ISDEI Instituto de Seguridad, Defensa y Estudios Internacionales

DAMASCUS, May 3 (Xinhua) -- The Syrian army on Sunday wrested back control over an important town in eastern countryside of capital Damascus, cutting a key rebel supply route, according to the official SANA news agency. The government forces captured town of Maidaa' and its surrounding orchards in east of Damascus, said SANA, adding that the town served as a supply route for rebels between the hotbed towns of Douma and Dumair. Meanwhile, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said the Syrian troops were advancing in the outskirts of Eastern Ghouta near Dumair. It said the troops captured large swathes of Maidaa' after clashes with jihadist groups in the area amid reports of losses on both sides. The UK-based watchdog group said the battles were coupled with shelling from both sides. Clashes also went on in the surrounding of Zabdin, another town in Eastern Ghouta. Eastern Ghouta, an agricultural region in east of Damascus, has emerged as a threat to the capital due to the larg

An expended BLU-108 canister from a CBU-105 Sensor Fuzed Weapon found in the al-Amar area of al-Safraa, Saada governorate, in northern Yemen on April 17, 2015. (image from http://www.hrw.org) Download video  (40.24 MB) The Saudi Arabia-led coalition is using US-supplied cluster munitions in its airstrikes on Houthi forces in Yemen, Human Rights Watch reported. Targets include those close to villages, posing a threat from undetonated submunitions to civilians. In recent weeks the coalition has used cluster bombs in Yemen’s northern Saada governorate, a region bordering Saudi Ararbia, which is historically controlled by the rebels, HRW said. “These weapons should never be used under any circumstances. Saudi Arabia and other coalition members – and the supplier, the US – are flouting the global standard that rejects cluster munitions because of their long-term threat to civilians,” said Steve Goose, arms director at Human Rights Watch. A BLU-108 canister with four submunitions still

By Robert Fisk  Let me try to get this right. The Saudis are bombing Yemen because they fear the Shia Houthis are working for the Iranians. The Saudis are also bombing Isis in Iraq and the Isis in Syria. So are the United Arab Emirates. The Syrian government is bombing its enemies in Syria and the Iraqi government is also bombing its enemies in Iraq. America, France, Britain, Denmark, Holland, Australia and – believe it or not – Canada are bombing Isis in Syria and Isis in Iraq, partly on behalf of the Iraqi government (for which read Shia militias) but absolutely not on behalf of the Syrian government. The Jordanians and Saudis and Bahrainis are also bombing Isis in Syria and Iraq because they don’t like them, but the Jordanians are bombing Isis even more than the Saudis after their pilot-prisoner was burned to death in a cage . The Egyptians are bombing parts of Libya because a group of Christian Egyptians had their heads chopped off by what might – notionally – be the same so-ca

Vietnam has celebrated the 40th anniversary of what it calls Reunification Day in Ho Chi Minh City [Reuters] Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam - Pham Quoc Hung felt calm when the end finally came. It was the morning of April 30, 1975, and North Vietnamese tanks were rumbling towards their final military objective: Saigon. Those tanks were a sign that the war in Vietnam was finally over, said Hung, recounting the last hours, 40 years ago today, of the country once known as the Republic of Vietnam, and the fall of its former capital, Saigon, to North Vietnamese forces. "I felt calm because I could expect the result," said the 75-year-old Hung, who was a battlefield photographer with the defeated South Vietnamese army at that time. After years covering the war that brought so much death and destruction on his country, Hung said he wasn't filled with dread at the prospect of a Communist victory. He was just relieved that peace would finally arrive. "I wasn't afraid because I

Houthi militants gesture in the yard of the residence of the military commander of the Houthi militant group, Abdullah Yahya al Hakim, after it was hit by an airstrike, in Sanaa April 28, 2015. (Reuters/Khaled Abdullah) Download video (36.7 MB) In order to break the stalemate in the ongoing conflict in Yemen, Saudi Arabia has reportedly started training hundreds of Yemeni tribesmen to fight the Houthis on the ground, while Riyadh continues its bombardment campaign. “You cannot win a war against the Houthis from the air – you need to send ground forces in, but now there's a program to train tribal fighters on the border,” a Doha-based military source familiar with the matter told Reuters. According to another Yemeni official source, some 300 fighters have already managed to return to Yemen after getting Saudi training. They were allegedly send the Sirwah district in the central Marib province to battle Houthis in the area. According to the source the newly trained unit managed to p

RT collage As Victory Day looms closer, Russia remembers the millions of Soviet lives lost in WWII to make the Nazi defeat possible. RT is launching a project that amongst personal stories and letters will also feature a unique battle map of the Eastern Front. World War II was the world's biggest and bloodiest military conflict. It affected 61 countries with a total population of 1.7 billion people. Battles took place in 40 of those states and it was the first and only war in which nuclear weapons were used. By far the greatest losses were suffered by the Soviet Union. Out of the 55 million lives lost, 27 million were Soviet. Over 1,700 Soviet towns and settlements and 70,000 villages were razed by the Nazis, and half of the country's infrastructure was destroyed. The USSR's confrontation with Nazi Germany lasted from June 1941 until May 1945 and became known as the Great Patriotic War, the name it acquired after a nation-wide radio address by Joseph Stalin.

Former CIA director David Petraeus (Reuters/Chris Keane) The problem with the lenient treatment of former CIA Director, David Petraeus, isn't that he was lightly punished for his leaks. It is that other whistleblowers are punished at all. It's a tale of two CIA employees. The first, Jeffrey Sterling, has just been convicted of leaking information about a bungled agency sortie to James Risen, a reporter. The operation took place almost 20 years ago, around the time everyone was doing the Macarena and Tom Cruise’s first Mission Impossible movie was released. Federal prosecutors are calling for a 24-year prison sentence for Sterling. The second, David Petraeus, has already learned his fate. He received a $100,000 fine and two-years probation. The six-figure sum may seem like a lot to you, but it’s less than the former 4-star general earns for a single speech. Petraeus was the boss, Sterling an underling. However, Sterling’s so-called misdemeanor pales into insignificance when com

RIA Novosti / A. Solomonov Rosatom, Russia’s nuclear agency, confirms scientists are testing 10th generation centrifuges. No other country even possesses 9th gen tech, putting Rosatom years ahead of the competition. “We’re on to 10 Gen,” announced Aleksandr Belousov, general director of Urals Integrated Electrochemical Plant (UIEP), a Rosatom subsidiary in Novouralsk, Sverdlovsk Region, in the Urals. “Scientists and engineers are solving technical issues, which is quite difficult. Any kind of new research and technological development is a venture undertaking, you can either succeed or fail... Any new machinery must be economically efficient. [10Gen] is being developed out of economic expediency, not for mere modernization. The more energy-intensive the machinery is, the more technical problems emerge,” Belousov said. A gas centrifuge uses principles of centrifugal force to perform radioisotope separation of gases, by accelerating molecules to such an extent that particles of different