Source: SputnikNews
US officials acceded to Iran participating in Syrian peace talks because they are finally accepting the stark reality that Tehran is indispensable to ending the civil war in Syria, experts told Sputnik.

WASHINGTON (Sputnik) — On Tuesday, the US State Department confirmed that Iran had been asked to join discussions on a Syrian political settlement in Vienna on Friday, despite Tehran being considered a major backer of the Syrian government of President Bashar Assad.

This will be the first time that Iran will sit down at the negotiating table with the United States to work out a peaceful solution to the conflict in Syria.

“The United States is growing more aware of the influence Iran wields in the region,” geopolitical analyst and StopImperialism.org editor Eric Draitser told Sputnik on Wednesday.

Washington has shifted its position because they realize Iran is a central actor in both Iraq and Syria, which has imported militias to fight alongside Syrian government and Hezbollah forces, Draitser explained.

Elizabeth Gould and Paul Fitzgerald, authors of highly-acclaimed books on US foreign policy, told Sputnik that the United States inviting Iran to Syrian political talks may mean that “dawn has finally broken over the US Capitol.”

“Washington has reached the moment when it has no alternative but to compromise and change course [in Syria],” Gould and Fitzgerald claimed. “Reality is a hard thing to ignore, even for the US Secretary of State.”

Nine nations are set to join Friday’s talks on Syria in Vienna, including the United States, Russia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Egypt, Qatar, Lebanon and France.

The two-day ministerial talks come a week after a smaller round of negotiations took place involving US, Russian, Saudi and Turkish representatives.

On Wednesday, US State Department spokesperson John Kirby said the roles the Syrian opposition and President Bashar Assad will play in the political transition will be part of the talks.

Some 250,000 people have been killed in the Syrian civil war and more than 13 million have been displaced, according to the UN.

Source: AWD News
Ankara— The Israeli Intelligence news outlet Debka claimed the Saudi officials purportedly vowed Ankara that the oil-rich Kingdom shall supply munificent financial support to President Erdoğan’s Justice and Development Party(AK PARTİ) in the early parliamentary election, due to be held on November 1st .

Once being boasted for its dazzling popularity among Turkish middle-class, AKP dominance in Turkish political arena began to wane since the onset of Al Qaida-inspired rebellion in the neighboring Syria and Turkish concomitant support for the radical terrorist groups, plunging Turkey back to the 1980s deadly ethnic war with Kurdish separatist PKK militants.

According to Debka’s well-informed sources, the Saudi ambassador to Ankara, Mr. Adel Serajedin Merdad has allegedly met with Turkish Premier Davutoğlu where the latter promised the Turkish official that Saudi Arabia will pay Erdoğan’s election campaign $17 billion in grants and support his bid to crush Turkish judiciary.

Fawaz Gerges, a professor of Middle East politics and international relations at the London School of Economics believes Saudi officials seek to forge a short-term alliance with their erstwhile rival and nemesis, President Erdoğan, vying to shift the balance of power in Syria amid Moscow’s military intervention. Emboldened by Russian much-needed military support, Syria’s President Assad is gaining ground against U.S.-Saudi-Turkish so-called moderate rebels.

President Erdoğan called for snap election as his party lost the majority of seats in the Parliaments and abjectly failed to persuade the opponent factions to form a coalition government.

According to recent polls, Erdoğan’s Islamic-rooted AKP’s popularity has slumped 17.4 % to record low over the past year due to staggering rise of inflation and the number of terrorist attacks, namely Turkey’s deadliest terrorist attack which hit Ankara train station last week ,killing and injuring dozens.

Dr Tim Anderson, Sydney University Lecturer.

http://www.radio4all.net/files/anonymous@radio4all.net/16-1-DelegitimizingSyriaResistance.mp3

Source: The Greanville Post
Since 2011, Syria has been facing a campaign of international terrorism. This terrorism has nothing to do with the peaceful protests that took place during the Arab Spring. This terrorism isn’t led by human rights activists, “democratic socialists,” Trotskyists, anarchists, or “idealistic youth.” The terrorism that has plagued Syria since 2011 is primarily directed by takfiris. Takfiris are Sunni Muslim extremists who justify the slaughter of other Muslims over religious disagreements.

Many of the groups currently attacking Syria have open links to the networks once led by Osama Bin Laden, commonly called Al-Qaeda. The Al-Nusra Front, the Free Syrian Army (sic), and the wide variety of extremist takfiri factions currently attacking Syria conducted joint training and military operations with the Islamic State (ISIS) organization. In 2014, it is estimated that 50% of the fighters in the Free Syrian Army defected to join ISIS.

These takfiri extremist organizations have been torturing, killing, and slaughtering. Children are abducted by the Syrian “opposition” and forced to fight as child soldiers. The majority of the extremists who have poured into Syria are not Syrian. Fighters from as far away as Malaysia have been arrested by the Syrian government.

The anti-government insurgency in Syria routinely bombs schools, randomly attacks civilians, kidnaps for ransom and engages in other war crimes.

Since 2011, the wave of terrorism that has afflicted Syria has had a disastrous humanitarian toll. It is estimated that over 250,000 people are already dead, with 3 million refugees.

The reason that the anti-government forces in Syria are able to continue their campaign of violence is because of foreign funding. The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Turkey, Jordan, and other US-aligned regimes throughout the region have openly facilitated and championed the terrorists of Syria.

Training camps in Jordan, directed by the CIA, train anti-government fighters. The Central Intelligence Agency has already spent $1 billion on training anti-government fighters.

The now infamous ISIS organization is just one faction of a broad variety of religious anti-government extremists in Syria. The Al-Nusra Front, which has been supported by the United States, is almost a clone of ISIS, sharing its goals of creating a sunni caliphate, and slaughtering Christians and Alawites.

The Western Apparatus of Destruction

The horrific humanitarian crisis in Syria, the direct result of the US and its allies funding and supporting the insurgency, has been going on since 2011. The US media has not highlighted this crime against humanity. Instead, US media reports focus on describing Bashar Assad as a “dictator” and playing up the idea that the takfiris are “freedom fighters” against a “brutal regime.”

Syrians are fleeing their country in huge numbers to get away from the campaign of terrorism, directed by the United States and its allies. A refugee crisis has swept Europe. The refugee crisis has escalated in recent weeks, with arsons in Germany and horrific scenes in Hungary.

Suddenly, US media is voicing alarm and concern for Syrian refugees. A photograph of a Syrian toddler on a beach has circulated social media. As the US media now bemoans the Syrian crisis, it does not call for the obvious solution. At no point do major US commentators call for an end to the funding of the anti-government forces in Syria.

The war could end immediately if the United States, France, Britain, Jordan, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia were to halt their financial support and facilitation of the anti-government fighters.

Now, US media calls not for a scaling back, but for an escalation of US intervention — the source of the crisis to begin with. The direct meddling of the United States and its allies and their funding of anti-government extremists with the intent of destabilizing and overthrowing the Syrian government caused the crisis.

The crisis created by foreign intervention is being used to justify more intervention.

If one looks at Iraq, Afghanistan, or Libya, one can see the direct result of past “humanitarian” “rescue missions” led by the United States and its NATO allies. In none of these countries has the result been stability, peace, or an increase in the living standard.

Western intervention results in chaos, destruction, and continued poverty and violence. This chaos, destruction and continued poverty and violence is then used to somehow justify further intervention. It is a twisted, downward spiral.

The world needs to realize that the Pentagon is not a humanitarian organization, and does not “rescue” anyone. The US military, the NATO military alliance, the International Monetary Fund, the European Union; all of these entities constitute an international apparatus created for the purpose of destruction.

They don’t build. They don’t rescue. They don’t “reconstruct.” They simply destroy.

Caleb Maupin is a political analyst and activist based in New York. He studied political science at Baldwin-Wallace College and was inspired and involved in the Occupy Wall Street movement, especially for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”.

By Finian Cunningham

Source: Information Clearing House
In the latest atrocity in Yemen, Saudi warplanes bombed a residential area, killing at least 65 people. Most of the victims are reported to be civilians from the Salah district of Taiz, Yemen’s third largest city.

The apparent war crime committed has tragically become an almost daily occurrence during five months of relentless aerial bombardment of Yemen by a Western-backed coalition of foreign powers.

In recent days, there were similar air strikes on civilian centers in the Red Sea port city of Hodeida and the northern province of Saada. In the Hodeida strike, which killed several dock workers, the British charity Save the Children said it believed the attack was a deliberate bid by the Saudis to sabotage aid supplies to the civilian population.

READ MORE: Religious eugenics: How Saudi Arabia is sponsoring a frightening new movement in the ME

Surely, this should be front page news, with CNN, the BBC and France 24, among other big Western media outlets, splashing it as their top story. The onus is on them because their governments are implicated in grave crimes. However, there has been no news coverage of the tragic events. Aside from some brief, vague reports of a generalized humanitarian crisis, there has been a wall of silence as to how the Western-backed Saudi-led coalition is pulverizing Yemeni civilians and creating the crisis. That suggests a deliberate blackout by Western media.

To date, the death toll in the country has reached near 4,500, according to the World Health Organization. This week, the United Nations put the total number of children who have been killed at 400. Yemeni sources say the civilian casualties are much higher, but can’t verify because of the widespread mayhem.

Meanwhile, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) and the World Food Program say the country is on the brink of cataclysmic famine, with over 50 percent of the 24 million population at immediate risk.

Yemen was already the Arab region’s poorest country even before the US-backed and Saudi-led military coalition began bombing on March 26. In just five months, the country is crumbling into a “Syria-level crisis,” according to the ICRC.

READ MORE: Yemeni president proposes 15-day ceasefire, dozens of civilians die in Saudi-led airstrike

What’s happening in Yemen cannot be described as anything less than “foreign aggression” on a sovereign country, where civilians are being slaughtered by American-supplied “precision bombs” and F-16 fighter jets. The systematic starvation of people by denying them food, water and medical aid as a result of an air and sea blockade on the country adds to the barbarity. This is genocide by any legal definition of the word.

Despite the horror and complicity of Western governments in that horror, the Western news media avoid providing informative reports on the carnage in Yemen. When the media do give occasional brief reports, they routinely distort the nature of the violence as if it is being perpetrated by two warring sides: on the one hand, “Saudi coalition forces”; and on the other, “Iranian-backed Houthi rebels”.

Let’s quickly dispense with that self-serving distortion. The Houthi rebels are not Iranian-backed. How could they be when Yemen is blockaded by Saudi and American forces? The Houthis are in alliance with the Yemeni national army and other rebel groups, called Popular Committees. Earlier this year, the revolutionary front kicked out the US and Saudi-backed puppet-president Abded Rabbo Mansour Hadi, taking over much of the country’s territory, including the capital Sana’a.

READ MORE: Yemen on brink of famine following bombing of vital port, UN says

That is why the Saudis and their Persian Gulf Arab dictator cronies, plus the Egyptian dictatorship of Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, joined forces to bomb Yemen. They claim to be defending the “legitimate government of Yemen” represented by Hadi and his corrupt clique who are exiled in the Saudi capital Riyadh. No doubt the region’s dictatorships fear the spread of revolutionary contagion, as do the Western patrons of these despotic regimes.

Washington, along with Britain and France, is supporting the Saudi-led bombing coalition, not just politically and diplomatically, but with the supply of warplanes, missiles and logistics. The US has set up a fusion center in Saudi Arabia for the purpose of coordinating the Arab-piloted F-16s.

Germany is also implicated as, according to Der Spiegel, it is the fourth biggest arms supplier to Saudi Arabia, after France, Britain and Italy.

On the ground in Yemen, there are remnant supporters of the deposed Hadi regime. Clashes between these loyalists and the revolutionary forces have indeed contributed to the civilian death toll. But, again, Western media attempts at portraying the conflict as some kind of civil war are grossly misleading.

Among the pro-Hadi forces are troops from Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. Several Saudi and Emirati soldiers have been confirmed killed in recent battles in the southern areas around the port city of Aden, as well as in fire fights across Yemen’s northern border with Saudi Arabia. The Saudi-led coalition has expanded its involvement in the ground war over the past month with the arrival of artillery and armored vehicles and up to 3,000 Saudi and UAE troops, according to the Financial Times.

Also among the pro-Hadi forces are Jihadist mercenaries from across the region that have been trafficked into Yemen by the Saudis, according to Yemeni civilian and military sources. This is the same strategy that the Saudis and the Persian Gulf Arab regimes have been using in Syria over the past four years to overthrow the Assad government, along with covert support from Turkey, Jordan, Israel and Western governments.

Western media have, of course, given copious coverage of the Syrian war, with false narratives about “moderate rebels” fighting against a “despotic regime”. Syria gets covered because Washington, London and Paris want to implement regime change there for strategic reasons to do with undermining Assad’s allies in Russia and Iran. Whereas in Yemen “regime reinstallation” of a corrupt exiled clique doesn’t quite have the same story appeal. Therefore, the Western media just ignore Yemen.

The jihadists fighting in Yemen are linked to the Sunni extremists of Al-Qaeda and the Islamic State network, specializing in suicide bomb attacks on mosques frequented by the Shia Houthis.

Washington and its Western allies are thus heavily involved in an illegal war of aggression against Yemen, prosecuted by Saudi Arabia and other Arab dictatorships working in collusion with Islamist terror networks. Adding “efficacy” to this state-sponsored terrorism is the humanitarian siege imposed on the population.

What is happening in Yemen is truly a heinous crime against humanity committed by Western governments. It is an unspeakable crime. And that is why the Western media will not dare talk about it. The Western media are obliged to ignore, obfuscate and distort the shocking truth of what their governments are committing in Yemen.

This makes the Western media just as complicit in the appalling criminality.

Finian Cunningham, is a freelance journalist based in East Africa, his columns appear on RT, Sputnik, Strategic Culture Foundation and Press TV.

Source: United Nations Human Rights
GENEVA (11 August 2015) – As Yemen plunges deeper into conflict, the country is now in the midst of a major food crisis, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the right to food, Hilal Elver, has warned today.

“As the conflict continues to escalate, over 12.9 million people in Yemen are now surviving without adequate access to basic food supplies, including six million who are deemed severely food insecure,” Ms. Elver said, expressing her deep concern over the dire humanitarian situation currently ravaging the country.

“The situation facing children in the country is particularly alarming, with reports suggesting that 850,000 Yemeni children face acute malnutrition, a figure that is expected to rise to 1.2 million over the coming weeks, if the conflict persists as its present level,” she stressed.

Sieges in a number of governorates, including Aden, AL Dhali, Lahj and Taiz have been preventing staple food items, such as wheat, from reaching the civilian population, while airstrikes have reportedly targeted local markets and trucks laden with food items.

“The deliberate starvation of civilians in both international and internal armed conflict may constitute a war crime, and could also constitute a crime against humanity in the event of deliberate denial of food and also the deprivation of food sources or supplies,” Ms. Elver warned.

“The right to food does not cease in times of conflict, indeed it becomes more crucial as a result of the acute vulnerabilities in which individuals find themselves,” the Special Rapporteur noted. “Parties to the conflict must be reminded of their obligations under international humanitarian law to ensure that civilians and prisoners of war have access to adequate food and water during armed conflict.”

The human rights expert explained that “in a country that relies on imports for 80 per cent of its food intake, current restrictions have resulted in steep price hikes, which, combined with increases in the price of diesel by some 47 per cent, are having a devastating impact on food security.”

“An immediate and unconditional humanitarian pause in hostilities must be put in place to allow humanitarian aid and food to reach all people of Yemen,” Ms. Elver said, recalling that the ceasefire that was to take effect on 10 July 2015 until the end of Ramadan in order to ensure that vital food aid and medical supplies reach vulnerable civilians caught up in the conflict was not implemented.

The Special Rapporteur also warned about the shortfall in funds necessary to prevent a deepening national catastrophe in Yemen. “I call on the international community to do everything possible to provide on an emergency basis the necessary funding as well as essential aid,” she said.

Ms. Hilal Elver (Turkey) is a Research Professor, and global distinguished fellow at the UCLA Law School Resnick Food Law and Policy Center. She was appointed Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food by the Human Rights Council in 2014. Learn more: http://www.ohchr.org/EN/Issues/Food/Pages/FoodIndex.aspx

The Special Rapporteurs are part of what is known as the Special Procedures of the Human Rights Council. Special Procedures, the largest body of independent experts in the UN Human Rights system, is the general name of the Council’s independent fact-finding and monitoring mechanisms that address either specific country situations or thematic issues in all parts of the world. Special Procedures’ experts work on a voluntary basis; they are not UN staff and do not receive a salary for their work. They are independent from any government or organization and serve in their individual capacity.

Comments By D. MacIlwain:
“It looks like the humanitarian NGOs and their overlords are launching a ‘save Yemen’ campaign, completely whitewashing their own responsibility for creating and condoning the Saudi’s murderous bombing and the US assistance to it.

This interview this morning with the President of the International Committee of the Red Cross, Peter Maurer, speaking from Dijbouti, is almost the first such attention to what has been happening in Yemen since March. He, and his interviewer Fran Kelly, completely distort the real situation, talking of attacks on medics and hospitals and the shortages of water and food without even mentioning the Saudi airstrikes and blockade. Maurer even suggested that there was NO blockade – rather it was a result of ‘the fighting’. Interestingly he reported on a visit to Yemen, and how bad the situation was in ADEN, without even mentioning Sana’a, leave alone Sa’ada city.