By Brandon Turbeville

As concern over the last week of Obama’s tenure as President continues to mount and as tensions with Russia edge upwards more and more by the day, the United States and NATO are doing everything they can to signal that they are ready and willing for World War Three. After months of falsely accusing the Russian government of “war crimes,” “crimes against humanity,” and empire expansion simply for killing Western-backed terrorists in Syria, the U.S. government and corporate media followed up with months more of claims of “Russian hacking” even insinuating that the Russians “hacked the U.S. elections.” This was, of course, after over a year of claiming Russia shot down civilian airliners, invaded Ukraine, imprisons gays, and has no rights for women.

Over the course of the crisis in Ukraine, the U.S. has repeatedly moved troops into threatening positions close to the Russian border. Now, however, one of the biggest pushes yet has materialized in Eastern Europe, right on Russia’s doorstep in Poland, Estonia, Latvia, Hungary, and Bulgaria. Dubbed, Operation Atlantic Resolve, the massive NATO troop deployment is an obvious act of troop placement in order to prepare for an actual ground assault on Russia itself. At best, it is an incredibly foolish act of bullying and intimidation. At worst, it is preparation for a nuclear holocaust.

As the International Business Times summarizes

US tanks and armoured vehicles along with over 3,000 US soldiers begin arriving in Poland on Thursday, (12 January). The deployment, which falls under Operation Atlantic Resolve, is the largest exercise of US troops in Europe in decades.

Hundreds of armoured vehicles and over 80 main battle tanks have already arrived in Germany and are reportedly being moved by road and rail to Eastern Europe.

Operation Atlantic Resolve is a mission to show Moscow that Washington is committed to protecting its allies in Eastern Europe. It was launched in the aftermath of Russia annexing Crimea, which triggered fears that Moscow could move to make a similar land grab in Eastern Europe.

The US Armoured Brigade will also reportedly conduct military exercises in the Baltics. The exercise is a part of President Barack Obama’s plan to ease tensions among Nato allies who are concerned about Russian aggression. According to reports, the forces will rotate every nine months.

Tanks and other materials will eventually be stationed in Poland, Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, Romania and Hungary.

The Duran also describes the massive troop deployments in the following way:

Self-propelled Howitzers and hundreds of other armored fighting vehicles were landing on the shores of northern Germany. To those who had at least one eye on the news, it was like watching the US invasion at Normandy all over again. Over the last few days, some 2,800 pieces of military hardware and 4,000 troops have arrived at the port in Bremerhaven.

The delivery of US Abrams tanks, Paladin artillery, and Bradley fighting vehicles marks a new phase of America’s continuous presence in Europe, which will now be based on a nine-month rotation.

. . . . .

Operation Atlantic Resolve – as it is being called – is the newest phase in adding and keeping a US armored brigade on the European NATO front and will operate on a nine-month rotational basis. With its headquarters based in Germany, the brigade will first enter Poland and then disperse throughout seven countries from Estonia to Bulgaria; a military front much closer to the Kremlin in Moscow than was setup during the Cold War with the former USSR.

Since the announcement, Putin has had no choice but to counter the military move along Russia’s borders.

. . . . .

Great Britain will also be joining the military surge – sending fighter jets to the Black Sea and a battalion of troops, tanks and light armor to Estonia later in the spring. Those troops with be supported by French and Danish troops while Germany will be bolstering troops and sending tanks into Lithuania.

Other counties participating in the “Enhanced Forward Presence” are Canada, Romania, the Netherlands, Albania, Croatia, Belgium, Italy, Slovenia and Luxembourg. The US will also be relocating its Stryker Unit from Germany to Poland to join the vastly expanded military presence.

It should be clear enough by now that the U.S. is by no means acting defensively in Ukraine, Syria, Europe or anywhere else. The U.S. government is playing a very dangerous game that could very well end the lives of the overwhelming majority of the planet. Thankfully, Putin has proven to be a cooler head than any leader in the NATO infrastructure and his calm responses are most likely the only reason the world has not been incinerated by now. The American people had better start paying attention to the aggressive posturing of their government and begin speaking out before it is too late.

Brandon Turbeville – article archive here – is the author of seven books, Codex Alimentarius — The End of Health Freedom, 7 Real Conspiracies, Five Sense Solutions and Dispatches From a Dissident, volume 1 and volume 2, The Road to Damascus: The Anglo-American Assault on Syria, and The Difference it Makes: 36 Reasons Why Hillary Clinton Should Never Be President. Turbeville has published over 850 articles on a wide variety of subjects including health, economics, government corruption, and civil liberties. Brandon Turbeville’s radio show Truth on The Tracks can be found every Monday night 9 pm EST at UCYTV. His website is BrandonTurbeville.com He is available for radio and TV interviews. Please contact activistpost (at) gmail.com.

This article may be freely shared in part or in full with author attribution and source link.

By Ulson Gunnar

Despite unmaterialized hopes of a new tack for US foreign policy, it appears that each and every front of US aggression has reopened in earnest, from the Middle East vis-a-vis Iran, to the South China Sea opposite China and now across Eastern Europe between US-led NATO and Ukrainian forces against Russia.

Articles like the UK Independent‘s “‘Everything is destroyed’: on the ground as latest surge of deadly violence strikes eastern Ukraine,” sound the alarm, stating:

While the fighting has been largely kept to the outskirts of Avdiivka during the day, the nighttime has been hellish for residents. Shells have landed indiscriminately throughout the town, and civilian casualties are racking up.

The Independent would continue, stating:

According to Hug, both sides are making use of heavy weapons such as the multiple-launch Grad missile system, and they are doing so in plain sight of OSCE observers. Grads, along with 152mm and 122mm artillery, were banned under the Minsk II agreement, which was signed two years ago after the catastrophic battle of Debaltseve.

And to accent just how “in plain sight of OSCE observers” Ukrainian forces are operating, footage taken by BBC staff shows two OSCE observer vehicles following directly behind advancing Ukrainian tanks during one of the reported offensives.

Despite the BBC’s own staff capturing the footage, the BBC’s reporting on Ukraine features carefully cropped photos omitting the OSCE observer vehicles.

The OSCE itself, in its own official reports, states (emphasis added):

In violation of withdrawal lines, the SMM observed two tanks (T-64) between government-controlled Orlivka (22km north-west of Donetsk) and Avdiivka (17km north of Donetsk). In government-controlled Talakivka (90km south of Donetsk) the SMM saw two towed howitzers (D-30, Lyagushka, 122mm) towed by two military trucks (Ural). In government-controlled Ivanivka (59km south-west of Donetsk) the SMM saw four multiple rocket launcher systems (BM-21 Grad, 122mm) at a military compound which were previously seen on 29 November 2016. On 29 January, approximately 2.5km north of government-controlled Aslanove (85km south of Donetsk), an SMM mini unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) spotted four self-propelled howitzers (2S1 Gvozdika, 122mm) near a tent with two-three soldiers visible and stacks of what appeared to be ammunition boxes.

While US and European media portray US foreign policy as having shifted under incoming president Donald Trump, Ukrainian forces are emboldened by a systematic campaign of US-NATO support, including US-NATO forces operating both inside and outside Ukraine attempting to train and equip Ukrainian forces ahead of renewed fighting anticipated in eastern Ukraine.

CBS News in its February 1, 2017 article titled, ““Re-tooling an army from scratch,” as it fights a war,” admits:

The U.S. is working with Canadians, British and Lithuanian forces at the remote training center near Yavoriv, which is now referred to as the Joint International Peacekeeping Security Center.

Training ranges from gearing up ministry of interior troops to regular troops, military police and medical personnel, all admittedly for the purpose of reengaging rebel forces in the east in direct violation of agreements made with eastern Ukrainians, brokered between the US, NATO and Russia.

CBS News would admit as much, stating:

“The training here will increase their survivability on the battlefield,” Ducich said. “They’re going against an enemy that has very sophisticated weapons — and not just from the lethal standpoint… there’s an electronic warfare aspect to this that we have not seen that we are now incorporating into the training here. I don’t think it’s about matching (Russia’s capabilities). I think it’s knowing what you can do and maximizing that effectiveness on the battlefield.”

In addition to openly training Ukraine’s army to reignite hostilities, rebel leaders have been targeted and assassinated amid the fragile ceasefire.

In October 2016, Arseny ‘Motorola’ Pavlov, a prominent and effective rebel commander, was killed in a terrorist bomb-blast in Donetsk. More recently, the BBC would report that Oleg Anashchenko, the defense minister of the Luhansk People’s Republic was likewise killed in a targeted terrorist bombing.

It is no coincidence that US-NATO forces openly and diligently prepare Ukraine for war in violation of ceasefire agreements, while assassinations are carried out against military commanders of the very forces the West is preparing Kiev to fight against.

Despite this, US and European media sources are attempting to portray Ukraine as “abandoned” by the US. while portraying America’s new presidential administration as “sympathetic” to Russia.

Despite this elementary attempt at misdirection, it should be noted that US-NATO attempts to bolster Ukrainian forces and covert attempts to degrade eastern Ukrainian rebel forces ahead of renewed hostilities has only accelerated under the presidency of Donald Trump, not subsided.

For geopolitical analysts, understanding the actual interests driving hostilities and confrontation between Washington, London and  Brussels vis-a-vis Moscow, unfolding directly and indirectly, helps sift through political rhetoric and identify the actual motivations and special interests behind them moving this war forward regardless of who sits in the White House.

By all actual metrics, the war in Ukraine appears set only to expand, not in spite of US efforts under President Trump to the contrary, but precisely because US special interests plan to use Trump’s intentionally misleading and empty rhetoric as cover to reignite hostilities more drastically than before the ceasefire was struck.

Just like the US feigned rapprochement with Iran in an attempt to paint Tehran as unreasonably aggressive and ungrateful for American sympathy ahead of hostilities always meant to expand, Trump’s feigned affinity for Russia and its political leadership will be quickly converted into “regret” as Russia is portrayed as taking advantage of American “good-will,” “forcing” America to become more heavily involved in a Ukrainian crisis it itself ignited between 2013-2014.

Ulson Gunnar, a New York-based geopolitical analyst and writer especially for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”, where this article first appeared.

By Brandon Turbeville

Despite Oscar Win, Organization Revealed As Al-Qaeda Rescue Operation

Since 2001, Americans have lost the majority of their Constitutional rights under the guise of security and protection from terrorist attacks launched by al-Qaeda. Freedom of travel has been restricted, the Fourth Amendment has virtually been eliminated, due process scarcely exists, and even the First Amendment has been rapidly curtailed and is being chipped away even more with each passing day.

But sixteen years after Americans began throwing their rights at the U.S. government in fear of al-Qaeda, the terrorist organization blamed by the Bush administration for the 9/11 attacks, the United States’ film academy has given al-Qaeda an Oscar.

Unfortunately, however, the award was not granted because the academy was impressed by the technical skill of the highly staged and faked White Helmets’ videos designed to tear at the heartstrings of somnambulant American consumers but, instead, the award was given for best documentary short. Our only surprise was that the presenters and award winners could take a break from their staged and carefully marketed PC political speeches long enough to actually deal with awards.

But while we have to give props to the makers of the White Helmets video and documentary in terms of propaganda production, to informed observers, the truth about the group is even transparent through the film itself. Aside from the many short videos found on the Internet showing the group taking part in executions, carrying arms, and chanting support for the extermination of specific ethnicities, religions, or the SAA, the film contains a number of questionable medical scenes designed to horrify the viewer at the “brutality” of the “Assad regime.” Upon a closer look, however, they reveal several anomalies.

According to Professor Marcello Ferrada de Noli writing for The Indicter, a number of Swedish medical doctors have raised questions about the legitimacy of the medical procedures being conducted in the documentary. De Noli writes,

A notably peculiar factor of the White Helmet footage of this alleged attack [alleged Sarmin, Idlib chlorine attack] is that they do not film any external shots of the attack itself, despite their declared anticipation of being targeted, having “heard” helicopters.

Instead, the only footage is of an enclosed indoor space with no contextual filming to evidence where they are in Syria or that an attack has just taken place. The indoor environment certainly resembles a makeshift hospital emergency room. White Helmet “rescuers” parade in and out, manhandling and maneuvering the limp, lifeless bodies of three children. The naked bodies of these children have no external, visible injuries and do not respond when the various “medics” perform all manner of ostensibly “life-saving” procedures, in a haphazard effort to resuscitate these children.

. . . . .

In order to obtain qualified clinical opinions, I sent the video to eminent Swedish medical specialists. I stressed that, particular attention, must be paid to the Syringe needle procedure (seemingly, intracardiac injection) carried out on one of the children, as seen in the screen shot from the video, below

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3GXz9ww7JY4&feature=youtu.be

Dr Leif Elinder, a known Swedish medical doctor profile, author and specialist in paediatrics, summarised the following in his reply: [7]

“After examination of the video material, I found that the measures inflicted upon those children, some of them lifeless, are bizarre, non-medical, non-lifesaving, and even counterproductive in terms of life-saving purposes of children”.

Further, I received a detailed clinical statement from Dr Lena Oske, a Swedish medical doctor and general practitioner. In her statement, Dr Oske referred to the presumed, adrenaline injection, performed in the White Helmet video (excerpt in the photo above). Her specialist opinion dismisses the procedure conducted in the White Helmet video, as unqualified and incorrect. Furthermore, she describes the earlier assessment of the procedure by a colleague who had exclaimed:

“If not already dead, this injection would have killed the child!”

Excerpts from Dr Lena Oske’s statement to SWEDHR: [8]

“Intracutaneous injection with adrenalin may be used if any other resuscitation measure does not succeed. Especially under precarious circumstances – such as in field emergency settings– where safer ways for the administration of medication (i.e. endotracheal, intravenous, or intraosseus) might be difficult or unavailable. But not in the way shown in the video”.

“In order to perform the injection, CPR (cardiopulmonary resuscitation) has to be interrupted, and then the CPR resumed immediately after. Which is not done in the procedures shown in the video.”

And referring to a correct medical procedure, the Swedish specialist MD adds:

“The technique is simple. Long needle, syringe with 1 mg adrenaline, find the 4th or 5th intercostal space and insert the needle just adjacent to the sternum, left side, deposit the medication after checking you are in the right position (aspiration of blood and no resistance), take out the needle and immediately resume CPR! So, the doctor who wrote the comment, ‘If not already dead, this injection would have killed the child’ was right! What a macabre scene; and how sad.” [8]

[Both colleagues, doctors Leif Elinder and Lena Oske, are senior members of SWEDHR, and on behalf of the SWEDHR board I fully endorse each other’s statements.]

The Syria Civil Defense VS The White Helmets

NOTE: This writer recommends reading Vanessa Beeley’s article, “The REAL Syria Civil Defense Exposes Fake ‘White Helmets’ As Terrorist-Linked Imposters.”

Despite the failure to award the White Helmets with the Nobel Peace Prize and the pathetic propaganda film that accompanied the run-up to the decision, there remains a continued effort to not only promote the White Helmets as being a humanitarian organization and hide their actual terroristic nature, but also to conceal the real humanitarian heroes in Syria, the Syria Civil Defense.

Indeed, if one searches the web for Syria Civil Defense, he will be met with links to a White Helmets website operating under the domain of SyriaCivilDefense.org. Wikipedia also lists the Syria Civil Defense as “aka” the White Helmets.

It is, of course, a necessity for the NATO powers to erase the real Syria Civil Defense and replace them with the White Helmets so that the corporate outlets’ information sourcing can come from a “respected” humanitarian organization whenever false claims leveled against the Syrian government. Propaganda sounds so much better when it comes from selfless, humanitarian, rescue operations.

Vanessa Beeley, the researcher who has ripped the mask of the White Helmets numerous times before and who may be the person most responsible for preventing the terrorist support group from receiving the Nobel Peace Prize, describes the real Syria Civil Defense in the following way:

The REAL Syria Civil Defence was established as an organisation, in 1953, some 63 years before the White Helmets were a glimmer in the eyes of CIA and MI6 operatives.

The REAL Syria Civil Defence is a founding member of the ICDO (International Civil Defence Organisation). Other ICDO partners include the UN Department of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), Secretarian of the International Strategy for Disaster Reduction (UNISDR), International Search and Rescue Advisory Group (INSARAG), World Health Organisation (WHO), United Nations of Geneva (UNOG), Red Cross and the Red Crescent.

To our knowledge and according to the Head Quarters of the REAL Syria Civil Defence in Damascus, the White Helmets are NOT a member of the ICDO. The REAL Syria White Helmets have received awards for their participation in the training of other member states in USAR (Urban Search and Rescue) and for their contributions to the Civil Defence community, prior to the NATO dirty war on Syria that began in earnest, in 2011.

Later in Part II, we will go into further detail regarding this affiliation with the ICDO and the role the REAL Syria Civil Defence has played in global civil defence developments for the last 63 years – which is tremendous, and something the White Helmets could never lay claim to in reality, despite all the superficial accolades being rained down upon them by the US and NATO fueled organisations, foundations and cosmetic award bodies.

This is an introduction to the unsung heroes who, unlike the counterfeit White Helmets, do truly risk their lives every day, working not only in government controlled areas, but forging deep into terrorist strongholds to rescue civilians living under the brutal US-NATO-backed terrorist siege and occupation that engulfs all of Syria.

When Syrian civilians are at risk, injured, or buried under the rubble of homes, schools and hospitals destroyed by terrorist mortar showers, it’s not Le Mesurier’s White Helmets who rush to their aid – it’s the REAL Syria Civil Defence, a real civic organization who, up until the publication of this article, have never been mentioned by any western media outlets.

Beeley traveled to Syria in 2016 in order to get a firsthand feel for the situation on the ground and to investigate the Syria Civil Defense/White Helmet issue. She traveled all over the country, most notably in Aleppo and Damascus, the latter city being the headquarters of the real Syria Civil Defense. She, along with journalist Eva Bartlett, was able to interview members of the SCD and inspect the organization’s equipment and facilities.

Beeley writes,

On the 15th of August, I entered the work yard of Aleppo’s REAL Syria Civil Defence and was greeted by an exhausted team of about fifteen crew-members. That morning from 11am until around 3 pm, just before our visit, they had been fighting a fire in a cement and plastics factory which had been ignited by Al Nusra Front mortar fire.

They were understandably wary, but they still gathered around us (my colleague and independent journalist, Eva Bartlett and our translator) in the searing arid summer heat. Over the course of this 5 years and 6 months of this dirty war against Syria, not one western media journalist had ever asked to speak to them.

This extraordinary omission and failure to follow the most rudimentary journalist text book rules by the western media is staggering, but hardly surprising considering the level of spin and propaganda employed daily by the likes of the BBC, CNN, FOX News, The Guardian, New York Times, and Washington Post. Sadly, western media lap dogs end up simply wagging their tails to their masters voice and turning somersaults with the truth to merit reward.

Unfortunately for the Syrian people, western pundits have only reported on crucial and pivotal events in the war on Syria based largely on ‘evidence’ supplied by the US-UK-NATO construct, the White Helmets, who are ensconsed only in Al Nusra Front aka Al Qaeda and ISIS held areas.

As a result of western media outlets not bothering to make contact with the volunteer Syrians in the REAL Syria Civil Defence, western audiences never received a balanced view of the situation. Instead, western media only disseminates what amounts to a biased, one-sided view which mirrors anti-Syrian state and Syrian Arab Army rhetoric issued by the US State Dept and British Foreign Office.

I explained in detail, why I had come to talk with them, that my objective was to find out who were the real heroes inside Syria, the multi million NATO funded White Helmets created in 2013 or the Syrian Syria Civil Defence established in 1953.

Aleppo’s REAL Syria Civil Defence informed us there are 150 volunteers working across all units in Aleppo, the headquarters are in the Hamadaniya area which is one of the most severely targeted civilian areas, by Al Nusra Front Hell Cannon mortar fire and explosive bullets. The volunteers ages range between 25-45 years old, and the minimum age for training is 18.

All members of the crew were genuine volunteers. They spoke proudly of the intensive training process they undergo before they can be accepted into the unit. They are fully trained in urban search and rescue techniques (USAR). They are also fully qualified paramedics.

A glance around their yard revealed that their equipment is tired and worn. The fire trucks were gleaming in the sun but showed signs of heavy use. Tattered jackets hung from the fenders and wing mirrors of the trucks and a Syrian flag had been draped across the radiator of one truck, perhaps in honour of our visit.

She adds,

The West Aleppo crew is forced to attend missions without the standard issue equipment and to deal with situations like chemical weapons attacks with only the ineffectual paper breathing masks. This is another result of the EU-US sanctions being enforced against Syria, and effectively against the Syrian people. The REAL Syria Civil Defence is unable to replace equipment or replenish supplies, unlike the NATO White Helmets who enjoy an endless stream of kit and replacement materials via the Turkey supply chain that has remained unbroken for much of the four years that Aleppo has been under terrorist siege.

Beeley’s article, “The REAL Syria Civil Defence Exposes Fake ‘White Helmets’ As Terrorist-Linked Imposters,” details firsthand accounts of SCD volunteers risking (and sometimes losing) their lives in order to save the lives of civilians. The article also details stories from volunteers regarding the horrific aftermath of terrorist hell cannons, missiles, and other indiscriminate strikes against civilian areas. I would highly recommend reading the entirety of Beeley’s article.

When Beeley asked the volunteers their opinions on the White Helmets, an image was painted that appears much different from the fantasy portrayed by Western media and Hollywood film sets as well as the Nobel Prize committee. She writes,

When we got on to the subject of NATO’s White Helmets, the West Aleppo REAL Syrian Civil Defence crew became animated. One of them, stepped forward and began to talk excitedly to our translator. He had been stationed in East Aleppo at a REAL Syrian Civil Defence unit based in an area that has since been overrun by Al Nusra Front and their associate terrorist gangs.

Again, we are unable, as we have said, to provide names of the men we spoke with. They are prime targets for the Al Nusra Front and company in East Aleppo. This crew member, lets call him ‘Khaled,’ described what happened when the terrorists (western media still call them “opposition” or “moderate rebels”) started to invade East Aleppo in 2012.

“They came in and they drove us out of our homes and they came to the Syria Civil Defence yard and they killed some of my comrades, they kidnapped others. They wanted to force me to work with them. I escaped at night. I was forced to leave my teenage sons behind. They burned my house to the ground and they put my name on all the terrorist checkpoints so if I go back, they will kill me.”

Khaled went on to explain how those men who later became the White Helmets were among this first wave of terrorists:

“They are terrorists, not rescuers. They stole our ambulances and three of our fire engines. They don’t do any rescue work. They drive round with guns in the back of their car like any other terrorist. Some are from East Aleppo, some are from Syria but not from Aleppo and some are even coming in from abroad.”

Granted, this might come as a shock to anyone who has already bought into the public relations image of the group that’s already been developed over three years by various agencies in New York, Washington DC and London, but these are the real accounts regarding what one might say is the true unmasked nature of the west’s White Helmets.

Beeley also writes that the volunteers of the SCD had a chance to view some of the White Helmets’ “rescue videos” and found a number of oddities if the White Helmets were truly rescuing trapped civilians or even simply retrieving bodies.

Beeley continues,

At this point other crew members interjected and told me that they had watched the White Helmet “rescue” videos.

“They are fake. They don’t carry out any correct procedures, either as paramedics or as search and rescue experts.”

They described how the White Helmets use a heavy-duty power drill to dig down for civilians buried under the rubble of homes allegedly targeted by “Syrian or Russian airstrikes.”

“It’s the wrong equipment to use. It is not sensitive enough and because it vibrates powerfully, it can displace the rubble which is dangerous if anyone is genuinely buried beneath it.”

They went on to describe other aspects of the White Helmet videos that they believe contravene all standard procedures that are followed by genuine search and rescue experts, paramedics and first responders.

In the following very recent video made by a White Helmet camera crew, men pretending to be genuine rescuers attack an area of rubble where they seem to know where a body buried. They start with a mint condition JCB digger, which attacks the heap of rubble with gusto. Then, alarmingly, they begin to pound the rubble with a heavy duty mallet without employing any devices to actually determine where the body is located, under the impenetrable concrete blocks. Finally, the JCB digger returns to the mound of rubble and enters the teeth of its bucket into the rubble without any hesitation, surely not standard procedure if there is a chance of a body being under the debris.

Miraculously, as with all White Helmet videos, they seem to find exactly where the bodies are, despite having displaced the majority of the rubble in the process. They also, miraculously, avoided staving in the first body’s head with the mallet. There is no intention to downplay or belittle the deaths that have obviously occurred but we do ask the questions:

1. How did the White Helmets know the bodies would be exactly where they found them?

2. Where is this rescue being filmed?

3. “Activists”, “citizen journalists”, the White Helmets and western media would have us believe that East Aleppo is under almost constant Russian or Syrian aerial attack yet the White Helmets make, on average, 4 or 5 films per day and we never see or hear any sign of an attack, only the “aftermath”.

4. Where do these bodies come from? Are they victims of air strikes as we are told by these NATO funded “activists” and “first responders” or are they taken from among the thousands of “disappeared” that have been kidnapped by Nusra Front and other terrorist gangs in East Aleppo? Are they gruesome props being used inhumanely, to polish the image of this faux NGO embedded in East Aleppo, HQ for Al Nusra Front.

Indeed, upon my own travels to the Middle East, I spoke with Syrians (not volunteers with the SCD) who had similar questions about White Helmets rescues. How do they always know right where to find the bodies? How do they not kill living victims or damage dead bodies with the equipment they are using in the videos? Why are they always videotaped? These were all questions the individuals that I spoke with were asking about the White Helmets. Another issue was the extraordinary budget this group receives from the U.K. and the U.S., a budget that is more akin to a military coffer than a humanitarian one.

Beeley went further, however, and met with the real Aleppo Medical Association. She asked them about the White Helmets and the alleged work they do in East Aleppo (they only operate in terrorist-held territory). Interestingly enough, according to Dr. Bassem Hayak, the man in charge of the medical teams that assess civilians fleeing East Aleppo to West Aleppo, stated that the White Helmets are unknown to civilians in East Aleppo.

Beeley writes,

One of the other meetings we had during our time in Aleppo, was with the Aleppo Medical Association. We met with the Director, Dr Zahar Buttal and Dr Bassem Hayak, who is in charge of the medical teams assessing refugees from East Aleppo who fled to West Aleppo via the Russian and Syrian state humanitarian corridors, created on the 29th July, which have allowed over 2000 people to escape the terrorist strongholds to safety, food and medical care in government-protected West Aleppo. These figures were given to us by the Aleppo Medical Association on the 15th August 2016.

One of the questions I asked Dr Hayak, who spoke good English, was what he knew of the White Helmets. His response was concise and without preamble. His family is still in East Aleppo and although he has not been able to get back into East Aleppo for the last year, his family have told him that the White Helmets are not known in East Aleppo. I asked again to be sure, and was told again, people, civilians do not know of the White Helmets in East Aleppo. Any actual first response work is carried out by foreign workers from various countries, Pakistan and the Gulf region among them. These foreigners work with Syrian people who are not properly trained in first response. They might only receive 2 or 3 months training before being allowed to work.

Dr Hayak says, “Even with our relationship with WHO (World Health Organisation) and the UN, we still didn’t hear about the White Helmets.”

Are the White Helmets, NATO ghosts?

Dr Hayak also states quite clearly, he has a cousin, working as a surgeon in East Aleppo. ISIS and other terrorist factions have forced her to stay in East Aleppo by threatening to kill her family, should she leave for West Aleppo.

Dr Hayak also said that the majority of civilians in East Aleppo are “hostages”of the NATO/US allied terrorists.

In East Aleppo, civilians living under Al Nusra Front occupation, do not know the White Helmets.

It is possible to view her interview with Dr. Hayak here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G66GSSwpc_w

The History And Formation Of White Helmets – The Founders And Directors

White Helmets was founded by James Le Mesurier, an admitted former British army officer and mercenary with the Olive Group, a private contracting organization that is now merged with Blackwater-Academi into Constellis Holdings.[1] Although White Helmets half-heartedly attempts to hide its source of funding, the organization is linked to George Soros through a PR firm named Purpose Inc., a pro-war firm that argues for Western intervention against Assad. The co-founder of Purpose is Jeremy Heimans, who also helped found Avaaz, a “pro-democracy” group connected to Soros’ Open Society Foundation, SEIU, and MoveOn.org.

In her expose of White Helmets, “White Helmets: War By Way Of Deception,” Vanessa Beeley summarizes the history and funding of the organization when she wrote:

The White Helmets were established in March 2013, in Istanbul, Turkey, and is headed by James Le Mesurier, a British “security” specialist and ‘ex’ British military intelligence officer with an impressive track record in some of the most dubious NATO intervention theatres including Bosnia and Kosovo, as well as Iraq, Lebanon, and Palestine.

Le Mesurier is a product of Britain’s elite Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst, and has also been placed in a series of high-profile pasts at the United Nations, European Union, and U.K. Foreign and Commonwealth Office.

The origins of The White Helmet’s initial $300k seed funding is a little hazy, reports are contradictory but subsequent information leads us to conclude that the UK, US and Syrian opposition [Syrian National Council] are connected. Logistical support has been provided by given by Turkish elite natural disaster response team, AKUT.

A further $13 million was poured into the White Helmet coffers during 2013 and this is where it gets interesting. Early reports suggest that these “donations” came from the US, UK and SNC with the previously explored connections to George Soros in the US.

However, subsequent investigations reveal that USAID has been a major shareholder in the White Helmet organisation.

The website for the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) claims that “our work supports long-term and equitable economic growth and advances U.S. foreign policy objectives by supporting: economic growth, agriculture and trade; global health; and, democracy, conflict prevention and humanitarian assistance.”

In a USAID report update in July 2015 it is clearly stated that they have supplied over $ 16m in assistance to the White Helmets.

In addition to Soros and the $16 million, White Helmets is known to receive approximately $23 million dollars from the U.S. State Department via USAID, a figure that was confirmed more recently by Deputy State Department Spokesman Mark Toner when questioned by reporters at a State Department briefing on April 27, 2016.

It is thus no surprise that White Helmets have been publicly calling for Western intervention in Syria, particularly a No-Fly Zone since their creation. The organization is, after all, a fully funded arm of U.S./Western imperialism. It is, therefore, reasonable to expect the group to publicly call for the same desires as their bosses in the United States and Europe.

Raed Saleh, head of White Helmets (aka Syrian Civil Defense) has publicly called for the implementation of a “No-Fly Zone” over Syria by the United Nations Security Council, an act that is tantamount to direct military warfare, an example of which can be seen in the rubble of Libya. Indeed, such a decision would simply be a repeat of the Libyan tragedy.

Saleh has stated on the White Helmets website:

Barrel bombs – sometimes filled with chlorine – are the biggest killer of civilians in Syria today. Our unarmed and neutral rescue workers have saved more than 40,823 people from the attacks in Syria, but there are many we cannot reach. There are children trapped in rubble we cannot hear. For them, the UN Security Council must follow through on its demand made last year to stop the barrel bombs, by introducing a ‘no-fly zone’ if necessary.”

Saleh himself is an interesting case. Content to shower Saleh and his organization with millions of dollars and flattering public relations material, the United States apparently does not trust Saleh enough to allow free access to American soil. In April, 2016 Saleh was set to receive another typical back-slapping award in Washington, D.C. However, Saleh’s visa was canceled and he was forced to go back to Istanbul. The New York Times reported,

The leader of a Western-backed rescue organization that searches for survivors of bombings in Syria was denied entry into the United States this week, where he was to receive an award recognizing his contributions to humanitarian relief.

Raed Saleh, the head of the Syria Civil Defense, was to accept the award from InterAction, an alliance of aid agencies, at its gala dinner Tuesday night in Washington. The dinner’s keynote speaker was Gayle Smith, the administrator of the United States Agency for International Development.

But when Mr. Saleh, who works in Syria and Turkey, arrived Monday at Washington’s Dulles International Airport on a flight from Istanbul, the authorities said he could not enter the United States. He was told his visa had been canceled.

It was unclear whether Mr. Saleh’s name might have shown up on a database, fed by a variety of intelligence and security agencies and intended to guard against the prospect of terrorism suspects slipping into the country.

The State Department declined to give specifics, but a spokesman, John Kirby, said that “the U.S. government’s system of continual vetting means that traveler records are screened against available information in real time.”

“While we can’t confirm any possible specific actions in this case, we do have the ability to immediately coordinate with our interagency partners when new information becomes available,” he added.

State Department Spokesman Mark Toner was also questioned about the details surrounding Saleh’s visa but Toner found it difficult to answer any questions regarding this incident in a coherent fashion. According to the State Department’s own published transcripts the reporter/spokesman interaction went as follows:

QUESTION: On the last one —

MR TONER: Yes, sir.

QUESTION: — you commend this group, you’re going to continue to support them, and yet you revoked the visa of their leader. I don’t – that makes zero sense to me.

MR TONER: Well —

QUESTION: What – what’s exactly going on?

MR TONER: Well, I mean, this group, and I would precisely make that —

QUESTION: Yeah, but this is the guy who is the leader of this group who the head of USAID lionized in a – and her – that she lauded him —

MR TONER: Sure. Sure.

QUESTION: — in a speech at the event that he was supposed to be accepting —

MR TONER: Sure.

QUESTION: — an award that he couldn’t get here for because the State Department canceled his visa while he was in the middle – while he was in midair, presumably, over the Atlantic so that when he arrived at Dulles, he was promptly thrown on the next plane back to Turkey. And now here you are talking about how wonderful his group is. I just don’t understand how it works.

MR TONER: So a couple responses. One is, unfortunately, we can’t speak to individual visa cases. I think broadly speaking, though, on any visa case we are constantly looking at new information, so-called continually vetting travel or records. And if we do have new information that we believe this – an individual —

QUESTION: But —

MR TONER: — let me finish – would pose a security risk, we’ll certainly act on that. I can’t speak again specifically to this case, but what I can talk about is this group. And this group, as I said, has saved some 40,000 lives, that are first responders, they operate in a combat zone, and the fact that they’re being singled out and hit by the Syrian regime is, frankly, cause for a concern. And we do support this group. We do support their efforts to save lives in what is admittedly a very complex and convoluted battlefield scene.

And to speak to your broader – to say that this group’s – which I think is the implication of your question, that they somehow have ties to —

QUESTION: No, I’m not suggesting that at all.

MR TONER: Then – okay.

QUESTION: I’m saying that it just strikes me as a bit odd that you’re saying that this group is wonderful and does such a great job and you’re commending them for their heroism, and yet, this – you’re doing this just 10 days after the leader of this group, who was supposed to be – who got his visa revoked and wasn’t allowed to travel here. I understand there was an attack that killed some of its members, and I know that that’s the immediate cause of it —

MR TONER: Right.

QUESTION: — but it just strikes me as being a bit inconsistent if you say that this group is wonderful, and yet, you also ban its leader from coming to the States to collect an award for which – and you say you’re going to continue to support the group. I mean, if you have reason to revoke his visa, that he could be a security threat or something like that, why would you continue to support —

MR TONER: But again – but again, I’m trying to separate this individual from the group, which we believe is —

QUESTION: All right. So the guy is – you’re saying that basically he is suspect but his group is not?

MR TONER: Well, again, I can’t speak to the specific allegations against him, Matt.

QUESTION: Well, not if I —

MR TONER: No, I’m sorry, I – my hands are tied too but —

QUESTION: All right. The other thing —

MR TONER: — but yes, we’re not condemning the group in any way whatsoever.

QUESTION: Off —

MR TONER: We believe it’s doing good work.

QUESTION: Could I —

QUESTION: (Off-mike.)

QUESTION: If he is the leader of the group, how do you support this group and he is not allowed to get into the States? This is the question.

MR TONER: I understand that and all I can say is that —

QUESTION: How can you separate the leader of the group from the group?

MR TONER: Well, he’s one individual in the group.

QUESTION: But the leader of the group.

MR TONER: And any individual – again, I’m broadening my language here for specific reasons, but any individual in any group suspected of ties or relations with extremist groups or that we had believed to be a security threat to the United States, we would act accordingly. But that does not, by extension, mean we condemn or would cut off ties to the group for which that individual works for.

QUESTION: Okay. It just seems a little odd.

QUESTION: Could I just follow up on the group? Which group is —

MR TONER: Sophisticated. (Laughter.)

QUESTION: I mean, they are a civil defense group, right? They are —

QUESTION: The White Helmets?

QUESTION: Who are —

MR TONER: The White Helmets. So this is a group —

QUESTION: White Helmets. Okay, I understand.

MR TONER: So, yeah, this is the Syrian Civil Defense Group. Yeah.

QUESTION: Do you know – I understand about the White Helmets. Do you know who finances them, how they operate, who are they supported by, what kind of organization they have? How do you get your information from them and so on?

MR TONER: Well – well, I can say we provide them with —

QUESTION: We – you do know a little bit.

MR TONER: Well, I can tell you that we provide, through USAID, about $23 million in assistance to them.

Vanessa Beeley also exposes Mosab Obeidat, White Helmets Project Officer and Farouq al-Habib. She writes,

Mosab Obeidat, previous Assistant Chief of Mission with the Qatar Red Crescent, one of whose officials, Khaled Diab was accused of supplying $ 2.2 m to secure arms for the terrorist groups in Syria. Details of this transaction and its exposure can be found in this Al Akhbar article from June 2013. http://english.al-akhbar.com/node/16160

At least three other members of the team were a part of the Syrian “revolution” including Farouq al Habib, one of the 3 most prominent White Helmet leaders who was also a leader of the Homs uprising against the Syrian government and according to his testimony, was tortured by the Syrian “regime” security forces in 2012 for smuggling a journalist into Syria to “cover” the “peaceful protests”. Habib was a founder member of the ‘Homs Revolutionary Council’ (the CIA have been linked to nearly all ‘Revolutionary Councils in Syria) before fleeing to Turkey in 2013 (A more in-depth analysis of his anti-Syrian government testimony will be presented in Part II of this article).

Fraudulent Photos: White Helmets And The Propaganda Machine

In addition to calling for the implementation of a “No-Fly Zone,” the White Helmets have also gone so far as to post fraudulent photos so as to blame the Syrian military for civilian casualties and intentional targeting of civilians when such is not the case. In October, 2015 White Helmets released pictures on its Twitter account purporting to show the aftermath of the Russian bombing campaign against ISIS and assorted terrorists launched on September 30. “Russia strike in Homs today. 33 civilians killed including 3 children and 1 @SyriaCivilDef volunteer” the caption read.

The picture showed a bleeding girl being held by a “Civil Defense” volunteer and claimed that the child was injured along with a number of other civilians.

Unfortunately for the White Helmets, Twitter users immediately exposed the photos as a fraud, since the pictures were actually taken five days prior on September 25, 2015.

Interestingly enough, the White Helmets, in an attempt to assist drumming up opposition to Vladmir Putin and Russia’s attack on jihadists, also managed to tweet about the horror of Russia’s air strikes hours before Russia’s parliament even granted Putin the authority to use the Air Force in Syria, according to Sputnik.

White Helmets: Anti-Assad Propaganda, Support And Rescue Team For Al-Nusra

Despite being routinely cited as a “humanitarian” organization, however, the White Helmets appear to be much more than even a wolf in sheep’s clothing in the NGO world. Not only providing the basis for carefully crafted propaganda opportunities, the organization appears to actually work side by side with terrorist outfits like Jobhat al-Nusra both on the propaganda angle and the battlefield.

For one, it is important to note that the area of operation for the White Helmets is never within territory controlled by the Syrian government. It is without deviation solely located within territory held by “moderate terrorists,” Nusra, or other related Western-backed terrorist groups. Obviously, if White Helmets truly represented the Syrian people, they would be operating in both territories. As Rick Sterling wrote in his article “Highly Effective Manipulators,”

The trainees are said to be ‘nonpartisan’ but only work in rebel-controlled areas of Idlib (now controlled by Nusra/Al Queda) and Aleppo. There are widely divergent claims regarding the number of people trained by the White Helmets and the number of people rescued. The numbers are probably highly exaggerated especially since rebel-controlled territories have few civilians. A doctor who recently served in a rebel-controlled area of Aleppo described it as a ghost town. The White Helmets work primarily with the rebel group Jabat al Nusra (Al Queda in Syria).

White Helmets: ‘Unarmed And Unbiased’

While the White Helmets’ tag line is “unarmed and unbiased,” nothing could be further from the truth. Indeed, the organization is incredibly biased and visibly armed. In the second part to her expose of White Helmets, “Part II: Syria’s White Helmets: War By Way Of Deception,” Vanessa Beeley writes,

As part of the myth-building process, White Helmet members are repetitively described as ‘ordinary people’, specifically, “bakers, tailors, engineers, pharmacists, painters, carpenters, students”, and are relentlessly depicted as heroes, miracle workers, saints and super-humans scaling the “Mount Everest” of war zones with impartiality and neutrality. “Unarmed and unbiased” is their strapline, as they sacrifice themselves for the “Syrian People”. Indeed, those same Syrian people who have never heard of them. The myth-making continues…

. . . . .

Can a organisation rightly be called an ‘independent relief organisation’ when it is being funded by a foreign government who is directly involved in the military over-throw of Syria’s government? Most intelligent people should have no problem answering that question.

. . . . .

This video below reveals a White Helmet operative describing the “throwing of Shabiha bodies in the trash”. Shabiha is a derogatory term for Syrian Government militia or state-employed security forces but is liberally applied by terrorist aka “rebel alliance” factions to any member of the Syrian military, irrespective of whether they are Alawite, Sunni, or Shia. Let’s remind ourselves of White Helmet claims on their websites of how its ‘aid workers’ “have risked sniper fire to rescue SAA bodies to give them a proper burial.”

Watch this shocking video here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eOz0jt_wA8w

This same neutral White Helmet operative goes on to pledge allegiance to the terrorist forces in the region stating:

“They are our role models, the best of people and we have the honour to serve them”
“SERVE THEM [armed terrorists, Al Nusra/Al Qaeda]”, curious turn of phrase for a neutral, impartial humanitarian “moderate” organisation? Watch here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5qM0Xu4Sz80

He also congratulates the Mujahadeen for liberating Jisr al Shugour from Assad’s forces.

“Glad tidings have reached us in Jisr al Shugour by the hands of our Mujahadeen brothers. May Allah strengthen them and make them steadfast on the correct way and soon, insh’Allah, the strongholds of the Assad regime in Latakia and Damascus will be liberated.”

It should be clear that these alleged “moderates” you are watching here are actually moderate extremists and jihadists, and the western media has been very careful in hiding this fact. Watch:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EiRquhd50mc

. . . . .

Moving on to another video, this time revealing White Helmet operatives standing on the discarded dead bodies of SAA [Syrian Arab Army] soldiers and giving the victory sign. This display of support for the Al Nusra extremist terrorists who have just massacred these soldiers once again demonstrates where their true allegiances lie.

Numerous photos and large amounts of video footage is available showing the alleged “unarmed” White Helmets parading about with rifles, virtually indistinguishable in their appearance and actions from the terrorists they are working with except for their actual white helmets. In at least on instance, White Helmets members were videotaped apparently taking part in the execution of a man condemned to death by Nusra/ISIS fighters. In this video, the execution of the man who is shot in the head by the terrorists is clearly shown. Before his body is even fully still, the White Helmets arrive at the scene, within seconds, to collect the body as if they were on standby.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=96AcFZ32RRE

White Helmets Stand In Solidarity With al-Qaeda

Only a short time after the terrorist support group known as the White Helmets, thoroughly exposed and discredited by the alternative media, were nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize, the true nature of the organization was on display yet again. This time, the water crisis in Damascus represented the fake humanitarian organization’s time to shine.

Shortly after the liberation of Aleppo, al-Qaeda fighters in the Barada Valley outside Damascus dumped diesel fuel into the water supply to the city on December 22, 2016. Obviously, this made the water supply impossible to consume and, on December 23, the Syrian military launched a campaign to retake the area and to restore the city’s water supply.

According to the Moon of Alabama website, photos were even posted online showing the water treatment plant rigged with explosives but those photos were, according to MOA, removed from the internet.

Despite hostilities, the Syrian government was ready to send teams to restore water to Damascus, the lack of which only punished civilians and held a vast number of people hostage under the possibility of thirst. Terrorists, however, denied access to the site and, instead, offered to allow teams access the facilities on the condition that the Syrian military and Hezbollah end their military siege of the city. In effect, the terrorists held the people of Damascus hostage for military gain.

That terrorists would hold civilians hostage is not surprising. However, the White Helmets, who typically attempt to stay behind the scenes (although they have been exposed for doing much more than mere behind-the-scenes activity),  openly released a statement of solidarity with al-Qaeda in Barada and Damascus. Tweets released by “civil groups” and “activists” demanding an end to Syrian military operations around Damascus in exchange for drinking water to civilians bore a number of signatures from organizations, one of them being the White Helmets.

In other words, the White Helmets  signed on to a document produced by terrorists and standing in solidarity with them, holding Syrian civilians as hostages, and, apparently, suggesting that they have control or at least some sway over the situation.

As Moon Of Alabama wrote,

The organizations who make an offer to lift the water blockade of Damascus obviously think they have the power to do so. They then must also be held responsible for keeping the blockade up. They must also have intimate relations with the al-Qaeda fighters who currently occupy the damaged water facilities.

The U.S. and UK government created and paid White Helmets are “impartially”, “neutrally” and “for all Syrians” blocking the water supply to 5 million Syrians in Damascus. U.S. military and CIA officers run the “operations rooms” in Jordan and Turkey that direct the insurgency.

This increases suspicion that the blockade is part of an organized response by the enemies of Syria to the recent liberation of east-Aleppo. As noted yesterday:

This shut down is part of a wider, seemingly coordinated strategy to deprive all government held areas of utility supplies. Two days ago the Islamic State shut down a major water intake for Aleppo from the Euphrates. High voltage electricity masts of lines feeding Damascus have been destroyed and repair teams, unlike before, denied access. Gas supplies to parts of Damascus are also cut.

Even after 14 days of water crisis in Damascus the “western” media are not reporting about the al-Qaeda blockade of water for 5 million Syrians. We can be sure that not a word will be written by them about this illegal hostages taking of millions of civilians in Damascus by their favorite propaganda organization White Helmets.

Conclusion

With all of the above information taken together, White Helmets should be considered nothing more than a terrorist rescue operation and propaganda wing for al-Nusra Front. This organization is wholly funded, directed, and promoted by Western governments, intelligence agencies and Foundations for the purposes of assisting Western-backed terrorists in destroying secular Syria and replacing it with a collection of impotent religious/ethnicity-based petty squabbling microstates and mini-states.[2] The organization serves as a clever and opportunistic tool to be used by Western media for the purposes of sourcing false claims from “impartial” “activist” groups on the ground in Syria and giving the claims the source and credibility of a “human rights” organization. Clearly, whatever claims are made by the White Helmets should be immediately dismissed as yet another false statement in a long string of lies easily traced directly back to the United States and the UK.

Notes:

[1]Anderson, Tim. The Dirty War On Syria. Pg. 75.
[2] Brzezinski, Zbigniew. The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy And Its Geostrategic Imperatives. Basic Books, 1st Edition. 1998.

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Brandon Turbeville – article archive here – is an author out of Florence, South Carolina. He has a Bachelor’s Degree from Francis Marion University and is the author of eight books, Codex Alimentarius — The End of Health Freedom, 7 Real Conspiracies, Five Sense Solutions and Dispatches From a Dissident, volume 1 and volume 2, and The Road to Damascus: The Anglo-American Assault on Syria, The Difference It Makes: 36 Reasons Hillary Clinton Should Never Be President and Resisting The Empire: The Plan To Destroy Syria And How The Future Of The World Depends On The Outcome. Turbeville has published over 700 articles dealing on a wide variety of subjects including health, economics, government corruption, and civil liberties. Brandon Turbeville’s podcast Truth on The Tracks can be found every Monday night 9 pm EST at UCYTV. He is available for radio and TV interviews. Please contact activistpost (at) gmail.com.

By Daniel Lang

The way President Trump spoke on the campaign trail, it sounded like he was going to repair our relationship with Russia. But with every week that passes, that seems less and less likely. This week for instance, NATO forces that mainly consisted of US soldiers moved into Poland in a show of force against Russia.

The U.S-led battalion contained of 900 American soldiers, 150 British troops, and 120 Romanian troops. Though there have been many training exercises in recent years that involved those kinds of personnel numbers, this is definitely not a training exercise. The leader of the battlegroup, U.S. Army Lt. Colonel Steven Gventer, stated emphatically at a press conference that “this is a mission, not a cycle of training events. The purpose is to deter aggression in the Baltics and in Poland … We are fully ready to be lethal.”

And that’s not the only battlegroup in Eastern Europe. 120 British soldiers just landed in Estonia; the first of 800 that are expected to be posted in that country. That may not sound like a lot of soldiers, but it is a unique event. This is one of the largest deployments of UK forces to Eastern Europe since the end of the Cold War. Germany and Canada are going to lead two additional battlegroups in Latvia and Lithuania by June. When all of these forces are in place, there will be a total of 4,000 NATO troops in the region for the sole purpose of deterring intimidating Russia.

And just like that, the Second Cold War just got a little bit warmer.

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By Dr. Rand Paul

Today Sen. Paul took to the senate floor to shame his colleagues about not debating and voting for war before sending young Americans to fight in foreign countries. “Nobody wanted to have this debate,” Paul said. “They want to rubber stamp… and they want to send your kids to war with no debate.”

By Isaac Davis

As more of the blame for the world’s exacerbating opiate overdose crisis is now being rightly put on the pharmaceutical industry, the dark side of this epidemic in the fact that the production of opium containing poppies has exploded since the military occupation of Afghanistan beginning in 2001.

According to Russian diplomat, Sergey Lavrov, there are signs of collusion between NATO and drug producers and traffickers working to flood the world with opium. Remarking on how the mission to rid Afghanistan of terrorists quickly became distorted after the invasion, ultimately creating a never-ending supply of drugs to the West.

During their operation in Afghanistan, the terrorist threat has not been rooted out, while the drug threat has increased many times over. The drug industry prospered. There is factual evidence that some of the NATO contingents in Afghanistan turned a blind eye to the illegal drug trafficking, even if they were not directly involved in these criminal schemes. ~Sergey Lavrov, Russian Foreign Minister

So, what exactly is the evidence? In a 2014 report, the UN notes that poppy production had reached an all-time global high, with shocking increases in heroin users worldwide.

The amount of land used for cultivating opium poppies around the world is at an all-time high, says a UN report. Afghanistan is largely behind the increase, with its crop growing by 36 percent over a year, producing 80 percent of the world’s opium.

A World Drug Report released by the UN’s Vienna-based Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) has charted the global use of drugs. Although it says that global drug use is “stable,” it notes that the cultivation of opium has grown drastically. [Source]

As noted by TDC:

When the Untied Nations produces a report that reads like a corporate stock prospectus you know something is fishy. The UN report was very detailed about the number of new addicts, the flow of drugs out of Afghanistan and the final destination. [Source]

Furthermore, as noted by Lavrov, there is a strategy of managed chaos in play at present in the Middle East and northern Africa, disrupting and ruining the lives of millions of people, for the benefit of America and those in positions to temporarily profit from unfettered access to the natural resources of targeted nations.

The concept of managed chaos appeared long ago as a method of strengthening US influence. Its basic premise is that managed chaos projects should be launched away from the United States in regions that are crucial for global economic and financial development. ~Sergey Lavrov

Lavrov’s comments on the opium crisis and managed chaos are included in the following video.

Read more articles by Isaac Davis.

Isaac Davis is a staff writer for WakingTimes.com and OffgridOutpost.com Survival Tips blog. He is an outspoken advocate of liberty and of a voluntary society. He is an avid reader of history and passionate about becoming self-sufficient to break free of the control matrix. Follow him on Facebook, here.

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This article (Russian Foreign Minister Implies NATO Collusion in Creating the Opioid Crisis) was originally created and published by Waking Times and is published here under a Creative Commons license with attribution to Isaac Davis and WakingTimes.com. It may be re-posted freely with proper attribution, author bio, and this copyright statement.

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By Ulson Gunnar

A curious op-ed appeared in The National Interest, penned by Hans Binnendijk and David Gompert, adjunct senior fellows at the RAND Corporation. Titled, “NATO’s Role in post-Caliphate Stability Operations,” it attempts to make a case for NATO involvement everywhere from Libya to Syria and Iraq in fostering stability in the wake of a yet-to-be defeated Islamic State.

The authors propose that NATO step in to fill what it calls an impending “vacuum left as the caliphate collapses,” heading off alternatives including “chaos or Iran, backed by Russia, filling the void, with great harm to U.S. and allied interests in either case.” The op-ed never explains why Iran, neighboring Syria and Iraq, is less qualified to influence the region than the United States which exists literally oceans away and shares nothing in terms of history, culture, language or shared interests in stability and peace.

The op-ed would literally claim:

NATO is the only security organization with the skills and breadth to take on this task. The U.S.-led anti-Islamic State coalition of 68 partners is ill equipped to engage in this complex task. A more cohesive organization such as NATO should lead, but in ways that allow continued Arab participation. A creative version of the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) coalition could provide the answer.

It was an interesting choice by the authors to showcase one of NATO’s most stupendous and continuing failures in Afghanistan with mention of the ISAF, a force that not only has failed to bring stability to the Central Asia nation in over a decade and a half of occupation, but has presided over the emergence of the Islamic State there where previously it had no presence.

The reality of what NATO is versus what The National Interest op-ed attempts to pass it off as, resembles more of a sales pitch for a shoddy product than a genuine attempt at geopolitical analysis or problem solving. But the truth goes deeper still.

NATO is a Global Wrecking Ball, It Cannot Create Stability

The op-ed focuses primarily on proposing NATO roles for a post-Islamic State Libya, Iraq and Syria.

Libya is perhaps the most tragic of the three, with NATO having used direct military force in 2011 to topple the government of Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi in support of known extremists passed off at the time by both NATO spokespeople and the US-European media as “moderate rebels.”

The predictable fallout from this military campaign was the collapse of Libya as a relatively stable and unified nation-state into warring factions. The instability became fertile grounds for extremism, with many of the groups backed by NATO evolving into what is now the “Islamic State.”

The National Interest op-ed also makes mention of “Arab participation.” It should be remembered that the most extreme factions fighting in Libya were not only aided by direct NATO military intervention, but were armed and funded by Persian Gulf dictatorships as well, including Qatar and the United Arab Emirates.

A similar pattern of sowing instability has unfolded in Syria, leading to, not averting the rise of the Islamic State.

And Iraq’s instability is a direct and lasting consequence of the US military invasion and occupation of 2003.

If nothing else, this exposes NATO and its members as a collective, global wrecking ball. Just as a wrecking ball cannot be used to construct a building on a vacant lot, NATO cannot be used to construct the conditions for stability across the Middle East and North Africa (MENA).

Really Stopping the Islamic State Means Really Stopping Support for It

Ultimately, what the op-ed calls for is the permanent occupation of the three nations by NATO forces ranging from special forces in Libya to the formal occupation of Raqqa in Syria and Mosul in Iraq.

Interestingly, the op-ed suggests that the NATO occupation force in Syria should not only be used to combat the Islamic State, but to also deter “Syrian military thrusts,” referring to the armed forces of the actual and only legitimate government in Syria.

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This last point exposes fully what NATO is really interested in, and what this sales pitch is really advertising. NATO is not in MENA to defeat the Islamic State, it is merely using the Islamic State as a pretext to project Western hegemony across the region.

The closing paragraph states:

This NATO strategy cannot, and should not be expected to, settle the Syrian civil war, bring ethnic and sectarian harmony to Iraq, or create an effective Libyan state. What it could do is create conditions of stability in which lasting solutions at least have a chance. It can do so only if the U.S. is ready to call upon NATO to join it in filling the post-ISIS void and for the European allies to answer that call.

Certainly, NATO’s presence in Syria, Iraq or Libya will not bring any sort of stability. NATO has proven its absolute inability to achieve this in its 16-year occupation of Afghanistan. Claiming NATO occupation will “create conditions of stability in which lasting solutions at least have a chance” is merely NATO’s way of ensuring no matter how the chaos it itself has created across MENA, it will hold a stake in the outcome if for no other reason because it has literally taken and occupies territory within the post-war region.

It is interesting that the Islamic State rose in the wake of US-led, NATO-backed violence stretching from North Africa to Central Asia and only began to suffer setbacks upon greater and more direct Russian and Iranian intervention.

The bombing of Islamic State and Jabhat Al Nusra logistical lines emanating from NATO-member Turkey’s borders by Russian warplanes, for example, inevitably led to huge gains by the Syrian Arab Army including the eventual liberation of Aleppo, the containment of Idlib and a significant retraction of Islamic State-held territory in eastern Syria.

The torrent of supplies feeding Islamic State and other fronts of extremist militancy flowing from Turkey is the admitted result of Persian Gulf sponsorship, which in turn, serves as an intermediary for US and NATO support for what the US Defense Intelligence Agency called in 2012 (.pdf) a “Salafist principality.”

The specific purpose of this “Salafist principality,” admittedly backed by Persian Gulf dictatorships, Turkey and what the US DIA refers to as “the West,” was to “isolate the Syrian regime.”  Clearly then, were NATO genuinely interested in defeating the Islamic State and undoing the damage it has done, it would begin by withdrawing it and its allies’ own support of the terrorist organization in the first place.

In short, if NATO truly wants to create stability across MENA, it merely needs to stop intentionally sowing instability.

Of course, a unilateral military bloc intentionally sowing chaos across an entire region of the planet is doing so for a very specific purpose. It is the same purpose all hegemons throughout human history have sought to divide and destroy regions they cannot outright conquer. A destroyed competitor may not be as favorable as a conquered, controlled and exploited competitor, but is certainly preferable to a free and independent competitor contributing to a greater multipolar world order. NATO, by embedding itself amid the chaos it itself has created, as it has proven in Afghanistan, only ensures further chaos.

Within this chaos, NATO can ensure if its own membership cannot derive benefit from the region, no one else will. A call like that featured in The National Interest for NATO to bring “stability” to the MENA region stands in stark contrast to the reality that everywhere NATO goes, chaos not only follows, it stays indefinitely until NATO leaves.

The best thing NATO can do for stability across MENA is to leave.

Ulson Gunnar, a New York-based geopolitical analyst and writer especially for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook,” where this article first appeared.

By Steven MacMillan

The end of May marked the death of a man who had been at the center of global affairs for decades. Zbigniew Brzezinski, born in Warsaw in the 1920s, was one of the most influential foreign policy advisers in the US, who also played a pivotal role in the drive towards further global integration.

Brzezinski earned his Ph.D. from Harvard in 1953, and subsequently became a professor at that university, before moving on teach at Columbia University. From 1966 to 1968, he was a member of the Policy Planning Council at the Department of State, and in 1968, he served as chairman of the Humphrey Foreign Policy Task Force for Hubert Humphrey’s presidential campaign.

Brzezinski: The Internationalist

From 1973 to 1976, Brzezinski served as the Director of the newly formed Trilateral Commission, an internationalist organization he himself helped to create. In a 1989 interview, Brzezinski revealed his role in founding the Trilateral Commission along with the elitist American banker, David Rockefeller, before bragging how this organization was the first to propose the idea of holding a G7 (was G8 for a period) summit (emphasis added):

Not only did I run it [the Trilateral Commission], I helped to found it and organize it with David Rockefeller. So, if any of our viewers are conspiracy minded, here is one of the conspirators… It is a North American, Western European, Japanese organization to promote closer contacts between these three regions of the world. And the commission is composed of private citizens, not government officials, who are leaders in the different sectors of society… We’re incidentally the ones who proposed, originally, the holding of the annual summit meeting of the industrial democracies.

Throughout their lives, Brzezinski and Rockefeller worked towards the goal of creating an integrated global system. In David Rockefeller’s book Memoirs, he admits that his family has been part of a “secret cabal” working towards building a “one world” system (emphasis added):

Some even believe we (the Rockefeller family) are part of a secret cabal working against the best interests of the United States, characterizing my family and me as ‘internationalists’ and of conspiring with others around the world to build a more integrated global political and economic structure—one world, if you will. If that’s the charge, I stand guilty, and I am proud of it.

In addition to playing an instrumental role in founding the Trilateral Commission, Brzezinski was also a member of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) and a frequent attendee at the elitist Bilderberg conference, illustrating his position as a high-ranking individual deeply entrenched in the parallel governmental system.

Giving the Soviets their Vietnam War and Encouraging Pol Pot

Brzezinski’s most notable role in public life was when he served as Jimmy Carter’s National Security Advisor (NSA) from 1977 to 1981. Famously, in this role, Brzezinski was one of the main intellectual architects who advocated arming the Mujahiddin in Afghanistan, a scheme that he hoped would increase the probability that the Soviet Union would intervene. In an interview with Le Nouvel Observateur in 1998, Brzezinski recalled this operation (with the translation from French provided by William Blum and David N. Gibbs):

Question: The former director of the CIA, Robert Gates, stated in his memoirs that the American intelligence services began to aid the Mujahiddin in Afghanistan six months before the Soviet intervention. In this period, you were the national security advisor to President Carter. You therefore played a key role in this affair. Is this correct?

Brzezinski: Yes. According to the official version of history, CIA aid to the Mujahiddin began during 1980, that is to say, after the Soviet army invaded Afghanistan on December 24, 1979. But the reality, closely guarded until now, is completely otherwise: indeed, it was July 3, 1979 that President Carter signed the first directive for secret aid to the opponents of the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul. And that very day, I wrote a note to the president in which I explained to him that in my opinion this aid was going to induce a Soviet military intervention.

Q: Despite this risk, you were an advocate of this covert action. But perhaps you yourself desired this Soviet entry into the war and looked for a way to provoke it?

B: It wasn’t quite like that. We didn’t push the Russians to intervene, but we knowingly increased the probability that they would.

Q: When the Soviets justified their intervention by asserting that they intended to fight against secret US involvement in Afghanistan, nobody believed them. However, there was an element of truth in this. You don’t regret any of this today?

B: Regret what? That secret operation was an excellent idea. It had the effect of drawing the Russians into the Afghan trap and you want me to regret it? The day that the Soviets officially crossed the border, I wrote to President Carter, essentially: “We now have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam war.” Indeed, for almost 10 years, Moscow had to carry on a war that was unsustainable for the regime, a conflict that bought about the demoralization and finally the breakup of the Soviet empire.

Q: And neither do you regret having supported Islamic fundamentalism, which has given arms and advice to future terrorists?

B: What is more important in world history? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some agitated Moslems or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the cold war?

Also in his role as NSA, Brzezinski and the Carter administration encouraged the Chinese to continue supporting the genocidal Pol Pot in Cambodia. After Vietnam launched a full-scale invasion of Cambodia at the end of 1978, seizing power by early 1979, the US pressed China to continue assisting the Khmer Rouge in their fight against the occupying Vietnamese forces, with Brzezinski admitting that he “encouraged the Chinese to support Pol Pot.”

Obama: Brzezinski an “Outstanding Friend”

In more modern times, Brzezinski remained a pivotal figure in the US, working in a plethora of think tanks and advising numerous mainline political figures. One such figure was the former US President, Barack Obama, who he was very close to. In a March 2008speech, Obama revealed how intimate his relationship was with Brzezinski, calling him an “outstanding friend:”

To Dr. Brzezinski; I can’t say enough about his contribution to our country. Here’s somebody who helped to shape Camp David, and bring about a lasting peace between Israel and some of its neighbours. Somebody who has over decades trained some of the most prominent foreign policy specialists, not only in the democratic party, but has trained a number who ended up in the republican party as well… He has proven to be an outstanding friend, and somebody who I have learned an immense amount from. And for him to support me in this campaign, and then come out to here in Ohio, is a testimony to his generosity.

NATO to be the Global Security Nexus Point?

One of the defining features of Brzezinski was his essays and books pertaining to his long-range geostrategic visions. In one such essay, penned in 2009 for Foreign Affairs – the publication of the CFR – Brzezinski expounds on his vision of what NATO’s purpose and role could be in the future.

Titled: An Agenda for NATO: Toward a Global Security Web, Brzezinski begins by detailing how, in essence, NATO has been obsolete since the end of the Cold War, and how the security alliance faces a problem of legitimacy. “What next?” he writes. Brzezinski then moves on to argue that the world now faces “unprecedented risks to global security,” with “extremist religious and political movements” among these risks, movements that he himself helped to empower through advocating giving the Mujahiddin US aid (emphasis added):

The basic challenge that NATO now confronts is that there are historically unprecedented risks to global security… The paradox of our time is that the world, increasingly connected and economically interdependent for the first time in its entire history, is experiencing intensifying popular unrest made all the more menacing by the growing accessibility of weapons of mass destruction – not just to states but also, potentially, to extremist religious and political movements. Yet there is no effective global security mechanism for coping with the growing threat of violent political chaos stemming from humanity’s recent political awakening.

From there, Brzezinski details how an array of different security pacts have arisen around the world in recent decades, including the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO). Brzezinski then gives a glimpse into how many individuals in the Western elite see the role of NATO in the future. He first rejects the idea that NATO could be, in itself, a global army, before advocating a variant of this idea, in the form of NATO being the “hub of a globe-spanning web of various regional cooperative-security undertakings” (emphasis added):

To remain historically relevant, NATO cannot – as some have argued – simply expand itself into a global alliance or transform itself into a global alliance of democracies… A global NATO would dilute the centrality of the U.S.-European connection, and none of the rising powers would be likely to accept membership in a globally expanded NATO. 

NATO, however, has the experience, the institutions, and the means to eventually become the hub of a globe-spanning web of various regional cooperative-security undertakings among states with the growing power to act. The resulting security web would fill a need that the United Nations by itself cannot meet but from which the UN system would actually benefit. In pursuing that strategic mission, NATO would not only be preserving transatlantic political unity; it would also be responding to the twenty-first century’s novel and increasingly urgent security agenda.

Although Brzezinski’s vision seems far from probable at the present time, it will be interesting to see the path the world takes in the years and decades to come.

Steven MacMillan is an independent writer, researcher, geopolitical analyst and editor of  The Analyst Report, especially for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”, where this article first appeared.

By Ulson Gunnar

In 2011, US and European policy think tanks, which both create and promote policy serving the collective interests of the corporations that sponsor them, promoted NATO military intervention in Libya. Under the guise of a humanitarian intervention, what unfolded was the long-planned overthrow of the Libyan government, then headed by Muammar Ghaddafi.

Unable or unwilling to commit significant ground troops, the majority of the fighting was carried out by militant groups with NATO air and covert ground support. Many of these militant groups would be later revealed as comprised of extremists, including Al Qaeda and its affiliates.

In essence, NATO overthrew a unifying government in Libya, placed entire regions of the fractured nation under the control of terrorist organizations and opposing militant groups, and allowed the nation to slid into chaos ever since.

The consequences of overthrowing the Libyan government in 2011 were well known long before the intervention even took place. Libya’s role as a destination for refugees and migrants fleeing socioeconomic turmoil across Africa was long-established. After NATO’s intervention, Libya has now become a springboard for those fleeing from across Africa, across the Mediterranean Sea, and into Europe.

The issue of pirates, smuggling, organized crime and many other ills the Libyan government had kept under control, have also predictably spiraled out of control.

Now, those same policy think tanks that promoted the Libyan intervention, lament over the catastrophe that has continued to unfold ever since.

Foreign Affairs, published by one of the most prominent of these policy think tanks, the Council on Foreign Affairs (CFR), has published a series of articles by various authors, illustrating a sort of “buyers remorse” regarding the now devastated North African state. Part historical revision, part spin and part shifting of blame, articles like, “Europe’s Libya Problem: How to Stem the Flow of Migrants,” go into great detail about the problems now facing Libya and its neighbors.

The article laments:

Nearly 11,000 migrants arrived on Italian shores in just the last five days of June, following nearly 80,000 in the first half of 2017. Over 2,000 have perished at sea since the start of this year. The vast majority came from sub-Saharan Africa and embarked from the Libyan coast.

It then notes how Europe has been attempting to deal with the ongoing migrant crisis, claiming:

The European Union (EU) has been searching for a way to stem the flow of migrants and handle the tens of thousands who arrive in Italy on a daily basis. The EU’s current policy approach aims to shut off the route through the central Mediterranean and strengthen Libyan coastal patrol and enforcement capacities at sea. But it is unlikely to be effective or humane, given the sheer volume of migrants and the number of groups that profit from trafficking them, not to mention the weakness of the Libyan navy and other official security structures.

The final sentence, noting the “weakness of the Libyan navy,” is particularly ironic, since it was NATO that attacked and sent many of the Libyan navy’s vessels to the bottom of Libya’s harbors.

The article concludes, offering no practical means of stemming the crisis besides waiting for the next Ghaddafi to unite Libya’s currently warring factions, eliminate or confine Western-sponsored terrorist organizations mainly based in the east, particularly in Benghazi, and rebuilding the nation’s economy to once again offer incentives for refugees and migrants to live and work in Libya rather than traveling onward toward Europe.

Nowhere in Foreign Affairs‘ article is it mentioned that the only reason Libya is now in chaos is not despite NATO military intervention, but because of it.

Unifying Libya will be difficult. Another Foreign Affairs article, titled, “Filling the Vacuum in Libya: The Need for a Political, Not Military Solution,” admits just how fractured the nation is:

The GNA [Government of National Accord] barely controls the capital, Tripoli, through militias that are only nominally under its authority. Although the GNA recently succeeded in pushing a rump government—containing remnants of the Islamist-dominated parliament that was elected in 2012—out of the capital, it was long in coming, and these rival factions continue to prove a threat to Tripoli.

Meanwhile, in the eastern part of the country, Field Marshal Khalifa Haftar, a former military officer under Qaddafi, and his Libyan National Army (LNA)—a coalition largely made up of eastern, anti-Islamist militias—are aligned with the House of Representatives, which refuses to recognize the GNA.

Foreign Affairs notes the rising political as well as military prominence of Field Marshal Khalifa Haftar, a “strongman” who appears to have the most potential of creating anything resembling a unified Libya. However, that will leave Libya once again in the same position it found itself before the 2011 intervention, with a strongman running the nation, and likely to drift further and further away from US and European interests until yet another proxy war is engineered, promoted by think tanks like the CFR and fought.

Again, despite Foreign Affairs‘ apparently in-depth analysis, it failed to isolate the true source of Libya’s upheaval and instability: NATO. It was the 2011 intervention that upended stability not only in Libya, but created a chain reaction of violence and chaos that was felt as far west as Nigeria, Mali and Niger. This violence prompted, or more accurately, served as a pretext for the reintroduction of French troops in several of its “former” colonies. It has also served as a pretext for US Africa Command’s (AFRICOM) continued expansion.

Ultimately, Libya is a showcase of the chaos and regression that NATO intervention brings, and serves as the greatest case for isolating, containing and by all means, opposing and obstructing further use of NATO military forces anywhere beyond NATO’s own borders. The enduring chaos that is currently consuming nations like Libya also serve as a warning of what awaits nations like Syria and beyond should they fail in dissuading the West from further intervention within their borders.

It has been 6 years since NATO divided and destroyed Libya and the nation still remains fractured and fighting. The notion that NATO and its Western membership hold the solution to problems the West itself intentionally created should not be entertained, and, if international organizations, courts and laws had any meaning, NATO would be barred from any further role regarding Libya, beyond paying reparations for what it has done.

Ulson Gunnar, a New York-based geopolitical analyst and writer especially for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”, where this article first appeared.

By Spiro Skouras

An investigative journalist has been interrogated by government national security forces and fired from her job for documenting and exposing covert CIA-NATO operations directly arming ISIS and Al Qaeda terrorists – a covert operation involving NATO, CIA, U.S.-based Mega Arms Trafficker(s), a shady U.S. organization ran by well-known Deep State Players, and much more.

Watch this Newsbud exclusive breaking story and investigative report, including our exclusive interview with investigative journalist Dilyana Gaytandzhieva, a candid commentary by Sibel Edmonds, leaked documented evidence, and glaring direct connections to some of the biggest names and entities connected to the Deep State, and CIA-NATO Operation Gladio B.

Subscribe to Newsbud here to see full report. Follow Newsbud on Twitter and YouTube.

By Ulson Gunnar

NATO members including the US, UK, Germany, Norway, Spain, Denmark and the Netherlands have begun taking public steps in defining guidelines regarding the deployment of offensive cyberweapons.

Reuters in its article, “NATO mulls ‘offensive defense’ with cyber warfare rules,” would state:

A group of NATO allies are considering a more muscular response to state-sponsored computer hackers that could involve using cyber attacks to bring down enemy networks, officials said.

Reuters would also report:

The doctrine could shift NATO’s approach from being defensive to confronting hackers that officials say Russia, China and North Korea use to try to undermine Western governments and steal technology.

The article also noted that the United States and its allies already possess and have threatened to use cyberweapons offensively, citing the 2010 Sutxnet virus deployed against Iranian nuclear infrastructure as a possible example. Other examples cited of possible applications included shutting down power plants with malware rather than bombing them.

Reuters also reported that NATO was setting up “cyber commands” including one in Estonia apparently intended to launch cyber attacks into Russia.

Extending NATO Aggression into Cyberspace 

At face value, a nation developing the ability to defend itself and carry out counterattacks against foreign aggressors, including in cyberspace, appears as legitimate policy.

For NATO, however, its track record of serial aggression and expansion beyond its borders predicated on intentionally false pretexts indicate that the military alliance will simply carry its aggression into cyberspace as well.

The NATO invasion and occupation of Afghanistan followed the attacks on September 11, 2001 on Washington D.C. and New York City. Despite none of the alleged suspects involved in the attack actually coming from Afghanistan, and the government of Afghanistan having played no role in the attacks, NATO would invade and has since occupied the nation for the past 16 years.

The 2003 invasion of Iraq led by the US and other prominent NATO members was predicated entirely on falsehoods. Claims that the Iraqi government at the time possessed chemical and biological weapons later turned out to have been intentionally fabricated to justify an invasion that, by some estimates, cost the lives of over a million Iraqis and thousands of US and European soldiers. The invasion and occupation resulted in regional conflict that continues to this day.

In 2011 when terrorists affiliated with Al Qaeda moved against the government of Libya, NATO portrayed the resulting conflict as a crackdown on what it and Western media called “freedom fighters.” NATO armed militants and eventually intervened in an air campaign that toppled the government, leaving Libya in ruins since.

Between 2013-2014 the US and its NATO partners openly fomented protests against the elected government of Ukraine. Supporting Neo-Nazi militias and their affiliated political parties, NATO succeeded in overthrowing the government and placing into power organizations and parties involved in the protests. NATO has since intervened on various levels, short of military intervention, to protect the regime in Kiev from both political challengers and a possible counter-coup.

In many ways, since the Arab Spring in 2011, the US and its NATO partners have already used cyberweapons of sorts to destabilize and attack targeted nations. Social media was manipulated in the opening weeks of protests, false information transmitted, technology and software distributed among US-NATO funded opposition groups, all in an effort to stampede targeted governments out of power.

Today, NATO members are involved in the bombing, invasion, occupation and drone warfare from Africa to Asia. They employ the tools of modern disinformation and propaganda to interfere and manipulate in the political processes of nations worldwide.

The notion that NATO will develop and deploy cyberweapons in an offensive capacity will not only enhance ongoing aggression, but because of the nature of cyberweapons and the possibility of attacks concealing their point of origin, might see it expand into areas where currently, conventional military means cannot be justified.

Considering the extensive experience NATO possesses in fabricating pretexts for aggression, and the perceived benignity of cyberwarfare versus conventional weapons, we can expect to see NATO use this new concept of “offensive defense” to further menace the nations and peoples of this planet with a degree and frequency far above and beyond its conventional military operations.

While Reuters cites Russia, China and North Korea as likely targets of NATO cyberattacks, it is likely that any and all actors, both state and non-state, will find themselves targets of NATO aggression should their interests conflict with those that underwrite the NATO alliance.

Developing the means to put these capabilities in check and prevent NATO from developing any sort of advantage in cyberspace will be a prerequisite for future peace and stability, online and off.

Ulson Gunnar, a New York-based geopolitical analyst and writer especially for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”., where this article first appeared.

Image credit: Pixabay

By Brandon Turbeville

After the defeat of ISIS and the liberation of Deir ez Zour, the Syrian military is now setting its sights on the terrorist capitol of Idlib. While maintaining a sizable terrorist presence since the beginning of the conflict, various cease-fire agreements have seen terrorists shipped from cities and towns from all across the country into Idlib city and province. As a result, a massive concentration of terrorists now populate the area and thus Idlib represents the last major battle to eliminate Islamic extremist terrorists from Syria (not counting the Kurdish extremists in the north and northeast).

Indeed, in the last several weeks, the Syrian military has launched a large number of successful operations in Idlib province, liberating nearly fifty villages and towns. Terrorist infighting has also helped the Syrian government’s operations since, given the nature of extremists, many of these groups have been battling one another over the course of the last few years.

But as the Syrian military closes in on terrorists in Idlib, there is another enemy openly embedded in the area that presents the possibility of a wider war and greater conflict if the two forces meet.

The Turkish military deployed troops to Idlib last October, allegedly as part of an agreement with Russia and Iran to “enforce de-escalation zones” in the area, but, in reality, it is more of a defensive measure against Kurdish extremists. It was also clearly an attempt to annex more territory from Syria and to shore up the terrorists Turkey has been supporting since day one in the Syrian crisis.

As Reuters reported in October, 2017

A first convoy of the military operation that Turkey is carrying out in Syria’s Idlib province crossed into the area late on Thursday, two rebels and a witness said.

The convoy included about 30 military vehicles, said Abu Khairo, a commander in a Free Syrian Army (FSA) rebel group based in the area, and it entered Syria near the Bab al-Hawa border crossing, according to a civilian witness.

It was heading to Sheikh Barakat, a hilltop that overlooks large areas of rebel-held northwestern Syria, but also the Afrin area held by the Kurdish YPG militia.

The convoy was escorted by fighters from Tahrir al-Sham, an alliance of jihadist groups including the former al Qaeda affiliate previously known as the Nusra Front, Abu Khairo said.

“The Turkish army convoy is entering under the protection of Tahrir al-Sham to take positions on the front line with the YPG,” another FSA official in the area said.

Turkey said on Saturday it was carrying out a military operation in Idlib and surrounding areas as part of a deal it reached with Russia and Iran last month to enforce a “de-escalation” zone in northwest Syria.

The zone is one of several set up around Syria to reduce warfare between rebels, including groups backed by Turkey, and the government, which is supported by both Russia and Iran.

UPI News explains the agreement further by reporting,

Last September, the plan for Idlib was altered by the Russians, at An­kara’s request. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan had been wanting to send troops to the coun­tryside of Damascus and Aleppo, arguing that they could monitor the cease-fire and serve as a buffer be­tween warring factions. This would give Erdogan a permanent foot­hold in Syrian territory, under the umbrella of the Russian-imposed cease-fire.

The idea, however, was rejected by the Iranians, who vowed never to give the Turks what they had been denied after opposition forces had refused to accept Iranian peace­keeping troops in Ghouta, the agri­cultural belt surrounding Damas­cus.

Tehran agreed to look the other way as Erdogan’s forces marched into Idlib province, which borders Turkey, if the Turkish president signed off on increasing Iranian troops around Damascus. The Turk­ish military move was positioned as part of the international peace-keep­ing forces mandated by the Astana process.

As illegal as it may be for the Turks to be setting up shop in Syria, the fact is they are there and the Syrian military is marching steadily toward those positions. Keep in mind that the Syrian President has already promised to liberate every inch of Syria from all invading forces.

This presents a major military question. Once the Syrian military reaches the positions held by the Turkish military, will it continue its push and clash with Turkey? Will Turkey withdraw as Syria pushes forward? Will Syria and Turkey negotiate an exit for the Turkish troops? Will Syria stop short of liberating areas with deployed Turkish military personnel? Have the Russians agreed to partition Syria? Are there other unforeseen agendas afoot?

And what happens if Turkey and Syria clash? Turkey is a member of NATO and, if the two engage a direct clash, it could be argued that the NATO treaty could be invoked and NATO forces might then attempt to move against the Syrian government. Russia too would have decisions to make if a conflict breaks out between Syria and Turkey. Does Russia continue to back Syria and risk being drawn in to a wider (or massive) military confrontation with Turkey and/or NATO? Likewise, Iran and Hezbollah will also be drawn into the military mix .

At this point, we can only wait and see what course the new military operations take. However, for the sake of everyone in the region and for the sake of the rest of the world, the Turks must leave Syrian territory immediately and cease all support being provided to terrorists crossing the Turk/Syria border and those that currently reside in Syria.

Brandon Turbeville writes for Activist Post – article archive here – He is the author of seven books, Codex Alimentarius — The End of Health Freedom, 7 Real Conspiracies, Five Sense Solutions and Dispatches From a Dissident, volume 1 and volume 2, The Road to Damascus: The Anglo-American Assault on Syria, The Difference it Makes: 36 Reasons Why Hillary Clinton Should Never Be President, and Resisting The Empire: The Plan To Destroy Syria And How The Future Of The World Depends On The Outcome. Turbeville has published over 1000 articles on a wide variety of subjects including health, economics, government corruption, and civil liberties. Brandon Turbeville’s radio show Truth on The Tracks can be found every Monday night 9 pm EST at UCYTV. His website is BrandonTurbeville.com He is available for radio and TV interviews. Please contact activistpost (at) gmail.com.

This article may be freely shared in part or in full with author attribution and source link.

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By Corbett Report Extras

For the past two years, Vanessa Beeley has been doing on-the-ground reporting in Syria exposing the lies of the NATO powers and their terrorist proxies. Her work on the White Helmets in particular has drawn the ire of the warmongers and their media mouthpieces. Today we talk to Beeley about the true nature of the White Helmets and the well-funded PR campaign that seeks to defend them.

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You can read more about the White Helmets from Brandon Turbeville HERE.

By Derrick Broze

Facebook has announced a new partnership with the Atlantic Council, a think tank with close ties to the Military Industrial Complex and Defense Department.

On Thursday Facebook announced a new partnership with the Atlantic Council, a think tank which officially claims to provide a forum for international political, business, and intellectual leaders. The social media giant said the partnership is aimed at preventing Facebook from “being abused during elections.” The press release promotes Facebook’s efforts to fight fake news by using artificial intelligence, as well as working with outside experts and governments.

Today, we’re excited to launch a new partnership with the Atlantic Council, which has a stellar reputation looking at innovative solutions to hard problems. Experts from their Digital Forensic Research Lab will work closely with our security, policy and product teams to get Facebook real-time insights and updates on emerging threats and disinformation campaigns from around the world. This will help increase the number of “eyes and ears” we have working to spot potential abuse on our service — enabling us to more effectively identify gaps in our systems, preempt obstacles, and ensure that Facebook plays a positive role during elections all around the world.

Facebook goes on to describe how the Atlantic Council’s Digital Research Unit Monitoring Missions will be monitoring traffic during elections and other “highly sensitive moments.” Facebook claims this will help the company monitor for misinformation and foreign interference. Of course, there is also the obligatory reference to protecting democracy and “free and fair elections across the world.”

So who is the Atlantic Council and what is The Digital Forensic Research Lab?

The Atlantic Council of the United States was established in 1961 to bolster support for international relations. Although not officially connected to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, the Atlantic Council has spent decades promoting causes and issues which are beneficial to NATO member states. In addition, The Atlantic Council is a member of the Atlantic Treaty Organization, an umbrella organization which “acts as a network facilitator in the Euro-Atlantic and beyond.” The ATA works similarly to the Atlantic Council, bringing together political leaders, academics, military officials, journalists and diplomats to promote values that are favorable to the NATO member states. Officially, ATA is independent of NATO, but the line between the two is razor thin.

Essentially, the Atlantic Council is a think tank which can offer companies or nation states access to military officials, politicians, journalists, diplomats, etc. to help them develop a plan to implement their strategy or vision. These strategies often involve getting NATO governments or industry insiders to make decisions they might not have made without a visit from the Atlantic Council team. This allows individuals or nations to push forth their ideas under the cover of hiring what appears to be a public relations agency but is actually selling access to high-profile individuals with power to affect public policy. Indeed, everyone from George H.W. Bush to Bill Clinton to the family of international agent of disorder Zbigniew Brzezinski have spoken at or attended council events.

In 2016, The New York Times wrote “The Atlantic Council, which has seen its annual revenue grow to $21 million from $2 million in the last decade, offers access to United States and foreign government officials in exchange for contributions. Individual donors, like FedEx, have also helped fund specific reports that align with their agendas.” The Times wrote that giving financial support is rewarded with “an ‘unprecedented level of information and access,’ including the chance to have a corporate executive, if the company donates at least $50,000 a year, speak at an Atlantic Council event ‘with top U.S. and foreign leaders’ present.”

In another report, The Times describes the relationship between FedEx the Atlantic Council and European governments. According to documents obtained by The Times, the Council helped FedEx “to build support for a free-trade agreement the company hoped would increase business. Six months before the Atlantic Council report was issued, FedEx and the think tank worked on plans to use the report as a lobbying tool.” The Atlantic Council helped organize “a public report launch with member(s) of Congress from one of the relevant committees.”

FedEx and the Atlantic Council, working with the European American Chamber of Commerce, also told companies being asked to participate in the study that the goal was to ’emphasize the positive impact that a comprehensive agreement would have on American and European small businesses.’

According to their website, “The Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab (DFRLab) has operationalized the study of disinformation by exposing falsehoods and fake news, documenting human rights abuses, and building digital resilience worldwide.” The DFRLab tracks global disinfo campaigns, fake news stories, and “subversive attempts against democracy while teaching the public skills to identify and expose attempts to pollute the information space.”

Despite the promise to document human rights abuses, one would be hard pressed to find a single item on The Atlantic Council website mentioning the human rights violations of the United States or any of their allies – some of whom are financial supporters of the Atlantic Council. In addition, the Council has a publication under the “disinformation” category called “Breaking Aleppo.” Disinformation is a fitting title for the publication because it largely repeats the narratives pushed by Western Media – President Assad is a horrible dictator who won’t stop using chemical weapons on his own people and anyone who questions that narrative is buying into Syrian and Russian propaganda. The report also promotes the work and credibility of the discredited White Helmets.

The list of financial supporters reads like a who’s-who of think tanks and Non-Governmental Organizations. The Atlantic Council receives funding from the Brookings Institution, Carnegie Endowment, Cato Institute, Council on Foreign Relations, and the Rand Corporation, to name a few. In addition, various members of the Military-Industrial Complex are benefactors of the Atlantic Council, including Huntington Ingalls, the United States’ sole maker of aircraft carriers; Airbus, the plane manufacturer; Lockheed Martin, the shipbuilder and aviation company; and Raytheon, which makes missile systems. All of the companies have contracts with the U.S. Department of Defense and offer financial support to the Atlantic Council. The Council also receives support from Chevron and the Thomson Reuters Foundation. Finally, the Atlantic Council receives direct financial support from the U.S. Departments of the Air Force, Army, Navy and Energy and from the U.S. Mission to NATO.

It is clear that despite what Facebook says, this partnership will further align the goals of Facebook with the Western Military-Industrial Complex. It’s time for people to stop supporting these platforms – both Facebook and Government. It’s time we opt-out of these systems and opt-in to our communities. Only by organizing on a local level to protect and defend those closest to us we will thrive in the coming totalitarian American state.

Derrick Broze is an investigative journalist and liberty activist. He is the Lead Investigative Reporter for ActivistPost.com and the founder of the TheConsciousResistance.com. Follow him on Twitter. Derrick is the author of three books: The Conscious Resistance: Reflections on Anarchy and Spirituality and Finding Freedom in an Age of Confusion, Vol. 1, Finding Freedom in an Age of Confusion, Vol. 2 and Manifesto of the Free Humans.

Derrick is available for interviews. Please contact Derrick@activistpost.com

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By Jay Syrmopoulos

Washington, D.C. — U.S. President Donald Trump met with leaders of NATO member states last week in a “very intense” summit in which he reportedly secured commitments from European leaders of NATO member states to increase their weapons expenditures on the military alliance.

Trump reportedly told NATO leaders during the summit that if they failed to meet defense spending targets of a 2 percent GDP by January, 2019, the United States would consider leaving the alliance – which prompted an emergency NATO session.

After the emergency meeting Trump told reporters, “I told people that I’d be very unhappy if they didn’t up their financial commitments substantially.”

Afterwards, some European leaders, such as Emmanuel Macron and Angela Merkel, disputed the claims that an agreement to increase their spending had been reached, while simultaneously proclaiming that their nations “must” increase military spending and NATO funding.

While the “making NATO pay their fair share” shtick scores points with Trump’s base, it’s clear that the POTUS operates as the chief negotiator for U.S. weapons manufacturers. The increase in international weapons sales orders, particularly from NATO nations, coupled with a dramatic increase in domestic military spending has seen production, from manufacturers like Lockheed Martin, “explode.”

Whitney Webb, writing for MintPress News, explained:

The precipitous increase in Lockheed missile sales comes after the launch of Trump’s “Buy American” weapons-selling initiative to foreign allies, as well as his efforts to rewrite the government’s Conventional Arms Transfer policy and the International Traffic in Arms regulations in order to make it easier to export more military-grade weapons. Lockheed’s good fortune following Trump’s actions at the recent NATO summit again underscores Trump’s role as the U.S.’ top weapons salesman.

Underscoring this point, Bob Delgado, director of international business development for integrated air and missile defense at Lockheed, in an interview with Defense News, said the company plans to double its production capacity.

“There is a lot of interest in [Patriot Missiles], so much so we are doubling our capacity,” Delgado told Defense News, adding, that although Lockheed was currently meeting demand, “it is getting more difficult as more orders come in, and that is why we are foreseeing, along with the U.S. government, a point where we need to increase our capacity.”

Reuters reported that “shares in Lockheed Martin (LMT.N), Boeing (BA.N) and other big U.S. arms makers have seen double-digit percentage rises since President Donald Trump took office in January 2017.”

The U.S. defense industry is without question the most prolific arms exporter in the world.

A recently created timelapse video created by data scientist Will Geary using data from the from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) Arms Transfers Database, which tracks the movement of major conventional weapons, reveals the flow of U.S. weapons exports across the globe over the past 67 years; from 1950 to 2017.

America is the world’s largest weapons exporter. I was curious to see what this looks like over time, so I mapped the flows of arms transfers leaving the U.S. from 1950 to 2017. The data comes from @SIPRIorg ‘s Arms Transfers Database. Full video here: https://t.co/5h1I6B2Xlp pic.twitter.com/WlSW73ZbLT

— Will Geary (@wgeary) July 16, 2018

The revealing video show that in the 1950s, the majority of US arms went to Europe, Canada, Japan and Turkey. While in the 1960s, Germany was the recipient of the largest amount of U.S. weapons. Iran received the largest amount of U.S. weapons in the 1970s, until the U.S.-backed Shah was deposed by the Islamic Revolution in 1979, with Israel climbing into second on the list of recipients in the 1970s.

The 1980s saw Japan receive the most weapons from the U.S., followed by Saudi Arabia and Israel, which was largely repeated in the 1990s. In the 2000s, South Korea and Israel received the most weapons exports form the U.S.

From 2010 until 2017, Saudi Arabia topped the list, with Australia next in line. Between 2013 and 2017, the US accounted for 34 percent of total arms exports, an increase of 25 percent from its exports between 2008-2012.

After the United States, Russia, France, Germany and China had the largest number of arms exports.

“Based on deals signed during the Obama administration, US arms deliveries in 2013–17 reached their highest level since the late 1990s,” said Dr Aude Fleurant, director of the SIPRI Arms and Military Expenditure Programme. “These deals and further major contracts signed in 2017 will ensure that the USA remains the largest arms exporter in the coming years.”

The U.S. is clearly the undisputed champ of providing the world with advanced military armaments, with U.S. presidents acting as the top salesman for these death merchants.

Jay Syrmopoulos is a geopolitical analyst, freethinker, and ardent opponent of authoritarianism. He is currently a graduate student at the University of Denver pursuing a masters in Global Affairs and holds a BA in International Relations. Jay’s writing has been featured on both mainstream and independent media – and has been viewed tens of millions of times. You can follow him on Twitter @SirMetropolis and on Facebook at SirMetropolis. This article first appeared at The Free Thought Project.

By corbettreport

In this week’s edition of #PropagandaWatch James looks at “The News Hero,” the latest fake news Russian bot propaganda scare to emerge from the neo-McCarthyist fever dreams of the NATO Stratcom Centre of Excellence!

SHOW NOTES: https://www.corbettreport.com/?p=27643

By Brandon Turbeville

In August of 2017, Bulgarian reporter Dilyana Gaytandzhieva published a report in mainstream outlet Trud in her home country exposing the paper trail documenting the US, NATO, and Gulf countries were shipping weapons to terrorists in Syria. Gaytandzhieva’s reporting was the result of her own travels to Syria where she saw these documents firsthand and her subsequent follow-up investigation after her return home.

That article, “350 Diplomatic Flights Carry Weapons For Terrorists,” is still available and I highly recommend reading it now before going any further in this article.

Now, nearly a year to the day after Gaytandzhieva’s article was released (for which she was summarily fired), journalist Robert Fisk has conducted a similar investigation and come to similar conclusions. In his article for The Independent, “A Bosnian signs off weapons he says are going to Saudi Arabia – but how did his signature turn up in Aleppo?” Fisk traces back the numbers found on shell casings, mortars, and other weapons used by terrorists to their manufacturers in Bosnia and the United States. He writes,

In the basement of a bombed-out al-Qaeda arms storage building in eastern Aleppo last year, I found a weapons log book from a mortar factory in Bosnia – with the handwritten name of one of their senior officials, Ifet Krnjic, on each page. It was dispatched from the Balkans with a cargo of 500 120mm mortars in January 2016. But now, in the forested heart of central Bosnia, I have found Mr Krnjic, who says his company sent the arms to Saudi Arabia.

Sitting on the lawn of his home south of the weapons-manufacturing town of Novi Travnik, he brings his finger down onto the first page of the log book which I showed him. “This is my signature! Yes, that’s me!” Krnjic exclaims loudly. “It’s a warranty for the 120mm mortar launcher – this is Nato standard. It [the shipment] went to Saudi Arabia. It was part of a supply of 500 mortars. I remember the Saudi shipment well. They [the Saudis] came to our factory to inspect the weapons at the beginning of 2016.”

This is astonishing. Not only does Krnjic, the 64-year old newly retired weapons control director of the BNT-TMiH factory at Novi Travnik, acknowledge his signature – but he says he recalls the visits of Saudi officials and military personnel to inspect the mortars before their shipment to Riyadh, and insists all such sales were strictly in accordance with the legal end-user certificates which his company obtained from all customers, stating that the weapons were to be used only by the armed forces of the nations which purchased them.

Please note that Fisk’s article contains screenshots and photos of the documents in question. He continues,

Five-hundred mortars is a massive shipment of weapons – most European armies don’t have that many in their individual inventories – and some of them at least appear to have ended up in the hands of Bashar al-Assad’s Islamist Nusrah Front/al-Qaeda enemies in northern Syria within six months of their dispatch from Bosnia 1,200 miles away. Because the mortars left Bosnia on 15 January 2016 under a BNT-TMiH factory guarantee for 24 months – numbered 779 and with a weapons series number of 3677 – the documents now in The Independent’s possession must have reached Aleppo by late July of 2016, when Syrian government troops totally surrounded the enclave held by armed factions including Nusrah, Isis and other Islamist groups condemned as “terrorists” by the United States.

When The Independent asked the Saudi authorities to respond to the documents in its possession and their discovery in eastern Aleppo, the Saudi embassy in London replied that the Kingdom did not give “practical or other support to any terrorist organisation [including Nusrah and Isis] in Syria or any other country” and described the allegations raised by The Independentas “vague and unfounded”. It said Saudi Arabia had been a “leading voice within the international community in support of a diplomatic solution to the conflict in Syria, while at the same time working with our neighbours and allies to counter the growth of forces of extremism”. It made no comment on the weapon log book and arms control coupons, photographs of which The Independent had asked it to examine.

. . . . .

During this period, however, the city’s Islamist defenders – most of whom later departed under a promise of safe passage for jihadi-held areas of Idlib province – fired barrages of mortar shells at government-held western Aleppo.

In the weeks that followed the mid-December surrender of the fighters in eastern Aleppo, the square miles of wreckage remained sown with mines and booby-traps. There were whole districts still cordoned off when I entered three former military barracks of the Islamist groups in February 2017, rubble sometimes blocking my path; stones, bricks, sheet metal and bomb fragments strewn across the roads and inside still standing, though badly damaged, buildings. Inside one of these, lying half-concealed amid iron fragments and field dressings, I found piles of discarded documents containing firing instructions for machine guns and mortars, all of them in English.

They also included weapons shipment papers and arms instruction booklets from Bosnia and Serbia, the pages still damp from winter rains and some stained by footprints. I stuffed as many as I could in the satchel I always carry in wars, later finding – in another building – a Bulgarian weapons shipment paper for artillery shells. In a deep basement of a third building in the Ansari district, with the words Jaish al-Mujaheddin (Army of the Holy Fighters) crudely painted but still visible on the front, its upper floors clearly bombed by Syrian or Russian jets, lay dozens of empty boxes for anti-armour weapons, all marked with their maker’s name – the Hughes Aircraft Company, of California. The boxes were labelled “Guided Missile Surface Attack” with stock numbers starting with the computer code “1410-01-300-0254”.

These papers, some of them lying amid smashed guns and pieces of shrapnel, provide the most intriguing paper trail yet discovered of just who is producing the weapons that have armed the Assad regime’s most ferocious Islamist opponents – and how they apparently reach the fighters of Syria via countries ‘friendly’ to the west. While claiming that he would have to “search” for documents on the end-user of the 2016 mortar shipment, Adis Ikanovic, the managing director of the Novi Travnik factory, acknowledged to me in his head office that most of his company’s exports went to “Saudi Arabia, probably”. An email reminder to Ikanovic six days after our meeting, for copies of the 2016 end-user certificate papers for the mortar shipment, elicited no reply.

. . . . .

Milojko Brzakovic, managing director of the Zastava arms factory in Serbia, looks through the arms manuals I found in Aleppo – including a 20-page instruction document for the powerful Coyote MO2 machine gun which his company manufactures – and says “there is not a single country in the Middle East which did not buy weapons from Zastava in the past 15 years”. He agrees that the documents I presented to him, which included a 52-page manual for his company’s 7.62mm M84 machine gun, which I also found in the Aleppo ruins beneath a bombed apartment bloc which had ‘Nusrah’ painted in Arabic on its wall, were published by Zastava in Serbia, and that Saudi Arabia and the Emirates were among his customers.

Ifet Krnjic’s account of the mortar shipment from BNT-TMiH in Bosnia is both precise and detailed. “When the Saudis came to our factory to inspect at the beginning of 2016, there was a Saudi ‘minister’… and some Saudi officers who also came to inspect the weapons before receiving them. The officers wore civilian clothes. The minister was in a robe. All our production after the [Bosnian] war is under the control of the Americans and Nato who are always coming here… and they know each and every piece of our weapons which go outside our factory.”

Krnjic, who lives in the tiny village of Potok Krnjic, Bosnian hamlets sometimes carry the names of extended families, south of Novi Travnik, describes how he recognised Nato officers visiting the plant, one of them “a Canadian officer, a black guy whose name is Stephen”. Ikanovic, the BNT-TMiH boss, confirms that all weapons shipments, including those to Saudi Arabia, were checked by the European Union Force Althea (EUFOR), the successor to Nato’s SFOR, and set up under the 1995 Dayton accords which ended the Bosnian war. Ikanovic says an Austrian general visits his factory for inspections, identified to me by other employees as Austrian two star Major General Martin Dorfer, the EUFOR commander. Krnjic says weapons from the plant are exported by Tuzla airport or through Sarajevo.

The Saudis, Krnjic tells me, “were never complaining because we have had a very good reputation for a long time, not only for our weapons but for who can give the shortest delivery date… I know I should not say all of this, but Nato and the EU have given us the green light to do this. Ours is the only mortar that can shoot from asphalt. Each mortar has a base plate, but other base plates [from other countries’ mortars] break – they can only be used on soft ground. With ours, the mortars can also be carried in sacks – they are three shells, one barrel, you shoot at a building and then you disappear. Only Chinese mortars are better than ours – I saw them in Iraq.”

It transpires that although Krnjic has never visited Syria, he was employed in a weapons factory built by BNT-TMiH in Iraq in 1986, during the eight year Iran-Iraq war. “I was working inside the factory in Iraq – I wasn’t waging a war there” he says. “The factory there was more modern than ours [in Novi Travnik] – we were in Fallujah and Ramadi. By that time, we were already doing rocket launchers for Saddam, 260mm with a range of 500km. I saw Saddam three times.”

But Novi Travnik’s fortunes declined when the Bosnian war began in 1992, its once 10,000-strong workforce today reduced to fewer than 900. Much of the factory compound is now overgrown with rusted steel walls around some of its machine shops. Krnjic, a member of Bosnia’s Social Democratic Party and a veteran of the country’s civil war, retired from the company some months before Ikanovic was appointed managing director.

“I cannot export anything without a licence with the approval of five different ministers here in Bosnia, and it [the contract] is overlooked by Nato,” Ikanovic said. “We can only sell to countries which are on Nato’s ‘white list’.” Like Krnjic, and Brzakovic in Serbia, he says that his arms company must receive an internationally recognised end-user certificate for any arms export – but agrees that exporters had neither an obligation nor any way of preventing the further shipment of its weapons to third parties once they had arrived at their initial destination.

Fisk followed up his article with another entitled, “I traced missile casings in Syria back to their original sellers, so it’s time for the west to reveal who they sell arms to,” also published in The Independent. In that article he writes,

Readers, a small detective story. Note down this number: MFG BGM-71E-1B. And this number: STOCK NO 1410-01-300-0254. And this code: DAA A01 C-0292. I found all these numerals printed on the side of a spent missile casing lying in the basement of a bombed-out Islamist base in eastern Aleppo last year. At the top were the words “Hughes Aircraft Co”, founded in California back in the 1930s by the infamous Howard Hughes and sold in 1997 to Raytheon, the massive US defence contractor whose profits last year came to $23.35bn (£18bn). Shareholders include the Bank of America and Deutsche Bank. Raytheon’s Middle East offices can be found in Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Israel, Egypt, Turkey and Kuwait.

There were dozens of other used-up identical missile casings in the same underground room in the ruins of eastern Aleppo, with sequential codings; in other words, these anti-armour missiles – known in the trade as Tows, “Tube-launched, optically tracked and wire-guided missiles” – were not individual items smuggled into Syria through the old and much reported CIA smugglers’ trail from Libya. These were shipments, whole batches of weapons that left their point of origin on military aircraft pallets.

Some time ago, in the United States, I met an old Hughes Aircraft executive who laughed when I told him my story of finding his missiles in eastern Aleppo. When the company was sold, Hughes had been split up into eight components, he said. But assuredly, this batch of rockets had left from a US government base. Amateur sleuths may have already tracked down the first set of numbers above. The “01” in the stock number is a Nato coding for the US, and the BGM-71E is a Raytheon Systems Company product. There are videos of Islamist fighters using the BGM-71E-1B variety in Idlib province two years before I found the casings of other anti-tank missiles in neighbouring Aleppo. As for the code: DAA A01 C-0292, I am still trying to trace this number.

Even if I can find it, however, I can promise readers one certain conclusion. This missile will have been manufactured and sold by Hughes/Raytheon absolutely legally to a Nato, pro-Nato or “friendly” (i.e. pro-American) power (government, defence ministry, you name it), and there will exist for it an End User Certificate (EUC), a document of impeccable provenance which will be signed by the buyers – in this case by the chaps who purchased the Tow missiles in very large numbers – stating that they are the final recipients of the weapons.

There is no guarantee this promise will be kept, but – as the arms manufacturers I’ve been talking to in the Balkans over the past weeks yet again confirm – there is neither an obligation nor an investigative mechanism on the part of the arms manufacturers to ensure that their infinitely expensive products are not handed over by “the buyers” to Isis, al-Nusra/al-Qaeda – which was clearly the case in Aleppo – or some other anti-Assad Islamist group in Syria branded by the US State Department itself as a “terrorist organisation”.

Of course, the weapons might have been sent (illegally under the terms of the unenforceable EUC) to a nice, cuddly, “moderate” militia like the now largely non-existent “Free Syrian Army”, many of whose weapons – generously donated by the west – have fallen into the hands of the “Bad Guys”; i.e. the folk who want to overthrow the Syrian regime (which would please the west) but who would like to set up an Islamist cult-dictatorship in its place (which would not please the west).

Thus al-Nusra can be the recipients of missiles from our “friends” in the region – here, please forget the EUCs – or from those mythical “moderates” who in turn hand them over to Isis/al-Nusra, etc, for cash, favours, fear or fratricidal war and surrender.

It is a fact, I’m sorry to recall, that of all the weapons I saw used in the 15-year Lebanese civil war (1975-1990), not one was in the hands of those to whom those same weapons were originally sold. Russian and Bulgarian Kalashnikovs sold to Syria were used by Palestinian guerrillas, old American tanks employed by the Lebanese Christian Phalange/Lebanese forces were gifts from the Israelis who received them from the US.

These outrageous weapons shipments were constantly recorded at the time – but in such a way that you might imagine that the transfers were enshrined in law (“American-made, Israeli-supplied” used to be the mantra). The Phalange, in fact, also collected bunches of British, Soviet, French and Yugoslav armour – the Zastava arms factory in the Serbian city of Kragujevac, which I have just visited, featured among the latter – for their battles.

In eastern Aleppo, who knows what “gifts” to the city’s surviving citizens in the last months of the war acquired a new purpose? Smashed Mitsubishi pick-up trucks, some in camouflage paint, others in neutral colours, were lying in the streets I walked through. Were they stolen by al-Nusra? Or simply used by NGOs? Did they arrive, innocently enough, in the lot whose documents, also found in Aleppo, registered “Five Mitsubishi L200 Pick Up” sent by “Shipper: Conflict, Humanitarian and Security Department (Chase), Whitehall SW1A SEG London”?

Of course they did – alongside the Glasgow ambulance I found next to a gas canister bomb dump on the Aleppo front line at Beni Zeid in 2016, whose computer codings I reported in The Independent at great length – five codings in all – and to which the Scottish Ambulance Authority responded by saying they could not trace the ambulance because they needed more details.

But back to guns and artillery. Why don’t Nato track all these weapons as they leave Europe and America? Why don’t they expose the real end-users of these deadly shipments? The arms manufacturers I spoke to in the Balkans attested that Nato and the US are fully aware of the buyers of all their machine guns and mortars. Why can’t the details of those glorious end user certificates be made public – as open and free for us to view as are the frightful weapons which the manufacturers are happy to boast in their catalogues.

It was instructive that when The Independent asked the Saudis last week to respond to Bosnian weapons shipment documents I found in eastern Aleppo last year (for 120mm mortars) – which the factory’s own weapons controller recalled were sent from Novi Travnik to Saudi Arabia – they replied that they (the Saudis) did not provide support of any kind “to any terrorist organisation”, that al-Nusra and Isis were designated “terrorist organisations” by Saudi Royal Decree and that the “allegations” (sic) were “vague and unfounded”.

But what did this mean? Government statements in response to detailed reports of arms shipments should not be the last word – and there is an important question that remained unanswered in the Saudi statement. The Saudis themselves had asked for copies of the shipment documents – yet they did not specifically say whether they did or did not receive this shipment of mortars, nor comment upon the actual papers which The Independent sent them.

These papers were not “vague” – nor was the memory of the Bosnian arms controller who said they went with the mortars to Saudi Arabia and whose shipment papers I found in Syria. Indeed, Ifet Krnjic, the man whose signature I found in eastern Aleppo, has as much right to have his word respected as that of the Saudi authorities. So what did Saudi Arabia’s military personnel – who were surely shown the documents – make of them? What does “unfounded” mean? Were the Saudis claiming by the use of this word that the documents were forgeries?

These are questions, of course, which should be taken up by the international authorities in the Balkans. Nato’s and the EU’s writ still runs in the wreckage of Bosnia and both have copies of the documents I found in Aleppo. Are they making enquiries about this shipment, which Krnjic said went to Saudi Arabia, and the shipping documents which clearly ended up in the hands of al-Nusra – papers of which Nato and the EU had knowledge when the transfer was originally made?

All of this information, however, was documented at least a year ago when Bulgarian reporter Dilyana Gaytandzhieva was provided leaked documents showing Azerbaijani airline Silk Way Airlines was trafficking weapons via diplomatic flights.

The report by Gaytandzhieva entitled, “350 Diplomatic Flights Carry Weapons For Terrorists,” blew the lid on a secret program to provide weapons to terrorists in Iraq and Syria as well as anti-Houthi militants in Yemen. Gaytandzhieva’s report claimed that the documents leaked to her by anonymous sources show that the Azberbaijani airline Silk Way Airlines was contracted by companies in the United States, Israel, and the Balkans to the militaries of Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates as well as U.S. Special Ops. Gaytandzhieva’s own on-the-ground reporting also uncovered many weapons related to this secret trade in Aleppo after she had traveled there to investigate the story.

PLEASE NOTE: It is important to visit Gaytandzhieva’s original article in which she presents scanned copies of the documents sent to her. 

Although Gaytandzhieva’s report was months old, it gained wider traction in the alternative media after it was revealed she was subsequently interrogated by Bulgaria’s intelligence services and then fired from her newspaper because of the story.

Gaytandzhieva reported that at least 350 diplomatic flights by Silk Way Airlines (an Azeri state-run company) transported weapons all across the world to various war zones over the past three years. She writes that the planes carried “tens of tons of heavy weapons and ammunition headed to terrorists under the cover of diplomatic flights.” Gaytandzhieva stated that the documents implicating Silk Way Airlines were sent to her on Twitter by Anonymous Bulgaria.

She reported that the documents included correspondence between the Bulgarian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Embassy of Azerbaijan to Bulgaria. They also include documents which were attached requesting clearance for overflight and/or landing in Bulgaria and many other countries in Europe as well as the United States, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, and Turkey including others still.

According to Gaytandzhieva, the documents show Silk Way Airlines offering diplomatic flights to private companies and arm manufacturers in Israel, the Balkans, and the United States as well as the UAE, KSA, militaries and U.S. Special Ops Command (USSOCOM). The airline also offered its services to the militaries of Germany and Denmark in Afghanistan and to Sweden in Iraq.

According to Gaytandzhieva, the diplomatic flights were utilized because they are exempt from checks, taxes, and air bills. For that reason, she stated that the Silk Way planes transported “hundreds of tons of weapons to different locations around the world without regulation” and for free. The reporter wrote that the planes made stops ranging from a few hours up to a whole day for no logical reason i.e. repair, refueling, etc., thus lending further evidence that the planes were indeed shipping weapons as a primary mission.

Gaytandzhieva wrote that the International Air Transport Association (IATA) requires that “Dangerous Goods, Regulations, operators, transporting dangerous goods forbidden transportation by civil aircrafts, must apply for exemption for transportation of dangerous goods by air.” She stated that, according to the documents she received, Azerbaijan’s Foreign Ministry sent instructions to its embassies in Bulgaria and other European countries requesting diplomatic clearance for Silk Way Airlines flights. The embassies then sent diplomatic notes to the Foreign Ministry of the host countries to request the exemption. The Foreign Ministry would then send back a note signed by the local civil aviation authorities granting the necessary exemption for the transport of the dangerous goods by air.

These requests, according to the documents and the report, included information about the type and quantity of the goods on board, listed as “heavy weapons and ammunition.” Still, Gaytandzhieva wrote, “the responsible authorities of many countries (Bulgaria, Serbia, Romania, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Slovakia, Poland, Turkey, Germany, UK, Greece, etc.) have turned a blind eye and allowed diplomatic flights for the transport of tons of weapons, carried out by civil aircrafts for military needs.”

US Connection

The main customers of the “flights for weapons” program seem to be American companies which supply weaponry to the U.S. military and Special Operations Command. In the cases being addressed by Gaytandzhieva, however, all the weapons being transported are “non-Standard” weapons, meaning those not used by the U.S. military or Special ops.

According to the “register of federal contracts,” American companies were awarded contracts for $1 billion over the last three years under a program for “non-US standard weapons supplies.” According to the documents analyzed by Gaytanzhieva, all of these companies used Silk Way Airlines for the weapons transport. In some cases where Silk Way Airlines was too busy to accommodate shipment, Azerbaijan Air Force planes were used to transport the weapons. The weapons, however, never reached Azerbaijan.

Gaytanzhieva writes,

The documents leaked from the Embassy include shocking examples of weapon transport. A case in point: on 12th May 2015 an aircraft of Azerbaijan Air Forces carried 7,9 tons of PG-7V and 10 tons of PG-9V to the supposed destination via the route Burgas (Bulgaria)-Incirlik (Turkey)-Burgas-Nasosny (Azerbaijan). The consignor was the American company Purple Shovel, and the consignee – the Ministry of Defense of Azerbaijan. According to the documents, however, the military cargo was offloaded at Incirlik military base and never reached the consignee. The weapons were sold to Purple Shovel by Alguns, Bulgaria, and manufactured by Bulgaria’s VMZ military plant.

According to the federal contracts registry, in December of 2014 USSOCOM signed a $26.7 million contract with Purple Shovel. Bulgaria was indicated as the country of origin of the weapons.

On 6th June 2015, a 41-year old American national Francis Norvello, an employee of Purple Shovel, was killed in a blast when a rocket-propelled grenade malfunctioned at a military range near the village of Anevo in Bulgaria. Two other Americans and two Bulgarians were also injured. The US Embassy to Bulgaria then released a statement announcing that the U.S. government contractors were working on a U.S. military program to train and equip moderate rebels in Syria. Which resulted in the U.S. Ambassador in Sofia to be immediately withdrawn from her post. The very same weapons as those supplied by Purple Shovel were not used by moderate rebels in Syria. In December of last year while reporting on the battle of Aleppo as a correspondent for Bulgarian media I found and filmed 9 underground warehouses full of heavy weapons with Bulgaria as their country of origin. They were used by Al Nusra Front (Al Qaeda affiliate in Syria designated as a terrorist organization by the UN).

Another U.S. contractor involved in the same program for non-US standard military supplies is Orbital ATK. This company received $250 million over just the past two years. Information as to what type of weapons and to whom those weapons were supplied is classified.

According to the documents, Orbital ATK transported weapons on 6 diplomatic Silk Way Airlines flights in July and August of 2015 flying the route Baku (Azerbaijan)-Tuzla (Bosnia and Herzegovina)-Baku-Kabul (Afghanistan). The weapons were exported by IGMAN j.j. Konjic, (Bosnia and Herzegovina) commissioned by Orbital ATK. The consignee was the National Police of Afghanistan. Interestingly, all these diplomatic flights with weapons had technical landings and a 7 h 30 min stop at Baku before their final destination – Afghanistan.

Military aircrafts of Azerbaijan transported 282 tons of cargo (PG-7VL and other grenades) on 10 diplomatic flights in April and May 2017 to the destination Baku-Rijeka (Croatia)-Baku. The consignor was the Ministry of Defense of Azerbaijan, and the consignee – Culmen International LLC, USA. This same company has been awarded two contracts ($47 million each) along with other contractors for non-US standard weapon supplies on 18 February 2016 and 19 April 2017 respectively. Culmen International LLC has also signed a $26.7 million contract for foreign weapons with the Department of Defense and a $3.9 million contract for newly manufactured non-US standard weapons.

Chemring Military Products is another main contractor in the program for non-US standard weapon supplies to the US army through diplomatic Silk Way Airlines flights. This military supplier has 4 contracts for $302.8 million in total. The weapons were purchased from local manufacturers in Serbia, Bulgaria, and Romania and according to documents transported to Iraq and Afghanistan via diplomatic flights.

One of those flights in particular, on 18 October 2016, carrying 15.5 tons of 122 mm rockets bought by Chemring in Belgrade, Serbia, was diverted from its destination – Kabul, and instead landed in Lahore, Pakistan. After a 2-hour stop, the aircraft took off to Afghanistan. The only possible explanation for the extension of the flight by a thousand kilometers is offloading in Pakistan, even though documents stated that the cargo was destined for Afghanistan.

The largest non-US standard weapons supplier to the US army is Alliant Techsystems Operations-USA with contracts totalling $490.4 million. In December of 2016, this company transported tons of grenades (API 23×115 mm, HE 23×115 mm, GSH 23×115 mm) from Yugoimport, Serbia to the Afghani Defense Ministry on diplomatic flights to the destination Baku-Belgrade-Kabul.

The Saudi Connection

The United States is by no means the sole patron of Silk Way Airlines and the diplomatic cover business for arms transfers. As many as 23 diplomatic flights carrying weapons from Bulgaria, Serbia, and Azerbaijan to Riyadh and Jedda were utilized according to Gaytanzhieva’s investigation. The consignees were listed as VMC military plant and Transmobile of Bulgaria, Yugoimport in Serbia, and CIHAZ in Azerbaijan, according to the documents.

It must be noted that KSA was clearly not purchasing those weapons for itself because KSA only uses Western weapons. It seems obvious that, if the documents are accurate, the weapons were those being funneled to terrorists in Syria and Yemen. KSA also provides weapons to southern Africa where wars, civil wars, warlords, and terror are commonplace due to the region’s vast amounts of natural wealth.

Gaytanzhieva writes,

On 28 April and 12 May this year, Silk Way carried out two diplomatic flights from Baku to Burgas-Jeddah-Brazzaville (Republic of Congo). The military cargo on-board of both flights was paid for by Saudi Arabia, according to the documents leaked from Azerbaijan’s Embassy to Bulgarian sources. The aircraft made a technical landing at Jeddah airport with a 12 h 30 min stop for the first flight and 14 h stop for the second one.

The aircraft was loaded with mortars and anti-tank grenades including SPG-9 and GP-25. These very same weapons were discovered by the Iraqi army a month ago in an Islamic State warehouse in Mosul. Islamic State jihadists are also seen using those heavy weapons in propaganda videos posted online by the terrorist group. Interestingly, the consignee on the transport documents, however, is the Republican Guards of Congo.

Coyote machine gun 12,7х108 mm appeared in videos and photos posted online by militant groups in Idlib and the province of Hama in Syria. The same type of weapon was transported on a diplomatic flight via Turkey and Saudi Arabia a few months earlier.

In February and March of 2017, Saudi Arabia received 350 tons of weapons on Silk Way diplomatic flights flying to the route Baku-Belgrade-Prince Sultan-Baku. The cargo included 27 350 psc. 128-mm Plamen-a rockets and 10 000 pcs. 122 mm Grad rockets. The consignor was Tehnoremont Temerin, Serbia to order by Famеway Investment LTD, Cypruss.

On 5 March 2016, an Azerbaijan Air Force aircraft carried 1700 pcs. RPG-7 (consignor: Ministry of Defense of Azerbaijan) and 2500 pcs. PG-7VM (consignor: Transmobilе Ltd., Bulgaria) for the Defense Ministry of Saudi Arabia. Diplomatic flights from Burgas Airport to Prince Sultan Airport on 18 and 28 February 2017 each carried a further 5080 psc. 40 mm PG-7V for RPG-7 and 24 978 psc. RGD-5. The weapons were exported by Transmobile, Bulgaria to the Ministry of Defense of Saudi Arabia. Such munitions and RPG-7 originating in Bulgaria can often be seen in videos filmed and posted by the Islamic State on their propaganda channels.

UAE Connection

UAE also uses western standard weapons for its military. However, it is also another country that purchased non-standard weapons which were then apparently transferred to a third party. Gaytanzhieva writes,

On three flights to Burgas-Abu Dhabi-Swaihan in March and April of 2017, Silk Way transported 10.8 tons of PG7VM HEAT for 40 mm RPG-7 on each flight with technical landing and a 2-hour stop in Abu Dhabi. The exporter is Samel-90, Bulgaria, the importer – Al Tuff International Company LLC. The latter company is involved with Orbital ATK LLC, which is the Middle East subsidiary of the American military company Orbital ATK. Although the ultimate consignee is the UAE army, the documents of the flight reveal that the sponsoring party is Saudi Arabia.

Cash And Carry

Gaytanzhieva reported that, on February 26, 2016, an Azeri Air Force plane took off from Baku and landed in UAE. At this point, it loaded two armored vehicles and a Lexus car. The payment, according to the “request for clearance” documents showed that the payment was made in U.S. dollars cash. The plane then landed in North Sudan and, the next day, it landed in the Republic of Congo. Safe Cage Armour Works FZ LLC., UAE was listed as the exporter and the Republican Guards of the Congo was listed as the receiving entity. Saudi Arabia was the sponsoring party.

White Phosphorous

Although not specifically considered a “chemical weapon” in the traditional sense, white phosphorous is, in effect, a chemical agent. It is used largely for its smoke screening purposes but there is also a psychological element since contact with white phosphorous results in excruciatingly painful deep first, second, and third degree burns.

The use of white phosphorous over heavily populated civilian areas is prohibited under international law. In fact, white phosphorous is only allowed if the agent is being used for the purposes of masking or camouflage. If being used as a weapon, it is banned as a chemical weapon under the Chemical Weapons Convention.

With that in mind, Gaytanzhieva writes,

White Phosphorus is an incendiary weapon whose use is very controversial due to the deadly harms it can inflict. On 31 March 2015, Silk Way transported 26 tons of military cargo including white phosphorus from Serbia (exporter: Yugoimport) and 63 tons from Bulgaria (exporter: Arsenal). On 22 March, another 100 tons of white phosphorus were exported from Yugoimport, Belgrade to Kabul. No contract is attached to the documents of those flights.

On 2 May 2015, a Silk Way aircraft loaded 17 tons of ammunition, including white phosphorus, at Burgas airport. The exporter was Dunarit, Bulgaria. The aircraft made a technical landing and a 4-hour stop at Baku before reaching its final destination – Kabul. The consignee was the Afghani police. No contract is attached as proof.

Baku – The Secret Weapons Hub For The World

Although Azerbaijan’s Ministry of Defense is routinely listed as the consignee for weapons, it routinely did not receive the arms it was slated to obtain. For instance, according to Gaytandzhieva, on May 6, 2015, an Azeri military plane flew to Burgas, Bulgaria to Incirlik Turkey and back to Burgas. That flight carried aviation equipment from Bulgaria to Turkey with EMCO LTD, Sofia listed as the consigner and the Ministry of Defense of Azerbaijan listed as the consignee. The cargo, however, was unloaded in Turkey and never even touched down in Azerbaijan.

Gaytanzhieva asserts that some of the weapons carried on diplomatic Azeri flights were used by Azerbaijan against Nagorno-Karabakh against Armenia. Back in 2016, Azerbaijan accused Armenia of using white phosphorous but Armenia denied the Azeri allegations. Armenia accused Azerbaijan of making the story up for propaganda purposes. Indeed, she writes, the only evidence that Azerbaijan could produce was one unexploded grenade discovered by Azeri soldiers. She also asserts that documents from the Embassy of Azerbaijan in Sofia, Bulgaria showed that white phosphorous weapons were transported on a diplomatic flight via Baku in 2015.

She writes,

Baku plays the role of an international hub for weapons. Many of the flights make technical landings with stops of a few hours at Baku airport or other intermediary airports en-route to their final destinations. Moreover, these types of aircrafts flying to the same destinations do not typically make technical landings. Therefore, a landing for refueling is not actually required. Despite this, Silk Way aircrafts constantly made technical landings. A case in point: in December of 2015 Silk Way carried out 14 flights with 40 tons of weapons on each flight to the destination Ostrava (the Czech Republic)-Ovda (Israel)-Nososny (Azerbaijan). The exporter is not mentioned in the documents while the receiver is consistently the Defense Ministry of Azerbaijan. Strangely, the aircraft diverted and landed at Ovda airport (a military base in Southern Israel), where it remained for 2 hours.

In 2017, there were 5 flights from Nish (Serbia) via Ovda (Israel) to Nasosny (Azerbaijan). Each flight carried 44 tons of cargo – SPG Howitzer, RM-70/85. The consignor is MSM Martin, Serbia, the consignee: Elbit Systems, Israel, and the Ministry of Defense of Azerbaijan. All aircrafts landed in Israel and stayed for 2 hours en-route to Azerbaijan.

The same Israeli company Elbit Systems on a flight from Barno (the Czech Republic) via Tel Aviv (Israel) to Bratislava (Slovakia) re-exported armored vehicles (TATRA T-815 VP31, TATRA T-815 VPR9). They were sent by Real Trade, Prague to Elbit Systems. The ultimate consignee, however, was the Ministry of Defense of Azerbaijan. The aircraft landed in Tel Aviv and then in Bratislava, where the cargo was imported by another company – MSM Martin, Slovakia. It is not clear why the plane flew from Europe to Asia and then back to Europe with the same cargo on-board. Ultimately, it did not reach its final destination – Azerbaijan. This type of aircraft, IL 76TD, can carry cargo of up to 50 tons. This one carried only 30 tons according to the documentation provided. Therefore, it could carry additional cargo of 20 tons. Since the flight was diplomatic, it was not subjected to inspection.

Burkina Faso’s Military Coup

Gaytanzhieva also draws a connection between diplomatic weapons flights landing in Brazzaville, Burkina Faso, dropping off non-standard weapons. A week after the weapons were dropped a coup was attempted in the country. She writes,

Some diplomatic flights carry weapons for different conflict zones crossing Europe, Asia and Africa. Such is the case with two Azerbaijan Air Forces flights to the destination Baku-Belgrade-Jeddah-Brazzaville-Burkina Faso on 30 August and 5 September 2015. The consignors were CIHAZ, Azerbaijan, and Yugoimport, Serbia. The consignee was the Ministry of Defense of the Republic of Congo. The aircraft made two technical landings – in Turkey and Saudi Arabia.

The 41.2-ton cargo from Baku and Belgrade included: 7, 62 mm cartridges, 12 pcs. sniper rifles, 25 pcs. М12 “Black Spear” calibre 12,7х108 mm, 25 psc. RBG 40×46 mm/6M11, and 25 pcs. Coyote machine gun 12,7х108 mm with tripods. The same heavy machine gun appeared in videos and photos posted online by militant groups in Idlib and the province of Hama in Syria a few months later. The aircraft also carried: 1999 psc. M70B1 7,62х39 mm and 25 psc. М69А 82 мм. On 26 February 2016, a video featuring the same М69А 82 mm weapons was posted to Youtube by a militant group calling itself Division 13 and fighting north of Aleppo.

Interestingly, the aircraft that carried the same type of weapons landed in Diyarbakir (Turkey), 235 km away from the border with Syria. Another type of weapon, RBG 40 mm/6M11, which was from the same flight and supposedly destined for Congo too, appeared in a video of the Islamic Brigade of Al Safwa in Northern Aleppo.

After Turkey, the aircraft landed in Saudi Arabia and remained there for a day. Afterwards it landed in Congo and Burkina Faso. A week later, there was an attempted military coup in Burkina Faso.

The Kurdish Connection

Gaytanzhieva also documents how Kurdish groups such as the YPG have been receiving arms transporting by these secret diplomatic flights. She writes,

In March of 2017, over 300 tons of weapons were allegedly sent to the People’s Protection Units (YPG) in Northern Syria. Six diplomatic flights transported 43 tons of grenades on each flight from VMZ Military Plant, Bulgaria, to the Defense Ministry of Iraq. There are no contracts applied, however. On 28 March, 82 tons of cargo (AKM 7,62×39 mm and AG-7) were sent from Otopeni (Romania) to Erbil (Iraqi Kurdistan). The consignor was Romtechnica S.A., the consignee – again the Ministry of Defense in Baghdad. No contracts are provided for this flight either.

On 16 March 2016, yet another Silk Way diplomatic flight carried 40 tons of military cargo from Slovenia to Erbil: the exporter is ELDON S.R.O., Slovakia, the importer – Wide City Ltd. Co, Erbil, the final consignee – the government of Kurdistan.

Wide City Ltd. Co has three offices – in Limassol (Cyprus), Sofia (Bulgaria) and Erbil. The office of the Bulgarian company Techno Defence Ltd is at the address in Sofia. On the website of the company, the owner of Techno Defense Ltd Hair Al Ahmed Saleh claims that he has an office in Erbil and that his company manufactures Zagros weapons in Azerbaijan (K15 zagros, 9×19 mm and automatic K16 zagros). These types of Zagros weapons appeared in propaganda footage posted by the military wing of the Kurdish PKK party, which is designated as a terrorist organisation by Turkey. The President of Azerbaijan Ilham Aliev is also an ethnical Kurd.

Gaytandzhieva states that she reached out to all sides for questions and statements on her investigation but never received an answer or comment.

Gaytandzhieva Fired From Newspaper After Questioning

Although the report was months old, Qatari-based al-Jazeera ran the story and revealed that Gaytanzhieva had been interrogated by the Bulgarian national security services and subsequently fired from her job with the paper. The reporter later tweeted and confirmed that she had indeed been questioned by security services and fired from her job.

Conclusion

Gaytandzhieva’s report was groundbreaking to say the least not simply because she exposed the fact that Western and gulf countries are procuring weapons for conflicts across the globe but also because she exposed the direct mechanism that they have undertaken to accomplish the weapons facilitation.

Her report exposed the fact that these weapons did not simply make it in to the hands of the moderate cannibals known as “rebels” by the Western corporate press but also into the hands of al-Qaeda and al-Nusra. In other words, these weapons found their way into the hands of ISIS since ISIS and Nusra/Qaeda are essentially the same organization.

Fisk’s report is also groundbreaking in that it has not only corroborated the work of Gaytandzhieva but also because it has unearthed further connections and shed light upon some of the exact players in the terrorist funding game.

Taken together, both reports show how NATO standard and non-NATO standard weapons are being shipped to Western-backed terrorists in Syria and how the rat lines of the war contain more than just rats but weapons as well.

Brandon Turbeville writes for Activist Post – article archive here – He is the author of seven books, Codex Alimentarius — The End of Health Freedom, 7 Real Conspiracies, Five Sense Solutions and Dispatches From a Dissident, volume 1 and volume 2, The Road to Damascus: The Anglo-American Assault on Syria, The Difference it Makes: 36 Reasons Why Hillary Clinton Should Never Be President, and Resisting The Empire: The Plan To Destroy Syria And How The Future Of The World Depends On The Outcome. Turbeville has published over 1000 articles on a wide variety of subjects including health, economics, government corruption, and civil liberties. Brandon Turbeville’s radio show Truth on The Tracks can be found every Monday night 9 pm EST at UCYTV. His website is BrandonTurbeville.com He is available for radio and TV interviews. Please contact activistpost (at) gmail.com.

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By Joseph Jankowski

NATO has launched the largest war games to take place in Latvia since the country became independent in 1918. 

The military games, which have been in preparation for four years, are scheduled to include military and police addressing “spontaneous” unrest in Russian-populated towns, reports RT.

“After four years of intensive preparations, this will be the largest military training exercise since the restoration of Latvia’s independence in which we will test the armed forces’ readiness to defend Latvia from any threats,” said Latvian Chief of Defense, Lieutenant General Leonids Kalnins.

One such drill will include troops being deployed to counter unrest among the general public in the towns of Valmiera and Jekabpils, both of which are made up of a Russian ethnic majority.

Citizens have been made aware that no live ammunition will be used but received warning that the training would be very realistic.

The war games come just weeks after the Russian Priminister Medvedev voiced opposition of Georgia joining NATO.

“This (Georgia’s entry to NATO) could provoke a terrible conflict. I don’t understand what they are doing this for,” Medvedev told a local paper.

NATO discussed its commitment to admit Georgia to the military alliance during a July summit in Brussels.

The drills are also shortly proceeding a warning from Russian President Putin who warned NATO against cultivating closer ties with Ukraine and Georgia, saying such a policy was irresponsible and would have unspecified consequences for the alliance.

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By Daniel Lang

The way President Trump spoke on the campaign trail, it sounded like he was going to repair our relationship with Russia. But with every week that passes, that seems less and less likely. This week for instance, NATO forces that mainly consisted of US soldiers moved into Poland in a show of force against Russia.

The U.S-led battalion contained of 900 American soldiers, 150 British troops, and 120 Romanian troops. Though there have been many training exercises in recent years that involved those kinds of personnel numbers, this is definitely not a training exercise. The leader of the battlegroup, U.S. Army Lt. Colonel Steven Gventer, stated emphatically at a press conference that “this is a mission, not a cycle of training events. The purpose is to deter aggression in the Baltics and in Poland … We are fully ready to be lethal.”

And that’s not the only battlegroup in Eastern Europe. 120 British soldiers just landed in Estonia; the first of 800 that are expected to be posted in that country. That may not sound like a lot of soldiers, but it is a unique event. This is one of the largest deployments of UK forces to Eastern Europe since the end of the Cold War. Germany and Canada are going to lead two additional battlegroups in Latvia and Lithuania by June. When all of these forces are in place, there will be a total of 4,000 NATO troops in the region for the sole purpose of deterring intimidating Russia.

And just like that, the Second Cold War just got a little bit warmer.

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By Dr. Rand Paul

Today Sen. Paul took to the senate floor to shame his colleagues about not debating and voting for war before sending young Americans to fight in foreign countries. “Nobody wanted to have this debate,” Paul said. “They want to rubber stamp… and they want to send your kids to war with no debate.”