Homs falls to Assad: UN, Iranian officers secure Syrian rebels' exit after Iranian hostages freed in Aleppo - http://www.debka.com/article/23896/Homs-falls-to-Assad-UN-Iranian-officers-secure-Syrian-rebels'-exit-after-Iranian-hostages-freed-in-Aleppo
A joint team of UN observers and Iranian Revolutionary Guards officers in civilian dress began evacuating some 2,000 Syrian rebels and their families from the Old City of Homs on Wednesday, May 7, so ending a cruel two-year siege. The rebels' exodus from their last remaining stronghold represented another major victory for Syrian President Bashar Assad. As a rebel on his way out put it to Western reporters, "The rest of the world failed us."
For two years, the armed Syrian opposition to Assad held onto Homs as the capital of their revolution, against the Syrian army's ultimatum "to starve of surrender" and the most brutal assaults. Assad's army bombarded the Old City of Homs with chemical weapons and barrel bombs for two years. Syrian tanks and heavy artillery methodically destroyed homes, street-by-street, house-by-house, driving the rebels and their families into underground cellars and tunnels, without food, water or medicine.
In despair, the rebels finally gave up. Their exit from from Homs Old City under UN and Iranian protection was the final admission of their inability to vanquish Assad and his main backers, the Iranians.
To secure Assad's consent to their exit from this hell, the rebels agreed to the release of Iranian Revolutionary Guards officers held hostage by comrades in Aleppo, and to a withdrawal from a number of Shiite towns and villages in central and northern Syria.
debkafile's sources note the grim symbolism in the timing of the final surrender of Homs Wednesday, just one day after the Obama administration declared it was granting the main Syrian opposition group, the Syrian National Coalition-SNC, permission to open a foreign mission in Washington under the Foreign Missions Act.
Obama administration officials, senior senators and congressmen vied against each other over a few minutes with opposition leader Ahmad Jarba, who was in Washington. The administration also announced that it was allocating an additional $27 million in "non-lethal assistance" for the rebels to combat Assad.
The dissonance is clear and deadly: the Obama administration is continuing its war on Assad in the halls of Capitol building, with no regard for what is happening on the ground in Syria.
After the resounding collapse of the Geneva II peace talks in early February, and US Secretary of State John Kerry's failure to convene a Geneva III, it became clear that Moscow and Tehran had intensified their cooperative effort to keep the US from intervening in Syria.
The Obama administration tried to dispel this impression with deliberate leaks in April, suggesting that Washington was finally supplying the rebels with US BGM-71 TOW missiles and SA-16-9K310 Igla-1 anti-aircraft missiles. But debkafile's military sources report that the quantities supplied were so small that they had little impact on the battlefield and Assad's forces retained the upper hand.
The timing of the Wednesday surrender and the involvement of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards also corresponds nicely with US National Security Advisor Susan Rice's arrival in Israel for talks on the nuclear issue.
That the UN stood in need of Iranian assistance to accomplish this rescue operation attested to the importance the world body attaches to Iran's indispensible role in Damascus and its recognition that the Revolutionary Guards - even more than the Russians - are the only military force in the area able to control the Syrian and Hizballah military forces on the ground.
With all this underway, can Rice offer anything new to the Israeli political and security leadership, which is up against the reality of a US policy which only bolsters the Islamic Republic and its Middle East allies and the Iran-Syria-Hizballah axis?
Moscow, furthermore, continues to lavish high-quality arms on Assad's armed forces.
The state-owned arms Rosoboronexport will deliver the first batch of nine Russian Yakovlev Yak-130 jet trainers to the Syrian government by the end of this year. The contract for 36 aircraft is scheduled to be completed by the end of 2016, a source close to the deal told the local business daily Kommersant. The first 12 aircraft will be delivered in 2015, and a further 15 jet trainers in 2016.
"Thus, we will fulfill the obligations under a previously signed contract," the source was quoted as saying.
Israel: Assad has killed with poison gas 30 times since August - By Mitch Ginsburg and Adiv Sterman - http://www.timesofisrael.com/israel-assad-has-killed-with-chemical-weapons-30-times-since-august/
Regime, which signed convention against use last summer, developing range of 'non-classic' chemical weapons, senior IDF officer says
Syrian forces loyal to President Bashar Assad have used chemical weapons in over 30 cases since Syria joined the Chemical Weapons Convention last year and agreed to the destruction of its entire arsenal, a senior IDF officer said Thursday.
"From the day that he signed the deal, [Assad] has used chemical weapons over thirty times, and in every case citizens were killed," the officer said, adding that the weapons were "tactically deployed" with mortars and short-range rockets.
According to the officer, who spoke on condition of anonymity, Assad's regime was now focused on developing "non-classic" unconventional weapons based on weaker gas such as chlorine.
"We cannot say which type of chemical weapons, but factually, we can say he has used what we call 'non-classic' substances, which, in the end, have killed citizens," he said.
The officer asserted that although Syria's joining of the Chemical Weapons Convention had significantly reduced the threat of a chemical attack on Israel, Assad still aimed to produce weapons that could be deployed despite Syria's membership in the CWC.
"Our assessment is that [Assad] will attempt to retain a small stockpile, but he is constrained by the convention," the officer said.
"That is why he is developing chemicals that, as I said before, are 'non-classic' - chlorine, for example, which can be found all over Israel or in any other country."
Israeli intelligence exposed the Assad regime's use of chemical weapons early last year. The Israeli army's military intelligence analyst Itai Brun, in April 2013, delivered a bombshell lecture in which he declared publicly that Assad was using nerve gas against rebel forces: "To the best of our professional understanding, the regime has used lethal chemical weapons," he said at the time, and specified that the IDF believed the toxic element was sarin. He noted then that it had been used on more than one occasion, including in an attack on March 19, 2013.
His assertion was initially queried, but subsequently accepted, by US and other officials. The Israeli conclusion was "based on very special work," by a team that "saw very clearly," Brun later said.
Last week, the head of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, Ahmet Uzumcu, announced the creation of a mission to "establish facts surrounding allegations of use of chlorine in Syria."
He told a meeting of the body's executive council at headquarters in The Hague that the mission would soon leave for Syria.
"The Syrian government, which has agreed to accept this mission, has undertaken to provide security in areas under its control," the statement said.
The OPCW and the United Nations are already in the process of destroying Syria's chemical weapons as part of a disarmament deal agreed to last August in the wake of deadly sarin nerve agent attacks outside Damascus.
The new probe comes after France and the United States alleged that Assad's forces may have made tactical use of industrial chemicals on a rebel-held village in central Hama province last month.
France made the first claim last week, with President Francois Hollande saying his country had "information" - but no proof - that Assad's regime was still using chemical weapons despite the deal.
The United States has said it was investigating the allegations.
"We have indications of the use of a toxic industrial chemical, probably chlorine, in Syria this month, in the opposition-dominated village of Kafr Zita," White House spokesman Jay Carney said on April 21.
There have been conflicting accounts of the alleged chlorine attack on Kafr Zita, with the government and the opposition trading blame.
Activists have also reported other chlorine gas attacks, most recently in Idlib province, in the northwest, two weeks ago.
Syria has surrendered all but eight percent of its chemical weapons under the terms of the US- and Russia-brokered deal, which headed off the threat of US military action last year.
Iranian general accidentally reveals troops in Syria - F. Michael Maloof - http://www.wnd.com/2014/05/iranian-general-accidentally-reveals-troops-in-syria/?cat_orig=world
News site scrubbed after candid comments published
An Iranian general made a major mistake by conceding Shiite Iran has military forces in Syria fighting to preserve the embattled government of Shiite Alawite President Bashar al-Assad.
Gen. Hossein Hamedani, a commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, or IRGC, commented in a speech that the Islamic republic is militarily involved in Syria.
The problem is Tehran has repeatedly denied that Iranian combat forces are fighting alongside Syrian troops in a three-year civil war in which more than 140,000 Syrians have been killed.
Until now, Iranian officials claimed that Tehran was providing only humanitarian, economic and technical help to Syria.
At a news conference in 2012, however, Gen. Mohammad Ali Jafari, commander of the IRGC, had acknowledged Iran had a military presence in Syria but was only providing non-military assistance.
"A number of members of the Quds Force (IRGC) are present in Syria, but this does not constitute a military presence," Jafari said at the time.
No longer at risk of collapse
Iran's Fars News Agency originally had published Hamedani's comments but soon removed them.
Revolutionary Guard commander Hossein Hamedani was quoted as saying that the Syrian regime was no longer "at the risk of collapse."
"Today we fight in Syria for interests such as the Islamic Revolution," Hamedani was quoted as saying. "Our defense is to the extent of the Sacred Defense."
"Sacred Defense" is a term Iranian officials use to refer to the 1980-1988 Iran-Iraq war.
Hamedani reportedly had made his comments at a recent administrative council meeting in the province of Hamedan. The province's capital, Hamadan, is believed to be one of the oldest cities in the world, dating back to the Assyrians in 1100 B.C.
In referring to their shared war experiences, Hamedani said that "in this conflict, without any expectations, the experiences were transferred and training was provided to the Syrians.
"We provided training that included the separation of armed forces from the people and reduced the number of casualties," the IRGC commander said.
Pilgrims?
His comments are supported by reports to WND from sources inside Damascus who said that young fighters in civilian clothes would quietly come to hotels but would then disperse to accompany Syrian military personnel.
They officially referred to themselves as "pilgrims," but these sources remarked that none carried the Quran. They were bearded, spoke Farsi and were physically fit.
Their numbers also have been reinforced by the influx of Iranian-backed Hezbollah from neighboring Lebanon, which has prompted increasing attacks by the Sunni foreign fighters inside the country.
Hamedani pointed out that in addition to the Hezbollah from Lebanon, Iran had established a "second Hezbollah" in Syria.
"The prime minister of Israel had said, at the time when the U.S. was ready to attack Syria, come, weaken Hezbollah and cut the hand of Iran," Hamedani said. "But Iran has formed a second Hezbollah in Syria."
Before Fars pulled Hamedani's comments, the IRGC general said that the Syrian regime is no longer "at risk of collapse."
The assessment is generally shared by U.S. intelligence officials and regional analysts who believe that Assad's military forces have the battlefield advantage. However, his forces control critical chokepoints throughout the country although al-Nusra and other Islamist foreign fighters control sections, including outside the Syrian capital of Damascus.
In underscoring Assad's ability to survive, Hamedani pointed to a combination of Iran's alliance with Syria and the creation of Hezbollah inside Syria as constituting the "axis of resistance."
"Without these," he said, "the region would be easy for the U.S. (to influence)."
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