News - World News Assad and Russia use banned cluster bombs, killing and injuring dozens of civilians

 47 cluster munition attacks that killed and injured dozens of civilians in rebel-held areas

BEIRUT (AFP) - Human Rights Watch accused the Syrian regime and its ally Russia on Thursday of extensively using banned cluster munitions in their offensive against rebels in the war-torn country.
The New York-based watchdog said it had documented 47 cluster munition attacks that killed and injured dozens of civilians in rebel-held areas in three provinces since May 27.
Many of these attacks took place north and west of Aleppo, as Russia-backed regime forces sought to besiege the opposition-controlled part of the northern city, it said.
Russia in September launched a campaign of air strikes in support of Bashar al-Assad's regime.
'Since Russia and Syria have renewed their joint air operations, we have seen a relentless use of cluster munitions,' said Ole Solvang, deputy emergencies director at HRW.
'The Russian government should immediately ensure that neither its forces nor Syria's use this inherently indiscriminate weapon,' he said.
HRW in December said it had documented the use of cluster munitions on 20 occasions since Russia launched air strikes on September 30.
'Although Russia and Syria are not members of the Convention on Cluster Munitions, they are still bound by international humanitarian law, or the laws of war, which prohibits indiscriminate attacks,' HRW said.
Cluster munitions contain dozens or hundreds of bomblets and are fired in rockets or dropped from the air.
Widely banned, they spread explosives over large areas and are indiscriminate in nature, often continuing to maim and kill long after the initial attack when previously unexploded bomblets detonate.
More than 280,000 people have been killed in Syria since the war started in 2011 with the brutal repression of anti-government protests.
Source: AFP, 28 July 2016

U.S. Treasury Official to Travel to Europe to Talk Sanctions

Adam Szubin, secretary for terrorism and financial intelligence at the U.S. Department of the Treasury

The U.S. Treasury Department said a top counter-terrorism official will visit Europe next week to discuss sanctions enforcement. Treasury also lifted sanctions from a Panamanian company it targeted a month ago.
Treasury said in a statement that Adam Szubin, acting undersecretary for terrorism and financial intelligence, will visit Paris and Berlin next week to meet with senior government officials and members of the financial-services community to discuss sanctions on Russia, implementation of the Iranian nuclear deal and the importance of working together to strengthen standards against terrorism financing.

Enough is enough — U.S. abdication on Syria must come to an end

Syrian refugees wait to cross the border into Turkey 

Washington Post, February 9,2016- As Russian planes decimate Aleppo, and hundreds of thousands of civilians in Syria’s largest city prepare for encirclement, blockade and siege — and for the starvation and the barbarity that will inevitably follow — it is time to proclaim the moral bankruptcy of American and Western policy in Syria.
Actually, it is past time. The moral bankruptcy has been long in the making: five years of empty declarations that Bashar al-Assad must go, of halfhearted arming of rebel groups, of allowing the red line on chemical weapons to be crossed and of failing adequately to share Europe’s refugee burden as it buckles under the strain of the consequences of Western inaction. In the meantime, a quarter-million Syrians have died, 7 million have been displaced and nearly 5 million are refugees. Two million of the refugees are children.

Syrian refugees wait to cross the border into Turkey 

This downward path leads to the truly incredible possibility that as the Syrian dictator and his ruthless backers close in on Aleppo, the government of the United States, in the name of the struggle against the Islamic State, will simply stand by while Russia, Assad and Iran destroy their opponents at whatever human cost.
It is time for those who care about the moral standing of the United States to say that this policy is shameful.
 If the United States and its NATO allies allow its inglorious new partners to encircle and starve the people of Aleppo, they will be complicit in crimes of war.
 The ruins of our own integrity will be found amid the ruins of Aleppo. Indiscriminate bombardment of civilians is a violation of the Geneva Conventions. So is the use of siege and blockade to starve civilians. We need not wait for proof of Assad’s and Vladimir Putin’s intentions as they tighten the noose. “Barrel bombs” have been falling on bread lines and hospitals in the city (and elsewhere in Syria) for some time. Starvation is a long-standing and amply documented instrument in Assad’s tool kit of horrors.
Aleppo is an emergency, requiring emergency measures. Are we no longer capable of emergency action? It is also an opportunity, perhaps the last one, to save Syria. Aleppo is the new Sarajevo, the new Srebrenica, and its fate should be to the Syrian conflict what the fate of Sarajevo and Srebrenica were to the Bosnian conflict: the occasion for the United States to bestir itself, and for the West to say with one voice “enough.” It was after Srebrenica and Sarajevo — and after the air campaign with which the West finally responded to the atrocities — that the United States undertook the statecraft that led to the Dayton accords and ended the war in Bosnia.
   

Smoke rises over Aleppo, once Syria’s commercial capital and a tourist magnet

The conventional wisdom is that nothing can be done in Syria, but the conventional wisdom is wrong. There is a path toward ending the horror in Aleppo — a perfectly realistic path that will honor our highest ideals, a way to recover our moral standing as well as our strategic position. Operating under a NATO umbrella, the United States could use its naval and air assets in the region to establish a no-fly zone from Aleppo to the Turkish border and make clear that it will prevent the continued bombardment of civilians and refugees by any party, including the Russians. It could use the no-fly zone to keep open the corridor with Turkey and use its assets to resupply the city and internally displaced people in the region with humanitarian assistance.
If the Russians and Syrians seek to prevent humanitarian protection and resupply of the city, they would face the military consequences. The U.S. military is already in hourly contact with the Russian military about de-conflicting their aircraft over Syria, and the administration can be in constant contact with the Russian leadership to ensure that a humanitarian protection mission need not escalate into a great-power confrontation. But risk is no excuse for doing nothing. The Russians and the Syrians will immediately understand the consequences of U.S. and NATO action: They will learn, in the only language they seem to understand, that they cannot win the Syrian war on their repulsive terms. The use of force to protect civilians, and to establish a new configuration of power in which the skies will no longer be owned by the Syrian tyrant and the Russian tyrant, may set the stage for a tough and serious negotiation to bring an end to the slaughter.
This is what U.S. leadership in the 21st century should look like: bringing together force and diplomacy, moral commitment and strategic boldness, around an urgent humanitarian objective that would command the support of the world. The era of our Syrian abdication must end now. If we do not come to the rescue of Aleppo, if we do not do everything we can to put a stop to the suffering that is the defining and most damaging abomination of our time, Aleppo will be a stain on our conscience forever.

Adel Al-Jubeir: Saudi Arabia will not allow Iran to undermine our security or the security of our allies

Saudi Foreign Minister Adel Al-Jubeir

Jeddah, Arab News, 19 January 2016 - “Saudi Arabia will not allow Iran to undermine our security or the security of our allies. We will push back against attempts to do so,” Saudi Foreign Minister Adel Al-Jubeir said in an op-ed published in the New York Times on Tuesday.
“The world is watching Iran for signs of change, hoping it will evolve from a rogue revolutionary state into a respectable member of the international community,” he said, adding that Tehran had a hostile policy toward its neighbors that would only cause more violence in the region.
“But Iran, rather than confronting the isolation it has created for itself, opts to obscure its dangerous sectarian and expansionist policies, as well as its support for terrorism, by leveling unsubstantiated charges against the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia,” he said.
Al-Jubeir said Saudi Arabia and its Gulf allies had no option but to continue resisting Iran’s expansionist ideology and responding forcefully to its acts of aggression.
“Superficially, Iran may appear to have changed … Certainly, we know that a large segment of the Iranian population wants greater openness internally and better relations with neighboring countries and the world. But the government does not,” he said, adding that its behavior has been the same since the 1979 revolution.
“The constitution that Iran adopted states the objective of exporting the revolution. As a consequence, Iran has supported violent extremist groups, including Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Houthis in Yemen and sectarian militias in Iraq,” said the foreign minister.
He said Iran or its proxies have been blamed for terrorist attacks around the world, including the bombings of the United States Marine barracks in Beirut in 1983, the Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia in 1996, and the assassinations in the Mykonos restaurant in Berlin in 1992. And by some estimates Iranian-backed forces have killed over 1,100 American troops in Iraq since 2003.
Iran uses attacks on diplomatic sites as an instrument of its foreign policy, he said, citing the 1979 takeover of the American Embassy in Tehran and the embassies of Britain, Denmark, Kuwait, France and Russia. The most recent incident involved Saudi Arabia’s missions in Iran, he said.
Touching on the Syrian crisis and the Iranian intervention in the war-torn country, Al-Jubeir said: “It is clear why Iran wants Bashar Assad of Syria to remain in power: In its 2014 report on terrorism, the State Department wrote that Iran views Syria ‘as a crucial causeway to its weapons supply route to Hezbollah.’”
“The report also noted, citing United Nations data, that Iran provided arms, financing and training “to support the Assad regime’s brutal crackdown that has resulted in the deaths of at least 191,000 people.”
The same report for 2012 noted that there was “a marked resurgence of Iran’s state sponsorship of terrorism,” with Iranian and Hezbollah’s terrorist activity “reaching a tempo unseen since the 1990s.”
He also underlined the Iranian support of Houthi militias for the takeover of Yemen. A process he described as having caused the war that has killed thousands. The minister said while Iran claims its top foreign policy priority is friendship, its behavior shows the opposite is true.
“Iran is the single-most-belligerent-actor in the region, and its actions display both a commitment to regional hegemony and a deeply held view that conciliatory gestures signal weakness either on Iran’s part or on the part of its adversaries,” he said.
Moreover, Al-Jubeir said Iran continues to violate international agreements. “In that vein, Iran tested a ballistic missile on Oct. 10, just months after reaching an agreement on its nuclear program, in violation of United Nations Security Council resolutions. In December, an Iranian military ship fired a missile near American and French vessels in international waters,” he said.
“Saudi Arabia has been a victim of terrorism, often at the hands of Iran’s allies. Our country is on the front line of fighting terrorism, working closely with our allies. Saudi Arabia has arrested thousands of terrorism suspects and prosecuted hundreds. Our fight against terrorism is continuing as we lead multinational efforts to pursue those who participate in terrorist activities, those who fund them and those who foment the mind-set that promotes extremism,” he said.
“The real question is whether Iran wants to live by the rules of the international system, or remain a revolutionary state committed to expansion and to defiance of international law. In the end, we want an Iran that works to solve problems in a way that allows people to live in peace. But that will require major changes in Iran’s policy and behavior. We have yet to see that,” he said.

How ‘facts on the ground’ in Syria were created by Russia

                  Russian airstrikes in Syria

Russia’s expanded role in the Middle East has been simply hiding in plain sight for months waiting to be found. And the Obama administration, eager for Moscow’s diplomatic help, all but invited it. (Yet another mistake.) Now that Russian jets and tanks have arrived in Syria, this intervention doesn’t look so benign, The Washington Post reported.
“These are facts on the ground,” warns John McLaughlin, former deputy director of the CIA, in an interview about the Russian military deployments. “Anything we do now will be conditioned by their presence and influence. This is a reality we now have to deal with.”
To American officials, Russian involvement in defusing the Syria mess seemed just a few months ago like a useful spinoff of the Iran nuclear deal. At the last negotiating session in Vienna, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov is said to have turned to his “P5-plus-1” colleagues and proposed similar cooperation in resolving other Middle East disputes.
President Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry were hopeful about working with the Russians on a “managed transition” away from a weakened President Bashar al-Assad. “I do think the window has opened a crack for us to get a political resolution in Syria, partly because both Russia and Iran, I think, recognize that the trend lines are not good for Assad,” Obama told reporters at the White House on Aug. 5.
Back then, the enthusiasts for greater Russian involvement in the Middle East included many traditional U.S. allies who also seemed eager to play the Russian card. Saudi Deputy Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman traveled to Moscow; so did U.A.E. leader Mohammed bin Zayed. Saudi Foreign Minister Adel al-Jubeir met with Kerry and Lavrov in Qatar. An ominous sign of what was really ahead — a Russian-Iranian alliance to bolster Assad — came with the Moscow visit of Gen. Qasem Soleimani, the head of Iran’s Quds Force. But otherwise, this looked until a week ago like a diplomatic love boat.
Obama and his allies failed to anticipate that Russian President Vladimir Putin would come armed to the negotiating table — and prepared to use his weapons to gain military leverage. Putin embodies a kind of muscular diplomacy the U.S. disdained over the last three years of halfhearted attempts to train and equip the Syrian opposition. Obama’s failure to develop a coherent strategy left the field open for Putin.
The speed and decisiveness of Russian action appear to have taken the administration by surprise, prompting Kerry to voice “grave concerns.” A U.S. official said the intelligence community predicted that Russia would provide indirect support to Assad, such as training and advisers, but that “direct military intervention was not considered the most likely” response.
A close source to Assad’s regime blasted what he claimed was chronic American misunderstanding of Syria. “The scandal is how amazingly incompetent American intelligence is,” he wrote in an email. “Not only were U.S. officials predicting until weeks ago that the Russians could abandon Assad, ... U.S. intelligence could not even pick up on what the Russians were doing, the logistical, technical, military and manpower preparations ... [ to] execute such an unprecedented mission.”
Though Putin claimed Monday that Russia was intervening to fight the Islamic State, so far his targets have mostly been the anti-Assad rebels who were advancing in Homs and Hama in western Syria, threatening Assad’s ancestral homeland of Latakia in the northwest. U.S. officials may protest, but they are “de-conflicting” military operations with the Russians, which many Syrians translate as cooperation.read more

Is the U.S. Air Force Ready to Attack Iran’s Nuclear Sites?

U.S. and Mullah's negotiators have been scrambling in Vienna to concoct an accord that will stay Tehran nuclear ambitions for at least a decade. Meanwhile, the Pentagon has spent the same amount of time plotting how to derail such an effort if it can’t be done at the negotiating table.

The U.S. has made it clear that it will not allow Iran to develop a nuclear weapon to threaten its other neighbors in and around the Persian Gulf. If the atomic talks break down—and U.S. intelligence decides Iran is on the verge of becoming a nuclear-armed state—look for the Air Force’s Massive Ordnance Penetration to get the assignment to try to destroy that capability.

 The Obama Administration and its five negotiating allies—Britain, China, France, Germany and Russia—are engaged as much in psychological gamesmanship as potential pyrotechnics. The U.S. has leaked just enough information about the MOP to let the Iranian Mullahs know that the Americans believe its use could set back Iranian efforts to develop a nuclear weapon for years.

But the nation’s military leaders have made clear that a single strike with one or (more likely) more Massive Ordnance Perpetrators may not halt Iran’s nuclear ambitions. “Obviously anything like that can be reconstituted,” Defense Secretary Ashton Carter said July 1. “And so a military strike of that kind is a setback, but it doesn’t prevent the reconstitution over time.” It’s a hammer that might have to be used repeatedly if Iran refuses to back down and continues to work on its nuclear program. “The military option isn’t use once and set aside,” Army General Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, added. “It remains in place.”

While no one will say so, Iran’s nuclear facility at Fordow–buried up to 80 meters beneath a mountain near the Shiite city of Qom, at a former missile base controlled by Iran’s unpredictable Revolutionary Guards–is at the top of that target list. Iran has been conducting much of its suspected nuclear-weapons work for years in underground labs and research facilities thought to be able to survive attacks by earlier generations of U.S. military bunker-busters.

“In October 2014, the Air Force successfully completed one weapon drop from the B-2 aircraft on a representative target,” the Pentagon’s top weapons-tester reported earlier this year. “The test, conducted at the White Sands Missile Range, New Mexico, demonstrated weapon behavior after planned enhancements were incorporated.” Several additional tests have been carried out in recent months, Pentagonofficials say.

Nearly a decade ago, the Pentagon concluded that dropping its one-ton bombs on buried targets was like using a peashooter against an elephant. “Our past test experience has shown that 2,000-pound perpetrators carrying 500 pounds of high explosive are relatively ineffective against tunnels, even when skipped directly into the tunnel entrance,” a 2004 report said. “Instead, several thousand pounds of high explosives coupled to the tunnel are needed to blow down blast doors and propagate a lethal air blast throughout a typical tunnel complex.”

In late 2009, the Air Force quietly circulated a solicitation seeking a “Quick Reaction Capability” to “defeat a specific set of Hard and/or Deeply Buried Targets.” The weapon, the service said, would “maximize effects against Hard and/or Deeply Buried Targets (HDBTs), while minimizing time over target.” The Air Force said it needed the weapon to meet “Urgent Operational Needs requirements”—generally a plea from a battlefield commander who doesn’t think he has the weapons he needs to accomplish a mission assigned to him.

After several upgrades, the US Air Force has let it been known that there’s an operational stockpile of the world’s most powerful non-nuclear bombs at Whitman Air Force Base, Missouri. They’re not far from the B-2 bombers, ready to carry them 7,000 miles to Iran. That much is certain. If the Iranian Mullahs did not comply with what they have accepted in the Nuclear deal and make it collapse, Obama will be obliged to order   the deployment of the Big bomb to take out their illicit nuclear activity.  

As Deadline nears France mistrusts Iranian Mullahs

"We need to be extremely firm, at the stage where we are now, things are still not clear," Fabius said in talks with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

France's Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius said on Sunday it was unclear whether an international deal could be reached on Iran's nuclear program by a June 30 deadline.

Fabius has said he would meet his Iranian counterpart on Monday to assess where Iran stands ahead of the final round of talks on its nuclear program, which begin later in the week.

Monday's bilateral meeting, on the sidelines of an EU foreign ministers' summit in Luxembourg, will be followed by a meeting between an Iranian agent and all the European parties negotiating with them.

In Luxembourg, the Iranian agent will also  meet   EU foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini and ministers from Britain and Germany   to discuss the nuclear talks, an EU source said, calling it "a political meeting in the framework of ongoing negotiations."

  The parties are aiming for a final agreement by June 30 under which Iran would restrict its nuclear program in exchange for relief from economic sanctions.

France is deemed to have been one of the toughest in pressing for limits to prevent Iran acquiring an atomic bomb capability, although Tehran denies seeking nuclear weapons.

 Nucleartalks between Iran and six world powers have virtually stalled and a deadline for a final deal may have to be postponed again, Russian news agency TASS quoted a diplomatic source as saying on Friday, June 12.

Iran and the powers -- the United States, Russia, China, France, Britain and Germany -- are trying to reach a settlement by June 30 under which Iran would curb its nuclear program in exchange for relief from economic sanctions.

The United States has said it stands by the end-June deadline for the deal, meant to assuage Western fears that Iran is working to develop a nuclear bomb.

But other officials have indicated the date might be missed as negotiations about technical details drag on.

The latest round of discussions in Vienna on Friday had made no significant progress, the source from one of the missions said, according to TASS.

'The process has virtually stalled, there is risk that deadline will have to be postponed again,' TASS said the source added.

Among the unresolved issues is the pace of easing Western sanctions imposed over the Iranian program and the monitoring and verification measures to ensure Iran could not pursue a clandestine nuclear weapons program.

once again the Mullahs in Iran demonstrates this reality that the clerical regime and the Rouhani’s government have no intention to give up the project to obtain atomic bomb and any hope for changes within this regime is but a mirage that buys time for the mullahs to obtain the nuclear bomb, and continue to carry out further aggressions and  warmongerings in the region.