By Shaza
Source: SANA
Daraa – A new batch of displaced Syrians on Wednesday returned home coming from refugee camps in Jordan via Nassib border crossing.

SANA reporter said that a new batch of displaced Syrians returned on Wednesday from al- Azraq camp in Jordan heading for their areas liberated by the Syrian Arab Army from terrorism after providing them with all the basic services.

The returnees, numbered 19600 since the re-opening of the border crossing on October 15th, returned to Syria, using temporary passage tickets, head of the Immigration and Passports department at Nassib crossing Mazen Ghandour said.

For their parts, a number of the returnees expressed their joy for their returning home after the Syrian Arab Army restored security and stability to their villages and towns.

Source: Syria News
The Syrian Arab Army crowned its military operation in the south and southwest Syria has managed to clean the main Nassib Border Crossing with Jordan from US-sponsored FSA terrorist groups.

After one of the swiftest, professional, and intense 2 weeks military operation by the Syrian Arab Army, the SAA managed to restore the Nassib border crossing with Jordan thus opening the vital M5 Highway connecting Aleppo in Syria’s north to Amman in Jordan through Syria’s main cities Hama, Homs, and Damascus.

This is the most strategic breakthrough in this hybrid operation that was carried out by both the SAA and the Russian Aerospace Forces and the Reconciliation Center in Hmeimim.

Tens of villages in Daraa countryside joined the reconciliation efforts after years of oppression and horrors under the US-sponsored terrorists, many of the armed groups within went as far as joining the SAA advancing forces in pursuing the more fanatic and radical anti-Islamic Wahhabi FSA groups, including al-Qaeda’s Nusra Front and ISIS. Many other towns and villages showed some resistance but eventually were liberated by the SAA.

The cleaning of Nassib border crossing is as a strategic victory for the Syrian state almost equal to the cleaning of Damascus Eastern Ghouta from the terrorists due to its economic value.

The Nassib Border Crossing will be reopened within days after this major achievement and after the SAA’s engineering units mop the whole route from IEDs and dangers leftovers by the terrorists. Goods from all of Syria and Lebanon can now be exported by land to and through Jordan continuing to other countries in the south, such countries like the GCC group has seen prices of essentials rise as much as 3 times after the closure of this same crossing.

Syria’s produce is 5 times cheaper (1/5th of its price) from those of any of its neighboring countries, thanks to the State’s policies in supporting and subsidizing all essentials in the country.

Lebanon, though not deserving in its majority who conspired against Syria, will breath better now having its goods exported through this very important land route.

Thanks to the sacrifices of the Syrian Arab Army, the help of the Russian Aerospace forces and the vast support of the people of Daraa and its countryside, the eliminating of terrorists strangling Syria’s economy and threatening its statehood was achieved. We hope the Kurds in the north and northeast of Syria would learn from all these lessons in not to depend further on the US, Israel or the Saudis in their adventure of creating another Israel in the territories they control or plan to handover to Turkey. The Syrian leadership and the Syrian Arab Army have determined to clean the whole country from all terrorists and separatists and to restore the country to the last inch.

The SAA’s new target is to clean the south and southwest remaining pockets of terrorists especially those ISIS-affiliated groups of the FSA protecting Israel. The next missions in the south will be easier using the newly cleaned highway.

By Manar al-Frieh/Manal
Source: SANA
Daraa -The Syrian Arab Army advanced in the northeastern countryside of Daraa province, killing scores of terrorists.

SANA’s war correspondent in Daraa said that the army restored control over the villages and towns of al-Herak, Rakham, al-Soura, Alma, al-Mliha al-Sharqia and al-Mliha al-Gharbia in Daraa countryside in the northeast of Daraa city.

Following the liberation, the army’s engineering units started combing the area in order to dismantle mines and IEDs planted by terrorists before they fled towards neighboring areas.

The reporter added that army units secured the families in their houses and enhanced military points in the liberated villages and towns to use them as a launchpad for continued military operations to eradicate the terrorist presence in the entire province of Daraa.

During the combing operation in Alma town, the army uncovered two ammunition caches, mostly western-made, two BMP vehicles, a bulldozer and a field hospital.

The hospital which is located on the outskirts of Alma town is a residential building with medicines from international organizations and regional countries that entered Syria illegally.

Speaking to SANA, a field commander said that army units used tactics compatible with the geographical nature of Alma town and fought violent clashes with terrorists who had barricaded themselves inside civilian houses which they turned into command sites.

The commander added that the 24-hours battles resulted in the liberating of the town by the army’s heroes while terrorists fled through agricultural roads in the eastern countryside of the province.

The Army will continue its operations till eradicating terrorism in Daraa, the commander said.

Army units also regained control over the Air Defense Battalion /49/ which was turned by terrorists into one of their sites.

Another field commander indicated that the Battalion overlooked Damascus-Daraa International Highway and a number of neighboring towns and was used by terrorists to fire shells at the Highway and attack the army’s points in the area.

SANA’s war correspondent cited information indicating that militants in the villages of Um Walad, Jbib and al-Aslaha in the farthest eastern countryside of Daraa agreed to hand over their weapons and join reconciliation.

Source: Fars News
Terrorist groups in the Southern province of Dara’a demanded reintroduction of the reconciliation plan after the Syrian Army troops managed to advance against them in several flanks on Saturday.

The army men, supported by the artillery and missile units, carried out heavy attacks on terrorists’ strongholds from the three flanks of the village of al-Bustan, Harran Air Defense Base and Sama al-Hanidat region in Northeastern Dara’a.

The army men managed to drive terrorists out of Deir Dama and al-Bustan settlements in al-Lajah region in Northeastern Dara’a and cut off militants’ supplying lines.

In the meantime, local sources reported that the army’s rapid advances in Dara’a province caused the terrorist groups to lay down their arms in the villages and towns of al-Lajah region and agree to the army’s terms and conditions, calling for implementation of reconciliation plan.

Meanwhile, the army’s helicopters dropped thousands of leaflets in the towns of al-Harrah, Aqraba and Kafr Shams in Dara’a province, calling on terrorists to hand over their weapons and surrender to the army men.

On Thursday night, the army’s artillery and missile units launched very heavy attacks on terrorists’ strongholds in Northeastern Dara’a to introduce the preliminary phase of a major operation in the Southern part of the country.

Using a variety of artillery shells and surface-to-surface missiles, the army unleashed a relentless assault last night that targeted the positions of Tahrir al-Sham Hay’at (the Levant Liberation Board or the Al-Nusra Front) in al-Lajah region.

The army could score several direct hits against the terrorists, resulting in a series of powerful explosions that could be heard from a long distance away.

According to a military source at the government stronghold of Izra’a, the army launched more than 30 missiles towards the terrorist-held towns of Busra Al-Sham, Busra Al-Harir, and Al-Karak.

By Eric Zuesse
Source: Strategic Culture
Now that the United States (with the cooperation of its NATO partners) has turned the former Soviet Union’s states other than Russia into NATO allies, and has likewise turned the Soviet Union’s Warsaw Pact allies into America’s own military allies in NATO, the United States is finally turning the screws directly against Russia itself, by, in effect, challenging Russia to defend its ally Syria. The US is warning Syria’s Government that Syrian land, which is occupied by the US and by the anti-Government forces that the US protects in Syria, is no longer really Syria’s land. The US is saying that there will be direct war between Syria’s armed forces and America’s armed forces if Syria tries to restore its control over that land.

Tacitly, America’s message in this to Moscow is: now is the time for you to quit defending Syria’s Government, because, if you don’t — if you come to Syria’s defense as Syria tries to kill those occupying forces (including the US troops and advisors who are occupying Syria) — then you (Russia) will be at war against the United States, even though the US is clearly the invader, and Russia (as Syria’s ally) is clearly the defender.

Peter Korzun, my colleague at the Strategic Culture Foundation, headlined on May 29th, “US State Department Tells Syria What It Can and Can’t Do on Its Own Soil” and he opened:

“The US State Department has warned Syria against launching an offensive against terrorist positions in southern Syria. The statement claims that the American military will respond if Syrian forces launch an operation aimed at restoring the legitimate government’s control over the rebel-held areas, including the territory in southwestern Syria between Daraa and the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights. Washington is issuing orders to a nation whose leadership never invited America in the first place! The very idea that another country would tell the internationally recognized Syrian government that it cannot take steps to establish control over parts of its own national territory is odd and preposterous by any measure.”

The pro-Government side calls those “terrorist positions,” but the US-and-allied side, the invaders, call them “freedom fighters” (even though the US side has long been led by Al Qaeda’s Syrian affiliate and has increasingly been relying upon anti-Arabic Kurds). But whatever they are, the United States has no legal authority to tell Syria’s Government what to do or not do on Syrian land.

Russia’s basic position, at least ever since Vladimir Putin came into power in 2000, is that every nation’s sovereignty over its own land is the essential foundation-stone upon which democracy has even a possibility to exist — without that, a land cannot even possibly be a democracy. The US Government is now directly challenging that basic principle, and moreover is doing so over parts of the sovereign territory of Syria, an ally of Russia, which largely depends upon Russia to help it defeat the tens of thousands of invading and occupying forces.

If Russia allows the US to take over — either directly or via the US Government’s Al Qaeda-linked or its anti-Arab Kurdish proxy forces — portions of Syrian territory, then Russia’s leader, Vladimir Putin, will be seen as being today’s version of Britain’s leader Neville Chamberlain, famous, as Wikipedia puts it, for “his signing of the Munich Agreement in 1938, conceding the German-speaking Sudetenland region of Czechoslovakia to Germany.”

So: Putin will now be faced with either knuckling under now, or else standing on basic international democratic principles, especially the principle that each nation’s sovereignty is sacrosanct and is the sole foundation upon which democracy is even possible to exist or to evolve into being.

However, this matter is far from being the only way in which the US Government now is challenging Russia to World War III. On May 30th, the Turkish newspaper Yeni Safak bannered “US trains armed groups at Tanf base for new terror corridor” and reported that:

New terror organizations are being established by the US at the Tanf military base in southern Syria that is run by Washington, where a number of armed groups are being trained in order to be used as a pretext to justify US presence in the war-torn country. …

Military training is being conducted for “moderate” opposition groups in al-Tanf, where both the US and UK have bases.

These groups are made up of structures that have been established through US financing and have not been accepted under the umbrella of opposition groups approved by Turkey and the FSA.

From Deir Ezzor to Haifa

Claiming to be “training the opposition” in Tanf, the US is training operation militants under perception of being “at an equal distance to all groups.”

Apart from the so-called opposition that is linked to al-Qaeda, Daesh [ISIS] terrorists brought from Raqqa, western Deir Ezzor and the Golan Heights are being trained in the Tanf camp. …

The plan is to transport Iraqi oil to the Haifa [Israel] Port on the Mediterranean through Deir Ezzor and Tanf.

Actually, Deir Ezzor is also the capital of Syria’s own oil-producing region, and so this action by the United States is more than about merely a transit-route for Iraq’s oil to reach Israel; it is also (and very much) about America attempting theft of oil from Syrian land.

Furthermore, on May 23rd, Joe Gould at Defense News headlined “House rejects limit on new nuclear warhead” and he reported that the US House, in fulfillment of the Trump Administration’s Nuclear Posture Review, which seeks to lower the threshold for nuclear war so as to expand the types of circumstances in which the US will “go nuclear,” rejected, by a vote of 226 to 188, a Democratic Party supported measure opposing lowering of the nuclear threshold. President Trump wants to be allowed to lower the threshold for using nuclear weapons in a conflict. The new, smaller, nuclear warheads, a “W76-2 variant,” have 43% the yield of the bomb that the US dropped on Hiroshima, but it’s called a ‘tactical nuclear weapon’ meaning that it is supposedly intended for use in ‘conventional’ wars, so that it is actually designed to eliminate altogether the previous meta-strategic principle, of “Mutually Assured Destruction” pertaining to nuclear war (that nuclear weapons are justifiable only in order to prevent another World War, never in order to win such a war) that successfully prevented nuclear war till now — that once a side has introduced nuclear weapons into a military conflict, it has started a nuclear war and is challenging any opponent to either go nuclear itself or else surrender — America’s new meta-strategic doctrine (since 2006) is “Nuclear Primacy”: winning a nuclear war. (See this and this.)

US President Trump is now pushing to the limit, presumably in the confident expectation that as the US President, he can safely grab any territory he wishes, and steal any oil or other natural resource that he wishes, anywhere he wants — regardless of what the Russian Government, or anyone else, thinks or wants.

Though his words often contradict that, this is now clearly what he is, in fact, doing (or trying to do), and the current US House of Representatives, at least, is saying yes to this, as constituting American values and policies, now.

Trump — not in words but in facts — is “betting the house” on this.

Moreover, as I headlined on May 26th at Strategic Culture, “Credible Report Alleges US Relocates ISIS from Syria and Iraq into Russia via Afghanistan.” Trump is apparently trying to use these terrorists as — again like the US used them in Afghanistan in order to weaken the Soviet Union — so as to weaken Russia, but this time is even trying to infiltrate them into Russia itself.

Even Adolf Hitler, prior to WWII, didn’t lunge for Britain’s jugular. It’s difficult to think of a nation’s leader who has been this bold. I confess that I can’t.

By Moon of Alabama
Source: The Ron Paul Institute
The Syrian government and its Russian ally plan to clean up the southwest region of Syria around the city of Daraa. The move should open the M5 highway, Syria’s lifeline, between Damascus and Jordan and secure the border with Jordan as well as the demarcation line with the Israel occupied Golan Heights.

The operation was supposed to start in a day or two, but the US has now threatened to intervene. As the southwest Daraa governorate is infested with a large Islamic State (ISIS) group as well as al-Qaeda and associated groups the US move must be interpreted as protection for these terrorists.

On July 7 2017 The US, Russia and Jordan agreed to set up a de-escalation zone in southwest Syria. The parameters were not publicized and the implementation lagged. Russia had offered to let its military police supervise the zone but the US rejected that. The opening of the important M5 highway to Jordan which was originally part of the plan did likewise not happen. The ceasefire in the region was broken several times. There was also infighting between ISIS and al-Qaeda.

In November 2017 the presidents of the United States and Russia met and agreed to a Memorandum of Principals which covered southwest Syria. The memorandum was not published.

The neo-conservatives at the Institute for the Study of War (ISW) disliked the agreement. It headlined Southern Syria Deal Fails to Constrain Iran, al Qaeda. Israel had demanded that no groups associated with Iran should come near the zone, but no such rule was agreed upon. ISW also noted:

Al Qaeda has exploited the ‘de-escalation zone’ to develop a new durable safe haven along the Syrian-Jordanian border.

Neither al-Qaeda nor the Islamic State are covered by the de-escalation and ceasefire agreement. UN Security Council resolutions 2249 and 2254 demand that all UN members fight Al Qaeda, ISIS, and individuals and groups associate with them. It calls upon UN member states “to eradicate the safe haven they have established over significant parts of Syria”.

At that time ISW published a map of southwest Syria which shows the strategic positions taken by ISIS (grey), al-Qaeda (brown) and aligned groups (light brown):

In December 2017 the US stopped payments to “rebels” in the south west. Some of the groups, including al-Qaeda, receive money, weapons and fire support from Israel.

In April 2018 ISW published a new version of its map of the area. Amusingly al-Qaeda had vanished from it:

Over the last days Syrian helicopters have dropped leaflets over “rebel” held towns in the western part of the rebel held areas. They demand that the rebels give up fighting and reconcile with the Syrian government.

The Iranian ambassador to Jordan Mojtaba Ferdowsi-pour publicly declared that Iran has no role in any military operation in south of Syria. He added:

After ending its mission in Syria, Iran will not remain in Syria and whenever Syrian government ask us, Iran will leave the country.

It is obvious that the Syrian government and its Russian allies have all rights to fight ISIS and al-Qaeda independent of any de-escalation agreement. The UNSC resolutions even demand that. But the US thinks different.

Last night the US State Department published this threat:

The United States is concerned by reports of an impending Assad regime operation in southwest Syria within the boundaries of the de-escalation zone negotiated between the United States, Jordan, and the Russian Federation last year and reaffirmed between Presidents Trump and Putin in Da Nang, Vietnam in November. The United States remains committed to maintaining the stability of the southwest de-escalation zone and to the ceasefire underpinning it. We also caution the Syrian regime against any actions that risk broadening the conflict or jeopardize the ceasefire. As a guarantor of this de-escalation area with Russia and Jordan, the United States will take firm and appropriate measures in response to Assad regime violations.
…

One wonders what “firm and appropriate measures” the US has planned for. Strong words? Cruise missile attacks? Nukes?

I have not seen any reaction yet from the Syrian or Russian side.