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Attention

Turkey begins cross-border shelling of Syrian Kurds in Afrin: Turkish army attempts to enter Syrian province, Kurds repel attack - UPDATE


RT
Fri, 19 Jan 2018 16:39 UTC
Reyhanli turkish military convoy tanks
© Osman Orsal / ReutersA Turkish military convoy arrives at an army base in the border town of Reyhanli near the Turkish-Syrian border in Hatay province, Turkey January 17, 2018
Ankara has no option but to carry out a military op in the Syrian enclave of Afrin, Turkey's defense minister said. The operation has 'de facto started' with cross-border shelling, he added.

Turkey would continue discussing its operation in Afrin with Russia, Nurettin Canikli said on Friday in an interview with broadcaster AHaber.

The Kurdish YPG militias confirmed the Turkish minister's announcement of the shelling in Afrin region, saying it has started around midnight and continued into Friday morning and targeted Kurdish villages.

According to Turkish news agency Anadolu, at least ten howitzer shells were fired on targets in Syria by Turkish artillery deployed in the Kirikhan and Hassa districts of Hatay province. The Turkish military say they are preventing the creation of a "terror corridor" connecting Syrian Kurdish enclaves along the border. RIA Novosti cited an YPG source as saying some 70 artillery rockets coming from the Turkish side had landed in the Afrin area.


Comment: Turkish-backed FSA fighters have reportedly begun relocating to Turkey from where they can participate in the operation against the YPG in Afrin. (More pics of the convoys at Fort Russ.)
fsa convoy turkey
Kurds meanwhile are protesting the Turkish operation and supporting the YPG in the streets:
kurds protest
In response to the shelling from Turkey, the YPG attacked the Aziz hospital in a Turkish-backed, rebel-controlled area of Syria. Over 13 casualties have been reported so far. (Pics at Fort Russ.)

Update: Turkey-led forces have attacked the areas of Ziwan, Baliya and Jalamah in the area of Afrin as it appears that Ankara has launched the first stage of its widely announced operation against Kurdish militias [YPG/YPJ/PKK] in northwestern Syria.

The YPG media wing even claimed that the Turkish Army attempted to cross the Syrian-Turkish border and to enter Afrin. However, Kurdish forces repelled the attack.


Update (Jan. 20): More than 70 Turkish military aircraft that have been engaged in Ankara's Olive Branch operation in northern Syria against the Kurdish troop, according to Turkey' General Staff.
The Turkish Air Force attacked the Menagh Military Airbase in northwestern Syria, which the US used for supplying weapons to Kurdish armed forces, the Hurriyet newspaper reported citing military sources.

The newspaper noted that the airfield was among the 113 targets scheduled for the attack during Operation Olive Branch in Syrian Africa.


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Gear

Hezbollah leader Nasrallah says US created ISIS to legitimize its return to the Middle East

Paul Antonopoulos
Fort Russ News
Sat, 20 Jan 2018 19:27 UTC
Hezbollah leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah
Hezbollah leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah
The Secretary General of the Hezbollah resistance group, Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, stated that ISIS was created by the United States to justify its return to the Middle East after their partial withdrawal from Iraq.

"The announcement of US Secretary of State, Rex Tillerson, on his country's keeping its troops in Iraq and Syria under the pretext of preventing the return of Daesh [ISIS] proves the US objectives in the region, especially after the Iraqi people and the Iraqi resistance drove them out and refused to give them military bases and under the same pretext they came to Syria and they want to remain in it," Nasrallah said in a speech on Friday.
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Info

Fusion GPS founder Simpson's testimony suggests FBI may have paid Chris Steele's travel expenses

Aaron Klein
Breitbart
Fri, 19 Jan 2018 18:21 UTC
obama comey
© AP/Charles Dharapak
Glenn R. Simpson, the co-founder of the controversial opposition research firm Fusion GPS, stated in testimony it "makes sense" to him that the FBI paid for a trip to Rome by the former British spy who was contracted by Simpson's company to produce the largely discredited 35-page anti-Trump dossier.

Fusion GPS hired Christopher Steele, a former British intelligence agent, to do the work cited in the anti-Trump dossier. Last July, Steele reportedly traveled to Rome, where he met with an FBI contact to supply the agency with the anti-Trump dossier and other information he found during the course of his anti-Trump work.

Steele's dossier reportedly served as some of the basis for the FBI's investigation into Trump's 2016 presidential campaign and unsubstantiated claims of coordination with Russia.

In August 22 testimony released last week and reviewed in full by Breitbart News, Simpson stated that Steele's outreach to the FBI was "something that Chris took on on his own."

Simpson stated that as far as he knew Fusion GPS did not fund Steele's trip to Rome to meet with the FBI. He said he believes that the trip expenses may have been reimbursed by the FBI.

Comment: Further reading:

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Network

Google suspending its Fact Check Project - credits Daily Caller investigation with decision

Eric Lieberman
The Daily Caller
Sat, 20 Jan 2018 17:59 UTC
google eric schmidt
© Justin Sullivan/Getty ImagesGoogle CEO Eric Schmidt looks on during a conversation with U.S. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi October 27, 2008 at Google headquarters in Mountain View, California.
Google says it is discontinuing its fact-check feature because it proved to be too faulty for public use, directly attributing the decision to an investigation by The Daily Caller News Foundation. The company has no date set for when it will return, if ever.

"We launched the reviewed claims feature at the end of last year as an experiment with the aim of helping people quickly learn more about news publications," a spokeswoman for Google told TheDCNF, while also adding that TheDCNF was the catalyst for the recent move. "We said previously that we encountered challenges in our systems that maps fact checks to publishers, and on further examination it's clear that we are unable to deliver the quality we'd like for users."

There were two main problems with the fact-check widget, which appeared on the sidebar of Google's search results for very few sites and publications.

Comment: It will be interesting to see how fast Google restores this part of its gate-keeping structure. Or will it be resurrected in some other, less obvious form?

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Bad Guys

Russian MoD accuses US of stirring up tensions in northern Syria with arms supplies to the rebel groups


RT
Sat, 20 Jan 2018 19:15 UTC
Smoke rises from the Syria's Afrin region
© Osman Orsal / ReutersSmoke rises from the Syria's Afrin region, as it is pictured from near the Turkish town of Hassa, on the Turkish-Syrian border in Hatay province, Turkey January 20, 2018
The US is fuelling the crisis in northern Syria and the ongoing Turkish military operation against the Kurds through reckless weapon supplies to pro-American rebel groups, Russia's Defense Ministry has said.

"The Pentagon's uncontrolled deliveries of modern weaponry to the pro-US militants in the north of Syria, including, according to our information, contributed to the rapid escalation of tensions and prompted the Turkish special operation,"the ministry said Saturday.

The "provocative actions" of Washington - the announcement of the creation of "border forces" and other activities aimed at the "disintegration of Syrian sovereignty, and supporting armed militant groups" have triggered an "extremely negative"reaction from Ankara, the ministry noted.

Comment: See also: Erdogan officially announces that Turkish military op against Afrin Kurds underway

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Pistol

Portentous Assassination of Oliver Ivanovic a Message to All Leaders in The Balkans

Stephen Karganovic
Strategic Culture Foundation
Sat, 20 Jan 2018 00:00 UTC
Oliver Ivanović
Serbian community leader in the NATO-occupied Kosovo, Oliver Ivanović, was gunned down, mafia-style, in front of his party offices in the town of Kosovska Mitrovica on January 16.

As the old Romans used to say, de mortuis nihil nisi bene, of the dead nothing but the good. Mr. Ivanović did nothing that anyone is aware of to merit such a ghastly fate. But it would also be a mistake to regard him as the Gandhi or Mandela of Kosovo's Serbs. He was a career politician, with everything that encompasses, including rumors of shady deals on the side. Curiously, his profile was that of a "moderate" and "cooperative" local politician. For that, he was rewarded by Pristina authorities with a war crimes indictment so preposterous (the obligatory bevy of false witnesses included) that even their own Supreme Court was compelled to throw the conviction out.

But what matters here is that Ivanović was a symbolic "high value target", to use the terminology favored by those who are probably behind his murder. The "lone gunman," to again borrow an expression from their lexicon, will probably never be apprehended. At most, some patsy will be convicted of the crime, just for form's sake.

Comment: See also:

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Boat

US media loses it when Russian 'spy' ship makes annual trip to the Caribbean

Lucas Tomlinson
Fox News
Sat, 20 Jan 2018 11:14 UTC
The Russian spy ship Viktor Leonov in 2014.
© REUTERS/Stringer, FileThe Russian spy ship Viktor Leonov in 2014.
The Russian spy ship first spotted near American waters last year is making its way back in the direction of the U.S., Fox News confirmed on Thursday.

The Victor Leonov is still in the Caribbean, according to officials, but heading north off the coast of Florida, home to a U.S. Navy base located in North Florida, east of Jacksonville.

The ship could be off the Florida coast by Friday if the ship maintains present course and speed, according to officials.

Comment: The US routinely violates border agreements and international law and the mainstream media rarely reports on it but when another country so much as briefly enters their airspace or their predicted course looks to be nearing US territory, the US establishment becomes hysterical:

Three incidents were reported just this week! Also See:

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Vader

Alfred McCoy: A possible scenario for global war near 2030

Alfred McCoy
TomDispatch
Wed, 26 Sep 2018 17:17 UTC
book war china
© Alfred W. McCoyIn the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power.
At the U.N. recently, Donald Trump followed up on his bloodcurdling threat to unleash on North Korea "fire and fury like the world has never seen" (essentially a warning of nuclear terror) with an even grimmer threat: to "totally destroy" that country. In his histrionic bluntness, Trump was not alone in raising the nuclear issue. We know, for instance, that Secretary of Defense James Mattis recently discussed with his South Korean counterpart the reintroduction of American "tactical" nuclear weapons, which happen to be anything but tactical in the normal sense of the word, in the South. While it's true that no previous American president has spoken in the style of The Donald, he stands in something of a proud American tradition when it comes to threatening North Korea, one that goes all the way back to the Korean War era.

During that conflict, the U.S. Air Force dropped World War II levels of explosives on the Korean peninsula, leaving hardly a building standing in the northern and central parts of the country, and driving much of the population quite literally underground. The city of Wosun, for example, was bombarded from the sea for 41 days and nights in what Rear Admiral Allan Smith called "the longest sustained naval or air bombardment of a city in history."

Meanwhile, the use of nuclear weapons was both considered and threatened. Here, for instance, is a passage from my book The End of Victory Culture on the subject:
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Binoculars

Erdogan officially announces that Turkish military op against Afrin Kurds underway


RT
Sat, 20 Jan 2018 17:31 UTC
turkish tanks hatay
© Osman Orsal / ReutersTurkish army howitzers fire from a military post on the Turkish-Syrian border in Hatay province, Turkey January 20, 2018
Ankara has "de facto" begun its operation against Kurdish forces in Syria's Afrin, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said after the army called the military strike "legitimate self-defense."

"The Afrin operation has de facto been started on the ground," Erdogan said in a televised speech in the city of Kutahya, as cited by AFP.

"This will be followed by Manbij," he added, referring to a Kurdish-controlled town in northern Syria, about 30 kilometers west of the Euphrates.

Both Afrin and Manbij are controlled by the YPG Syrian Kurdish militia.

"The promises made to us over Manbij were not kept. So nobody can object if we do what is necessary," Erdogan said, referring to previous US assurances that the YPG would move out of Afrin.

"Later we will step-by-step clear our country up to the Iraqi border from this terror filth that is trying to besiege our country," he concluded.

Comment: Despite threats from Damascus than any Turkish jets bombing Afrin would be shot down, the Turks have reportedly started bombing Kurdish positions in Afrin.
"TSK (Turkish Armed Forces) has started airborne operations," Prime Minister Binali Yildirim said at a party congress on Saturday, as quoted by Hurriyet. Yildirim said eight F-16 aircraft were involved in the aerial sortie.

"As of this moment our brave Armed Forces have started the aerial offensive to eliminate the PYD and PKK and [Islamic State] elements in Afrin," Yildirim said.

Turkey's General Staff has officially declared the start of the operation, dubbing it 'Operation Olive Branch,' according to a statement cited by Turkish newspaper Sol.

AP journalists at the Turkish border reported seeing at least five jets heading toward Afrin. Also sighted was a convoy of buses, believed to be carrying Syrian opposition fighters, and trucks mounted with machine guns.


A senior Kurdish official said that Turkish warplanes had struck residential parts of Afrin, forcing people to retreat inside their homes and in shelters, Reuters reported. Several wounded people arrived at a local hospital, according to Hevi Mustafa, a top member of the civilian administration that governs the area.

Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu has discussed the military offensive with US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, Turkish officials said. Ministry officials earlier said Tillerson had requested a telephone conversation with his Turkish counterpart. Ankara's Chief of Military Staff, Hulusi Akar, has also spoken with his US and Russian counterparts, according to Turkish media reports.

The US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) have meanwhile accused Turkey of using cross-border shelling as a false pretext to launch an offensive into Syria, according to Reuters. The SDF, an alliance of Kurdish and Arab militias fighting Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS), said it will have no choice but to defend itself if attacked. The alliance controls areas in Syria's east and north.
Moscow has only given this slightly half-hearted response:
The launch of 'Operation Olive Branch' by Ankara against Kurdish militias controlling the Syrian region of Afrin has raised deep concerns in Russia, the Foreign Ministry said on Saturday. Moscow urged all the parties to show restraint and respect the territorial integrity of Syria, stressing the importance of focusing international efforts on the peace process in the country after the main forces of Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS) have been crushed.
The Russians even appear to be pulling whatever military personnel they have there out of Afrin:
The Russian command in Syria has taken measures to ensure the security of servicemen in Afrin, where Turkey is conducting an operation against the Kurds, the Defense Ministry said.

The military department stressed that "to prevent possible provocations, to exclude the threat to life and health of Russian servicemen," the operational group of the Center for reconciliation of warring parties and military police was relocated from Afrin to Tel Adjar.

The Center for Reconciliation continues to monitor the situation in the de-escalation zone of Tel-Rifat in order to promptly provide assistance to the civilian population leaving the combat areas, the report said.
See also:

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Arrow Down

Japan incensed as US military continues to fly helicopters over local school


Japan Today
Fri, 19 Jan 2018 17:16 UTC
US helicopters in Japan
© KYODOU.S. military helicopters fly near the Futenma No. 2 Elementary School in Ginowan, Okinawa, on Thursday.
The Japanese government on Friday doubled-down on its accusation that the U.S. Marine Corps flaunted safety concerns by flying helicopters above a school near a U.S. air base in Okinawa, despite U.S. military denials.

"In the video footage (we have), the helicopters' underbellies are clearly visible as they flew," Defense Minister Itsunori Onodera said, referring to video shot from a school which had a helicopter window fall into its grounds on Dec. 13, sparking outrage from the local and central governments.

After the incident, the U.S. Marine Corps in Okinawa had said it instructed all crew of aircraft taking off and landing at the Marine Corps Air Station Futenma to avoid flying over schools to the "greatest extent possible," according to the Defense Ministry.

"Children, teachers and parents will certainly be worried. This is a kind of flight we don't want to see," Onodera said. The minister also said he will continue to urge the U.S. military to avoid flying over the school just outside the Futenma base.
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