Russia prepares for any Turkish or Saudi surprises in Syria

With Turkey's ongoing shelling of Kurdish and Syrian forces, as well as several reports of Turkey sending mercenaries across the border in an attempt to stop SAA and Kurdish advances, it seems that Russia isn't taking any chances: Anticipating Ankara's next move is paramount.

Introduction by Gordon Duff, Senior Editor, Veterans Today: To the casual observer, seemingly unrelated stories do not interrelate, nor do they support the scenario of a global threat. To the professional, working in the arena of intelligence "fusion," unrelated stories can, and often do, support threat hypotheses, occasionally of global import.

This is the purpose of "intelligence" as a scientific discipline.

This story began in 2009, when the air forces of Turkey and Israel undertook joint air attack training scenarios presupposing the "enemies" to be Armenia and Iran. Soon thereafter, an American exploration ship leased to Germany but crewed by Israelis, the USS Grapple, landed in Georgia at the port of Poti, heavily guarded by fast torpedo boats. This ship offloaded bunker buster and cluster "runway denial" munitions, which were soon trucked into Azerbaijan to a secret air base, home to a "lost" Israeli F15 squadron and drone unit.

Soon thereafter, as a next step according to our hypothesis, the US spent $100m for a $30m public health facility in Tbilisi which was soon turned over to a combined CIA and Georgian secret services unit. Reports begin to spread, backed by considerable hard evidence, that the production of biological and chemical weapons was underway.

This was followed by Bechtel and British Petroleum, and their private security forces, partnering with Ukrainian and Turkish special operations groups and contractors from the shadowy and very obscure "Google Ideas Group" while Sarin moved south through Turkey into Syria and thousands died.

Yesterday, Turkish Prime Minister Davutoglu told Reuters that YPG fighters would have seized Azaz and Tal Rifaat if it had not been for Turkish artillery shelling. He failed to mention that these towns would have been liberated from Al Qaeda. Al Qaeda's Syrian branch, Jabhat Al Nusra, shares control of Azaz with "moderate" FSA brigades. Davutoglu has effectively admitted that Turkey is protecting Al Qaeda.

This would not be the first time Turkey has had a direct hand in helping Al Qaeda take a Syrian town. In March 2014, Turkish president Erdogan provided direct air support to Jabhat Al Nusra as it took over the town of Kessab. In a blatant act of support for Al Qaeda, Erdogan brazenly shot down a Syrian Jet which was attempting to fire on Jabhat Al Nusra terrorists crossing in from the Turkish border. Kessab was a Syrian town inhabited by mostly Armenian diaspora, who had a century ago escaped genocide at the hands of Turkey.

In recent years, Turkey's aid of Al Qaeda and ISIS in Syria has developed from an open secret to an accepted fact. In November, footage emerged of Turkish border guards leisurely conversing with ISIS militants in Kassab.

The last ten days have been the moment when it has finally dawned upon the West that the Syrian army - backed by Iran and Russia - is close to winning a decisive victory in Syria.

The Syrian army has expanded the government's control of the countryside around Damascus. It has cleared Hama and Homs of the jihadi rebels who established themselves there in 2012. It has broken the siege of Aleppo, reopening the roads that link Aleppo to the rest of the country. It has also succeeded in largely clearing the rebels from Latakia province, site of Russia's Khmeimim airbase.

These initial steps of consolidation are now being followed by military offensives along two axes.

The first is in the northwest of the country, with the Syrian army now very close to encircling the jihadi rebels who since 2012 have partly occupied and besieged Syria's biggest city and economic capital, Aleppo.

It seems that all the main road links to Turkey have now been cut, reducing the jihadi rebels to reliance on country roads through Idlib province where they are very vulnerable to attack from the Russian airforce.

In the midst of an election year in the United States, Radio Sputnik's Brian Becker is joined by investigative journalist and filmmaker John Pilger to discuss the idea that "extremists" run Western political systems, and the important role of whistleblowers.

"This is the first time that a...major international organization, an official body, has had the opportunity to examine all of the salient information to do with the Assange case," Pilger tells Loud & Clear host Brian Becker, referring to a recent ruling by the United Nations that the WikiLeaks founder is being "arbitrarily held."

The Islamic State claims to have orchestrated 25 terror attacks in Yemen in less than a year, releasing a data visualization detailing the killings as way to demonstrate its influence in the war-torn country.

The group's semi-official news agency Amaq released the numbers on Telegram; they were discovered by Vocativ's deep web analysts, who have previously found similar dispatches listing ISIS activities in Syria and Iraq.

The infographic purports to show that ISIS carried out at least 25 separate attacks in Yemen since the group established its affiliate there last Spring, after war broke out between Houthi rebels and the Saudi-backed government forces. The majority of ISIS attacks have targeted the rebels, who are believed to be aligned with Iran, although the rebels and Tehran deny this.

If they carry through on their threats, Saudi Arabia and Turkey will not do so in the manner that many expect, nor for the reasons that are commonly discussed.

Saudi Arabia sent tongues wagging with its latest threat to dispatch ground troops to fight against Daesh alongside the US. This comes on the heels of the Russian military declaring that Turkey appears ready to invade Syria.

The reaction that some commentators have had to both of these news developments has been to either totally ridicule them as impossible or to conjure up fearful images of a large World War II-style invasion force just waiting to stream into the country.

Both extremes inaccurately portray the reality of the situation and demonstrate an unawareness of the post-conflict strategic vision that Saudi Arabia and Turkey want to advance.

There's a strong degree of psychological warfare at play here, both in convincing these states' allies and attempting to deter their adversaries, but it mustn't be forgotten that there are practical ways in which they may try to reach their objectives short of the full-scale invasion that some are fretting about.

The end game for both actors is to shape the battlespace to the point where they can later pressure Damascus in acceding to an autonomous or federalist "solution", which would thereby allow them to herald in the strategic establishment of a transnational sub-state "Sunnistan" with Iraq and revive their grand plans for a Qatari-Turkish gas pipeline to Europe.

Turkey has shelled Syrian Kurdish forces in northern Syria for the fourth day in a row as Ankara tries to stop the YPG from claiming the town of Azaz, which is just 8km from the Turkish border.

Turkish artillery units in the southeastern province of Kilis fired shells at Kurdish targets on Tuesday morning, in areas that were under the control of the Syrian Kurdish Democratic Union Party (PYD), Today's Zaman daily reports, citing the Dogan news agency. The sound of shelling could be heard from Kilis city center, just kilometers from the Syrian border.

A Turkish official said on Tuesday that Ankara will ask its coalition partners, including the US, to take part in a joint ground operation in Syria. "Turkey is not going to have a unilateral ground operation. We are asking coalition partners that there should be a ground operation. We are discussing this with allies," the official told reporters at a briefing in Istanbul, as cited by Reuters.

Former Head of Russia's Federal Security Service Nikolai Kovalyov warned Turkey and Saudi Arabia against sending ground troops to Syria, saying that Russian warplanes are likely to launch airstrikes on their positions if they deploy in the war-torn country.

"The Turkish and Saudi officials are well aware that in case of deployment of their forces in the Syrian territories, the Russian air force will likely bomb them," Kovalyov, also a member of the State Duma's security and resistance to corruption committee, was quoted as saying by al-Mayadeen news channel on Tuesday.

"If the Saudi and Turkish ground forces enter Syria, they cannot be distinguished from the terrorists and Russia will act upon the demand of the legal Syrian government," he added.

His remarks came after Saudi Arabia and Turkey said they plan to send ground forces to Syria.

Human Rights Watch (HRW) has investigated the use of cluster munitions in five attacks by the Saudi-led coalition in Yemen, a representative told RT. The munitions, made by a US company and banned in populated areas, injured at least five civilians.

Just two days after the organization released a report on the topic, Mary Wareham, advocacy director of the Arms Division of HRW, spoke to RT about the findings.

"At Humans Right Watch, we have been documenting the use of cluster munitions in the conflict in Yemen since March of last year. Yesterday we issued our fifth, I think, report on the use of cluster bombs there. It was looking at a particular type of high-tech version of cluster munition manufactured in the United States and transferred to Saudi Arabia, and to the United Arab Emirates in recent years.

So we wanted to see how this particular cluster munition is being used in Yemen by the Saudi-led coalition, because it is really the only type that the US is allowed to export or use anymore. What we found was at least five separate attacks in four different governorates of this particular type of air delivered cluster munition, and at least five civilian victims from the time of attack, including a woman and three-year-old child, who were hurt in their home, and the mother was hurt so badly that her leg was amputated after the attack."

'Use in populated areas'

"So these cluster munitions were provided to those countries on the understanding or the requirement that they would not be used in civilian areas. And we saw use at least in a couple of populated areas: the fishing village next to a port that was attacked in December is the most recent attack, but we also saw them used just outside a village in April and our researchers were at the scene collecting munitions that they found on the ground at that time.

So it's very clear to us that these cluster munitions are being used right now. They are causing civilian casualties, and we question whether or not this high-tech version that's supposed to not fail - at least 99 percent of the time - if it's failing, because we've also seen numerous instances of these remnants of the cluster munitions lying on the ground with their sub-munitions still attached."