Category Archives: History

Cease Fire Effective Friday in Syria, Assad/Hezbollah in Control

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These talks have been underway for quite some time and the United States was not invited to participate. It is being reported that Hezbollah is the guarantor of the process and will manage the weapons control. Notice that Russia, Turkey, Syria and Iran don’t mention destruction of Islamic State or terminating the role of coalition nations participating in the Raqqa region, the headquarter location for ISIS.

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Syria Cease-Fire Agreement Reached

Deal brokered between Turkey and Russia; Syrian military confirms truce, which is set to go into effect at midnight

WSJ: MOSCOW—Russia, Turkey and Syria announced that a cease-fire would go in effect in Syria early Friday morning, in a deal hammered out between Ankara and Moscow to bring the regime of President Bashar al-Assad and opposition groups into peace talks.

Details of the cease-fire were still emerging, but statements by Russian President Vladimir Putin, Turkey’s Foreign Ministry and Syria’s military said it would begin at midnight local time in Syria.

Mr. Putin said agreements had been reached earlier Thursday between the Syrian regime and the “militant opposition” for a cease-fire and for arrangements to monitor it. While acknowledging the accords were “very fragile,” he also said consensus had been reached over the “readiness of peace talks to resolve [the situation] in Syria.

The Turkish Foreign Ministry said Ankara and Moscow would be guarantors of the plan “to cease all armed, including aerial, attacks.” Under the accord, each side is to refrain from seizing further territory, the ministry said.

In his remarks, Mr. Putin didn’t identify the militant groups that had agreed to the truce, but Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu

said they included the “main forces” of the armed opposition.

Turkey’s Foreign Ministry said the cease-fire deal excluded groups designated as “terrorist organizations” by the United Nations Security Council. Islamic State and the Syrian Conquest Front, an armed group linked to al Qaeda, have been excluded from previous truces in the nearly six-year-old war.

The ministry also said that Ankara hoped that a successful cease-fire would lead to a renewal of the U.N.-supported process for a political transition in Syria.

Russia, Iran and Turkey agreed in Moscow last week to hold talks in Kazakhstan next month aimed at ending the fighting in Syria. Those talks would exclude the U.S.

The U.S. has participated in the U.N.-backed process in Geneva to end the fighting in Syria. Following last week’s meeting in the Russian capital, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov played down the U.N. initiative while promoting the diplomatic push by Tehran, Moscow and Ankara. “I believe that the most effective format is the one that you see today,” Mr. Lavrov said.

A U.S. official said Wednesday the Obama administration wasn’t opposed to the talks being held in Kazakhstan, even if American diplomats weren’t directly involved. The State Department’s only condition, the official said, is that the negotiations are consistent with resolutions approved by the U.N. on Syria.

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Given the standing 3 zones in Israel now where constant ground battles happen and John Kerry wants to add a 4th for Palestine, the same proposal is on the table in agreed draft form for Syria. Russia and Turkey are calling it zones of influence. ‘Influence’? Really? No one is reporting that Iran is in full agreement or what the future holds for Syria, meaning who is responsible for reconstruction and creating a stage for Syrians to return to their homeland….but do these powers even care?

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Russia, Turkey, Iran eye dicing Syria into zones of influence

Reuters: Syria would be divided into informal zones of regional power influence and Bashar al-Assad would remain president for at least a few years under an outline deal between Russia, Turkey and Iran, sources say.

Such a deal, which would allow regional autonomy within a federal structure controlled by Assad’s Alawite sect, is in its infancy, subject to change and would need the buy-in of Assad and the rebels and, eventually, the Gulf states and the United States, sources familiar with Russia’s thinking say.

“There has been a move toward a compromise,” said Andrey Kortunov, director general of the Russian International Affairs Council, a think tank close to the Russian Foreign Ministry.

“A final deal will be hard, but stances have shifted.”

Assad’s powers would be cut under a deal between the three nations, say several sources. Russia and Turkey would allow him to stay until the next presidential election when he would quit in favor of a less polarizing Alawite candidate.

Iran has yet to be persuaded of that, say the sources. But either way Assad would eventually go, in a face-saving way, with guarantees for him and his family.

“A couple of names in the leadership have been mentioned (as potential successors),” said Kortunov, declining to name names.

Nobody thinks a wider Syrian peace deal, something that has eluded the international community for years, will be easy, quick or certain of success. What is clear is that President Vladimir Putin wants to play the lead role in trying to broker a settlement, initially with Turkey and Iran.

That would bolster his narrative of Russia regaining its mantle as a world power and serious Middle East player.

“It’s a very big prize for them if they can show they’re out there in front changing the world,” Sir Tony Brenton, Britain’s former ambassador to Moscow, told Reuters. “We’ve all grown used to the United States doing that and had rather forgotten that Russia used to play at the same level”

BACKROOM DEALS

If Russia gets its way, new peace talks between the Syrian government and the opposition will begin in mid-January in Astana, the capital of Kazakhstan, a close Russian ally.

The talks would be distinct from intermittent U.N.-brokered negotiations and not initially involve the United States.

That has irritated some in Washington.

“So this country that essentially has an economy the size of Spain, that’s Russia, is strutting around and acting like they know what they are doing,” said one U.S. official, who declined to be named because of the subject’s sensitivity.

“I don’t think the Turks and the Russians can do this (political negotiations) without us.”

Foreign and defense ministers from Russia, Turkey and Iran met in Moscow on Dec. 20 and set out the principles they thought any Syria deal should adhere to.

Russian sources say the first step is to get a nationwide ceasefire and then to get talks underway. The idea would then be to get Gulf states involved, then the United States, and at a later stage the European Union which would be asked, maybe with the Gulf states, to pick up the bill for rebuilding.

The three-way peace push is, at first glance, an odd one.

Iran, Assad’s staunchest backer, has provided militia fighters to help Assad, Russia has supplied air strikes, while Turkey has backed the anti-Assad rebels.

Putin has struck a series of backroom understandings with his Turkish counterpart Tayyip Erdogan to ease the path to a possible deal, several sources familiar with the process say.

Moscow got Iran to buy into the idea of a three-way peace push by getting Turkey to drop its demands for Assad to go soon, the same sources said.

“Our priority is not to see Assad go, but for terrorism to be defeated,” one senior Turkish government official, who declined to be named, said.

“It doesn’t mean we approve of Assad. But we have come to an understanding. When Islamic State is wiped out, Russia may support Turkey in Syria finishing off the PKK.”

Turkey views the YPG militia and its PYD political wing as extensions of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), which has long waged an insurgency in its largely Kurdish southeast.

“Of course we have disagreements with Iran,” said the same Turkish official. “We view some issues differently, but we are coming to agreements to end mutual problems.”

Aydin Sezer, head of the Turkey and Russia Centre of Studies, an Ankara-based think tank, said Turkey had now “completely given up the issue of regime change” in Syria.

Turkey’s public position remains strongly anti-Assad however and Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu said on Wednesday a political transition with Assad was impossible.

Brenton, Britain’s former ambassador, said Moscow and Ankara had done a deal because Moscow had needed Turkey to get the opposition out of Aleppo and to come to the negotiating table.

“The real flesh in the game the Turks have, and the fear they have, is of an autonomous Kurdistan emerging inside Syria that would have direct implications for them,” he said.

Ankara launched an incursion into Syria, “Operation Euphrates Shield”, in August to push Islamic State out of a 90-km (55-mile) stretch of frontier territory and ensure Kurdish militias did not gain more territory in Syria.

REALPOLITIK

The shifting positions of Moscow and Ankara are driven by realpolitik. Russia doesn’t want to get bogged down in a long war and wants to hold Syria together and keep it as an ally.

Turkey wants to informally control a swathe of northern Syria giving it a safe zone to house refugees, a base for the anti-Assad opposition, and a bulwark against Kurdish influence.

The fate of al-Bab, an Islamic State-held city around 40 km (25 miles) northeast of Aleppo, is also a factor. Erdogan is determined that Turkish-backed rebels capture the city to prevent Kurdish militias from doing so.

Several sources said there had been an understanding between Ankara and Moscow that rebels could leave Aleppo to help take al-Bab.

Iran’s interests are harder to discern, but Ali Akbar Velayati, Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s top adviser, said Aleppo’s fall might alter a lot in the region.

By helping Assad retake Aleppo, Tehran has secured a land corridor that connects Tehran to Beirut, allowing it to send arms to Hezbollah in Lebanon.

Russian and Western diplomatic sources say Iran would insist on keeping that corridor and on Assad staying in power for now. If he did step down, Tehran would want him replaced with another Alawite, which it sees as the closest thing to Shia Islam.

Iran may be the biggest stumbling block to a wider deal.

Iranian Defence Minister Hossein Dehghan has said Saudi Arabia must not take part in talks because of its stance on Assad – Riyadh wants the Syrian leader to step down.

Scepticism about the prospects for a wider deal abounds.

Dennis Ross, an adviser to Democratic and Republican administrations, now at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, said he did not think a deal would bring peace to Syria.

“I doubt this will end the war in Syria even after Aleppo,” Ross told Reuters. “Assad’s presence will remain a source of conflict with the opposition.”

ISIS in Latin America, Terror Funding Operations

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Islamists population report, including those in Cuba is found here. Latin America has a long history of nefarious connections starting with those in support of Nazis and harboring many that fled to the region after the fall of the Third Reich. There is Paraguay, then Argentina and Chile, even Brazil.

Now we have the modern day threat of militant Islam as a neighbor.

 Wisc.edu

 Jamaica

 Buenos Aires

 El Paso

Spanish Military Report: Islamic Terrorists Operate, Raise Cash in Latin America to Attack U.S.

JW: Latin America is a hotbed of Islamic terrorism where groups like ISIS and Hezbollah operate freely and raise large sums of money to finance terrorist activities in other countries, mainly the United States, according to a new report released by Spain’s Defense Ministry. “Latin America represents an important region for Islamic radicalism because conditions enable the free, almost undetectable, movement of their members throughout the region,” the defense document states.

Governments in the region consider Islamic terrorism to be a foreign problem, the report says, and intelligence agencies are ill equipped to handle the threat they represent. “The ignorance involving the threat of jihadist terrorism in Latin America has been such that some governments have refused to cooperate with U.S. authorities and other intelligence services,” the disturbing assessment reveals. The report was released this month by the division of Spain’s Defense agency known as Instituto Español de Estudios Estratégicos (IEEE), Spanish Institute of Strategic Studies. The document, authored by a counterterrorism expert, is titled “El radicalismo islámico en América Latina. De Hezbolá al Daesh (Estado Islámico),” Islamic Radicalism in Latin America, from Hezbollah to ISIS.

The Lebanese group Hezbollah is identified as having the largest fundraising operations in the region, though others, such as ISIS, are also prominent. The terrorist organizations have teamed up with established drug trafficking conglomerates to raise and launder large quantities of cash. The report identifies a group called El clan Barakat in Paraguay and Joumaa in Colombia as two examples of drug trafficking enterprises that have long worked with Islamic jihadists to launder money. Spain’s military experts refer to the relationships as a “marriage of convenience” between Latin American organized crime and Muslim terrorists with different objectives and interests. “Each takes advantage of the benefits that the relationship provides,” the report states.

ISIS is expanding quickly in Latin America, the report warns, revealing that around 100 individuals from the region’s large Muslim community have traveled to Syria and Iraq to join terrorist groups recently. Argentina and Brazil have the largest Muslim populations in Latin America with more than 1 million each, the report says. Venezuela, Mexico, Peru and Chile also have large and rapidly growing Muslim populations. Trinidad and Tobago, Caribbean islands on the northern edge of Latin America, are identified as “especially worrisome” because local authorities reported that 70 of their citizens traveled to Syria and Iraq to join ISIS. Additionally, nine of the islands’ citizens were detained in Turkey attempting to cross the border into Syria. The report cites a 2012 article in a military publication from Trinidad that compares the growth of radical Islam in the country to a group of violent Muslims that tried to overthrow the government in 1990.

The strong connection between Islamic terrorists and Latin America has been developing for years and Judicial Watch has reported it extensively, especially when it comes to Mexico. With a dangerously porous southern border, the collaboration between Muslim terrorists and Mexican drug cartels has created a critical threat to the United States. Last year Judicial Watch reported that ISIS is operating a camp just a few miles from El Paso, Texas, in an area known as “Anapra” situated just west of Ciudad Juárez in the Mexican state of Chihuahua. Judicial Watch also broke a story about Mexican drug cartels smuggling foreigners from countries with terrorist links into a small Texas rural town near El Paso. The foreigners are classified as Special Interest Aliens (SIA) by the U.S. government and they are being transported to stash areas in Acala, a rural crossroads located around 54 miles from El Paso on a state road—Highway 20.

Earlier this year Judicial Watch uncovered State Department records confirming that “Arab extremists” are entering the U.S. through Mexico with the assistance of smuggling network “cells.” Among them is a top Al Qaeda operative wanted by the FBI. The government documents also reveal that some Mexican smuggling networks actually specialize in providing logistical support for Arab individuals attempting to enter the United States. The top Al Qaeda leader in Mexico was identified in the State Department records, via a September 2004 cable from the American consulate in Ciudad Juárez, as Adnan G. El Shurkrjumah. In December, 2014 Shukrijumah was killed by the Pakistan Army in an intelligence-borne operation in South Waziristan. But before he died Shukrijumah helped plan several U.S. attacks, including plots to bomb Oprah Winfrey’s studio and detonate nuclear devices in multiple American cities. For years Shukrijumah appeared on the FBI’s most wanted list and, despite being sought by the agency, he crossed back and forth into the U.S. from Mexico to meet fellow militant Islamists in Texas. Back in 2014 Judicial Watch reported that, as one of the world’s most wanted terrorists, Shukrijumah piloted an aircraft into the Cielo Dorado airfield in Anthony, New Mexico.

Obama/Kerry: Diplomatic Terrorism on Israel

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Israel was on the edge at least last October, they knew that Obama and Kerry had something in the pipeline against Israel. So it comes down to who wins the debate over Jerusalem? Should there even be a debate and Israel is fighting back on the never-ending use of the words ‘occupy’ and ‘settlement’s and should.

 CBS

Bloomberg: When Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was re-elected last year, the White House threatened to reconsider long-standing U.S. policy to veto U.N. Security Council resolutions on Israel’s presence in the West Bank. At issue was a last-minute interview in which Netanyahu said there would be no Palestinian state as long as he was prime minister. He took back that statement after the election. Nonetheless, the White House directed policymakers to draw up a set of options for how Obama could “preserve the two-state solution,” according to one U.S. official privy to the process.

So far, nothing has come of Obama’s threat. Indeed last month, Obama signed an agreement with Israel to extend the U.S. subsidy of its military for another ten years. In foreign policy, Obama is focused on the collapse of U.S. policy in Syria, which has become an even greater humanitarian emergency in the last month with the Russian and Iranian-led siege of Aleppo. Politically, the White House is working to elect Hillary Clinton as Obama’s successor.

Yet with a little more than three months left of his presidency, Israeli officials privately say they worry Obama intends to try to level the playing field between the Palestinians and Israelis before he leaves office. The threat of a last-minute speech, executive order, or U.N. action has stirred some of Israel’s friends in Washington. Last month, for example, 88 senators signed a letter to Obama urging him to restate “long-standing U.S. policy” to veto one-sided anti-Israel resolutions at the U.N.

The Obama administration has not made such a statement. This week, however, White House spokesman Joshua Earnest “strongly condemned” Israel’s approval of 98 new housing units in the West Bank settlement of Shilo. A CBS correspondent noted that this phrasing is “usually reserved” for terrorist attacks.  More here.

**** So Israel put some assets into the system and worked to determine who, what and when such actions would happen. Since the UN vote, Israel says it has iron clad evidence of the United States complicity in the text for the vote.

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Haaretz: he Egyptians distributed a Security Council resolution on the settlements last week, and demanded a vote within 24 hours, only to withdraw it after pressure from the prime minister’s bureau in Jerusalem and U.S. President-elect Donald Trump.

Israel’s UN ambassador, Ron Dermer, said Monday that Israel had evidence that the Obama administration was behind the wording of the resolution and had cooperated with the Palestinians behind Israel’s back. The document published on the Egyptian new site might be the evidence Israel has. On December 22, the day the original Security Council vote was to have taken place, the Israeli news site Walla published a report almost identical to the one on the Egyptian news site. Walla quoted a senior Israeli official as stating that in a meeting between Kerry and a Palestinian delegation to Washington headed by Palestinian Liberation Organization Secretary General Saeb Erekat, agreement was reached on the matter of a resolution against the settlements, and that Kerry said the United States would not veto it. More here.

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What else was Israel watching?

On December 23, 2016, the UN General Assembly approved spending $138,700 to create a “database” of all companies that conduct business – directly or indirectly – relating to Israeli “settlements” in Arab-claimed territories. The idea of a boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) blacklist came from a March 2016 resolution of the UN Human Rights Council. According to UN documentation, the $138,700 will be used “to pay for one staff member to create the database over a period of 8 months and present a report” to the Human Rights Council in March 2017. In other words, the December authorization backdated approval of an expenditure for an operation already underway.

When the General Assembly’s Budget Committee met to approve the UN budget, Israel proposed to delete approval specifically for funding the blacklist.The Committee rejected the Israeli amendment 6 in favor (Australia, Canada, Guatemala Israel, Palau and the United States), 151 against, with 6 abstentions (Cameroon, Côte d’Ivoire, Central African Republic, Georgia, Honduras and Ghana).

After Israel lost the vote on funding the BDS item, it declared it was “disassociating” from the General Assembly’s subsequent approval of the UN budget as a whole. Despite the U.S. voting against funding the blacklist initially, it voted in favor of the UN budget, and made no mention of any problem funding BDS.

Date
December 23, 2016
Title
Fifth Committee Vote on Israeli Proposed Oral Amendment to Resolution on Programme Budget Appropriations for 2016-2017 Biennium, UN Meeting Coverage
Original Source
https://www.un.org/press/en/2016/gaab4224.doc.htm
Attachment
Click here to view this document in MS Word/PDF format
Note
Israel’s oral amendment was rejected by a vote of 6 in favor (Australia, Canada, Guatemala Israel, Palau and the United States), 151 against, with 6 abstentions (Cameroon, Côte d’Ivoire, Central African Republic, Georgia, Honduras and Ghana)

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So, here is Kerry on 12/28/2016 speaking while Obama is on vacation in Hawaii:

AP: Secretary of State John Kerry says that if Israel rejects a two-state solution for peace with the Palestinian people, “it can be Jewish or it can be democratic.”

Kerry was responding to withering Israeli criticism of the United States’ abstention from a vote condemning Israeli settlement construction. He reiterated the American position that a two-state solution giving both Israelis and Palestinians a home state is the best roadmap to peace. He also made it clear that despite recent differences in policy, the United States continues to be Israel’s closest ally.

Israel has been furious at the United States since the UN vote late last week. But Kerry said in a farewell speech at the State Department on Wednesday that the vote was “in keeping with” American values for democracy.

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The full text of his speech is here, but while he ways that Israel has to be either Jewish or a democracy and not both, Kerry also suggests that Israel pay restitution to the Palestinians. In 2009, the United States gave Gaza $900 million, which is under the control of Abu Mazen.

 

More here.

Russia Using Battlefield Electronic Warfare and Hacking

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Iran and Turkey met in Moscow directly after the operations began to finish off the hostilities in Aleppo. The United States, meaning John Kerry was not invited. A new global leadership arrangement is underway and the United States has lost her ranking. Even after the murder of the Russian ambassador by a Turkish police officer, the relationship appears to be getting more cozy. This may be a good place to remember the fact that Turkey is a NATO country and the United States still has an aging nuclear weapons inventory at Incirlik in Turkey.

So what is the ultimate objective? Hard to describe but the Kremlin is the grand marshal of building pattern for the future. Russia, previously the Soviet Union is a country built on a militarist model and not a peacetime model, always has been.

Russia’s military is now stronger that any possible foe, President Vladimir Putin told an annual end-of-year meeting with the defense ministry on Thursday.

“We can say with certainty: we are stronger now than any potential aggressor,” he told the meeting. “Anyone!”

Putin made the comments after Defense Minister Sergei Shoygu presented his annual report, lauding Russia’s military achievements in Syria as well as successful efforts to modernize the Russian army.

Among other things, Shoygu said Russia “for the first time in its history” has fully covered the Russian border with early warning anti-missile systems. Shoygu also announced plans to send more troops to Russia’s west, south-west and the Arctic region. More from FNC.

Iran is geared the same and expanding its offensive military systems including global militias and missile systems. Russia is testing an anti-satellite weapons system. Iran is expanding the weapons arsenal using much of the money we paid to them in ransom.

The nearly $2 billion, which was delivered to Iran in cash, is a substantial cash infusion to the country’s coffers and was viewed by lawmakers as a primary means for Iran to invest in advanced military technology.
Since the payment was made, Iran has pursued multiple arms deals with Russia and sought to purchase a slew of new commercial jetliners, which the country has historically integrated into its air force.
Dunford admitted in his correspondence to Congress that Iran’s actions—including the buildup of ballistic missiles and other advanced weaponry—continue to cause worry in the Middle East.
“Regional actors have expressed great concern about Iran’s activities and intent, but I have not received new, specific concerns regarding an increasing belligerence or growing military investment on the part of Iran,” Dunford wrote.

Then there is the Ukraine Baltic region where Russia has applied hacking and electronic warfare against U.S. drone systems and hacking communications. Further, independent white hat software experts are proving Russian electronic hacking in other battlefield systems that include artillery units.

Both Russia and Iran are looking at the long game while the United States changes leadership and diplomacy every 4-8 years. So what is the long game? For Iran and Russia it is the same, military expansion. For Iran, it goes beyond their existing power in Lebanon and building bases in the region which include more of the Middle East with Yemen and to challenge the Gulf States, Bahrain, most especially Saudi Arabia and may involve Armenia. Iran has joint control of Syria and Iraq presently and Rouhani recently visited Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan. The president is accompanied by a number of his ministers and deputies. Kazakhstan is a former Soviet biological weapons facility of which the United States is paying still to this day to clean up and Baikonur is also the location for the space race and exploration systems.

For Russia it is the Bosporus Strait and the Dardanelles. This could be a power coup on Turkey that Erdogan has not figured out yet or may approve if there is another financial deal in the works.

The Black Sea is the ultimate power target by both nations. The Black Sea gives Russia more region authority over the Baltics and more access to the Mediterranean.

TURKEY BLOCKADING RUSSIA FROM DARDANELLES; BLACK SEA FLEET COMPLETELY CUT OFF

For Russia, the United States is not alone as the UK is also the target.

Vladimir Putin’s defence minister today compared the British army to Nazi Germany as the new Cold War plunged to a fresh low.

Sergei Shoigu claimed British troops on a Salisbury Plain training facility have started to use Russian-made tanks and uniforms of the Russian military to designate the enemy.

And the 61-year-old general, one of Putin’s closest allies and a personal friend, also alleged that NATO has doubled the intensity of military exercises, and dubbed them ‘anti-Russian.’

The man who heads the former Red Army said: ‘The last time this training method was used was by Nazi Germany during the Second World War.’

His comments came during a meeting in the Russian defence ministry of his top brass. More here from DailyMail.

 

 

 

Does China have a Covert System to Kill Americans with 4-FIBF?

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In 1893, Methamphetamine or crystal meth was first developed from ephedrine. A chemist by the name of Nagayoshi Nagai was responsible for this creation. It wasn’t until 1919, that methamphetamine was turned into its crystallized form by Akira Ogata. Ogata was able to do this by reduction of ephedrine using iodine and red phosphorous. Amphetamine, which is a related drug, first came into existence in 1887 by a Lazar Edeleanu in Germany. Methamphetamine manufacturing initially began in the United States in Hawaii in the 1960s.

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Adolf Hitler used cocaine and creative concoctions made by his personal doctor. He also relied on a stunning array of drugs while ruling Nazi Germany, including one made popular by the show Breaking Bad: crystal meth.

According to a 47-page U.S. military dossier, a physician filled the Fuhrer with barbiturate tranquilizers, morphine, bulls’ semen, a pill that contained crystal meth, and other drugs, depending on Hitler’s momentary needs, the Daily Mail reports. By this account, Hitler downed crystal meth before a 1943 meeting with Mussolini in which the Fuhrer ranted for two hours, and took nine shots of methamphetamine while living out his last days in his bunker.

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The next drug of choice used by militants is Captagon which is manufactured and trafficked from Lebanon. Captagon, a meth-like variant of the banned pharmaceutical Fenethylline, and is manufactured in large quantities primarily in Lebanon and neighboring Syria, where it is sold to ISIS via middle men.

Cali Estes, founder of The Addictions Coach, said the drug is referred to as the “Super Soldier Pill”because it can last up to 48 hours and causes users to be full of energy, impervious to pain, and “in a sense removes any barriers they would have to fighting and getting killed.”

Most of the blame for war in Iraq, Syria, Yemen can be blamed on Iran. The proxy terror group Hezbollah operated worldwide and is funded by outright selling Captagon.

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Image result for fluoro iso butyrfentanyl

The newest deadly narcotic on the market is being studied by the DEA and it is an epidemic, the basis of which appears to be China.

***  DailyHerald

WASHINGTON (AP) — No one knew what was in the baggie. It was just a few tablespoons of crystalline powder seized back in April, clumped like snow that had partially melted and frozen again.

Emily Dye, a 27-year-old forensic chemist at the Drug Enforcement Administration’s Special Testing and Research Laboratory, did not know if anyone had died from taking this powder, or how much it would take to kill you.

What she did know was this: New drugs were appearing in the lab every other week, things never before seen in this unmarked gray building in Sterling, Virginia. Increasingly, these new compounds were synthetic opioids designed to mimic fentanyl, a prescription painkiller up to 50 times stronger than heroin.

This, Dye realized, could be one of them.

The proliferation of rapidly evolving synthetic opioids has become so fierce that the DEA says they now constitute an entire new class of drugs, which are fueling the deadliest addiction crisis the United States has ever seen.

The fentanyl-like drugs are pouring in primarily from China, U.S. officials say — an assertion Beijing maintains has not been substantiated. Laws cannot keep pace with the speed of scientific innovation. As soon as one substance is banned, chemists synthesize slightly different, and technically legal, molecules and sell that substance online, delivery to U.S. doorsteps guaranteed.

More Americans now die of drug overdoses than in car crashes. Almost two-thirds of them, more than 33,000 in 2015 alone, took some form of opioid — either heroin, prescription painkillers or, increasingly, synthetic compounds like U-47700 and furanyl fentanyl, manufactured by nimble chemists to stay one step ahead of the law.

It is now forensic chemists like Dye who are on the front line of the nation’s war on drugs, teasing out molecular structures of mystery drugs so they can be named, tracked and regulated.

Dye held the baggie of powder in her gloved hand.

“Man,” she said. “I’ve got to figure out what this is.”

___

A NEW CLASS OF DEADLY DRUGS

Dye had an idea where to start. The sample came in tagged as suspected fentanyl. Dye picked up a vial with 2 milligrams of fentanyl from her long, clean lab bench. The container looked empty. Up close, squinting, she could see a spray of white dust clinging to its sides. The contents of that vial will kill 99 percent of the people who take it.

Dye first handled fentanyl three years ago. If she breathed it or touched it, she could die. It was nerve-wracking then — and still is.

The vial was made of glass. Dye had drop-tested it and knew that if it rolled off and hit the hard floor, it would not shatter. She rapped the vial against the benchtop, trying to make the powder inside more visible. Bang, bang, bang. It was still invisible.

“There’s nothing more terrifying than dealing with a lethal dose of material,” she said. Her hands were steady. Dye won modeling competitions for poise while she was at Graham High School in Bluefield, Virginia, a town of some 5,000 people on the eastern edge of Appalachian coal country.

Dye’s mother is a nurse who also deals with hazardous material. Mother and daughter both know that risk is not something to worry about, it’s something to manage. Dye has recommitted to every safety protocol she was ever taught. One, safety glasses. Two, lab coat, buttoned. Three, powder-free disposable nitrile gloves. Four, face mask. She placed an emergency naloxone injection kit — an antidote for opioid overdose — near her workspace. Just in case. And, on samples like this, she never works alone.

The Special Testing Laboratory is one of eight forensic chemistry labs the DEA runs. Focused on research, it has a worn functionality that gives it an academic feel. Down echoing hallways are labs packed with fume hoods and high-tech machines sprouting tubes and wires. Beakers dry by the sinks. “Safety First” signs have been taped to the doors. Mostly, it is silent.

Forty chemists work here. Their job is to identify substances seized by law enforcement in the field before they kill or kill again. One of the compounds they identified is carfentanil, which is so potent it was used as a chemical weapon before it hit the North American drug supply over the summer.

“Right now we’re seeing the emergence of a new class — that’s fentanyl-type opioids,” Dye’s boss, Jill Head, explained. “Based on the structure, there can be many, many more substitutions on that molecule that we have not yet seen.”

Entrepreneurial chemists have been creating designer alternatives to cannabis, amphetamine, cocaine and Ecstasy for years. But this new class of synthetics is far more lethal.

Back in 2012 and 2013, when reports of fentanyl derivatives started coming in to the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime in Vienna, chemists chucked them in the “other” category. Today those “other” substances are one of the fastest-growing groups of illicit chemicals tracked by the agency.

“New opioids keep emerging,” said Martin Raithelhuber, an expert in illicit synthetic drugs at the U.N. They deserve their own category, he added, but that will take time.

Once, forensic chemists like Dye confronted a familiar universe of methamphetamine, cocaine and heroin. Drug dealers, users and DEA agents generally knew what substance they were handling.

Today, things are different. This is a golden age of chemical discovery — and subterfuge. Dealers may not know that the high-purity heroin from Mexico they’re selling has been laced with fentanyl. Users may not realize the robin’s-egg-blue oxycodone tablets they’re taking are spiked with acetylfentanyl.

If field agents bust a clandestine drug lab and see a cloud of white powder in the air, they no longer assume it’s cocaine. They run.

“Had I come on board at a time when everything was cocaine and heroin and meth and marijuana, it’s not an exciting day,” Dye said. “Now I come to work and see something that’s never been seen.”

“And it can kill somebody,” she added.

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SEEDS OF A NEW INDUSTRY

The sprint to market unregulated chemicals is driven by demand in the U.S., where users gobble up 80 percent of the world’s opioids, according to the DEA.

Dye was just 6 years old when Purdue unveiled OxyContin as a breakthrough drug, a powerful yet supposedly nonaddictive opioid that would revolutionize pain management.

Instead, aggressive marketing and unscrupulous doctors helped push a generation of people into addiction.

Dye saw them all around her in Bluefield. Her dad’s pharmacy was her window on the crisis.

“People used to break into his store and steal Oxys,” Dye said. “He became friends with a lot of cops.” She did, too.

In high school, Dye fell in love with chemistry. Drawn to linearity and logic, she found beauty in the way equations yielded answers.

The year Dye graduated, 2007, Purdue Pharma and its executives paid more than $630 million in legal penalties for willfully misrepresenting the drug’s addiction risks.

By then it was too late.

The seeds of a new industry had already taken root. Today, it is almost as easy to order synthetic opioids on the open internet as it is to buy a pair of shoes, The Associated Press found in an investigation published in October . Payments can be made by Western Union, MoneyGram or Bitcoin, and products are shipped by DHL, UPS or EMS — the express mail service of China’s state-run postal service. As the lines between licit and illicit commerce blurred, it became possible for just about anyone with internet access to score an ever-changing array of lethal chemicals.

By the time Dye was in college studying forensic chemistry, U.S. regulators were cracking down on prescription drug abuse. Users turned from pills to heroin, which was cheap and relatively easy to get. Between 2010 and 2014 heroin overdoses in the U.S. tripled, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Three-quarters of today’s heroin users first used prescription opioids, a JAMA Psychiatry study showed.

Drug dealers soon learned that if they cut potent synthetic opioids, like fentanyls, into drugs like heroin, they could make vastly more money. Overdose deaths from synthetic opioids — a category dominated by illicit fentanyl — more than tripled from 2013 to 2015, hitting 9,580 last year, CDC data show.

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A DISCOVERY

On June 28, two months after the singer Prince died of a fentanyl overdose, Dye walked down a long, white hallway, past a heavy metal grate and into a dim room known as “the vault.” She was surrounded by packages of evidence, seized from the field and waiting for analysis. She checked out an envelope wrapped in plastic wrap and yellow tape that had come in on April 13, and placed it in a steel lockbox with her name on it.

Back in the lab, Dye unwrapped the package and found a silver pouch the size of a small handbag. Inside that was a palm-size baggie.

She scooped up a dot of powder from the baggie with a thin metal spatula and gingerly placed it in a small glass crimp vial. As she worked, she treated the material as if it were radioactive, twisting the spatula around with her fingers to avoid contamination. Using a glass pipette, she transferred a few drops of methanol into the vial and clamped it shut.

Dye dropped the sample into a mass spectrometer. The machine sucked the evidence through a copper-colored wire and bombarded it with electrons. That broke it up into many different small pieces. “Kind of like when you drop a puzzle,” she said.

The resulting pattern of peaks is akin to a chemical fingerprint. Dye compared the result with the lab’s library of approximately 1,500 known drugs.

None matched. This was new.

Dye had made a discovery.

China has banned many synthetic drugs, but new chemicals continue to sprout like weeds. In October and November, the AP identified 12 Chinese vendors hawking furanyl fentanyl and U-47700 — drugs that are not banned in China — as substitutes for blacklisted drugs. All offered their products via the Korean business-to-business platform EC21.com.

“Most customers choose the U-47700 now,” a man from XiWang Chemical Co. who called himself Adam Schexnayder emailed. “Although U-47700 is weaker than fentanyl. But it is a good opioid product. You can try it. How about it?”

Contacted by the AP, Schexnayder responded with a graphic Chinese obscenity, but said nothing more. The site has since vanished.

EC21 blocked searches for furanyl fentanyl and U-47700 after the AP called to ask about the chemicals, though “heroinn” still yielded results on Wednesday. The site has banned more than 768 search terms and is working with a developer to block changing patterns of forbidden terms more effectively, said Kim Min-Jeong, a service team manager. “We spend a significant amount of operating costs and labor on auditing.”

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‘ASK TO DIE’

The closest match to Dye’s evidence in the lab’s database was a compound called butyryl fentanyl. But it wasn’t the same. In her sample, distinctive small peaks kept popping up after taller ones.

She and her colleagues ran the evidence through a nuclear magnetic resonance spectrometer, which pulses samples with a magnetic field to help map the position of different atoms. Then they guessed. They bought a sample of the compound they thought they had from a legitimate research chemical company and used it to test their theory.

On July 26, Dye ran the reference standard they’d purchased through the mass spectrometer. The result matched their evidence exactly. Now they knew what they had on their hands.

“It’s 4-fluoroisobutyrylfentanyl,” Dye said.

Case closed.

What had Dye discovered?

4-fluoroisobutyrylfentanyl — 4-FIBF for short —has exactly the same weight and chemical composition as one of the compounds China banned in October 2015. The only difference is the arrangement of three carbon atoms.

Long before Dye made her discovery, Chinese vendors were offering 4-FIBF for sale.

Shanghai Xianchong Chemical Co., a trading company that operates from a small, spare office on a leafy street in central Shanghai, was one of them. Shanghai Xianchong started fielding requests for 4-FIBF around April, according to the manager, a clean-cut man in a white polo shirt named Jammi Gao.

Gao said in an email that he could sell 4-FIBF for $6,000 a kilogram, though he later denied ever brokering a deal.

He refused to ship opioids, like the ultrapotent carfentanil, that are banned from general use in the U.S. But 4-FIBF is so new to the street it is not a controlled substance in either the U.S. or China.

Drug users yearn for better chemistry, for highs with incredible analgesic power that go on and on. 4-FIBF showed promise. It was strong and cheap and though it produced little euphoria, it lasted a long time, users reported in online forums. Several said it could be used like methadone, to control opioid withdrawal symptoms. One user-turned-dealer called 4-FIBF “a miracle molecule.”

But 4-FIBF was so strong that getting the dose right was a problem. “Eyeball this, ask to die. ’nuff said,” one user noted in March.

None of the users replied to AP’s requests for comment.

Back in the lab, Dye peeled off her gloves and tossed them into a hazardous waste container. She didn’t know users were already warning each other not to go overboard chasing a heroin high that never kicked in with 4-FIBF. She didn’t know about the rough dosing schedules addicts had worked out. And she didn’t know that 4-FIBF gave some people satisfying, sleep-through-the-night results when they stuck it up their rectum.

Dye would go home, safe, to her dog. Maybe tomorrow she would find the next new thing in an evidence bag on her bench. User forums were already buzzing with talk of things like cyclopentyl fentanyl and acryl fentanyl.

But elsewhere, all across America, people would not make it through the night. By the time Dye finished work the next day, another 90 Americans would be dead of opioid overdoses.