By Prof. Tim Anderson
Source: Global Research
Over April-May dozens of people were murdered across Aleppo as civilian areas and major hospitals were bombed by the NATO-backed ‘rebel’ groups.

They were even filmed firing their ‘hell cannons’ and saying “throw it on the civilians”

Meanwhile, western media ran fantasy stories about the besieged city.

If you believed the western corporate media you might think that the Syrian Government, for some unknown reason, has been bombing its own hospitals, and had killed Aleppo’s only paediatric surgeon. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Aleppo faces a large operation by the Syrian Army, after the liberation of Palmyra on 28 March, to reclaim those sections of the city held by Islamist fighters since 2012. Almost half Aleppo’s population has been displaced because of the fighting, but there are still about 1.8 million residents.

The withdrawal of the Saudi-backed ‘High Negotiations Committee’ from the Geneva peace talks on 21 April was followed the very next day by a pre-emptive counter-offensive. Many hundreds of rockets were fired into government-held areas by a coalition led by the internationally banned terrorist organisation Jabhat al Nusra.

These attacks came mostly from ‘hell cannons’, which shoot large gas canisters filled with explosives and at times chemicals. They caused havoc, killing and wounding many people in the streets, residential areas, schools and hospitals. The Syrian Army responded by shelling the al Nusra hideouts.

Aleppo Doctor Dr Nabil Antaki Information Clearing House estimates that 1.5 million live in the government controlled western parts of the city, with another 300,000 in the Islamist controlled mostly eastern areas. Dr Antaki complains bitterly that the western media “only talk about loss of life in east of Aleppo which is entirely controlled by al Nusra. The three quarters of Aleppo under Syrian Government control, where numerous paediatricians are practising are of no consequence”.

He was referring to the string of NATO-Islamist bomb attacks on major state hospitals including Ibn Rushd, al Dabbit and al Razi. Many dozens of people were killed and injured. Those attacks were filmed by Syrian and Russian people on the ground, but very little of this reached the western media.

Photo caption: Aleppo Medical Association doctors stand with Syrian soldiers, demanding an end to the western mis-information about Aleppo attacks.

Dr Antaki wasn’t the only Aleppo doctor who was upset. The Aleppo Medical Association, on its Facebook page denounced the western propaganda campaign Facebook Album

Twenty doctors in front of the heavily damaged al Dabbit Hospital declared their support for the Syrian Army. Their signs – in English, Italian and German as well as Arabic – read: ‘Syrian Arab Army represents me’, ‘Long live Syria, long live Aleppo’, ‘Terrorists are killing our children’, ‘Armed opposition is destroying our civilisation’, ‘No for armed opposition’.

Yet the story of Russian or Syrian air attacks on the ‘al Quds hospital’ gained prominence in the western media. Stories were fuelled with information from the French group Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF, Doctors without Borders) and the US Government funded group the ‘White Helmets’ (who you can see celebrating their ‘revolution’ with Jabhat al Nusra here: White Helmets). CCTV showed people leaving this ‘hospital’ before an explosion.

The building is in the southern al-Sukkari district, which has been a stronghold of Jabhat al Nusra for some years. Many Aleppans had never heard of ‘al Quds hospital’. Dr Antaki says: ‘This hospital did not exist before the war. It must have been installed in a building after the war began”. MSF reports seem to confirm this.

This facility was not a state run or registered facility. Nevertheless, MSF representatives Pablo Marco and Muskilda Zancada claimed: “Al Quds hospital has been functional for more than 4 years so it was basically impossible that this information was not known … the facts are pointing to this being a deliberate attack” (Dissident Voice).

Photo caption: NATO-GCC backed terrorists in Aleppo load their weapon of choice, a ‘hell cannon’

Indeed, MSF-backed medical facilities in Syria have almost exclusively been in al Nusra held areas, such as Douma, north east of Damascus. Often they provide money but not doctors.

There is some debate as to whether clinics or hospitals run to service banned terrorist organisations have protection under international humanitarian law. Certainly US law does not allow it. A few years back the US jailed US doctor Rafig Sabir for 25 years after it emerged he had been ‘on call’ to treat al Qaeda fighters in Saudi Arabia (Caselaw).

Registered hospitals certainly do have such protection, and it is a crime to attack them. However this protection disappears when the facility becomes militarised. ‘Civilian objects are protected against attack, unless and for such time as they are military objectives’ (icrc).

Nevertheless, all three air forces that claim to be bombing terrorist groups in Syria – Russia, Syria and the USA – denied involvement in the ‘al Quds hospital’ incident. The US has engaged in bombing some areas around Aleppo (RT), but is not known to have carried out attacks on Jabhat al Nusra. That group is well embedded with the proxy armies Washington likes to call ‘moderate rebels’.

Photo caption: ‘al Quds hospital’: not quite a pile of rubble, nor a designated hospital

There were other serious discrepancies in the ‘al Quds hospital’ story. Pablo Marco for MSF told CNN and PBS that “there were two barrel bombs that fell close to the hospital … then the third barrel bomb fell in the entrance”. Barrel bombs are dropped by helicopters. Yet the MSF press release spoke of an “airstrike … [which] brought down the building … leaving a pile of rubble”. Reports of the death toll ranged from 14 to 50.

However that building is not a pile of rubble. As Rick Sterling pointed out in his 7 May ‘Open letter to MSF’ (Open Letter to MSF), photos show that the facility is still standing and it appears to be a heavily sand-bagged residential building, “a medical clinic in the ground floor of an unmarked and largely abandoned apartment building” ().

Even more damaging for the MSF story is the report that Russian satellite imagery shows the damaged building was in much the same state back on 15 October last year. If this is correct, the MSF-backed ‘al Quds hospital’, apparently a field clinic for al Nusra fighters and their families, suffered no attack on 27 April.

The scale of coverage of the ‘al Quds hospital’ story obscured the ugly fact that several much larger, real public hospitals in Aleppo were actually being bombed by the al Qaeda groups. The former story covered up these poorly reported massacres. It is not that there was no western coverage of the real hospital attacks, the coverage was just removed to the very margins of western headlines.

Take the devastating bombing of al Razi hospital, which Al Alam reported as killing 4 and wounding 38 (http://en.alalam.ir/news/1812988), in days of ‘rebel’ shelling which left 57 dead and 150 injured. The Wall Street Journal mentioned western Aleppo casualties and al Razi in an article which led by blaming Russia for the alleged ‘airstrike’ on ‘al Quds hospital’. The WSJ spent the next 28 paragraphs on that incident. Buried at paragraph 30 was this reference, from an anti-Syrian source: “shells had [also] hit the Al-Razi Hospital, a facility in a government-held neighbourhood where many wounded were being treated” (Airstrike on Hospital).

The bombing of al Dabbit hospital did make it into the UK Independent. This hospital was said to be in ‘regime controlled Aleppo’; apparently it pains them to say ‘Syrian government’. The report opened: “At least 19 civilians have been killed at a hospital and other parts of government-controlled Aleppo in shelling attributed to Islamist rebels” (Aleppo Bombing).

The Syrian news agency SANA reported on 3 May that the death toll from the bombing of al Dabbit hospital had risen to 16 dead and 68 injured (SANA).

Hardly mentioned in the western media was the bombing of the large Ibn Rushd hospital, but the Russian TV channel ANNA filmed the actual bombing and Latin American media ran that video (Ibn Rushd Hospital).

The attacks on Aleppo were extensive, well beyond hospitals. Vicar of Aleppo Mons. Georges Abou Khazen said “we have been under continuous bombardment over the past few days in Aleppo with civilian deaths, injuries and destruction”. He pointed his finger at the front backed by the West, along with Turkey and Saudi Arabia, saying that “These bombings … are from the front of the so-called ‘moderates’ and … in reality [they] are no different from other jihadists [Islamic State (IS) and the Nusra Front]” (Asia News).

I wrote back in January 2014 (Global Research) that the al Qaeda groups’ attacks on Syria’s health system were far more systematic that any one incident could explain.

In just the first three years of this war, before ISIS came to Syria, the NATO and Gulf monarchy-backed armed groups had systematically attacked more than two thirds of Syria’s public hospitals, and had murdered, kidnapped or injured more than 300 health workers.

When an Australian delegation met Syria’s then Health Minister Dr Sa’ad al Nayef on 22 December 2013 he told us that foreign backed terrorists had just detonated two truck bombs, completely destroying Aleppo’s al Kindi hospital, one of the biggest anti-cancer centres in the Middle East. All health workers inside were killed in the blast. Dr Malek Ali, Syria’s then Minister for Higher Education added that Al-Kindi was a functioning educational hospital co-managed by his ministry. You can see one of the suicide truck bomb attacks here, proudly cheered on in the Jabhat al Nusra video: al Nusra

In an Orwellian revision of events the BBC (21 December 2013) reported the destruction of Al-Kindi with the headline: “Syria rebels take back strategic hospital in Aleppo”. The introduction claimed the “massive suicide lorry bomb” had managed “to seize back a strategic ruined hospital occupied by Assad loyalists.” Al-Kindi was said to have been “a disused building” and “according to an unconfirmed report, 35 rebels died in the attack”.

In fact, these ‘rebels’ were a coalition of Free Syrian Army and Jabhat al Nusra, while the ‘Assad loyalists’ were the staff and security guards of a large public hospital.

Dr al Nayef told us that, since March 2011, 67 of the country’s 94 national hospitals had been attacked and damaged, with 41 out of service. 174 health workers had been killed, 127 wounded and 33 kidnapped. Further, 1921 primary health centres had been damaged, and 678 were out of service. 421 ambulances had been lost or were out of service, and 197 support vehicles had been damaged, with 169 out of service.

The scale of destruction of health facilities, combined with attacks on pharmaceutical factories, schools, universities and civilians shows the armed groups have been intent on destroying a functioning state, with no interest in trying to win public support.

The Health Minister showed us a video of the FSA (Farouk Brigade) blowing up Homs National Hospital in April 2012, another of damage to Al- Salamiyeh National Hospital (in Hama) after an attack in January 2013 and a third of the damage to Al Zahrway Hospital (in Damascus) after yet another terrorist attack in May 2013.

He also gave us details of the 26 November 2013 terrorist attack on Deir-Ateya Hospital in Rural Damascus, where 11 medical staff (2 Anesthesiologists, 3 Resident doctors, 4 Nurses and 2 Drivers) were stabbed to death.

The al Qaeda attacks are often accompanied by skilled social media campaigns, assisted by western created agencies such as the White Helmets. In her article titled ‘The storm of lies surrounding Syria’s humanitarian crisis: Aleppo Is Burning campaign calls for Syria no-fly zone’, investigative journalists Vanessa Beeley has compiled some of those campaigns in the ‘Aleppo Hospital’ smokescreen.

Steve Sahaiouni, an on ground reporter, informed us that at least one thousand bomb shells fell on Aleppo’s schools, homes and hospital on 22 April, causing lots of casualty and massive damage.

Another Syrian activist on the ground, Afraa Dagher. tell us: ‪‎Aleppo‬ the historical city, the beautiful Syrian city, is under daily attack of the US backed moderate terrorists, terrorists sponsored by Turkey, Qatar, and Saudi. The so-called ‪‎cease‬-fire which the delegation of Saudi, asked for in ‎Geneva‬ talks, was just for providing those terrorists by more weapons to bomb Syrians.

Another point i discussed here (video available on Youtube) is that is the whole of Syria is under ‪‎Siege‬ , because of the west ‪‎Sanctions‬, most of Syrians now are under ‪#‎poverty‬level.

The Syrian News Agency, SANA, reported this week that 5 civilians were killed and 20 others were injured in a terrorist car bomb explosion that hit the entrance of al-Diabiyeh town in Damascus countryside.

Meanwhile, in HAMA – Islamist fighters of the al-Qaeda-affiliated Nusra Front on Sunday 22 April bombed a Christian town in Syria’s central province of Hama, killing and wounding a number of civilians.

Local sources reported the death of at least four civilians and the injury of nine others in the town of Sqelbiya in Hama province.

“Nusra fighters, backed by rebels of the Ahrar al-Sham, shelled Sqelbiya with at least 14 mortars on Sunday,” media activist Abboud Sarkis told ARA News in the embattled town.

“The offensive targeted residential neighborhoods in Sqelbiya, causing the death and injury of more than fifteen civilians,” the source reported.

“Also, the bombardment has caused mass destruction in residential buildings, and rescue teams are still looking for victims under the rubble,” Sarkis added.

Sqelbiya town, where Christians constitute a majority, is under the control of the Syrian government forces. The town has earlier been exposed to several attacks by Islamist factions that have been struggling to take over the strategic town for months.

Source: ARA News

Source: Press TV
Several Iraqi policemen claim to have seen US aircraft dropping weapons and munitions for Daesh terrorists in a region west of the Anbar province on Friday.

In a video posted on Iraq’s al-Maaloomah news website on Sunday, they are purportedly heard saying that the American plane had also jammed their communication devices in the Hadisah Island district.

“There is an American aircraft seen at four o’clock in the morning on Friday over the Hadisah Island district of the Anbar province, delivering weapons and munitions to Daesh criminals,” one of the policemen says.

“The plane proceeded to jam radar devices of the police regiment stationed in Hadisah Island to prevent contact between the affiliates and the headquarters of the regiment,” he added.

The man said they had seen a military vehicle of Daesh arriving in the region a few minutes later and transferring the weapons to the place the group controlled.

In the video, the man and his associates are heard appealing to Iraqi Prime Minister Haidar al-Abadi to follow up the issue.

The Iraqi army and the volunteer Hashd al-Shaabi forces liberated the district from Daesh terrorists just last month.

US military surge

On Friday, US Secretary of State John Kerry visited Baghdad where he said Daesh was losing ground, including more than 40 percent of the territory that they once controlled in the country.

The United States, which withdrew its forces from Iraq in 2011, has redeployed several thousand as part of a coalition, which it says, it is leading against Daesh.

President Barack Obama is reportedly weighing an increase in the number of American troops in Iraq but Kerry said there had been no formal request from the Iraqis and the issue had not been raised on Friday.

US officials said last week Washington was also considering to greatly increase the number of its special operations forces deployed to Syria.

The US, they said, looked to “accelerate recent gains” against Daesh.

Critics, however, questioned motives behind the plan, citing Washington’s failure to commit troops when Daesh was overrunning Syrian and Iraqi cities one after another.

Military might projection

On Saturday, the US Air Force deployed B-52 bombers to Qatar, the first time they have been based in the Middle East since the end of the Persian Gulf War in 1991.

“The B-52 demonstrates our continued resolve to apply persistent pressure on Daesh and defend the region in any future contingency,” said Charles Brown, commander of US Air Forces Central Command.

Brown said the bombers would be able to deliver precision weapons and carry out a range of missions, including strategic attack, close-air support, air interdiction, and maritime operations.

The US has seen its projected military might overshadowed by a relatively successful Russian campaign in Syria. Washington’s recent flexing of muscles is seen as part of a bid to reassert its dominance.

Arms shipment history

In October 2014, Daesh released a new video in which it bragged it recovered weapons and supplies that the US military intended to deliver to Kurdish fighters in the Syrian city of Kobani.

Some Iraqi MPs have also accused the US of deliberately arming Daesh, citing an arms air-drop case in Tikrit, but government officials have rejected it was intentional.

In Syria, the US military has airdropped tons of ammunition to militants while softening its opposition to using the materiel to attack President Bashar al-Assad.

On Friday, the US government’s Federal Business Opportunities (FBO) website detailed arms shipment to militants in Syria, showing it delivered 3,000 tonnes of weapons in December 2015 despite a ceasefire.

By Maram Susli
Source: New Eastern Outlook
Last month, US secretary of State John Kerry called for Syria to be partitioned saying it was “Plan B” if negotiations fail. But in reality this was always plan A. Plans to balkanize Syria, Iraq and other Middle Eastern states were laid out by former U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice in a 2006 trip to Tel Aviv. It was part of the so called “Project For a New Middle East”. This was a carbon copy of the Odid Yinon plan drawn up by Israel in 1982. The plan outlined the way in which Middle Eastern countries could be balkanized along sectarian lines. This would result in the creation of several weak landlocked micro-states that would be in perpetual war with each other and never united enough to resist Israeli expansionism.

“Syria will fall apart, in accordance with its ethnic and religious structure, into several states such as in present day Lebanon, so that there will be a Shi’ite Alawi state along its coast, a Sunni state in the Aleppo area, another Sunni state in Damascus hostile to its northern neighbor, and the Druzes who will set up a state, maybe even in our Golan… ” Oded Yinon, “A strategy for Israel in the Nineteen Eighties”,

The leaked emails of US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton reveal advocates of the Oded Yinon plan were behind the US push for regime change in Syria. An Israeli intelligence adviser writes in an email to Hillary,

“The fall of the House of Assad could well ignite a sectarian war between the Shiites and the majority Sunnis of the region drawing in Iran, which, in the view of Israeli commanders would not be a bad thing for Israel and its Western allies,”.

Kerry’s plan B comment came right before UN’s special envoy de Mistura said federalism would be discussed at the Geneva talks due to a push from major powers. Both side’s of the Geneva talks, the Syrian Government and the Syrian National Coalition flat out rejected Federalism. Highlighting the fact that the idea did not come from the Syrian’s themselves. The Syrian ambassador to the United Nations, Bashar Al Jaafari, said that the Idea of federalization would not be up for discussion. “Take the idea of separating Syrian land out of your mind,” he would say.

But some may not completely understand the full implications of federalism and how it is intrinsically tied to balkanization. Some cite the fact that Russia and the United States are successful federations as evidence that federation is nothing to fear. However the point that makes these federalism statements so dangerous is that in accordance with the Yinon plan the borders of a federalized Syria would be drawn along sectarian lines not on whether any particular state can sustain its population. This means that a small amount of people will get all the resources, and the rest of Syria’s population will be left to starve. Furthermore, Russia and the US are by land mass some of the largest nations in the world, so federalism may make sense for them. In contrast Syria is a very small state with limited resources. Unlike the US and Russia, Syria is located in the Middle East which means water is limited. In spite of the fact Syria is in the so-called fertile crescent, Syria has suffered massive droughts since Turkey dammed the rivers flowing into Syria and Iraq. Syria’s water resources must be rationed amongst its 23 million people. In the Middle East, wars are also fought over water.The areas that the Yinon plan intends to carve out of Syria, are the coastal areas of Latakia and the region of Al Hasake. These are areas where a substantial amount of Syria’s water, agriculture and oil are located. The intention is to leave the majority of the Syrian population in a landlocked starving rump state, and create a situation where perpetual war between divided Syrians is inevitable. Ironically promoters of the Yinon plan try and paint federalism as a road to peace. However, Iraq which was pushed into federalism in 2005 by the US occupation is far from peaceful now.

Quite simply, divide and conquer is the plan. This was even explicitly suggested in the headline of Foreign Policy magazine, “Divide and conquer Iraq and Syria” with the subheading “Why the West Should Plan for a Partition”. The CEO of Foreign Policy magazine David Rothkopf is a member of to the Council of Foreign Relations, a think tank Hillary Clinton has admited she bases her policies on. Another article by Foreign Policy written by an ex-NATO commander James Stavridis, claims “It’s time to talk about partitioning Syria” .

The US hoped to achieve this by empowering the Muslim Brotherhood and other extremist groups, and introducing Al Qaeda and ISIS into Syria. The Syrian army was supposed to collapse with soldiers returning to their respective demographic enclaves. Evidence of this could be seen in the headlines of NATO’s media arm in 2012, which spread false rumours that Assad had run to Latakia, abandoning his post in Damascus. The extremists were then supposed to attack Alawite, Christian and Druze villages. The US hoped that enough Alawites, Christians and Druze would be slaughtered that Syria’s minorities would become receptive to the idea of partitioning.

Then NATO planned on shifting narratives from, ‘evil dictator must be stopped” to “ we must protect the minorities”. Turning on the very terrorists they created and backing secessionist movements. There is evidence that this narrative shift had already started to happened by 2014 when it was used to convince the US public to accept US intervention in Syria against ISIS. The US designation of Jabhat Al Nusra as a terrorist organisation in December of 2012 was in preparation for this narrative shift. But this was premature as none of these plans seemed to unfold according to schedule. Assad did not leave Damascus, the Syrian army held together, and Syrian society held onto its national identity.

It could be said that the Yinon plan had some success with the Kurdish PYD declaration of federalization. However, the Kurdish faction of the Syrian national coalition condemned PYD’s declaration. Regardless, the declaration has no legal legitimacy. The region of Al Hasakah where a substantial portion of Syria’s oil and agriculture lies, has a population of only 1.5 million people, 6% of Syria’s total population. Of that, 1.5 million, only 40% are Kurdish, many of which do not carry Syrian passports. PYD’s demand that the oil and water resources of 23 million people be given to a tiny part of its population is unlikely to garner much support amongst the bulk of Syria’s population.

Former US National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger understood that the key to dismembering a nation was attacking its national identity. This entails attacking the history from which this identity is based upon. In an event at Michigan University Kissinger stated that he would like to see Syria balkanized, asserting that Syria is not a historic state and is nothing but an invention of the Sykes-Picot agreement in the 1920’s. Interestingly, Kissinger is using the same narrative as ISIS, who also claims that Syria is a colonial construct. In fact, ISIS has been a key tool for Kissinger and the promoters of the project of a New Middle East, as ISIS has waged a campaign of destruction against both Syrian and Iraqi historical sites.

In spite of efforts to convince the world of the contrary, the region that now encompasses modern day Syria has been called Syria since 605 BC . Sykes-Picot didn’t draw the borders of Syria too large, but instead, too small. Historical Syria also included Lebanon and Iskandaron. Syria and Lebanon were moving towards reunification until 2005, an attempt at correcting what was a sectarian partition caused by the French mandate. Syria has a long history of opposing attempts of divide and conquer, initially the French mandate aimed to divide Syria into 6 separate states based on sectarian lines, but such plans were foiled by Syrian patriots. The architects of the Yinon plan need only have read Syria’s long history of resistance against colonial divisions to know their plans in Syria were doomed to failure.

Maram Susli also known as “Syrian Girl,” is an activist-journalist and social commentator covering Syria and the wider topic of geopolitics. especially for the online magazine“New Eastern Outlook.”

By Wayne Sonter
Source: The Guardian – The Workers’ Weekly
The war on Syria is a covert CIA-managed war the USA and its allies have initiated to overthrow the Syrian government. The Syrian adventure was to be a relatively brief regime change exercise, camouflaged by the social unrest of the Arab Spring and a step in re-ordering the Middle East in the interest of the US and its allies.

This accorded with the US global strategic objective of remaining the world’s ‘first, last and only’ truly global empire, despite a declining economic base relative to rest of the world.

Five years later the US-led War on Syria is showing itself to be one more brutal, costly and disastrous venture into which the US state has dragged much of the world.

The plan was to trigger the collapse of the Syrian government, through inciting sectarian war, mainly used foreign gangs paid, armed, trained and logistically supported by US and its allies, as the CIA itself disclosed to a US congressional budget committee in 2015.

Not only did the CIA train and equip nearly 10,000 fighters out of its own budget in the previous few years, as part of a broader, multi-billion dollar effort involving Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkey, it also managed a sprawling logistics network to move fighters, ammunition and weapons into the country.

The process of grinding Syrian society into subjugation, at the cost of hundreds of thousands of Syrian lives, creation of millions of refugees and destruction of the country’s heritage and civil infrastructure, was suddenly interrupted by Russia’s intervention last October, at the invitation of Syria’s government.

Russia’s serious concern with jihadi terrorism and its joint efforts with the Syrian army have rapidly collapsed the anti-Syrian, fundamentalist militias. It has disrupted ISIS’s multi-million dollar oil trade with Turkey, previously untouched by the US-led “war on ISIS”. The joint forces are set to lift the siege on Aleppo, Syria’s largest city and cut the ISIS/Al-Qaeda supply lines between Syria and Turkey. They are preparing to take Raqqa, the ISIS “capital”.

At this rate peace could be restored in Syria within a few months and the Syrian people could start to rebuild their lives. The destruction of ISIS and Al-Qaeda related terrorist forces and the end of this cruel war should be welcome.

However, the US and its allies are portraying the Syrian and Russian gains as a disaster, a narrative a compliant media unrelentingly transmit to Western audiences.

The “disaster” is that those military assets the US-led coalition created to directly subjugate or dismember Syria are being destroyed “in the field” before they can be used to enforce a regime “transition” “at the table”.

Instead, the US is warning it will create a “quagmire” for Russia in Syria if it does not disengage, and Turkey and Saudi Arabia are openly preparing to invade Syria if Assad is not promptly despatched at peace talks.

Russia has warned that the US and its allies risk “a new world war” if they send troops into Syria. If the outside powers seeking regime change in Syria do not back off, but instead escalate the war, then Syria could suck the world’s two main nuclear powers into direct conflict.

At this stage it is only a matter of whether this is what the US wants – a war with Russia to permanently relegate it to economic colony status – or whether the US has already lost control of what it has set in train, and is being dragged towards disaster.

US society itself is under tremendous duress, and both Turkey and Saudi Arabia are riven by internal tensions. These are regimes whose policies are driven by desperation, as well as imperialist ambitions.

Ultimately the war on Syria will need a political solution – not the one of imposed regime change, but the one where the democratic and progressive forces within the countries aiding the US to prosecute this war demonstrate that they know what their governments are up to and act forcefully to rein them in.

This includes Australia – whose government has moved in lockstep with the US in all its imperialist ventures, obligingly breaking diplomatic relations with Syria, participating in a US-initiated sanctions regime against Syria and deploying military forces to the Middle East to participate in the US pseudo-war against ISIS.