After the events in 1979 and the Islamic Revolution, which took place in Iran by overthrowing the Pahlavi dynasty, the new government of Iran was charged with a serious task: maintaining order and preventing a counter-revolution. The survival of the new government was crucial, especially since the previous dynasty was very close to the Western governments and the US. The most reliable mechanism for achieving this was, of course, military control. Regular forces of Iran's army were not enough to ensure the survival of the Islamic Republic - we should keep in mind that much of the regular forces were leftovers of the previous regime and could not be fully trusted. However, revolutionary forces, which include the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), Basij militia and the Quds Force, have had an enormous impact on maintaining the Islamic Republic's government, but also, the IRGC gained a significant position in Iranian society and state policy. The IRGC, which was formed in 1979, is a product of the Islamic Revolution and since then, as a military organisation in Iran, it became one of the pillars of the Iranian state. On the 5th of May 1979, Ayatollah Khomeini issued a decree with which the IRGC was formed as a parallel military structure beside the Iranian Army. The IRGC was focused on internal matters rather than on external ones. The Revolutionary Council also stated eight categories of duties for the IRGC:

• Assisting security apparatus in dealing with counter-revolutionary elements
• Fighting armed counter-revolutionaries
• Battling against foreign forces inside the country
• Cooperating with the armed forces of the country in training subordinates in moral, ideological and political matters
• Assisting the government in implementing the Islamic Revolution
• Supporting liberation movements across the world in their fight for justice under the tutelage of the leader of the Islamic Revolution
• Utilising all resources in dire times of catastrophes and calamities in order the help and improve the society of the Islamic Republic of Iran

Putin's meetings with the Chinese leadership in Beijing and Tashkent consolidate the most powerful alliance in the world today.

Though it has received minimal attention in the West, last week Putin completed his 15th visit to China where he held intensive talks with the Chinese leadership led by Chinese President Xi Jinping.

This came directly after Putin met Xi Jinping at the immediately preceding Shanghai Cooperation Organisation summit in Tashkent. According to Chinese Prime Minister Li Keqiang, whom Putin also met in Beijing, Xi Jinping has met Putin more often than he has met any other foreign leader.

On the Russian side the talks between Putin and the Chinese leadership in Beijing did not involve Putin alone. Putin's meeting with Xi Jinping in Beijing started as a one-to-one meeting with just the two leaders and their interpreters present. It was then expanded to include top officials and ministers of both the Russian and Chinese governments.

Who are you going to believe: us, or your lying eyes? That's the good word from Democratic Party powers that be and their transcribers in the corporate media, in response to the "allegations" by Bernie Sanders supporters that the nomination was stolen by Hillary Clinton.

I used scare quotes around the word "allegations" because the truth is plain to see and undeniable by anyone with a microgram of honesty: Hillary Clinton cheated. If the rules had been followed, Bernie Sanders would be the nominee.

As with all things Clinton, of course, definitions matter. It depends on what the meaning of "cheat" is.

To most people, "cheating" means breaking the rules of a contest. By this standard definition, there's no doubt that the Clinton campaign, its political allies and the Democratic National Committee cheated in favor of Clinton and against Sanders. They broke the law. They disenfranchised voters. They broke party rules. And they violated long-standing customs that are so widely accepted that they are essentially de facto rules of the Democratic Party and the American political system.

In this video the former finance minister of Greece and founder of DiEM25 (Democracy in Europe Movement 2025), Yanis Varoufakis, provides us an insight into why the European constitution does not represent the people of Europe and lacks substance. He also talks about disintegration of the European Union, what forces are driving its demise and how Orwellian language is used to hide this.

• Do we have a constitution that represents the voice of the European people?
• Could the EU disintegrate in the near future?
• What are the observations that are pointing towards a disintegrating European Union?
• Is Orwellianism being employed to deceive the population?

These questions and more are addressed in this video.

This has been an amazing week which saw the first clear sign of the collapse of the EU and Turkish President Erdogan presenting his excuses to Russia for the downing of a Russian SU-24 over Syria 7 month ago. While the latter event was largely eclipsed by the former, it might be the sign of something even more dramatic taking place: the collapse of Turkey.

Does that seem like hyperbole?

Let's look again.

The Presidency of Erdogan has been nothing short of cataclysmic for Turkey which resulted in a perfect storm of crises, each of them very serious:

1) Crisis in Syria: the Turkish policy of support for Daesh to overthrow Assad has failed. Abjectly so. Not only is Assad still in power, but the latest bombing in Turkey seem to indicated that Daesh is turning against Turkey now (assuming the official explanations is true, which it might not be as we will discuss below). The entire Syria policy of Erdogan is now in shambles.

2) Crisis with the EU: the last thing the Brits did before Brexiting was to tell Turkey that it could join the EU in 3000 years. Other EU member states were not as direct, but everybody knows that this is true. Furthermore, the grand Erdogan-Merkel friendship and alliance has completely fizzled out.

The first two days of the past week saw two momentous developments on the diplomatic front take place on the Turkish scene. But Tuesday night then witnessed a heinous terror attack that left the country reeling. The ruling Justice and Development Party (or AKP), led by Prime Minister Binali Yıldırım (aka Hapless) and staunchly supported by the nominally neutral President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan (aka the Prez), appeared in shock following a triple suicide attack on the Atatürk Airport in Istanbul . . . but could it be that these seemingly random and unrelated events are somehow interlinked and interconnected?

Last Monday and Tuesday (27-28 June 2016) have constituted a most momentous 48 hours for Turkey. At the very outset of the week, things looked up with the Turkish media (read, the state propaganda apparatus) reporting that Israel had finally decided to make reparations and reinstate cordial relations with Turkey, relations that have been shaky ever since then-PM Erdoğan's "One Minute" performance at Davos (30 January 2009) and the subsequent deadly Mavi Marmara incident (31 May 2010).

Later on during the same day then news emerged that Turkey had, in turn, made overtures towards Russia, in an attempt to patch up things between Ankara and Moscow, between Tayyip Erdoğan and Vladimir Putin. Following these two major developments on the political scene, pundits and the public alike were busy regurgitating the facts when Tuesday night, towards 10 PM, terrorist struck at Istanbul's main communication artery, the Atatürk Airport in Yeşilköy, the nation's biggest and Europe's third largest, in operation since 1924, serving more than 60 million passengers last year.

The Ukrainian Army has received four advanced counterbattery radar systems and 10 countermortar radar systems from the United States military, according to Russian language news accounts.

The systems, used at the battalion level by US troops, are among the most advanced of its type in the world. The systems enables the operator to pinpoint the location of firing artillery and mortars and enable friendly artillery to hit and destroy firing artillery, according to a story posted on the korrespondent.net news website.

Four each AN/PQ-36 Firefinder radar systems and 10 each AN/TPQ-49 radar systems arrived at the Boryspil International Airport on Saturday. According to the report, additional $500 million in direct aid is to be transferred to Ukraine from the United States.

Whatever deal has been struck still leaves Palestine under a horrendous, medieval siege. Israeli historian Ilan Pappe was not far off the mark when he qualified it as "incremental genocide." It's like this was a post-modern normalization of relations with apartheid South Africa.

Pepe Escobar is an independent geopolitical analyst. He writes for RT, Sputnik and TomDispatch, and is a frequent contributor to websites and radio and TV shows ranging from the US to East Asia. He is the former roving correspondent for Asia Times Online, where he wrote the column The Roving Eye from 2000 to 2014. Born in Brazil, he's been a foreign correspondent since 1985, and has lived in London, Paris, Milan, Los Angeles, Washington, Bangkok and Hong Kong. Even before 9/11 he specialized in covering the arc from the Middle East to Central and East Asia, with an emphasis on Big Power geopolitics and energy wars. He is the author of "Globalistan" (2007), "Red Zone Blues" (2007), "Obama does Globalistan" (2009) and "Empire of Chaos" (2014), all published by Nimble Books. His latest book is "2030", also by Nimble Books, out in December 2015. He currently lives between Paris and Bangkok. In an exclusive interview with the English section of Khamenei.ir, Mr. Escobar's sheds light on Turkey-Israel relations and the issue of Palestine.

The following is the full text of the interview:

On July 4, 1776, America gained independence from Britain. Everything changed but stayed the same under new management - the way the framers planned it.

Today we'd call them a Wall Street crowd - a deplorable bunch, including bankers, merchants, planters, ship owners, lawyers, politicians, judges, slave owners and traders, speculators, smugglers, privateers, and other type wheeler-dealers.

"We the people," meant them, not us. They created a government of men, not laws. Property owners alone had rights. Ordinary people didn't matter, entirely left out.

The Washington Post in its recent article, "How Obama went from reluctant warrior to drone champion," attempts to address the White House's recent claims regarding civilian casualties resulting from US drone strikes since 2009. The article points out that while the US officially claims "between 64 and 116″ civilians have been killed, it also includes estimates from various think-tanks and pro-war propaganda outlets admitting to at least 200-300 civilian deaths.

However, even these numbers are conservatively low, and in The Washington Post's attempt to "check" White House numbers, it itself appears to be attempting to downplay the full scale of America's global drone operations, portraying it as a perhaps ill-fated but honest attempt to target and eliminate dangerous terrorists. However, it is anything but, and the "numbers game" is merely a distraction from this fact.

Leaked US Documents Reveal Drones Seek to Create, Not Stop Terror

It was revealed by the Intercept through leaked US government documents that civilians may account for as much as 90% of all casualties from drone strikes. In its first article in a long series detailing America's drone operations titled, The Assassination Complex, it reports:

...documents detailing a special operations campaign in northeastern Afghanistan, Operation Haymaker, show that between January 2012 and February 2013, U.S. special operations airstrikes killed more than 200 people. Of those, only 35 were the intended targets. During one five-month period of the operation, according to the documents, nearly 90 percent of the people killed in airstrikes were not the intended targets. In Yemen and Somalia, where the U.S. has far more limited intelligence capabilities to confirm the people killed are the intended targets, the equivalent ratios may well be much worse.

And upon viewing the leaked Operation Haymaker documents, it becomes clear that America's drone operations in Afghanistan have admittedly very little tactical value in eliminating specific "terrorists," and the actual "benefits" noted amid these operations is instead the perpetuation of terror, fear and sociopolitical division in targeted areas, including among civilian populations.

Considering these noted "benefits," high civilian casualty rates of up to 90% makes sense. If the goal is to simply instill fear, it doesn't matter who dies, just as long as someone does.