Reuters reports: U.S. President Barack Obama said on Saturday that Israel has the right to guard against the transfer of advanced weapons to Hezbollah a day after Israel attacked a Hezbollah-bound missile shipment in Syria.

Israel has long made clear it is prepared to resort to force to prevent advanced Syrian weapons from reaching Hezbollah or jihadi rebels. Israeli warplanes went after the shipment inside Syria, where a two-year civil war is raging.

Obama, in an interview with the Spanish-language network Telemundo as part of a three-day Latin America tour that ended in Costa Rica, would not comment on whether the airstrikes had in fact taken place.

“I’ll let the Israeli government confirm or deny whatever strikes that they’ve taken,” he said.

But Obama, who visited Israel in March, made clear such strikes would be justified.

“What I have said in the past and I continue to believe is that the Israelis justifiably have to guard against the transfer of advanced weaponry to terrorist organizations like Hezbollah. We coordinate closely with the Israelis recognizing they are very close to Syria, they are very close to Lebanon,” he said.

The New York Times reports: The airstrike that Israeli warplanes carried out in Syria was directed at a shipment of advanced surface-to-surface missiles from Iran that Israel believed was intended for Hezbollah, the militant Lebanese organization, American officials said Saturday.

It was the second time in four months that Israel had carried out an attack in foreign territory intended to disrupt the pipeline of weapons from Iran to Hezbollah, and the raid was a vivid example of how regional adversaries are looking after their own interests as Syria becomes more chaotic.

Iran and Hezbollah have both backed President Bashar al-Assad in the Syrian civil war, now in its third year. But as fighting in Syria escalates, they also have a powerful stake in expediting the delivery of advanced weapons to Hezbollah in case Mr. Assad loses his grip on power.

Israel, for its part, has repeatedly cautioned that it will not allow Hezbollah to receive “game changing” weapons that could threaten the Israeli heartland after a post-Assad government took power.

Israel, for its part, has repeatedly cautioned that it will not allow Hezbollah to receive “game changing” weapons that could threaten the Israeli heartland after a post-Assad government took power.

And as Washington considers how to handle evidence of chemical weapons use by the Syrian government, a development it has described as a “red line,” Israel is clearly showing that it will stand behind the red lines it sets.

“The Israelis are saying, ‘O.K., whichever way the civil war is going, we are going to keep our red lines, which are different from Obama’s,’ ” said Ehud Yaari, an Israel-based fellow of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. [Continue reading…]

BBC News reports: Hundreds of Syrians have fled coastal areas where activists accuse government forces of carrying out massacres in a campaign of sectarian cleansing.

Footage of mutilated and burned bodies, allegedly from the town of Baniyas, have been posted online.

Activists said at least 77 people – 20 from the same family – were killed, a day after 72 died in nearby al-Bayda.

The government said it had fought back “terrorist groups” and restored peace and security to the area.

Following reports of the latest Israeli air strike on Syria, the New York Times says: The Israeli attack came as the Obama administration — as part of its examination of possible responses to obtaining conclusive proof that Mr. Assad has used chemical weapons — is considering military options with allies. Those options include attacking Syria’s antiaircraft systems, military aircraft and some of its missile fleet, according to senior officials from several countries.

Those officials say that attacking the chemical stockpiles directly has been all but ruled out. “You could cause exactly the disaster you are trying to prevent,” a senior Israeli military official said in an interview last week in Tel Aviv.

But attacking Mr. Assad’s main delivery systems, the officials say, would curtail his ability to transport those weapons any significant distance. “This wouldn’t stop him from using it on a village, or just releasing it on the ground, or handing something to Hezbollah,” said one European official who has been involved in the conversations. “But it would limit the damage greatly.”

The topic was alluded to on Thursday, when Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel met with his British counterpart and talked about “the need for new options” if Mr. Assad used his chemical arsenal, the officials said. But while the military has been developing and refining options for the White House for months, the discussion appears to have taken a new turn, officials say, in the struggle to determine whether the suspected use of sarin gas near Aleppo and Damascus last month was a prelude to greater use of such weapons.

“There are a lot of options on the table, and they’re generally carrying equal weight at the moment,” a senior administration official said Friday. He declined to discuss the others, though Mr. Hagel talked on Thursday about arming rebel groups

So far, President Obama has been reluctant to get involved in the Syrian conflict. He has ruled out placing American forces on the ground, a stance he reiterated on Friday at a new conference in San José, Costa Rica, where he was meeting with Latin American leaders.

Mr. Obama told reporters he did not foresee a situation in which “American boots on the ground in Syria would not only be good for America but also would be good for Syria,” adding that he had consulted with leaders in the Mideast who agree.

When asked in recent days whether recent evidence of chemical weapons use in Syria crossed the “red line” he set in August, Mr. Obama described questions he would need to have answered — including when and how chemical weapons were used — before he would take action. Even then, he made clear, he may choose something well short of military action.

By Israeli estimates, Syria has 15 to 20 major chemical weapons sites, many near airfields that would make transport by plane relatively easy. Military planners say they would want to avoid hitting the chemicals for fear of creating toxic sites that could injure or kill civilians.

Ideally, one American commander said, the stockpiles would be surrounded, protected and then incinerated, much as the United States has done with its chemical arsenal. But that takes years, and as one official said, “We don’t have years, and we can’t keep troops there.”

That is why attacking the delivery systems seems like the next best option to many in the administration. Israel was believed to be behind an attack on some Syrian missiles in February as they were about to be transported, presumably to Hezbollah. On Wednesday, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told Israeli lawmakers that a Hezbollah missile attack, using chemical weapons, was one of his chief concerns. [Continue reading…]

Al Jazeera reports: Israeli officials have confirmed that the country’s air force carried out a strike against Syria and say it targeted a shipment of advanced missiles.

The officials said on Saturday the shipment was not of chemical arms, but of “game changing” weapons bound for the Lebanese Hezbollah group.

They claimed, speaking on condition of anonymity, that the airstrike was early on Friday, but no mention was made of where it took place.

Following the strike, Defence Ministry strategist, Amos Gilad, said that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad retains control of Syria’s reputed chemical weapons and they are not sought by his Hezbollah allies in Lebanon.

“Syria has large amounts of chemical weaponry and missiles. Everything there is under (Assad government) control,” Gilad said in a speech.

“Hezbollah does not have chemical weaponry. We have ways of knowing. They are not keen to take weaponry like this, preferring systems that can cover all of the country (Israel),” he said.

Following a speech by Hezbollah’s leader Hassan Nasrallah this week, Jean Aziz writes: Beirut circles familiar with Hezbollah’s thinking said that Nasrallah addressed his supporters to assert that the war he is waging — in Sayyeda Zeinab’s shrine, Qusayr, and of course in south Lebanon — is legitimate. That legitimacy rests on three grounds:

First, that the war on Syria aims to liquidate the Palestinian cause and thus the war falls within Hezbollah’s doctrine of fighting Israel.

Second, that some Lebanese parties are directly involved in the Syrian conflict, as Nasrallah asserted. That involvement indicates that there has been a decision to use the Syrian arena to strike at Hezbollah. According to Nasrallah, that involvement preceded the Shiite involvement in Syria.

In effect, Nasrallah said to both his supporters and opponents that when former Lebanese Prime Minister Saad Hariri started arming the Syrian opposition, and when Hariri appointed one of his MPs to represent him with the jihadist and takfiri groups in Syria, and when Lebanese Shiites returning from a religious pilgrimage in Iran were kidnapped in Syria on the Turkish-Syrian border last year, and when the arms shipments to the Syrian opposition were coming through the Tripoli port, and when dozens of Lebanese Sunni fundamentalists were ambushed when infiltrating Syria from northern Lebanon to fight alongside Jabhat al-Nusra, Hezbollah was not yet involved in Syria, as it is today in a limited way. So Nasrallah was telling his supporters that he is in a position of self-defense and is defending his people, or at least was counterattacking a push to eliminate Hezbollah.

The third ground is purely religious: to defend Sayyeda Zeinab’s shrine. Zeinab was the daughter of Imam Ali, who is revered by Shiites, and Fatima, who was the daughter of Islam’s prophet, Muhammad. Zeinab also played a key role in the Battle of Karbala, which happened in 680 and is central to Shiite consciousness. It is that battle that split the Muslims into Sunnis and Shiites. [Continue reading…]

Scott Lucas writes: You know that a media narrative has been established when Reuters puts it into its boilerplate text.

For example, the standard reference for the Islamist faction Jabhat al-Nusra is now “the Nusra Front, an al-Qaeda linked rebel group“.

Other news outlets have joined in — or go even farther. Associated Press also uses “Al-Qaeda-linked group“.

The New York Times chooses “aligned with Al Qaeda“. Then, after declaring, “Nowhere in rebel-controlled Syria is there a secular fighting force to speak of”, it asserts: “Among the most extreme groups is the notorious Al Nusra Front, the Qaeda-aligned force declared a terrorist organization by the United States.”

But what if that narrative is only part of the story, based on a repetition of a distorted interpretation of a Jabhat al-Nusra statement, which misses crucial points and nuances?

How does that affect our understanding of the Syrian conflict, and our responses to it?

While the US Government established the “extremist” label for Jabhat al-Nusra late last year when it designated the faction as a terrorist group, the “Al Qa’eda-linked” mantra was fostered last month after a statement by JAN head Abu Mohammad al-Golani.

Responding to an attempt by the Islamic State of Iraq to claim leadership of JAN, al-Golani emphasised the autonomy of the movement, stressing that it is a local faction that is working and fighting with other local groups.

However, that part of the message was lost — at least in the Western press, who rather than analyzing the nuances of al-Golani’s statement and placing those within a wider context, focussed entirely on a reference to Ayman al-Zawahiri, the head of Al Qa’eda after the death of Osama bin Laden.

However, the full text of al-Golani’s statement, translated by EA, is far different from the simplistic, reductionist “allegiance to Al Qa’eda” soundbite presented and re-presented in media outlets, few (if any) of which actually read al-Golani’s full statement in English, let alone Arabic. [Continue reading…]