ISDEI Instituto de Seguridad, Defensa y Estudios Internacionales

Saudi Arabia is increasingly using the internationally-prohibited cluster bombs in its airstrikes on Yemen, thus doubling the casualties among women and children. According to the Yemeni news agency, SABA, Saudi fighter jets pounded, yesterday, the district of Baqem in the northern province of Sa’ada with cluster bombs. It is believed that at least 105 Yemeni civilians, mostly women and children, have been killed by cluster bombs dropped by Saudi warplanes during 2015. The UK-based Thomson Reuters Corporation published a report on behalf of the Cluster Munition Coalition (CMC) saying these missiles which can be fired on the ground or in the air are capable of turning into hundreds of smaller bombs influencing a larger area. These smaller splinter versions of these bombshells survive on the ground and act as a potential threat like a landmine. Due to their miniature design and toy-like appearance, these bombs pose a great danger to children in particular.

Yesterday saw a series of dead blasts rio through Damascus, Tartous, Homs and Hasakah. ISIS took responsibility for the attacks. Bahram Qassemi, the Iranian Foreign Ministry’s spokesman, condemned the attacks and highlighted the Saudi Wahhabi ideology that ISIS follow. “The actions taken by the criminal Takfiri terrorists and their Wahhabi supporters to target civilian citizens indicates their dejection and defeat in military warfare and the defeat of their political pipe dreams in the region,” he said. He then explained that the international community had to stop being indifferent to the crimes committed in Syria and Yemen. “International conventions and the international community have to stop remaining indifferent toward those ordering, supporting, and perpetrating these reprehensible crimes,” the Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman said.

In 2016, Russia delivered the first battalion of S-300PMU-1/SA-20 Gargoyle SAM batteries to Iran under the agreement signed by Moscow and Tehran in 2007. The S-300 is a long-range surface-to-air missile system. It can engage aircraft, cruise missiles and theater ballistic missiles.

By Eric Margolis What a mess! In the crazy Syrian war, US-backed and armed groups are fighting other US-backed rebel groups. How can this be? It is so because the Obama White House had stirred up the war in Syria but then lost control of the process. When the US has a strong president, he can usually keep the military and intelligence agencies on a tight leash. But the Obama administration has had a weak secretary of defense and a bunch of lady strategists who are the worst military commanders since Louis XV, who put his mistress, Madame de Pompadour, in charge of French military forces during the Seven Year’s War. The French were routed by the Prussians. France’s foe, Frederick the Great of Prussia, named one of his dogs, “la Pompadour.” As a result, the two arms of offensive US strategic power, the Pentagon, and CIA, went separate ways in Syria. Growing competition between the US military and militarized CIA broke into the open in Syria. Fed up with the astounding incompetence of th

As territory held by the Islamic State (ISIS) in Iraq and Syria continues to shrink, more and more evidence of the militant group’s atrocities have been uncovered with a total of 72 mass graves discovered holding thousands of dead. The Associate Press reported that 72 mass graves had been discovered in the most extensive survey carried of its kind. The known number of the dead buried in the unmarked pits, and known only to a handful of witnesses and ISIS itself, is believed to number between 5,200 to 15,000. The highest number of graves have been found in Iraq’s Sinjar province where ISIS carried out what has been described as a genocide against Yazidis. Sinjar Mountain itself is reportedly dotted with mass graves, six of them containing more than 100 people. One witness to the atrocities in Sinjar, who peered through binoculars as ISIS carried out its extermination, told the AP about handcuffed men from nearby villages being shot and then buried by a waiting bulldozer. The burials las

Damascus, Syria (2:16 A.M.) – The Syrian Army enabled the exit of over 300 civilians from the families of Darayya who lived in the neighboring Muaddamiyah in Western Ghouta resulting in the full conclusion of the Darayya treaty. Al-Masdar’s correspondent was informed through exclusive sources that this step was in the shadow of an agreement that demands the surrender of the militants occupying the town of Muaddamiyah along with their weapons. Under the Amnesty granted by the executive office of the Syrian Arab Republic, the rebels would reclaim their citizen status and be relieved from the lawful consequences of their insurgency. “The agreement in Muaddamiyah will enter execution pages after placing its last thumbprints while regular residents of the city would not need to leave for the refuge centers.” Sources added that the agreement would allow for government institutions to restore their functions and operations inside the city. In a separate development, some militants in Wa