Obama weighs moving U.S. troops closer to front lines in Syria, Iraq


President Obama’s most senior national security advisers have recommended measures that would move U.S. troops closer to the front lines in Iraq and Syria, officials said, a sign of mounting White House dissatisfaction with progress against the Islamic State and a renewed Pentagon push to expand military involvement in long-running conflicts overseas. 
The debate over the proposed steps, which would for the first time position a limited number of Special Operations forces on the ground in Syria and put U.S. advisers closer to the firefights in Iraq, comes as Defense Secretary Ashton B. Carter presses the military to deliver new options for greater military involvement in Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan.

The changes would represent a significant escalation of the American role in Iraq and Syria. They still require formal approval from Obama, who could make a decision as soon as this week and could decide not to alter the current course, said U.S. officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the discussions are still ongoing. It’s unclear how many additional troops would be required to implement the changes being considered by the president, but the number for now is likely to be relatively small, these officials said.

The recommendations came at Obama’s request and reflect the president’s and his top advisers’ concern that the battle in Iraq and Syria is largely stalemated and in need of new ideas to generate momentum against Islamic State forces.


The list of options that went to the president was generated by field commanders and vetted by the president’s top national security advisers, including Carter and Secretary of State John F. Kerry, in a series of meetings over the past few weeks.


The recommendations delivered to Obama would not put U.S. forces in a direct combat role. But they reflect a major shift in mission for the Pentagon, where as recently as last year officials were focused on winding down U.S. wars and on emerging threats such as China’s military rise.

The proposal would put a small number of U.S. advisers on the ground in Syria for the first time since the United States began military operations against the Islamic State last year. The Pentagon has sent small Special Operations teams into Syria for lightning-quick missions several times since the war began in 2011. The newly proposed Special Operations forces would work with moderate Syrian Arab rebels and possibly some Kurdish groups, such as the People’s Protection Units, or YPG, that have scored some recent victories against the Islamic State.

As for the Iraq side of the border, the president’s top advisers have recommended embedding U.S. advisers at the brigade level for specific operations such as the attack to retake Ramadi, a key western Iraqi city that Islamic State forces seized this past spring. Such a move would position U.S. troops, now largely assigned to training bases, closer to the front lines, where they could help Iraqi commanders plan and prosecute the day-to-day fight against the Islamic State in Ramadi.





In three days of operations, the Russian aviation group in Syria has hit 258 targets belonging to the Islamic State and Jabhat al-Nusra terror groups, the Defense Ministry said.


"Over the past three days, the warplanes of the Russian air group have carried out 164 sorties, hitting 285 targets,” Igor Konashenkov, a spokesman for the Ministry of Defense, said Monday.
In the past 24 hours, 59 sorties were carried out, targeting 94 terrorist sites in the provinces of Hama, Idlib, Latakia, Damascus, Aleppo and Deir ez-Zor.
Konashenkov said a large ammunition dump belonging to the Jabhat al-Nusra terror group has been destroyed in Syria’s Damascus province. The two metallic hangars were razed to the ground as munitions inside them detonated following a direct hit by a Russian bomber.

In Aleppo, the Russian planes bombed an Islamic State command center used by the terrorists to coordinate their actions against the Syrian Army units near the Quaires airport, the spokesman added. In the same region, an Islamic State base equipped with anti-aircraft guns, mortars and heavy machine guns was destroyed in an airstrike.







For any Democrat anxious to see the unpopular Iran nuclear agreement fade from public view between now and November 2016, it’s been a rough couple of weeks.
Headlines about the GOP Senate’s failed battle to stop the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action had all but disappeared when Iranlaunched an Oct. 11 test of an intercontinental ballistic missile. Suddenly foes of the deal were back in the news, accusing Iran of breaking the agreement.

The White House and Iran countered that the launch did not violate the nuclear deal because it does not include missile testing. Even so, a group of Senate Democrats responded with a letter to Secretary of State John F. Kerry denouncing Iran’s move as a violation of U.N. Security Council Resolution 1929 and calling for “unilateral and multilateral responses.”

The episode exemplifies a worst-case scenario for Democrats as they head into next year’s election, namely that Iran will give Republicans ample “I-told-you-so” opportunities by breaking the agreement, violating other international sanctions or keeping the issue in the public eye with recurring acts of aggression or anti-U.S. rhetoric.

House Committee on Foreign Affairs Chairman Edward R. Royce weighed in after the formal adoption of the nuclear agreement on Oct. 18, known as Adoption Day, by ticking off a list of Iran’s recent transgressions, including Iranian Gen. Qasem Soleimani’s travel to Moscow in violation of sanctions.
“It’s sure tough to look at Iran’s actions over the last three months — let alone 35 years — and think Tehran will live up to its end of the nuclear bargain,” Mr. Royce said in a statement. “If this is what the last 90 days look like, the next few years look like a disaster.”





The female anaesthetist said the German health service has been completely overwhelmed by the influx of Muslim asylum-seekers who are REFUSING to be treated by female medics. 

In a furious outburst the experienced doctor said hospitals simply cannot cope because so many of the migrants require treatments for diseases long since eradicated in Europe. 

She also shockingly claimed migrant parents are abandoning their children at pharmacies across the country after being told that they have to pay a prescription charge for lifesaving drugs.

She also claimed huge numbers of the asylum-seekers have Victorian diseases including TB, which they risk passing on to locals. 

Meanwhile, German authorities have been forced to post police at hospitals around the country after others got involved in angry clashes with medics over cultural differences. 

The doctor, who wished to remain anonymous, wrote to the press back home in the Czech Republic to express her shock at the "unsustainable" situation which she says is now affecting the medical care received by taxpaying Germans. 
She said: "Clinics cannot handle emergencies, so they are starting to send everything to the hospitals.

"Many Muslims are refusing treatment by female staff. Relations between the staff and migrants are going from bad to worse. 

"Since last weekend, migrants going to the hospitals must be accompanied by police with K-9 units.

"Many migrants have AIDS, syphilis, open TB and many exotic diseases that we, in Europe, do not know how to treat them. 

"If they receive a prescription in the pharmacy, they learn they have to pay cash. 

"This leads to unbelievable outbursts, especially when it is about drugs for the children. 

"They abandon the children with pharmacy staff with the words: 'So, cure them here yourselves!' So the police are not just guarding the clinics and hospitals, but also large pharmacies."

"For now, the local hospital staff has not come down with the diseases they brought here, but, with so many hundreds of patients every day – this is just a question of time."







About midnight, on October 21st, a man wielding a knife lunged at a border patrol officer. The assailant was shot four times.
Did you hear about this incident? Probably not. That’s because the incident took place took place not somewhere in Israel, where all incidents of this type are recorded and broadcast around the world, but at the border crossing in Calexico, California, just across the border from Mexicali, Mexico.
The reason the man was shot by a Border & Patrol Protection officer and, subsequently, died from his wounds, should be obvious. People wielding knives and lunging at police—or anyone else, intend to injure or kill and it is essential to stop those attacker immediately—before they do their harm and people are killed.
This incident did not make international headlines. There was no outcry and no rage for the poor guy even after details emerged and we learned that he was on a bicycle and jumped off it to perpetrate his attack and that he was denied entry into the United States and that was why he went on his rampage.
There is a double standard here.
If this incident would have happened in Israel, the country’s many critics would be screaming about the murder of innocent people riding their bikes. The Palestinian propaganda machine would have turned the truth upside down to convince the world that the killer was the victim.
These are some of the lies that were told to the United Nation Security Council by PA UN Representative Riyad al Malik on Thursday, October 22nd. In describing the tension between the Palestinians and Israel, he said:

“Our Palestinian people, particularly our children, are being killed, targeted by the Israeli occupation forces.”
“They are denied fundamental right to life because of their national and religious identities. Their legitimate rejection of illegal occupation is being faced with killing and destruction.”
“Incitements and provocations continue in al-Haram al-Sharif (the Noble Sanctuary, as the Temple Mount is known by Muslims) and the al-Aqsa Mosque – attacks, incitement by the Israeli extremists and the officials against Palestinian civilians. Day after day we watch this.”
They believed every word. They gobbled up every untruth.
When Israel’s new Ambassador to the UN, Danny Danon, had his turn to speak, the damage was done. This is a war where lies and false rumors are the ammunition of the propagandists. And Israel is losing.
And it doesn’t stop. If the Palestinians speak untruths  it’s one thing. But when the United States delivers falsehoods, it’s something else entirely. On Monday, October 19th, three days before the UN Security Council heard from al Maliki and Danon, Secretary of State John Kerry had this to say about Israel and the Palestinians:
“We continue to urge everybody to exercise restraint and restrain from any kind of self-help in terms of the violence, and Israel has every right in the world to protect its citizens, as it has been, from random acts of violence.”


I don’t get it—and that’s probably because the secretary of state doesn’t really get it. Can the Israelis defend themselves or not? And why can’t Israeli be vigilant and help fight the terror spreading throughout their country. That is what Nir Barkat, the mayor of Jerusalem, advised when he asked that citizens who are trained marksmen and have licenses and permits and weapons carry their weapons with them wherever they go.

And what about this idea of restraint on both sides? Israel is showing great restraint—especially because they are the people being attacked. The vast amount of Palestinians who have been injured during this terror spree were the terrorists themselves. And they were injured or killed in the midst of the act of terror. Israel is killing terrorists—not innocent teenagers.

This is not, as Kerry erroneously stated, a question of “protection” but rather one of self defense. It baffles the mind that even now the United States is still attempting to put forth an agenda of impartiality. How could the US see things in such a warped manner as to confuse those who are the terrorists with those who are the victims? Why does the United States administration continue to persist in their desire to put both sides on an equal playing field?







When all strands of Palestinian political society came together in a deadly incitement based on religion radiating out from the Temple Mount in Jerusalem it left many dead on both sides of the religious divide – Jewish Israelis who were the prime target of Islam-motivated Palestinians.

Although the Islamic Movement and Hamas two of the leading Palestinian instigators of the violence, it was the statements of a presumed secular Mahmoud Abbas that inflamed the Palestinian street. He, like Yasser Arafat before him, presumed to speak for the Muslim world when he exhorted his people in a televised address to his people on September 16, “We welcome every drop of blood spilled in Jerusalem. This is pure blood, clean blood, blood on its way to Allah. With the help of Allah, every martyr will be in heaven, and every wounded will get his reward.”

He was referring to his incitement to prevent Jews from visiting the Temple Mount plateau which is the most holy place in Judaism.  About them he said, “The Al-Aqsa Mosque is ours. The Church of the Holy Sepulcher is ours as well. They have no right to desecrate the mosque with their dirty feet; we won’t allow them to do that.”

This statement was not only inflammatory; it was disdainful not only to Jews and Christians but also to King Abdullah, the Hashemite leader of the Kingdom of Jordan. It was also terribly presumptuous as Palestinian Arabs have no religious right to govern any holy site in Jerusalem and the Temple Mount in particular.

The accepted status quo rests on Israel’s agreement in 1967 to allow the Jordanian appointed Waqf to govern the Islamic holy site on the Temple Mount, known in the Muslim world as “Haram al-Sharif.” 

The explosion of the Arab war of 1948 against the nascent state of Israel left part of Jerusalem and all of Judea and Samaria, colloquially called “the West Bank,” under Jordanian occupation.