Aleppo Codex, Oldest Surviving Treasure

Posted on February 12, 2016February 12, 2016 by Denise Simon

As the chatter among some world leaders centers around a cessation of hostilities in Syria, tragically Aleppo is a big turning point for history and control. If Damascus is the next target, then history in the region is all but erased.

The Aleppo Codex was written in the 10th century, C.E. At some point the Codex was transferred to Egypt and emerged in Syria. It remained there for 600 years until in 1947, there were riots against Jews and their properties in Aleppo and an ancient synagogue was burned but the Codex survived with some damage. The Aleppo Jewish and Christian community protected the Codex allegedly in a cave as the most sacred possession.

The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) has officially recognized the Codex as a world treasure.

World treasure: UNESCO recognizes oldest surviving copy of Hebrew Bible

FNC: It is one of the world’s greatest treasures.

Written sometime around 930 A.D. in the town of Tiberias on the shores of the Sea of Galilee, the Aleppo Codex is the oldest surviving copy of the Hebrew Bible, according to experts.

The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, UNESCO, added the millennium-old manuscript earlier this week to its International Memory of the World Register, which honors some of the most important discoveries in human history.

“It is regarded as the oldest complete Hebrew Bible in the world,” Don Bassett, director of the Biblical Museum of History in Tennessee, told FoxNews.com. “The text has been preserved with phenomenal accuracy,” Bassett said.

Damage to Historical Sites in the Syrian Civil War | Graphiq Interactive map of damaged or destroyed sites.

All current versions of the Old Testament are believed to have stemmed “in one way or another, from this ancient manuscript,” Adolfo Roitman, head curator of the Shrine of the Book Museum in Jerusalem, told the Christian Post.

“The best Bible for scholarly study available today is traceable back to the Aleppo Codex,” added Bassett.

The Codex, which was smuggled out of Syria and brought into Israel in 1958, currently resides at the museum.

Some 190 pages of the Codex — around 40 percent of the total — are missing, Bassett told FoxNews.com.

The missing pages include four out of five books of the Pentateuch — the first section of books in the Bible also called the Five Books of Moses — and five books from the last section –Lamentations, Ecclesiastes, Esther, Daniel and Ezra, i24News reported.

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“It’s fitting the Aleppo Codex has been designated as a world treasure, given its storied past and significance to Jews and Christians through the ages,” said Michael Holmes, Ph.D., executive director of the Museum of the Bible’s research arm, the Scholar’s Initiative. “It’s simply unparalleled in the world of biblical manuscripts.”

There is also a disagreement over who owns the priceless text.

Filmmaker Avi Dabach, who is making a documentary on the ancient manuscript, told the newspaper he believes the Codex belongs to the Jewish community that fled Syria.

“In the 1960s the Aleppo-Jewish community sued the people who brought the Codex to Israel,” Dabach said, according to the Christian Post. “The Israeli authorities decided to confiscate this item and then, from a position of strength, force on the community an arrangement.”

UNESCO says on its website that the manuscript, also known as the “Crown,” is “the oldest extant nearly complete Hebrew Bible (Old Testament).”

“It is considered by many scholars to be the most exact and authoritative Hebrew Bible and served as a source of text, cantillation and vocalization of the Bible – both in the past and present,” according to UNESCO.

The First Refugee Resettlement Program, Medina

Posted on February 12, 2016February 12, 2016 by Denise Simon

Medina—The First Muslim Refugee Resettlement Program

Kilpatrick ~CrisisMagazine: With all the talk about the Syrian refugees, one point is often overlooked. Much of the debate focuses on the question of whether or not the refugees can be reliably vetted. If they can be certified as one hundred percent terrorist-free, then, presumably, the resettlement can safely proceed.

But even if every terrorist could be excluded from the ranks of the refugees, a problem would remain. Many analysts are concerned that the resettlement program might facilitate the growth of terrorist-tolerant communities in America. By “terrorist-tolerant” I don’t mean that its members are thinking every minute about what they can do to support jihad, but rather that they have come to take for granted things that aren’t assumed in other societies.

Terror, for instance. Nonie Darwish, a former Muslim who grew up in Egypt, puts it this way:

One of the reasons that the so-called moderate Muslims have become irrelevant … is that over the centuries they have become tolerant of Islamic terrorism and considered it as part of normal life.

“Life under Sharia itself is a life under terror,” observes Darwish. And that daily low-level terrorism accustoms Muslims to view it as something “like a natural disaster or part of life that must be tolerated.”

So, although a Syrian refugee may have no personal taste for terror, he can be surprisingly tolerant of it. A 2007 public opinion poll of Syrians revealed that 75 percent of those polled supported financial aid for Hamas, Islamic Jihad, Hezbollah, and “Iraqi fighters” (at that time, mostly al-Qaeda). Need it be mentioned that all these groups are designated as terrorist organizations by the U.S. government? A more recent poll of 1,365 Syrians found that one out of five considered ISIS to be a positive influence on the country. And living in the West doesn’t seem to change these attitudes. A 2014 opinion poll showed that 27 percent of the French population in the 18-24-year-old demographic supported ISIS. Assuming a random sample, and assuming that the majority of pro-ISIS respondents were Muslim, that would mean that the vast majority of young French Muslims support ISIS.

That kind of supportive environment is a factor that’s often overlooked in the debate over Syrian refugees. As defenders of the resettlement program like to point out, terrorists can get into the U.S. by other means than by mingling with refugees. But once here, they need a network to support them and give them cover. And the network itself can only function if the larger community is willing to look the other way.

Europe is now dotted with such networks—in the Paris suburbs, in the Brussels borough of Molenbeek, in the Neukölln district of Berlin, and in numerous other places. There is evidence that similar networks already exist in nascent form in the U.S. Beyond the question of whether terrorists will mix in with refugees lies a larger question about the refugee resettlement program. Will it contribute to a strengthening of our society, or will it lead instead to the strengthening and expansion of terror-supportive networks?

Whether or not a particular group of refugees has been infiltrated by ISIS, there remains the fact that many refugees subscribe to the same general worldview held by members of the Islamic State. After all, they’ve been steeped in the same cultural-religious milieu that produced the terrorists. Many of them will take it for granted that Islam is the supreme religion, that Muhammad was the perfect man, and that Jews and Christians are unclean. They may be averse to committing violence, but they may find it perfectly understandable if other Muslims resort to violence in order to avenge a real or perceived insult to Islam. Although that mindset is alien to us, it shouldn’t be incomprehensible. At the time that a death fatwa was issued against the author Salman Rushdie, I remember talking with several Catholics who felt quite sympathetic to the Ayatollah Khomeini (who issued the fatwa), and rather unsympathetic to Rushdie and his “blasphemous” attitude toward religion.

Given their cultural background, it’s reasonable to expect that Sunni Muslim refugees will bring with them a set of beliefs and attitudes conducive to the incubation of terrorism. Even if there were a foolproof method for excluding active terrorists from their midst, there is no way of vetting for future terrorists—young Muslims who at some point in their development decide that ISIS or some similar movement is the logical conclusion of all they have been taught.

This “conversion” to radical Islam can come quite suddenly. Mohamed Abdelslam, the brother of two of the Paris terrorists, told reporters that his brothers began to change roughly six months before the attack, when they, “stopped drinking and started praying.” Likewise, the radicalization of Mohammod Youssuf Abdulazeez, the Chattanooga jihadist who killed five servicemen, could not easily have been forecast. To his classmates and teachers, he seemed like a normal American boy, and if he had problems, they were of the normal young American male variety—pot-smoking, heavy drinking, and fast driving. Unlike other young Americans, however, he would have been exposed—either at home or on Islamist websites—to the belief that one can wipe out one’s sins by an act of martyrdom.

This “sudden conversion syndrome” to more radical forms of Islam is increasingly common among Muslim youth. But, as I said, it’s not easy to predict. If you’re a government official whose job it is to vet refugees, how can you know if the smiling fourteen-year-old boy standing in front of you and surrounded by his polite and pleasant family is going to go radical three years down the line?

Absent other information and unfair as it may seem, his family’s culture has to be taken into account. To some extent, we are all creatures of our culture, and Islamic cultures seem to produce a disproportionate number of terrorists. Contemporary Western culture, on the other hand, seems to produce a disproportionate number of naïve egocentrics who are incapable of imagining that other cultures may be radically different from their own. Their tendency is to automatically project their own values and attitudes on to all they see.

But, as should now be clear to anyone willing to look, Islamic culture is not simply a colorful variation of our own. In those places where traditional Islam is the governing principle—whether in the Islamic State, or in parts of Pakistan, Indonesia, or Nigeria—the same disdain for non-Muslims and their religions can be found. This attitude is common not just among terrorists, but also among ordinary Muslims. By all accounts, the fifteen Muslim migrants who threw twelve Christians overboard during a Mediterranean crossing were not terrorists, they were simply Muslims who took offense when some of the Christians began to pray. Some of the Muslims who attacked Christians in European refugee camps appear to have been members of ISIS, but others were not. Blind to the differences in culture, European officials initially put Christian and Muslim migrants together in the same camps. With a bit more cultural awareness under their belts, they came to the politically incorrect conclusion that the two groups had to be housed separately. A less violent example of Islamic contempt for other cultures was provided by the Turkish soccer fans who booed and chanted when, during a Turkish-Greek soccer match, a moment of silence was requested for the victims of the Paris massacre.

As concerns the Syrian refugee crisis, Christians are regularly reminded that the Holy Family were once refugees in Egypt. Yes, but the culture brought into the world by the Holy Family is worlds apart from the one introduced six centuries later by Muhammad.

Let’s not forget that the Holy Family were once refugees. But in regard to the present crisis there’s another and perhaps more appropriate analogy to consider: Muhammad and his followers were also once refugees. He and his group of about 100 men, women, and children had long overstayed their welcome in Mecca. According to Muslim chroniclers, they had to flee in order to avoid persecution. Fortunately for Muhammad, the more “enlightened” citizens of Medina extended an invitation to the Muslims to come and live in their city. It is not recorded whether or not they held up large “welcome refugees” banners as is now the custom at European train stations, but they soon enough experienced the kind of regrets that Europeans are now having. Muhammad gradually acquired wealth and converts, and within a half-dozen years he was the master of Medina. Those Medinans who were not exiled or slaughtered were thoroughly subjugated. Muhammad then used Medina as the launching pad for his conquest of all Arabia. Within a century of his death, his followers had conquered nearly half of the civilized world.

The relevant analogy for our society is not the flight to Egypt, but the flight to Medina and the subsequent colonization of that city by the Muslims. A similar process of cultural conquest by migration is now underway in Europe. Citizens of the United States would be well-advised to monitor the situation over there before embarking on their own ill-considered experiment in welcoming the stranger.

NYPD Covertly Tracked Cell Phones

Posted on February 11, 2016February 11, 2016 by Denise Simon

New York police have covertly tracked cell phones, group says

Reuters: New York City’s police have made extensive use of covert devices to track cell phones without obtaining warrants since 2008, a civil liberties group said on Thursday, revealing how frequently law enforcement in the largest U.S. city has employed the technology.

The New York Civil Liberties Union released files that showed the New York Police Department used “cell site simulators” to track nearby cell phones more than a 1,000 times over the past eight years.

The American Civil Liberties Union has identified 60 local, state and federal agencies that have adopted the devices in recent years, but the group has said there are likely far more. The extent of the devices has largely been shrouded in secrecy, as departments and private manufacturers such as Harris Corp have refused to disclose information about their use.

U.S. Representative Jason Chaffetz of Utah, a Republican, has introduced a bill to require warrants for the use of cell site simulators.

The documents released on Thursday were obtained by the NYCLU through a Freedom of Information Law request.

The NYPD does not have a written policy on using the surveillance devices and does not obtain warrants when doing so, according to the NYCLU.

Instead, the department seeks “pen register” orders, which have been used for decades to gather information on specific phone numbers. The orders are issued by judges but require a lower standard than the probable cause needed for warrants.

The NYPD’s practice is less stringent than the one adopted last year by the U.S. Department of Justice, which calls for warrants except in emergency situations.

“We still have concerns that this military equipment is being used in a civilian context,” said Mariko Hirose, an NYCLU attorney. “At the very least, they should be using warrants and with a strict privacy policy that is written.”

The NYPD did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The devices mimic cell towers and intercept signals from nearby phones to gather information. That data can include locations of calls, numbers that are called or texted and even the content of communications, the NYCLU said.

The simulators can also sweep up information from nearby “bystander” phones.

The documents do not indicate what data police collected. The simulators were used to investigate a wide range of crimes, including murder, rape and drug trafficking.

No New York court has yet tackled the question of whether the warrantless use of such devices is constitutional, Hirose said.

She said the NYCLU could have difficulty establishing the legal standing to bring such a challenge, which would probably have to come from a criminal defendant specifically targeted by a simulator.

Yikes, there is more:

Intercept: The NYPD has used cell-site simulators, commonly known as Stingrays, more than 1,000 times since 2008, according to documents turned over to the New York Civil Liberties Union. The documents represent the first time the department has acknowledged using the devices.

The NYPD also disclosed that it does not get a warrant before using a Stingray, which sweeps up massive amounts of data. Instead, the police obtain a “pen register order” from a court, more typically used to collect call data for a specific phone. Those orders do not require the police to establish probable cause. Additionally, the NYPD has no written policy guidelines on the use of Stingrays.

Stingrays work by imitating cellphone towers. They force all nearby phones to connect to them, revealing the owners’ locations. That means they collect data on potentially hundreds of people. They are small enough to fit in a suitcase, or be mounted on a plane.

When they were originally developed in 2003, Stingrays were designed for military use. But in the past decade, they have increasingly been purchased by law enforcement agencies. According to the ACLU, Stingrays are used by at least 59 police departments in 23 states, and at least 13 federal agencies, including the DEA, FBI, and the IRS. Because most departments withhold information about Stingrays, these numbers likely underrepresent the total.

In December, The Intercept published a secret U.S. government catalogue of cellphone surveillance technology, including Stingrays and “dirt-boxes.” The advertisements boast that many of the items can spy on “up to 10,000 targets.”

Stingrays have long been a topic of concern for privacy activists. “Cell-site simulators are powerful surveillance devices that can track people, including in their homes, and collect information on innocent bystanders,” said Mariko Hirose, a senior staff attorney at the NYCLU. “If they are going to be used in communities the police should at minimum obtain a warrant and follow written policies.”

Instead, law enforcement agencies have fought to keep Stingrays secret, even dropping criminal cases to avoid disclosing anything about them. The FBI has forced local police agencies to sign Stingray-related non-disclosure agreements, claiming that criminals and terrorists who know about Stingrays could take countermeasures against them.

The increasing use of Stingrays, coupled with the lack of transparency, has alarmed civil liberties groups. “I think it’s critical to have transparency about the use of technology like Stingrays,” said Faiza Patel, an attorney with the Brennan Center for Justice. “That’s what allows courts, the public, and our elected officials to weigh in on the proper rules.”

In September, the Department of Justice issued guidelines requiring its officers to seek probable cause warrants before using a Stingray. But the guidelines only applied to federal law enforcement agencies, not to state and local police, who have fought such a change. In one ongoing court case, the state of Maryland has argued that anyone who turns on their phone consents to having his or her location tracked.

In November, Senator Ron Wyden, D-Ore., and Rep. Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah, introduced the GPS Act, a bill that would extend the Department of Justice’s guidelines to all law enforcement agencies. “Buying a smartphone shouldn’t be interpreted as giving the government a free pass to track your movements,” Wyden said.

See the government catalogue here:

Top photo: “nypd” by Nick Allen, used under CC BY 2.0/ cropped and color corrected from original.

Contact the author:

Putin Demands a Stand-down or Escalation of War

Posted on February 11, 2016February 11, 2016 by Denise Simon

As you read this, Obama is in California fundraising. Poor guy, he is sleeping at a Sheraton rather than his usual Fairmont….sigh.

Russia proposes Syria ceasefire but warns foreign troops risk ‘world war’

Munich (Germany) (AFP) – Moscow said Thursday it had made a “quite specific” ceasefire proposal for Syria as foreign ministers gathered in Munich, hoping to revive a floundering peace process amid warnings of a “new world war”.

With Syria peace talks derailed by the regime onslaught on Aleppo, the UN said 51,000 Syrians had fled the northern city this month as government forces backed by Russian bombers and Iranian fighters left the opposition there virtually surrounded.

“We made propositions for a ceasefire that are quite specific,” Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said as he sat down for talks with US counterpart John Kerry.

Moscow has refused to confirm reports that its ceasefire would take effect only on March 1, giving another three weeks to an offensive which the UN says could place 300,000 people under siege.

Observers say the bombardments on Aleppo have killed 500 people since they began on February 1.

Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev, meanwhile, warned that any move by Gulf nations to send in troops to support the rebels would risk a “new world war”.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov (L) and US Secretary of States John Kerry shake hands as they …

“The Americans and our Arabic partners must think hard about this: do they want a permanent war?” he told Germany’s Handelsblatt newspaper.

US diplomats said that any ceasefire in the Syria conflict should be “immediate”.

“This is an issue of commitments we all took, and that we have to respect,” added EU foreign affairs chief Federica Mogherini.

But Russia and Iran have repeatedly labelled the rebels in Aleppo as “terrorists” and suggested there can be no settlement until they have been militarily defeated.

“Those who are outside Syria should help the peace process and not seek to impose conditions on the Syrian people,” Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif told Iran’s state TV after arriving for the talks.

– US ‘Plan B’ –

A first round of talks between the Syrian government and the opposition in Geneva collapsed earlier this month over the attacks on Aleppo.

The rebels say they will not return to talks, pencilled in for February 25, unless government sieges and air strikes end.

Hosted by Kerry and Lavrov, foreign ministers from the 17-nation Syria contact group came together late Thursday for a meeting billed as a moment of truth for the floundering peace process.

Washington has threatened an unspecified “Plan B” if talks fail, as tension mounts with Moscow over its air campaign.

Syrians ride a motorbike past a collapsed building on which graffiti reads “Russia kills us&quo …

The two sides traded accusations on Thursday about bombing in Aleppo, with the Pentagon claiming two hospitals had been destroyed, and Moscow saying US planes had struck the city — which was flatly denied by Washington.

– Weakening the West –

Analysts see little hope of reconciling differences.

Syria is a crucial ally and military staging post for Russia and Iran, while a growing number of observers say Moscow has benefited from the chaos created by the war, particularly the refugee crisis in Europe.

“The goal of Russian President Vladimir Putin is to destabilise and weaken the West,” Koert Debeuf, a research fellow at the University of Oxford, told the Carnegie Europe think tank.

Syrian government forces raise their weapons as they patrol after taking control of the village of K …

But they also see little chance of a decisive victory for Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

“The idea of a full reconquest… seems neither credible nor durable. It will simply turn into a terrorist or guerrilla situation,” said Camille Grand, of the Foundation for Strategic Research in Paris.

Many have criticised the United States for not doing more to support the rebels.

Even outgoing French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius could not hide his frustration as he announced his resignation on Wednesday, saying: “You don’t get the feeling that there is a very strong commitment” by the US in Syria.

Washington has been reluctant to involve itself in another war after the quagmires of Afghanistan and Iraq, and has sought to focus more on combatting the Islamic State group than getting involved in the civil war between Syria’s regime and rebels.

“The US has given up the idea of toppling Assad,” said Grand. “Kerry seems willing to accept pretty much anything to resolve the crisis.”

The conflict has also strained relations between Turkey and its Western allies.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan hit back at UN calls that his country, which is already hosting 2.5 million refugees, should do more for those fleeing Aleppo.

“We do not have the word ‘idiot’ written on our foreheads,” he said. “The United Nations should give advice to other countries. And then we can send the refugees to these countries.”

He has also slammed Washington’s increasingly close alliance with the Kurdish militias in the fight against IS, saying it was turning the region into “a pool of blood”.

*** A deeper dive on Putin

Mounting Evidence Putin Will Ignite WWIII

By letting Putin get away with whatever he likes in Syria, Obama has created a deeply dangerous situation

Schindler-Observer: Relations between Russia and Turkey have been dismal since late November, when a Turkish fighter jet shot down a Russian bomber on the border with Syria, killing its pilot. That began a war of words between Moscow and Ankara that ought to concern everyone, since the former has several thousand nuclear weapons and the latter is a member of NATO.

Kremlin propaganda against Ankara has increased of late, setting the stage for further confrontation. As I explained here last week, Russian media outlets initially blamed the Sinai crash of Metrojet 9268 last autumn on the Islamic State, an atrocity which killed 224 innocents, nearly all of them Russians—a quite plausible claim. However, the Kremlin has abruptly shifted course and now blames the mass murder on Turkish ultranationalist terrorists, without any evidence provided to support that explosive assertion.

Where things may be going between Russia and Turkey, ancient enemies who have warred many times over the centuries, was evidenced this week, when the Kremlin announced large-scale surprise military exercises in the regions of the country that are close to Turkey. Troops were moved to full combat readiness, the last stage before a shooting war, with Sergei Shoygu, the Russian defense minister, announcing on TV: “We began our surprise check of the military preparedness in the Southwest strategic direction.”

That would be the direction of Turkey. These snap exercises involve the Southern Military District and the navy’s Black Sea Fleet, which are deeply involved in Russia’s not-so-secret secret war in eastern Ukraine. However, they also involve the navy’s Caspian Sea flotilla, which is nowhere near Ukraine.

It’s difficult to see how Turkey could stand idly by as an ancient city of two million is crushed just fifty miles from its frontier.

This implies that the snap exercises, which have been prominently featured in Kremlin media, are about Turkey, not Russia. This goes back to recent events on the ground in Syria, where the Kremlin-backed regime of Bashar al-Assad is slowly crushing its opponents, thanks to prodigious military help from both Russia and Iran. Regime forces are closing in on Aleppo, Syria’s biggest city, and 50,000 civilians have already fled the city in panic.

The Russian military displays scant regard for civilian casualties. Mr. Putin’s air force killed almost 700 Syrian civilians last month (to compare, the Islamic State killed less than a hundred Syrian civilians in January), and if the crushing of the Chechen capital of Groznyy in 1994-95, when Russian forces killed roughly 35,000 Chechens, mostly civilians, in just six weeks, is any guide, residents of Aleppo are wise to get as far away as they can.

Needless to add, such a bloody siege of Aleppo would set off a humanitarian crisis that the world could not fail to notice. It’s difficult to see how Turkey could stand idly by as an ancient city of two million is crushed just fifty miles from its frontier.

That is precisely the scenario that has seasoned analysts worried. In Pentagon circles, among those who are watching the budding war between Moscow and Ankara, citations of this famous movie clip are now commonplace. Distressingly, smart Russian analysts are thinking along similar lines.

Today Pavel Felgenhauer published his analysis under the alarming title, “Russia has begun preparations for a major war,” and he marshals a convincing case that the snap exercises in the country’s southwest are really a cover for a shooting war with Turkey—and therefore with NATO too, if Ankara is perceived as defending itself and can assert its right to Article 5, collective self-defense, which obligates all members of the Atlantic Alliance to come to Turkey’s aid.

‘It’s clear that there has to be some actual ‘redline’ for Mr. Obama, something that the United States cannot tolerate Russia doing – but where is it? If I don’t know, I’m sure the Kremlin doesn’t either.’

As The New York Times dryly noted of the Kremlin, “The [Defense] Ministry has ordered surprise maneuvers over the last three years as tensions between the East and West have worsened. The maneuvers have at times come as combat escalated in Ukraine and Syria.” In fact, using large-scale military exercises as a cover for aggression is old hat in Moscow. It was used during the August 1968 Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, which explains why NATO always got jumpy when Moscow held military exercises anywhere NATO territory, while snap exercises like this week inevitably caused Cold War panic.

Mr. Felgenhauer paints an alarmingly plausible scenario. As rebel forces defend Aleppo in Stalingrad fashion, the Syrian military, with Russian help, commences a protracted siege of the city, employing massive firepower, which becomes a humanitarian nightmare of a kind not seen in decades, a tragedy that would dwarf the 1992-95 siege of Sarajevo. However, any Turkish move to lift that siege, even with international imprimatur, would quickly devolve into all-out war.

Mr. Felgenhauer minces no words about this: “Russia has begun the deployment of forces and resources for a major war with Turkey.” Mr. Putin has decided to let his client, the Assad regime, win its bloody civil war, first in the north around Aleppo, and any moves by Turkey or NATO to stop them will be met with force. So far, President Barack Obama has let Mr. Putin do whatever he likes in Syria, no matter the cost in innocent lives, so the Kremlin has no reason to think that will change.

The Yom Kippur War of October 1973, when the United States and the Soviet Union came alarmingly close to great power war, is cited as an ominous precedent by Mr. Felgenhauer—albeit one that ended happily when nuclear war was averted thanks to wise diplomacy. There is no reason to think the befuddled Obama administration is that diplomatically deft.

But who is Pavel Felgenhauer? Regrettably, he is not a guy in furry slippers in someone’s basement spouting weird conspiracy theories. Instead, he is one of Russia’s top defense analysts with solid connections in that country’s military. He is a frequent critic of the Russian military and the Putin regime; it’s noteworthy that he published his analysis in Novoe Vremya (New Times), a Ukrainian newsmagazine, not a Russian outlet, perhaps because this sort of truth-telling is unwelcome at home. His prognostications are often correct, for instance his prediction of the Russian invasion of Georgia in August 2008, which he called two months before it happened.

That is NATO’s top concern right now: that after years of weakness and vacillation, the Obama administration may find itself backed into a corner by aggressive Russian action.

Is Mr. Felgenhauer’s alarmism warranted? Many Western insiders think along similar lines. By letting Mr. Putin get away with whatever he likes in Syria, Mr. Obama has created a deeply dangerous situation in the region. By abandoning his infamous Syria “redline” in September 2013, the White House in effect outsourced American policy there to Mr. Putin, as I warned you at the time, and which the Obama administration, powerless to influence terrible events in Syria, is slowly realizing.

“Are we heading for our ‘Sarajevo moment’?” a senior NATO official bluntly asked: “It’s clear that there has to be some actual ‘redline’ for Mr. Obama, something that the United States cannot tolerate Russia doing – but where is it? If I don’t know, I’m sure the Kremlin doesn’t either.”

That is NATO’s top concern right now: that after years of weakness and vacillation, the Obama administration may find itself backed into a corner by aggressive Russian action. Particularly if coupled with intemperate Turkish reactions, that could create a nightmare of historic proportions around Aleppo. Although the White House has foresworn any military intervention in Syria’s fratricide, it’s worth noting that Mr. Obama led NATO to war in Libya exactly five years ago to prevent possible slaughter in Benghazi, a far smaller humanitarian threat than the terrifying sword of Russian artillery and airpower that’s hanging over Aleppo right now.

For their part, the Russians are upping the ante, with regime media publishing claims by the Defense Ministry that air attacks on Aleppo yesterday that killed civilians, including the bombing of a hospital, were actually perpetrated by U.S. Air Force A-10s, a war crime that they say the Pentagon has tried to pin on Moscow. In fact, American intelligence knows this was the work of the Russian Air Force: “We have intercepts of the Russian pilots talking during the attack,” explained a Pentagon official, “as usual, the Russians are lying.” Yet this sort of dishonest Kremlin propaganda, what spies term disinformation, is exactly what the Obama administration has refused to counter, as I’ve explained in this column, in a futile effort to keep the Kremlin happy.

Mr. Putin instead has taken his measure of Mr. Obama and has doubled down, saving his client regime in Syria. Russia has won in Syria and NATO and the West are stuck with that outcome, as are the unlucky residents of Aleppo. “I hope Obama doesn’t decide to get a backbone now,” suggested a retired American general who knows the Russians well, “since the Kremlin is in ‘drive’ in Syria and isn’t about to do ‘reverse’.”

There seems to be little chance of this White House taking on the Russians in Syria. However, there are no guarantees that Ankara is equally inclined to let the Kremlin do whatever it wants on its southern border, and that is how NATO could get embroiled in World War III over the Levant. Cooler heads may prevail, and all sensible people should hope they do here.

Syria, now Uncontrollable

Posted on February 10, 2016February 10, 2016 by Denise Simon

Opposition Leader: U.S. Diplomacy Costs Syrian Lives

Bloomberg: In the days since the collapse of the Syria peace talks championed by U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, the humanitarian catastrophe in northern Syria has grown, tens of thousands of new refugees were created, and the Russian- and Iranian-backed killing of civilians has increased. These are all consequences of the flawed U.S. strategy, according to the lead negotiator for the Syrian opposition.

Riyad Hijab was prime minister of Syria in 2012 under the dictator Bashar al-Assad; he became the highest-ranking defector from the regime when he switched sides and joined the rebels. He is now the leader of the High Negotiating Committee that represented the Syrian opposition at last week’s meetings in Geneva, which collapsed after two days. Kerry had pressured the Syrian opposition leaders to attend, even warning they could lose their U.S. funding if they boycotted. Hijab says that Kerry’s approach — to try to persuade Assad and Russia to negotiate while the offensive continues — has actually made things much worse.

“The administration is saying it is testing the good faith of the other side,” Hijab told me in a phone interview on Monday. “But when you are testing these things and it fails, the price that is being paid is horrendous death and the expansion of extremism and terrorism on the ground.”

Syrian forces backed by Russian air power are pressing an offensive against rebel groups in and around Aleppo, the nation’s largest city, that began before the scheduled peace talks. Kerry said Friday, “This has to stop.” He said he would know if the other parties, such as Russia, were “serious” about upholding United Nations Security Council resolutions on protecting civilians after a meeting later this week in Munich of the international group of countries supporting proxies in the Syrian civil war.

In the eyes of the Syrian opposition, Russia and Iran are making a mockery of the peace process, and Kerry’s reluctance to acknowledge this is putting them in deadly harm. It also creates more problems for America’s regional allies, aids the Islamic State and dims the prospects for future peace talks. “The failures of the negotiations end up lowering the credibility of the moderate opposition in front of the Syrian people,” said Hijab. “United States credibility is plummeting within the population of Syria but also in the region as a whole.”

This week, it is Syrians near Aleppo who are paying the price. Regime forces, with Russian support, are advancing toward the Turkish border, threatening to cut off opposition groups and civilians from their source of aid. At least 35,000 people have joined the flood of refugees since the collapse of the talks, ahead of what many anticipate will be another in a long line of starvation sieges the regime is perpetrating on cities. Hijab said there are now 18 cities under siege, three more than when the talks began. More here.

Syria, already a catastrophe, seems on the verge of an uncontrollable disaster

WaPo: Suddenly, after four years of brutal civil war, Syria this week became even more of an uncontrollable military, diplomatic and humanitarian disaster.

“We are not blind to what is happening,” Secretary of State John F. Kerry said Tuesday, as he prepared for a meeting in Munich of stakeholders from outside Syria. “We are all very, very aware of how critical this moment is.”

The Thursday gathering could well be the last gasp of a three-month, Kerry-orchestrated effort to bring together powerful countries on all sides of the conflict — from Russia and Iran on behalf of the government of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, to the United States and its partners on the opposition side — to try and forge a political solution that would allow them all to focus their efforts on defeating the Islamic State.

What seemed possible even two weeks ago, however, now seems all but hopeless. Failure of planned peace negotiations could lead President Obama finally to a decision he has long resisted — whether to more fully arm and back rebel groups whose cohesion and commitment to a democratic and secular Syria he mistrusts.

In recent days, Russian bombardment of opposition forces north of Aleppo, a rebel stronghold, has severed opposition supply lines and threatens to allow government-aligned forces to encircle the city. In a letter sent to the Obama administration this week, Russia proposed to stop the bombing on March 1, allowing it to continue for another three weeks

The Russian blitz has allowed pro-government ground forces, mostly composed of Iranian-trained militias from Iraq, Iran and Lebanon’s Shiite Hezbollah, to push north to with 20 miles of the Turkish border. This is the same area where the United States and Turkey have planned to carve out an opposition-held zone to combat Islamic State forces approaching it from the east.

Tens of thousands of new refugees have fled Aleppo and its environs to the recently closed Turkish border. Mercy Corps, one of the few aid agencies in a position to help them, said Tuesday that its supplies will soon run out. For those who haven’t fled, the encirclement of Aleppo “would leave up to 300,000 people, still residing in the city, cut off from humanitarian aid unless cross-line access could be negotiated,” the United Nations said.

In Europe, where a flood of nearly a million migrants and refugees from the region, most of them Syrians, have already arrived, political and social tensions are threatening the foundation of European unity constructed over the past 70 years.

“There are fault lines emerging that we thought we had overcome,” said Peter Wittig, Germany’s ambassador to the United States, who described the situation as an existential threat to Europe.

“The United States has been slow to recognize this is a much bigger thing than anything else we’ve experienced since the beginning of the European Union,” Wittig said. “We didn’t see it earlier, we were totally unprepared. . . . We’re not blaming the United States. It takes time for this country to realize that it’s really that serious.”

Germany has taken in the bulk of the migrants and refugees, while some Eastern European members of the E.U. have closed their borders to them.

Negotiation track derided

U.S. ties have become strained with partners closer to the conflict. These allies fear the Obama administration has been blinded to the threat from Russia and Iran by its desire to believe they can be swayed by diplomatic reason and appeals to shared worries about expansion of the Islamic State.

One senior official from a close partner nation described the negotiation track as a farce. The official said that it was unrealistic to expect the opposition to come to the table when its forces are being decimated on the ground and civilians are being starved by Russian bombing and the government gains it has enabled, in violation of United Nations resolutions that Moscow agreed to in order to get the talks started. The official, who said that U.S. leadership is still essential if the war is to end, did not want to be identified by name or nationality in order to speak candidly.

Frontline Turkey, a NATO ally and member of the U.S.-led coalition against the Islamic State, has dithered over its priorities, concerned that a U.S. alliance with Syrian Kurds fighting against the militants will give advantage to Turkish Kurds who seek independence. Even as pro-government forces expand north from Aleppo, Kurdish fighters in Syria’s northwest corner are pushing into the same area.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has demanded that the United States choose between Turkey and the Syrian Kurdish Democratic Union Party. After State Department spokesman John Kirby said this week that the United States does not consider the Syrian Kurds to be terrorists while recognizing that Turkey does, the Ankara government called in U.S. Ambassador John R. Bass on Tuesday for a dressing-down.

Talks between the Syrian government and opposition were suspended before they began this month after rebel representatives said they would not sit at the table until the government provided humanitarian access to besieged areas and released women and children it is holding prisoner. The Munich meeting, originally scheduled to monitor progress in the negotiations, became a final effort to get them started.

Scorched-earth policy

Kerry has long sought a more muscular U.S. policy than Obama has allowed. But he also firmly believes that if negotiations can begin, Assad will eventually be forced from power, with Russian acquiescence in the face of the inevitable.

For the moment, Moscow seems more interested in adjusting the balance of power on the ground — where just months ago, the rebels were on the ascendant — to strengthen Assad’s position before entering talks about his future.

Near the Turkey-Syria border Tuesday, rebels said they fear they are being betrayed by the countries they thought were their allies — most notably the United States. Without significant new injections of arms and ammunition, they said, they will not survive the combined onslaught of intense Russian airstrikes and advances by pro-government ground forces.

“Russia is the second superpower in the world, and Russia is using all of its power against the rebels,” said Mohammed Adib, a political officer with Jabhat Shamiya, the main rebel group fighting in northern Aleppo province. “They’re using a scorched-earth policy, and they don’t care what the international community says.”

“The problem is the friends of the regime are really good friends and give lots of support, whereas our friends sometimes give support and sometimes not,” he said.

While they don’t expect they will receive anti-aircraft missiles, which would have a major impact on the balance of power, rebels said they still hope to receive upgraded weapons, including new-generation models of the TOW missiles that have proved effective at taking out the Syrian government’s aging battle tanks, though these are no match for newly supplied Russian T-90 tanks.

If the rebel fighters cannot rebound, Adib and other rebel spokesmen said, there is a risk that opposition fighters will join more radical organizations, including the Islamic State. “People will not surrender to [Assad] under any circumstances,” said Khaled Shihabeddine, a political adviser to the Noureddin al-Zinki rebel group. “If things stay as they are, with no support and no one stopping Russia, the rebels will be pushed into a corner and . . . all possibilities will be open.”