ISDEI Instituto de Seguridad, Defensa y Estudios Internacionales

By Philip Weiss January 13, 2017 " Information Clearing House " - " Mondoweiss " - Last fall Secretary of State Kerry met privately with anti-Assad Syrian activists at the U.N. The meeting was secretly taped, and you can listen to the tape here:   The New York Times got a hold of the tape back in September and wrote a story about it . So did CNN . More on their accounts later. The thrust of the conversation was the mutual frustration of Kerry and the Syrians that Bashar al-Assad was still in power and able to commit atrocities with the support of the Russians, who don’t adhere to international law the way we Americans do. I’d recommend listening to the whole tape; but the conversation went something like this: The Syrians complained we aren’t helping enough. Kerry and his associates said we and the Saudis and Qatar and Turkey had provided huge amounts of aid to the rebels, who unfortunately were sort of aligned with extremists. “Nusra makes it hard,” Kerry said

Source: alwaght.com Written by Evgeny Satanovsky; Originally appeared at VPK When Islamists become European constituent body The defeat of jihadi forces in Aleppo and the recapture of Palmyra by the Islamic State (ISIS) put into question the threats that Islamic fundamentalists pose not only in the Middle East, but also to Russia and the EU. First of all, there is the question of the continuation of the struggle by Islamists receiving support and orders from Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkey against Moscow. (We leave the hopes for a long term cooperation with Turkey to the “experts” that are trying to substantiate such thesis to the Russian government). Then, one may ask about the flow of jihadists leaving highly dangerous zones – where their lives are threatened – for the European “alternate airfield”. We will discuss the current situation in non-Middle Eastern countries and regions that were touched by radical Islamism by using the article specially written by F.O. Pleshunov and Y. B. S