ISDEI Instituto de Seguridad, Defensa y Estudios Internacionales

ISIS committed a massacre in Eastern Syrian city of Deir el-Zour on Sunday leaving as many as 280 people dead. News agencies reported different death tolls with state news agencies reporting a number as high as 300 people and opposition groups and news agencies reporting between 85 and 135 deaths including combatants. Where the London-based activist group said that at least 42 ISIS fighters had died. In the onslaughts ISIS committed killings of whole families for their cooperation with Syrian Army troops, according to Reuters, with some of those killed being beheaded. The residents in the area of the massacre called al-Bagilya, had received Russian humanitarian aid earlier. Sputnik news quoted a local in the area as saying: “The horrific massacre carried out today by ISIL militants in al-Bagilya in Deir ez-Zor. 280 victims, including women, children and old people. Reason – cooperation with the Syrian army,” The massacre is considered as one of the worst mass killings committed in S...

Back in 2013 Fanar Haddad, a Research Fellow at the Middle East Institute (National University of Singapore) raised the issue of radical sectarianism in Wahhabism, (Riyadh’s very own dystopian interpretation of Islam) when he warned that latent anti-Shiism in the Middle East had already metastasized into a full doctrinal ostracization movement - thus positioning Shia Islam, and all Shiites outside the Islamic realm. He wrote for Foreign Policy: “The recent wave of anti-Shiite rhetoric and sectarian polarization has caused profound concerns across the Middle East. Sectarian tensions are not new, of course, but the vocabulary of anti-Shiism in the Middle East has changed dramatically over the last 10. Shiites who used to be accused of ethnic otherness are now being cast as outside the Muslim community itself. Exclusion on doctrinal grounds was a mostly Saudi exception in the framing of Shiism. It is now increasingly becoming the regional rule.” This “vocabulary” Haddad refers to is c...

By Finian Cunningham There was an underwhelming sense when Pentagon boss Ashton Carter met this week in Paris with other members of the US-led military coalition supposedly fighting the ISIL terror group. The US-led coalition was set up at the end of 2014 and in theory comprises 60 nations. The main military operation of the alliance is an aerial bombing campaign against terrorist units of IS (also known as ISIL, ISIS or Daesh). At the Paris meeting this week, Secretary of Defense Carter was joined by counterparts from just six countries: France, Britain, Germany, Italy, Netherlands and Australia. Where were the other 54 nations of the coalition? Carter and French defense minister Jean-Yves Le Drian patted themselves on the back about “momentum”in their campaign against the terrorist network. However, platitudes aside, there was a noticeable crestfallen atmosphere at the meeting of the shrunken US-led coalition. One telling point was Carter exhorting Arab countries to contribute more....

By Andrey Fomin Last September we published an outline of the analysis produced by the Russian investigator Vladimir Shalak on the hidden aspects of the Twitter-based campaign to lure the Middle Eastern refugees into Germany. Having studied 19000 refugee-related original tweets Shalak claimed that the great exodus to continental Europe was artificially arranged by non-European actors. The latest wave of migrant-caused violence in the number of European cities on New Year’s Eve sparked another intense anti-Merkel campaign in German and European social media, and yielded additional data for Shalak’s in-depth research . Below we will share its preliminary results. But before we do let’s have a glance at two pictures demonstrating drastic change in public narrative in Germany regarding the refugees in just 4 months:   January 2016 Was it a tragic but spontaneous development or a deliberate psy operation by an external agent? To come closer to ...

By Robert Barsocchini The US illustrates to ISIS , and the world, that the path to the seat of regional and then global power is genocide, land-theft, mass enslavement, never paying reparations, then wielding this illegally and brutally obtained money and military hardware over others and proclaiming one's national group to be superior (ethnocentrism) and a "respected leader", while in reality the country is feared, loathed, and isolated , maintaining and expanding its hegemony through continued methods of extreme propaganda , subversion, and physical force.- See more at: http://www.empireslayer.org/#sthash.8MB36baK.dpuf Through terror, bribery, threats, and other tactics, the US foists huge loans on small, relatively weak nations (which are often weak because of having been ravaged by Europe or the US), then forces them to repay the loans with interest as it drains and impoverishes the target countries, making them cheap resource and service stations for the top tiers of...

In 2006 the U.S. was at war in Iraq. Some of the enemy forces it very much struggled to fight against were coming in through Syria. The same year Israel lost a war against Hizbullah. Its armored forces were ambushed whenever they tried to push deeper into Lebanon while Hizbullah managed to continuously fire rockets against Israeli army position and cities. Hizbullah receives supply for its missile force from Syria and from Iran through Syria. Its long-term plans to attack Iran and to thereby keep supremacy in the Middle East depend on severing Hizbullah's supply routes. The sectarian Sunni Gulf countries, mainly Saudi Arabia, saw their Sunni brethren defeat in Iraq and a Shia government, supported by Iran, taking over the country. All these countries had reason to fight Syria. There were also economic reasons to subvert an independent Syria. A gas pipeline from Qatar to Turkey was competing with one from Iran to Syria. Large finds of natural gas in the coastal waters of Israel and ...

By Moon Of Alabama When the Russian campaign in Syria started Obama promised that it would end in a quagmire. Various media and opinion writer picked up that narrative. It was false as Russia was and is executing a well thought out campaign . Being confronted with reality the U.S. media is now changing its false narrative. The LA Times writes : The Latakia attack mirrors similar government gains across the country, as forces loyal to President Bashar Assad, backed by Russian air power, have been on the offensive. ... It's a dramatic shift for the forces of Assad, who less than six months ago had warned supporters that the government would have to "give up areas" after a string of humiliating setbacks. ... The gains have strengthened the government's position in the run-up to Syrian peace negotiations scheduled to begin next week in Geneva. The Obama administration and its anti-Syrian allies had hoped for a defeated Syrian government in Geneva that would agree to th...

By Pepe Escobar Facing the gleaming Doha skyline on a Persian Gulf winter carries the merit of a panoramic perspective. Most nations around it are going into melt down and the remaining ones – with the exception of Iran – exhibit neither the political leadership nor the economic and institutional infrastructure to do anything other than to meekly accept whatever tsunami hits their shores. They are nothing but scared spectators. The Empire of Chaos has enough warmongering hardware pre-positioned within spitting distance to turn the whole of Southwest Asia into ashes – as a gaggle of usual suspects in the Beltway, neocon or neoliberalcon, still can’t find a cure to their itching to «really win the next war» in a sort of exponential Shock and Awe. Fear reigns supreme. Jim Rickards, the author of Currency Wars, economist and CIA asset, has just released a new book, The Big Drop, with a pretty grim message. For his part J im Rogers , a.k.a. the «Sage of Singapore», most of the time China-bo...