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“Extremist groups will continue to exploit the vacuums that are there in Syria to expand their operations, which could include attacks against Russian interests, perhaps even Russian cities. Russia will continue to send troops home in body bags, and will continue to lose resources, perhaps even aircraft,” #John Kirby, the State Department's spokesperson, told reporters at Wednesday's press briefing.
But the United States is not doing the right thing in Syria. Arming, training and funding Islamic extremists — that have killed half a million people, displaced 7 million more and turned the country into an uninhabitable wastelands –is not the right thing. It is the wrong thing, the immoral thing. And the US is involved in this conflict for all the wrong reasons, the foremost of which is gas. The US wants to install a puppet regime in Damascus so it can secure pipeline corridors in the East, oversee the transport of vital energy reserves from Qatar to the EU, and make sure that those reserves continue to be denominated in US Dollars that are recycled into US Treasuries and US financial assets. This is the basic recipe for maintaining US dominance in the Middle East and for extending America’s imperial grip on global power into the future.
The war in Syria did not begin when the government of Bashar al Assad cracked down on protestors in the spring of 2011. That version of events is obfuscating hogwash. The war began in 2000, when Assad rejected a Qatari plan to transport gas from Qatar to the EU via Syria. As Robert F Kennedy Jr. explains in his excellent article “Syria: Another pipeline War”:
MR KIRBY: They’re hitting hospitals. They’re hitting civilian infrastructure. They’re hitting the headquarters of the White Helmets. Now, so what we’re seeing them hit is not Nusrah, and where we’re seeing them bomb is not where we know Nusrah to be. And this is a – this has been a pretense that Moscow and Damascus has been proffering now for many months. Well, if you’re going to go after terrorists --
QUESTION: Do you think they’re trying to take Aleppo?
MR KIRBY: Fine, you want to go after terrorists. If you’re going to do what you say you do, then show that you’re going after terrorists, and they haven’t done that. There have been times when they have, but they have also, under the pretense of going after terrorist groups – presumably al-Nusrah – they have hit what are clearly civilian targets.
QUESTION: So you think they’re trying to take Aleppo?
MR KIRBY: I think you can only conclude from the military activity that we’ve seen that the siege of Aleppo persists and it’s --
QUESTION: It’s eastern Aleppo, part of Aleppo, because larger Aleppo is not under siege.
MR KIRBY: All you can do from – all you can conclude from what we continue to see on the ground is that the regime wants to take Aleppo back.
QUESTION: Is the Administration committed to making sure that eastern Aleppo or this particular area of Aleppo does not fall into regime/Russian hands?
MR KIRBY: Obviously, we don’t want to see the regime --
QUESTION: I know you don’t.
MR KIRBY: -- acquire any additional territory as per – as laid out in the cessation of hostilities agreement. I’m not going to speculate about actions, decisions, consequences, down the road.
QUESTION: Down the road means – by some estimates, it could fall in, like, the next five days.
MR KIRBY: The Secretary was clear this morning in his phone call to Foreign Minister Lavrov about the sense of urgency that we have here on the United States side with respect to what we want to – what we need to see them do.
I find it ironic a French media outlet can claim copyright on a State Department press briefing. And yet every other day's press briefings are still available. Cover up much??
Thats ok, it has been uploaded plenty. At least we can get the relevant part even if we lost the entire briefing.