Harlem NY looking at the war danger under the new administration... No boys and girls, just because Obama is out doesn't mean that the nuclear war danger has gone away..... Can Trump handle it??
War Report For Sunday, March 12, 2017
1) US/NATO v. Russia
2) Syria and the War On ISIS
3) Israel v. Iran
1) US/NATO v. Russia
Two former NATO commanders, Breedlove and Stavridis, argue, in a new report published by RUSI, that NATO needs tot ake steps in the North Atlantic comparable to and in support of the actions it is taking in eastern Europe. “The North Atlantic is NATO’s lifeblood; it is the trans-Atlantic link,” Breedlove wrote in the RUSI report. “After two decades of relative calm, we now see a growing Russian threat to this region. The North Atlantic has become the testing area for Russia’s increasingly sophisticated submarines and aircraft.” Breedlove said that Russia has developed “offensive long-range, high-precision capabilities and is building high-end maritime capabilities that could deny NATO members freedom of maneuver at sea.” The RUSI report, says Stars and Stripes, argues that NATO has overlooked the North Atlantic maritime area, focusing instead on other areas, including Afghanistan, tensions in Ukraine and an alliance effort during the past two and half years to build up land forces along its eastern borders with Russia. “NATO must understand that because the North Atlantic plays an important part in Russian military strategic calculations — as evident in its growing naval and air force laydown — it is essential that the region become more central to NATO’s own planning, deployments and preparations,” Stavridis wrote in his contribution to the report.
To the Russians, this is nothing more than another exercise in NATO fear mongering. "All work is paid for, and this report is no exception. How objective it is and the competency of the person who prepared it is another issue. It's one thing if he has tried to give an objective picture, but if he wanted to spread some fear and think up some stories, that's quite another and it seems to me that in this case, it's most likely the second one," Nikolai Topornin, an associate professor of European Law at the Russian Foreign Ministry's Moscow State Institute of International Relations, told Radio Sputnik, in apparent reference to Breedlove. "The man has simply set himself the task of telling everyone that Russia was violating some kind of strategic standards, is strengthening its military presence, including naval and may constitute some kind of threat," Topornin told Radio Sputnik.
2) Syria and the War On ISIS
Rex Tillerson will be convening a meeting in Washington on March 22 to discuss the war against ISIS. Russia and Iran, two countries with forces directly engaged against ISIS in Syria won‛t be invited, however. Russian Senator Alexei Pushkov commented that it is quite possible to discuss the fight against Daesh without Russia's participation, but it is impossible to defeat them without Russia. Evgeny Satanovsky, head of the Moscow-based Middle East Institute, however, does note that there is US-Russian military cooperation in Syria, but that Trump doesn‛t want to discuss it because of the domestic political climate in Washington.
Fars News, meanwhile, citing something called Hawar news, reports that things aren‛t going swimmingly between the Turks and their proxies in the FSA. Hawar news quoted informed sources as saying that at least sixty Ankara-backed militants in al-Rai town in Northern Aleppo have dropped ties with the Euphrates Shield Operation over low salary and Turkish Army's indifferences to the promises it made to assist the militants.
And a senior official of the PYD warns that Turkey wants to occupy parts of northern Syria. "The territory that Turkey wants to advance to belongs to the Syrian state. These lands are part of Syria's sovereign system. Attacking these lands means attacking a sovereign state," said Ewwas Eli, responsible for foreign relations of the PYD's branch in Kobani. "Turkey wants to occupy Syria."
Meanwhile, the US State Department has declared Hayyat Tahrir al-Sham in a statement published on Friday. The reasoning is simple. The leader of HTS is Mohammad Al-Julani, commander-in-chief of Jabhat Fateh Al-Sham, which was Jabhat al Nusra, which was Al Qaeda, and therefore should still be considered Al Qaeda. Al Masdar published the US statement in Arabic, but I can‛t find it in English.
3) Israel v. Iran
When Netanyahu was in Moscow, last week, he reportedly told Putin that any truce in Syria should see the departure of Iranian and Iranian-backed militias from the country. “We do not want to see Shia Islamic terrorism led by Iran step in to replace Sunni Islamic terrorism,” Netanyahu told the Russian President. “Iran continues attempts to destroy the Jewish state. They speak of this openly and write this in black and white in their newspapers. According to The Independent and other reports, IRGC militias are on the Syrian side of the Golan Heights in the form of a Shiite paramilitary group called the “Golan Liberation Brigade.” Harakat Hezbollah al-Nujaba, an Iraqi force backed by Iran, is “ready to take action to liberate Golan” from Israeli occupation, according to spokesman quoted by Iranian state media this week. “I made it clear [ti Putin] that regarding Syria, while Israel is not opposed that there should be an agreement there, we strongly oppose the possibility that Iran and its proxies will be left with a military presence in Syria under such an agreement,” Netanyahu said.
While Iranian-backed militias in Syria could probably cause trouble, it seems unlikely to me that they could come anywhere close to invading and capturing the Israeli occupied part of the Golan Heights. They would get pulverized before they got very far.
