Category Archives: Lands

U.S. and allied support for Syrian opposition is dwindling

The New York Times reports: Four Syrian rebel commanders huddled in a knot, all broad shoulders and shiny gray suits, surveying the hotel lounge. Gigantic portraits of Jim Morrison and Jimi Hendrix gazed down at the carpet, a checkerboard of faux zebra-hide in squares of orange and magenta. On a low sofa, a couple snuggled to the sounds of Amy Winehouse.

The fighters decamped to a smokers’ enclosure behind a plate-glass window, its back wall a trompe-l’oeil image of electric-blue waves that made it seem as though they were submerged in a fish tank. It was an effect that fit their mood. They were in Geneva, notionally at least, for peace talks, but back in Syria, the government and its Russian allies were battering insurgents with scores of airstrikes. With their men under fire, the commanders were asking themselves how much longer they could credibly stay.

“Maybe a day,” one, Maj. Hassan Ibrahim, said on Monday night.

By Wednesday, the talks were indeed suspended, as the intense fighting on the ground proved there was as little to talk about as ever.

In an interview earlier, under the watchful eye of an adviser from Saudi Arabia, Major Ibrahim had dutifully projected strength and determination. But when the Saudi man walked away, the Syrian, who had defected from the government army in 2011, leaned forward and confided that the fighters he led in southern Syria were struggling. Supplies of weapons and salaries from the United States and its allies are dwindling. Moving in and out of Jordan is getting harder.

“They are doing it to put pressure on us to accept a political process,” he said, one in which he doubted that the Syrian government — or Russia, a sponsor of the talks — would make any compromise.

Major Ibrahim was reflecting a growing foreboding among the opposition’s fighters and civilians, mirrored by growing hope on the government side, that Washington, interested only in bombing the Islamic State militant group, is ceding the field to Russia and leaving the opposition on its own. [Continue reading…]

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After four months, Russia’s campaign in Syria is proving successful for Moscow

The Washington Post reports: Four months after launching airstrikes in Syria, the Kremlin is confident that Moscow’s largest overseas campaign since the end of the Soviet Union is paying off.

Under the banner of fighting international terrorism, President Vladimir Putin has reversed the fortunes of forces loyal to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, which were rapidly losing ground last year to moderate and Islamist rebel forces in the country’s five-year-old crisis. Government forces are now on the offensive, and last week, they scored their most significant victory yet, seizing the strategic town of Sheikh Miskeen from rebels who are backed by a U.S.-led coalition.

According to analysts and officials here, the Russian government believes it has won those dividends at a relatively low cost to the country’s budget, with minimal loss of soldiers’ lives and with largely supportive public opinion.

“The operation is considered here to be quite successful,” said Evgeny Buzhinsky, a retired lieutenant general and senior vice president of the Russian Center for Policy Studies in Moscow. It could probably continue for one year or longer, he said, “but it will depend on the success on the ground.”

Whether the benefits of Russia’s gambit to put soldiers on the ground in Syria will continue long term remains to be seen. President Obama warned last year that Russia was entering a “quagmire” reminiscent of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, and it is unclear when Moscow could declare victory and whether it has an exit strategy.

But as Assad’s forces push forward and as diplomatic talks in Geneva broke off in recriminations Wednesday after just two days, there is little pressure right now on the Kremlin to pull back. [Continue reading…]

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If Russia started a war in the Baltics, NATO would lose — quickly

Dan De Luce writes: If Russian tanks and troops rolled into the Baltics tomorrow, outgunned and outnumbered NATO forces would be overrun in under three days. That’s the sobering conclusion of war games carried out by a think tank with American military officers and civilian officials.

“The games’ findings are unambiguous: As currently postured, NATO cannot successfully defend the territory of its most exposed members,” said a report by the RAND Corp., which led the war gaming research.

In numerous tabletop war games played over several months between 2014-2015, Russian forces were knocking on the doors of the Estonian capital of Tallinn or the Latvian capital of Riga within 36 to 60 hours. U.S. and Baltic troops — and American airpower — proved unable to halt the advance of mechanized Russian units and suffered heavy casualties, the report said.

The study argues that NATO has been caught napping by a resurgent and unpredictable Russia, which has begun to boost defense spending after having seized the Crimean peninsula in Ukraine and intervened in support of pro-Moscow separatists in eastern Ukraine. In the event of a potential Russian incursion in the Baltics, the United States and its allies lack sufficient troop numbers, or tanks and armored vehicles, to slow the advance of Russian armor, said the report by RAND’s David Shlapak and Michael Johnson. [Continue reading…]

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Russia carried out practice nuclear strike against Sweden

Tupolev-Tu-22M3

The Local reports: When Russian planes carried out a simulated attack against Sweden in 2013, it included nuclear warfare, a Nato report has revealed.

The training mission by the Russian military took place just beyond the eastern edge of the Stockholm archipelago three years ago. It grabbed global headlines because Sweden’s military was slow to react due to staff being on vacation and had to rely on help from Nato.

Several Swedish media outlets had previously speculated that the exercises also included a simulated nuclear attack, but this was never confirmed.

Now, Nato’s Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg has revealed that this was indeed the case – a revelation that appears in the defence alliance’s annual report.

The text, which was released last week but only widely reported in Sweden on Wednesday, also confirmed that four Russian Tupolev Tu-22M3 bombers had participated in the training exercise as well as two Sukhoi Su-27 jets. [Continue reading…]

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The war in Ukraine is back — so why won’t anyone say so?

Pierre Vaux reports: Russia’s dirty war in Ukraine is far from frozen, and despite the deteriorating situation, the West appears keen to turn a blind eye.

While the fighting in southeast Ukraine has rumbled on incessantly throughout the winter, inducing conflict fatigue and a drop in media coverage, the last weeks have seen a marked spike in the number of attacks.

Ukrainian officials are reporting up to 71 attacks a day, with most of the fighting concentrated around the separatist-held cities of Donetsk and Gorlovka, as well as the countryside east of the Azov port city of Mariupol.

Both sides accuse each other of daily using heavy mortars, which were supposed to have been withdrawn in accordance over a year ago in accordance with the first Minsk agreement. [Continue reading…]

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Amidst north Aleppo chaos, thousands of displaced Syrians pour into ‘relative safety’ of Kurdish-held Afrin

Syria Direct reports: Thousands of civilians displaced by a major ongoing regime offensive in the northern Aleppo countryside are seeking refuge in Afrin, a pocket of Kurdish-held territory in the province’s northwest perceived as “comparatively more secure and stable,” an Afrin activist told Syria Direct Thursday.

Nestled in the northwest corner of Aleppo province, Afrin is the westernmost of the four cantons making up Rojava, a swathe of Kurdish territories in northern Syria held and primarily administrated the Democratic Union Party (PYD).

“Displaced people started to pour in around a week ago,” Sheikhmous al-Afrini, a Kurdish aid activist in Afrin told Syria Direct on Thursday.

In images posted by local news page Efrin Anha on social media on Wednesday, displaced north Aleppo residents sit surrounded by rugs, mattresses and plastic bags holding the possessions they were able to bring with them.

Russia has reportedly launched hundreds of air raids using cluster munitions and vacuum missiles in recent days in the north Aleppo countryside to support regime forces operating on the ground, pro-opposition Shaam News Network reported. The bombings are “like rain,” Smart News correspondent Muhammad Najm a-Din told Syria Direct on Wednesday. [Continue reading…]

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Drone captures scenes of devastation — the remains of Homs, Syria

The New York Times reports: A video taken by a drone winding its way through the battered city of Homs, Syria, has captured haunting images of the virtually complete destruction after five years of civil war.

The minute-and-a-half video was uploaded on Tuesday to a YouTube channel operated by Alexander Pushin, a cameraman who runs a drone filming company, Russia Works, and who has taken several videos of Syria’s war-torn landscape.

In his latest video, whose date of origin was unclear, the camera travels at low altitude between buildings and alleyways in Homs, a central city that had been home to a prewar population of one million people. It is almost completely empty of life.

The images evoke scenes from a post-apocalyptic video game — an abandoned graveyard, a lone motorcyclist, gutted buildings reduced to pile after pile of rubble — and help explain the desperation driving the country’s spasms of civilian flight. [Continue reading…]

In his YouTube description of the footage, camera operator Alexander Pushin claims the area was destroyed by “radical Islamists and foreign mercenaries,” but Tom Gara offers a more realistic assessment of the kind of fire power that can produce this level of destruction.


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Italian student Giulio Regeni found dead in Cairo ‘with signs of torture’

GIULIO-REGENI

The Guardian reports: Italian authorities are demanding a full investigation into the death of an Italian student whose body was found in Cairo bearing signs that he had been tortured.

The body of Giulio Regeni, a 28-year-old who was pursuing a PhD at Cambridge, was found in a ditch in the suburbs outside Cairo on Wednesday night, days after the Italian government announced it was growing increasingly concerned about his disappearance.

The Egyptian prosecutor leading the investigation team on the case said Regeni’s body had been found with stab wounds, cigarette burns, cuts to the ears and signs of beatings and a “slow death”. Reports in the local media said he was found naked from the waist down. The body was found on Wednesday, and it is believed that he may have been killed days earlier. [Continue reading…]

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The West must stop giving Turkey a free pass

Behlul Ozkan writes: Last month, more than 1,200 Turkish and foreign academics signed a petition calling attention to the continuing humanitarian crisis in many Kurdish-majority towns in southeastern Turkey, which are the site of fighting between the Turkish Army and the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or P.K.K. The petition decried the Army’s shelling of urban areas and the imposition of weekslong, 24-hour curfews, which have left many civilians unable to bury their dead or even obtain food. President Recep Tayyip Erdogan publicly denounced the signers as “so-called intellectuals” and “traitors.” Within days, antiterror police had detained and harassed dozens of the signatories.

Mr. Erdogan’s actions shouldn’t have been surprising. The president has a history of jailing journalists and cracking down on media companies critical of his policies. And yet this time the response from his supporters was exceptionally chilling: A pro-Erdogan organized crime boss proclaimed, “We will take a shower in your blood,” while the office doors of some of the academics were ominously marked with red crosses.

Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu, who as a former academic might have been expected to come to his colleagues’ defense, announced that he “did not regard the petition as falling under the rubric of free speech.” He then set out on a trip to several European countries in order to encourage foreign investment in Turkey’s foundering economy. In Britain and Germany, Mr. Davutoglu received a warm welcome from Prime Minister David Cameron and Chancellor Angela Merkel. The European Union’s response to the latest crackdown on dissent in Turkey amounted to little more than a statement calling the persecution of the academics “extremely worrying.”

Many prominent Western academics and non-governmental organizations have been vocal in censuring the persecution suffered by their Turkish counterparts. The European Union’s lack of action on Turkey’s crackdown on academic freedom and human rights would therefore be inexplicable but for one crucial detail: As the European Union faces its largest refugee crisis since World War II, the 2.5 million Syrians currently in Turkey are a huge bargaining chip for Ankara. Europe’s leaders are well aware of this. [Continue reading…]

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President Obama’s remarks at the Islamic Society of Baltimore on February 3

President Obama said: This is a moment when, as Americans, we have to truly listen to each other and learn from each other. And I believe it has to begin with a common understanding of some basic facts. And I express these facts, although they’d be obvious to many of the people in this place, because, unfortunately, it’s not facts that are communicated on a regular basis through our media.

So let’s start with this fact: For more than a thousand years, people have been drawn to Islam’s message of peace. And the very word itself, Islam, comes from salam — peace. The standard greeting is as-salamu alaykum — peace be upon you. And like so many faiths, Islam is rooted in a commitment to compassion and mercy and justice and charity. Whoever wants to enter paradise, the Prophet Muhammad taught, “let him treat people the way he would love to be treated.” (Applause.) For Christians like myself, I’m assuming that sounds familiar. (Laughter.)

The world’s 1.6 billion Muslims are as diverse as humanity itself. They are Arabs and Africans. They’re from Latin America to Southeast Asia; Brazilians, Nigerians, Bangladeshis, Indonesians. They are white and brown and black. There’s a large African American Muslim community. That diversity is represented here today. A 14-year-old boy in Texas who’s Muslim spoke for many when he wrote to me and said, “We just want to live in peace.”

Here’s another fact: Islam has always been part of America. Starting in colonial times, many of the slaves brought here from Africa were Muslim. And even in their bondage, some kept their faith alive. A few even won their freedom and became known to many Americans. And when enshrining the freedom of religion in our Constitution and our Bill of Rights, our Founders meant what they said when they said it applied to all religions.

Back then, Muslims were often called Mahometans. And Thomas Jefferson explained that the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom he wrote was designed to protect all faiths — and I’m quoting Thomas Jefferson now — “the Jew and the Gentile, the Christian and the Mahometan.” (Applause.)

Jefferson and John Adams had their own copies of the Koran. Benjamin Franklin wrote that “even if the Mufti of Constantinople were to send a missionary to preach to us, he would find a pulpit at his service.” (Applause.) So this is not a new thing. [Continue reading…]

The New York Times reports: For Mr. Obama, the remarks were also an admission of how little progress has been made since the speech in Cairo [in 2009], where he called for “a sustained effort to listen to each other, to learn from each other, to respect one another, and to seek common ground.” In his speech on Wednesday, he suggested that his hopes for a reconciliation had been dashed, but he called on all Americans to stick by the country’s founding ideals.

Muslims in the audience hailed the address.

“I think it was one of the best speeches he’s ever given,” said Representative André Carson, an Indiana Democrat. Representative Keith Ellison, a Minnesota Democrat, said the speech “hit me in the heart” and was a vital antidote to growing intolerance.

“I have a 19-year-old daughter who is a Muslim and wants to contribute to her nation, and it bugs me that someone who says he wants to be president would want to exclude her,” Mr. Ellison said.

But Morton Klein, president of the Zionist Organization of America, one of the country’s oldest and largest pro-Israel organizations, denounced Mr. Obama for visiting a mosque whose leaders, Mr. Klein said, have among other issues criticized Israeli military actions. “Going to such a mosque only encourages radical Muslims to harm Americans,” Mr. Klein said. [Continue reading…]

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Assad’s military momentum

TSG IntelBrief: On February 2, Syrian government forces, backed by Russian air support, continued a major push to cut rebel supply lines north of Aleppo. On top of recent successes against the rebels elsewhere, it appears that President Assad is determined to maintain military momentum even while peace talks stutter along in Geneva. In fact, given the opposition demand for a ceasefire against civilians—as called for by Security Council resolution 2254 (2015) adopted in mid-December—Assad’s actions appear calculated to bring the peace talks to a halt.

This is understandable for Assad, but unfortunate for Syria. Opposition groups have come a long way towards agreeing to a common position since the last attempt to hold talks in early 2014, and their representatives are far more likely to be able to implement an agreement now. The previous talks suffered from a disconnect between the political opposition around the table and the fighters on the ground, as well as from disagreements surrounding objectives. Efforts by Qatar, Turkey and Saudi Arabia—aided by the United States—have brought the majority of rebel groups together as the High Negotiations Committee (HNC). And although the alliance is fragile—and the extent to which it also represents Ahrar al-Sham, a key element of the opposition, remains unclear—the HNC has more credibility than any opposition alliance that has emerged previously.

The so-called Islamic State and al-Qaeda affiliate Jabhat al-Nusra (JaN) are expressly excluded from the HNC, as they are from the peace talks. Ahrar al-Sham, though a deeply conservative Islamist group that was originally seen as a sister organization to JaN, has steadily distanced itself from the global aspirations of al-Qaeda towards a strictly nationalist platform with no stated ambition beyond Syria. This has created divisions among its supporters and led to the assassinations of its leaders, but the group has nonetheless survived as a major force. JaN has tried repeatedly to merge with Ahrar al-Sham before it drifts too far away, but recent talks collapsed when JaN agreed to change its name, but not to abandon its affiliation to al-Qaeda. Tensions between the two groups have risen as a result and have led to armed clashes. JaN now faces an impending split as pressure builds to relax its hard line. [Continue reading…]

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Britain says Russia trying to carve out mini-state for Assad in Syria

Reuters reports: Britain said on Tuesday Russia could be trying to carve out an Alawite mini-state in Syria for its ally President Bashar al-Assad by bombing his opponents instead of fighting Islamic State militants.

Russia and Britain have been trading barbs after British Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond told Reuters he believed President Vladimir Putin was worsening the Syrian civil war by bombing opponents of Islamic State.

Hammond dismissed Russian criticism that he was spreading “dangerous disinformation”, saying there was a limit to how long Russia could pose as a promoter of the peace process while bombing Assad’s opponents, who the West hopes can shape Syria once the president is gone.

“Is Russia really committed to a peace process or is it using the peace process as a fig leaf to try to deliver some kind of military victory for Assad that creates an Alawite mini state in the northwest of Syria?” Hammond told reporters in Rome.

The comments indicate growing frustration in Western capitals about Putin’s intervention, alongside Iran, in Syria but also give a frank insight into the Western assessment of the Kremlin’s potential objectives for Syria. [Continue reading…]

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UN suspends Syrian peace talks in Geneva

BBC News reports: The UN has suspended peace talks aimed at ending Syria’s five-year civil war, the organisation’s special envoy has said.

Staffan de Mistura called the temporary halt, saying there had been a lack of progress in the first week.

It comes as the Syrian government claimed to have broken a siege of two towns north-west of Aleppo.

The advance, reported on Syrian state television, severs a key rebel supply route into the city.

On the talks, Mr de Mistura admitted “there’s more work to be done”. They are due to resume later this month. [Continue reading…]

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Russia’s manipulation of Germany’s refugee problems

Judy Dempsey writes: Russia’s propaganda machine—which went full blast against members of the Ukrainian government during the Ukraine crisis, labeling them fascists and anti-Semites—is in full swing again. This time, the target is Germany, once considered Russia’s closest ally in Europe.

Ever since Chancellor Angela Merkel declared her intention to allow refugees from Syria to enter Germany, the Russian media have been reporting every twist and turn of the opposition that is building up in her conservative bloc and among sections of the German public to her open-door refugee policy.

But in recent days, the Russian state media, joined by none other than Sergey Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister, have taken a different turn. They are tapping into Germany’s community of 1.2 million ethnic Russians to criticize Merkel’s policies and boost those who are unequivocally against Germany taking in refugees. The community is known for its conservative if not xenophobic views, as witnessed during demonstrations by Germany’s anti-Islam Pegida movement, in which ethnic Russians participate.

Now, Russia may be using Germany’s Russian-speaking community to create further opposition to Merkel, similar to the way it tries to instrumentalize the ethnic Russian communities in the Baltic states. Merkel is an easy target, certainly for many Russians living in Germany and for Russians back home. To the surprise and annoyance of the Kremlin, Merkel has managed to keep the EU united over maintaining sanctions on Russia after it annexed Crimea in March 2014 and subsequently invaded eastern Ukraine. [Continue reading…]

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Russia beefs up air group in Syria with advanced fighters

The Associated Press reports: The Russian military has beefed up its air group in Syria with state-of-the art fighter jets amid tensions with Turkey.

Russian Defense Ministry spokesman Igor Konashenkov said Monday that Su-35 fighters have been deployed to Hemeimeem air base in Syria. Konashenkov on Monday didn’t say how many Su-35s had been sent to Syria, but Russian media reports said there were four of them and state television showed them parked in Hemeimeem.

Russian warplanes so far have flown about 6,000 missions since Moscow launched its air campaign four months ago. [Continue reading…]

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Putin’s dragon in Chechnya

Ramzan-Kadyrov

Joshua Yaffa writes: Since 2001, to keep the peace, the Russian government has flooded Chechnya with cash, including at least fourteen billion dollars for postwar reconstruction. Today, more than eighty-five per cent of Chechnya’s budget comes from Moscow. Another untold sum comes from an opaque fund named after Kadyrov’s father, which is financed by business owners and public employees — who are informally required to pay a portion of their income to the fund — and by Chechen oligarchs paying tribute to [Chechnya’s leader — shown above — Ramzan] Kadyrov. The fund, in turn, disburses money for everything from repairing local hospitals to sending Chechens to Mecca for the hajj. Chechen officials have said that donations to the foundation are voluntary, but a staff member at a public institution in Grozny told me that as soon as the workers’ salaries are deposited they get a call from a superior, asking for around thirty to fifty thousand rubles, or four to six hundred dollars. “One time, he explained it was for organizing a big soccer match,” the person said. “Other times, he doesn’t give any explanation at all.” The fund, an indulgence granted to no other Russian governor, frees Kadyrov from complete financial dependence on the Kremlin.

Since succeeding his father, Kadyrov has wrested power not just from the Russian generals and intelligence officers who once oversaw Chechnya but also from internal rivals hailing from other prominent Chechen clans. In this, he resembles Putin, who built what has been called a “vertical of power” across the whole of Russia under his centralized authority. Chechnya is far smaller and more homogenous, so Kadyrov’s power is even more pronounced. Putin has eliminated opponents largely through political trickery and co-optation, reserving outright force for rare occasions. Kadyrov prefers blunter, unmistakably violent means.

For many years, Kadyrov’s chief rivals were the Yamadayev brothers, who had powerful patrons in Moscow. In 2008, Ruslan Yamadayev, a member of the Russian parliament, was shot and killed in his car, outside the Russian White House, the chief office of government administration in Moscow; in 2009, his younger brother Sulim was killed in the parking garage of a luxury apartment tower in Dubai, where he was living under an assumed name. A Dubai court tried and convicted two men, including an Iranian who worked as a stable hand for Kadyrov—Kadyrov keeps racehorses in Dubai — for carrying out the assassination. Dubai police testified in court that Adam Delimkhanov — Kadyrov’s closest ally, enforcer, and heir apparent — provided the killers with the murder weapon, a gold-plated 9-mm. pistol, and they put him on the Interpol wanted list. Delimkhanov denied involvement. He is a deputy in the Russian parliament, and maintains an unblemished legal record in Russia—though he once got into a fistfight with another deputy inside the parliament building in Moscow and a gold-plated handgun fell to the floor beside him. A third Yamadayev brother, Isa, published an open letter in a Moscow newspaper in 2009, claiming that Kadyrov had tried to kill him, but he reached an apparent truce with Kadyrov the next year. The end of the Yamadayev brothers as a political force left Kadyrov with nearly unchecked power. “These were strong guys with connections to the F.S.B.,” the successor agency to the K.G.B., Alexey Malashenko, an expert on the Caucasus at the Carnegie Moscow Center, told me. “But it turns out that even the F.S.B. couldn’t defend them, because Kadyrov isn’t protected by the F.S.B., or by the state writ large, but by Putin himself.” [Continue reading…]

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Will Turkey risk military confrontation with Russia?

erdogan

Semih Idiz writes: Tensions between Russia and Turkey continue to escalate following the downing in November of a Russian Su-24 fighter jet that strayed into Turkish airspace.

Questions are being raised now whether the two countries are heading for a military confrontation. A leading Turkish military expert told Al-Monitor that such a Russian move could spell disaster for Turkey.

Turkey accused Russia of violating its airspace again last week and summoned Russia’s ambassador in Ankara to lodge a formal protest. President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu also warned Moscow that it was playing with fire and would have to face the consequences. [Continue reading…]

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Pentagon won’t say how many troops are fighting ISIS

The Daily Beast reports: In the war against the self-proclaimed Islamic State, there are two ways to count the number of U.S. boots on the ground. There’s the one that officials admit to. Then there’s the ground truth.

Officially, there are now 3,650 U.S. troops in Iraq, there primarily to help train the Iraqi national army.

But in reality, there are already about 4,450 U.S. troops in Iraq, plus another nearly 7,000 contractors supporting the American government’s operations. That includes almost 1,100 U.S. citizens working as military contractors, according to the latest Defense Department statistics. [Continue reading…]

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