US sending 200 more special ops soldiers to Syria – Pentagon chief

FILE PHOTO: U.S soldiers ride a military vehicle in al-Kherbeh village, northern Aleppo province, Syria October 24, 2016 © Khalil Ashawi / Reuters

RT,

10 December, 2016

The US is sending 200 additional military personnel to Syria to help drive Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS/ISIL) from Raqqa, US Defense Secretary Ash Carter said on Saturday.

Speaking in Bahrain at the Manama Dialogue conference on Middle East security, Carter said the 200, including special forces trainers, advisers, and explosive ordnance disposal teams, would join 300 US special forces already in Syria.

“These uniquely skilled operators will join the 300 US special operations forces already in Syria, to continue organizing, training, equipping, and otherwise enabling capable, motivated, local forces to take the fight to ISIL,” Carter said, as quoted by AP.

“By combining our capabilities with those of our local partners, we've been squeezing ISIL by applying simultaneous pressure from all sides and across domains, through a series of deliberate actions to continue to build momentum,” he added.

READ MORE: 18K residents leave rebel-held parts of eastern Aleppo – Russian military

The vanishing civilians of Aleppo

Gwynne Dyer

Bangkok Post,

9 Deceber, 2016

The battles for Aleppo have been savage, but there now is a question of whether all the stories about endangered or slaughtered civilians were simply made up. (AFP photo)

Did it cross your mind occasionally, in the past week, to wonder where all of the "250,000 civilians trapped in eastern Aleppo" have gone? As the area of the city under rebel control dwindled -- by Wednesday morning the Syrian regime's troops had recaptured three-quarters of it -- did you see massive columns of fleeing civilians, or mounds of civilian dead?

If several hundred thousand people were on the move, you would expect to be seeing video images of it. If they were fleeing into the enclave the rebels still hold (to escape the evil Syrian army), you would expect the rebels to give us dramatic images of that. They certainly gave us footage of every civilian killed by Russian bombing in eastern Aleppo over the past three months.

And if hundreds of thousands or even just tens of thousands of civilians were fleeing for safety into government-held territory, you would expect the regime's propagandists to be making equally striking images available. "Look!" they would say. "The civilians really loved President Bashar al-Assad all along."

Or maybe the civilians are all dead. Stephen O'Brien, the UN's Undersecretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs, warned just a week ago that if Mr Assad's forces went on advancing, then "the besieged parts of eastern Aleppo" would become "one giant graveyard". So where are those quarter-million bodies? Or even a few thousand bodies? That's kind of hard to hide.

Here's a radical thought: Have most of those quarter-million people suddenly become invisible because they were never really there in the first place?

There were certainly a significant number of civilians trapped with the rebels: you saw them crying and shaking their fists every time the Russians bombed another hospital. But even then, did you sometimes think how strange it was that the Russian air force never seemed to bomb anything but hospitals? Where's the strategic sense in that?

Well, here's a clue. There were no foreign journalists in eastern Aleppo. They were quite reasonably afraid of being kidnapped by one of the many rebel groups in the city and held for ransom -- or accused of being spies and ritually slaughtered by one of the more extreme Islamist outfits.

All the reporting out of eastern Aleppo for the past three months has been what the rebel groups wanted us to see, and nothing else. And to them, the presence of large numbers of "defenceless civilians", the more the better, was their best protection against a full-scale onslaught by the regime.

So of course they gave us video of every civilian killed by a bomb, and greatly exaggerated the number of civilians in their part of the city, and almost never showed their own fighters.

There's no crime in this. It's the way propaganda works, and nobody fighting a war can afford to be too respectful of the truth. The real question is this: Why did the international media fall for it?

For months, what was obviously rebel propaganda has been shown by the world's media as if it were the impartial truth. Was it just laziness, or was it subservience to a political agenda set by the West and its main allies in the Middle East? A bit of both, probably.

The United States, Saudi Arabia and Turkey were all determined to see the overthrow of Bashar al-Assad's regime, even if it did take six years of civil war. And even though they didn't agree on what they wanted to replace it with.

Washington pursued the dream of a democratic, secular Syria. Riyadh and Ankara wanted a decisive victory by the Sunni Arab majority (about 60-65% of the population) and an authoritarian Islamic state. But they all agreed on the need to overthrow Mr Assad, and left the rest for later.

Syrians from the start were much more ambivalent. Few loved the Assad regime, which was repressive and brutal. But many Syrians -- including many Sunni Muslims, especially in the cities -- saw the regime as their only protection against the triumph of an even nastier Islamist dictatorship.

There was never a mass uprising in Aleppo against the regime. Various rebel groups from the overwhelmingly Sunni rural areas around Aleppo stormed into the city in 2012 and won control over the eastern half, but it was never clear that the local residents were glad to see them.

On the other hand, it was not a good idea to look too unhappy about it, so over the next four years a great many people left the rebel-held part of the city, whose population gradually dwindled to -- well, we don't know exactly how many remained by this year, but it was certainly not a quarter-million or anywhere near it.

And it would appear that when the Syrian army retook most of eastern Aleppo in the past week, most of those people just stayed in their homes and waited to be "liberated". Some of them will be terrified of being arrested and tortured, especially if they collaborated with the rebels even under duress. And others will simply be relieved that it's over.

Free Syrian Army Enters al-Bab From North, East With Turkish Army Support

Free Syrian Army troops entered the Syrian city of al-Bab in the Aleppo Governorate from North and East with the support of the Turkish army on Friday, according to the information received by Sputnik correspondent from a source in the FSA

Aleppo: people dance with relief after being freed

Streets of Old Aleppo Covered in Hair as 'Moderate Rebels' Shave Their Beards and Run

Once all the rage in Aleppo, jihad beards have suddenly become extremely unpopular

Russia Insider,
9 December, 2016

A quick update from Aleppo, which is now 85% under Syrian control, according to all reliable reports.

As Aleppo residents rush into government-controlled areas, Al-Qaeda affiliates and other democratic groups encircled by Assad and his allies are shaving their freedom beards and bouncing. Martyrdom will just have to wait, we suppose:

‏@maytham956

The hair of the shaved beards of the terrorist scum who exited #Aleppo. A photo that was taken in the old city of #Aleppo #Syria

4:05 AM - 10 Dec 2016

And as the "moderate rebels" (see: extremists who would gladly slit your throat) are hightailing it out of Aleppo, religious tolerance has once again returned to this ancient city:

Christian priest and a Muslim Imam pray together in #Aleppo #Syria following the #SAA recent victories pic.twitter.com/hUeGSPOOkx

— G (@SyrianLionesss)

December 9, 2016

A simple but important aspect of Assad's "evil regime" in Syria is that it is secular. What a shocking concept, right?

Readers with agile memories might also recall a similar, hair-related story from October, 2015, in which "moderate rebels", faced with Russian airstrikes, shaved their beards and fled to Turkey:

See all that hair? That's what victory looks like