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Earlier this year, President Donald Trump was shown a disturbing video of Syrian rebels beheading a child near the city of Aleppo. It had caused a minor stir in the press as the fighters belonged to the Nour al-Din al-Zenki Movement, a group that had been supported by the CIA as part of its rebel aid program. The footage is haunting. Five bearded men smirk as they surround a boy in the back of a pickup truck. One of them holds the boy’s head with a tight grip on his hair while another mockingly slaps his face. Then, one of...

Reports surface today that President Trump has cancelled the 2012/2013 covert CIA program giving weapons to ISIS and al-Qaeda in Syria.  [Washington Post Link] Various news organizations frame the issue as cancelling the program to “arm the moderate opposition to Bashir Assad”.  However, those news reports are entirely false. We know the Obama administration was arming ISIS as part of the larger Syria strategy because Secretary of State John Kerry went on record admitting the Obama Syrian strategy was actually to arm ISIS and extremist Islamic groups (al-Nusra) against Assad. We also know Secretary Kerry was being truthful in that media-hidden, albeit recorded, admission because CTH specifically...

President Trump has decided to end the CIA’s covert program to arm and train moderate Syrian rebels battling the government of Bashar al-Assad

President Trump cancelled the CIA’s secret program to arm and train Syrian rebels fighting the regime of Syrian strongman Bashar al-Assad — a move critics called a gift to Russia, a new report said Wednesday. “This is a momentous decision. Putin won in Syria,” a US official who supported the program told The Washington Post. The program to arm moderate Syrian rebels began under the Obama administration in 2013 and was continued under Trump until now. Officials told the paper that phasing out the covert program was a way to improve relations with Russia and President Vladimir Putin, who strongly...

Syria Civil Defense, popularly known as the White Helmets, can be seen in a new video assisting in a public execution in a rebel-held town in Syria. It is at least the second such execution video featuring members of the Nobel Prize-nominated group. The White Helmets have received at least $23 million in funding from the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), a wing of the State Department. The British Foreign Office and other European governments have pitched in as well. Frequently cited as an invaluable source of information by major Western media outlets, the group was the subject of...

This is from last year but pertains to the recent Syria situation. Gives a little credence to what some people have said about the sarin gas thing being either a false flag or rebels being the source of the sarin. Either way, Trump's being duped.In April of 2013, Britain and France informed the United Nations that there was credible evidence that Syria used chemical weapons against rebel forces. Only two months later, in June of 2013, the United States concluded that the Syrian government did, in fact, use chemical weapons in its fight against opposition forces. President Obama immediately used...

CIA-coordinated military aid for rebels in northwest Syria has been frozen since they came under major Islamist attack last month, rebel sources said, raising doubts about foreign support key to their war against President Bashar al-Assad. Rebel officials said that no official explanation had been given for the move this month following the jihadist assault, though several said they believed the main objective was to prevent arms and cash falling into Islamist militant hands. But they said they expected the aid freeze to be temporary.

I am so happy to report that Obama’s CIA backed so-called moderate Syrian rebels are not receiving their paydays any longer. Last month the money did not come, and the Obama gang is really up in arms about being cut out of CIA loop. I think it would be more accurate to say, they are down in arms, so they cannot give anymore to ISIS. Now they will all defect to the ISIS camp, as if they had not already, but Obama never gave up on them…(sarcasm). Hillary and Obama must be so upset to learn aide had been frozen...

Syrian government and allied forces advanced north of Aleppo, pressing their week-old offensive to take the insurgent-held, eastern part of the city after dozens of overnight air strikes. The Syrian army told rebels to leave the area, offering safe passage and aid supplies. The Syrian military, supported by Iranian-backed militias and Russian air power, began their push to take the whole of the divided city after a ceasefire collapsed last month. The assault has nearly destroyed eastern Aleppo's healthcare system, the U.N said. An air campaign by the Syrian government and its allies was reinforced by a ground offensive targeting...

<p>“Nobody believes in it. You’re like, ‘Fuck this,’” a former Green Beret says of America’s covert and clandestine programs to train and arm Syrian militias. “Everyone on the ground knows they are jihadis. No one on the ground believes in this mission or this effort, and they know they are just training the next generation of jihadis, so they are sabotaging it by saying, ‘Fuck it, who cares?’”</p>

<p>“Nobody believes in it. You’re like, ‘Fuck this,’” a former Green Beret says of America’s covert and clandestine programs to train and arm Syrian militias. “Everyone on the ground knows they are jihadis. No one on the ground believes in this mission or this effort, and they know they are just training the next generation of jihadis, so they are sabotaging it by saying, ‘Fuck it, who cares?’”</p>

A Syrian opposition group whose members beheaded a child captive near Aleppo on Tuesday had been part of a US-vetted alliance and been supplied with anti-tank missiles until a year ago. Images of the killing are widely seen as among the most shocking of the war and continued to receive condemnation, with Amnesty International describing the killing as having “truly plumbed the depths of depravity”. A US State Department spokesman described reports of the killing as “appalling” and said proof that the killers were linked to the group, known as Nour al-din al-Zenki, would lead to any further backing being...

EVER since Russia entered the Syrian civil war on the side of the Syrian regime led by Bashar al-Assad, rebel groups in Aleppo have been progressively isolated and besieged. In February they lost their main access route to Turkey; and two weeks ago the fighters in the east of the city, with a population of perhaps 250,000, were cut off entirely. It threatened to become the biggest and nastiest siege in the five-year-long war. Despair, it seems, forced a show of unity by the disparate rebel groups, with striking effect. On the weekend of August 6th-7th, mainstream and jihadist groups...

Weapons shipped into Jordan by the Central Intelligence Agency and Saudi Arabia intended for Syrian rebels have been systematically stolen by Jordanian intelligence operatives and sold to arms merchants on the black market, according to American and Jordanian officials. Some of the stolen weapons were used in a shooting in November that killed two Americans and three others at a police training facility in Amman, F.B.I. officials believe after months of investigating the attack. The Jordanian officers who were part of the scheme reaped a windfall from the weapons sales. The training program, which in 2013 began directly arming the...

The world leader of Syria's besieged Christians has issued a heartfelt plea to the West to "stop arming and supporting terrorist groups that are destroying our countries and massacring our people." The Patriarch of Antioch, Moran Mor Ignatius Aphrem II, said he was not asking the West for military intervention to defend Christians. If the West wants to do something about the present crisis, the most effective thing would be to support local governments, which need sufficient armies and forces to maintain security ...

The great investigative journalist Seymour Hersh, in two previous articles in the London Review of Books ("Whose Sarin?" and "The Red Line and the Rat Line") has reported that the Obama Administration falsely blamed the government of Syria’s Bashar al-Assad for the sarin gas attack that Obama was trying to use as an excuse to invade Syria; and Hersh pointed to a report from British intelligence saying that the sarin that was used didn’t come from Assad’s stockpiles. Hersh also said that a secret agreement in 2012 was reached between the Obama Administration and the leaders of Turkey, Saudi Arabia,...

Fierce clashes between U.S.-backed Syrian fighters and insurgent groups north of Aleppo killed dozens of combatants, a spokesman and a monitoring group said on Thursday. The Syria Democratic Forces alliance, which includes the powerful Kurdish YPG militia, has been fighting insurgents, some also supported by foreign states via Turkey, in northern Aleppo province for several months. Washington, which is leading an aerial campaign against Islamic State, supports the SDF in the separate fight against the jihadists around areas they control farther east. The YPG has proved the most effective partner on the ground for the U.S.-led campaign. SDF spokesman Talal...

Clashes between militias trained by the CIA and the Pentagon are intensifying as bitter fighting has broken out near Aleppo and the Turkish border. Chicago Tribune: The fighting has intensified over the past two months, as CIA-armed units and Pentagon-armed ones have repeatedly shot at each other as they have maneuvered through contested territory on the northern outskirts of Aleppo, U.S. officials and rebel leaders have confirmed. In mid-February, a CIA-armed militia called Fursan al Haq, or Knights of Righteousness, was run out of the town of Marea, about 20 miles north of Aleppo, by Pentagon-backed Syrian Democratic Forces moving...

The Russian president, Vladimir Putin, has declared that he is withdrawing the majority of Russian troops from Syria, saying the intervention had largely achieved its objective. The news, relayed to the Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad, personally, followed a meeting in the Kremlin with Putin’s defence and foreign ministers. He said the pullout, reducing an intervention that began at the end of September, is due to start from Tuesday.

The Pentagon wants to reboot a failed program designed to train Syrian rebels in the fight against the Islamic State, even though this same $500 million dollar program had almost nothing to show for itself. The goal was to train 5,000 fighters, but the first class of 54 melted and scattered after being attacked by the al-Nusra front, the al-Qaida affiliate in Syria. The second class of so-called moderate rebels handed over at least 25 percent of their U.S. military gear to al-Nusra. Pentagon officials now say they’ve identified what elements of the program to tweak to make sure they...