This morning’s key headlines from GenerationalDynamics.com

Syrian regime drops chlorine-laded barrel bomb on Aleppo market


Partial contents of a Bashar al-Assad barrel bomb (Sky News)

At least 71 people, including 37 children and 10 women, were hospitalized in Aleppo in Syria on Tuesday with severe breathing difficulties, after the regime of Syria’s president Bashar al-Assad used helicopters to drop barrel bombs containing chlorine on a crowded market. Other reports indicate that 120 people were hospitalized.

The al-Assad regime denied that it was responsible for the chemical weapon attack, and blamed it on “terrorists.” However, al-Assad is the only “terrorist” with access to helicopters, so there is no doubt that the regime was responsible for the chemical weapons attack.

Last month, the United Nations issued a report concluding that chemical weapons have been used by the Syrian regime and also by the so-called Islamic State (IS or ISIS or ISIL or Daesh).

Once again, there was no doubt that the regime had been the perpetrators of the chemical weapons attack because the United Nations “found no evidence that armed opposition groups had been operating helicopters at the time and location of the cases investigated.”

In 2013, the United Nations investigated a Sarin gas attack in Syria, killing hundreds of people. A U.N. chemical weapons team was authorized to investigate the incident. However, thanks to a threatened Russian veto, the U.N. team was forbidden from assigning blame for the Sarin attack. But the team found a clever way of assigning blame without having to say it. In their scientific analysis of the evidence, they included calculations of the trajectories of the rockets that delivered the Sarin gas. They drew no conclusions about where the rockets were launched, but they provided enough scientific information within the report so that experts studying the report could analyze the trajectories to prove that the rockets must have been launched from a Syrian Republican Guard unit. AP and Middle East Eye and United Nations (30-Aug)

From 2013: The history of how Syria’s Bashar al-Assad created ISIS

There has been much discussion in the news lately about how the so-called Islamic State (IS or ISIS or ISIL or Daesh) came into existence. I happen to be in an excellent position to answer that question, since I was writing “World View” articles pretty much every day. I wrote 361 articles in 2013, comprising almost 400,000 words. So I went back in time to 2013 to see what I wrote about how ISIS was created, and there is no doubt whatsoever that Syria’s president Bashar al-Assad created ISIS.

Starting around April 2013, there were reports of jihadists from other parts of the world coming to Syria to fight al-Assad. What was remarkable is that I was the only person I knew of who was describing the dangerous consequences of this. Of course I could not predict the formation of ISIS at that time, though I did start to mention ISIS in October of that year. And I repeatedly predicted that these jihadists would develop terrorist skills in Syria and bring them back to other countries to conduct terrorist attacks.

I was particularly contemptuous of the three leaders responsible for this impending disaster: Syria’s president Bashar al-Assad, Russia’s president Vladimir Putin, and Iran’s supreme leader Seyed Ali Khamenei. Even then it was clear to me that this these three idiots were going to cause a huge disaster and Mideast and beyond. And as I said, no one else was writing about this.

I was also contemptuous of president Obama’s flip-flop on the Sarin gas red line. That is the reason that no one else was writing about this: because it gave the lie to Obama’s claim that things were under control in the Mideast, and the mainstream media didn’t dare to write anything critical of Obama.

The flow of jihadists into Syria began as a trickle, but turned into a flood because of two events.

The Mideast changed dramatically on April 30, when Sayyed Hasan Nasrallah, the leader of the Lebanon-based Shia terror group Hezbollah, gave a televised saying that Hezbollah would militarily enter the fight in Syria on the side of the regime of Syria’s president Bashar al-Assad, and then followed up by winning an overwhelming victory against Syria’s opposition in Qusair. That was the point in time when Syria’s civil war turned into a war between Sunnis and Shias in the Mideast. Nasrallah was acting under orders from Iran.

The second event was President Obama’s flip-flop on his “red line” declaration, after al-Assad used Sarin gas on his own people. It is hard to overestimate the impact of this flip-flop, because it made it clear to everyone – al-Assad, Iran, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, etc. — that for the first time in decades, the United States would no longer be a force for peace in the Mideast. After this, everyone knew that they could do anything they wanted with impunity.

With tens of thousands of jihadists flooding into Syria to fight al-Assad, it was only a matter of time when there would be total disaster, and that’s what’s happened. These thousands of jihadists joined together to form ISIS, and I blame it entirely on the unbelievably stupid actions of al-Assad, Putin, and Khamenei.

I put the collection of 2013 excerpts into a posting in the Generational Dynamics forum.

KEYS: Generational Dynamics, Syria, Bashar al-Assad, Aleppo, Islamic State / of Iraq and Syria/Sham/the Levant, IS, ISIS, ISIL, Daesh, Russia, Vladimir Putin, Iran, Ayatollah Seyed Ali Khamenei, Hezbollah, Turkey, Saudi Arabia
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