Bashar Assad was given a big break by the Russian air strike that Friday, Dec. 25, killed Zahran Aloush, founder of the most powerful Syrian rebel group Jaysh al-Islam and his deputy.
It was a grave loss for the Syrian rebels fighting the Assad regime and will accelerate the breakup of their strongholds in and around Damascus.
Since the assassination of Samir Quntar Sunday, the IDF has notched up the alert level on the Golan, the Lebanese and Syrian borders and the main roads of northern Israel, in view of signs that Iranian leaders are bent on avenging not only his death, but that of his two secret Iranian controllers, who are now revealed by DEBKAfile to have been with him at the time.
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The importance of the offensive launched Tuesday, Dec. 22 to recapture the Iraqi town of Ramadi from ISIS lies chiefly in the makeup of the assault force facing ISIS, which is unique in contemporary Syrian and Iraqi conflicts. DEBKAfile: For the first time, US and Russian army and air force are fighting side by side along with Iraqi Shiite and Sunni militias and the Iraqi army,
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The northern Syria battlefield close to the Turkish border will have a greater impact on determining Syria’s future than any Security Council resolution. A very large mixed bag of combatants consists of Russia, the Kurdish YPG militia, most of the important rebel groups - including radical Sunni organizations tied to Al Qaeda, such as the Nusra Front and Ahram al-Sham - not to mention Iran and Shiite Hizballah and the jihadist Islamic State.
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The Russian-Turkish clash over the downing of the SU-29 by Turkish warplanes Tuesday, Nov. 24, has sharply ramped up the personal head-on-head between the US and Russian Presidents Obama and Putin over the fate of Bashar Assad.
Russia has launched a merciless blanket air campaign, backed by Kalibr cruise missiles fired from the Caspian and Mediterranean Seas, for wiping the Islamic State’s Syrian center of Raqqa off the map, debkafile reports. At least 75 air sorties so far are systematically razing the town of 200,000 inhabitants, district by district.
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The secret Obama-Putin deal on a political solution for Syria that was reached on the sidelines of the G20 summit in Antalya has radically changed and intensified Russia’s air strike tactics in the last 24 hours. For the first time, Russian air force planes took off for Syria Tuesday, Nov. 17 from home bases.
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Thursday Nov. 19, ISIS threatened a suicide attack on New York’s iconic Times Square, depicting a bomber unzipping his coat to display an explosive vest. The NYPD rushed to the scene. Anti-terror agencies are taking no chances after the string of terrorist slaughters claimed by the Islamic state.
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Syrian media confirmed early Sunday, Dec. 20, that Israeli rocket fire destroyed a building in eastern Damascus and killed Samir Quntar, head of Hizballah terror networks in southern Syria and the Golan. Footage showed a multi-storey residential building collapsed and rescue workers digging through the rubble. Samir Quntar is notorious for the exceptionally vicious murder of a family in Nahariya in 1979. In 2008, Israel released him from life imprisonment in exchange for the bodies of two Israeli reservists killed by Hizballah in 2006..
On Friday, Dec. 11, a squadron of 12 new Russian Mi-35M helicopters landed at the Russian military’s Hmeymim airbase for its first test in battle conditions. This “flying tank,”' will show how it performs in lifting an elite force at speed to a targeted arena while covering their landing with a massive blast of fire to reduce enemy resistance on the ground. This craft is the answer the Russians needed for special missions, primarily to ferry elite troops into battle against Syrian rebels and Islamic State fighters and perform rescue missions for lifting them out.
After two tries, US Secretary of State John Kerry finally turned President Barack Obama away from his insistence that Bashar Assad must go before the Syrian conflict can end. Tuesday night, Dec. 15, the Secretary announced in Moscow: “The United States and our partners are not seeking so-called regime change.” debkafile: Washington yielded to Moscow three days before a major international conference on Syria takes place in New York. But the US also yielded to Tehran, when the UN nuclear watchdog's board in Vienna closed its investigation into whether Iran sought atomic weapons.
In a pivotal breakthrough in the Yemen civil war, Thursday, Dec. 11, Saudi, Egyptian and UAR marines seized from Yemen’s Iran-backed Houthi rebels the Greater Hanish island, part of the strategic archipelago commanding the Strait of Bab al Mandeb, debkafile reports. This strait links the Indian Ocean with the Gulf of Aden and the Red Sea – i.e. Africa and Asia. The Arab forces no doubt received help in their operation since Iran had converted the island into a regional arms supply depot and observation point for regional shipping, including Israeli sea traffic from Eilat.
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