US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson unveiled a tentative agreement with his Turkish counterpart Mevlut Kavusoglu Friday after a bilateral meeting in Ankara aimed at patching up sharp differences. The meeting was part of a Middle East tour by Tillerson, who made clear that the US is in the advanced stages of preparing a major…
The Russian military has just suffered in Syria its biggest loss of life in a single action fought on foreign soil since the Soviet war in Afghanistan. Furthermore, the Russians were killed by US gunners and pilots. Dozens, and potentially hundreds, of Russian soldiers died when US artillery, Apache helicopters and an AC 130 Spectre…
“Israel is climbing up a high horse,” Alex Fishman (the veteran Israeli Defence Correspondent) wrote in the Hebrew daily, Yedioth Ahronoth, last month, “and is approaching with giant steps a ‘war of choice’: Without mincing words, it’s an initiated war in Lebanon.” In Fishman’s article, he notes: “Classical deterrence is when you threaten an enemy not to…
Events in Syria have recently clearly taken a turn for the worse and there is an increasing amount of evidence that the Russian task force in Syria is being targeted by a systematic campaign of “harassing attacks”. First, there was the (relatively successful) drone and mortar attack on the Russian Aerospace base in Khmeimin. Then…
French President Emmanuel Macron has said he would order airstrikes against Syria if the rumors that its government has used chemical weapons (CW) against civilians are confirmed. Never backed up with any solid evidence, such reports crop up from time to time in the Western media. In some cases the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons…
Bilateral relations are the most strained in decades over numerous issues, most notably: • for the July 2016 coup attempt Erdogan blamed on exiled cleric Fethullah Gulen living in America; • Washington providing heavy weapons to Kurdish YPG fighters in Syria; and • its plan to establish a 30,000-strong largely Kurdish YPG border security force…
