**Image by Carlos Martinez
Sept 23, 2014, Syria Solidarity Movement: STATEMENT ON UNAUTHORIZED US AIR STRIKES INSIDE SYRIA:
The US Administration has escalated its three-year-long war for regime change in Syria by launching air attacks, not authorized by the Syrian government or the UN Security Council, on ISIL positions in Syria; by increasing funding and training of “moderate rebels” in Syria to the tune of $500 million; and by enlisting the support of other countries in a new “coalition of the willing” to do its dirty work. The Syria Solidarity Movement believes that these belligerent US actions amount to a further attempt at regime change in Syria through the back door. We believe that the USA will in fact go on to bomb Syrian government positions. In response, the SSM urges peace-loving people in every country to do everything possible to RESIST and STOP this drive toward increased aggression against the people of Syria and Iraq.
The irony is that the USA, along with others in the so-called “Friends of Syria” Group of countries (FSG), created the Frankensteinian monster known as ISIL. They organized a covert war to topple the legitimate government of Syria using jihadist mercenaries. Inside Syria, the jihadist mercenaries executed (sometimes by beheading) priests, journalists, and prisoners of war; terrorized and laid waste to whole cities; and shamelessly posted videos of themselves committing crimes against humanity. All this without a word of criticism from President Obama.
However, when ISIL, an offshoot of al Qaeda jihadists in Syria funded by the FSG, invaded Iraq, pursued Yezidis up a mountain, and beheaded two US journalists, Obama suddenly appeared concerned. In our opinion, his real concern was to use ISIL barbarism as a pretext for an eventual back-door assault on Syria’s government.
There are many problems with Obama’s air strikes against ISIL in Iraq and Syria and increased funding for “moderate rebels”. First, air strikes against Syria, without the consent of its government, are a violation of its sovereignty and of international law. So is arming mercenaries to overthrow its government.
Secondly, the notion there are indeed any “moderate Syrian rebels” has been repeatedly disproved. Even mainstream media outlets such as the New York Times discount the very idea of their existence.
Thirdly, after the disastrous 2003 Anglo-American invasion and occupation of Iraq, the world simply shouldn’t accept the return to Iraq of foreign governments guilty of major war crimes: partly using craven lies about weapons of mass destruction and partly under the guise of a “humanitarian” intervention, the previous “coalition of the willing” was responsible for at least a half million Iraqi deaths, the creation of millions of internal and external refugees, the effective division of the country into three parts, and the destruction of its economy and infrastructure.
Finally, unauthorized US air strikes, especially in Syria, may lead to military confrontation with Syria’s allies – Russia, China, and Iran – provoking a wider regional and/or world war.
If the US really wants to stop ISIL, it should cooperate with the Syrian government and people who’ve been the main victims of and fighters against ISIL. The USA could compel its client states, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Qatar, to stop funding terrorist mercenaries. It could pressure Turkey and Jordan to close their borders to the terrorists. Finally, it could disband the FSG, which has coordinated the covert war of aggression against Syria and imposed illegal economic sanctions against it.
After the disasters and mayhem caused by the US/NATO invasions against Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya, American and world public is rightly skeptical of Obama’s motives in trying to defeat ISIL now. All three of the above-mentioned countries now lie in ruins as failed states, with millions of people having perished and millions more turned into refugees as a result of western “humanitarian” interventions.
It’s up to the people of Syria to modify or change their government, not for the US or Saudi Arabia or NATO. And, in the recent presidential election of 2014 which saw massive voter turnout, they recently voted overwhelmingly to re-elect President Al-Assad.
Left on their own, the people of Iraq and Syria can deal with the problem of ISIS and terrorism. Continued US interference and aggression will makes things worse not better.
Please mobilize your colleagues, friends and families to oppose US aggression against Syria. Let your elected representatives know how you feel. Write letters to the editor and posts on social media.
USA: HANDS OFF SYRIA! HANDS OFF IRAQ!
Syria Solidarity Movement “
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Nasrallah: “America is the mother of terrorism”:”
“…America is the mother of terrorism, the source of terrorism. If there is terrorism anywhere in the world, look at America
America provides complete support for the terrorism of the Zionist state. It supports Israel militarily, financially, legally, and even provides it veto in the United Nations Security Council.
He who dropped the atomic bomb on the people of Japan, and who killed [relentlessly] in Vietnam and elsewhere, and who stood by [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu in the 50 day war on Gaza … is not qualified ethically or morally to present itself as a leader of a coalition to fight terrorism
…we will not fight in a coalition that serves US interests and not the interests of the people of the region.”
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Sep, 24, 2014, Finian Cunningham: ‘US seeks to target Syrian govt.':
“Washington and its allies have now crossed a dangerous Rubicon, setting the stage for an all-out war on Syria under the guise of “defeating extremism.”
The absurd contradictions and deceptions of this latest US-led war in the Middle East should be brazenly obvious for anyone not brainwashed by Western “news” propaganda. The extremists that Washington is supposedly hunting now down are the progeny of American covert war in Syria that the Syrian government has been battling against for the past three years. The Saudi and Qatari allies now joining US warplanes to pound Syria are the financiers and weapons suppliers of the very terrorist networks that they are claiming to attack.
Meanwhile, as Washington and its assortment of Arab stooge regimes were attacking their sponsored extremist militants in the north of Syria, a Syrian armed forces warplane going after the same extremists in the southern Golan Heights was shot down by an Israeli missile. It was the first such shoot-down incident in nearly 30 years of stand-off between Syria and Israel.
The opening of this US-led blitzkrieg on Syria is an illegal act of aggression regardless of whether Washington informed the Syrian government minutes before the strikes took place, and regardless of the appearance of an “international coalition” of states carrying out the attacks.
Five states were reported to have joined in the American salvos on Syria on Tuesday night: Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Qatar, United Arab Emirates and Jordan.
All of these unelected kingdoms have openly expressed hostility toward the Syrian government over the past three years. Saudi Arabia and Qatar in particular – with their brand of extremist Wahhabi cult religion – have gone even further to endorse regime change against Assad, an important regional ally of Shia Iran.
The Persian Gulf monarchies have funneled over $10 billion into arming the mercenary networks that have descended on Syria since March 2011, according to a Financial Times report. These mercenaries typically espouse the same kind of Wahhabi fundamentalism of their Arab sponsors, and view other Muslims and Christians as “infidels” to be slaughtered.
The barbarism of the terror groups ISIS (or IS, ISIL) and al-Nusra stems directly from their sponsorship by the Saudi and Qatari despots. These extremist outfits would not have gained the prominence and terror presence in Syria or Iraq if it were not for the covert support from Washington and the Arab monarchs in their obsession to get rid of Assad.
…In the latest US-led air attacks on Syria, the New York Times reported the operations “unleashing a torrent of cruise missiles and precision-guided bombs from air and sea.” The targets were said to be bases near the northern Syrian cities of Raqqa and Idlib held by the
al-Qaeda-linked ISIS and Al-Nusra Front.
For three years, the US and its NATO and regional Arab allies were constrained by legal and political reasons to limit themselves to fuelling a dirty covert war against Syria. That criminal conspiracy involved flooding Syria with mercenaries for the desired purpose of regime change against the government of President Bashar al-Assad.
But the US-led covert war has turned out to be an abject failure, racking up a death toll of nearly 200,000 and millions of refugees. The Assad government has remained intact, with the president re-elected in June this year with a massive popular vote and turnout, verified by international observers. The Syrian army has also recaptured most of the territory lost earlier to the foreign-backed militants, which are now confined to remote northern and eastern areas.
This is the necessary context for why the US-led regime-change game plan has shifted a gear to open war.
Weeks of Western media highlighting beheadings and other atrocities carried out by ISIS in Iraq and Syria has primed the Western public to give its consent to belated US-led military intervention. The Baghdad government may have consented to foreign air strikes against the extremists in Iraq. But the Syrian government has not. Even though Damascus appears to have been notified hours before the latest strikes on its territory, the New York Times reported that they “occurred without the approval of President Bashar al-Assad.”
Apart from the absurd contradictions of the US-led anti-ISIS coalition, there are other evident anomalies pointing to the complete fraudulence of the agenda.
As the NYT noted in another article this week, the US-led bombing campaign that began last month in Iraq has failed to quash the terror network in that country. Yet, suddenly, the unfeasible war front has opened up in neighboring Syria.
“After six weeks of American airstrikes, the Iraqi government’s forces have scarcely budged the Sunni extremists of the Islamic State from their hold on more than a quarter of the country,” reported the Times.
So if the salvos have not worked in Iraq, why are they being expanded now into remoter Syria where there is even less chance of supposed success? That is predicated on the false assumption of defeating ISIS.
Also, the strikes come days before the United Nations Security Council was due to meet this week to discuss a draft anti-ISIS resolution. It was expected that Russia would have insisted that any air attacks carried out by the US-led coalition had to be conducted with the strict consent of the Syrian government and within the parameters of international law. Otherwise, any military action would have been vetoed.
That resolution has now been pre-empted by the US-NATO-Arab bomber squadron launching its blitzkrieg.
Washington has already said that its bombing campaign in Syria is in no way aimed at helping the Syrian government in its war against the (Western-sponsored) mercenaries. “We don’t plan to make it easy for Assad to reclaim territory,” an Obama official told media.
That clearly means preventing the Syrian government reclaiming its own sovereign territory against the new cohort of US and Arab-trained “moderate” extremists under the $500-million package Obama pushed through Congress last week. It also anticipates that the next move for the US-led coalition will be the targeting of Syrian government forces “to prevent them reclaiming territory.”
Saudi, Qatari, Jordanian warplanes striking the Syrian capital, Damascus, alongside American Tomahawks and Israeli missiles is the nefarious logical conclusion.
The overt US-led war on Syria has begun despite its flagrant criminality and fraudulence. Thanks to the Western and Arab-sponsored terror networks in Syria and latterly Iraq, and the mendacity of Western media not highlighting this connection but rather saturating the airwaves with barbaric scare stories, the criminal US-led war on Syria is being conducted with a grotesque image of “humanitarianism and lawfulness.””
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Sana, Sep 23, 2014: President al-Assad to Iraqi envoy: Syria proceeding resolutely in its war against terrorism:
“President Bashar al-Assad on Tuesday met Faleh Fayyad, the Iraqi National Security Advisor and the envoy of Russian Prime
Minister Haider al-Abadi.
Talks during the meeting tackled counterterrorism efforts, with the Iraqi envoy briefing President al-Assad on the latest steps taken in this regard,
as well as discussing upcoming steps and possible measures to ensure the success of these efforts and eliminate terrorists organizations in all their forms.
President al-Assad affirmed to Fayyad that Russia is proceeding resolutely in its war against all forms of takfiri terrorism which it has been waging for years, asserting that Syria supports any international counterterrorism effort.
The President stressed that the success of such efforts isn’t just linked to military action which is important, as it’s also linked to states committing themselves to relevant international resolutions and what they entail in terms of stopping all forms of support for terrorist organizations.
The two sides affirmed the need to continue cooperation and coordination between the two countries’ leadership in combating terrorism, particularly since this cooperation produced positive results for the people of Syria, Iraq, and the region.”
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Sep 23, 2014, Denis Kucinich, Huffington Post: Why Are We Bombing Syria?:
“The fact can’t be refuted: ISIS was born of Western intervention in Iraq and covert action in Syria.
…ISIS and the U.S….benefit from some of the same events:
a) Ousting former Iraqi President Nouri al Maliki for his refusal to consent to the continued presence of U.S. troops in his country.
b) Regime change in Syria.
c) Arming the Kurds so they can separate from Iraq, a preliminary move to partitioning Iraq.
What a coincidence for war-profiteering neo-cons and the war industry, which has seen its stock rise since last week’s congressional vote to fund the rapid expansion of war. We have met the enemy and he isn’t only ISIS, he is us.
Phase two of the war against Syria is the introduction of 5,000 “moderate” mercenaries (as opposed to immoderate ones), who were trained in Saudi Arabia, the hotbed of Wahhabism, at an initial installment cost of $15 billion. These new “moderates” will replace the old “moderates,” who became ISIS, just in time for Halloween.
…One wonders if Saudi training of these moderate mercenaries will include methods of beheading which were popularized by the Saudi government long before their ISIS progeny took up the grisly practice.
Last week Congress acted prematurely in funding a war without following the proscriptions of Article I, Section 8 of the U.S. Constitution. (The day of the vote, I urged Congress to resist this dangerous and misguided legislation.) But even while the funding was given, the explicit authorization to go to war was not. To authorize a war, Congress must vote for war. It has not done that yet.
To sell its case, the administration is borrowing from the fear mongering tactics of the Bush administration. ISIS poses no direct, immediate threat to the United States — The White House even said so yesterday, just hours before bombing commenced – yet we are being sold make-believe about ISIS sleeper cells.
This attack on Syria, under the guise of striking ISIS, is by definition, a war of aggression. It is a violation of international law. It could lead to crimes against humanity and the deaths of untold numbers of innocent civilians.
… I expect the bombing of Syria will momentarily boost the White House’s popularity with self-serving heroic accounts of damage inflicted upon ISIS (and the U.S. equipment they use). Stuffing the November ballot box with bombs and missiles may even help the Democratic Party retain the Senate. …
There were alternatives. The U.S. and the international community could have contained and shrunk ISIS by cutting off its funds and its revenue from sale of oil on the black market. We could have looked to strike a deal with Syria and Iran.”
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Sukant Chandan on Libya (the destroyed country that disappeared from corp media): REAL RACIST HUMAN ZOOS AND ‘EXHIBIT B’, AND A PUBLIC APOLOGY
**excerpts, please read the full at Sons of Malcom
“When the british, french and yankee state unleashed their blitz against Libya along with their proxies/death squads on the ground since Feb 2011, they unleashed an orgy of killing of all Libyan people who did not go along with that war of aggression. They targeted and gave cover for targeting of darker skin or ‘Black’ Libyans as Gadafi was the most effective Pan-Africanist of the last generation and he celebrated Nkrumah, Lumumba and others (I saw massive government banners for them in Libya when I was there in 2011).
In this video one can see that our brothers from a Libyan town called Tawergha had been captured by the nato proxy forces and they were punished, they were put in a REAL zoo (used before for animals), they forced Green Flags (flags of the Libyan Jamahiryan government and Revolution) in their mouths and tortured and goaded as ‘monkeys’.
The town of Tawergha of 40,000 relatively darker skinned or ‘Black’ Libyans was wiped out by the pro nato death squads. The people of Tawergha have filed a law suit against the french govt who along with britain, usa and others directly supported, armed and directed these death squads (see here: http://telesurtv.net/english/news/Libyan-City-Sues-France-for-Support-of-Anti-Gaddafi-Militias-20140822-0025.html ). This and other moves for human rights of these and other Libyans deserve our support.
Tens of thousands of Libyans who did not agree with the destruction of Libya in 2011, light skinned, and darker skinned and everyone in between are STILL being held in the zoo in Tripoli and in torture dungeons across Libya (some sources: http://www.migrant-rights.org/2013/09/libyas-tripoli-zoo-houses-a-detention-center-for-illegal-immigrants/ +http://www.hrw.org/news/2014/06/22/libya-whipped-beaten-and-hung-trees+ http://www.un.org/apps/news/story.asp?NewsID=46151&#.VCKq2PldUTE PLEASE REMEMBER ‘human rights watch’, ‘amnesty’ and others all supported the propaganda campaign as part of the war on Libya in 2011, its part of the neo-colonial human rights hustle that they help to create the mess and then benefit from ‘campaigning’ against the mess that they helped to create. hrw, amnesty and others all promoted the lies of the ‘African mercenaries’ and basically EVERY lie from nato to justify the destruction of that country).
This is a situation which is repeated by the SAME alliance of forces across Africa and Asia. france, usa and britain in alliance with the Gulf monarchies and the current Turkish government are developing death squads who are in action and in ideology a ‘mini-me’ of the ‘western’ powers, in that they have supremacist, colonial and zionist-type notions that they are God’s chosen people and that anyone outside that realm are worthy of torture and death.
The SAME alliance of forces that have done what they have to the Libyan people are doing the same to people who they consider fall outside their supremacist club in Mali, Algeria, Somalia, Nigeria, Syria, Lebanon, Egypt, Pakistan, Afghanistan and other places. People who are secular, Shia, Christian, socialist, nationalists, Sunnis who disagree with the death squads and everyone and anyone are being publicly beheaded, publicly tortured, publicly mutilated, publicly crucified (ACTUALLY crucified) and much more. This is a depraved death squad movement which is DIRECTLY promoted, financed, and armed by the west and its allies in especially the Gulf Monarchies, Turkish govt and the Pakistani military intelligence.
This is directly impacting us in the ‘west’ and in england as many of our youth are attracted to this ‘call of duty’ style death squad movement, petty gang members from this country are going off to kill, injure, behead etc all in the service of the ‘west’ despite the west sometimes stating they oppose the same death squad movements. No, the west are allied and support these movements and intend to confuse and befuddle us by their media and politicians, but the reality is that in Libya, Syria and previously in Kosovo, they were and are in direct open alliance, as well as Qatar, UAE, Saudi Arabia being primary allies of the west, the SAME countries which are the main supporters of the death squads!
This is a western-backed death squad movement which is impacting white, ‘Brown’, ‘Black’ alike, and it really requires us to connect the dots and start a bigger push back against it.
The people of Libya who are still being held in the zoo, in torture dungeons are some of the most forgotten and ignored people on the planet who are direct victims of the british and their allies. I pray and wish we will ‘straighten the crooked’ and come increasingly to the service of those humans who, due to the theories and physical oppressions of the ‘west’ and their allies, fall outside the zone of Humanity.”
WATCH: Libya Lies – Riots, Racism and Regime Change AND Lynching of Blacks in LibyaFiled under: Syria
