Puppet Masters
Two villages, Fuaa and Kafraya, in northwestern Idlib province, which are still controlled by the government, and a rebels' stronghold in the town of Zabadani at the Lebanese border are subject to a ceasefire beginning Sunday at noon, a member of the town council, told AFP.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR), which also confirmed the information, said the length of the ceasefire hadn't been revealed, but negotiations to extend the truce will continue.
"There is calm in Fuaa, Kafraya and Zabadani. There is no shelling and there have been no violations of the ceasefire since noon (0900 GMT)," said Rami Abdel Rahman, head of the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.
"To accept the proposal of the Russian government to sign an agreement on a Russian air base in Belarus between Russia and Belarus," the decree reads according to the Kremlin's press service.
President Putin also ordered the Russian Defense Ministry to start all necessary negotiations with Minsk on the issue.
"The agreement will help jointly protect the outer border of the Union State [of Russia and Belarus] in the air and also create a unified system of air defense," the order reads. How exactly this will be done and what role the base will play is still subject to talks.
It comes just over a week after Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev said Moscow is ready to establish military air bases in neighboring countries.
Comment: Surely Western pundits will call this another example of 'Russian aggression'. It's not. It's a reaction to NATO aggression. See: STRATFOR Chief outlines psychopathic Zio-Anglo-American plans for world domination in speech to Chicago Council on Global Affairs

The bombing of Nasser University in Tripoli on June 12 2011 is one of many examples of NATO's destruction of Libya's infrastructure.
As French President Francois Hollande calls for the "neutralization of Bashar Assad", British Defence Minister Michael Fallon announces preparations for "Striking ISIL in Syria [...] [to] keep our streets safe here at home" and Turkish media proclaims "Aleppo to become the 82nd province of Turkey"; it is worth remembering the September 2011 visits by the arch-war criminals French President Nicolas Sarkozy, British Prime Minister David Cameron and Turkey's Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan to the NATO-occupied Libya.
Comment: Lying just beneath these "mission accomplished" photo-ops are crimes, death and suffering of such magnitude that one could hardly believe that these heads of state could be capable of spinning what's happened in the way that they did. But that's what psychopathic leaders in positions of power do. To fully grok the extent of the carnage and malevolence underlying NATO's takeover of Libya, see the following:
In Case You Missed It - NATO Atrocities In Libya - Mass Murder of the Innocent
Behind the Headlines: Truth about Libya - Interview with James & JoAnne Moriarty
Libya, Syria, Ukraine: It's worse than we can imagine
Libya & Gaddafi - The Truth you are not supposed to know
The Russians are flying transports bringing tanks and troops to an air base near the coastal city of Latakia to create a supply chain to provide a steady flow of weapons and munitions to the Syrian army.
Syrian President Bashar Assad, an ally of Russia, has lost half his country to ISIS and the Nusra Front, a branch of al-Qaida.
Putin fears that if Assad falls, Russia's toehold in Syria and the Mediterranean will be lost, ISIS and al-Qaida will be in Damascus, and Islamic terrorism will have achieved its greatest victory.
Is he wrong?
Comment: If US neocons want a confrontation with Russia, well here's your chance in Syria.
Brutality from on high: Suspect shot from police helicopter when driving down motorway the wrong way

The windshield of a robbery suspect's car is shattered by bullets after being shot from a San Bernardino County sheriff's helicopter in California
The driver was a suspect of a robbery, who police began to pursue on Friday in Devore, California.
Police said he then drove at speeds of up to 100mph, driving through residential areas before moving onto the Interstate 215 freeway through San Bernardino, which is east of Los Angeles.

A deputy checks an SUV involved in a crash on Interstate 215 at the Little League Drive freeway overpass in San Bernardino, California
After being fired at, the driver jumped from the Chevrolet Yukon which then carried on driverless, crashing into an SUV.
Three people in the SUV: a man, his wife and a 13-year old boy have been taken to hospital with injuries. According to ABC news, the female is still in hospital.
Police said it was unclear whether the suspect, who died at the side of the road, died as a result of gunshot wounds or from leaping out of the vehicle.
Deputy Olivia Bozek said: "It's a public safety issue. Once he starts going the wrong way, obviously he doesn't care about passengers or pedestrians or other cars that are around."
"Given the security environment, given the actions of Russia, it has become apparent that we need to make sure to update the plans that we have in response to any potential aggression against any NATO allies," a senior defense official familiar with the plan told Foreign Policy.
According to Michèle Flournoy, a former undersecretary of defense for policy and co-founder of the Center for a New American Security, the move was prompted by the Ukraine situation.
"Russia's invasion of eastern Ukraine made the US dust off its contingency plans," Flournoy told FP. "They were pretty out of date."
Moscow, however, has repeatedly denied having a role in the Ukraine conflict, despite accusations by Kiev and its Western backers that it has supported the rebelling eastern Ukrainian regions of Donetsk and Lugansk with weapons and manpower.
Although the Department of Defense generates contingency plans continuously, the move is significant because it marks the first time since the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 that Washington has revisited plans for a potential armed conflict with Moscow.
Comment: Russia is not the enemy. It is unbelievable that the truly aggressive U.S. is still hyping this nonsense. It's obvious that the U.S. wants regime change in Russia, but how far will they go? Russia's actions have been those of true Statesmanship. Russian leaders have navigated the genocidal mess the U.S. has created quite brilliantly thus far. Those Pentagon idiots are in way over their tiny heads.
- Russia's 'existential threat' to the USA is really the human threat to psychopaths in power
- Russophobia in the West
Talking about the refugee crisis, he noted that "this is a problem because refugees are used by IS to send their own people there." "What they will do in the future and what tasks they will perform, it is hard to say," Smirnov added.
People who underwent training in IS later return to their own countries or go to other regions, he continued. They even come to China, Smirnov noted adding that this is a threat for many countries.
Comment: The threat of Muslim terrorism has been more of a manufactured boogeyman for the West, something like 1984's Emmanuel Goldstein, used to scare Western populations into more wars and more draconian 'security' practices. But for Russia it has been very real, in the sense that the threat was originally manufactured as a weapon against the Soviet Union with the mujaheddin, and has been active ever since to one degree or another. While Russian officials will probably never come out and say it (except in tidbits like this one, from President Putin), they're most likely fully aware of the true nature of Muslim extremism: made and paid for by the USA.
Reading between the lines, it looks like Russia knows what the West has up its sleeves regarding the refugee crisis:
- Syrian refugees in Europe, regime change in Damascus, and the mass migrations still to come
- 'ISIS among the refugees' - Prelude to another European "terror attack"?

A migrant child looks out of a train window at a train station in Tovarnik, September 19, 2015
More than 20,000 migrants, many of them refugees from the Syrian war, have trekked into Croatia since Tuesday, when Hungary used a metal fence, tear gas and water cannon on its southern border with Serbia to bar their route into the European Union.
EU leaders, deeply divided, are due to meet on Wednesday in a fresh attempt to agree on how and where to distribute 160,000 refugees among their countries, but the noises from some of the newer members of the bloc were far from friendly.
The NATO Baltic air-policing mission has been carried out by its member states since 2004, when Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania acceded to the military bloc.
In contrast with September - December 2014, the aircraft will carry enough ammo for a real fight: a gun, infrared short-range missiles, radar-guided medium-range missiles and an electronic defense system with decoys that are ejected at a threat.
Comment: NATO and the West are sending threatening messages but seems to be all bark and no bite. For more on this geopolitical chess game:
- STRATFOR Chief outlines psychopathic Zio-Anglo-American plans for world domination in speech to Chicago Council on Global Affairs
- Boston Globe: Russia is not the enemy
- Massive Russia-led war games simulate 'international threat coming from central Asia'
- US general says US air power advantage fading in face of 'Russian military advances' - Pentagon must keep up












Comment: Now that Russia is openly supporting Syria, the rebels seem to be thinking twice.