ISDEI Instituto de Seguridad, Defensa y Estudios Internacionales

Don't file this one under "surprising", but a video has emerged of ISIS jihadists having a lovely chit-chat with Turkish border guards. The video is allegedly from October, so this is not a new Turkish tourism campaign launched in the wake of losing hundreds of thousands of Russian tourists. No, Turkey just sort of "likes" ISIS. They go together like peas and carrots. This is precious : The clip begins with the two apparent jihadists lighting fires near a group of cars, which are believed to have been abandoned by desperate Kurdish families who fled Kobane in recent weeks when ISIS militants stepped up their attacks on the city. After appearing to realise they are being filmed from inside Turkey, the pair start walking towards the border fence, stopping only to mockingly wave at the amateur filmmaker. As they reach the border fence, an armoured military vehicle belonging to Turkish border guards speeds up to meet them. Heavily armed officials jump out the bac...

Arrival of Russian S-400 has forced the US to halt manned flights in some parts of Syria, a Pentagon official said There is a new crisis for the international effort to destroy the Islamic State, created by the Kremlin. The U.S. has stopped flying manned air-support missions for rebels in a key part of northern Syria due to Russia’s expansion of air defense systems there, and the Barack Obama administration is scrambling to figure out what to do about it. Russia’s military operations inside Syria have been expanding in recent weeks, and the latest Russian deployments, made without any advance notice to the U.S., have disrupted the U.S.-led coalition's efforts to support Syrian rebel forces fighting against the Islamic State near the Turkey-Syria border, just west of the Euphrates River, several Obama administration and U.S. defense officials told us. This crucial part of the battlefield, known inside the military as Box 4, is where a number of groups have been fighting the Islamic ...

The Western public just has to get used to it - Assad's not going anywhere, and not because of what Russia or Iran says, but because he's Syrians' choice By David Macilwain On Sunday Syria's President Bashar al Assad went with his wife Asma to a Christmas Mass concert in Damascus. For many people in the West, the photos that soon appeared of Bashar and Asma hugging and being hugged by small children, old men and young women would probably cause consternation or apoplexy - if they were to see them. But this is unlikely, as Western media would exercise its duty of care to protect people from such an upsetting sight, and the public disorder that might result. It shouldn't worry however that people's perception of the Syrian leader might change for the better; it is simply not possible for this to happen, any more than it is possible that Syrians would change their minds about President Assad. The Western media apparatus has strange standards of propriety - often...

The Jobar neighborhood of Damascus is the epicenter of some of the fiercest fighting in Syria with Islamist rebels refusing to give up their only stronghold. Once densely populated, the area has now been completely obliterated, RT’s Murad Gadziev reports. Most of the pre-conflict population has fled the rebel-held neighborhood of Jobar in the eastern suburb of Ghouta in Damascus, while fighting between the Syrian army and rebel groups has devastated the suburb over the past years. Before the conflict in Syria erupted in 2011, the neighborhood was home to some 300,000 residents, most of whom were Sunni Muslims. The suburb contained a number of ancient landmarks, most notably the Green Synagogue, the oldest Jewish synagogue in the world. It also contained the Grand Jobar Mosque in addition to the tomb of the Prophet Elijah. Jobar also housed ancient baths that were built during Ottoman times. Now totally destroyed, as can be seen in RT’s exclusive drone footage, Jobar is just one ...

SAS and US special forces reportedly bolstering Afghan military in Helmand province, a year after Nato pulled combat troops out of country   Afghan National Army soldiers patrol in Helmand on Monday. Much of the town of Sangin has been taken over by Taliban forces. Photograph: Noor Mohammad/AFP/Getty Images The Afghanistan government has suffered a serious setback after a Taliban offensive succeeded in taking control of much of Sangin, the Helmand town that became totemic for British forces, accounting for a third of their casualties. The fall of key locations in and around the town on Sunday and Monday comes just a year after Nato pulled combat troops out of Afghanistan. Since then the Taliban has made inroads in Helmand and elsewhere around the country. The SAS and US special forces have been deployed to help retake lost ground in the province, according to reports from the Times and Wall Street Journal . The Taliban stormed the police headquarters, the administrative headqu...

For more than a century, Dabiq was one of northern Syria’s forsaken villages, a speck on a vast agricultural plain between the Turkish border and the deserts of Iraq, which hardly seemed likely to shape the fate of nations. A weathered sign at its entrance said 4,000 people lived there, most of whom appeared to have left by 2013, driven out over time by a lack of work – and lately by insurrection. For the first three years of Syria’s civil war, the arrival of a strange car would lure bored children to the town’s otherwise empty streets, scattering cats and chickens as they scampered after it. Little else moved. Dabiq’s few remaining men worked on the odd building project: a half-finished mosque, a humble house for one local who had just returned after 10 years labouring in Lebanon, or a fence for the shrine that was the town’s only showpiece – the tomb of Sulayman ibn Abd al-Malik. The Ummayad caliph was buried under a mound of earth in 717, which over many centuries had somehow gro...

At least 65,000 jihadi fighters could fill vacuum if Islamic State was defeated By  agencies More than half of the rebel fighters in Syria who are opposing President Bashar al-Assad are sympathetic to Islamic State views, a leading thinktank has claimed. The Centre on Religion and Geopolitics said efforts to wipe out Isis in Syria and Iraq would not end the global threat from jihadi groups because extremist views were common among Syrian fighters of all stripes. At least 15 militias, numbering 65,000 fighters, could fill any vacuum resulting from a defeat of Isis in Syria and Iraq by a coalition led by the US, a report by the thinktank found. About 60% of fighters in rebel factions in Syria identified with a religious and political ideology similar to that of the terror group, it added. The thinktank, run by the Tony Blair Faith Foundation, said: “The west risks making a strategic failure by focusing only on IS. Defeating it militarily will not end global jihadi...

By Seymour M. Hersh Barack Obama’s repeated insistence that Bashar al-Assad must leave office – and that there are ‘moderate’ rebel groups in Syria capable of defeating him – has in recent years provoked quiet dissent, and even overt opposition, among some of the most senior officers on the Pentagon’s Joint Staff. Their criticism has focused on what they see as the administration’s fixation on Assad’s primary ally, Vladimir Putin. In their view, Obama is captive to Cold War thinking about Russia and China, and hasn’t adjusted his stance on Syria to the fact both countries share Washington’s anxiety about the spread of terrorism in and beyond Syria; like Washington, they believe that Islamic State must be stopped. The military’s resistance dates back to the summer of 2013, when a highly classified assessment, put together by the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, then led by General Martin Dempsey, forecast that the fall of the Assad regime would lead to ch...