There are some 2,000 Iranian troops currently on the ground in Syria, the US’s top US military officer estimated Tuesday, suggesting that they were helping cement embattled president Bashar Assad’s hold on power together with Russian airstrikes.
Newly minted Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Joseph L. Dunford, fresh from a trip to the Middle East that included a visit to Israel last week, told a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing that the “balance of forces” is currently in Assad’s favor.
He also said some thousand Iranian troops were in Iraq.
“I think there’s more than 1,000 that are on the ground in Iraq,” Dunford said. “In Syria, we think the numbers are probably something less than 2,000.”
Iran, which together with Russia is one of Assad’s staunchest backers, has acknowledged sending military advisers to Syria and Iraq to help beat back the radical Islamic State group, but insists it has deployed no actual fighters on the ground.
However, Israel has expressed worries that Iran and its Lebanese proxy Hezbollah, which has been mired in Syria for years, have been using the fighting in Iran as a pretext to set up bases along the Golan border from which to launch attacks against the Jewish state.
Russia, which recently began a bombing campaign in Syria, also insists it is targeting Islamic State fighters, but critics, including US officials, have charged that Moscow is mainly targeting other rebel groups to help Assad maintain power after nearly five years of bloody civil war.
In the latest effort to revive direct Israeli-Palestinian peace talks, New Zealand has drafted a UN resolution that reportedly calls for a freeze on Israeli settlement building in the West Bank and for Palestinians to abandon their bid to take legal action against Israel at the International Criminal Court.
The draft resolution would assert that the Security Council is “very concerned” over the stalled peace talks, and call on both parties to “take the necessary measures to rebuild confidence and prepare for the resumption of negotiations,” based on a two-state solution, Haaretz reported on Wednesday.
The draft urges both sides to avoid taking “actions or declarations that would harm mutual confidence or predetermine the results of negotiations,” including the expansion of settlements and demolition of Palestinian homes in the West Bank, the report said.
Distributed to the 14 members of the Security Council on Friday, the resolution would also call on both sides to refrain from making “provocative actions” against the status quo on Jerusalem’s Temple Mount, the epicenter of recent unrest in Israel and the West Bank.
The resolution would appeal to Security Council member states, Arab supporters of the Saudi peace initiative and Quartet representatives, to support Israelis and Palestinians in preparing for renewed talks.
Last week, New Zealand’s Foreign Minister Murray McCully told the Security Council he hoped the measure would help “stimulate a level of debate” on the way forward as Israel and the Palestinians sink deeper into violence.
“The events of recent weeks cry out for council action,” said McCully.
“Islam as a whole has been slashing and burning and forcing people to join their religion at the point of the sword for 1,400 years,” Kupelian said. “But in America, it cannot happen in that way. America is too big, too powerful, and still too Christian, so it has to happen just as … the left has [conspired] to take over America – slowly, in an evolutionary, not revolutionary, way.”
This slow, stealthy strategy involves infiltrating and subverting America's institutions, said Kupelian. To cite one example, he noted that several "mainstream" Islamic organizations in the U.S. have close ties to the Muslim Brotherhood, among them the Muslim American Society and the Council on American-Islamic Relations, or CAIR.
Kupelian reiterated that this is the very same technique the left has used to infiltrate and ultimately dominate major American institutions over the last couple of generations.
Now, the author says Muslims bent on bringing about shariah dominance in America are doing what Marxists did – fighting a two-front war, supplementing violent assault with a steady, behind-the-scenes infiltration of American institutions. The public schools appear to be one battleground. For example, middle-school students in Tennessee were recently taught a sanitized version of Islam in their social studies class and even forced to declare, "There is no God but Allah."
First it was wildfires, then it was unprecedented flooding, and now it is earthquakes. In the past two weeks alone, more than 400 earthquakes have shaken San Ramon – a small city that sits approximately 45 miles east of San Francisco. Never before have so many earthquakes been recorded in that area in such a short span of time. Standing alone, that earthquake swarm may not mean that much. But when you stand back and look at all of the unusual events that have been happening since late September, a very disturbing picture begins to emerge.
But first, let’s talk about this earthquake swarm. All over the planet, seismic activity seems to be increasing. According to Volcano Discovery, dozens of volcanoes around the world have recently erupted, and Afghanistan was just hit by a massive 7.5-magnitude quake. It was one of the worst earthquakes that Afghanistan has ever seen, and it is going to take months to deal with all of the damage. So that is why it is so alarming that right now there is record breaking earthquake activity just outside of San Francisco…
San Ramon, California, appears to have broken a new earthquake record over the last two weeks: A total of 408 small quakes have shaken the East Bay city, almost four times the record set in 2003 in half the amount of time.
“I’ve not felt so many tremors in decades,” Mark Stone said outside a San Ramon Starbucks on Tuesday morning. “My dog, Gimmel, she’s the first one to know a couple of seconds before.”
Islamic State evolved from the Arab Spring and gained momentum due to the duplicity of certain world powers, the head of Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) has told a meeting of top security heads of ex-Soviet states (CIS) in Moscow on Wednesday.
There are world powers that are using Islamic State (IS, former ISIL/ISIS) as a kind of “terror battering ram” to ensure their interests in Asia and Africa, said FSB director Aleksandr Bortnikov. In pursuing their goals with IS, these countries have put the world on the verge of a global religious and civilizational crisis, he added.
The outcome of this global conflict could be disastrous, Bortnikov stressed
Russia's security agency chief also said that with parts of the Taliban movement in Afghanistan joining Islamic State, there is an imminent threat of the terrorists invading Central Asia.
Terrorist forces are attempting to turn the Middle East and North Africa into a bridgehead to destabilize other countries, said Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Growing terror activities and the merging of radical groups with organized crime presents a threat of special concern, the Russian leader said in a welcome address at the meeting of CIS security heads.
“The terrorists are using the region as a foothold. They are recruiting and training new militants, which could be used for destabilization efforts in other countries,” Putin said.
Aleksandr Bortnikov stressed that incidents on the borders of Russia’s regional partners are already taking place. Militants returning to CIS countries from various hotbeds are bringing instability back home, he told his colleagues.
After decades of berating Americans for their constitutionally protected right to bear arms, Europeans are finally starting to wake up. It took over a million Islamic immigrants and violence across their union to convince them, but it appears that they finally get it.
Despite how hard it is to attain these weapons in countries like Austria, firearms are currently being sold there in record numbers much like they are in the United States. But instead of the threat of confiscation, this trend is being fueled by the refugee crisis. According to a Czech TV report, pretty much all of the long guns in the country have been sold out for the past three weeks. One gun merchant revealed that most of the buyers are women who want to protect themselves, and those who can't buy firearms are buying up pepper spray.
Prior to the refugee crisis, most gun buyers were sportsman and hunters. Now there is a growing interest in buying weapons for self-defense. And according to Alan Gottlieb, vice president of the Second Amendment Foundation, European attitudes on firearm ownership are beginning to shift. "I just returned from a gun rights meeting in Belgium, and I can attest that all over Europe people now want the means to defend themselves. Self-defense is no longer a dirty word. In countries like Austria, where it is still legal to own a firearm, gun sales are at record levels."
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