bad guys," said Oren, but "we always wanted Bashar Assad to go, we always preferred the bad guys who weren’t backed by Iran to the bad guys who were backed by Iran."
The Paris attacks are the signal for full-scale Western intervention in Syria, a “pitiless war,” as French President Francois Hollande put it, and the US is likely to follow in his wake. This will achieve another longstanding Israeli goal: the interposition of a substantial Western military force between Israel and its enemies. (Although the Israeli far right doesn’t necessarily agree.)
What we are looking at is a Western expeditionary force aimed at smashing the Islamic State, occupying Syria, and imposing a “negotiated settlement” of the civil war.
November 24, 2015 by Brad Hoff
While the document was referenced and analyzed in literally hundreds of independent/alternative and foreign media reports, major U.S. news maintained its silence, even after Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn (Ret.), head of the DIA at the time the report was prepared, confirmed its accuracy and importance in an Al Jazeera interview with Mehdi Hasan.
The New York Times has finally acknowledged the 2012 DIA report a full six months after its release through FOIA , including new statements confirming its high importance, in a lengthy investigative piece about the rise of ISIS. To my great surprise the article sources my initial reporting of the Pentagon document...
Nafeez Ahmed: "So the US is not targeting the Islamic State’s financial lifeline - its black market oil infrastructure - but instead is teaming up with the same al-Qaeda affiliated groups that spawned IS in the first place, to undermine Assad. And Russia, for all its muscle-flexing rhetoric, sees its main priority as countering US-led efforts to topple Assad, by targeting his most immediate opponents.
This is, in other words, a New Cold War between competing empires, the unending victims of which are the Syrian people. As for the Islamic State, it is little more than the proxy bastard child of a conflict that looks set to escalate.
This essay is excerpted from the first chapter of Patrick Cockburn’s new book, The Jihadis Return: ISIS and the New Sunni Uprising, with special thanks to his publisher, OR Books. The first section is a new introduction written for TomDispatch "The Underrated Saudi Connection " (underrubrik) "The “war on terror” has failed because it did not target the jihadi movement as a whole and, above all, was not aimed at Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, the two countries that fostered jihadism as a creed and a movement. The U.S. did not do so because these countries were important American allies whom it did not want to offend. Saudi Arabia is an enormous market for American arms, and the Saudis have cultivated, and on occasion purchased, influential members of the American political establishment. Pakistan is a nuclear power with a population of 180 million and a military with close links to the Pentagon."
Tony Cartalucci, Bangkok-based geopolitical researcher and writer, especially for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”. "Despite an open conspiracy to drown the region in sectarian strife, the US now poses as a stakeholder in Iraq’s stability. Having armed, funded, and assisted ISIS into existence and into northern Iraq itself, the idea of America “intervening” to stop ISIS is comparable to an arsonist extinguishing his fire with more gasoline."
"This, now, is the real War on Terror. But this time it will be led from inside the Middle East, gain universal support and change the regional political balance of power for generations to come." Sharmine Narwani is a commentary writer and political analyst covering the Middle East. You can follow Sharmine on twitter @snarwani.