The Saudi regime has resorted to the targeted killing of its mercenaries who have changed their stances and defected to the opposition camp in Southern Yemen. Those assassinated in Lahij province have been killed for changing sides from the US and Saudi Arabia; most of the slain militants have formerly been allies of former fugitive President Mansour Hadi or his former Prime Minister Khaled Bahah.

Most of those assassinated had changed their stance on Saudi Arabia and defected coalition-backed Hadi and Bahah groups after they found out about the realities of the war.

In a relevant development on Sunday, pro-Hadi commander Ali al-Yafe'yee was gunned down by unknown assailants in Shalal military base in Ma'ala region in Aden province. Hadi stepped down in January 2015 and refused to reconsider the decision despite calls by Ansarullah revolutionaries of the Houthi movement. Saudi Arabia has been striking Yemen for more than 11 months now to restore power to fugitive president Mansour Hadi, a close ally of Riyadh.

The Saudi-led aggression has so far killed at least 8,550 Yemenis, including hundreds of women and children. Despite Riyadh's claims that it is bombing the positions of the Ansarullah fighters, Saudi warplanes are flattening residential areas and civilian infrastructures. Over 3,750 schools have been closed and at least 1.2 million Yemeni people have been displaced so far.

Former al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden received 12 million dollars from his brother on behalf of the Saudi Binladin Group, alleged will shows.

The alleged handwritten will is part of a cache of 113 documents translated and released by US intelligence agencies on Tuesday. It is the second tranche of documents seized from his hideout in Abbottabad, Pakistan, when he was killed in 2011.

In the will Bin Laden indicates that he had around $29 million in Sudan, collected from various sources including his brother "Abu Bakr Muhammad Bin (Laden) on behalf of Binladin company for investment in Sudan."

Inside Syria Media Center sources in Iraq report that the Turkish armed forces suffered heavy losses in a battle against Iraqi Kurds on February 16th. Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) fighters downed a Turkish S-70 Black Hawk helicopter by heavy machine-gun fire. The helicopter crashed in an Iraqi region, near the border with the Turkish province of Hakkari to the north-west of Erbil. Six Turkish military personnel died in the crash.

Observers report that Turkish forces have faced strong resistance from the Kurds since the beginning of their operations in northern Iraq, despite the fact that the Kurds are largely defending themselves with small arms in a life-and-death situation.

The Turkish army has been killing civilians across the border in southeasten Turkey. The Kurdish-inhabited areas of Diyarbakir, Cizre, Silopi, Mardin are all under military curfew. The locals face a humanitarian disaster as the Turkish authorities block necessities, including medicine and food supplies. In the meantime, they are preventing journalists and representatives of humanitarian organizations from entering those areas.

Whether or not Donald Trump ultimately succeeds in winning the White House, historians are likely to rank him as the most consequential presidential candidate of at least the past half-century. He has already transformed the tone and temper of American political life. If he becomes the Republican nominee, he will demolish its structural underpinnings as well. Should he prevail in November, his election will alter its very fabric in ways likely to prove irreversible. Whether Trump ever delivers on his promise to "Make America Great Again," he is already transforming American democratic practice.

Trump takes obvious delight in thumbing his nose at the political establishment and flouting its norms. Yet to classify him as an anti-establishment figure is to miss his true significance. He is to American politics what Martin Shkreli is to Big Pharma. Each represents in exaggerated form the distilled essence of a much larger and more disturbing reality. Each embodies the smirking cynicism that has become one of the defining characteristics of our age. Each in his own way is a sign of the times.

In contrast to the universally reviled Shkreli, however, Trump has cultivated a mass following that appears impervious to his missteps, miscues, and misstatements. What Trump actually believes -- whether he believes in anything apart from big, splashy self-display -- is largely unknown and probably beside the point. Trumpism is not a program or an ideology. It is an attitude or pose that feeds off of, and then reinforces, widespread anger and alienation.

The pose works because the anger -- always present in certain quarters of the American electorate but especially acute today -- is genuine. By acting the part of impish bad boy and consciously trampling on the canons of political correctness, Trump validates that anger. The more outrageous his behavior, the more secure his position at the very center of the political circus. Wondering what he will do next, we can't take our eyes off him. And to quote Marco Rubio in a different context, Trump "knows exactly what he is doing."

Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS/ISIL) fighters in Iraq have reportedly killed 8 Dutch jihadists following a month-long altercation with a group of foreign fighters which involved shootouts and deaths on both sides, activists report.

"Daesh (Arabic acronym for IS) executed eight Dutch fighters on Friday in Maadan, Raqa province, after accusing them of attempting desertion and mutiny," wrote Abu Mohammad, a citizen journalist from Raqqa is Being Slaughtered Silently (RBSS) on his Twitter page on Monday.

The Ukrainian government has banned all civil servants from publicly expressing criticism towards the work of state institutions or officials amid the ongoing political crisis and the cabinet's failure to tackle corruption.

The public servants should "avoid any public criticisms of the work of state institutions and their officials," says a new decree outlining "ethical standards" for Ukrainian officials, which was published on the Ukrainian cabinet's official website.

According to the document, state service inevitably envisages "forming a positive image of the authorities." It also demands that the officials avoid "actions that could harm the interests of the state service or negatively influence the image of a state official."

More than 50 companies from 20 different countries are legally supplying Daesh, also known as Islamic State, with bomb-making material, according to a new report by Conflict Armament Research (CAR), which suggests countries are failing to monitor what they are selling. CAR investigated the supply chain of weapons used in Iraq and Syria and discovered that components used in improvised explosive devices (IEDs) are built using commercial goods that do not require a government export license and fall under the radar and regulation of weapon sales.

The investigation found that the weapon supply chain in Iraq and Syria has links to markets in other countries including Turkey, India and the United States.

"IS [Daesh] forces have manufactured and deployed improved explosive devices (IEDs) across the battlefield on a quasi-industrial scale....Made of components that are cheap and readily available, IEDs have become IS forces' signature weapon", the report 'Tracing the supply of components used in Islamic State IEDs' says.


Over 20 months, investigators traced the supply chain of more than 700 components used by Daesh militants to make IEDs and found 51 companies from 20 different countries were involved in the manufacture of those detonated by Daesh.

Syrian government forces held back from conducting retaliation strikes against those violating the truce in order to give the agreement "a chance to survive," President Bashar Assad said in a recent interview.

"We will do our part so that the whole thing works," President Assad told German broadcaster ARD, referring to the truce drawn up by Russia and the United States that came into force on Saturday.

He also added that the Syrian Army "has refrained from retaliating in order to give [a] chance for the agreement to survive."

"The terrorists have breached the deal from the first day. We as the Syrian Army are refraining from responding in order to give a chance to sustain the agreement and that is what we can do," he said.

At the same time, Assad stressed that "at the end everything has a limit" and pointed out that the maintenance of the ceasefire now "depends on the other side."

Proving that politics does indeed make strange bedfellows, the Nation of Islam's Louis Farrakhan joined with the Ku Klux Klan in expressing his admiration for 2016 GOP presidential front-runner Donald Trump.

In remarks during the Nation's annual Saviours' Day sermon in Chicago, the leader of the black separatist group praised Trump for not accepting money from the "Jewish community," reports The Hill.

"[Trump] is the only member who has stood in front of [the] Jewish community and said, 'I don't want your money,'" Farrakhan told his followers.

"Anytime a man can say to those who control the politics of America, 'I don't want your money,' that means you can't control me. And they cannot afford to give up control of the presidents of the United States." Farrakhan explained before hastening to add, ""Not that I'm for Mr. Trump, but I like what I'm looking at."

Trump has been battered for failing to immediately disavow the support of the Klan and other white supremacist organization, with former GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney calling his delayed response "disgusting and disqualifying."

Like Trump, Farrakhan is not a fan of the Bush family, blaming them for the 9/11 terrorist attack.

"They needed another Pearl Harbor," Farrakhan stated. "They needed some event that was cataclysmic, that would make the American people rise up, ready for war. "They plotted a false flag operation and when a government is so rotten that they will kill innocent people to accomplish a political objective, you are not dealing with a human."

Greg Palast has investigated Paul "The Vulture" Singer for BBC TV and The Guardian for the last 9 years

Paul Singer, known as The Vulture, won a $4.65 billion payment from Argentina* — nearly ONE HUNDRED TIMES his "investment" of $50 million in old Argentina bonds. It was, in finance speak, the most successful "vulture attack" ever. Singer's actions are outlawed in most of the civilized world. Hillary Clinton, as Secretary of State, attempted to stop Singer's predatory act, but Singer did a brilliant end-run: he used his cash to help elect a new President in Argentina that would jump to his tune and pay him billions.

Now, he's attempting to do the same to the USA: pick a president for us who will feather his vulture's nest. He's the number one donor sugar daddy for Marco Rubio's candidacy [See, "Who Hatched Rubio"]. Singer is also the big bankroller of Karl Rove, to make sure that, even if he can't sell Rubio to the GOP base, at least The Vulture can use "Turdblossom" Rove to ensure that Hillary won't become President and put him out the of vulture business.

Rubio, in fact, skirted some ethical lines in his attempts to pressure the State Department to side with his corpse-chewing donor against Argentina.