A look at recent USAID schemes from Pakistan to Syria shows US empire can be very hazardous to your health.…
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Earlier this year, with little publicity, the official position of Israel on terrorism was explained by Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Yaalon
“I would like to see ISIS rule all of Syria (by inference, the whole region – RG); ISIS and its offshoots do not pose a threat to the Israeli State. Iran remains the main enemy!”
After fleeing sex-slave captivity in Iraq, Ashwaq Ta’lo thought she was safe in Germany but, when she was returning home from school one night, a car pulled up beside her, driven by the man who had bought her as a sex slave in Iraq. [...]
To anyone who has followed the Syrian war the news today sounds all too depressingly familiar.
After a series of advances the Syrian army has gained control of around 90% of the former Jihadi enclave of East Ghouta. The last remaining part of the enclave still under Jihadi control – the town of Douma – is now entirely surrounded by the Syrian army save for a single humanitarian corridor, and the position of the Jihadis there has become militarily hopeless.
The battle of East Ghouta appears to be almost over, with news that thousands of Jihadi fighters previously holed up in the town of Douma – the last Jihadi stronghold in East Ghouta, the rest of which has been almost entirely recaptured by the Syrian army – have been withdrawing from Douma under Russian military police escort.
Exactly as I predicted last month on 26th February 2018, events in the Jihadi enclave of East Ghouta are following precisely the same script as they did in the Jihadi enclave of eastern Aleppo in 2016, with the important difference that this time the script is being played out in record time, as if the same film was being played in fast motion.
Just as they did during the ‘Great Battle of Aleppo’ of 2016, so in East Ghouta the Jihadis swore to resist the Syrian army fanatically, to the last man.
The fight for East Ghouta took a dramatic but inevitable turn earlier today when the Syrian army, continuing its advance, capturing the town of Mesraba inside the enclave, and splitting the enclave into three separate pockets.
The latest advances mean that the Syrian army now controls more than 70% of the territory of the former Jihadi enclave of East Ghouta.
Here is a map provided by the Al-Masdar news agency which shows the present situation in the enclave
Latest reports from the fighting in East Ghouta suggests that despite fierce resistance from Jihadi fighters the Syrian army is continuing to make rapid advances in the enclave.
According to this map provided by the Al-Masdar news agency, around a third of the enclave has now been captured by the Syrian army.
Reading media reports of the fighting in east Ghouta over the last few days has triggered an eery sense of déjà vu.
It is like taking a time machine back to the autumn of 2016 and listening to all the arguments over the fighting in Aleppo all over again.
Just as in 2016 the reports concern fighting between the Syrian military and a large force of Jihadis – in both cases around 10-15,000 men – trapped in a district of one of Syria’s two main cities.
In 2016 it was eastern Aleppo; this time it is east Ghouta, which is a suburb of Syria’s capital Damascus.
Back in August 2016, at the height of the fighting in Aleppo, international media headlines were dominated by the story of the so-called ‘Aleppo boy’, who was supposedly pulled from the rubble following a Russian or Syrian air strike, and whose photograph was plastered across the Western media.
