Introduction — March 17, 2023
There is one key element to this story that Reuters omits to mention. The fact that Reuters doesn’t note exactly why President Assad would welcome more Russian troops speaks volumes about Reuters and its objectivity.
Crucial to this story and pointedly omitted by Reuters, is the fact that the U.S. military is still in northeastern Syria.
Not only are they there illegally, they jointly occupy sites with militants who wrought havoc in Syria before Russia intervened in 2015. Prior to then they had been on the verge of ousting President Assad in a Western backed regime change operation.
The fact that they remain in northeast Syria with US support is probably the main reason Assad would welcome more Russian troops. Ed.
Syria’s Assad would like more Russian bases and troops
Guy Faulconbridge and Caleb Davis — Reuters March 16, 2023
-> Assad courts more Russian support
-> Assad would welcome more Russian troops
-> Assad suggests Russian bases should be permanent
-> Syria supports Putin’s war in Ukraine – Assad
MOSCOW, March 16 (Reuters) – Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad said on Thursday that he would welcome any Russian proposals to set up new military bases and boost troop numbers in the Middle Eastern country, suggesting Russia’s military presence there should become permanent.
When Russia intervened in the Syrian Civil War in 2015, it helped tip the balance in Assad’s favour, ensuring the Syrian leader’s survival despite Western demands that he be toppled.
Assad, who met President Vladimir Putin in the Kremlin on Wednesday, has supported Russia’s war in Ukraine and told Russia’s state news agency RIA that Damascus recognises the territories claimed by Russia in Ukraine.
Syria, Assad said, would welcome any Russian proposals to set up new military bases and boost Russian troop numbers – and said they need not be temporary.
“We think that expanding the Russian presence in Syria is a good thing,” Assad told RIA in an interview. “Russia’s military presence in any country should not be based on anything temporary.”
“We believe that if Russia has the desire to expand bases or increase their number, it is a technical or logistical issue.”
Assad’s years as president have been defined by the conflict that began in 2011 with peaceful protests before spiralling into a multi-sided conflict that has fractured the Middle Eastern country and drawn in foreign friends and enemies.
He has stitched much of his state back together with the help of Russia and Iran, aided by the fact that his allies were always more committed to his survival than his enemies were to his defeat.
Alongside the Hmeimim air base, from which Russia launches air strikes in support of Assad, Moscow also controls the Tartus naval facility in Syria, its only naval foothold in the Mediterranean, in use since the days of the Soviet Union.
Russia’s defence ministry said in January that Russia and Syria had restored the al-Jarrah military air base in Syria’s north to be jointly used. The small base east of Aleppo was recaptured from Islamic State fighters in 2017.
In Moscow, Assad thanked Putin for the help Russia had given to Syria after a devastating earthquake and praised the Kremlin chief for his support of Syrian unity.
Syria stood beside Russia on the issue of Ukraine, Assad said.
“Because this is my first visit since the start of the special military operation in Ukraine, I would like to repeat the Syrian position in support of this special operation,” Assad told Putin, according to a Kremlin transcript.
Syria recognises the territories of Ukraine which Russia has seized as Russian, Assad said.
“I say that these are Russian territories, and even if the war had not happened, these are historically Russian territories,” Assad told RIA.
Russia has claimed around a fifth of Ukraine and says the lands are now part of Russia. Ukraine says it will fight until every last Russian soldier is ejected from Ukraine. The West says the annexation of Ukrainian territory is illegal.
Assad said Russia and Syria planned to sign an agreement on economic cooperation in the coming weeks.
every day US and israeli forces steal millions of gallons of oil plunder mineral resources in syria
Israel backs this up with bouts of bombing and general terrorism as they do in palestine this is a big criminal enterprise
israel says its not stealing as syria will soon be part of israel
https://www.presstv.co.uk/Detail/2023/02/19/698506/Syrian-Foreign-Ministry-urgent-international-action-Israeli-regime-aggression-missile-attack-
Why has Putin allowed Israel to bomb /Damascua. more or less every day for the last few years?
I am becoming very suspicious of the war between Russia and the Ukraine.
The people of the Ukraine are Slavs and Christian, The Russian Slavs are Christian.
Why are they fighting each other? Why do they rake orders from the Jews to fight each other?
Cholomoisky is Jewish and so is Zelensky and Netanyahoo is all for this war which they say they intend to make into Great Isael! And they are not even Semitic!
And why is Netanyahoo on such good terms with Putin?
“We Jews, the destroyers, will remain the destroyers forever. Nothing the Gentiles do will meet ouf needs, our demands. We want a world of our own.” Maurice Samuel.
Too many of us are taken in by Putin it seems.
Good for Assad. He’s popular in Syria and occasionally he and his wife walk around among the people, something Gaddafi used to do because he was popular too. They say Assad has outlasted several western leaders who have tried to oust him – Obama, Cameron, Trump, Johnson, Sarkozy at least. The way things are going he might outlast the west.
Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad is one of the Earth’s few leaders who has his moral compass set to normal. He deserves all our praise and encouragement as he fights the forces of darkness. His country borders on the forces of darkness central. One hopes the Russians can spare some additional forces in Syria to help him out, he deserves it.
It is time for Russia and company to evict the American squatter from Eastern Syria.
And while they’re doing that they should not allow Israeli war planes on a mission to bomb Syria to return to that occupied squat from whence they came from.
Israel, from now on you are on your own in that squat you call Israel…
All your neighbours hate you.
Browser not letting me copy link.
Strange… Perhaps Browser needs to be refreshed.
Short excerpt from article.
Jonathan Cook
It’s not just the settlers – or Israel – responsible for the torching of Huwwara
Jonathan Cook
9 March 2023 15:21 UTC | Last update: 1 week 21 hours ago
Endless indulgence from Israel’s supporters in the West has cleared a path to a fascist government intent on ‘wiping out’ Palestinian communities
‘Merciless attacks’
Smotrich, Israel’s finance minister, who has also been awarded unprecedented powers by Netanyahu to run the occupation, responded to the Huwwara attack by urging greater violence. He called for the town to be “wiped out”.
But he qualified his statement by arguing that it was important the Israeli state organise the violence rather than that it be left to the settler movement he represents.
“Heaven forbid it should be done by private individuals,” he said. “I think the village of Huwwara should be wiped out, but I think the State of Israel should do it.”
His comment did not come out of the blue. Hours before the settlers’ invasion of Huwwara, Smotrich had called on his own government to abandon discussions with Palestinian officials in Jordan to ease tensions. He demanded instead that Israel attack Palestinian cities “mercilessly with tanks and helicopters”.
Other legislators in his faction have echoed him. Zvika Fogel, a retired general who was once in charge of Gaza, said in response to the settlers’ rampage: “Huwwara closed and burned down – that’s what I want to see.” Last December, he told the UK’s Channel 4 News that Israel was “too merciful” towards Palestinians and it was “time for us to stop being so”.
Both were giving succour to a familiar slogan against Palestinians shouted out at demonstrations by Israel’s fascist right: “May your village burn.”
In any other context, calls by a senior government minister for state-organised violence against civilians because of their ethnic or national status would be clearly understood as genocidal. But, of course, other standards apply to Israel, a key partner for the United States and Europe in projecting western power into the oil-rich Middle East.
Instead, the full significance of Smotrich’s threat – given that he and his partner, Ben-Gvir, the police minister, control the means by which such genocidal actions can be undertaken – is not being addressed.
The Biden administration called his remarks “irresponsible” and “repugnant”.
The liberal Haaretz newspaper warned only that Smotrich was urging “collective punishment” of Palestinians, in violation of international law. But collective punishment has been the stock-in-trade of Israeli policy towards Palestinians for decades.
Genocidal project
In my view, something far more sinister is going on. Smotrich’s comment that it should not fall to individuals to “wipe out” Palestinian communities – that it was the duty of the state – was directed at his supporters among the fanatical settlers. He was intimating two things to them.
First, he was reminding these religious fascists, the constituency that propelled him into government, that he and Ben-Gvir are now the state – thanks to them. He was not seeking to dissuade the settlers from perpetrating genocidal violence against Palestinians. He was reassuring them that he is there to help.
He and Ben-Gvir now effectively run the occupation. He was telling the settlers they have allies for their genocidal project in the highest places.
But, in my opinion, he was doing something more. He was also reminding them that he and Ben-Gvir are fighting their corner but cannot win the battle alone. They need the settlers to aid them in their struggle against wavering ministerial colleagues, or those in government who might hold back from fear of the international reaction.
Smotrich’s remarks were intended not to curb the settlers’ excesses. He wants them to exert even more pressure on the government to strengthen his hand.
The more effective he is in forcing the state to “wipe out” places like Huwwara – or help the settlers to do so – the larger his support base will grow, the more he will become a central figure in Israeli politics, and the more his and settlers’ agenda will become normalised.
And Smotrich knows too that opposition to the settlers’ genocidal violence may be only skin deep among much of the wider Israeli Jewish public. The dehumanisation of Palestinians and incitement towards violence is standard fare, on both the right and the supposed left.
Singling him out pretends that more respectable government ministers, even prime ministers, have not been talking and thinking this way for decades.
Generals, senior politicians and rabbis regularly compare Palestinians to cockroaches, snakes, lice and cancer. Settler rabbis have even called for Jews to kill Palestinian babies.
In 2008, Matan Vilnai, an army general who at the time was a Labor deputy defence minister, called for a “shoah” – the Hebrew word for the Holocaust – against the Palestinians of Gaza.
Ehud Barak, a former Labor prime minister, famously compared Israel to a “villa in the jungle”, implying that the dangerous creatures outside needed exterminating.
And Netanyahu himself suggested in the 2019 general election that the parties representing Israel’s large, much-oppressed minority of Palestinians, “want to annihilate us all – women, children and men”. The implication was clear: Israel had a right to pre-empt such annihilation.
Smotrich knows that most Israeli Jews understand, at least subconsciously, that their self-declared Jewish state was founded by wiping out – literally blowing up and demolishing – many hundreds of communities like Huwwara in 1948. So why not continue that process in the occupied territories? Why not make explicit in the areas occupied in 1967 what was entirely routine in the areas seized in 1948?
Keeping those US troops in Syria is illegal, immoral and UNLAWFUL. Uninvited, it constitutes an INVASION, yet they are STILL there (ILLEGALLY), YET.
There is no real justification, just more BS trying to act it, American blood and treasure being horribly used as a protection racket for thieves, still no end in sight.
The new speaker of the house aims to cut waste from the bloated budget,
this should be the first, the BEST cut!
thats good ! syria, russia, iran, china united
against hate + war mongering terrorist failed
states USA+ israhell !
lt’s incredble don’t you think?…
that Vlad Putin actually fields the real Russian Army in Syria (with Wagner support l may add..this is where Wagner began the now famous ‘sledge hammer’ response to traitors and insurgents.. )..
But uses drafted peasants to fight the so called ‘existential’ war on his border….
Presumably it’s a matter of Nomenklatura…
Tell me who your friends are – and I will tell you who you are: A criminal like your enemies
Did you say Syria needs troops to fight ZOG?
Yahoo News: North Korea claims almost 800,000 have signed up to fight against U.S.
“SEOUL (Reuters) — North Korea claims that about 800,000 of its citizens volunteered to join or reenlist in the nation’s military to fight against the United States, North Korea’s state newspaper reported on Saturday.”
————–
If you all remember, last month I wrote again and again North Koreans are anxious to go kill Amerikans in Ukraine.
Internet prognosticator Yukon Jack, sitting in his recliner chair, right again. LOLROFL
Belt and Road Initiate is just like Eisenhower’s interstate freeway, you can move the goods cross country or you can move the troops to the front line.
https://dwvyw8kf1avne.cloudfront.net/s3fs-public/inline-images/BRI.jpg
Oh yeah baby, here they come!
Stephen–the moral compass has a free-floating needle, pointing to “good”; if you set it, it will not work
@ ASTRAEA
Putin is the Golem of Chabad Lubavitcher + israel .
like Biden/Trump are Golems of Lubavitcher + israel.
so you see all this war politics are false .
the only outcome of all this war today + tomorrow
is to kill as many white goyim as possible . so that
the jews are again profiters like in 1.+2.worldwars
they iniciated .
and Jesus said :You are the salt of the earth !
VERY SALTENED SOUP !
@ STEWEN
Assad did not want to lead after his father
but he had to help his people . despite the
jewish western hate propaganda medias falsely
always indoctrinated stupid western people
that he + Syria would be a terrorist suporter
they, the CIA/FBI/MI5+6/Mossad/Pentagon/
CFR/RIIA/SAS/USstateDepartment etc are the
truthful main terrorists in the world since 75 years !
same about Gadaffis gold + oil they robbed .