The lion's share of Islamic State illegal oil exports is conducted through Turkey and Kurdish areas. Although Washington could curb the illegal traffic, it has chosen to focus on other issues, a former CIA officer told the Sputnik news agency.

"It's a question of priorities. They have never allocated enough resources to do so. Other goals and missions have been rated as having more urgent calls on intelligence and tactical resources," John Kiriakou, a former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) counterterrorism officer and US Senate Foreign Relations Committee senior investigator, told Sputnik.

He said Islamic State's (IS, formerly ISIS/ISIL) oil revenue lifeline could be cut short, if Washington made an effort to do so.

"I do believe that," Kiriakou stressed.

Nearly 100,000 refugees in Gaza face a second winter without proper housing, with just one of their homes rebuilt since being damaged or destroyed in Israel attack last year, said a United Nations agency that provides assistance in the region.

Families are living under tarpaulins, in animal shacks or with relatives and last winter, at least three children froze to death, said a spokesman for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East, known as UNRWA. "As the winter approaches, one shudders how these people are going to survive," the UNRWA spokesman, Christopher Gunness, said in an interview, Reuters reported on Friday.

The agency helps some 5 million Palestinian refugees in Gaza, the occupied West Bank, Lebanon, Jordan and Syria. "What these people need is proper homes," he said. Reconstruction in the enclave of 1.8 million people is hindered partly because of a lack of funds and partly because of a blockade that restricts goods entering and leaving Gaza, Gunness said.

During last year's 50-day war, Israeli airstrikes and shelling hammered the densely populated Gaza Strip causing widespread destruction of homes, schools, hospitals and factories. More than 2,100 Palestinians were killed, mostly civilians. Israel put the number of its dead at 67 soldiers and six civilians. "The underlying dynamics that saw the war in 2014 are still there," Gunness said. "Indeed they've probably got worse because in 2014 there weren't 13,000 families whose homes were uninhabitable.

"Even if Gaza was reconstructed magically tomorrow morning, unless Gaza is allowed to function economically, then it's hard to see how the instability is going to go away." The World Bank said in May that blockades, war and poor governance have strangled Gaza's economy and the unemployment rate is now the highest in the world. It stands at 43 percent, rising to 68 percent among people ages 20 to 24, the World Bank said. There have been no significant exports from Gaza since 2007. Israel maintains tight controls on the movement of goods and people in and out of the territory.

Scrambling now for weeks for an answer to their failed strategies in Syria, the U.S. empire has been licking its wounds from the setback their "7 countries in 5 years" PNAC plans have suffered at the hands of Russian strategy to take out CIA's ISIS.

Violent aggressive empires never give up in their quest to conquer foreign nations. Thus, not so surprisingly, in this next round of the global political chess game, the West and its military have apparently decided (notice on their own, without invitation from Syria itself) to send special forces ground troops into Syria, all under the guise of fighting their supposed enemy ISIS who is nothing more than their own proxy army which they have been supporting, arming and training all along as reported and confirmed widely.

This is a reminder that the oligarchs behind the U.S. empire know no boundaries even when they are exposed to the world. They are only concerned with pushing their plans at any cost. They believe the world belongs to them and that they are entitled to it. Thus at the root of these wars is a ruling class that feels these wars are profitable and well worth it since they also promote depopulation while providing an opportunity to destroy and consume other nations.

Daily Israeli atrocities continue, Palestinians are being murdered daily - the latest victim an 8-month-old baby boy. The PA health ministry said Ramadan Mohammad Faisal Thawabta died from toxic tear gas inhalation - another victim of Israeli state terror.

Since October 1, Israeli forces murdered 71 Palestinians in cold blood, including women (one pregnant), over a dozen children and two infants.

Three died on Friday alone:

• the 8-month-old infant;
• East Jerusalem youth Ahmad Hamada Qneibi, shot multiple times at point blank range, left to bleed to death, medics prevented from aiding him; and
• Qabatia youth Qasse Saba'na, another phony attempted stabbing incident claimed.

Stop the Wall activist Jamal Juma said Israel's ethnic cleansing scheme and plan to judaize al-Quds (Jerusalem) is being "hit strongly in the heart by the Palestinian youth uprising."

An apparent discovery of huge volumes of oil in the disputed Golan Heights brings the stakes of the Russian involvement in Syria to a new geopolitical dimension, F. William Engdahl stresses.

It is no secret anymore that the Western political establishment and its Gulf allies have facilitated the Syrian turmoil of 2011 which then evolved into a civil war in order to build competing gas pipelines through Syria to Turkey or via Lebanon to the Mediterranean.

However, it is only a part of the story, American-German historian and strategic risk consultant F. William Engdahl underscores.

"Now oil, lots of oil, comes into the play, and Israel is claiming it's theirs. The only problem is that it isn't. The oil is in the Golan Heights which Israel illegally took from Syria in the 1967 Six Day War," Engdahl pointed out in his recent article for New Eastern Outlook.

It would have remained just an Israeli or a Syrian headache if the problem was not a part of Western global energy game.

Catalonia's push for independence from Spain is illegitimate, as the region has not been recognized by the United Nations as a non-autonomous territory, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon told Spanish media.

"When one speaks of self-determination, certain areas have been recognized by the United Nations as non-autonomous territories. But Catalonia does not fall into this category," Ban said in an interview with Spanish newspapers El Pais, El Mundo, ABC and La Vanguardia.

Since the beginning of decolonization after World War II, the UN has considered "non-autonomous" those territories that are geographically separate and distinct ethnically and culturally from the country, which is administrating them.

The pro-independence parties, which won the local parliamentary election in September, say Catalonia has the right for self-determination due to having its own language and distinct culture.

Broadcasting from deep in the heart of the American Empire, join your host Elan Martin, and fellow Sott.net editors, as they discuss everything from current events and the latest machinations and manipulations of the global elite to history, science, and religion, and how it all fits together.

Monsters: What are they exactly? What forms do they take? What do they do? Is there a common thread between the 'supernatural' cases of Chupucabras or Mothman and serial killers Ted Bundy or Jeffrey Dahmer? Why has ISIS been so often referred to as a monster? And what do what do they all represent? Join us as we explore the concept of monsters, their meaning and their possible relation to our world.

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The United States' decision to send troops into Syria is an act of aggression because it does not have the government's agreement, a Syrian member of parliament said Saturday.

Sharif Shehadeh told The Associated Press that the troops will have no effect on the ground, but that Washington wants to say it is present in Syria.

"What has happened to make America realize, after five years, that it should send between 30 and 50 military advisers?" asked Shehadeh, referring to the start of the country's crisis in March 2011 that has since killed more than 250,000 people.

American officials say up to 50 special operations troops will be sent to assist Kurdish and Arab forces in northern Syria.

A U.S.-led coalition has been targeting the Islamic State group with airstrikes since September 2014, killing 12,000 extremists without weakening the group.

The decision to send U.S. troops to Syria comes a month after Russia began launching airstrikes against insurgents in the country. Russia's airstrikes were agreed upon with the Syrian government.

Georgia is demanding explanations from Ukraine after a leaked tape implicated the governor of the Odessa region Mikhail Saakashvili (also Georgia's former president), in calling for a violent coup in his home country.

Saakashvili, who resigned his presidential office in 2013 after almost a decade in power, is wanted at home on allegations of embezzlement and abuse of power. He was appointed a governor in Ukraine after a violent armed coup ousted its president in February 2014, an event that Saakashvili supported and praised.

The website called "Ukrainian revolution" has published a tape implicating Saakashvili in orchestrating a similar uprising in Georgia. In the conversations, which have not been independently verified, a man with a voice strongly resembling Georgia's ex-leader is heard to be advising such a course to Nika Gvaramia, the head of Rustavi 2, one of Georgia's biggest TV stations, and opposition leader Georgy Bokeria.

The U.S. political, military and intelligence leadership have been scrambling to save face in Syria since Putin threw a geopolitical curve-ball at the empire-builders one month ago. Russia has now been pounding them with it repeatedly for 30 glorious days, taking out 1,600 terrorist targets and sending many of the critters fleeing. Put simply, the Americans created a wasteland, dug a giant hole in that wasteland, filled it with cannibalistic, head-chopping psychopaths, and bet the farm on burying their enemies in it, only to find themselves neck-deep in their own duplicity and hubris, scrambling to escape a problem of their own creation. American petard, meet Russian hoist.

Here's how it happened. After decades of using every dirty trick in the book to expand and maintain their hegemony -- bribery, blackmail, torture, coups, assassinations, death squads -- the Americans got complacent. To this end, the 'Al-Qaeda' bogeyman served them well. It is at once both a media creation to terrify the plebs and justify domestic and foreign power-grabs and a cover for mercenary warfare against foreign resistance to American occupation (e.g., Iraq), and against governments who refused to toe the American line (e.g., Libya).

Al-Qaeda 2.0 (ISIS/ISIL/IS) is no different. From 9/11 and the launch of the 'war on terror', the empire-builders enforced the PATRIOT Act and corresponding police state legislation right across the Western world, launched wars of occupation and proxy wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Pakistan, Yemen, Mali and elsewhere and increased their economic, political and military dominance around the globe.

Naturally, they didn't think anyone would seriously challenge or call them on their bluff and bluster. Enter Vladimir Putin. Judging by American words and actions over the last month, and despite crying wolf about 'Russian invasions' in Ukraine since the coup d'état in Kiev in February 2014, the Americans didn't see the Russians coming in Syria.

Let's be honest here, the Americans practically handed it to Putin on a platter. They spent so much time and energy building up ISIS as the biggest, baddest, scariest bunch of psychopathic monsters that all Putin had to do was say, "Yeah, you guys are right. Mind if I take 'em on? You know I know Judo, right?" I would have loved to see the looks on their faces when they heard the news on September 30th.