ISDEI Instituto de Seguridad, Defensa y Estudios Internacionales

After 36 hours of continuous clashes, the Syrian Arab Army (SAA) seized the meat company and all the surrounding buildings in Ayn Tarma area east of Damascus. The meat company is considered one of the strategic positions in Ayn Tarma. Click to see the full-size image According to pro-government sources, Faylaq al-Rahman tried to defend the position for the last minute, but the Syrian Republican Guard managed to control it after a successful raid on the meat company building. Opposition media claimed for the fifth time that the SAA used chlorine gas during its offensive on Ayn Tarma. The sources published a video of an opposition fighter claiming to have found a hand grenade containing chlorine and chemicals with the dead body of a Syrian soldier in Ayn Tarma. After a close look we were able to identify the bomb, a Russian-made RGN hand grenade, which is a conventional bomb containing only RDX explosives. Faylaq al-Rahman and Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) seem not to be in ...

FA-50PH Aircraft arrives at the Air Force City base Clark,81 km north or Manila on November 18,2015. Photo By Edward Solo The Philippine Air Force announced that it had stopped using the FA-50PH fighters after a failed airstrike that resulted in the killing and wounding of a number of Philippines soldiers in Marawi city where clashes between government troops and ISIS members are still ongoing. The Philippine Air Force announced that it would determine the cause of the incident before reusing it again. The Philippine Air Force has 12 FA-50PH multi-roller fighters made by the Korea Aerospace Industries (KAI) in South Korea. Brig-Gen Restituto Padilla of the Philippine Army announced that the death toll in the Manila battle rose to 537, including 399 ISIS fighters, 93 Philippines soldiers and 45 civilians, and the Marawi battle is about to enter its third month. According to Padilla, The Philippine Army has so far managed to rescue 1723 civilian hostages from ISIS fighters, and...

FILE IMAGE On Saturday, the US House of Representatives overwhelmingly approved two amendments to the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) banning the United States from participating in the Saudi war against the Houthis in Yemen. The Davidson amendment prohibits the United States from carrying out any military action in Yemen prior to its approval. According to the legislation, US military action in Yemen, since it’s not targeting Al-Qaeda or ISIS, is not subject to permission to use force against terrorist organizations given in 2001. The Nolan amendment prohibits the deployment of US troops in Yemen, and may prevent the United States even from air refueling Saudi and UAE warplanes over Yemen. Moreover, the House of Representatives is working to persuade the United States Senate to approve the same legislation to push US President Donald Trump to agree to stay away from Yemen war. Many politicians in USA believe that the war in Yemen has led to the destruction of the...

When taxi and bus drivers take journalists into Syria via the Beirut-Damascus Highway these days, there’s a common greeting that has become a kind of local tradition as the drivers pull into their Damascus area destinations.  They confidently tell their passengers: “welcome to the  real  Syria.” Local Syrians living in government areas are all too aware of how the outside world perceives the government and the cities under its control.  After years of often  deceptive imagery  and  footage  produced by opposition fighters coordinating with an eager Western press bent on vilifying Assad as  “worse than Hitler” , many average Syrian citizens increasingly take to social media to post images and scenes of Syria that present a different vision:  they see their war-torn land as fundamentally secular, religiously plural, socially tolerant, and slowly returning to normalcy under stabilizing government institutions. As the most intense ph...