Military Defense News: “Train and Equip” Program in Syria = Full Metal Retard, Part Deux

When you start reading this, you will begin shaking your head in disbelief. When you have finished reading this, you will be looking for a bottle of advil because your head will be pounding.-SF

It would be difficult to find a program that better exemplifies the word “failure” than the Pentagon’s “train and equip” effort in Syria.

Last May, US Central Command issued a hilariously absurd press release outlining what was quite obviously going to be a disastrous effort to arm rebel fighters. “The US military and partner forces have begun training the initial class of appropriately vetted Syrian opposition recruits this week to support the effort to degrade and ultimately defeat ISIL in Syria,” the PR read.

The idea was to field a contingent of more than 5,000 fearsome warriors by the end of the year.

Long story short, the effort was a fiasco – a complete debacle – a hilarious screwup. First, Colonel Nadim al-Hassan and an unknown number of other fighters from “Division 30” were kidnapped in the Aleppo countryside in July. “A senior U.S. defense official confirmed the snatched fighters had gone through the initial vetting process to receive training in Turkey,” The Daily Beast wrote at the time. “But then, for reasons that remain unclear, they traveled to Syria before they were ready to do battle with ISIS.” Subsequently, al-Nusra simply arrested them at a checkpoint near Zahart al-Malkia.

“We warn soldiers of (Division 30) against proceeding in the American project,” the al-Qaeda affiliate said in a statement distributed online. “We, and the Sunni people in Syria, will not allow their sacrifices to be offered on a golden platter to the American side.

As humiliating as that most certainly was, it got far, far worse. In late September, rumors circulated that Division 30 commander Anas Ibrahim Obaid had defected to al-Nusra after he disappeared in Aleppo.

Apparently, Obaid entered Syria from Turkey the day before with some 70 new graduates of the US program and a dozen or so four-wheel vehicles equipped with machine guns and ammunition. Although there are competing accounts as to what exactly happened next, Division 30 ultimately handed over all of the ammunition and the pickup trucks to al-Nusra in exchange for “safe passage.”

“They handed over a very large amount of ammunition and medium weaponry and a number of pick-ups,” one Abu Fahd al-Tunisi, an al-Nusra member, said on Twitter. “A strong slap for America… the new group from Division 30 that entered yesterday hands over all of its weapons to Jabhat al-Nusra after being granted safe passage,” he added.

Yes, “a strong slap for America” that came just days after “a strong slap” for taxpayers who on September 16 learned that only “four or five” graduates of the $500 million program were still fighting in Syria.

The program was understandably mothballed a few weeks later, but that doesn’t mean US-trained forces didn’t continue to rack up embarrassing battlefield losses to al-Nusra. In fact, it was exactly two weeks ago that al-Nusra took over Maarat Numan from Division 13 (one of the first rebel groups to receive US-made TOWs), confiscating anti-tank missiles, armored vehicles, a tank, and other arms in the process. “We congratulate [al-Nusra chief Mohammad] al-Jolani on this conquest!” Division 13’s leadership exclaimed, sarcastically on Twitter.

 

Read the Remainder at Zero Hedge

Military Defense News: Russian T-90 Tank vs American TOW Missile…T-90 Can Take A Lickin’ But Keep on Tickin’

For all the videos coming out of the Syrian civil war, a one minute, 31-second clip of a U.S.-made TOW missile slamming into a T-90 tank got more attention than most. In the video uploaded in February, Russia’s most advanced operational battle tank met one of the United States’ main tank killers on the battlefield.

The T-90 was Russian made, but likely crewed by Syrian troops. The missile was supplied by the United States — most likely via Saudi Arabia or the CIA — to the Hawks Mountain Brigade fighting near Aleppo.

For the participants, the whole experience might have been terrifiying. For most of the rest of the world, it was a chance to see what happens when state-of-the-art hardware from two major world powers violently collide in the Middle East.

The only good news is that nobody appeared to get killed. What happened to the tank … well, no one who watched the video was exactly sure.

We saw the wire-guided missile bob toward the T-90, which was parked on a crest between two low-slung buildings. Then the missile hit the tank’s turret with a tremendous flash which sent up a cloud of smoke. One of the crew members bailed and the video ended.

There was no fire and the tank didn’t “brew up,” meaning the fuel tank didn’t ignite and burn the crew to death. (The Syrian army has lostthousands of tanks since the war began in 2011.) This one, it seemed, survived.

A recent photograph circulated on Russian military forums shows what the tank looked like after impact. Sure enough, the T-90’s Kontakt-5 reactive armor appeared to save it. Reactive armor explodes outwards and stops incoming missiles from penetrating into the tank and killing the crew.

The Research Institute of Steel, a Russian company which makes reactive armor plates for the T-90, was pleased. The crew lived, according to Russian press reports, and the only visible damage was on one of the T-90’s two Shtora transmitters, which hanged limp in the photograph. However, the angle of the photograph only shows a glimpse of the side of the turret which was hit.

The Shtora is an electro-optical jammer designed to disrupt guided missiles. It’s not clear if the jammers were switched on, or didn’t work, when the Hawks Mountain Brigade opened fire. Russian media has also reported that the particular tank was an earlier version of the T-90, so more recent upgrades, such as the T-90A which boasts a modified turret, should fare better.

The photograph doesn’t tell us much more than add more evidence to what everyone already expected — that the missile disabled the tank, but didn’t destroy it. The T-90 was knocked out of the fight, and the Syrian army soon withdrew it to a repair plant, according to the Russian trade journal Military-Industrial Courier.

The main thing is that the armor appeared to accomplish its job. Losing a tank from the front line is one thing — it can always be replaced or repaired. The Syrian army was likely relieved to have saved the crew from being killed.

Read the original Article at War is Boring

Clinton Email Reveals Google Sought Overthrow of Syria’s Assad

The more things change, the more they stay the same. Just like with Iran Coup ’53, Big Business and Big Money are often the motivating factor for “Democracy”.-SF

 

Google in 2012 sought to help insurgents overthrow Syrian President Bashar Assad, according to State Department emails receiving fresh scrutiny this week.

Messages between former secretary of state Hillary Clinton’s team and one of the company’s executives detailed the plan for Google to get involved in the region.

“Please keep close hold, but my team is planning to launch a tool … that will publicly track and map the defections in Syria and which parts of the government they are coming from,” Jared Cohen, the head of what was then the company’s “Google Ideas” division, wrotein a July 2012 email to several top Clinton officials.

“Our logic behind this is that while many people are tracking the atrocities, nobody is visually representing and mapping the defections, which we believe are important in encouraging more to defect and giving confidence to the opposition,” Cohen said, adding that the plan was for Google to surreptitiously give the tool to Middle Eastern media.

“Given how hard it is to get information into Syria right now, we are partnering with Al-Jazeera who will take primary ownership over the tool we have built, track the data, verify it, and broadcast it back into Syria,” he said.

“Please keep this very close hold and let me know if there is anything [else] you think we need to account for or think about before we launch. We believe this can have an important impact,” Cohen concluded.

The message was addressed to deputy secretary of state Bill Burns; Alec Ross, a senior Clinton advisor; and Clinton’s deputy chief of staff, Jake Sullivan. Sullivan subsequently forwarded Cohen’s proposal to Clinton, describing it as “a pretty cool idea.”

Cohen worked as a low-level staffer at the State Department until 2010, when he was hired to lead Google Ideas, but was tied to the use of social media to incite social uprisings even before he left the department. He once reportedly asked Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey to hold off of conducting system maintenance that officials believed could have impeded a brief 2009 uprising in Iran.

The unusual involvement by Google in foreign affairs highlights the difficulty of involvement in the internal politics of foriegn states. While Cohen seemed to consider his company’s effort as helpful to American interests, the effort to overthrow Assad helped spur the rise of the Islamic State, which eventually filled a vaccuum resulting from Assad’s loss of control over of Syria.

The exchange on Syria was highlighted by Wikileaks on Saturday. Earlier in the week, the secret-leaking website posted more than 30,000 emails that Clinton sent or received during her tenure leading the State Department.

Read the Original Article at The Washington Examiner

Iranian Basij Fighting Forces Bolster the Assad Regime in Syria

This fanatical Para-Military Volunteer pipeline stretches from Tehran to Damascus

Tehran downplays its presence in Syria, but its volunteers are hard to hide.

The most obvious clue as to their presence is the fact that Iranian troops have died in the conflict, including high-profile commanders such as Brig. Gen. Hossein Hamedani of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps.

Iran’s Syrian military presence also heavily relies on the Basij — a paramilitary organization numbering between four to five million members. Ostensibly under IRGC control, the Basij reserves its greatest loyalty to Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

The Basij is most well known in the West for its terrifying human-wave tactics during the Iran-Iraq War. While these historical tactics are well documented, this is a simplistic view that neglects the Basij’s enormous breadth and scope in present-day Iranian society.

“[The Basij] carries out military training and surveillance, supervises public behavior, runs businesses, educates members, and propagandizes through physical space and social media,” the Guardian noted in a 2015 article which referenced scholar Saeid Golkar’s book Captive Society: The Basij Militia and Social Control in Iran.

We now have a better picture Basij’s presence in Syria — because it’s acknowledged in the Iranian press.

Shargh, a reformist newspaper based in Tehran, recently detailed the Basij’s volunteer pipeline to Syria. Officially, the Basij recruits fighters to defend the Sayyidah Zaynab Mosque in Damascus, an important Shia holy site. Once in Syria, these volunteers serve as “advisers” or “religious pilgrims.”

But the volunteers are clearly doing much more. ” Twenty-eight Basij fighters from Tehran have died in Syria — indicating a more extensive combat role. As the Basij recruits volunteers from across Iran, the true number of dead is surely higher.

OE Watch, the monthly newsletter of the U.S. Army’s Foreign Military Studies Office, took notice.

For several years, the Iranian government has described Iranians captured by Syrian opposition forces as religious pilgrims rather than fighters. The open discussion of the IRGC and Basij organizing volunteers to defend Shi‘ite shrines in Syria affirms the statements of Syrian opposition forces and belies earlier Iranian denials.

Nor does the portrayal of the volunteers as mere advisors seem plausible, as greater military expertise is a requirement for any advisor who seeks to make a qualitative difference; rather, it seems that the Basij is recruiting less experienced Iranians to engage more directly in the fight against Syrian opposition groups and perhaps the Islamic State as well. That 28 Basij-recruited volunteers have been killed fighting in Syria — and perhaps dozens more once Iran’s other provinces are factored in — further indicated that missions Iranian diplomats downplay as advisory only are far more engaged in combat.

That the IRGC must hold recruitment drives to man the fight in Syria raises questions regarding the broader Iranian deployment to Syria. While the Revolutionary Guards exists to protect not only Iran’s territory, but also its ideology, the fact that it must recruit volunteers rather than simply order members into Syria may raise questions about fissures within the organization between a more ideological leadership and a significant and perhaps majority portion who joined the Corps less for the ideology and more for the pay and privilege, especially in juxtaposition to service in the conscript army.

Read the Original Article at War is Boring