Free Republic

If anywhere can show the consequences of American foreign policy under President Barack Obama, it may be the small town of Marea, north of Aleppo. In the course of the last five years, it has seen Assad regime tanks roll through from the south, firing shells through its houses. It has been repeatedly attacked from the east by Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (Isil). On occasion it has been bombed from the air by the regime and shelled from the ground by Isil on the same day. Now its rebel defenders are fighting Isil, the regime, Russian bombers,...

GAZIANTEP, Turkey — Syrian rebels battled for their survival in and around Syria’s northern city of Aleppo on Thursday after a blitz of Russian airstrikes helped government loyalists sever a vital supply route and sent a new surge of refugees fleeing toward the border with Turkey. The Russian-backed onslaught against rebel positions in Aleppo coincided with the failure of peace talks in Geneva, and helped reinforce opposition suspicions that Russia and its Syrian government allies are more interested in securing a military victory over the rebels than negotiating a settlement. After two days of what rebel fighters described as the...

You might recall a report from last September regarding the first batch of rebel soldiers to graduate from a U.S.-led training program in Turkey. President Obama’s ISIS strategy long included the condition that he would not put American boots on the ground in Syria, so instead, the United States reportedly trained 9 rebels at a cost of $500 million to set their boots on the ground.

A report by the Tony Blair Faith Foundation found that the Syrian rebels were mostly Islamic Jihadists and that even if ISIS were defeated there were 15 other groups sharing its worldview that were ready to take its place.

Syria rebels begin leaving Homs under truce deal AFP By Maher Al Mounes 2 hours ago Homs (Syria) (AFP) - Syrian rebels began evacuating the last opposition-held district in Homs on Wednesday, paving the way for President Bashar al-Assad's regime to take full control of the country's third-largest city. Hundreds of Syrian rebels and civilians were leaving the Waer district under a rare local ceasefire agreed with the regime at the start of December. Some 2,000 rebels and their families will abandon Waer in Homs -- once dubbed the "capital" of Syria's revolution -- to travel to other opposition-held areas,...

MANAMA, Bahrain – The United States is ramping up its support for Syria's opposition with a pledge of nearly $100 million in fresh aid. Deputy Secretary of State Antony Blinken announced the additional assistance Saturday at the Manama Dialogue security conference in the Gulf island nation of Bahrain.

In order to deter the Syrian and Russian Air Forces inside the East Ghouta (collection of farms) region of rural Damascus, the U.S. backed moderate rebels from “Jaysh Al-Islam” (Army of Islam) and the Free Syrian Army (FSA) have placed kidnapped Alawite women in cages to protect themselves from airstrikes. The U.S. backed Syrian Opposition’s social media activists posted the photos of the six kidnapped Alawite women on Twitter, adding their extra commentary that included sectarian insults to degrade the helpless women and taunt the Syrian President Dr. Bashar Al-Assad. This is not the first time that the U.S. backed...

Obama’s decision to send Special Forces into Syria is being widely viewed as a US military escalation in the country. The troop dispatch also signals that the US trying to forestall Russian successes in wiping out Washington’s regime-change assets in Syria. In short, the US Special Forces are being used as “human shields” to curb Russian air strikes against anti-government mercenaries, many of whom are instrumental in Washington’s regime-change objective in Syria. First of all, we need to view a host of developments, including the hastily convened “peace talks” in Vienna, as a response by the US and its allies...

Syrian rebel fighters have been pictured eagerly unpacking Chinese-made surface-to-air missile launchers understood to have been smuggled into the country by African arms dealers. Taken in a remote area north of the city of Aleppo, the photographs show fighters from the Free Syrian Army assembling FN-6 anti-aircraft missile launchers for use against soldiers loyal to the Assad regime. The Chinese-made weapons are thought to have been provided to the Free Syrian Army by sympathisers in Qatar, who are likely to have purchased them from dealers with links to corrupt officials in the Sudanese government, before having them smuggled into Syria...

Rebels battling the Syrian army and its allies near Aleppo said on Monday they had received new supplies of U.S.-made anti-tank missiles from states opposed to President Bashar al-Assad since the start of a major government offensive last week. The rebels from three Free Syrian Army-affiliated groups contacted by Reuters said new supplies had arrived in response to the attack by the army, which is backed up by Russian air strikes and on the ground by Iranian fighters and Lebanon's Hezbollah. The "Free Syrian Army" refers to a loose affiliation of groups fighting Assad that do not operate with a...

Washington has been continuing to develop measures against the Russian strategy in Syria. First of all, the US has to demonstrate the existence of the so-called “moderate rebels”. For that reason the topic of the “Free Syrian Army” (FSA) became popular in the US and European media. But what is the FSA? FSA units were created about half a year after the start of the Syrian war.Turkey supported this idea. However, it always was a PR myth and never was a real power in the battlefield. The first FSA activity was noted in 2011 when its leader, a former colonel...

The Senate has approved a 2016 Defense Department spending bill that earmarks nearly $1 billion to arm Syrian and Ukrainian rebels, including several batallions adopting neo-Nazi symbols and slogans. By a veto-proof 70-27 vote, the Senate voted on October 7 to approve the $612 billion Pentagon appropriation bill for 2016, known as the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA). While most of the items in the bill would never be approved were our government to be bound by the enumerated powers of the Constitution, a few of the provisions are particularly pernicious.

A Kurdish militia in northern Syria has joined forces with Arab rebels, and their new alliance has been promised fresh weapon supplies by the United States for an assault on Islamic State forces in Raqqa, a spokesman said on Monday. The alliance calling itself the Democratic Forces of Syria includes the Kurdish YPG militia and Syrian Arab groups, some of which fought alongside it in a campaign that drove Islamic State from wide areas of northern Syria earlier this year. The Arab groups in the new alliance are operating under the name "The Syrian Arab Coalition" - a grouping which...

A U.S.-backed Syrian-Kurdish militia, a number of Arab rebel groups and an Assyrian Christian group in Syria have formed a coalition to build a democratic representation for a number of moderate parties within Syria, according to a statement seen by Reuters on Monday. The new alliance, which is calling itself the Democratic Forces of Syria, includes the Kurdish People's Protection Units (YPG) that beat back the Islamic State (ISIS) with the support of U.S. airstrikes in the Syrian-Kurdish border town of Kobani earlier this year. The YPG continues to battle the radical Islamist group in areas of northeastern Syria and...

Even this guy’s own deputies won’t defend him anymore. Current and former Obama officials say the president’s reluctance to respond more assertively against Putin is signaling U.S. weakness and indecision. “We’re just so reactive,” said one senior administration official. “There’s just this tendency to wait” and see what steps other actors take… Sources familiar with administration deliberations said that Obama’s West Wing inner circle serves as a brick wall against dissenting views. The president’s most senior advisers — including National Security Adviser Susan Rice and White House chief of staff Denis McDonough — reflect the president’s wariness of escalated U.S....

<p>The U.S. military airdropped 50 tons of ammunition to Syrian rebels fighting ISIS on Sunday — the latest maneuver in the United States' attempt to help turn the tide of a chaotic civil war.</p> <p>The airdrop, consisting of AK-47 rounds, hand grenades, rocket-propelled grenades and mortar rounds, targeted rebels in ISIS-held territory in northern Syria, senior defense and military officials told NBC News.</p>

BEIRUT — American antitank missiles supplied to Syrian rebels are playing an unexpectedly prominent role in shaping the Syrian battlefield, giving the conflict the semblance of a proxy war between the United States and Russia, despite President Obama’s express desire to avoid one. The U.S.-made BGM-71 TOW missiles were delivered under a two-year-old covert program coordinated between the United States and its allies to help vetted Free Syrian Army groups in their fight against President Bashar al-Assad. Now that Russia has entered the war in support of Assad, they are taking on a greater significance than was originally intended. So...

Hitting Back 10.12.151:03 AM ET Written by Austin Bodetti, David Axe Syria Rebels Plan Suicide Attacks on Russians The Homs Liberation Movement, a Free Syrian Army faction close to al Qaeda, plans to infiltrate the Syrian military to find where the Russians are—and blow them up. After more than a week of Russian aerial attacks, Syrian rebels plan to hit back with double agents and suicide bombers. “First, we will endure the violent aerial bombardment, then move to weaken Russia by all means available, such as recruiting agents in the ranks of the regime to provide us with the movements...

President Obama now says he never believed in the $500-million program to train and equip the moderate Syrian opposition. The administration last week halted the failed program, which ended up “training” fewer than 100 Syrians, all but four or five of whom deserted or died after the Americans tried to turn them into anti-ISIS fighters. “Steve, this is why I’ve been skeptical from the get-go about the notion that we were going to effectively create this proxy army inside Syria,” Obama told CBS’ Steve Kroft during an interview for “60 Minutes.” …

CNN)U.S. military cargo planes gave 50 tons of ammunition to rebel groups overnight in northern Syria, using an air drop of 112 pallets as the first step in the Obama Administration's urgent effort to find new ways to support those groups. Details of the air mission over Syria were confirmed by a U.S. official not authorized to speak publicly because the details have not yet been formally announced. C-17s, accompanied by fighter escort aircraft, dropped small arms ammunition and other items like hand grenades in Hasakah province in northern Syria to a coalition of rebels groups vetted by the US,...