Al Qaeda fighters retook on Wednesday two southern Yemeni towns they briefly occupied four years ago, residents and local fighters said, exploiting the collapse of central authority in Yemen in its eight-month war.

In an early morning surprise attack on the capital of Abyan province, Zinjibar, and the neighbouring town of Jaar, the militants overcame local forces and announced their takeover over loudspeakers after dawn prayers.

Residents identified them as Ansar al-Sharia, a local affiliate of al Qaeda.

At least seven local militiamen and five militants were killed, according to local fighters. Militants were deployed to the streets of both towns, and in Jaar blew up the house of a local commander killed in the fighting, residents said. Schools and shops were closed.

Another Doctors Without Borders medical facility in Yemen was bombed yesterday — the second to be destroyed by the U.S.-backed Saudi-led coalition in just over a month.

At least nine people were injured, including two medical staff members. Two of the wounded have life-threatening injuries. The injured were transferred to two other hospitals being supported by Doctors Without Borders, which is known internationally as Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF).

The clinic, which was located in the al-Houban district of Yemen's southern city Ta'iz, had treated 480 patients in the two days before the attack.

As in previous cases of U.S.-backed forces bombing MSF facilities, the Saudi-led coalition was given the precise location of the al-Houban clinic. "The health structure's GPS coordinates were regularly shared with the Saudi-led coalition, most recently on November 29, when we informed them about this specific activity in al-Houban," noted Jerome Alin, MSF head of mission in Yemen. "There is no way that the Saudi-led coalition could have been unaware of the presence of MSF activities in this location."

Neither the Saudi-led coalition nor the Houthi Shiite rebels are winning the war in Yemen. Who is? Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP). Yes, the same terrorist group that senior U.S. officials once listed as the "most dangerous" threat to domestic and international American interests. As a U.S.-led coalition of 65 nations degrades the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) across nine lines of effort, the war in Yemen continues to strain the resources of various Arab air forces, with some Gulf states temporarily withdrawing from counter-ISIS sorties in order to support the war in Yemen. The results have not been in Saudi Arabia's favor; Yemeni civilian casualties are high, coalition troops continue to be attacked by advanced weaponry, and the fragile state in the Arabian Peninsula continues to plunge into a desolate chaos.

It's everything AQAP has ever wanted. Worrisome of what the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action — the agreement to halt Iran's enrichment of uranium — will mean for the region, Riyadh is focused on checking Tehran's influence in southwest Asia. The coalition's primary objective is to root Iran's proxy, the Houthis, from power after the rebels sent Yemeni President Abdu Rabu Mansour Hadi into exile in early 2015 — except it isn't working. The weak power projection of Hadi's government forces and the Houthis' resolve in the north are allowing for swathes of central and eastern Yemen to essentially be ungoverned areas, which is ripe for al Qaeda's expansion. With neither a functioning government in Sanaa to provide services and a coalition that is undoubtedly failing to drive their Iranian-backed opponents out of power, Yemen has once again become a safe haven for AQAP and, to a dramatically lesser extent, ISIS militants.

Germany's lower house of parliament has approved joining the military campaign against Islamic State in Syria.

Germany will send six Tornado reconnaissance jets, a frigate to help protect the French aircraft carrier Charles de Gaulle, refueling aircraft, and up to 1,200 military personnel to Syria, Reuters reported.

However, Germany will not join in airstrikes, which are currently being launched by the US, Britain, France, and Russia.

Of the 598 lawmakers who took part in the Friday vote, 445 voted for military action and 146 against. Seven members of parliament abstained.

The decision was put to parliament following an appeal from France which came after the November 13 terror attacks in Paris. Until now, Germany has provided only logistical and technical assistance to the international alliance fighting against IS.

The mission's cost is estimated to reach about US$141.7 million.

Donald Trump's recent strategy to deal with ISIS — executing their families, whether or not they are involved in terrorist activities — is probably one of the coldest suggestions to come from Trump yet. Akin to executing the families of the Oath Keepers, the Ku Klux Klan, or another right-wing terrorist group, Trump's idea has managed to incense a lot of people — including Israeli counter-terrorism expert and former consultant to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Boaz Ganor.

During a Wednesday appearance on Fox and Friends, Trump said that not only would he "bomb the sh*t out of" ISIS — he'd hunt their loved ones down and kill them too, because YOLO — though he would "do his best" to avoid "collateral damage":

"I mean one of the problems that we have and one of the reasons that we're so ineffective, is they're trying to, they're using them as shields. A horrible thing. They're using them as shields. But we're fighting a very politically correct war. And the other thing is with the terrorists, you have to take out their families. When you get these terrorists, you have to take out their families. They care about their lives, don't kid yourself. But they say they don't care about their lives. You have to take out their families."

Trump has traditionally refused to say how he would stop ISIS, explaining that he doesn't want the enemy to know his big, beautiful strategy — but he's perfectly happy making it clear that, whatever he does, he has no problem blasting through scores and scores of helpless women and children to accomplish it. Ganor says that Trump's plan is not only horrific — he is basing his ISIS strategy on committing war crimes:

"Any deliberate attacks aimed against civilians is a war crime, regardless if they are family members of terrorists or presidents or presidential candidates."

"Adopting this policy is immoral and against the common liberal democratic values," Ganor, the founder and executive director of the International Institute for Counter-Terrorism, explained. "Deliberate attacks against the terrorist families is blurring the moral differences between the terrorist organizations and the state which is fighting terrorism. This by itself might benefit the terrorists which are trying to claim that they are fighting a moral war against relentless and immoral entity."

Ganor says that slaughtering entire families might feel great to someone like Trump, but it will actually have little impact on terrorism. "They might just spend more time and resources" on protecting family members, he said. "Nevertheless, I don't think that the threat to kill their families will deter terrorist leaders from being engaged in terrorist activities."

Like predictable clockwork, just when the truth comes out exposing the criminal enterprise behind terrorism and war on a global scale, another false flag mass shooting steals the mainstream headlines in a wag the dog formula that works like a charm every time. The latest is the Russians have just released proof that the US Empire's number one ally in the Middle East - Turkey - has just been caught financing Islamic State terrorism, the largest terrorist organization on the planet. A press conference held Wednesday by the Russian Ministry of Defense revealed that an illegal family business belongs to Turkish President Erdogan and his son as owner of the oil distribution company that funds ISIS terrorism. For over two months now Putin has been demolishing ISIS infrastructure, rapidly destroying the Islamic State's biggest funding source from continued sale of stolen oil from Syria and Iraq transported to the Erdogans in Turkey.

A senior defence official has called on Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu's right wing government to prepare to intervene in Syria and deal with the likely spillover of the nearly five-year long conflict into Israel itself.

Amos Gilad, the director of the political-security division in the Defence Ministry and a former senior Military Intelligence official, was reported on Israel's Army Radio on Saturday as saying, "Syria is a dead state, and Israel must understand this and prepare accordingly."

Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's grip on his country was failing and it had become "a land without rule."

In his call to put Israel on a war footing, Gilad is ramping up the possibility of a much broader conflagration in the region. His remarks come in the wake of Russia's aerial bombardment of Islamist forces, many linked to AlQaeda and other militias backed by the US and its regional allies, to shore up the Assad regime, alongside support from Iran, and Lebanon's Hezbollah.

Netanyahu has claimed that Iran and Syria have been providing advanced weapons, many of which are directed at Israeli cities, to Hezbollah, against which it fought a murderous war in 2006 as part of a broader plan to push back Iran's regional allies.


Last September, during a meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Moscow, he warned that Israel would not tolerate Iran's arming of Tel Aviv's enemies, and would take action to prevent it. "At the same time, Iran, under the auspices of the Syrian army, is attempting to build a second terrorist front against us from the Golan Heights," he said.

Israel seized part of Syria's Golan Heights in the 1967 war, later annexing it and building settlements there in defiance of international law.

The western news blackout of Russia's evidence of Turkish involvement in ISIS oil smuggling, along with the dismissal of Putin's appeals during his "state of nation" address, sets a troubling precedent

Is it any wonder that your average, well educated, public minded American, Briton, Frenchman, or Belgian is largely clueless about the key international events that are today leading the international community to the brink of world war after reading his or her favorite newspaper of record, be it The New York Times, The Guardian, Le Figaro or Le Soir, and trying to catch the news bulletins on local state television, or on Euronews or the BBC for that matter.

I will take one vivid example from this week to drive home the reality of a news blackout that cuts across the United States and Europe media when something which might upset the complacency of the audience about Russia comes up. On Wednesday, 2 December, the Russian Ministry of Defense invited several hundred journalists and all the military attaches of accredited embassies in Moscow to a briefing at which Deputy Minister Anatoly Antonov presented reconnaissance photos taken from satellites and aircraft proving the existence of a massive logistical operation that has been bringing illicit oil from wells in Iraq and Syria controlled by the Islamic State jihadists by tanker truck across the border with Turkey and onward to processing facilities for local use and to port installations from where it is shipped to third countries. The key points in this operation were identified explicitly. Given the scale, involving thousands of tankers on the move, the revenue from these sales would amount to hundreds of millions of euros per year, sufficient to finance extensively the recruitment of fighters and military supplies for the terrorists.

The Pentagon isn't known for being frugal with its spending habits, and new reports have surfaced which show that US taxpayers footed the bill for nearly $150 million in luxury villa rentals and fine dining in Afghanistan.

When Pentagon personnel travel abroad, they're typically placed in government housing, perfectly livable accommodations which save taxpayers millions. But according to a letter written by John Sopko, the chief of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR), a Defense Department agency spent an exorbitant sum to house government employees in "western-style accommodations."

"If (task force) employees had instead lived at (Department of Defense) facilities in Afghanistan, where housing, security, and food service are routinely provided at little or no extra charge to DoD organizations, it appears the taxpayers would have saved tens of millions dollars," Sopko wrote, according to USA Today.

To provide those employees of the Task Force for Business and Stability Operations (TFBSO) with flat-screen TVs of at least 27 inches, private bodyguards, and food of at least "three star" quality, the total bill reached $150 million, 20% of the task force's total budget.

That money was meant to go toward rebuilding Afghanistan's infrastructure, but instead went to a military contractor known as Triple Canopy to provide the pricey accommodations. That company has earned approximately $2.2 billion in government contracts since the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan began in 2003.

Before absorbing the message conveyed by the mainstream media when they show you images of masked terrorists, (juxtaposed with images of masked special forces) have you ever stopped and wondered how to tell them apart? Why do people wear masks anyway? Wearing a mask obviously helps to conceal identity. When 'officers of the law' hide their faces in this way, we assume it is to to prevent possible "revenge" attacks against him or his family. But is that really the case?

Before we answer that, what about these lunatic Muslim terrorists who carry out attacks like we saw in Paris a few weeks ago? We're told that they wish to die in the name of Allah and be remembered as prophets or martyrs, but they wear masks too. But wouldn't a mask defeat that particular purpose, not to mention being rather superfluous on a 'suicide mission'?