A Russian Su-24 aircaft on a runway at the Hmeimim airbase in Syria. © Maksim Blinov / Sputnik
Director of Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) Sergey Naryshkin held a constructive meeting he held with a representative of Syria’s new security agencies, TASS reported on April 25.
“Last week, we held a conference on Afghanistan in Baku, attended by the leaders and high-level representatives of the Middle East and Greater Eurasia. A Syrian senior official was also present there. We held a quite constructive and friendly meeting with him,” Naryshkin told the Russian news agency.
The SVR director visited Baku on April 17 and 18 to participate in the conference titled Afghanistan: Regional Interconnectivity, Security and Development.
Since the fall of the regime of former president Bashar al-Assad last December, Russia has maintained a high level of communication with the country’s interim government.
To this day, Russian forces are still operating at two large facilities along the Syrian coast, the Tartus naval base and Khmeimim air base, in addition to Qamishli airport in the northeast of the country, which is de-facto controlled by Kurdish forces.
Early last March, thousands of civilians, mainly members of the Alawite religious minority, took shelter at Khmeimim following a government crackdown that left more than 1,600 dead. Still, no friction was reported between Russian forces there and government troops.
Russia’s Permanent Representative to the United Nations Vasily Nebenzya said last week that Moscow was still holding talks with the interim government.
“Our servicemen stayed where they were. We are talking to the current Syrian government,” he told reporters on April 19.
More recently, Syrian interim president Ahmad al-Sharaa said that Moscow had supplied the Syrian military for decades, implying that his country will not abandon its historic military ties with Russia.
“Russia is a permanent member of the Security Council. Syria’s weapons are entirely Russian. And there are many food and energy agreements that Syria has relied on for many years,” al-Shara told The New York Times in an interview published on April 23. “We must take these Syrian interests into consideration.”
Despite the positive atmosphere, the interim government is committed to an agreement guaranteeing the future of Russian bases in Syria.
The security of the bases was also put into question in recent weeks by a series of mysterious drone attacks, the last which took place late on April 24.
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syria is a sideshow now. putin had good instinct & timing for launching his special military operation. the hamas attack & the subsequent israeli grotesque, genocidal response + the biden’s regime unconditional ,complicit material & moral support to netanyahu delivered the white house to trump on a silver platter. now is just a matter of time before putin gets everything he wanted & even more if psionist puppets in the usa go to war with iran
russia will talk with everyone . greater israel project mafia will not
russia is a terrible ally…heheheh
big mistake, there is no syrian government just a jihadi gang of thugs, russia should just take what it wants in syria, after all the us did for years with illegal bases and the turks and israelis are taking what they like right now.
the muslim genocide of 2.5 million christians raymond ibrahim is a shillman fellow at the david horowitz freedom center. last friday, april 24, marked the “great crime,” that is, the genocide of may 1, 2020 by raymond ibrahim 4 comments
raymond ibrahim is a shillman fellow at the david horowitz freedom center.
last friday, april 24,
marked the “great crime,” that is, the genocide of christians—primarily armenians assyrians and greeks—that took place under the islamic ottoman empire, throughout world war i. then, in an attempt to wipe out as many christians as possible, the turks massacred approximately 1.5 million armenians, 300,000 assyrians, and 750,000 greeks.
most objective american historians who have studied the question unequivocally agree that it was a deliberate, calculated genocide:
more than one million armenians perished as the result of execution, starvation, disease, the harsh environment, and physical abuse. a people who lived in eastern turkey for nearly 3,000 years [more than double the amount of time the invading islamic turks had occupied anatolia, now known as “turkey”] lost its homeland and was profoundly decimated in the first large-scale genocide of the twentieth century. at the beginning of 1915 there were some two million armenians within turkey;
today there are fewer than 60.000 despite the vast amount of evidence that points to the historical reality of the armenian genocide, eyewitness accounts, official archives, photographic evidence, the reports of diplomats, and the testimony of survivors, denial of the armenian genocide by successive regimes in turkey has gone on from 1915 to the present.
similarly, in 1920, u.s. senate resolution 359 heard testimony that included evidence of “[m]utilation, violation, torture, and death [which] have left their haunting memories in a hundred beautiful armenian valleys, and the traveler in that region is seldom free from the evidence of this most colossal crime of all the ages.”
in her memoir, ravished armenia, aurora mardiganian described being raped and thrown into a harem (consistent with islam’s rules of war). unlike thousands of other armenian girls who were discarded after being defiled, she managed to escape. in the city of malatia, she saw 16 christian girls crucified: “each girl had been nailed alive upon her cross,” she wrote, “spikes through her feet and hands, only their hair blown by the wind, covered their bodies.” such scenes
armenian girls who were discarded after being defiled, she managed to escape. in the city of malatia, she saw 16 christian girls crucified: “each girl had been nailed alive upon her cross,” she wrote, “spikes through her feet and hands, only their hair blown by the wind, covered their bodies.” such scenes were portrayed in the 1919 documentary film auction of souls, some of which is based on mardiganian’s memoirs.
whereas the genocide is largely acknowledged in the west, one of its primary if not fundamental causes is habitually overlooked: religion. the genocide is usually articulated through a singularly secular paradigm, one that factors only things that are intelligible from a secular, western point of view—such as identity and gender politics, nationalism, and territorial disputes. such an approach does little more than project modern western perspectives onto vastly different civilizations
and eras.
war, of course, is another factor that clouds the true face of the genocide. because these atrocities mostly occurred during world war i, so the argument goes, they are ultimately a reflection of just that—war, in all its chaos and destruction, and nothing more. but as winston churchill, who described the massacres as an “administrative holocaust,” correctly observed, “the opportunity [wwi] presented itself for clearing turkish soil of a christian race.”
even adolf hitler, ominously presaging his own plans, had pointed out that “turkey is taking advantage of the war in order to thoroughly liquidate its internal foes, the indigenous christians, without being thereby disturbed by foreign intervention.”it’s worth noting that little has changed; in the context of war in iraq, syria, and libya, the first to be targeted for genocide have been christians and other minorities.
but even the most cited factor of the armenian genocide, “ethnic identity conflict,” while legitimate, must be understood in light of the fact that, historically, religion accounted more for a person’s identity than language or heritage. this is daily demonstrated throughout the islamic world today, where muslim governments and muslim mobs persecute christian minorities who share the same race, ethnicity, language, and culture; minorities who are indistinguishable from the majority—
except, of course, for being non-muslims, or “infidels.”as one armenian studies professor asks, “if it [the armenian genocide] was a feud between turks and armenians, what explains the genocide carried out by turkey against the christian assyrians at the same time?” the same can be said about the greeks. from a turkish perspective, the primary thing armenians, assyrians, and greeks had in common was that they were all christian “infidels.”
according to a 2017 book, year of the sword: the assyrian christian genocide, the “policy of ethnic cleansing was stirred up by pan-islamism and religious fanaticism. christians were considered infidels (kafir). the call to jihad, decreed on 29 november 1914 and instigated and orchestrated for political ends, was part of the plan” to “combine and sweep over the lands of christians and to exterminate them.” ”
as with armenians and greeks, eyewitness accounts tell of the sadistic eye-gouging of assyrians and the gang rape of their children on church altars. according to key documents, all this was part of “an ottoman plan to exterminate turkey’s christians.today, from indonesia in the east to morocco in the west, from central asia in the north, to sub-sahara africa—that is, throughout the entire islamic world—muslims are, to varying degrees, persecuting, killing, raping, enslaving,
degrees, persecuting, killing, raping, enslaving, torturing and dislocating christians; where formal islamic groups such as the islamic state (isis), al shabaab, boko haram, etc, hold sway, christians and other “infidels” are literally experiencing a genocide. (see crucified again: exposing islam’s new war on christians — or my monthly “muslim persecution of christians” report — for a comprehensive and ongoing account of the “great crime” of our times.
to understand how the historic genocide of armenians, assyrians, and greeks is representative of the modern day plight of christians under islam, one need only read the following words written in 1918 by president theodore roosevelt; however, read “armenian” as “christian” and “turkish” as “islamic,” as supplied in brackets:
the armenian [christian] massacre was the greatest crime of the war, and the failure to act against turkey [the islamic world] is to condone it… the failure to deal radically with the turkish [islamic] horror means that all talk of guaranteeing the future peace of the world is mischievous nonsense.
similarly, if we “fail to deal radically” with the “horror” currently being visited upon millions of christians around the islamic world, we “condone it” and had better cease talking “mischievous nonsense” of a utopian world of peace and tolerance.
put differently, silence is always the ally of those who would liquidate the “other.” in 1915, adolf hitler rationalized his genocidal plans, which he implemented some three decades later, when he rhetorically asked: “who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the armenians?”
1) i am perplexed by the form of these apparent negotiations, what would they be like? russians:”in the spirit of long cooperation between our countries, we propose and offer…” , new syrians:”nah, we’ll chop your heads off”.
russian pig, take your meds and start your own news blog instead of shitting up every comment section here