NEW YORK — A UN-brokered ceasefire has once again been established, now for the sixth time, in Syria and, like most of those that preceded it, has now been broken. The current ceasefire sought to end fighting in Eastern Ghouta, an area near the Syrian capital of Damascus that has long been controlled by militant U.S.-Saudi backed rebels seeking to overthrow the Syrian government.
News stories are full of quotes painting the situation as nearly unprecedented in its horror: “hell on earth,” “never seen anything like this,” “one of the worst attacks in Syrian history,” and “flagrant war crime” on an “epic scale.”
Back in June last year the Russian Ministry of Defence published a claim that a meeting of ISIS commanders in May in the then besieged ISIS ‘capital’ of Raqqa included no less a person than ISIS’s leader – Ibrahim Abu-Bakr Al-Baghdadi – himself.
The meeting was apparently called to plan the escape of ISIS’s top leaders from Raqqa. Of these the most important obviously is Al-Baghdadi himself, which was presumably why he attended the meeting.
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The former spokesman of the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), who defected from the US-backed coalition to Turkey, has accused the Kurdish-led group of making evacuation deals with Daesh (ISIS) fighters.
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Al Assad meets with Putin in Sochi, Russia on Tuesday November 21, 2017 [PPIO]
Russian President Vladimir Putin will call his American counterpart after Syrian President Bashar Al Assad concludes his trip to the Russian port city of Sochi.
“Already a talk is planned with the emir of Qatar and tomorrow—with the President of the U.S. Donald Trump, while afterwards (I will speak) with leaders from countries in the region,” a statement from the Kremlin quoted Putin on Tuesday.
On Tuesday, Turkey lambasted the US and its largely Kurdish allies in Syria, the YPG, for having made a deal that allowed 250 Daesh (ISIS) fighters and all their children and relatives to flee from Raqqa.
Turkey’s prime minister Binali Yildirim said,
At a moment of widespread acknowledgment that the short-lived Islamic State (ISIS) is no longer a reality, and as ISIS is about to be defeated by the Syrian Army in its last urban holdout of Abu Kamal City in eastern Syria, the US is signaling an open-ended military presence in Syria. On Monday Defense Secretary Jim Mattis
