Shi'a

Unverified footage that circulated on social media showed thick smoke rising from a vehicle engulfed in flames (screengrab)
The Thursday evening blast was the latest incident in Qatif, which has seen criminal violence as well as protests among the Sunni-dominated kingdom’s Shia minority.
Police spotted the vehicle used “to carry out terrorist and criminal crimes” and then took “necessary action”, a ministry statement said, without detailing what tactics were used.
“As a result, it caught fire and exploded,” killing its two occupants.

Richard Nixon is thought to have said, “We are all Keynesians now”. At the end of the Cold War Francis Fukuyama implied, ‘We are all Americans now’. Today, Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu more or less said, “We are all Wahhabists now”.

Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Joseph Dunford greets Defense Secretary James Mattis at the Pentagon (AP/Alex Brandon)

Russian President Vladimir Putin, right, shakes hands with Iranian President Hassan Rouhani during a joint news conference at the Kremlin in Moscow, Russia, Tuesday, March 28, 2017. Russia and Iran agreed to boost their energy cooperation and continue joint efforts to help Syrian settlement. (Sergei Karpukhin/AP)

Since the New Year there has been a lot of speculation in the mainstream and alternative media about Saudi Arabia and Turkey directly intervening into the war in Syria. Each week there have been threats, demands, and sabre rattling from Saudi Arabia and Turkey. Meanwhile, there is the growing momentum of the Syrian Armed Forces on the killings fields of Syria. To be blunt, the Saudi royal family and Erdogan’s Mafia clan are apoplectic about the series of defeats that their proxy forces are suffering at the hands of the Syrian Arab Army (SAA) and its allies.

Because the western mass media is so overwhelmingly slanted to corporate and state interests, the need for principled and independent news and information that can reach the masses is vital.

Consider this comical scene described by Peter Van Buren, a former US diplomat, who was deployed to Iraq on a 12-month assignment in 2009-10:

The maintenance of superpower prestige above all obligates the Obama Administration to launch a full scale air war against the against the well organized, well supplied and so far victorious barbaric Islamic State (IS) in Iraq and Syria (formerly ISIS, the Islamic State of Iraq and Greater Syria).