Germany has just warned its citizens of an upcoming catastrophe and urged them to stockpile food, water and money for at least 10 days, to be autonomous and independent until the government has caught up putting the necessary public safety systems in place - in case of a 'catastrophe'. There was no mention on the type of disaster awaiting them. A war, an economic and or monetary collapse, or both? - The warning was later downplayed as part of a 'routine exercise' in Germany's new defense strategy.

On a related note, against many Members of Parliament and several ministers, the German Bundeswehr (army) has declared Russia as an enemy nation. This is akin to a declaration of war. The head of the Foreign Affairs Committee of the Russian State Duma, Alexei Puschkow, has posted the Twitter message:

'The decision of the German government declaring Russia to be an enemy shows Merkel's subservience to the Obama administration.'

The idea of the German warning is to scare people. People who are afraid can be easily manipulated. While buying supermarkets' shelves empty, they will ask for more police and military protection. That's precisely what Washington and the EU want - a militarization of Europe. Germany, being Obama's chief vassal, is the mouthpiece for the rest of Europe. At the same time, this scare tactic is an indirect warning of a threat of aggression from Russia. The past weeks of western lie-propaganda have shown Russia's protection of Crimea with heavy maneuvers in the Black Sea, depicting them as a preparation of war towards the west. Never mind that Ukraine's self-styled lord Poroshenko has threatened to take Crimea back, amassing troops and tanks at the border of this historic and strategic Russian peninsula.

Of course, things do not look good for the US-NATO led West with its EU stooges. Turkey's President Erdogan has turned away from the notorious west to Mr. Putin and may be abandoning his alliance with Washington, Brussels - and NATO. Russia has asked Ankara to use its Incirlik airbase in the south, close to the Syrian border, currently mainly occupied by NATO, storing some 50 US nuclear warheads and uncountable US fighter jets and helicopters, plus housing at least 5,000 US-NATO troops. Turkey's Prime Minister, Binali Yildirim, said last Saturday, that Russia could use the base, but denied that any such request has been made by Russia. In fact, according to EurActiv.com, "the Pentagon has initiated the transfer of 20 B61-type aviation bombs with nuclear warheads from the Turkish Incirlik air base to the Deveselu base in Romania currently hosting the US missile shield." Although the Romanian Foreign Ministry has denied this news, it is nonetheless largely credible, says Valentin Vasilescu of Russia's katehon.com.

Incidentally, Incirlik is the base from which the two Turkish fighters took off to shoot down the Russian fighter jet Su24 patrolling the Turkish-Syrian border last November. The two pilots, one of whom was the killer, were either CIA agents, or were acting on CIA orders. It is known that Incirlik is infested with dozens of CIA agents.

According to US defense officials, the guided missile destroyer USS Nitze was intercepted by four Iranian vessels near the Strait of Hormuz on Tuesday.

The American destroyer was operating in international waters alongside the USS Mason when officials say four Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps vessels performed a "high-speed intercept" of the Nitze.

"These sorts of unsafe and unprofessional actions can lead to escalation and miscalculation, which may necessitate additional defensive measures," said Cmdr. Bill Urban, public affairs officer for US Naval Forces Central Command, according to Stars and Stripes.

"Commanding officers have an inherent obligation for self defense."

A Westerner with extensive on-the-ground experience in Syria and Iraq tackles conventional Western views of the civil wars in Iraq and Syria and proposes a dramatic rethinking of the region.

Editor's Note: This is the second of two articles on this topic, the first of which was published last week. There has been some controversy over my decision to allow this author to write under a pen name. I know the author's identity and while his arguments are surely controversial, I am confident in his sourcing and subject matter expertise. I carefully considered his request to use a pen name. I decided that this case reasonably meets the standards for such protection published on our site. The author, in my view, can reasonably and seriously fear for his professional employment and safety publishing under his real name. -RE

I was not surprised to see my first article greeted with so much outrage by those who adhere to the conventional Western narrative of the civil wars in Iraq and Syria as well as the larger tumult of the Middle East. In truth, these conflicts are not so easily defined by the easy sectarian narrative offered in the Western press. I argued that Western elites were surrendering to and even embracing the Saudi definition of what Sunni identity should mean. And I provided accounts of the conflicts in Syria and Iraq that do not comport with what you likely have been reading in the newspapers.

It has been a quarter of a century now since the fall of the Soviet Union and yet the memory of the Soviet Armed Forces is still vivid in the minds of many of those who lived through the Cold War or even remember WWII. The NATO-sponsored elites of Eastern Europe still continue to scare their citizens by warning of a danger of "Russian tanks" rolling down their streets as if the Soviet tanks were about to advance on Germany again. For a while, the accepted image of a Russian soldier in the West was a semi-literate drinking and raping Ivan who would attack in immense hordes with little tactical skills and an officer corps selected for political loyalty and lack of imagination. Then the propaganda narrative changed and now the new Russian bogeyman is a "little green man" who will suddenly show up to annex some part of the Baltics to Russia. Putatively pro-Russian "experts" add to the confusion by publicly hallucinating of a Russian deployment in Syria and the Mediterranean which could wrestle the entire region away from Uncle Sam and fight the entire NATO/CENCOM air forces and navies with confidence. This is all nonsense, of course, and what I propose to do here is to provide a few very basic pointers about what the modern Russian military can and cannot do in 2016. This will not be a highly technical discussion but rather a list of a few simple, basic, reminders.

Russia is not the Soviet Union

The first and most important thing to keep in mind is that the Russian military is truly focused on the defense of Russian territory. Let me immediately say that contrary to much of the Cold War propaganda, the Soviet military was also defensive in essence, even if it did include a number of offensive elements:

1. The military control of all of Eastern Europe as a "buffer zone" to keep the US/NATO away from the Soviet Union's borders.
2. An official ideology, Communism, which was messianic and global in its stated goals (more or less, depending on who was in power)
3. A practice of global opposition to the US Empire anywhere on the planet with technical, political, financial, scientific and, of course, military means

Russia has exactly zero interest in any of these. Not only did the nature of modern warfare dramatically reduce the benefits of being forward deployed, the messianic aspects of Communism have even been abandoned by the Communist Party of Russia which is now focused on the internal socio-economic problems of Russia and which has no interest whatsoever in liberating the Polish or Austrian proletariat from Capitalist exploitation. As for a global military presence, Russia has neither the means nor the desire to waste her very limited resources on faraway territories which do not contribute to her defense.

Airstrikes carried out by the Saudi-led coalition in Yemen are responsible for the majority of civilians killed in the country's ongoing conflict, the UN has found, while calling for an international investigation into the coalition's violations there.

"OHCHR has documented incidents in which air strikes by the coalition forces had an impact on localities with a high concentration of civilians, including markets and residential areas, as well as on events such as wedding ceremonies, frequently incurring high casualties and causing substantive infrastructural damage," the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights said in a report.

"The cases monitored by the Office indicate that air strikes were the single largest cause of casualties," the report published on Thursday states. "The prolonged duration of the conflict has strongly heightened the disastrous risk of a systemic collapse of Yemen."

The Kremlin website has confirmed that Russian President Vladimir Putin had a telephone conversation about Ukraine with German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Francois Hollande on Tuesday 23rd August 2016.

"President of Russia Vladimir Putin updated his colleagues on the crude provocation by Ukraine, which sent a group of subversives in early August to stage terrorist attacks in Russia. Kiev's use of such forceful measures is directly harming the Minsk process and
cooperation within the Normandy format."

Labour leadership candidate Owen Smith has vowed to stop the government triggering Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty, the official process to bring Britain out of the EU, unless a second referendum is held on the final Brexit deal.

The leadership challenger said on Wednesday the party wants to stay in the EU and that he will hold a second referendum if he becomes prime minister.

Smith's comments have sparked a backlash among Brexiteers, who described it as a snub to the 35 percent of Labour members who opted to leave the EU.

Britain voted to leave the EU by 52 percent to 48 percent on June 23 after a heated referendum campaign which exposed sharp divisions throughout the country.

France could be responsible for the 2013 Ghouta chemical weapons attack along with several other countries with similar motives and capabilities, former envoy to the UN James Paul told Sputnik.

"Many hawkish parties keen for a Syrian intervention might have seen a black operation using such weapons as a logical move," Paul said on Wednesday. "France could have been one such party, Britain another, the United States a third. But the list is long."

Representative of the Syrian Republic to the UN, Bashar al-Jaafery told Sputnik in an exclusive interview this week that there was evidence suggesting the involvement of France in the these attacks.

Paul cautioned that there were other suspects with motives to try and embroil the United States in a full-scale war with Syria.

The US has agreed to help Turkey capture the border city of Jarablus in Syria to appease Ankara, which was concerned it would fall to Kurdish fighters. US warplanes are carrying out airstrikes in support of the operation, a Pentagon official said. On Wednesday, Turkey sent special forces and tanks to seize the border city of Jarablus in northwestern Syria from Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS/ISIL), which has been in control of it since 2013.

Turkish artillery has been pounding targets in Syria for two days and Turkish warplanes are providing aerial support for the troops on the ground in their first foray into Syrian airspace since November of last year, when a Turkish fighter jet shot down a Russian bomber near the Syrian-Turkish border.

US drones based at Incirlik Air Base in southern Turkey are assisting the operation by carrying out surveillance missions over the combat zone, the Wall Street Journal reported, citing US officials. American military advisers on the Turkish side of the border are reportedly helping to plan the offensive. "We are syncing up with the Turks," a senior US official told the WSJ. "We have full visibility on what they are doing." American A-10 'Warthog' ground attack aircraft and F-16 figher jets are carrying out airstrikes in support of the Turkish ground operation, a Pentagon official told Reuters.

The coordinated attack is meant to capture Jarablus and hand it over to Turkish-backed Syrian rebels before Syrian Kurdish forces can take it, the report said. The Kurds recently took the city Manbij south of Jarablus and have been pushing north.

The ruling of the Court of Arbitration for Sport on the Russian Paralympic team ban is cynical and immoral, President Vladimir Putin has said, adding that Russia will not accept accusations of doping without proof.

Speaking to the Russian Olympic team - which has recently returned from the Rio 2016 Games - Putin congratulated the athletes on their performance. With Russia's track and field team banned from this summer's Olympics, the nation still finished fourth in the medal standings, behind the US, Great Britain and China. The country won 19 gold, 18 silver and 19 bronze medals.

"I want to thank all of you [the Olympic team] for passing a severe test with dignity. You have shown the highest skill, displayed endurance, and confirmed the strong position of Russia in the world of sport," Putin said.

The president added that Russia will hold a competition similar to the Rio 2016 Paralympic Games for the athletes who have been banned. "I'd like to address our Paralympic team: we will support you and will hold a special competition where you will show your skills," Putin said. The prizes and compensation will be equivalent to those at the Rio Paralympic Games, he said.