French hostage in Algeria is beheaded in new video

The New York Times reports: A French tourist captured in North Africa by a group aligned with the Islamic State is seen beheaded in a video circulated on Wednesday, according to SITE Intelligence, which tracks jihadist groups.

The Frenchman — Hervé Gourdel, a 55-year-old mountaineering guide from Nice — was abducted in Algeria on Sunday by the terrorist group, known as Jund al-Khilafah. Mr. Gourdel had arrived only a day before on a trip to go hiking in Algeria’s northern mountains.

The terrorist group issued a statement after his abduction, saying that it was following the guidance of the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL, which has seized large parts of Syria and Iraq and has called on its sympathizers to strike Westerners — especially the French — wherever they can. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Hamas weighs alternatives to Palestinian unity government

Adnan Abu Amer reports: As Cairo’s indirect negotiations between Israelis and Palestinians started on Sept. 23 toward a cease-fire agreement in the Gaza Strip, Palestinian negotiations between Fatah and Hamas also kicked off on files related to the reconciliation reached in April.

The Palestinian dialogue comes amid tensions between Fatah and Hamas that escalated immediately after the end of the Israeli war on Gaza Aug. 26, due to disputes regarding the reconstruction of Gaza and the unpaid wages of former government employees.

Speaking at a celebration organized by the International Union of Muslim Scholars on Sept. 21, before the Cairo talks, Khaled Meshaal, Hamas’ political bureau chief, said: “As soon as the Gaza war ended, the attack against Hamas started. This aims at stirring a hostile media campaign. Hamas has no time to waste on secondary battles. We have priorities, most important of which is the issue concerning the reconstruction of Gaza. We will not tolerate negligence in any issue and we will not accept the cancelation of any part stipulated in the reconciliation.” [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Jabhat Al-Nusra: ‘Why attack us? We didn’t do anything against the U.S. We just want to fight Assad’

Mike Giglio reports: At least eight U.S. airstrikes targeted the infamous Syrian rebel group called Jabhat al-Nusra in the last 24 hours. But a week ago, serving tea at his apartment in southern Turkey, an official with the extremist group complained that it gets a bad rap in the U.S. — and that the Obama administration should even see it as an ally.

Nusra is one of the most powerful insurgent forces in Syria’s civil war, with a long record of fighting the regime. It’s also a branch of al-Qaeda. This has seen it blacklisted as a terrorist group by the U.S. and U.N., something that has always angered some of its members, such as the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity. They say their lone goal is to overthrow Syrian President Bashar al-Assad — a man whose ouster the Obama administration has called for too. “Why this treatment?” the official asked.

With global attention — and U.S. airstrikes — focused on another extremist group in the region, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, or ISIS, some Nusra members were pushing to mark a clear distinction between the two organizations. Nusra even released a U.S. man it was holding captive — journalist Peter Theo Curtis — as well as 45 U.N. peacekeepers. “They’re just criminals,” the official said of ISIS, making a point of condemning the group for beheading U.S. journalists James Foley and Steven Sotloff. “They’re against the U.S. generally.”

He suggested that Nusra and the U.S., which backs moderate rebel groups inside Syria, were on the same side: “We are fighting with the rebels. We are fighting with their alliance against the other alliance. So why attack us?”

He added: “We didn’t do anything against the U.S. We just want to fight Assad.” [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Doubts cast over U.S. strike on ‘Khorasan’ group

AFP reports: The US says it has hit a little-known group called “Khorasan” in Syria, but experts and activists argue it actually struck Al-Qaeda’s affiliate Al-Nusra Front, which fights alongside Syrian rebels.

In announcing its raids in the northern province of Aleppo on Tuesday, Washington described the group it targeted as Khorasan, a cell of Al-Qaeda veterans planning attacks against the West.

But experts and activists cast doubt on the distinction between Khorasan and Al-Nusra Front, which is Al-Qaeda’s Syrian branch.

“In Syria, no one had ever heard talk of Khorasan until the US media brought it up,” said Rami Abdel Rahman, director of the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.

“Rebels, activists and the whole world knows that these positions (hit Tuesday) were Al-Nusra positions, and the fighters killed were Al-Nusra fighters,” added Abdel Rahman, who has tracked the Syrian conflict since it erupted in 2011.

Experts were similarly dubious about the distinction.

“The name refers to Al-Qaeda fighters previously based in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iran who have travelled to Syria to fight with… Al-Nusra,” said Matthew Henman, head of IHS Jane’s Terrorism and Insurgency Centre.

“They… should not be considered a new or distinct group as such.” [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Syrian Kurds call for more targeted strikes

The Wall Street Journal reports: The chaos in a town near Turkey’s Syrian border intensified after U.S.-led airstrikes against Islamic State targets Tuesday, prompting Kurdish leaders to call on Washington to give them a role in coordinating the fight against the jihadists.

Kurdish leaders said that after U.S. warplanes hit Raqqa, the de facto capital of Islamic State, the insurgents redeployed men and heavy weaponry closer to Kurdish areas. The officials said the jihadist onslaught around the Syrian city of Ayn al-Arab, known in Kurdish as Kobani, continued through Tuesday, as shells fell on the city and surrounding villages were seized.

Turkey’s government said on Tuesday that the number of refugees fleeing the jihadist advance rose to 150,000, while the United Nations relief agency warned the number could reach 400,000.

Panic over Islamic State’s advance led to fresh clashes at the border between Turkish security forces and angry Kurdish protesters who cursed the absence of Turkey—a North Atlantic Treaty Organization member with a major U.S. air base—from the Washington-led coalition. Speaking to reporters in New York, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said Turkey could give military or logistical support to the U.S.-led coalition, but stopped short of offering any firm commitments.

The Syrian Kurdish militia, which fights under the banner of the People’s Defense Units, or YPG, on Tuesday asked to join President Barack Obama’s coalition.

“We welcome the airstrikes but they didn’t help Kobani. The U.S. should coordinate with us,” said Redur Xelil, a YPG spokesman. “We fear that the airstrikes may even push their fighters to concentrate on Kobani, endangering the city even more.” [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

U.S., allies risk benefiting Syria’s Assad by striking militants

Stars and Stripes reports: One year ago, the Obama administration considered a cruise missile strike on Syria, but the target was not the Islamic State or al-Qaida.

The president accused Syrian President Bashar al-Assad of murdering over 1,000 citizens with poison gas. But U.S. air strikes never came. Instead, the U.S. opted to negotiate the removal of Syria’s chemical weapons, and Assad continued a bloody war against his opponents that has killed an estimated 200,000 Syrians over more than three years.

Administration officials said again this week that Assad must relinquish power. But the new U.S.-led air war there against the Islamic State and al-Qaida offshoots Khorasan and the Nusra Front puts the administration in a precarious position – it is counting on Assad’s ouster while pounding some of his most dangerous enemies from the air.

Islamic State and Nusra Front fighters in Syria are among the most effective opposition forces battling a regime that Washington opposes. The U.S. plan to arm and train moderate rebels is still in its infancy. Aircraft and missile strikes against Islamist fighters and facilities in the north runs the risk of strengthening Assad in his fight to hold on to power. [Continue reading…]

The Wall Street Journal adds: “The only beneficiary of foreign intervention in Syria is the Assad regime, in the absence of any real strategy to topple it,” said Hamza al-Shamali, the commander of moderate rebel group Harakat Hazm, which is close to Qatar.

The group opposed the airstrikes, calling them a breach of Syria’s national sovereignty.

Reactions of Syrian rebel groups reflected the rifts and competing loyalties and agendas that have plagued the opposition fighters since the start of the conflict more than three years ago.

Rebels of all stripes have been battling both the Islamic State and Mr. Assad. And while regime forces and the Islamic State have largely avoided direct confrontation, this changed after the group grabbed significant territory in eastern Syria and neighboring Iraq starting in June.

There were differences and confusion even among the relatively moderate groups that have been the beneficiaries of U.S. and Western arms, training and other forms of support.

The head of the rebel umbrella group known as the Fifth Legion of the Free Syrian Army welcomed the airstrikes but said they had to also extend to “the source of terrorism: the Assad regime.” The Western-backed group said greater coordination with rebels on the ground was needed to avert civilian casualties.

Facebooktwittermail

Does Turkey still remain hostage to ISIS?

Cengiz Candar writes: Faruk Logoglu, a former Turkish ambassador to Washington and an opposition member of parliament, a leading figure in foreign policy issues, sees the “deal with IS” as scandalous, which could place Turkey’s relations with the Western world on a more problematic course. He asked the government: “There are serious allegations that IS has been supplied with tanks and weapons and that these were carried by train to Tell Abyad. The government must respond to these allegations. What is meant by a ‘diplomatic deal’ is the freeing of IS militants detained in Turkey. How many? Why were they detained? For example, on March 25, 2014, three IS terrorists were arrested for killing three citizens at Ulukisla-Nigde. Are they part of the deal?

“Erdogan’s remarks on an exchange are scandalous, showing that he recognizes IS as an interlocutor to make diplomatic deals with. Social media close to IS reported 150 IS militants, 50 of them women, detained in Turkey were released. Sources close to the PKK allege Turkey has supplied IS with tanks and other weapons. Finally, IS could have been assured that Turkey will remain outside the coalition.”

There are many indicators that Turkey, even after the hostage release, does not have a free hand vis-a-vis IS. While it has rescued its hostages, it still remains hostage to IS. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Syrian rebels angry that strikes hit al Qaida ally but not Assad

McClatchy reports: Anti-government media activists and rebel commanders gave a mixed assessment of U.S.-led airstrikes in northern Syria on Tuesday, saying that some of the Islamic State encampments hit had been evacuated and one building that was struck had been filled with displaced civilians, even as at least one major Islamic State base was seriously damaged and many fighters were killed.

But the greatest damage, they said, may be to the Free Syrian Army, the moderate rebel faction that enjoyed U.S. support for years.

By focusing exclusively on Islamic State insurgents and al Qaida figures associated with the Khorasan unit of the Nusra Front, and bypassing installations associated with the government of President Bashar Assad, the airstrikes infuriated anti-regime Syrians and hurt the standing of moderate rebel groups that are receiving arms and cash as part of a covert CIA operation based in the Turkish border city of Reyhanli.

Rebel fighters argue that they constitute the only friendly ground force available to the international coalition to fill the security vacuum in places that Islamic State fighters are forced to abandon. But rebel commanders said they’d played no role in selecting the targets or planning for the aftermath.

The U.S. informed the Syrian government of the impending airstrikes Monday, the official Syrian news agency reported, but no one dropped a hint to the inner circle of rebel commanders. They learned about it from the news. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Is this Iraqi official Washington’s intermediary to Assad?

Foreign Policy: Immediately after the United States began its bombing campaign in President Bashar al-Assad’s backyard, the Syrian leader received a conspicuous visitor: Iraqi National Security Advisor Faleh al-Fayyad. The two men discussed the ongoing fight against Islamic State militants and, according to the Syrian state media summary of the meeting, Assad told the Iraqi official “that Syria supports any international counterterrorism effort.” It was at least their second meeting in as many weeks.

While the report contained no specific mention of U.S. bombing in Syria, Assad’s comment walks that fine line where it can be easily interpreted as a signal to Washington that Damascus will not stand the way of — and indeed welcomes — U.S. efforts to strike the Islamic State, which Assad sees as a mortal enemy.

The Syrian civil war and the subsequent rise of radical jihadist groups in the country have made strange bedfellows of the United States and its erstwhile enemies. Inside Iraq, U.S. airstrikes have at times come in support of Iranian-backed Shiite militias, putting Washington in the odd position of serving as Tehran’s air force in Iraq. As for Syria, President Barack Obama has called for Assad’s ouster but has now found common cause with the brutal strongman in launching an air war against the Islamic State militants fighting to overthrow him.

While U.S. officials maintain that they are not cooperating with Iranian forces in Iraq, privately they concede that they are coordinating airstrikes with Iranian militias by using Iraqi security forces as intermediaries. With the U.S. air war now expanding to Syria, Fayyad’s repeated trips to Damascus raise the possibility that Iraqi officials are reprising that coordination during another alliance of convenience between the United States and an ostensible enemy. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

If the U.S. wants to destroy ISIS, why did it just attack the group’s arch rival?

“We don’t have any specific, credible information about specific plans that they [the “Khorasan Group”] had. On the other hand, the intelligence did lead us to believe that they were in the process of getting very close to the execution phase of general plans that we know that they were interested in,” said Attorney General Eric Holder in an interview today with Yahoo’s Katie Couric.

“So for some time now we’ve been tracking plots to conduct attacks in the United States or Europe. We believe that that attack plotting was imminent, in that they had plans to conduct attacks external to Syria,” said Ben Rhodes, deputy national security adviser at the White House.

Close to the execution phase of general plans? Imminent plotting for an attack somewhere outside Syria?

The New York Times reports:

[O]ne senior counterterrorism official, who insisted on anonymity to discuss intelligence matters, said the group might not have chosen the target, method or even the timing for a strike. An intelligence official said separately that the group was “reaching a stage where they might be able to do something.”

When government officials make vacuous statements like these and warn about the “imminent” threat posed by America’s latest diabolical foe, is it any wonder that conspiracy theorists like Alex Jones find it so easy to capture a mass audience?

Those Americans less inclined to question official statements and willing to accept that airstrikes against a terrorist group they never heard of must nevertheless be a good thing if that group was about to attack the U.S., would be well advised to ask this question: does an administration that just presented its strategy for degrading and destroying ISIS, actually have a clear strategy if its war against ISIS is now also targeting one of ISIS’s principal adversaries?

Aron Lund writes:

What is being discussed is not a “new terrorist group,” but rather a specialized cell that has gradually been established within, or on, the fringes of an already existing al-Qaeda franchise, the so-called Nusra Front. What this seems to be about is a jihadi cell consisting of veteran al-Qaeda members who have arrived to the Nusra Front in Syria from abroad, mainly via Iran, and who are in direct contact with al-Qaeda’s international leader Ayman al-Zawahiri, himself believed to be based in Pakistan.

Lund continues:

Whatever one decides to call it, this is not likely to be an independent organization, but rather a network-within-the-network, assigned to deal with specific tasks. Most likely it has no fixed name at all, and the “Khorasan Group” label has simply been invented for convenience by U.S. intelligence or adopted from informal references within the Nusra Front to these men as being, for example, “our brothers from Khorasan.”

The issue of the name is significant because it appears that from the vantage point of most Syrians, the U.S. strikes were simply strikes on Nusra and the implications are clear:


U.S. officials have repeatedly said that a campaign of airstrikes against ISIS will not accomplish its ultimate goal of destroying the organization without a ground operation involving Syrian opposition fighters. How will those fighters be recruited if the U.S. is seen as having already further undermined the war against Assad?


Whatever the U.S. might claim about imminent plots being hatched by the Khorasan Group, its leader is apparently viewed as having played a crucial role in the fight against Assad. Indeed, it seems somewhat more plausible that a guy who trains snipers would be focused on the war in Syria rather than some vague plot directed elsewhere.

Whether attacking Jabhat al Nusra has made America any safer is highly debatable but it seems much more likely this will help ISIS — and Assad.

And lastly there’s this footnote: New evidence that Twitter obediently takes directions from the U.S. government:

Facebooktwittermail

How the U.S. fragmented Syria’s rebels

Jonah Schulhofer-Wohl writes: American failure to take early, decisive action to prevent a power vacuum in Syria was a significant factor in the rise of ISIS. Such action could have been taken far earlier. One of the main sources of U.S. reluctance to do so has been the fragmentation and radicalization of the armed Syrian opposition. But this concern over acting in Syria mistakenly identifies the character of the opposition as the source of that fragmentation and radicalization.

In fact, dynamics within the war itself and not the inherent nature of the opposition have contributed significantly to the current disarray. In an ongoing research project on alliances and infighting between Syrian armed groups, I show how infighting among the opposition’s military formations increases when and where the fighting against the regime of President Bashar al-Assad has become stalemated or indecisive. The implications are two-fold. Fragmentation and radicalization in Syria were driven by factors that allowed the proliferation of armed opposition groups and by the absence of military support designed to bolster their offensive capabilities.

When the sources of the state of the armed opposition are weighed against U.S. policy on Syria since the war’s outset, the picture is clear: A hesitant U.S. role was central to the fragmentation and radicalization of the opposition. Particularly to blame are the combined failures to coordinate the actions of other pro-opposition states, to provide timely financial and military support to the opposition, and to use military support to produce qualitative changes in the opposition’s capabilities vis-à-vis the regime.

Such a causal story offers a different reading of ISIS’s swift organization of a militarily effective force, its barbaric violence and its consolidation of territory from Syria into northern Iraq. While the rise of ISIS might appear to confirm the worst fears of those who argued that the United States should not support the armed Syrian opposition, in fact it shows the opposite. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Why U.S. airstrikes in Syria may be bad for the planet

The Washington Post reports: The United States and its partners expanded its war against Islamic State on Tuesday, with airstrikes against the extremist group striking within Syria for the first time. It’s a dramatic escalation: Strikes in Syria have been a subject of heated debate for months, and a lesser-known but widely feared group linked to al-Qaeda, known as Khorasan, is being targeted for the first time.

The strikes in Syria are clearly a big deal. It’s also possible, however, that they may overshadow an issue with an even wider importance.

On Tuesday, more than 120 world leaders were gathering at the United Nations General Assembly in New York for an unusual one-day summit on climate change. While there have been some notable absences, the scale of the event is hard to ignore: It’s one of the largest one-day meetings of world leaders in history, and it’s certainly the largest-ever summit on climate change.

However, despite a push for publicity from U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon and a huge climate change march in New York City on Sunday, it’s hard not to feel like attention is elsewhere at the United Nations.

In the U.N. Correspondents Lounge, much of the talk focuses on the strikes in Syria, and while President Obama is due to speak at the summit later, his comments on the Syria strikes were dominating the news during the mid-morning.

Online data seem to confirm that the strikes in Syria are winning the war for attention: According to social analytics firm Topsy, the number of people tweeting about “Syria” on Tuesday morning was twice the number tweeting about “climate change.” Google Trends shows a spike of search traffic for Syria, but topics related to climate change are not mentioned. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Israeli troops kill Palestinian murder suspects accused of slaying teens

“We opened fire, they returned fire and they were killed in the exchange” — is this how Israelis attempt to arrest criminal suspects? By first shooting at them?

Reuters reports: Israeli troops shot dead two Palestinians in the West Bank city of Hebron on Tuesday and the military said they were members of Hamas responsible for the killing of three Israeli youths in June, an attack that led to the Gaza war.

Marwan Kawasme and Amar Abu Aysha, both in their 30s, were shot dead during a gun battle after Israeli troops surrounded a house in the city before dawn, the army and residents said. Israel had been hunting the men for three months.

Kawasme and Abu Aysha were suspected of carrying out the kidnapping and killing of the three teenage seminary students, who were abducted while hitchhiking at night near a Jewish settlement in the West Bank on June 12.

The military said army and police forces were trying to arrest the two suspects when a firefight erupted.

“We opened fire, they returned fire and they were killed in the exchange,” Israeli military spokesman Lieutenant-Colonel Peter Lerner said.

The Times of Israel reports: Palestinian security cooperation with Israel enabled Israel to target and kill two Hamas operatives suspected of kidnapping and killing three Israeli teenagers in June, a Hamas official in Gaza charged on Tuesday.

Salah Bardawil said in a statement published on Hamas’s official website that “the success of the Israeli occupation in assassinating the perpetrators of the Hebron operation [sic] early Tuesday morning was due to the security cooperation in the occupied West Bank.”

By killing Marwan Kawasme and Amer Abu Aysha rather than arresting them, Israel has avoided the politically risky process of putting them on trial — a trial which might have highlighted that the two men were not following directions from Hamas and thus Netanyahu’s pretext for the most recent war on Gaza was baseless.

That the killings happened at the very same time that the international media is firmly focused on U.S. airstrikes in Syria must surely just be a coincidence. Right?

Facebooktwittermail

Obama’s ill-conceived coalition against ISIS

Musa al-Gharbi writes: The U.S. was the only non-Arab actor to participate in the Syria raids. Collaborating with the U.S. were five other Arab states: Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the UAE, Bahrain, and Jordan.

While many pundits have and will continue to describe them as “moderate Arab allies” — what “moderate” usually means is something akin to “compliant with the U.S. agenda in the region.” What may be more significant to note about these powers is that they are all monarchies—in fact, the actors who took part in the strike are most of the region’s surviving dynasties (excluding only Oman, Kuwait, and Morocco).

The Gulf monarchs are far from beloved in Iraq, even among the Sunni population. Readers may remember that the “Sunni” Hussein regime wanted to go to war with the KSA, provoking the U.S.-led Operation Desert Shield. There is a long enmity between the peoples of Iraq and the Gulf monarchs — and an even deeper enmity between these powers and the Syrians. So the idea that the populations of IS-occupied Iraq and Syria will find these forces and their actions legitimate simply in virtue of the fact that they are “Sunni” is a gross oversimplification that reinforces problematic sectarian narratives even as it obscures important geopolitical truths. Among them:

If anything, the alliance that carried out the strike actually reinforces the narrative of the IS: it will be framed as the United States and its oppressive monarchic proxies collaborating to stifle the Arab Uprisings in order to preserve the doomed status quo.

In a similar manner, it is somewhat irrelevant that salafi and “moderate” Sunni Muslim religious authorities have condemned al-Baghdadi’s “caliphate” as invalid and ill-conceived — in part because it presupposes that most of the foreign fighters who are joining ISIS for ideological reasons are devout, well-informed about fiqh and closely following the rulings of jurists, etc. In fact, the opposite seems to be true, and many of those coming from abroad to join the IS are motivated primarily by factors other than religion. Even much of their indigenous support is from people who join for money, or else due to their grievances against the governments in Iraq and/or Syria — not because they buy into the vision of al-Baghdadi and his ilk. Accordingly, the value of “Sunni buy-in,” framed religiously, is probably both misstated and overstated.

And not only will the involvement of the Gulf kingdoms strikes be extremely controversial on the ground in Iraq and Syria, but also within the emirates who took part in these raids. Syria and the so-called “Islamic State” remain highly polarizing issues across the region — many will be apprehensive of their governments getting involved, others actually support the aspirations of these mujahedeen and view their own regimes as corrupt. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Kurds say they have halted ISIS advance on Syrian town

Reuters reports: Syrian Kurdish fighters have halted an advance by Islamic State fighters to the east of a predominantly Kurdish town near the border with Turkey, a spokesman for the main armed Kurdish group said.

“Fierce clashes are still under way but the ISIS (Islamic State) advance to the east of Kobani has been halted since last night,” Redur Xelil, spokesman for the main Kurdish armed group, the YPG, said via Skype.

He said the eastern front was the scene of the fiercest fighting in the offensive launched by Islamic State last Tuesday on Kobani, also known in Arabic as Ayn al-Arab. More than 100,000 Syrian Kurds, driven by fear of Islamic State, have fled its advance, many crossing the border into Turkey.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which tracks violence in the Syrian war, said Islamic State fighters had made no significant advance in the last 24 hours. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

PKK leader calls for mass mobilization of Kurds to fight against ISIS

The Associated Press reports: The imprisoned leader of a Kurdish rebel group fighting Turkey has called for a mass mobilization of all Kurds against the Islamic State militant group which is fighting Kurdish forces in Syria.

In a message relayed through his lawyer late Monday, Abdullah Ocalan said: “I call on all Kurdish people to start an all-out resistance against this high-intensity war.”

“Not only the people of Rojava (Syrian Kurdistan) but also all people in the north (Turkey) and other parts of Kurdistan should act accordingly,” lawyer Mazlum Dinc quoted Ocalan as saying.

The call came hours before the United States and five Arab countries on Tuesday launched airstrikes against the Islamic militants in Syria. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Iran slams U.S.-led attacks on ISIS while Syria supports ‘any international counterterrorism effort’

Press TV: A senior Iranian diplomat has censured the recent US-led airstrikes in Syria as violation of the Arab country’s sovereignty and the international law, emphasizing that they will create a pretext for fresh interference in the Middle East.

“From Tehran’s view, any military action in Syria’s territory, without the request of the Damascus government and respect for the international law, is not acceptable since the fight against terrorism cannot serve as logic for violating the national sovereignty of countries,” Iran’s Deputy Foreign Minister for Arab and African Affairs Hossein Amir-Abdollahian said on Tuesday.

SANA (Syrian state media) reports: President Bashar al-Assad on Tuesday met Faleh Fayyad, the Iraqi National Security Advisor and the envoy of Russian Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi.

Talks during the meeting tackled counterterrorism efforts, with the Iraqi envoy briefing President al-Assad on the latest steps taken in this regard, as well as discussing upcoming steps and possible measures to ensure the success of these efforts and eliminate terrorists organizations in all their forms.

President al-Assad affirmed to Fayyad that Russia is proceeding resolutely in its war against all forms of takfiri terrorism which it has been waging for years, asserting that Syria supports any international counterterrorism effort.

SANA also reports: In a press statement on Tuesday, the Ministry added “Yesterday, Minister of Foreign and Expatriates Affairs Walid al-Moallem received a letter from his American counterpart delivered by the Iraqi Foreign Minister in which he informed him that “The US will target the positions of the ISIS terrorist organization, some of which are in Syria.”

The Ministry continued “The Syrian Arab Republic affirms that it has been and it is still fighting the ISIS in Raqqa and Deir Ezzour and other areas, and it will not stop fighting it in cooperation with the countries which are directly or indirectly affected by it, on top of which the brotherly country of Iraq…In this framework, Syria affirms that coordination between the two countries is ongoing and on highest levels to fight terrorism in implementation of the international resolution No. 2170 which was unanimously passed by the UN Security Council.”

The Ministry concluded the statement by saying “Announcing for the second time that it is standing with any international efforts in the framework of combating and fighting terrorism regardless of its names such as Jabhat al-Nusra and the ISIS, the Syrian Arab Republic asserts that this must be done with completely preserving the lives of innocent civilians and in the framework of the national sovereignty and according to the international pacts.”

Facebooktwittermail