TBR News February 17, 2018

Feb 17 2018

Washington, D.C. February 17, 2018:” “A constant subject for the high-level intelligence people inside the Beltway is the progress of what is called ‘The Plan.’

This is a long-term program, formulated and implemented, by the far-right element in the government and eagerly supported by the so-called neo-cons.

The purpose of this program is to destabilize Russia, force Putin and his supporters out of office and replace them, as was done during the reign of the CIA-friendly Yeltsin, with persons friendly to the United States aims and, especially, friendly to US business interests.

Russia is in possession of a very large reservoir of natural resources from oil to gold and American interests very nearly had their controlling hands on all of this during the Yeltsin years but lost it when Putin got in control.

They hate his intractable nationalism and have done, and are doing, everything they can to discredit, defeat and eventually oust him.

A major part of The Plan has been to get physical control of countries surrounding Russia from the Baltic states to the ‘Stans and to ring Russia with American-oriented and friendly countries.

Putin, aware of this because of the obviousness of the plottings and also because of very high-level information leaks from Washington, responded and with deadly effect. Georgia was run by a domestic politician who was eccentric, egotistical but in the pocket of Washington, and who allowed American troops and their military equipment to pour into the country.

But two Georgian provinces, inhabited mostly by Russians, objected to the blatantly pro-West government in Tiblisi and protested.

Georgia’s answer was to threaten force and, with full American support, to mass Georgian troops on the borders of these provinces.

Putin responded by sending a Russian military strike force into the area in support of the break-away areas and this caused a two-fold retreat on the part of American supporters. The military units rapidly evacuated west to the Black Sea and US Naval evacuation while an army of CIA personnel fled in terror to the airport at Tiblisi to avoid capture. This demarche disillusioned a number of eastern European countries who then toned down their anti-Russian rhetoric and made pacific moves towards the Kremlin.

A very high-level Polish government contingent flying into Smolensk to confer with the Russians were destroyed when their aircraft, responding to faked ground signals at the fog-shrouded Smolensk airport, slammed into the ground, wiping out the top level Poles. The Russians did not destroy the Poles but American intelligence operatives did.

This pointless slaughter was designed to teach wavering cantonists a lesson.

And the so-called “Orange Revolution” in the Ukraine was entirely a CIA operation.

The government in that country was replaced with a pro-Western one and the Ukraine was then viewed in Washington as another country to stock with threatening American missiles and troops.

When the Ukrainians tired of the corruption that inevitably is attendant upon a pro-West government and eventually elected a pro-Russian president, the CIA predictably responded by fomenting civil strife in Kiev and when that appeared to be waning, had their surrogates start shooting at random into the crowd to stir up public anger.

Putin’s response was to occupy the Russian-populated Crimea, hold an election that overwhelmingly supported union with Russia and gained the important naval base at Sebastopol that the Ukraine had promised to the US Navy and, more important, the Crimean off-shore oil fields and a coastline that permitted an easier installation of the South Stream oil transmission line from Russian oil fields to southern Europe.

The fury of the balked intelligence and governmental organs in Washington has been monumental and because a restive Europe is presenting a disunited front in the dictated attacks on Russia, more pressure is being planned to further threaten and pressure Putin.

The oil-rich Arctic is a prime future battlefield selected by Washington to engage the Russians, but the latter hold most of the geo-political cards.

And attempts to economically isolate Russia can easily backfire and create economic chaos with America’s economic powers.

The Russians hold 118 billion dollars worth of US Treasury certificate and their tenative allies, the Chinese, hold one trillion dollars of the same certificates. Should these countries, against whom the United States has been conducting clandestine political warfare, ever decide to jointly dump these financial instruments, the collapse of the dollar as the leading international currency would create an economic crisis that could easily prove fatal to Washington.

When tempted to fight fire with fire, remember that the fire department usually uses water.”

 

 

 

Table of Contents

  • A New York Times Fairy Tale
  • George W. Bush doesn’t deserve the media’s efforts at rehabilitation
  • Bush White House Gay Sex Scandal Stars Jeff Gannon
  • Confluence of crises crashes Trump’s ‘Infrastructure Week’
  • The American far right arms itself for battle
  • The media exaggerates negative news. This distortion has consequences
  • Syria strikes back as Israel discovers its warplanes aren’t invincible
  • Hezbollah: Lebanon must be firm in Israel energy dispute
  • Hezbollah says U.S. must accept Lebanon’s demands over Israel border dispute
  • Israel against Hezbollah: Air Power Won’t Do It
  • Turkish army hit village in Syria’s Afrin with suspected gas: Kurdish YPG, Observatory

 

 

 

 

A New York Times Fairy Tale

by Jacob G. Hornberger

February 14, 2018

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Frank Bruni, columnist for the New York Times, is outraged — outraged! — that people are comparing Kim Yo Jong, the sister of North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un, to Ivanka Trump, the daughter of U.S. President Donald Trump. Both women are part of their respective governmental delegations to the Winter Olympics in South Korea. In his NYT column yesterday, Bruni expressed outrage that people would make such a comparison and, even worse, that they would actually compare North Korea and the United States. He believes that while North Korea is “rotten to the core,” America, under Trump, is only “in a rotten moment.”

Notice how Bruni conflates the government and the country in both North Korea and the United States. Like many North Koreans, who themselves are the victims of a state educational system, Bruni is obviously mentally unable to separate out the two entities. In his mind, the government and the country are one and the same, which leads him to conclude that “North Korea” is “rotten the core” while “America” is only experiencing “a rotten moment.”

That mindset obvious inures to the benefit of the U.S. government. If North Korea is “rotten to the core,” then it’s no big deal to kill everyone in North Korea should war break out there. They’re all commies. They’re all Reds. They’re all gooks. Carpet-bomb every town and city, like the U.S. government did in the Korean War. Inflict nuclear fire and fury over the entire nation. No American would need to be concerned because the whole country, including everyone in it, is “rotten to the core.”

The conflation mindset inures to the government in another way. If an American citizen criticizes or condemns actions of the U.S. government, that demonstrates that he hates “America,” given that the government and the country are supposedly one and the same. At the risk of belaboring the obvious, that is also the mindset that the North Korean government has with respect to criticism of the North Korean government by North Korea citizens.

Bruni indignantly writes that “the United States is nothing like North Korea and to come anywhere near that suggestion is nuts.”

Really? Nothing like North Korea?

What about Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and other welfare-state programs by which the U.S. government takes care of people? Isn’t that the essence of North Korea’s socialist economic system? Sure, there is no question that North Korea has a more complete welfare state than the United States has but isn’t that simply a difference in degree rather than principle? Isn’t the overall philosophy of North Korea’s socialist economic system the same as the overall philosophy of America’s welfare state: that it is the purpose of the state to take care of the citizenry and protect them from the vicissitudes of life?

Let’s not forget the system of state schooling in both nations, the vehicle by which both governments indoctrinate their citizens and mold their minds into conformity and obedience.

Of course, Bruni would say, “You’re wrong, Jacob. The government in North Korea uses public schooling to indoctrinate North Korean children, but here in the United States, public schooling is used only to educate children.”

Really? Then why do so many Americans thank the troops for protecting our “rights and freedoms” by killing people in the Middle East, Afghanistan, and Africa when no one in those lands is trying to take away our rights and freedoms? Why did so many Americans (including, if memory serves me, NYT journalists) buy into the notion that the U.S. invasion of Iraq was to “disarm Saddam” when it was patently clear that the invasion was simply the continuation of the regime-change operation that the 11 years of brutal U.S. sanctions against Iraq had failed to achieve? Why do so many Americans continue to believe that the U.S. invasions and occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan have brought “enduring freedom” to both countries?

If that’s not successful state indoctrination, I don’t know what is.

As an example of how rotten to the core North Korea is, Bruni points to the North Korean dictator’s purported assassination of his half-brother. His implication, of course, is that U.S. officials would never do something that heinous.

Really? Does he just block out of his mind that the U.S. government has a formal international assassination program, one that kills people on a regular basis without any due process of law? Does he also block out of his mind that that assassination program extends not just to foreigners but also to American citizens? Just ask the families of American citizens Anwar al-Awlaki and his 16-year old son, both of whom were murdered by U.S. federal assassins. Sure, Trump hasn’t killed a member of his family, but isn’t that a distinction without a difference? The fact is that in his one year in office, his Pentagon-CIA assassination team has already killed lots of people. Before him, President Obama could easily have referred to himself as the nation’s assassin-in-chief.

Bruni obviously has a difficult time processing the fact that the federal government has a formal assassination program, as evidenced by his outrage over candidate Trump pointing out to television host Joe Scarborough that “our country does plenty of killing, too, Joe.” Bruni is terribly discomforted that Trump said that. Better to keep the truth unspoken.

Bruni points to North Korea’s mistreatment of Otto Warmbier, the U.S. student who North Korean officials returned to the United States in a coma after serving about a year of a 15-year sentence for theft. That’s bad, but is it any worse than what the U.S. government has done to people at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq and at its torture-prison center at Guantanamo? Don’t forget, after all, that the U.S. prisoners at both facilities, including those who have actually been killed, were citizens of countries whose government never attacked the United States.

Of course, I could mention MKULTRA or even the state assassinations of Frank Olson, Mary Pinchot Meyer, Dorothy Kilgallen, or President Kennedy on grounds of “national security,” but I’m sure that that would be too much for Bruni’s mindset to process. So, I’ll just settle for the U.S. government’s role in the extra-judicial executions of American citizens Charles Horman and Frank Teruggi during the U.S.-instigated Chilean coup in 1973. I can’t help but wonder if Bruni is familiar with the official State Department memo, which was kept secret for many years, that detailed an official investigation that determined that U.S. intelligence had participated in those executions, with impunity. All that sure seems like more than a “rotten moment” to me.

In fact, it’s not just America’s welfare state that is similar, in principle, to North Korea’s socialist system. There is also the matter of the national security state, which, not surprisingly, Bruni doesn’t even mention.

Both North Korea and the United States are national-security states or “deep states.” They both have enormous, permanent military establishments that require massive amounts of money to fund. They both have secret intelligence agencies that engage in spying and surveillance, including on their own citizens.

Of course, it wasn’t always that way here in the United States, which I’ll bet Bruni doesn’t even realize. Like many Americans, his mindset undoubtedly is that the United States has always had the same governmental structure — i.e., three co-equal branches of government — and that nothing fundamental changed when the federal government was converted to a national-security state after World War II.

Need I mention the drug war? How can Bruni maintain that North Korea and the United States are different in that regard given that they both punish people severely for ingesting substances that the state disapproves of? Oh sure, North Korea’s punishments for drug law violations might be more severe but, again, that’s just a difference in degree, not in principle.

Maybe it’s also worth mentioning the U.S. government’s support of and partnership with foreign regimes that are every bit as tyrannical as that of North Korea. Egypt, Vietnam (another brutal communist regime just in case Bruni has forgotten), and Egypt come to mind. In fact, it’s probably also worth mentioning the brutal, tyrannical, corrupt regimes that the U.S. government has installed into power and trained, including in countries like Iran, Guatemala, Chile, Iraq, and Afghanistan. That sure seems rotten to me.

Bruni says that North Korea’s dictator “gleefully threatens to nuke other countries,” which makes him, in Bruni’s mind, a “homicidal fanatic.” You see, in the mind of a U.S. indoctrinated person, any ruler who threatens to deter or defend against a U.S. regime-change invasion of his country is obviously a “homicidal fanatic.” Any reasonable, sane foreign ruler would simply accede to any U.S. regime-change operation against his country, whether it by be coup, invasion, assassination, sanctions, or embargo.

Needless to say, Bruni would undoubtedly argue that Fidel Castro was also a “homicidal fanatic” because he invited the Soviets to install nuclear weapons in Cuba to deter another U.S. invasion of his country or to defend against another such invasion. Again, a foreign ruler is simply not supposed to do that. He’s supposed to agree to a U.S. invasion, war of aggression, assassination, or coup and stand down and obey orders. Otherwise, he will be treated as the “homicidal fanatic” that he obviously is. Equally important, any of his citizens who resist a U.S. war of aggression against their country will be treated as the terrorists they obviously are, like Iraqis were when U.S. forces illegally invaded their country (looking for those long-lost WMDs that the United States had provided Saddam Hussein in the 1980s to help him kill Iranians, who had had the audacity to oust the U.S.-installed tyrant the Shah of Iran, who the CIA had installed in 1953 in the process of destroying Iran’s democratic system).

What Bruni’s mindset prevents him from seeing is that it’s not North Korea and America that are rotten in the moment or rotten to the core. It is the North Korean government and the U.S. government that are both rotten in the moment and rotten to the core.

 

George W. Bush doesn’t deserve the media’s efforts at rehabilitation

February 15, 2018

by James Bovard

The Hill

“Our democracy is only as good as people trust the results,” former President George W. Bush declared in a presumably well-paid speech last week in the United Arab Emirates, a notorious Arab dictatorship. Bush is being exalted as if he is the second coming of George Washington thanks to his implied slams against the Trump administration. But Bush’s actions during his eight year reign did far more to ravage democracy at home and abroad than most people realize.

Thanks to gushing media coverage, Bush is enjoying one of the greatest comebacks in modern American history. In the summer of 2008, only 22 percent of Americans approved of Bush and 41 percent said he was the “worst president ever.” Last month, a poll showed that 61 percent of Americans now approve of Bush, and his support among Democrats quintupled, from 11 percent in early 2009 to 54 percent now. If Americans want to understand current political challenges, they need to recall Bush’s forgotten debacles.

Speaking in New York in October, Bush called for “a new, 21st century American consensus on behalf of democratic freedom and free markets.” But when he was president, Bush’s policies assumed that spreading democracy gave him a license to kill.

Shortly before he invaded Iraq in 2003, Bush assured a Washington think tank:

“The nation of Iraq — with its proud heritage, abundant resources and skilled and educated people — is fully capable of moving toward democracy and living in freedom.”

Though he invoked democracy to justify the war, U.S. military commanders three months after the fall of Baghdad “ordered a halt to local elections and self-rule in provincial cities and towns across Iraq, choosing instead to install their own handpicked mayors and administrators, many of whom are former Iraqi military leaders,” the Washington Post reported. Many Iraqis were outraged to see Saddam’s former henchmen placed back in power over them. But, as Noah Feldman, the Coalition Provisional Authority’s law advisor, explained, “If you move too fast, the wrong people could get elected.”

The Bush administration only agreed to Iraqi elections after massive street protests demanding the right to vote. Bush reportedly authorized massive covert aid to pro-American Iraqi parties and politicians. However, when senior members of Congress such as Nancy Pelosi

were briefed on the plan, they vehemently objected. Bush canceled the formal plan but delivered covert aid anyhow, using back channels and undercover operators kept secret from Congress as well as the American public.

Iraq’s 2005 election was more akin to a Soviet Bloc referendum than a New England town meeting. As part of Operation Founding Fathers, American troops traveled around broadcasting a get-out-and-vote message at the same time they raided people’s homes. After soldiers passed out thousands of sample ballots, the top UN election official condemned U.S. military interference. Bush proclaimed the elections a “resounding success” but despite CIA handouts, pro-U.S. candidates were crushed by pro-Iranian parties. The animosities inflamed by the election campaign helped propel Iraq to civil war, which Bush invoked the following year to justify sending far more U.S. troops there.

Bush has recently fretted about Russian involvement in American elections but when he was president, Bush acted as if the United States was entitled to intervene in any foreign election he pleased. He boasted in 2005 that his administration had budgeted almost $5 billion “for programs to support democratic change around the world,” much of which was spent to tamper with foreign elections.

The Bush administration spent over $65 million to boost their favored candidate in the 2004 Ukraine election, including “helping to underwrite exit polls indicating he won a disputed runoff election,” according to the Associated Press. Yet, with boundless  hypocrisy, Bush proclaimed that “any (Ukrainian) election … ought to be free from any foreign influence.” The Bush administration rushed $2 million to aid the ruling Fatah party to help them thwart Hamas in a 2005 Palestinian election, to no avail. U.S. government-financed organizations helped spur coups in Venezuela in 2002 and Haiti in 2004. Both of those nations remain political train wrecks.

In his October speech, Bush boasted: “No democracy pretends to be a tyranny.” But as president, Bush acted as if ravaging the Constitution was part of his job description. Shortly after 9/11, Bush turned back the clock to before 1215 (when the Magna Carta was signed), formally suspending habeas corpus and claiming a prerogative to imprison indefinitely anyone he labeled a terrorist suspect. In 2002, Justice Department lawyers informed Bush that the president was entitled to violate the law during wartime — and the war on terror was expected to continue indefinitely. In 2004, Bush White House counsel Alberto Gonzales formally asserted a “commander-in-chief override power” entitling presidents to ignore the Bill of Rights.

Under Bush, the U.S. government championed barbaric practices which did more to destroy America’s moral credibility than all of Trump’s tweets combined.  Bush’s “enhanced interrogation” regime included endless high-volume repetition of a “Meow Mix” cat food commercial at Guantanamo, head slapping, waterboarding, exposure to frigid temperatures, and manacling for many hours in stress positions. After the Supreme Court rebuffed some of Bush’s power grabs in 2006, he pushed through Congress a bill that retroactively legalized torture — one of the worst legislative disgraces since the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850.

In his October spiel, Bush also bemoaned: “Our politics seems more vulnerable to conspiracy theories and outright fabrication.” Coming from Bush, this had as much credibility as former president Bill Clinton

lamenting the decline of chastity. As the lies by which he sold the Iraq war became exposed, Bush resorted to vilifying critics as if they were traitors in a 2006 speech to the Veterans of Foreign Wars.

George W. Bush should have permanently taught Americans that presidents are most dangerous when seeking to con the nation into unnecessary wars — for democracy or any other pretext.  Unfortunately, the recent media consecration of Bush may be expunging that bitter lesson. It is possible to vigorously oppose Trump’s abuses without fomenting delusions about his predecessors.

 

Bush White House Gay Sex Scandal Stars Jeff Gannon

April 30, 2005

by Uri Dowbenko

The Bush White House gay sex scandal heats up, as new revelations show that fake reporter and male prostitute Jeff Gannon “slept over” on numerous occasions at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

Gannon had previously advertised his services on the internet as a male prostitute “top” at $1200 per weekend.

White House overnight trysts were not uncommon, according to Secret Service logs of Jeff Gannon’s White House entries and exits, requested by Rep. Louise Slaughter (D-NY) and Rep. John Conyers (D-MI) using the FOIA (Freedom of Information Act).

Since “Jeff Gannon” has given the term “media whore” a whole new definition, the question arises — could “Jeff Gannon” be President George Bush’s Lewinsky albeit in gay apparel?

White House logs furnished by the Secret Service show that fake reporter Jeff Gannon (a.k.a James Guckert) stayed overnight at the White House on many occasions – even when press conferences or briefings were not scheduled.

These records reveal that the White House is like a Gay Roach Motel — they check in but they don’t check out.

FOIA documents reveal that Gannon signed in on many occasions, but never signed out, reports John Byrne in an exclusive report on Raw Story http://rawstory.com/exclusives/byrne/secret_service_gannon_424.htm

Gannon’s inexplicable access to the Bush White House as well as his shilling for GOP fake news outlet ‘Talon News’ (not to be confused with fake news by Jon Stewart of course) raises more questions about planted and paid-for Bushonian shills in the so-called mainstream media.

Gannon aka James Guckert appeared more than 200 times at the White House as a fake reporter in 2 years and attended 155 of 196 White House press briefings, reports Raw Story. Since Gannon was previously employed as a male prostitute, questions naturally arise regarding the nature of his overnight stays at the White House.

“On at least fourteen occasions, Secret Service records show either the entry or exit time missing,” Raw Story continues. “Generally, the existing entry or exit times correlate with press conferences; on most of these days, the records show that Guckert checked in but was never processed out.”

Who was Jeff Gannon servicing in the newly redecorated Gay Green Room?

The White House “Don’t ask, don’t tell” policy is obviously not working…

 

Confluence of crises crashes Trump’s ‘Infrastructure Week’

February 16, 2018

by Steve Holland and Roberta Rempton

Reuters

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – This was supposed to be “Infrastructure Week” for U.S. President Donald Trump, a time to unveil a long-promised plan to create jobs by revitalizing America’s roads and bridges.

Instead, the White House careened from crisis to crisis, with Trump’s chief of staff fighting for his job, a mass shooting at a school in Florida, a fierce immigration battle on Capitol Hill and a report that a former Playboy model had an affair with Trump over a decade ago.

It was capped by news that the office of U.S. Special Counsel Robert Mueller had charged 13 Russians and three Russian companies with conducting an operation aimed at sowing political divisions and undermining democracy in the United States, including by meddling in the 2016 presidential election campaign.

Trump and his aides spent Friday behind closed doors after the charges were announced by U.S. Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein. The president emerged late on Friday to go to his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida for the weekend.

His itinerary originally included an infrastructure-related event at which he had planned to tout his record on creating jobs. It was canceled after 17 people were killed on Wednesday at a high school not far from his resort.

Traveling with Trump to Florida was his chief of staff John Kelly, who has been criticized for how he handled the case of former White House staff secretary Rob Porter, who has been accused of domestic violence by two former wives.

Porter resigned last week as a furor erupted over his working under a temporary security clearance that gave him access to classified information, in the absence of a final security clearance.

Kelly issued a memo to White House staff on Friday ordering tighter procedures for security clearances.

“Kelly has no credibility left with the staff,” said one Trump confidant from outside the White House who asked not to be identified.

Trump has been sounding out friends on potential Kelly replacements. Among possibilities are economic adviser Gary Cohn and Kevin McCarthy, the No. 2 Republican in the House of Representatives, the source said.

Release of Trump’s fiscal 2019 budget proposal was overshadowed by the Porter controversy, then by a failed push in the U.S. Senate to overhaul immigration laws, and a scathing report from an inspector general investigation into travel expenses of senior officials at the Department of Veterans Affairs.

On Friday, New Yorker magazine reported that Trump had an affair with a former Playboy model at about the same time in 2006 that he was allegedly involved with an adult-film star.

The White House declined to comment on the story.

Trump and his wife, Melania, traveled separately to Air Force One at Joint Base Andrews for the flight to Florida, thus there were no photographs of them walking together to the Marine One helicopter on the White House South Lawn.

The first lady’s spokeswoman, Stephanie Grisham, attributed their separate arrivals at the base to a scheduling issue.

Trump extended a thumbs-up to reporters as he walked to the Marine One helicopter and ignored a flood of questions about the week that was.

Reporting by Roberta Rampton and Steve Holland; Editing by Kevin Drawbaugh, Toni Reinhold

 

The American far right arms itself for battle

February 17, 2018

by Christian Jürs

The policy of current American far right groups, heavily supportive of President Trump and in full cooperation with his people, is to exacerbate latent racism in the United States to the point where public violence erupts and the political polarization of the public becomes manifest.

By encouraging and arming the far right and neo nazi groups, the so-called Scavenius group is laying the groundwork for an acceptable and militant government reaction, the institution of draconian control over the entire population and the rationale for national and official government control, all in the name of law and order.

It is planned that the far right and neo nazi groups eventually be taken into the law enforcement structure and used to put down any public demonstrations that the government deems to be a potential threat to their policies.

Who are these groups? Here is a listing of only some of them:

  • ACT for America
  • Alliance Defending Freedom
  • America’s Promise Ministries
  • American Border Patrol/American Patrol
  • American Family Association
  • American Freedom Party
  • American Renaissance
  • Aryan Brotherhood
  • Aryan Brotherhood of Texas
  • Aryan Nations
  • Blood & Honor
  • Brotherhood of Klans
  • Center for Security Policy
  • Church of the National Knights of the Ku Klux Klan
  • The Creativity Movement
  • The Sovereign Citizen Movement of the US and Canada
  • The Dominonist Movement of America
  • National Alliance
  • National Coalition for Immigration Reform
  • National Socialist Movement
  • National Vanguard
  • Oath Keepers
  • Stormfront
  • The Aryan Terror Brigade.
  • The neo-Confederate League of the South.
  • Traditionalist Worker Party
  • White Revolution

The basic plan of the planners is to supply activists neo-nazi groups in the United States with weapons smuggled into the US. These weapons originate with the Chinese firm, NORENCO, The China North Industries Corporation. This is a Chinese company, located at the Xicheng District, Beijing, China that manufactures civil and military firearms and ammunition.

The specific weapons involved in the arming of neo-nazi groups are the following:

  • Type 54, copy of TT-33 Pistol Model
  • Type 64, pistol
  • Type 77, pistol
  • NP50, copy of Smith & Wesson model 64
  • NP-216, 9x19mm revolver
  • QSZ-92 (Type 92), pistol NP-42, civilian export version of QSZ-92
  • NZ-75, copy of CZ 75 pistol NZ-85B, clone of CZ 85 pistol
  • NP-40, copy of CZ 85 pistol in .40S&W
  • NP-22 (rename by importer NP226 or NC226) a SIG Sauer P226 pistol first version copy NP-34 (rename by importer NP228 or NC228), copy of SIG Sauer P228 pistol
  • NP-56 45ACP, SIG Sauer P220 Rail pistol Copy in .45ACP
  • M-1911A1C, Combat Commander style pistol
  • NP-28, Colt M1911A1 copy in 9x19mm Parabellum with double-column magazine (10 rounds)
  • NP-44, Colt M1911A1 copy in .45 ACP with double-column magazine (14 rounds)
  • CQ, copy of M16A1 variant of M16 rifle
  • NR-08, sub machine gun (SMG), copy of Heckler & Koch MP5.
  • Type 56 Carbine, copy of Russian SKS semi-automatic rifle
  • Type 56 assault rifle, copy of AK-47 MAK-90, a civilian, semi-automatic version of the AK-47
  • NHM-90, 1994–2004 gun ban model, w/1.5mm stamped receiver, thumbhole stock, no bayonet lug, non-flashhider
  • Type 86S bullpup assault rifle
  • Type 87 (also known as QLZ87) 35 mm automatic grenade launcher (AGL)
  • QBU-88 (Type 88), sniper rifle
  • QBZ-95 (Type 95), an assault rifle
  • Norinco-designed QBZ-95 rifle.QBB 95, a squad automatic weapon version of the QBZ-95
  • QBZ-97 (Type 97), a rifle,export version of QBZ-95 that uses 5.56×45mm NATO ammunition
  • QBZ-03 (Type 03), an assault rifle
  • NDM-86, a version of the Dragunov Sniper Rifle that fires .308 Win. ammo or traditional 7.62×54mmR depending on model
  • JW-25a, or TU-G33/40, patterned after G33/40.

 

Because of strict port security in Vancouver, the weapons are off-loaded in the Pacific, off the west coast of Vancouver Island, from a Chinese-flag container ship headed for the port city of Vancouver. The weapons are loaded onto commercial fishing vessels, very common in the area, who subsequently take them south to the Washington port of Tacoma. From there, they are driven by commercial trucks to the Boeing Field airport and placed on private aircraft for distribution to other American destinations.

It is to be noted that there is a strong Chinese presence in the Vancouver-Seattle area. In Vancouver, the Chinese population is over 400,000 and in Seattle they represent 4% of the population. All the smuggled weapons are handled by Chinese personnel until they are loaded onto the aircraft.

Funding for the weapons purchases does not come from the organizing entity but from a different source.

The payments are made via the manufacture and sale of counterfeit nazi period memorabilia. This project is funded initially from retrieved buried nazi concentration camp gold hidden in the mountains of southern Austria.

An expedition there in 2014 netted the American neo-nazi group almost $20,000,000 in gold bullion coins and jewelry. The gold and other treasure was buried by an SS general at the end of the war. The gold has been stored in the cellars of a prosperous commercial dealer in neo-nazi relics and used, as needed, to fund the weapons purchases.

There are two powerful agencies in the United States that are, or would be, involved with anti-government activities.

The existence of major FBI–CIA problems has always been refuted by both entities.

The FBI was an established agency prior to 1948 when the CIA was founded and as the latter expanded, it moved more and more into the FBI’s area of competence.

Eventually, after a period of intense rivalry and competition, an agreement was arrived at that mandated the FBI handle all domestic intelligence matters and the CIA did its work outside the United States.

This was an agreement observed more in the breach than the observance.

In the Scavenius plan, the CIA would subsequently be allowed to be the premier intelligence agency, doing both domestic and foreign intelligence work.

The FBI, greatly reduced in number and duties, would be relegated solely to criminal matters such as bank robberies and the removal of stolen automobiles across state lines.

This concept has been extensively discussed with persons close to the Presidency and the agreement is that the CIA would have both domestic and foreign intelligence on the condition that they liaised all projects with the White House prior to any execution.

The President has animosity towards the FBI whom he sees as an entity that is out to discredit him, his family and his plans.

 

The media exaggerates negative news. This distortion has consequences

Whether or not the world really is getting worse, the nature of news will make us think that it is

by Steven Pinker

February 17, 2018

The Guardian

Every day the news is filled with stories about war, terrorism, crime, pollution, inequality, drug abuse and oppression. And it’s not just the headlines we’re talking about; it’s the op-eds and long-form stories as well. Magazine covers warn us of coming anarchies, plagues, epidemics, collapses, and so many “crises” (farm, health, retirement, welfare, energy, deficit) that copywriters have had to escalate to the redundant “serious crisis.”

Whether or not the world really is getting worse, the nature of news will interact with the nature of cognition to make us think that it is.

News is about things that happen, not things that don’t happen. We never see a journalist saying to the camera, “I’m reporting live from a country where a war has not broken out”— or a city that has not been bombed, or a school that has not been shot up. As long as bad things have not vanished from the face of the earth, there will always be enough incidents to fill the news, especially when billions of smartphones turn most of the world’s population into crime reporters and war correspondents.

And among the things that do happen, the positive and negative ones unfold on different timelines. The news, far from being a “first draft of history,” is closer to play-by-play sports commentary. It focuses on discrete events, generally those that took place since the last edition (in earlier times, the day before; now, seconds before).

Bad things can happen quickly, but good things aren’t built in a day, and as they unfold, they will be out of sync with the news cycle. The peace researcher John Galtung pointed out that if a newspaper came out once every 50 years, it would not report half a century of celebrity gossip and political scandals. It would report momentous global changes such as the increase in life expectancy.

The nature of news is likely to distort people’s view of the world because of a mental bug that the psychologists Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman called the Availability heuristic: people estimate the probability of an event or the frequency of a kind of thing by the ease with which instances come to mind. In many walks of life this is a serviceable rule of thumb. But whenever a memory turns up high in the result list of the mind’s search engine for reasons other than frequency—because it is recent, vivid, gory, distinctive, or upsetting—people will overestimate how likely it is in the world.

Plane crashes always make the news, but car crashes, which kill far more people, almost never do. Not surprisingly, many people have a fear of flying, but almost no one has a fear of driving. People rank tornadoes (which kill about 50 Americans a year) as a more common cause of death than asthma (which kills more than 4,000 Americans a year), presumably because tornadoes make for better television.

The data scientist Kalev Leetaru applied a technique called sentiment mining to every article published in the New York Times between 1945 and 2005, and to an archive of translated articles and broadcasts from 130 countries between 1979 and 2010. Sentiment mining assesses the emotional tone of a text by tallying the number and contexts of words with positive and negative connotations, like good, nice, terrible, and horrific.

Putting aside the wiggles and waves that reflect the crises of the day, we see that the impression that the news has become more negative over time is real. The New York Times got steadily more morose from the early 1960s to the early 1970s, lightened up a bit (but just a bit) in the 1980s and 1990s, and then sank into a progressively worse mood in the first decade of the new century. News outlets in the rest of the world, too, became gloomier and gloomier from the late 1970s to the present day.

The consequences of negative news are themselves negative. Far from being better informed, heavy newswatchers can become miscalibrated. They worry more about crime, even when rates are falling, and sometimes they part company with reality altogether: a 2016 poll found that a large majority of Americans follow news about Isis closely, and 77% agreed that “Islamic militants operating in Syria and Iraq pose a serious threat to the existence or survival of the United States,” a belief that is nothing short of delusional.

Consumers of negative news, not surprisingly, become glum: a recent literature review cited “misperception of risk, anxiety, lower mood levels, learned helplessness, contempt and hostility towards others, desensitization, and in some cases, … complete avoidance of the news.” And they become fatalistic, saying things like “Why should I vote? It’s not gonna help,” or “I could donate money, but there’s just gonna be another kid who’s starving next week.”

Relentless negativity can have other unintended consequences, and recently a few journalists have begun to point them out. In the wake of the 2016 American election, the New York Times writers David Bornstein and Tina Rosenberg reflected on the media’s role in its shocking outcome:

Trump was the beneficiary of a belief— near universal in American journalism—that “serious news” can essentially be defined as “what’s going wrong.” … For decades, journalism’s steady focus on problems and seemingly incurable pathologies was preparing the soil that allowed Trump’s seeds of discontent and despair to take root. .. One consequence is that many Americans today have difficulty imagining, valuing or even believing in the promise of incremental system change, which leads to a greater appetite for revolutionary, smash-the-machine change.

Bornstein and Rosenberg don’t blame the usual culprits (cable TV, social media, late-night comedians) but instead trace it to the shift during the Vietnam and Watergate eras from glorifying leaders to checking their power—with an overshoot toward indiscriminate cynicism, in which everything about America’s civic actors invites an aggressive takedown.

It’s easy to see how the Availability heuristic, stoked by the news policy “If it bleeds, it leads,” could induce a sense of gloom about the state of the world. Media scholars who tally news stories of different kinds, or present editors with a menu of possible stories and see which they pick and how they display them, have confirmed that the gatekeepers prefer negative to positive coverage, holding the events constant.

That in turn provides an easy formula for pessimists on the editorial page: make a list of all the worst things that are happening anywhere on the planet that week, and you have an impressive-sounding—but ultimately irrational—case that civilization has never faced greater peril.

 

Syria strikes back as Israel discovers its warplanes aren’t invincible

February 16, 2018

by Rania Khalek

RT

Israel has long been the unchallenged bully in the Middle East, but now Tel Aviv will face consequences for its temper tantrums. That was the message from Damascus last weekend when the Syrian army shot down an Israeli F-16.

The dramatic escalation happened as Israel claimed one of its warplanes was in Syrian airspace to intercept an Iranian drone that had been operating in Israeli territory. But, in reality, the Iranian drone was intercepted in the Golan Heights, which is Syrian land that has been illegally occupied by Israel since 1967.

Of course, this didn’t stop major western publications like the Wall Street Journal from referring to the Golan as “Israeli airspace.” Nevertheless, the mainstream media was left in disbelief by the incident—the New York Times, for example, was startled to discover that “Israeli jets aren’t invincible.”

As usual, Israel painted itself as a victim of irrational Arab aggression. However, in fact, Syria was clearly acting in self-defence against repeated Israeli violations of its sovereignty.

Even the head of the Israeli Air Force Air Division confessed that his country has carried out “thousands of operations in Syria” in the last year alone. This fact was missing from most mainstream news accounts, which portrayed Israel as a non-interventionist bystander in the Syrian conflict. That couldn’t be further from the truth. Not only has Israel repeatedly bombed Syrian government installations, it has also armed Jihadist rebel groups in the Golan Heights, coordinated with Al-Qaeda’s Syria affiliate against government forces and provided medical treatment to Al-Qaeda and Islamic State-linked rebels before sending them back into battle.

Muddying Waters

Support for Al-Qaeda in Syria serves two strategic purposes for Tel Aviv. One reason is to weaken Hezbollah, the armed Lebanese political party that defends Lebanon’s borders from Israel and Salafi Jihadist groups alike. The second purpose is to solidify its takeover of the Golan.

Don’t take my word for it, Israeli officials have said as much. The former head of Mossad (Israel’s intelligence agency) admitted to Al Jazeera that Israel provides medical treatment to Al-Qaeda fighters in Syria. And, since 2012, the UN Disengagement Observer Force (UNDOF), the peacekeeping mission responsible for monitoring the 1974 ceasefire line between Israeli and Syrian forces in the Golan Heights, has documented dozens of interactions between the Israeli army and Syrian insurgents. On top of that, there are Syrians who defected from the Free Syrian Army after discovering the relationship between Israel and the rebel groups in the Golan.

For people living in the region, the downing of Israel’s F-16 felt like long-overdue retaliation, while Tel Aviv tried desperately to paint the escalation as a fight with Iran. But it was Damascus, not Tehran which downed the fighter jet in a deliberate calculation, which was not made lightly. This was, after all, the first time since 1982 that Syria has shot down an Israeli plane.

The leadership in Damascus has warned time and again that it would eventually respond to Israeli aggression, and it finally did, sending a message that Israel cannot continue to violate Syria’s sovereignty without a response.

Israel responded by striking what it called Iranian bases and claiming to have wiped out most of Syria’s air defenses. But, according to the Syrian government, Israel struck bases from which Syria and its allies target Al-Qaeda in Idlib, essentially making Israel into Al-Qaeda’s air force.

After years of western attempts to overthrow the Syrian regime, one thing is clear: the Syrian state has remained intact and is winning the war, having retaken almost all of the territory it lost to rebel groups that were armed and funded by western and gulf states. The Syrian state has been able to take back territory due in large part to assistance provided by its allies, particularly Russia.

The next war

There will eventually be a showdown between Israel and Hezbollah. But the rules of the game have changed dramatically in Hezbollah’s favor since the two last fought. In the 2006 war, Hezbollah gave Israel a bloody nose but Lebanon was devastated in the process. In any future war, Hezbollah will be able to do far more damage to Israel. The organization is much stronger, far better armed and is able to carry out offensive maneuvers after gaining extensive battlefield experience against jihadists in Syria. Also, any future war with Israel will likely include the involvement of Hezbollah’s allies in Syria and Iraq, transforming what would otherwise be a local conflict into a regional one.

Israel is afraid to test these waters, so, for the time being, the Israelis are not interested in a hot war with the group. After all, it was the Syrian army that downed the plane using Russian anti-aircraft S-200s. Russia’s involvement in Syria complicates Israel’s ambitions as Israel cannot go to war with Russia. Moreover, Israel does not have the same backing as usual from its American benefactors. While there are almost no limits on the amount of aggression Israel can inflict on Palestinians, Syria is a far more complicated battlefield involving major world powers.

Both the US and Russia have personnel on the ground in Syria–the US is supporting the Syrian “Democratic” Forces, while Russia is backing the government. Turkey, a member of NATO, has troops occupying areas of northern Syria and is fighting the Kurds in Afrin. Meanwhile, Iran has advisers on the ground assisting Syrian government forces against Al-Qaeda and Islamic State. This month, a Turkish helicopter was shot down by the US-backed Kurdish forces in northern Syria, a Russian plane was downed by Jihadists in Idlib, an Iranian drone was blown up by Israel, an Israeli F-16 was destroyed by Syria, and the US has claimed it killed up to 100 pro-government forces in airstrikes near Deir Ezzor.

Thus, if Israel escalates the situation in Syria, too much can go wrong. And judging from the State Department’s weak words of support for Israel in the aftermath of the F-16 crash, the US does not seem interested in backing an Israeli war at this time because it risks a hot war with Russia and undermines the ongoing fight against ISIS, which is an American priority.

However, Israel fears Hezbollah’s growing strength and Iran’s growing influence as a threat to its regional hegemony—a concern shared by its Saudi and American counterparts—and will continue its provocations in Syria in an effort to counter what it sees as a growing Iranian presence next door. There are also domestic Israeli considerations that may influence their actions. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is currently facing a corruption probe and potential indictment, which has saturated the Israeli press and has led to protests against him.  Of course, war can serve as an excellent distraction under such circumstances.

At the same time, Damascus has warned it will no longer take acts of Israeli aggression lying down, demonstrating that after seven years of attempted regime change in Syria by western powers, Iran, Syria and Hezbollah–known by their many supporters in the region as “the resistance axis” for their role in challenging western imperialism—are in a position of strength. And they are on a collision course with Israel.

 

Hezbollah: Lebanon must be firm in Israel energy dispute

Lebanon’s Hezbollah has escalated the Mediterranean race for offshore gas and oil, threatening Israel and saying America is “not an honest broker.” At issue is Lebanon’s offshore search, which is disputed by Israel.

February 17, 2018

DW

Hassan Nasrallah, the head of the Iranian-backed movement Hezbollah, urged Lebanon’s government Friday to stand firm against Israel, with force if necessary, to assert access to an anticipated energy windfall.

Lebanon, Israel and Cyprus skirt the Levant Basin in the eastern Mediterranean, where big sub-sea gas fields have been identified since 2009. Israel and Cyprus agreed on maritime boundaries in 2010.

“This is Lebanon’s wealth and hope,” Nasrallah said, referring to Lebanon’s otherwise weak economic growth and high debt-to-earnings ratio, and adding that the US was “not an honest broker.”

If you [Israel] prevent us, if you bomb us we will bomb you, and if you hit us we will hit you,” said Nasrallah in televised remarks from a Hezbollah rally.

His threat follows further rumblings from Israel and Thursday’s visit to Beirut by US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, who said Lebanon also stood to prosper from natural resources development “in agreement with all its neighbors.”

Offshore exploration tenders granted

An energy consortium, comprising France’s Total, Italy’s ENI and Russia’s Novatek, last month won a tender from the Lebanese Petroleum Administration (LPA) to begin drilling offshore next year in two blocks, including one disputed by Israel.

Since last week, US Acting Assistant Secretary of State David Satterfield has been meeting with officials in Lebanon on the issue.

Lebanese parliament speaker Nabih Berri on Friday said a Lebanese-Israeli maritime border should be determined by a committee, similar to one that produced the UN-demarcation Blue Line Border used to guide Israel’s withdrawal from southern Lebanon in 2000.

Late last month, Israeli Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman described as “very provocative” Lebanon’s call for offshore exploration tenders, saying participating firms would be making a “grave error.”

“This is very, very challenging and provocative conduct here,” Lieberman told an international security conference in Tel Aviv.

Mediterranean exploration accelerated

Total has said its first drill will avoid the Israeli-disputed “Block Nine,” saying that one covered only 8 percent of Lebanon’s total offshore exploration area.

It comprises Lebanese coastline waters as well as its larger maritime Exclusive Economic Zone of 22,700 square kilometers (8,765 square miles) further offshore.

The Lebanese Petroleum Administration has delineated 10 blocks in all, spanning the Mediterranean seabed that lies up to 2,064 meters (6,770 feet) below the surface.

Eastern Mediterranean nations, including Cyprus, have accelerated exploration in recent years, spurred further by ENI’s discovery of Egypt’s Zohr gas field far off Port Said in 2015. Production began last December.

Last week, Turkish warships blocked an Italian drilling vessel seeking to begin drilling for gas off Cyprus.

Cyprus has been divided into a Turkish north and a Greek south since 1974. The internationally recognized government is on the Greek Cypriot side. Only Turkey recognizes the breakaway north.

 

Hezbollah says U.S. must accept Lebanon’s demands over Israel border dispute

February 16, 2018

Reuters

BEIRUT (Reuters) – Lebanon’s Hezbollah said on Friday the United States must accept the Lebanese government’s demands over border disputes with Israel and vowed it was ready to act against Israel if necessary.

U.S. diplomats have been mediating between the two countries after a surge in tensions over a border wall which Israel is building and Lebanon’s decision to explore for offshore energy near disputed waters.

Earlier on Friday, Parliament Speaker Nabih Berri told a U.S. envoy that Lebanon rejects current U.S. proposals over the marine border with Israel.

“The state must have a strong and firm position,” said Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of the Iran-backed political and military movement, in a televised speech at a rally.

“If the Americans come and say you must be responsive so that I restrain Israel from you: tell the Americans they must accept (Lebanon‘s) demands so that we hold Hezbollah back from Israel,” he added.

Nasrallah said the main issue currently at stake was Lebanon’s maritime borders.

“In the oil and gas battle, the only power (the Lebanese) have is the resistance,” he said, in a reference to the heavily armed, Shi‘ite Muslim Hezbollah.

The Lebanese army could not stop Israel in this matter, he said, because the United States – Israel’s key ally and also a key supporter of Lebanon’s military – would stand in its way.

“If Lebanon’s Higher Defence Council were to decide that (Israeli) offshore oil and gas plants…should be forbidden from working, I promise they would stop working within hours,” he said.

Nasrallah spoke in a televised address at a rally commemorating senior commanders, including former military leader Imad Moughniyah who was killed in a bomb blast in Damascus in 2008.

Hezbollah was formed in the 1980s as a resistance movement against Israel’s occupation of southern Lebanon and the two remain bitter enemies. There has been no major conflict between them since a month-long war in 2006.

In recent years, Israeli jets have repeatedly struck Hezbollah arms stores and convoys in neighbouring Syria, where the group fights alongside Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s army.

Reporting by Ellen Francis and Laila Bassam; Writing by Lisa Barrington; Editing by Raissa Kasolowsky

 

Israel against Hezbollah: Air Power Won’t Do It

by Philip H. Gordon,  Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs, U.S. Department of State

Brookings Institute

Military historians have a name for the logic behind Israel’s military campaign in Lebanon. It’s called the “strategic bombing fallacy.” Almost since the dawn of the age of military air power, strategists have been tempted by the prospect that the bombing of “strategic” targets such as infrastructure and transportation hubs could inflict such pain on a population that it would turn against its leaders and get them to surrender or compromise.

Unfortunately — as the United States itself discovered during World War II and Vietnam, to cite just two examples — strategic bombing has almost never worked. Far from bringing about the intended softening of the opposition, bombing tends to rally people behind their own leaders and cause them to dig in against outsiders who, whatever the justification, are destroying their homeland.

The history of perennial overoptimism about air power is worth keeping in mind as we consider some of the arguments heard in Jerusalem and Washington that the Israeli bombing campaign will put Hezbollah out of business or somehow lead the Lebanese people and army to turn against it. According to retired Israeli army Col. Gal Luft, the goal of the campaign is to “create a rift between the Lebanese population and Hezbollah supporters.” The message to Lebanon’s elite, he said, is this: “If you want your air conditioning to work and if you want to be able to fly to Paris for shopping, you must pull your head out of the sand and take action toward shutting down Hezbollah-land.”

The theory is almost as neat as those that postulated that an American show of force in Iraq would bring peace and democracy throughout the region — but it is even less realistic. The issue is not whether Hezbollah is responsible for this crisis — it is — or whether Israel has the right to defend itself — it does — but whether this particular strategy will work. It will not.

It will not render Hezbollah powerless, because it is simply impossible to eliminate thousands of small, mobile, hidden and easily resupplied rockets via an air campaign. And it will not lead the weak Lebanese government to confront Hezbollah, because the civilian casualties caused by Israel’s bombing are infuriating the Lebanese population and providing fodder for Israel’s enemies throughout the Muslim world.

Perhaps recognizing that an air campaign alone might not bring about the desired effects, some have been calling on Israel to launch a ground invasion. What is less clear is why an Israeli invasion of southern Lebanon now would be any more successful than the one carried out in 1982, which led to the creation of Hezbollah, a bloody 18-year occupation and, ultimately, to Israeli withdrawal. Again the strategy seems to be based more on hope than on experience.

What is striking about all this wishful thinking on Lebanon is that it is being promoted by many of the same people most closely associated with the wildly misplaced optimism about the effects of the use of force in Iraq. The theory behind that invasion was that an American show of force to remove Saddam Hussein would so impress the region’s populations (and frighten its dictators) that it would produce a chain reaction of democratization all the way to Palestine. Critics who worried that Iraqis would quickly come to resent and challenge the seemingly all-powerful American occupiers — or that outside actors such as Iran or Syria would seek to undermine Iraq’s stability — were accused of an almost un-American historical pessimism. That Iraq is now plagued with a violent insurgency and putative civil war suggests that the pessimists’ arguments might have deserved a greater hearing.

Proponents of strategic bombing in Lebanon acknowledge that it is not sufficient in itself to deal with the Hezbollah threat, and they point out — rightly — that Iran and Syria are the real instigators of the trouble. But it is one thing to say that, and quite another to explain just how Israel and the United States are supposed to go about eliminating the Iranian and Syrian problems. Invasions or airstrikes with the purpose of installing stable, pro-Western democracies would not seem a great bet in light of recent experience.

Those calling on Israel or the United States to use force against Lebanon, Syria and Iran legitimately ask what the alternatives to decisive action are. But they asked the same question about Iraq, and they seemed to overlook the possibility that a bad situation can be made even worse.

Given the long odds against Israeli or U.S. bombing campaigns actually producing the desired effects, a more focused and sustained strategy of proportional retaliation, increased support for the Lebanese government, international pressure on Iran and incentives for Syria to end its support for Hezbollah would seem a better approach than another wild throw of the dice.

 

Turkish army hit village in Syria’s Afrin with suspected gas: Kurdish YPG, Observatory

February 16, 2018

Reuters

BEIRUT (Reuters) – Syrian Kurdish forces and a monitoring group said the Turkish military carried out a suspected gas attack that wounded six people in Syria’s Afrin region on Friday.

There was no immediate comment from the Turkish military, which has previously denied accusations of hitting civilians in its Afrin operation.

Birusk Hasaka, a spokesman for the Kurdish YPG militia in Afrin, told Reuters that Turkish bombardment hit a village in the northwest of the region, near the Turkish border. He said it caused six people to suffer breathing problems and other symptoms indicative of a gas attack.

Turkey launched an air and ground offensive last month on the Afrin region, opening a new front in the multi-sided Syrian war to target Kurdish fighters in northern Syria.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights told Reuters that Turkish forces and their Syrian insurgent allies hit the village on Friday with shells. The Britain-based war monitoring group said medical sources in Afrin reported that six people in the attack suffered breathing difficulties and dilated pupils, indicating a suspected gas attack.

Syrian state news agency SANA, citing a doctor in a Afrin hospital, said Turkish shelling of the village caused choking in six people.

On Feb. 6, the United Nations called for an immediate humanitarian ceasefire in Syria.

Since the onset of the conflict in 2011, the YPG and its allies have set up three autonomous cantons in the north, including Afrin. Their sphere of influence expanded as they seized territory from Islamic State with U.S. help, though Washington opposes their autonomy plans as does the Syrian government.

U.S. support for Kurdish-led forces in Syria has infuriated Ankara, which views them as a security threat along its frontier. Turkey sees the YPG as terrorists and an extension of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) that has waged a three-decade insurgency on Turkish soil.

Reporting by Ellen Francis in Beirut and Rodi Said in northern Syria; Additional reporting by Daren Butler in Istanbul; Editing by Toni Reinhold

 

 

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