Syrian army celebrates as rebels quit most of their Ghouta stronghold

Syrian rebels left one besieged enclave on Friday and agreed to abandon another, leaving only the city of Douma still in insurgent hands in eastern Ghouta after a month-long army assault to drive them from the stronghold near Damascus.

It brings President Bashar al-Assad to the cusp of his biggest victory over the rebels since driving them from Aleppo in December 2016, though they remain entrenched in areas of northwestern and southwestern Syria.

The offensive to capture the towns and villages on the outskirts of the capital, which began on Feb. 18 with a massive bombardment, has brought 90 percent of eastern Ghouta back under government control. More than 1,600 people have been killed, a war monitor said.

In case you didn’t know it, we are already at war with Syria, Russia and Iran.
We have been there since 2011.
We support the Syrian rebels.
We trained and funded the rebels under John Brennan’s CIA and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, Secretary of Defense Hillary and Kerry.
475,000 people have died due to Obama’s sponsorship of rebels in Syria.
We have 2,000 Americans on the ground in Syria.
Russia has 4,000 regular army in Syria with 2,000 mercenaries.
The Russian mercenaries attacked us and we responded, killing an unknown number of Russians.
Iran has an unknown number in Syria.
Turkey is fighting in Syria and there is a real possibility they will hit our embedded troops.
Nikki Haley asked the terrorists to use chemical weapons on the Syrians so we have an excuse to bomb Damascus.
The Russians have threatened to retaliate if their embedded are attacked in a Damascus bombing.
We dropped 12,192 bombs in Syria in 2016. Obama’s last year in office.
We made 2,963 airstrikes in Syria in 2016.
Obama, Tillerson and Nikki Haley made it clear we were in Syria to overthrow their president.
Trump on the other hand negotiated with the Mid-East and Africa to cut off funding for the terrorist.
Saudi Arabia announced the end of their 1979 Islamic revolution, granting freedoms to women again.
Now, Mattis says regime change is not our objective. Killing ISIS is.

Tillerson wanted regime change in Syria. That would support the jihadist.
Trump was able to fight the jihadist by cutting out their funding, mainly the terrorist sponsor Qatar. Tillerson wanted to ease up on the sanctions the Gulf States imposed on Qatar.

I read a piece by Steve Bannon this morning.
Here’s an excerpt:

http://www.wnd.com/2017/10/bannon-credits-trump-for-defeating-isis/

“What’s happened in the last nine months – President Trump has accomplished something that I think people would have laughed and mocked at in the campaign. Raqqa fell the other day. The physical destruction of the ISIS caliphate, which shocked the world on its rapid rise, and I think put the world back on its heels,” the Breitbart executive said. “It was breathtaking, the whole world kind of backed off.”

But in less than a year, Trump’s strategy, executed by Gen. James Mattis, the secretary of defense, is forcing jihadists around the globe to retreat, Bannon said.

“That strategy was not a war of attrition; it was very specific from day one. This will be a war of annihilation. We will physically annihilate the caliphate, and that’s what’s been accomplished,” he said.

Trump created the conditions for better relations in the Middle East by warning U.S. allies there against funding terrorism during the Arab Islamic American Summit he held in Riyadh in May, Bannon argued.

“We went into the summit with UAE and Saudi Arabia and others, and the number one thing is that we must take care of this financing of radical Islam and there can be no more – as President Trump says – ‘no more games’ – you can’t have it both ways, you can’t on one side say you are a friend and an ally and on the other side be financing Hamas,” he said.

In the worst diplomatic crisis to hit Gulf Arab states in decades, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Egypt and the United Arab Emirates broke off relations with Qatar in June. The three Gulf countries and Egypt accused Qatar of supporting terrorism and destabilizing the region.

Bannon said that break was because of Trump’s leadership.

“I don’t think it’s just by happenstance, that two weeks after that summit you saw the blockade by the United Emirates and … Bahrain, Egypt and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia on Qatar,” he said. “I’ve said from day one, even in the situation in the northwest Pacific, Korea, I think the single most important thing happening in the world is the situation in Qatar.”

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