U.S. proxy war against Iran/Assad may get dangerously hot

Submitted by gjohnsit on Wed, 02/14/2018 - 1:34pm

A week ago we bombed Syrian government forces near Deir Ezzor, killing around a hundred troops. Some of them were mercenaries from Russia.
The clash has been framed as "we acted in self-defense".
While that is probably true, what is certainly true is that our SDF allies went on the offensive after that.

After nearly a week of being under attack, you can imagine how the Syrian government might react.

Pro-Assad Al Masdar reported on Monday that Syria's 5th Legion and several units from Hezbollah are preparing an attack on ISIS near Deir Ezzor, in the country's west. Al Masdar seemed to confirm that the Syrian troops planned to encounter US-backed forces in a subsequent story on Wednesday.
But Syria's own state-run media said in November that Deir Ezzor had been liberated from ISIS. Western assessments of Syria no longer say the terror group holds territory there.

It may come as a shock to most Americans, but we aren't very much liked in the Middle East, even by NATO allies.

For the moment, the loose alliance of Turkey, Russia and Iran appears able to hold, despite their differences, because of shared animosity toward the United States.

I guess we are uniting the world after all.

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Submitted by gjohnsit on Wed, 02/14/2018 - 1:41pm

starving Syria

“Pure and simple, anywhere the SDF controls in eastern Syria is considered by the Americans to be no-go zones for [President Bashar] Assad and his allies,” Heras said. “Every inch of the soil under the SDF is now a de facto American military base, and will be defended as such.”
...“Damascus is furious that the Americans are backing the SDF coalition there, essentially boxing Assad out of his oil. There is every incentive for Assad and his partner forces, be they Iranian proxies or Russian mercenaries, to seek to conquer the energy resource-rich SDF zone,” Heras said.

On the eastern banks of the Euphrates, U.S.-backed forces control a number of oil fields and gas plants that the SDF seized from ISIS last year. Among them is the Conoco natural gas facility, which had the largest capacity of any gas field in Syria before the conflict.

“Pro-regime forces want to recapture Syria’s critical infrastructure and natural resources in order to rehabilitate the Assad regime, provide economic concessions to repay Russia and Iran for their military support, and as a stepping stone toward their ultimate goal of reconquering the country,” said Jennifer Cafarella, senior intelligence planner at the Institute for the Study of War. “They also want to expel U.S. forces, a goal the Assad regime is messaging frequently.”

“Russia had both incentive and means to support the attack. The Russians may well be testing whether they will get away with sending in irregular forces like Wagner contractors,” Cafarella said.

Last year, Syria agreed to give a Russian oil company 25 percent of oil and gas profits from areas that private Russian security contractors helped Damascus retake.

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Submitted by MrWebster on Wed, 02/14/2018 - 6:25pm

/Looks like the building up of invasion forces to march onto Damascus. Now France is threatening to bomb Syria over fake charges of chemical weapons. ISIS and Al Queda could not overthrow the Assad regime so Israel and US will get more directly involved? And once we destroy the Syrian government what next? The country will revert to warlords and wanna bet ISIS re-groups and replicates what the Taliban did--only with mass genocide.

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Submitted by gjohnsit on Wed, 02/14/2018 - 9:50pm

We are already at war in Syria.

In its five months in Syria last year, a single U.S. Marine Corps artillery battalion fired more shells than any equivalent American military unit since Vietnam.
The statistic – revealed this month by the Marine Corps Times – was another reminder of just how violent, out-of-control and complex the largely hidden war in Syria remains.
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