Five years ago this month, Russia began conducting fateful military operations in Syria at the request of the government in Damascus. It was a momentous "turning point," as
noted by Syria's President Assad this week, whose nation is slowly rising from the ashes of war.
More than salvaging Syria from a nearly decade-long war - vitally important though that was - Russia's pivotal intervention also marked the strategic setback for a Western-backed campaign of regime change and wanton illegal war-making across the Middle East and North Africa.
That decisive blow against the presumed hegemony of the United States and its NATO allies is no doubt a factor in the seeming relentless efforts by the West to isolate and smear Russia with sanctions and other provocations, efforts that continue unabated to the present day.
Russia's intervention was a principled response to aid an historic ally, the Syrian Arab Republic. The Levantine nation was at the time already assailed for four years by an array of illegally armed militant groups which were threatening to over-run the country. These groups comprised hundreds of thousands of mercenaries from dozens of countries and were lionized in Western media as "rebels" in a deceptive propaganda cover for the fact that they were in reality hardcore terrorists slaughtering their way to Damascus. These "rebels" beloved by Western governments and media carried out beheadings and other unspeakable atrocities against civilians.
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