US, Russian, and French warplanes are pounding the ISIS capital city of Raqqa over the past several days, a dramatic escalation in numbers, which have raised questions about why, if these nations had so many targets available, they’re only getting around to attacking them now.
The reality so far seems to be that these aren’t targets at all, with witnesses on the ground saying the strikes are hitting empty areas or abandoned buildings, doing virtually nothing to ISIS forces, and seemingly designed primarily to avoid civilian deaths.
Keeping support for the escalation going necessarily meant limiting civilian casualties, but the narrative also meant more strikes were needed. This appears to have been resolved, with the lack of good targets, by just hitting empty fields around Raqqa and hyping that they’re going after the ISIS capital.
25-30 French strikes were reported since Friday in Raqqa, but very limited casualties, and most of the property damage apparently to sites that had already been hit in the past or were simply not in use anymore anyhow.
Poor Syria. Just a toy for the little guy to show how tough he is.
Indeed. Little Vlad has staked everything on reversing the post-cold war settlement and exhuming the Soviet Union. Syria is the rock on which he'll perish. Good news for Ukrainians!
You must see Putin everywhere.
One more Middle Eastern Guernica.
An unending and unwinnable war against an invisible enemy. The more they attack, the more they kill people having nothing to do with ISIS but who, outraged by the attacks upon them, are diven into the arms of the guerillas. It's classic gureilla tactics to try to provoke such tactics and a classic mistake of states to fall into the trap. That's why such wars are always unwinnable.
There Jason Ditz goes again, telling us that friend and foe alike are doing the identical thing again.
Problem is, Russia is the only nation that Syria has invited in to help end the war, which means that only Russia is given up-to-the-minute data on ISIS troop locations. Also, as the Russian economy benefits greatly from a terrorist free environment, while all the Western powers are striving to maximize profit in the trading of war materials for Middle-East oil, the Ditz fiction that all motives in this war are so equal as to be identical, one would think that this WEB site is reading from the same script as FOX News.