Back by Syrian warplanes, Russia is escalating its own airstrikes against ISIS territory, with a flurry of attacks on Deir Ezzor on Friday evening killing at least 36 people. 10 children were among the slain, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.
The attacks, like so many in recent days, centered around oilfields in ISIS-controlled territory, aiming to deny ISIS the revenue from oil smuggling. These oilfields are largely run by local and tribal factions, however, putting civilian workers in the targeting sights of US and Russian warplanes.
Russian strikes and increased military operations in the area are putting pressure on commercial flights as well, with Lebanon rerouting some flights out of Beirut, and Iraq announcing a temporary halt to flights into the Iraqi Kurdistan region because of cruise missiles in the vicinity.
The UN Security Council approved yet another anti-ISIS measure Friday, urging all nations to take “all necessary measures” against ISIS in Syria and Iraq. The resolution, drafted by France, is just the latest in a series of resolutions which nations are using as the international legal justification for their ever-escalating strikes.
Why do you continue to report everything this Syrian Observatory for Human Rights says, uncritically and without other confirmation, when to me they are obviously connected to one faction in this fighting and there's no reason at all to thing they are reliable? In other words, this one goes in the BS file until I see confirmation. Just like all the other BS from this group that's constantly on this website.
They do it, I think, because most of what the Observatory says is favourable to Putin, either directly or by ctiticizing the US.
Antiwar.com, as well as having an agenda — opposition to war(?) — is also a "news" aggregation site, publishing material of all sorts from all manner of sources. I understand your complaint, but in today's (dis)information environment, the buck stops with the individual reader. Antiwar.com provides the unfiltered bullshït,… you and I, and everyone else, must do the filtering. Only infantalized, pre-internet Kool-Aid (ie MSM) zombies still allow someone else to do their thinking for them.
In Russia???
Jason: You do a find job covering the news for Antiwar.com but… Continuing to quote the 'Syrian Observatory for Human Rights' as a source is erroneous at best: http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=00c_1369069241
This guys is a sham with an agenda.
Best-Donna
I am no sure what will it take to put a disclaimer next to anything coming out of Syrian Observatory of Human Rights. But just the opposite is happening — you cannot open any news without one or the other authoritative statements coming of this organization, without any reservation by the publishers.
So, let us say it AGAIN. Syrian Observatory of Human Rights is run by a single person out of his home in Coventry, UK. There is no office — no staff. Nobody to talk to if for example a member of the press comes and wants to have an interview or get a statement. The person is under his new name, and his history in Syria is known. He is a typical profile of an intelligence asset.
His "information" is famous for making things up — but since no Western media has a presence in Syria, this source passes for the authority. There were many of his reports — too many to go into here, that were false or hugely distorted. One recent should have raised flags — but it did not. This was at the start of Russian bombing raids in Syria. The Syrian Observatory of Human Rights reported civilian casualties, including children. The report came out BEFORE first planes were up in the air. Such gross abuses are commonplace today, as we seem to have lost any standards of accepting information. We see in press old pictures, passing off as new conflicts, we have information about events that never happened, or we assign one side in conflict the acts that are actually committed by other.
We are ALL guilty party. We readily accept "truths" when told by media and politicians, even though common sense should dictate that we resist being mauled by the torrent of falsehoods. But we do not. So, in Syria, without a shred of evidence we are ready to accept that the government of Assad, and the Syrian army are guilty of mass murder of its population. And that is the same government that before armed militants started killing soldiers, police, postmen and people on streets — was THE most tolerant and peaceful country in the Middle East. For decades. all the different religions, ethnic groups and political views lived in peace. The country was secular, with no discrimination in either employment, business, education of other government services being present. I am sure that they had their fanatics like we have ours, but society lived in harmony. Nobody could say that Israel was a more tolerant society at the time of the rule of Assad. NOBODY. What about women? Unlike in Saudi Arabia, they drove cars, went to school and university, had careers, dressed according to their outlook on life, and married who they wanted. Many were successful in business, education and entertainment industry. So — what happened that overnight the regime went mad, and turned on its population. According to a fact-free narrative, population rebelled against tyrant. Absolutely untrue. Nobody rebelled. Taking a pictures of some protests that happen in any country on any given day — and claiming it to be the proof of rebellion, is cheesy. But we buy it. Where did the well armed and well trained groups show up, and why did they immediately started mayhem against up until that time unsuspecting military, and all government workers, from postmen to social workers? They were brought in from the outside. These groups started taking territory by being brutal to population — extremely brutal in the manner in which they killed to get compliance and total obedience. Most of the rank and file of these groups were Salafi fantatics, those that UP UNTIL TODAY SAUDI WAHABI authority REFUSES TO CONDEMN. They are supported, ideologically nurtured and financially secured through the influence of Saudi royal family and its OFFICIAL SUNNI RELIGION, Wahhabism, that has under Saudi kingdom managed to completely take over Mecca, and push out all other representatives of Sunni Islam. The convergence of interest between Saudi push to eliminate all other Moslem branches in Sunni world, and the neoconservative goal of weakening Middle East to make it easier for Israel to dominate and to expand — coincided also with the neoconservative goal of imperial expansion using chaos to establish new order on its ashes. With such convergence of interests, Syria was doomed. Until some other countries decided that sovereignty matters, that borders matter, and that it was time to put the foot down. But, again, reading the mainstream media one would think that Russia just decided on its own to waddle into Middle East. Without a large global support — outside of the Western ideological block — we would not see Russian intervention. But it is part of silly narrative that we all accept — and even when objecting to some aspect of it — or another, we sheepishly still accept the basic premises. For as long as we do not learn to REJECT in TOTO what has been served, even to toss out an occasional baby with the bathwater, we will struggle chasing the mirage of imperial logic. May sound strange, but it is time for some Star Wars thinking — learn how to refuse to be mind controlled by the empire. We need to defend our mind by first learning to disbelieve, and then finding out our power.
I hear the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights is one guy sitting in Britain. It has no credibility whatsoever. The Tribune article Jason cites does reference report by the credible Doctors Without Borders saying Saturday that bombing in Eastern Ghouta had killed eight people, but the Tribune article did not specify whether these deaths were at a MSF hospital/facility or whether they were civilians.
The idea that Putin has fallen into the collateral damage trap sems to worry this blogger.
Putin has fallen into the same "cakewalk" trap as the US fell into in Iraq.
I don't think so. Putin will just walk over all the bodies already in this ditch (US, France, Turkey, Canada, UK (soon), Saudi Arabia, UAE etc.). Misery loves company and he will have lots.