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The Turkish Armed Forces (TAF) and the Turkish-backed Free Syrian Army (TFSA) used their advantage over Kurdish YPG/YPJ forces in the area of Afrin and captured Bursaya Mount, Qastal Jundu and Yazibagh. Additionally, the TAF and the TFSA entered the area of Kevire Kerr Mountain where an intense fighting was reported. On other fronts, the YPG/YPJ was able to repel attacks by Turkish forces.
The Turkish General Staff released a statement claiming that Turkish forces ‘neutralized’ 73 ‘terrorists’ including some mysterious ISIS members in Afrin on January 29 alone. The statement added that from the start of Operation Olive Branch on January 20 to January 29, in total 557 so-called ‘terrorists’ had been ‘neutralized.’
On the same day the YPG media wing claimed that, an YPJ member, Avesta Khaboor, blew herself up destroying a Turkish battle tank in the Jandaris district. The report allowed pro-Turkish sources to claim that the YPG/YPJ started using suicide bombers against the TAF and the TFSA.
Meanwhile, Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said that Ankara forces will clear the entire Turkish-Syrian border from Kurdish militias “step by step.” Separately, he hinted that the TAF may enter deeper into the province of Idlib and even reach the provincial capital. “If Allah permits, then we will reach Idlib,” he said.
The Turkish statements over the situation in Syria have become much more aggressive since Operation Olive Branch started. They indicate that Ankara could seek to establish own political or military control over a large areas. However, these goals are limited by the current diplomatic and military situation in the region.
In eastern Idlib, the Syrian Arab Army (SAA) and its allies are still working to secure the town of Abu al-Duhur. According to the recent reports, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham remains in control of some part of the town.
Syrian and Russian warplanes carried out up to 100 airstrikes on militant targets in eastern Idlib, southern Aleppo and northern Hama. Pro-government sources speculate, that this is a part of the preparations for the upcoming offensive. The SAA uses the pause to re-group its forces.
In Eastern Ghouta, Ahrar al-Sham, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham and Faylaq al-Rahman resumed their attempts to capture the Armoured Vehicles Base. The militants damaged 2 BMP-1 vehicles and killed an unknown number of the SAA soldiers, but were not able to overrun the government defense. In turn, the SAA destroyed a militant car bomb.
The situation in Eastern Ghouta shows that the ceasefire efforts in the area will remain useless while the militants still have capabilities and will to continue their offensive operations.
Turkish blood will boil over syrian soil, if they dare to go deeper into syria.
They will go deeper than Syria, they will go to Iraq and Iran too. And no one can do anything, they have a huge army.
who turkey? Vs Iran?? LoL! iran would crush them!
I think he meant taking out the YPG across Iraq up to Iran . Erdogan has no beef with Iran , and your right Iran would crush them .
They won’t fight, they will agree that Turkey crashes the terrorists and Iran fakes outrage like Syria did. Iran is a red line for Russia and China (that’s why they do and say whatever they want)
Nothing is clear so far. Surely Russia and Iran Know more about this. They are keep a tight lip about this.
Most probably for very sound military and political reasons. Russia is in particular wise to play stumm whilst the military picture unfolds and they can assess progress to unhinge the CIA’s plans in this region.
I sure hope Turkey diverts forces from their SDF front to their HTS front in order to fight ABORTION banners!
US claims its not leaving Manjbi , could get very interesting , is the US looking to start a war with Turkey ?
Not way, USA and Turkey are friends (militarily). All of this (Turkey-Kurds) is just a theater to make believe the people that there is a disagreement. However, both invader are protecting terrorists. Have you ear about the business Turkey has with terrorists with the desensamble of big Syria industries ?
Weren’t most of Syria’s industries already stripped by Turks and their proxy forces in the first few years of the war? I remember seeing reports of convoys of trucks with equipment from the looted Syrian companies returning to Turkey.
We will be side with russia. if usa event starts to talk like ‘wwe need to kick turkey out of nato’ China and russia officialy invited turkey to their side for a long time.
And to answer your question. Usa will either choose turkey or ypg. coz there is not other way we can withdraw from attacking kurddish terrorists. Public support in turkey is in its highests. for example i m turkish i live in turkey i ve always voted for main opposition party and i m atheist. but i support that operation. so we will continue that operation no matter what.
Τhe question should be ‘is Turkey looking to start a war with the U.S.’ … WTH is Turkey doing invading another country…? They assisted ISIS in any possible way for the past 6 + years and when they saw isis is finished they left them alone. All Turkey is interested in is killin Kurds, another genocide like the ones before against the Armenians, the Greeks, the Assyrians, the Bulgarians and even the Kurds again in the past. Thets the Turks for you.
Robert Fisk has a report for The Independent from Afrin. His conclusion: most “terrorists” that Turkey kills are civilians – often in villages where no YPG is present.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/afrin-turkey-invasion-syria-enclave-kurds-ypg-airstrike-war-civil-a8182266.html Inside Afrin, the true victims of Turkey’s invasion of northern Syria are revealed – refugees, babies, women and children
We have other video sources that proves turkey is securing those villages and helping the civilians by giving them foods. also there is refugee movement from turkey to newly-gained lands. Plus, ypg is proven to having used past civil war pictures as propaganda. they said turkish army killed a child. but it was from another time in the past . and i never believe in western media
Your credibility is zero. Only a fool would move to the lands Turkey just conquered in Afrin. The chances of a Kurdish counterattack are much too high and no civilian wants to be in the front lines of a battle.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-BsvFKuKhg
get the fucking refugees into europe then talk about my country. we dont want refugees here. there re already more than 3.5 millions of refugees. Plus if you dont believe me. just simply look at Jarablus and el-bab cities which turkish army cleared from isis in 2016. THere re now schools, hospitals, pparks in these territories and thousands of syrians already moved to these regions .
we rebuilt the city of jarablus and now there are syrian people living there peacefully https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4pHWjRcNe2I
Whats the difference between Turkey and ISIS , nothting at all
As I predicted, SDF retook the mountain within hours.
Stupid turks. Nato’s second army, with 25k added proxies, together claining to have some 50k and cannot even take a small region defended by, their claim, 8-10k while the attckers have heavy materiel and defenders only medium heavy arms or even just light arms.
A military disgrace.
Or is their something wrong with either the numbers and or the attckers themselves?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d6WD9O8Xc9Y
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L0pKX8XiYiU
The Face Of Suffering: Famine, Cholera Wreak Havoc In War-Torn Yemen | NBC News May 3, 2017 According to UN
1. The Largest Humanitarian Disaster. 2. 7 Million People Hungary. 3. More than 10,000 people killed. 4. More than 50,000 people wounded. 5. Entire villages and towns have been demolished and erased from the earth.
President Putin, Rouhani and Xi could open blocked on Houthis, send them humanitarian support and rescue them from Saudis butchers. They can call Houthis leadership to Sochi for at least for the small kids that have no food, medicines and shelters. ————————————————————————————————————————————
https://www.crossed-flag-pins.com/animated-flag-gif/gifs/Yemen_240-animated-flag-gifs.gif
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/a/af/Abdulmalik_Alhouthi_by_Mbazri.jpg/220px-Abdulmalik_Alhouthi_by_Mbazri.jpg Yemen president: Sayyid Abdul-Malik Badreddin al-Houthi
Abdur Rabu Mansur Hadi <– took power from Abdullah Saleh but Hadi was too weak to rule the Yemen therefore, the corruption was too high. Houthis had start complaining and when Hadi failed to rule so he resigned twice, then Houthis took the power of Yemen. So this was Yemen internal affair inwhich Saudi Arabia should not interfere.
In Yemen war US provides weapons and intelligence support to Saudi-led coalition forces, which reportedly include assistance in military targets in Yemen. It indicates that Trump indirectly attacks Yemen through Saudi led collation because Trump shows targets to Saudi led collation in Yemen. That is why Saudi led collation air forces targeting funerals, Mosques, schools, hospitals, markets etc.
President Putin, Rouhani and Xi could open blocked on Houthis and send them humanitarian support and rescue them from Saudis butchers. Call both parties to Sochi for negotiation at least for the small kids that have no food, medicines and shelters. ————————————————————————————————————————————
This Explain That ! =================
Trump, the US version of Gorbatchev
by Thierry Meyssan
For Thierry Meyssan, the policy of the United States since the fall of the Soviet Union has been a combat between two schools of thought. On one side, the partisans of prosperity, and on the other, the partisans of imperialism. Money or Power. This cleavage exists within each party, Republican and Democrat. However, time flies, and the United States is now on the edge of inner collapse. As of now, Donald Trump finds himself in the uncomfortable position of Mikhaïl Gorbatchev.
All pending international problems are affected by the refusal of the United States – and sometimes their European allies – to admit the growth of other countries. And Washington does not hesitate to use unspeakable methods to postpone the fall of its empire.
Let’s remember the end of the Soviet Union, in 1991. The colossus fell to ruins, throwing the economy of its populations back several decades, brutally amputating the life expectancy of its inhabitants by more than twenty years, and provoking the domino fall of several of its allies. At that time, the question of knowing what would be the consequences of this cataclysm on the other great empire of the 20th century – the United States and their allies – was already being asked.
An eminent Russian political scientist like Igor Panarin predicted the disintegration of the United States into five distinct countries, according to the ethnic origins of its inhabitants. Some people believed he was projecting onto Russia’s rival the reasoning that French political scientist, Hélène Carrere d’Encausse, had applied to the USSR – a scenario which did not occur, but which nonetheless governed the future of the ex-Soviet territory.
Seeking to avoid the implosion of his country, President George H. Bush decided to get rid of his Cold War military apparatus as quickly as possible. He forced international recognition of US leadership during operation « Desert Storm », then demobilised more than a million soldiers, in other words, half of his taskforce. He reoriented his policy, believing that he was entering a period of peace and prosperity. However, he nonetheless provided a doctrine for his country aimed at forestalling the emergence of a new rival. Although no-one at the time imagined that Russia would rise again, either in the medium or the long term, his extreme-left advisor, Paul Wolfowitz, convinced President Bush to keep the European Union in check.
Fearing the spectre of collapse, the Republican Party took over the House of Representatives in order to promote its Contract with America. In 1995, it forced Democrat President Bill Clinton to rearm the country and integrate the ex-members of the Warsaw Pact into the Atlantic Alliance. And yet there was no longer an enemy, and therefore no reason to arm, nor to perpetuate NATO. Congress rejected the dream of Presidents Bush the father and Clinton of a world where, freed from a serious rival, the United States would become the motor of the world economy. On the contrary, it considered that the Pentagon should profit from the disappearance of the USSR to extend its domination to the whole planet.
Once rearmament was voted, with the approval but not the commitment of President Clinton, the Pentagon was implicated in the wars in Yugoslavia. This engagement quickly became public and led to the war of NATO against the future Serbia.
In September 2000, the Project for a New American Century published its programme – « Rebuilding America’s Defenses ».
Simultaneously, the members of the Continuity of Government [1] (Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, James Woolsey, etc.) launched the Project for a New American Century. Its objectives were [2]:
– the defense of the homeland;
– the engagement and victory in several simultaneous major wars (the important point is victory, we shall find a way to justify these conflicts later. Author’s Note);
– the accomplishment of the usual tasks of the armed forces (mainly the defense of the multinational companies who are exploiting the oil. (Author’s Note);
– and the transformation of the armed forces in order to exploit the revolution in military affairs.
Powerpoint taken from a conference given by Admiral Cebrowski at the Pentagon on 23 July 2003. On the left, in mauve, the zone in which it was deemed necessary to destroy the States and their societies.
Only the initiated knew at the time that the fourth point was taken from the strategy elaborated by one of Rumsfeld’s protégés, the future Pentagon leader of the Office of Force Transformation, Admiral Arthur Cebrowski [3]. This strategy was taught in the different military academies from the end of 2001, then vulgarised in 2004 by Cebrowski’s assistant, Thomas Barnett [4]. We can see this strategy at work since the attacks of 9/11 with the progressive destruction of the States and their societies throughout the whole of the Greater Middle East, under various pretexts which mask its real objective.
The Rearmament Act of 1995 and the strategy of Pentagon’s new map, which were implemented in the Greater Middle East from 2001, are now on their last legs. While the United States concentrated the greater part of its resources on the destruction of the Muslim world, other countries were developing, including Russia and China. Today, the US armed forces are no longer the strongest armies in the world.
This is what President Donald Trump and General James Mattis, his Defense Secretary, admitted in the National Security Strategy statement during his speech on 17 January at Johns Hopkins University [5]. Even though they did not explicitly state that they had been overtaken, they posited that it was an absolute priority to « re-establish [their] comparative military advantage », which basically admits the same.
State Military expenditure in (source SIPRI)
United States 611 billion dollars
China 215 billion dollars
Russia 69 billion dollars
Saudi Arabia 63 billion dollars
India 65 billion dollars
Of course, the US armed forces have an unparalleled budget which is nine times greater than that of Russia. But its armies are pitifully unproductive [6]. In Syria and Iraq, the Pentagon deployed approximately 10,000 men against Daesh, of whom only a third were soldiers and two thirds « contractors » (mercenaries) from private companies. The budget for this operation was seven times greater than that of Russia, and the military outcome was a miserable failure. Donald Rumsfeld – who had brilliantly reorganised the multinational company Gilead Science, which he managed – not only proved incapable of reforming the Secretariat of Defense, but the more money he threw at it, the less efficient it became.
US armament is certainly produced in huge quantities, but it is obsolete compared with that of Russia and China. US engineers are no longer able to produce new weapons, as demonstrated by the failure of the F-35programme. At best, they cobble together bits of old machines and present them as new aircraft. As President Trump noted in his National Security Strategy, the problem is due both to the collapse of Research and Development and the omnipresent corruption in Pentagon acquisitions. The armament industries sell their products automatically, while the Secretariat of Defense has no idea of what is really necessary [7].
Whichever way we look at the problem, the United States army is a paper tiger and there is no hope of reforming it either in the medium or the long term – and there is even less chance that it will once again eventually overtake its rivals Russia and China.
The election of Donald Trump to the White House is first of all the consequence of this undeniable collapse. The only solution for maintaining the quality of life for US citizens is in fact to immediately abandon the dream of a global empire and to return to the principles of the United States Republic of 1789, as laid out in the Bill of Rights.
According to the Nobel Prize for Economy, Angus Deaton, the life expectancy of white US citizens has diminished drastically, specifically since 2001, while it has progressed for all other categories of the US population.
Over the last sixteen years, the very old problems of US society have developed exponentially. For example, the use of drugs, which until recently concerned mostly the minorities, has become an epidemic for white males [8]. To the point where the struggle against opioids has become a major national cause. Or again, the possession of fire-arms has become an obsession. The cause is not a question of the constitutional right to bear arms in order to protect oneself from eventual abuse by the State, nor the behaviour of cowboys gunning for potential criminals, but the fear of generalised riots. During the most recent Black Friday sales, weapons became the best sellers, overtaking portable phones. 185,000 guns were bought in one day, in 2015 and 2016, and more than 200,000 in 2017 [9]. Finally, as soon as they have the financial possibility, US citizens now group themselves in compounds with people of the same cultural origins [10] and the same social class.
As from now, international relations are dominated by this question – will the United States accept its current position or not. [11]. Today, Donald Trump finds himself in the same uncomfortable position that Mikhaïl Gorbatchev once occupied.
Thierry Meyssan
Translation
Pete Kimberley
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[1] The Continuity of Government is a civilian-military authority created by President Eisenhower, tasked with guaranteeing the continuity of the State in case of atomic war or the death of the most important elected civil servants. Its exact composition is secret.
[2] Rebuilding America’s Defenses, Project for a New American century, September 2000.
[3] “The US military project for the world”, by Thierry Meyssan, Translation Pete Kimberley, Voltaire Network, 22 August 2017. “The US Grand Strategy”, by Mikhail Leontyev, Translation Deimantas Steponavicius, 1tv (Russia) , Voltaire Network, 23 September 2017.
[4] The Pentagon’s New Map, Thomas P. M. Barnett, Putnam Publishing Group, 2004.
[5] “Remarks by James Mattis on the National Defense Strategy”, by James Mattis, Voltaire Network, 19 January 2018.
[6] “How Much Has The Syrian Civil War Cost Russia And The US?”, Lydia Tomkiw, International Business Times, March 14, 2016. “Russia’s Syria operation cost over $460 million — Putin”, Tass, March 17, 2016.
[7] “Donald Trump’s National Security Strategy”, by Thierry Meyssan, Translation Pete Kimberley, Voltaire Network, 26 December 2017.
[8] “USA: link established between the opioid crisis and job loss”, Translation Anoosha Boralessa, Voltaire Network, 12 September 2017.
[9] “Black Friday posts new single day record for gun checks at more than 200,000”, Kevin Johnson, USA Today; November 25, 2017.
[10] American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America, Colin Woodward, Viking, 2011.
[11] “Sergey Lavrov’s annual news conference”, by Sergey Lavrov, Voltaire Network, 15 January 2018.