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Russian Search Helicopter Downed Near Syrian Border By US-Made Anti-Tank Missile, Rebels Claim
Russian Search Helicopter Downed Near Syrian Border By US-Made Anti-Tank Missile, Rebels Claim
The news is coming fast and furious out of Syria on Tuesday where, earlier today, Turkey decided to shoot down a Russian Su-24 which Ankara says violated its airspace while conducting operations near the border.
Russia says the fighter jet was in Syrian airspace for the duration of the mission while Turkey insists that the plane crossed the border and was warned several times before being engaged by two F-16s.
For his part, Vladimir Putin has now called Turkey a “backstabber” on the way to accusing Ankara of funding ISIS and derailing the war on terror.
Meanwhile, the FSA which is aligned with al-Nusra and is backed and funded by the US and Turkey released two videos depicting its fighters celebrating over the body of a dead Russian pilot.
Just in case all of that wasn’t enough, the FSA now claims to have shot down a Russian helicopter as it searched for the two missing pilots.
- SYRIAN OPPOSITION SAYS RUSSIAN HELICOPTER DOWNED: JAZEERA
- RUSSIAN HELICOPTER MAKES EMERGENCY LANDING IN SYRIA: SOHR
- SYRIAN OBSERVATORY SAYS RUSSIAN HELICOPTER HIT IN SYRIA, REBEL GROUP SAYS IT STRUCK IT WITH ANTI-TANK MISSILE
And here’s The Telegraph:
In what appears to be a separate incident, another Syrian rebel group – the Free Syrian Army’s First Coastal Division – says it has destroyed a Russia helicopter on Turkmen Mountain, using a TOW anti-tank missile, writes Louisa Loveluck, Middle East Correspondent.Pro-regime media outlets appear to have confirmed the report, suggesting that a Russian helicopter has been forced to make an emergency landing in government-controlled Latakia.
It was previously reported that Russian helicopters were trying to access the location where the first fighter bomber had crashed.
If the strike is confirmed, the TOW missile was most likely supplied through the same US and Turkey-backed logistics programme that has reportedly been supplying Alwiya al-Ashar.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
The Six Most Disastrous Interventions of the 21st Century
The Six Most Disastrous Interventions of the 21st Century
On October 2 President Barack Obama, alluding to Russia’s decision to launch air strikes in Syria, told reporters at the White House that for Russia to view the forces targeted “from the perspective they’re all terrorists [is] a recipe for disaster, and it’s one that I reject.”
In other words, he was saying that Moscow is not (as it claims) really focusing on ISIL and the al-Nusra Front but on the anti-regime opposition in general, which supposedly includes “moderates.”
Never mind that Obama himself as well as Joseph Biden have on occasion pooh-poohed the existence of a moderate armed opposition that controls territory in Syria. Didn’t Biden say last year at Harvard that “there was no moderate middle [in Syria] because the moderate middle are made up of shop-keepers, not soldiers”?
And hasn’t it been shown that maps showing territory in the hands of the “Free Syrian Army” are the figments of propagandists’ imagination? The FSA has no coordinated command structure and its networks overlap those of groups that Washington would not normally define as “moderate” (unless it wanted to rehabilitate al-Qaeda, which having attacked the U.S. on 9/11 and supposedly the cause of all the—disastrous—post-9/11 U.S. military actions in the Middle East), has gradually become my-enemy-against-my-enemy and hence a new found friend.
Seriously. Gen. David Petraeus, architect of the “surge” in Iraq in 2007 and former head of the CIA (until brought down in a sex/email-misuse scandal), has actually suggested that the U.S. support al-Qaeda—the al-Nusra Front—in Syria to defeat the bigger foe that is ISIL. (It does seem one man’s extremist is another man’s “moderate,” especially under confusing crisis circumstances. And that every cable news anchorperson will call “moderate” whatever the State Department demands—without knowing jack-shit about the facts, this not being required by that profession.)
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
