Tag: war

Inside the Syrian war

One of the things I’ve noticed about the war in Syria is the complete failure of the media and the U.S. government to successfully establish Assad as the official bad guy. This is likely in part due to the fact that he’s the guy fighting the people who are beheading Westerners on YouTube.

This interview with a young Syrian man living in Russia, who volunteered to fight in Syria for the government, is tremendously informative and punctures the Western media narrative in a number of ways.

We talked to Michel Mizah, a 25-year-old citizen of Russia and Syria, who recently returned from Damascus, where he fought in the “Shabiha” pro-government paramilitary units.

He told us what the Syrians think about the war, President Bashar Assad, the Islamic state, and the future.

Why did you decide to go to Syria?

My father is from Syria, and there we still have a lot of relatives with whom we talk to on a daily basis, basically living in two countries at once. We are Christians. My second cousin is fighting in the Syrian army, my uncle and aunt, civilians, were killed in 2012 in Kalamun.

So, each time I saw the news, I was plagued by vague uneasiness… For three years, I wanted to go there, but something always got in the way – wife, job, etc. Only now, everything came together, and I was able to go.

When the “Arab Spring” had just begun, how did your family react?

At first, my family sympathized with the protesters. But then it became obvious that the hardliners among the secular opposition work in the interests of Turkey and the Arab monarchies. Plus the course for Islamization was visible early on, and that was a concern.

Like pretty much all normal people, my family, my friends and everyone I know in Syria are strongly against Wahhabis and religious extremism in general.

In Syria, the war is not against Assad, but against civilization itself. ISIS literally keeps slaves, crucifies people, introduces medieval taxes for Christians and kills Shiites and Alawites on the spot…

Do you, personally, want to live according to Sharia law, where you would be killed for smoking or alcohol, and beaten with sticks in the town square for wearing narrow jeans? Neither do we!

And we know that would happen, if Damascus falls. In Raqqa, it’s already like that, the locals tell us. There are still buses traveling, so we know the alternative to Assad very well.

In Damascus, I met a girl, she was only 20 years old, and she spent the last three months in ISIS slavery. One of their commanders bought her as a concubine, and when he died, she was “inherited” by his successor … Relatives barely managed to buy her back.

Did you know where you’ll be going to in Damascus, was there someone waiting for you?

Of course. About two months before departure, through a friend of the family, I got in touch with my future unit commander in “Shabiha”. This is the same “Shabiha”, which the UN in 2012, accused of “crimes against humanity”.

In general, over two months, I told him about myself: Who am I, what can I do, why do I want to come, and so on … And he explained what is going on over there, what I would do, and lots more.

I would have joined the army, but my turn for mobilization comes last, since I am the only breadwinner in the family, and you can’t simply go there for a short time. My cousin is there for three years, and he can’t even see his family, because the frontline is constantly very hot.

Your militia, did it include only Syrians, or was it an international team?

People come from Lebanon and Iran, because they understand that if Syria falls, they are next. They send us military advisers and weapons … The whole “Shiite axis of evil” supports us!

As for the rest of the world, I have not seen fighters from there… It seemed to me that the Embassy of Syria in Russia does not approve of such things. Perhaps this is due to the rumors about the so-called “Russian Legion”, which a few years ago was hired by some company in St. Pete to fight for Assad [officially, to guard some pipeline or other – ed.]. But when they arrived in Damascus, the Russian diplomats protested, and the “legionnaires” were sent back home, a few were prosecuted for mercenary activities [it’s legal by Russian law to fight in a foreign war, but not to make money from it – ed.].

In general, joining the fight for Syria is only possible if one has Syrian citizenship, or there is some agreement between governments. But the Islamists – they flock to attack Syria from all corners of the world.

It’s also informative in how it punctures the illusions of the multiculturalists. This is a young man who is second-generation “Russian” by their definition of ground-defined identity, and yet he was willing to go and fight and risk dying for Syria, his true nation, rather than fight for Russia. This suggests that the European nations that make the mistake of permitting the current “refugees” residence in Europe will find that their new residents imported the Middle East’s wars with them.

This is something that those who think 50 million Hispanics are going to become Americans in the U.S. sense should keep in mind. They’re not. And indeed, they’re already claiming Los Angeles as the northern capital of Latin America.

It’s already on the way

As Glenn Reynolds notes, “this column about  “THE NEXT GENOCIDE,” kind of misses the point:”

BEFORE he fired the shot, the Einsatzgruppe commander lifted the Jewish
child in the air and said, “You must die so that we can live.” As the
killing proceeded, other Germans rationalized the murder of Jewish
children in the same way: them or us….

When mass killing is on the way, it won’t announce itself in the language we are familiar with. The Nazi scenario of 1941 will not reappear in precisely the same form, but several of its causal elements have already begun to assemble.

It is not difficult to imagine ethnic mass murder in Africa, which has already happened; or the triumph of a violent totalitarian strain of Islamism in the parched Middle East; or a Chinese play for resources in Africa or Russia or Eastern Europe that involves removing the people already living there; or a growing global ecological panic if America abandons climate science or the European Union falls apart.

Today we confront the same crucial choice between science and ideology that Germans once faced. Will we accept empirical evidence and support new energy technologies, or allow a wave of ecological panic to spread across the world?

Denying science imperils the future by summoning the ghosts of the past.

Or, you know, the invasion of Europe by millions of Muslims. Or the invasion of the USA by tens of millions of third-worlders. Either of them strike me as considerably more likely candidates than a Chinese play for resources in Eastern Europe.

However, until this summer, I would have said that the Chinese play for Africa was the most likely one. The Europeans will probably be content to simply engage in a second Reconquista and the Chinese make the KKK look like the Anti-Defamation League. It wouldn’t surprise me in the slightest if the Chinese resorted to genetic warfare in Africa; I very much doubt the African invasion of Europe is leading them to believe that coexistence in a Chinese-colonized Africa is possible, let alone desirable.

Nationalism isn’t an evil. Nationalism and homogenous populations is what protects societies from horrors most people can’t even imagine.

Building the next Nazis

When the ultra-nationalists take power in Europe, it is the “open borders” advocates and “save the poor refugees” advocates who will be responsible. And we’ll all be lucky if they settle for mass deportations:

Italy’s simmering anti-immigrant sentiment has been stoked by the murder of an elderly couple in their home in Sicily, allegedly by an African asylum seeker. Mamadou Kamara, an 18-year-old from the Ivory Coast, allegedly slit the throat of Vincenzo Solano, 68, and then attacked his Spanish-born wife, Mercedes Ibanez, 70.

Ms Ibanez fell to her death from a second-floor balcony, during a robbery that turned violent.

Mr Kamara is one of thousands of migrants and refugees living at a vast reception centre at nearby Mineo, in south-eastern Sicily.

They are accommodated there after arriving by boat from Libya, and wait sometimes for months to have their asylum applications assessed.

The migrants are allowed to come and go freely from the facility, a former US military base where prostitution, links with organised crime and the trade in illicit goods is said to be rife.

Mr Kamara, who was rescued in the Mediterranean on June 8 and brought with other migrants to the port of Catania in Sicily, allegedly broke into the pensioners’ flat in the village of Palagonia, six miles away, and slit the throat of Mr Solano….Patience is wearing thin among many Italians, with some of the country’s 20 regions refusing to accommodate any more migrants and centre-Right parties accusing the centre-Left government of Matteo Renzi, the prime minister, of having lost control of the country’s borders.

I think we’re two election cycles away from the end of the pro-EU governments. They may end up shutting down Schengen and taking away the welcome mats, but by then, it will be too little, too late. The anti-immigrant sentiment is rapidly approaching a full boil; mass immigration is invasion. As you will see in an essay that appears in Riding the Red Horse V2, mass immigration is invasion. Mass immigration is occupation. Mass immigration is war.

Russia reinforces Syria

As if the Middle East wasn’t already enough of a powder keg: The Russians are showing up in force:

While military direct intervention by US, Turkish, and Gulf forces over Syrian soil escalates with every passing day, even as Islamic State forces capture increasingly more sovereign territory, in the central part of the country, the Nusra Front dominant in the northwestern region province of Idlib and the official “rebel” forces in close proximity to Damascus, the biggest question on everyone’s lips has been one: would Putin abandon his protege, Syria’s president Assad, to western “liberators” in the process ceding control over Syrian territory which for years had been a Russian national interest as it prevented the passage of regional pipelines from Qatar and Saudi Arabia into Europe, in the process eliminating Gazprom’s – and Russia’s – influence over the continent.

As recently as a month ago, the surprising answer appeared to be an unexpected “yes”, as we described in detail in “The End Draws Near For Syria’s Assad As Putin’s Patience “Wears Thin.” Which would make no sense: why would Putin abdicate a carefully cultivated relationship, one which served both sides (Russia exported weapons, provides military support, and in exchange got a right of first and only refusal on any traversing pipelines through Syria) for years, just to take a gamble on an unknown future when the only aggressor was a jihadist spinoff which had been created as byproduct of US intervention in the region with the specific intention of achieving precisely this outcome: overthrowing Assad (see “Secret Pentagon Report Reveals US “Created” ISIS As A “Tool” To Overthrow Syria’s President Assad”).

As it turns out, it may all have been just a ruse. Because as Ynet reports, not only has Putin not turned his back on Assad, or Syria, but the Russian reinforcements are well on their way. Reinforcements for what? Why to fight the evil Islamic jihadists from ISIS of course, the same artificially created group of bogeyman that the US, Turkey, and Saudis are all all fighting. In fact, this may be the first world war in which everyone is “fighting” an opponent that everyone knows is a proxy for something else.

According to Ynet, Russian fighter pilots are expected to begin arriving in Syria in the coming days, and will fly their Russian air force fighter jets and attack helicopters against ISIS and rebel-aligned targets within the failing state.

And just like the US and Turkish air forces are supposedly in the region to “eradicate the ISIS threat”, there can’t be any possible complaints that Russia has also decided to take its fight to the jihadists – even if it is doing so from the territory of what the real goal of US and Turkish intervention is – Syria. After all, it is a free for all against ISIS, right?

From Ynet:

    According to Western diplomats, a Russian expeditionary force has already arrived in Syria and set up camp in an Assad-controlled airbase. The base is said to be in area surrounding Damascus, and will serve, for all intents and purposes, as a Russian forward operating base.

    In the coming weeks thousands of Russian military personnel are set to touch down in Syria, including advisors, instructors, logistics personnel, technical personnel, members of the aerial protection division, and the pilots who will operate the aircraft.

The Israeli outlet needless adds that while the current makeup of the Russian expeditionary force is still unknown, “there is no doubt that Russian pilots flying combat missions in Syrian skies will definitely change the existing dynamics in the Middle East.”

Why certainly: because in one move Putin, who until this moment had been curiously non-commital over Syria’s various internal and exteranl wars, just made the one move the puts everyone else in check: with Russian forces in Damascus implicitly supporting and guarding Assad, the western plan instantly falls apart.

I think this demonstrates why the US coup in Ukraine was a grand strategic disaster. Putin now knows beyond any shadow of a doubt that the USA isn’t afraid to go after his backyard, which means that sitting tight is riskier for Russia than taking aggressive action. So, he’s not going to shy away from destabilizing actions, and he can do considerably more than interfere with the West’s plan to overthrow Syria under the guise of fighting ISIS.

I wouldn’t be surprised if Putin started sending serious arms to the Mexican drug cartels and relaunching the Soviet Union’s policy of funding revolutionary movements around the world. Thanks to the EU’s insane immigration policies, he could even turn the USA’s mujahideen strategy on its head and sow chaos throughout Western Europe if he wanted.

The end of air supremacy

ESR called this one in “Battlefield Lasers”, which appeared in Riding the Red Horse.

If history teaches us anything about military technology, it’s that cheap systems scale up faster than expensive ones do. It is already easy to imagine an up-gunned version of Rodriguez’s laser pointer slaved to a radar with a couple of bog-standard servomotors. Off-the-shelf parts, incremental cost less than $3K each, with most of it the development budget going for the targeting firmware. Cost per shot, effectively free.

Call it the PlaneZapper. You could sit it on a roof, power it off wall current, and it would blind every pilot it can see. Including drone pilots; even if there’s a peak-clipping filter between a drone’s sensors and its pilot’s screen, the effect will be like whiteout. Altitude and cloudy skies might save pilots from the early versions of the PlaneZapper, but for anything that has to fly low and slow this could already be a death knell. Close air support and medevac are obvious vulnerabilities.

Apparently someone at Boeing was reading Raymond:

Wednesday morning, the company showed off its Compact Laser Weapon System for media in Albuquerque, New Mexico. It’s a much smaller, significantly more portable version of the High Energy Laser Mobile Demonstrator (HEL MD) Boeing demonstrated last year. This setup looks like an overgrown camera, swiveling around on a tripod.

In the demo, Boeing used the laser to burn holes in a stationary, composite UAV shell, to show how quickly it can compromise an aircraft. Two seconds at full power and the target was aflame. Other than numerous safety warnings to ensure no one was blinded by the two-kilowatt infrared laser, there was no fanfare. No explosions, no visible beam. It’s more like burning ants with a really, really expensive magnifying glass than obliterating Alderaan.

Instead of a massive laser mounted on a dedicated truck, the compact system is small enough to fit in four suitcase-sized boxes and can be set up by a pair of soldiers or technicians in just a few minutes.

This means that the battle for air supremacy is going to have to move higher, which is to say, space.

The end of the invasion

It looks like the end of the Mediterranean Invasion is now in sight:

A Greek coast guard vessel allegedly sank a rubber dinghy full of Syrian refugees, including women and children, according to film footage shot by Turkish fishermen.

The footage, which was reportedly recorded a few days ago and obtained by Turkish media, suggests that the Greeks sank the migrant boat with some sort of “lance”.

The inflatable boat had just left the Turkish coast, just a few miles from the Greek islands of Kos and Lesbos, where thousands of Syrians and other refugees have landed in recent weeks.

As the Greek patrol vessel moved away from the area, one of the fishermen can be heard saying: “The boat is deflating, the boat’s taking on water and there are people on board.”

He then added: “The boat was pierced by what looks like a long lance.”

The footage then showed migrants in the water as the boat gradually sank. The fishermen went to the rescue of the Syrians – said to be around 50 – and then called the Turkish coast guard, who eventually took the refugees back to the Turkish coast.

Armed or not, mass migrants are invaders and it’s about time that the European coast guards started actually guarding their coasts. The only thing that surprises me is that it wasn’t the Italian Navy that started sinking the “refugee” boats.

If the Greek and Italian navies had simply sunk the first ten or twenty boats to try to cross the sea, the entire crisis could have been averted. Now, with African “refugees” beating up and raping the aid workers working in the “refugee” camps, it looks like it’s going to be an long and ugly process of violent repatriation.

The Italian article points out that the cost of housing and providing for the three “delinquent” immigrants is 20,000 euros a year, which happens to be the annual income for one-third of Italian families. Which means the invasion is going to be brought to an end soon, one way or another.

Fighting them there

I respect this British man’s decision to join the Christians fighting ISIS in Iraq. But given that ISIS and other jihadists are already in Britain and America, I don’t think it will be too long before one won’t need to go abroad to do so.

A British granddad has left his family to join militants fighting Isil on the frontline in Iraq claiming he could no longer sit back and do nothing.

Despite having no military experience, Jim Atherton, 53, of Tyne and Wear, has sold his car to buy weapons and has already come under mortar and rocket attacks.

The granddad, who before leaving for Iraq cared for rescued daschunds, said Special Branch had tried to persuade him to come home, but he believed his place was fighting jihadists.

It’s very strange that there has been so little martial activity inside Western countries given how completely they have been infiltrated by jihadists. One wonders what they are waiting for.

“A Reliable Source” in the real world

This link to an FBI activity alert was sent to me by a reader with the comment that it didn’t take long for “A Reliable Source” (which appeared in Riding the Red Horse) to become non-fiction.

Middle-Eastern Males Approaching Family Members of US Military Personnel at their Homes In Colorado and Wyoming, as of June 2015. 

SOURCE: An officer of another law enforcement agency.

In May 2015, the wife of a US military member was approached in front of her home by two Middle-Eastern males. The men stated that she was the wife of a US interrogator. When she denied their claims, the men laughed. The two men left the area in a dark-colored, four-door sedan with two other Middle-Eastern males in the vehicle. The woman had observed the vehicle in the neighborhood on previous occasions.

Similar incidents in Wyoming have been reported to the FBI throughout June 2015. On numerous occasions, family members of military personnel were confronted by Middle-Eastern males in front of their homes. The males have attempted to obtain personal information about the military member and family members through intimidation. The family members have reported feeling scared.

It’s my opinion that large-scale drone warfare could be easily counteracted by targeting the drone operators and their family members. It wouldn’t surprise me in the slightest if countries like Iran, Russia, Israel, and China already have near-complete lists of every US military drone operator and their home addresses. There are only 1,200 of them, after all. In less than 24 hours, the entire US drone fleet could be rendered inoperative, which is the main reason AI-controlled robodrones are inevitable, the various moral and technical concerns about unintended consequences notwithstanding.

I also wonder if their awareness of being the most vulnerable link in the chain is one reason why “drone pilots are quitting in record numbers.”

Blame the Royal Navy

You rescue them, you keep them:

A Sudanese migrant rescued by the Royal Navy in the Mediterranean Sea and dropped off in Italy just five weeks ago has already made it to Britain. Hamad Said, 22, was given free passage on trains across Italy, France and all the way to Calais, where he jumped on a lorry to England. His journey of more than 2,000 miles from Sicily to Birmingham cost him just €76 — around £53 — as the French and Italian authorities simply waved him through.

Mr Said said they helped him by providing free train rides. And he claimed that even when he was eventually stopped by police in Marseille, they told him he had to leave the country. He replied that he was off to England, to which the officers simply said: ‘OK.’ They then gave him a piece of paper that allowed him to travel free on trains across the country.

You have to love the Italians. I expect the British concern for the Africans crossing the Mediterranean is going to disappear pretty quickly now that the Italians, with French complicity, have decided to ship them to Britain.

I don’t know how long it will take before their policy changes, but I expect those Royal Navy warships are going to start sinking the refugee boats sooner or later. If they had done that the first place they would have saved many, many lives in the long run.

Mailvox: “we’re waiting for ISIS”

Shimshon asks about the Middle East:

i think i mentioned before. i heard word from someone who knows. the region north and west of amman, and all along the syrian border is thick with refugees. have you seen some of the pics? there’s around 600k i think. around 10% of the native population. my understanding is that king hussein is pretty terrified of the powderkeg in his midst.

Powderkeg barely begins to describe it. The refugee situation is even worse than that. I had lunch with a Lebanese Christian last week, who was visiting while on vacation. Apparently there are over a million refugees there now. I asked what the Maronites were doing and he said “we are waiting for ISIS.”

That sounded rather fatalistic, so I asked him if they would fight or if they would simply submit like the Assyrians and the Yazidi did. He smiled and said “We have always had to fight to stay alive. The difference is, this time many of those we used to fight against will be fighting with us.” It’s perhaps worth remembering that they were winning the Lebanese civil war when Syria entered and forced a settlement.

What the US and Israel should do is materially support Assad and the Alawites, the Jordanians, and the Lebanese Christians without getting involved in the fighting, and at the same time, clean house at home. Instead, they appear to be playing the same stupid game they did in Afghanistan, where they create a weaponized puppet who rapidly grows beyond their control. Too many parties appear to be too caught up in their historical concerns, such as the Turks with the Kurds, or their grand strategic vision, such as the Israelis with Iran, to focus on the actual danger at hand.

Sure, the Islamic State is no danger to Israel or the USA now, so they think they can use it to settle old scores. But just as the anti-Soviet mujahideen eventually transformed into the Taliban, Daesh is in the process of developing into a more serious and formidable force.

The Iran agreement, and the fact that Turkey, Israel, and the USA are all cooperating to hit Daesh in Syria may indicate that they’re finally beginning to rethink their previous perspectives. The one thing that is certain is that Syria is far less dangerous with Assad in control than Daesh.