Syrians attacked with chemical weapons in Aleppo, say reports

Both the Syrian government and the terrorists groups in charge of the conflict in Syria deny using chemical weapons

By LUIS MIRANDA | THE REAL AGENDA | MARCH 19, 2013

The Syrian government accused rebel militias that vie for control of the country of using chemical weapons in an attack in the southern province of Aleppo. According to the Information Ministry of Syria, 16 people died as a result of the attack.

In previous weeks and months, Western military forces issued a warning about the use of chemical weapons on the civilian population, with U.S. President Barack H. Obama threatening military action if Assad attacked his own people. This attack may then be the beginning of a set up by Western supported insurgents to create an excuse for a full invasion of Syria.

Syrian Information Minister, Omran Al Zoabi, said on Tuesday that the rebels used chemical weapons in an attack on Aleppo in which, in addition to the 16 deaths, mostly civilians, there were at least 86 wounded, mostly in critical condition. “This is a dangerous escalation,” said Al Zoabi on state television in an interview in which he said that Turkey and Qatar, official supporters of the rebels, are responsible for the “legal, moral and political” consequences of the attack.

Several rebel groups rejected the accusations on Tuesday and instead accused the regime of being responsible for the launch of a Scud missile loaded with these materials. “We have no long-range missiles or chemical weapons. If we had them, we would not employ civilians as a target,” said military spokesman Istanbul Lobre Sirius, Louay Muqdad, to AFP.

The regime has, in addition to conventional arsenals, vast reserves of sarin, mustard gas and cyanide. One of the concerns of the international community is that either the regime used these chemical weapons or that terrorists groups linked to the rebels and al-Qaeda in Syria who were brought to fight the Assad regime, get their hands on chemicals weapons handed out to them by Western supporters.

The news agency SANA did not specify what type of chemical weapon were used by the rebels, who the Assad regime has been fighting for over two years and that is composed by terrorists brought in from Jordan, Turkey, Qatar and other neighboring countries. The Syrian war, in which the West is heavily invested, has already claimed the life of more than 70,000 people and caused one of the largest migrations of refugees –more than one million– in the region.

Last week, the head of Israeli military intelligence, Brigadier General Aviv Kochavi, told a conference that he believes Assad is preparing for the use of its chemical arsenals. “Assad retains control over chemical weapons, air force and military equipment from Syria. Assad is making preparations to use these chemical weapons. He has not yet given the order, but is preparing for it,” he said. Israel is said to have requested that the United States attacks Syrian sites where they believe the Assad regime houses its military arsenal.

In August, U.S. President Barack Obama, who tomorrow will visit Israel, warned the Syrian government that if it used chemical weapons against its own people it would face a U.S. military intervention. Until today, the prospect of a chemical attack from the part of the Assad regime has been null, and continues to be, but the use of chemical weapons against civilians –either by Assad or the rebels– is the perfect excuse to invade the country with foreign troops. Several attempts by the United States and some European countries to drive through United Nations resolutions to attack Syria have failed due to the vetoes by Russia and China.

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No Peace in Syria unless Assad dies

Western supported terrorists admit to attacking infrastructure as a strategy to fight the Assad regime.

By LUIS MIRANDA | THE REAL AGENDA | FEBRUARY 15, 2013

“The war in Syria will end up being very similar to that of Libya. We will liberate city by city until we get to Damascus, ” said Gen. Abu Abeida, a rebel leader from the Al Liwa Derea Shabaa militia. According to him Aleppo is important for the regime, and if the city falls, it will mean the fall of the regime.

“After Aleppo and Idlib,” he says, the rebels will continue to fight to recover the rest of the country, “that the regime’s army defends tooth and nail,” such as Homs, Latakia and Damascus. “These will be our next targets” he asserts.

The same view is shared by Abdul Khader the Salad, commander of all operations in northern Syria, and who is a member of Liwa Al Tawhid. “We will not stop when Aleppo falls. Right now it is the stronghold of Assad, but when we move our troops to areas of Latakia and Tartus, we will enter the final battle for Syria, ” he said.

After nearly eight months of fighting in the city of Aleppo, the second largest city in Syria, the fight has become an entrenched battle between rebels and troops loyal to Assad. The bombings have decreased significantly and the fight has moved to the outskirts of the town.

“We started fighting in the city because we had a well-developed plan, most of the soldiers of the SLA-Free Syrian Army were civilians with no military experience and we needed a thinking head to develop, unify and come up with combat tactics.

The union of the ‘katibas’ or brigades was vital to put a spin on the strategy and “then we focused on attacking military bases, airports and schools that are scattered in the province of Aleppo, so we could do much more damage to the regime,” said the leader of Al Liwa Derea Shabaa.

According to the general, the situation in Aleppo is 50% of the city for each side, but he says he controls about 80% of the territory of the province. “We only need five or six military bases to choke the regime,” said the officer.

“We are focusing on Aleppo International Airport, the Artillery Academy and the Central Prison to give a blow to the regime within the city,” he added.

“Possibly, the battle over Aleppo becoming the most important element of this war. The regime was economically dependent on this city and with the outbreak of war, the industries stopped, causing them much economic damage, “says Abu Abeida.

“Assad sent many troops to regain control of the city and we have stopped them, causing the loss of many soldiers. In Aleppo the regime signed his death,” he says.

Abeida accusses the Syrian Army of bombing civilian targets because “they want the citizens to expel the ELS from Aleppo”. He adds that the regime wants the people to hate the rebels and to fight them, but that such strategy is not working and it is having the opposite effect.”

Abdul Khader believes that the Army has lost a lot of power in recent months. “At first it all depended on the firepower of tanks and we have destroyed a lot. Also they do not have enough soldiers to fight, as they have many fronts throughout the country.” He assures the press that the regime will collapsed and eventually die, but he just doesn’t know when. “Maybe a month, maybe three … maybe a year.” ELS has become the new army for the Syrian rebels, who are recognized by the international community as the acting government.

“You can not negotiate with someone who butchers his own people to stay in power.” Given a hypothetical negotiation with the Syrian regime, the generals have it clear. “There will be no negotiation if it does not include the death of Assad,” Abdul Khader says.

After nearly two years of war, the aim of the revolution is still the same. “A free Syria without Assad … There will be time to decide if we will have democracy or Islam, what is important now is to defeat the regime.”

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Syria working on retaliation against Israel and its allies

By LUIS MIRANDA | THE REAL AGENDA | FEBRUARY 4, 2013

Syria and its allies warned on Sunday that Israel’s attack against a military complex on the outskirts of Damascus will not go unanswered and that it is working on a way to respond through the use of force.

Beset by an internal revolt that has lasted almost two years and has claimed 60,000 lives, the Syrian President Bashar Assad accused Israel of wanting to destabilize his country and assured the public that, even with an internal conflict, his country is able to “respond to any aggression against Syrian citizens.”

Iran, an ally of Damascus, also said that there is the possibility of retaliation for that attack.

Meantime, Turkish prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, called the act of “state terrorism”.

“Israel’s aggression against the Jamariya Research Center shows the true position of Israel, working with foreign enemy forces and Syrian factions on the ground to try to destabilize and weaken Syria,” said Assad, after holding a meeting with Iran’s Secretary of National Security, Saeed Jalili, who was visiting Damascus on Sunday.

Several Iranian officials and military personnel also promised that Israel’s attack will not go unanswered. Corps Commander of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard, Gen. Mohammad Ali Jafari, said at a public event that “resistance and retaliation are the only possible way” to deal with Israel after the attack on Syrian territory, as reported by Iran’s official media. In his meeting with Assad, Jalili said that cooperation between Iran and Syria is crucial to curb “plots and foreign missions aimed at destabilizing security in the region.”

Though Israel does not admit publicly the nature of the attacks occurred on Wednesday, the defense minister of that country, Ehud Barak, claimed responsibility for the attack while participating in the Munich Security Conference. Barak said that although he can not “add anything to what people read in the newspapers about what happened in Syria,” the bombing “is further proof that when Israel promises something, it delivers.”

The bombing took place on Wednesday morning, when the Israeli Air Force attacked a nearby military research area near Damascus. U.S. intelligence sources believe that the target was a convoy loaded with missiles from Lebanon and en route to the Syrian capital, where it would be received by the Shiite militia Hezbollah, along with Iran, which is the main ally of Assad in the area .

Two days before the attack, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had told a delegation of U.S. lawmakers that their choices regarding Syria are “between bad and worse.” Israel has spent months warning of the possibility that the stockpiles of missiles and chemical weapons falling into the hands of Syrian Al Qaeda or Hezbollah.

The U.S. and Israel have claimed for months that Assad has deposits of sarin, mustard gas and cyanide and that he is prepared to use them against his own people, which the U.S. said would be the red line on the sand that would lead to a military intervention.

The Munich conference highlighted the gap that still separates Moscow and Washington over the Syrian conflict. U.S. Vice President Joe Biden called Assad a “tyrant” and attempted to predict his fall. Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, said that the demand that Assad go is the reason why the negotiations are going nowhere. However, Moscow has also shown signs of opening up to the Syrian opposition, after Lavrov himself met in Munich for the first time with Syrian opposition leader, Moaz Al Khatib.

The Iranian Foreign Minister, Ali Akbar Salehi, said in the Bavarian capital that Western intervention in Syria would “extend the flames of conflict throughout the region.” Only on Saturday, about 150 people were killed during clashes between government forces and rebels who are openly supported by Western allies of Israel.

Given the volatility of the situation in Syria, Israel has mobilized a battery of missile shield known as the Iron Dome to the city of Haifa, in northern Israel, which is 140 kilometers from Damascus. Haifa, with 268,000 inhabitants, was just one of the cities where more missiles fell during the war between Hezbollah and Israel in 2006.

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Syrian Crisis Spreads to Lebanon

By LUIS MIRANDA | THE REAL AGENDA | DECEMBER 10, 2012

Lebanon has experienced this week its worst outbreak of violence so far this year. At least 15 people have died and over a hundred injured in six days of fighting between loyalists and opponents of the Assad regime in Tripoli, the second largest city.

The contagion of the crisis in the neighboring country seems unstoppable, especially in the north, where both the Army and the Executive have been unable to halt spiraling sectarian tension that goes beyond the usual boundaries between the neighborhoods of Bab el Tabaneh (Sunni) and Jabal Mohsen (Alawi, the sect of Assad). Several bombs and mortars fired overnight kept the neighbors awake in areas near Zaharia, Mena and Abi Samra, close to the city center.

The last battle between the two neighborhoods, which has been going on for decades, began early Tuesday after images the mutilated bodies of several Lebanese fighters killed in Syria were disseminated. At least a dozen men, mostly Salafists, died last weekend in an ambush from the Syrian Army in Tal Kabaj.

Three of the bodies arrived this morning to Lebanon through the Arida border crossing in the northern part of the country. The repatriation has lit the fire since early in the morning. At least one of the bodies brought to one of the families has been badly destroyed, which has caused an outcry from relatives at the lack of sensitivity on the part of the Syrian and Lebanese authorities.

On Friday, the continuing conflict alerted authorities. After an emergency meeting, the pro-Syrian government headed by Najib Mikati Sunni got a weak truce that was soon broken by the sound of several explosions in both neighborhoods. Not even the intervention of the Army have stopped the outbreaks of violence.

“I left here,” said Mohammad Nablisi, “people are taking their things and getting out.” In the background, he points to the hill where he says stands Jabal Mohsen. The bullets of shots fired by snipers arrive all the way to his home.

The last six days set off all the alarms and highlighted the inability of the army to impose order while increasing fears abound that the situation goes out of control in an area taken over by the Free Syrian Army. The conflict in the neighboring country, has dragged on for 20 months, and has intensified into an open war that has claimed nearly fifty lives so far this year, while the radical elements are strong in the area.

“When I came here,” said a young refugee from Homs, “I went to Bab el Tabaneh to ask for a weapon to fight against followers of Assad. The Bab el Tabaneh forces are being reorganized around elements inspired by Al Qaeda jihadists and refugees in the neighborhood after the dismantling in 2007 of a croup called Fatah al Islam.

The opposition has used the coup to reload their fight against the inactivity of the pro-Syrian Executive.

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Conflict in Syria is an example of War 2.0

Another case of Slam Dunk, Yellow Cake, WMDs.

By LUIS MIRANDA | THE REAL AGENDA | DECEMBER 7, 2012

Nothing makes a better case for war than fear. There is not a better way to create fear than with allegories and hyperbole that remind people about past painful events, even though such events have nothing to do with the present. But during the George W. Bush administration, both fear and hyperbole came in handy as fuel to ‘justify’ another war in Iraq.

Now, in 2012, the same deceivers who swindled the international community into believing that Iraq posed a nuclear threat are out at their best game generating fear about chemical weapons in Syria. No one is arguing that Bashar al-Assad possesses or not chemical weapons just as no one argues that the U.S. possesses them, too. Nobody is questioning whether Assad is a tyrant who might decide to use chemical weapons just as nobody questions that the U.S. has used them and continues to use them in every conflict it intervenes.

The question is, why is the military industrial complex, aided by its minions resorting to the same rhetoric it used a few years ago to carry out another war? Well, first, because war is very profitable. Second, because it may the only possible way to destroy Assad aside from massively invading Syria with foreign troops both through air and land.

The war in Syria has been built around character assassination techniques to a point where people may buy the argument that Assad intends to use chemical weapons on his own people. Recent events resemble similar attacks; for example when the U.S. government said that Saddam Hussein was roasting babies in microwave ovens, or that Al-Qaeda was operating out of Iraq.

Now, after seeing the strong build up to war, with American battleships off the coast of Syria for no apparent reason, the Assad government has, for the thousandth time, publicly said that it has no intention of using chemicals weapons in any way, shape or form, despite the scaremongering from Western oppressors.

Since their indirect attacks on Syria have not worked as expected, the globalist who seek to control Syria — after invading and controlling Egypt and Libya — are using the tool of last resort, which is to create a fake threat to justify their invasion of yet another country in what is perhaps the most volatile region in the planet.

Meanwhile, the Syrian Deputy Foreign Minister, Faisal Maqdad, said that the controversy about the possible use of chemical weapons by the regime of Bashar al-Assad is a “pretext for international intervention” in Syria.

In an interview with Lebanese television station Al Manar, Maqdad insisted that the Syrian regime “would not use chemical weapons against its people” if it had any. In his opinion, the latest allegations about the possible use of these weapons by the Syrian regime “are part of a psychological warfare and a pretext for intervention” in the country, which would imply a “regional catastrophe.”

The U.S. network NBC released yesterday accusations by U.S. officials against Damascus, which include statements suggesting that Assad is preparing to use such weapons, and that the it is only a matter of receiving a final order from the president.

This week, the UN expressed concern over the possible presence of chemical weapons in the country, while the United States warned the Assad regime that the use of such weapons would have consequences. The U.S. knows very well what it is talking about as it has a long history of using chemical and biological weapons in almost every country it has invaded as well as against its own citizens.

“We fear that the U.S. and European countries could provide such weapons to terrorist organizations to say later that it was Syria who used them,” the deputy minister said, He added that he saw the controversy as a “theater to increase pressure” on Syrian authorities.

Maqdad also warned that the results of a possible intervention in Syria “will be catastrophic for the region” while implying that the Lebanese opposition was  collaborating with the rebels Syrians.

Violence has intensified in Syria amid political paralysis and mediating efforts that have failed to end a conflict that has resulted in an open civil war. The rebels have been fully advised, financed and armed by Western forces from NATO countries. Turkey, the Western puppet in the region has facilitated the air and land invasion of Syria by rebel groups and foreign military and paramilitary forces, who have been perpetrating attacks on cities all over the country.

It is estimated that since March 2011 at least 30,000 people have died in Syria as a direct result of the war between the rebels and the Syrian army. Hundreds of thousands of Syrians have left the country and turned into refugees in neighboring countries. The United Nations estimates that at least 200,000 have fled the country since the conflict began 9 months ago.

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