Following the announcement that Russia has agreed to provide Iran with two loans collectively worth $7 billion, analysts say this is part of a new strategy that the two countries have adopted to protect against US-led sanctions in the future.

Jim W. Dean, a managing editor at Veterans Today, has told Press TV that Iran and Russia would be still vulnerable to US sanctions over the next years. Dean said the stakes for both countries would be particularly high if a "hardline, neocon, extremely pro-Israeli" president is elected to office in Washington next year. "Anybody else is still vulnerable to what the wild card of what can the US would do in the future particularly if it gets a hardline, neo-con, extremely pro-Israeli president in," he said.


What testifies this, he said, are the recent remarks by the French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius that EU countries should be given guarantees from the US that any project they win from Iran, they would not be subject to the sanctions.

Dean said the US businesses are going to lose a lot from the expansion of Iran's economic relations with Russia and other European countries. He blamed what he described as the "greedy, militaristic foreign policy" of the White House leaders over this. Dean said relations between Iran and Russia are yet expected to grow in the future.

Two days of the Russian Air Force operation in Syria have resulted in bombing nearly three hundred terrorist facilities in eight Syrian provinces, the Defense Ministry said Friday. "On November 11-12 Russian warplanes delivered airstrikes in the Syrian provinces of Aleppo, Damascus, Deir ez-Zor, Hama, Homs, Idlib, Latakia and Daraa," Major General Igor Konashenkov, spokesman for the Russian Defense Ministry, said in a daily briefing.

"The airstrikes resulted in the elimination of 34 command observation and operational posts of the armed gangs, 16 munitions and fuel storage depots, two workshops producing munitions and homemade explosive devices, three field and training camps, 50 strongholds with military hardware and fire units, 184 fortified localities and defense positions," Konashenkov reported.


Islamic State's (IS, formerly ISIS) stronghold and a field ammunition depot have been eliminated in one sortie by a Sukhoi Su-24M bomber near Thaniet al-Rajma pike in Homs province. "A direct hit onto terrorists' engineer installations completely destroyed them along with three mortar detachments and a field ammunition depot," Konashenkov said. An air reconnaissance in Syrian province of Deir ez-Zor near the town of Mayadin exposed a convoy of tank trucks transporting crude oil towards the Iraqi border, in the direction of the oil processing facilities controlled by IS.

A notice was immediately passed to a Sukhoi Su-34 bomber patrolling the area, which delivered an airstrike on the convoy. "Objective control data confirmed complete elimination of the tank train," the military spokesman said. More than 50 aircraft and helicopters, including the Sukhoi Su-34 and Su-24M bombers, Su-25 attack aircraft, Su-30SM fighters and Mil Mi-8 and Mi-24 helicopters are taking part in Russia's ongoing military operation against terror groups in Syria. Russia's Caspian Flotilla ships also delivered a massive strike on ISIS targets in Syria using Kalibr NK ship-born cruise missiles on October 7. Kremlin has repeated on multiple occasions that Russia's military forces would not take part in any ground operations in Syria.

Ever since Russia began flying combat missions from Latakia there's been enormous pressure on Washington to prove that the US is serious about fighting terror and more specifically, about fighting ISIS.

The optics around Moscow's strikes have been a veritable nightmare for the US. The steady barrage of videos released by the Russian Defense Ministry seem to depict a successful air campaign (although it's impossible to assess exactly what the clips show) and one that's done far more damage in the space of 45 days than the US campaign has done in the space of 13 months. One problem of course is that Russia has a ground force in the Iranians and Hezbollah and the cooperation between air and ground seems to be far more robust than what Washington has been able to accomplish with Kurds.

So, in a last ditch effort to avoid complete humiliation, The Pentagon first prepared the US public for the deployment of spec ops (by releasing helmet cam footage of an ISIS prison raid) and then tried to float the idea of sending Apache gunships to Baghdad. When Baghdad rejected that strategy, The White House said it would send 50 spec ops to Syria and now, in conjunction with the Kurds, the US is attempting to take back the Northern Iraqi town of Sinjar which ISIS captured more than a year ago before terrorizing the local Yazidi population. This operation has received an enormous amount of Western media coverage over the past several days.

Well now, in the latest effort by Washington to prove to an increasingly skeptical world that the US can (or is willing) to bring something to the fight, the US says it has probably killed "Jihadi John," the ISIS member and Kuwaiti-born Brit who became famous after appearing a number of videos depicting the beheading of Westerners.

It's not over yet. But six weeks after Russia's President Vladimir Putin made the bold and principled move to intervene militarily in Syria, the result is already showing a stunning victory.

With Russian air power wiping out hundreds of foreign-backed terror targets, the Syrian Arab Army appears to be decisively turning back the enemy.

The latest gains by the Syrian state forces to liberate a key airbase near the northern city of Aleppo and surrounding countryside from the siege of terror groups is proving that Putin was so right in his intervention.

After a year of US-led air strikes against the so-called Islamic State, Syria was under more threat than ever from the wannabe jihadists. Six weeks after Russian air strikes, the same mercenary network is now on the run. The enemy is in disarray and in retreat.

Ahead of a meeting scheduled between Russian President Vladimir Putin and U.S. President Barack Obama and their speeches to the United Nations General Assembly in late September, the Russian President branded Washington's support for the insurgent forces in Syria as both illegal and ineffective in an interview with Charlie Rose for the U.S. CBS and PBS television networks. Aside from saying that U.S. support to the insurgents was a "provision of military support to illegal structures" that violates "the principles of modern international law and the United Nations Charter," Putin pointed out that the militants being trained and armed by the U.S. were actually joining the so-called Islamic State.

Washington is fighting a multi-dimensional global war on several fronts using proxies. In Europe it is using the Ukrainian government and the European Union to confront the Russian Federation while in Arabia it is using Saudi Arabia and a group of Arab regimes to gain control over Yemen. In East Asia, the U.S. is using tensions between the People's Republic of China and its neighbours to confront Beijing. In this context South Korea is being used to confront the North Koreans as a means of ultimately targeting the Chinese.

The so-called Islamic State or ISIL/ISIS is a creation of the U.S. It has been incubated by Washington as a proxy to wage the very same multi-dimensional war that has been described above. In fact, the U.S. military build-up in Iraq and Syria that the U.S. is leading is a smokescreen for regime change and war operations in Southwest Asia that target Syria, Iran, and their regional allies. The U.S. has been using parallel tracks of engaging these players while it continues to build-up the means for war and regime change. This is why mission creep is setting in and the U.S., along with Canada and France, has been bombing Syria and its infrastructure under the pretext of bombing ISIL/ISIS. The fact that the U.S. and its allies are engaging with Iran or Syria is only a repeat of the scenario of what happened to the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya; while the U.S. engaged with Muammar Qaddafi, it built-up the means for regime change against him. Moreover, it is precisely due to these regime change plans that Russia, Iran, Iraq, and Syria have setup a coordinating cell in Baghdad to fight the ISIL/ISIS and that the Russians are reinvigorating their military presence inside Syria.

One of the leaders of the international terrorist organization, the Al-Nusra Front, on an international wanted list, has been detained in Kiev, says the Ukrainian Security Service (SBU).

The man is a citizen of one of the former Soviet republics and took part in the Syrian conflict throughout 2013-2014. Shevchenko court in Ukraine's capital has issued an arrest warrant for the suspect, believed to be one of Al-Nusra's leading lights.

According to the SBU, the suspect will be extradited, but it's not clear to which country. The identity of the detainee hasn't been revealed to the media.

On November 11, Ukrainian border guards reported they had detained a Russian citizen suspected of belonging to Islamic State in Kiev's Borispol International Airport. The man on the international wanted list landed in Kiev on a flight from Istanbul. He was handed over to police and the arrest was reported to Ukraine's Interpol office.

The Al-Nusra Front, also known as Jabhat al-Nusra, is the Syrian branch of Al-Qaeda. The Sunni Islamic jihadist group is fighting against Syrian government troops alongside Islamic State. Their declared aim is to establish a caliphate in Syria and neighboring Iraq.

International Military Review - Syria-Iraq Battlespace (Nov. 12)

Moscow has condemned Reuters for its "exclusive" report which ignored a detailed statement from the Russian Foreign Ministry, in favor of the narrative predetermined by a "draft document" coming from an unnamed source and comments by anonymous officials.

In its "exclusive" story published on November 10, Reuters claimed it had obtained a "draft" of Russia's plan for a "constitutional reform process of up to 18 months," prepared for the multilateral talks on Syria this week.

The Reuters News Agency requested a comment from the Foreign Ministry, which it was given, but then decided to ignore it in their report.

"The [news] agency indeed contacted us prior to writing this information," Maria Zakharova, spokesperson for the Russian Foreign Ministry told reporters on Thursday. "[Reuters'] Moscow correspondents have received extensive comments that this information does not correspond to reality."

The White House indicated Tuesday that President Barack Obama will sign into law a Pentagon spending bill that significantly raises the base budget of the US war machine while prohibiting the shutdown of the prison camp at the Guantanamo Bay Naval Station in Cuba or the transfer of its detainees to US facilities.

The National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) provides for a base Pentagon budget (excluding expenditures on active military operations in Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria) of $548 billion, larger than any year since the end of the Cold War.

On top of the base budget, the funding bill includes $50.9 billion for "overseas contingency operations," that will pay for ongoing military interventions in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and elsewhere, down from $64.2 billion in the last fiscal year. Together with a few smaller increments, this brings the total in military spending to $607 billion for the fiscal year that began October 1.

Over the past 15 years, the base Pentagon budget has risen by 42.7 percent, growing steadily as Obama replaced Bush, the Iraq war was wound down and then restarted, and the Afghanistan war was escalated and then scaled back.

The White House indicated that Obama would approve the legislation. "I would expect that you would see the president sign the NDAA when it comes to his desk," White House spokesman Josh Earnest told a news briefing.

Let's begin with the $12 billion in shrink-wrapped $100 bills, Iraqi oil money held in the U.S. The Bush administration began flying it into Baghdad on C-130s soon after U.S. troops entered that city in April 2003. Essentially dumped into the void that had once been the Iraqi state, at least $1.2 to $1.6 billion of it was stolen and ended up years later in a mysterious bunker in Lebanon. And that's just what happened as the starting gun went off.

It's never ended. In 2011, the final report of the congressionally mandated Commission on Wartime Contracting estimated that somewhere between $31 billion and $60 billion taxpayer dollars had been lost to fraud and waste in the American "reconstruction" of Iraq and Afghanistan. In Iraq, for instance, there was that $75 million police academy, initially hailed "as crucial to U.S. efforts to prepare Iraqis to take control of the country's security." It was, however, so poorly constructed that it proved a health hazard. In 2006, "feces and urine rained from the ceilings in [its] student barracks" and that was only the beginning of its problems.

When the bad press started, Parsons Corporation, the private contractor that built it, agreed to fix it for nothing more than the princely sum already paid. A year later, a New York Times reporter visited and found that "the ceilings are still stained with excrement, parts of the structures are crumbling, and sections of the buildings are unusable because the toilets are filthy and nonfunctioning." This seems to have been par for the course. Typically enough, the Khan Bani Saad Correctional Facility, a $40 million prison Parsons also contracted to build, was never even finished.

And these were hardly isolated cases or problems specific to Iraq. Consider, for instance, those police stations in Afghanistan believed to be crucial to "standing up" a new security force in that country. Despite the money poured into them and endless cost overruns, many were either never completed or never built, leaving new Afghan police recruits camping out. And the police were hardly alone. Take the $3.4 million unfinished teacher-training center in Sheberghan, Afghanistan, that an Iraqi company was contracted to build (using, of course, American dollars) and from which it walked away, money in hand.

And why stick to buildings, when there were those Iraqi roads to nowhere paid for by American dollars? At least one of them did at least prove useful to insurgent groups moving their guerrillas around (like the $37 million bridge the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers built between Afghanistan and Tajikistan that helped facilitate the region's booming drug trade in opium and heroin). In Afghanistan, Highway 1 between the capital Kabul and the southern city of Kandahar, unofficially dubbed the "highway to nowhere," was so poorly constructed that it began crumbling in its first Afghan winter.

And don't think that this was an aberration. The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) hired an American nonprofit, International Relief and Development (IRD), to oversee an ambitious road-building program meant to gain the support of rural villagers. Almost $300 million later, it could point to "less than 100 miles of gravel road completed."Each mile of road had, by then, cost U.S. taxpayers $2.8 million, instead of the expected $290,000, while a quarter of the road-building funds reportedly went directly to IRD for administrative and staff costs. Needless to say, as the road program failed, USAID hired IRD to oversee other non-transportation projects.

In these years, the cost of reconstruction never stopped growing. In 2011, McClatchy News reported that "U.S. government funding for at least 15 large-scale programs and projects grew from just over $1 billion to nearly $3 billion despite the government's questions about their effectiveness or cost."