Iraqi special forces enter Mosul, take state television building


The fight to push ISIS out of the biggest urban area it holds took a big step forward today, into Mosul itself. Iraqi special forces entered the city limits, the first time in two years that the government in Baghdad has had a presence there. NBC News captured the moment, even if Iraq is still weeks away from capturing the rest of the city:

Iraq’s special forces entered the outskirts of Mosul on Tuesday and were advancing toward its more urban center despite fierce resistance by ISIS fighters who hold the city, an Iraqi general said.
Troops have entered Gogjali, a neighborhood inside Mosul’s city limits, and were only 800 yards from the more central Karama district, according to Maj. Gen. Sami al-Aridi of the Iraqi special forces. …
It was the first time Iraqi troops have set foot in Mosul in over two years, after they were driven out by a much smaller group of ISIS extremists in 2014. Mosul is the final ISIS bastion in Iraq, the city from which it declared a “caliphate” stretching into Syria, and its loss would be a major defeat for the jihadis.
Yet entering Mosul could be the start of a grueling and slow operation for the troops, as they will be forced to engage in difficult, house-to-house fighting in urban areas. The operation is expected to take weeks, if not months. The special forces troops remain some 5 miles from the center of the city, Iraq’s second-largest.
True, but they remain ambitious. One of the first tasks accomplished by the special forces was to capture a local television station, previously used by Iraqi state-run broadcasting:

Capturing the TV station is a major step forward, especially in an urban-combat theater. For one thing, it denies the enemy its use for coordinating a defense against the assault, which is important enough. The main importance, though, is morale and propaganda. Residents in the city may not have realized how close the Iraqi army was to entering Mosul, but having a live broadcast from the station will make it very clear that ISIS has lost ground within the city limits. The Iraqi government can also use the station to broadcast instructions to resistance fighters waiting for their moment to throw off ISIS’ tyrannical rule, as well as other propaganda and instructions to citizens trapped within the city limits.






A federal judge has rebuked the Obama administration over the lack of Syrian Christians being admitted from the war-zone.

Judge Daniel Manion addressed the refugee issue and took aim at the Obama administration over how few Christians had been admitted to the U.S.  The Judge called it a "perplexing discrepancy" that only 56 of 11,000 Syrian refugees to the U.S. in fiscal 2016 were Christian. The rebuke came in a Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals opinion on a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed by The Heartland Alliance’s National Immigrant Justice Center. A report from Fox News singled out the following quotes from Manion. 
“It is well‐documented that refugees to the United States are not representative of that war‐torn area of the world. Perhaps 10 percent of the population of Syria is Christian, and yet less than one‐half of one percent of Syrian refugees admitted to the United States this year are Christian,” he wrote.
“To date, there has not been a good explanation for this perplexing discrepancy,” Manion noted. 




Vladimir Putin in particular, and Russia in general,

have been the focus of an intensive high-drama propaganda campaign of late. Are you buying it? For the time being, Russophobia has replaced Islamophobia as the driving force behind the lies. Various US officials have been frantically warning Americans that the Russians are behind everything: hacking the DNC, controlling Trump, influencing the election and breaking the Syrian ceasefire agreement. They might as well add making your girlfriend break up with you, making your toast get burnt and making your car run out of fuel for all the evidence they have presented. Many of these totally unfounded allegations stem from (naturally) the Clinton campaign, home to career criminals Bill and Hillary Clinton, who are desperately seeking to find something to gain some sort of shred of popularity or advantage over Trump, who fills up arenas with 1000s of people more easily than Clinton can fill a high school gym with 50.
Many US officials and war hawks are trying to get in on the action; CIA man Mike Morell indicated it would be a good idea to covertly kill Russians to make them “pay a price”; Hillary Clinton called Vladimir Putin the “grand godfather of extreme nationalism” and blamed him for the rising popularity of right-wing leaders; and even standing VP Joe Biden came out and said that, “We’re sending a message to Putin … it will be at the time of our choosing and under the circumstances that have the greatest impact”. It seems there is no depth to which some US leaders won’t stoop in order to gain some political advantage, even it means lying, demonizing and destroying geopolitical partnerships in order to garner a few brownie points.



Vladimir Putin: It’s All About Distraction During Election Season


You would think Russian President Vladimir President would be agitated by all of this mud-slinging. At times he has been, for instance when he issued a warning a few months ago about an impending WW3 due to NATO’s constant aggression and advancement towards Russian borders. However, judging by his own words and mostly calm demeanor, he has seen through the agenda and understands what is going on. Putin spells out how it’s all inflamed rhetoric before an election season, an old trick used by politicians to distract when they have no meaningful solutions for internal and domestic problems. Thus, the Russophobia drama may well die down after the election.

Here is Vladimir Putin in his own words:

“You can expect anything from our American friends … the only novelty is that for the first time, on the highest level, the United States has admitted involvement in these activities, and to some extent threatened [us] – which of course does not meet the standards of international communication. As if we didn’t know that US Government bodies snoop on and wiretap anyone? Everyone knows this … 

Apparently, they are nervous. The question is why. I think there is a reason. You know, in an election campaign, the current government carefully crafts a pre-election strategy, and any government, especially when seeking re-election, always has unresolved issues. They need to show, to explain to the voters why they remain unresolved. In the US, there are many such problems … for example, the massive public debt is a time bomb for the US economy and global financial system … more examples can be cited in foreign policy … in these conditions, many choose to resort to the usual tactics of distracting voters from their problems … try to create an enemy and rally the nation against that enemy …

Iran and the Iranian threat did not work well for that. Russia is a more interesting story.”

Expect Vladimir Putin and Russia to keep being demonized by the Clintons – and more importantly the NWO manipulators who so desperately want them in power. Although the Clintons are a powerful modern American mafia family, replete with a long body count behind them, it’s important to remember they are lackeys for far greater and more pervasive powers (check out some of Hillary’s lovey-dovey letters to Lynn Forester de Rothschild here). There’s a lot at stake here. Right now, Vladimir Putin and Russia are being used with the sole purpose of getting Clinton elected. Although Putin is not perfect and has his own dark side, he deserves respect for standing his ground and refusing to become another US puppet. If we are to believe his own words, he has no qualm with Americans or even America itself, but rather the selfish, imperialistic and murderous agenda of the NWO agents running the USA: