THE BIDEN INVASION - Health inspections for foreign nationals entering our country illegally have gone out the window. That's enabled the importation of many diseases which affect livestock and other agricultural output, and already these things are happening. Legal immigrants and even returning U.S. citizens must pass these inspections to protect the U.S. food supply. But under Joe Biden's catch-and-release, illegals are exempt from such cumbersome requirements. MONICA SHOWALTER
Wednesday, January 24, 2018
JEFF FLAKE'S STATE OF ARIZONA - SCOTT DANIEL WARREN ARRESTED FOR GIVING FOOD AND WATER FOR INVADING ILLEGALS....... ISN'T AMERICA A COUNTRY WHERE TENS OF MILLIONS OF ILLEGALS HAVE JOBS WITH STOLEN SOCIAL SECURITY NUMBERS AND NO EMPLOYERS OF ILLEGALS EVER ARRESTED???
MILLIONS OF EMPLOYERS KNOWING HIRE ILLEGALS SO THEY DON'T HAVE TO PAY LIVING WAGES TO LEGALS.... NOT ONE IS ARRESTED!
Volunteer arrested for
giving food and water to immigrants along US-Mexico border
By
Will Morrow
24 January 2018
On January 16, US Border Patrol agents in Ajo, Arizona arrested
Scott Daniel Warren, a volunteer organizer for the immigrants’ rights advocacy
organization No More Deaths, which provides food, water and medical assistance
to immigrants crossing the treacherous US-Mexico desert borderlands. Warren
faces federal charges of harboring two people in the country illegally, which
carry a maximum sentence of five years’ imprisonment.
Warren’s arrest is a blatant act of retribution against No More
Deaths by the Trump administration and its border police force. It was made
just eight hours after the organization held a press conference to announce a
new report that documents US Border Patrol agents’ systematic destruction of
humanitarian water supplies left for immigrants along the border.
The report was accompanied by video footage, captured between 2010
and 2017, showing officers laughing as they pour out and kick over water
bottles in the desert. The video has sparked outrage and been viewed more than
18 million times on Facebook. By arresting Warren, the Trump administration and
the Customs and Border Protection agency are seeking to silence public exposure
or criticisms of their actions more broadly with the threat of prosecution.
Warren, 35, is a faculty associate professor at Arizona State
University in the School of Geographical Sciences and Urban Planning, where he
lectures on the humanitarian crisis along the US-Mexico border. In the last two
decades, as many as 27,000 people are estimated to have died attempting to
travel through Mexico to the US from countries in Central and South America
which have been torn apart by wars and dictatorships carried out or supported
by the United States government.
The government’s own tally as of December 2017, of 7,216 deaths—itself
a catastrophic figure, more than twice the number of people killed in the
September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks—dramatically understates the real total,
as revealed in a recent USAToday investigation. Many of
those who die in the desert of dehydration, starvation, suffocation or exposure
to the heat and cold, are never identified.
After attending a court hearing on January 18, Warren was released
without bail and is due to attend video deposition hearings next month. The
court is yet to decide on whether these hearings will be made public.
According to the court documents, federal agents had tracked two
migrants to a medical clinic run by No More Deaths in Ajo, known as “the Barn,”
which they had been monitoring for days. This is in line with a common practice
of placing cameras and sensors around medical aid camps set up by advocacy
groups and turning them into traps to ensnare immigrants who go to them in
desperate need of help.
The complainant statement filed in the court claims: “After
finding their way to ‘the Barn,’ Warren met them outside and gave them food and
water for approximately three days.” The report alleges that one of the two
immigrants, both of whom have now been detained and face deportation, “said
that Warren took care of them in ‘the Barn’ by giving them food, water, beds
and clean clothes.” In other words, the charges are aimed at criminalizing
anyone who provides life-saving assistance to immigrants or undocumented
workers who cross the border through the desert.
In comments cited by the ArizonaRepublic on January 22,
Warren’s attorney Bill Walker said the arrest violated a longstanding
understanding between immigrants’ rights groups, Border Patrol and the US
Attorney’s Office, allowing them to provide assistance.
“We don’t smuggle them, we don’t do anything to help them enter
the United States, we do nothing illegal,” Walker said. “This place that they
raided is not in the middle of the desert, it’s not hidden anywhere. It’s in
the city of Ajo, and it’s been used for a long time, not to help smuggle
migrants, but to give medical care and food and water.”
Warren’s arrest is part of a broader escalation of the Trump
administration’s crackdown on immigrants and undocumented workers. Last week,
following a series of workplace raids on over 100 7-Eleven convenience stores,
Immigrations Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials refused to deny a news report
that they are planning a massive dragnet in California to round up 1,500
undocumented workers.
On Friday, border patrol agents boarded a bus in Miami, Florida
and demanded that passengers provide documentation of their US residency
rights. They arrested one woman, later identified as Beverley, who had
allegedly overstayed her tourist visa. She was turned over to ICE for
deportation on Monday. A video of the arrest, captured by another passenger on
the bus, was viewed more than two million times over the weekend.
One day earlier, ICE agents arrested 14 undocumented workers in a
5 am raid at the Days Inn hotel in Colchester, Vermont, as they were leaving
for work.
The agency also appears to have begun a deliberate campaign
targeting migrants who publicly speak out against the administration’s
policies. On January 11, Ravi Ragbir, the executive director of the interfaith
immigrants rights group New Sanctuary Coalition of NYC, who moved to the United
States from Trinidad and Tobago decades ago, was detained by ICE when he attended a regular
check-in with ICE agents. On December 20, ICE agents in Washington began
deportation proceedings against Maru Mora-Villalpango, the founder of a local
immigrant rights group.
The systematic sabotaging of water supplies along the US-Mexico
border and the efforts to intimidate organizations from providing assistance to
immigrants is the outcome of a deliberate, bipartisan strategy of both the
Democrats and Republicans. This particularly cruel and criminal effort to deter
other immigrants from South and Central America from exercising their
democratic right—recognized under international law—to seek refuge in the US,
guarantees that hundreds of men, women and children will continue to die every
year.
The Obama administration deported more immigrants than any
previous administration and spent hundreds of millions of dollars recruiting
hundreds more border agents and militarizing the southern border. This policy,
which forces immigrants to cross over ever-more treacherous terrain away from
heavily guarded urban areas, was initiated under the Clinton administration in
1994 and has been maintained by every administration since, Democrat and
Republican alike.
The Democratic Party bears the principal political responsibility
for the Trump administration’s ability to carry out its reactionary
anti-immigrant crackdown. The Democrats have worked to systematically sabotage
popular opposition to Trump’s right-wing policies, including his attacks on
immigrants, massive tax cuts for the corporate elite, and threatening war with
North Korea, instead channeling opposition behind the McCarthyite campaign
against so-called “Russian influence” in US politics and in support of a more
aggressive confrontation for war with nuclear-armed Russia. The Washington-imposed economic policy of economic growth via mass-immigration floods the market with foreign labor, spikes profits and Wall Street values by cutting salaries for manual and skilled labor offered by blue-collar and white-collar employees. It also drives up real estate prices, widens wealth-gaps, reduces high-tech investment, increases state and local tax burdens, hurts kids’ schools and college education, pushes Americans away from high-tech careers, and sidelines at least 5 million marginalized Americans and their families, including many who are now struggling with opioid addictions.
Notice how we never hear the phony populist Trump talking about E-VERIFY!
AMERICA: NO LEGAL NEED APPLY!
“The percentage of foreign-born workers in the U.S. labor force has more than tripled over the last four decades and while the U.S. represents just 5 percent of the world’s population it attracts 20 percent of the world’s immigrants, according to a new report.”
Open the floodgates of our welfare state to the uneducated, impoverished, and unskilled masses of the world and in a generation or three America, as we know it, will be gone.
Those most impacted are middle class and lower middle class. It is they whose jobs are taken, whose raises are postponed, whose schools are filled with non-English speaking children that absorb precious resources for remedial English, whose public parks are trashed and whose emergency rooms serve as the local clinic for the illegal underground.
THE SECRET REPORT ON ILLEGALS TAKING MIDDLE AND HIGH END JOBS…. What? You thought they only took the sh//// -it jobs?
Members of Congress broadly oppose a legislative nationwide E-Verify mandate for employers because “they know it will work,” said NumbersUSA’s Rosemary Jenks, explaining why E-Verify is not being pushed in congressional negotiations for an amnesty deal for recipients of the Obama administration’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA). Jenks further noted that both parties are beholden to special interests supportive of “mass migration.”
Jenks offered her analysis during a Monday interview on SiriusXM’s Breitbart News Tonight with Breitbart News’s Senior Editors-at-Large Rebecca Mansour and Joel Pollak.
Mansour asked Jenks why most Republicans were not supporting a legislative nationwide mandate for E-Verify use by employers. “Why do you think that this isn’t being pushed, then? It seems like a no-brainer. Why is this not being included in all the negotiations?” she said.
“I think [E-Verify] is not being pushed precisely because members of Congress know it will work,” said Jenks. “I think that is exactly the reason it’s not being pushed. Democrats, for sure, don’t want mandatory E-Verify because they know it will discourage illegal immigration, which will discourage the push for the next amnesty. And, let’s face it, the establishment Republicans don’t want it because they know it will be effective and eliminate their cheap labor pools.”
Special interests, including “big business,” “organized religion,” and “ethnic advocacy groups,” subvert popular American will via their funding and political agitation, said Jenks, adding, “It’s about the donors and about the Democrat Party wanting mass immigration. Those are the two factors that rule every immigration debate. It’s always the big business donors, organized religion, the ethnic advocacy groups. All of the money is behind mass immigration, and then, there’s the American people on the other side. That’s the problem we have had. That’s why we haven’t controlled immigration in the last five decades.”
Legislating a national mandate for E-Verify use by employers is more important than construction of a southern border wall, argued Jenks. “In our view, mandatory E-Verify is more important than a wall. So that is the one place where we’re hoping that we can move the administration to saying E-Verify is a must-have.”
Approximately half of “the illegal population” is composed of foreigners who lawfully entered the homeland and overstay their visas, said Jenks. An E-Verify mandate on employers, she added, would “mostly shut down” the lure of employment for illegal aliens.
E-Verify usage by employers would facilitate more effective enforcement of immigration law by allowing federal authorities to target businesses abstaining for its use, said Jenks. “They have a clearer target for enforcement measures.”
Jenks listed the following elements as “must-haves” for any legislative amnesty proposal: 1) limiting the amnesty to the DACA population; 2) ending chain migration; 3) ending the “Diversity Visa Program” lottery; 4) implementation of effective border security and interior enforcement measures; and 5) implementation of a national mandate for employer use of E-Verify.
Breitbart News Tonight airs Monday through Friday on SiriusXM’s Patriot channel 125 from 9:00 p.m. to midnight Eastern (6:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m. Pacific).
A year ago, President Trump committed to the American people to build a wall along the United States-Mexico border to stop illegal immigration and the flow of drugs into the country.
A year later, Trump is still promising to build the border wall, as prototypes of what the wall could look like sit in the San Diego, California, desert and border-crossings surge back to President Obama-era illegal immigration levels.
Since September 2017, eight border wall prototypes have sat in San Diego, being tested by U.S. Customs and Border Protection and toured countlessly by government officials.
Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen toured the border wall prototypes in December 2017, telling Fox News that the wall was paramount to ending illegal immigration.
“We got to have a wall, we’re going to have a wall. But then you need the technology, you need the people, you need the censors, you need the cameras, you need the monitoring, to make sure that that wall is as effective as it can be,” Nielsen said.
A month later, Nielsen and the Trump administration have continued to struggle to secure the full $18 billion funding for the border wall from a Republican-controlled Congress that remains dedicated to the big business lobby’s interests on immigration, constantly demanding more legal immigration and continued access to illegal alien workers.
While the prototypes continue collecting dust in the San Diego region, border-crossings under Trump have surged back to where they were under Obama, a pattern that proves pro-American immigration reformers’ assertion that talk of cracking down on illegal immigration will only deter illegal immigrants from breaching the southern border for so long.
Between April 2017—when border-crossings hit a historic low—and December 2017, family unit border-crossings have surged 625 percent, Breitbart Texas reported, with the last month of 2017 even exceeding the number of border-crossings under Obama.
In the month of December alone, U.S. Border Patrol agents apprehended almost 30,000 illegal aliens trying to cross into the country between ports of entry, where Trump’s border wall would be sitting if it were constructed today.
As Breitbart News reported, for the last two months of 2017, the Republican establishment, Nielsen, and Democrats have floated the idea of giving amnesty to nearly 800,000 illegal aliens shielded from deportation by the President Obama-created Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program.
The mere talk of the DACA amnesty has coincided with surges in border-crossings, with Nielsen admitting last month that human smugglers on the southern border and future illegal aliens pay close attention to the national immigration debate in the U.S. to decide when will be the best time to cross into the country illegally.
Nearing the end of the first month of 2017, the Republican-controlled Congress has yet to hand over full funding for the border wall, and more importantly, have shifted focus to getting DACA illegal aliens a pathway to U.S. citizenship.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder.
Border City near Texas Considered Mexico’s Most Dangerous, Finds Survey
The city where citizens felt least safe is in Reynosa, according to 95.6 percent of local respondents.
Since 2010, this border city has been immersed in waves of violence where rival cartel groups fight for control. The violence began when the Gulf Cartel split off from its former enforcers, Los Zetas, thus setting off a series of gun battles for control of the streets. The skirmishes continue in waves where in addition to the fight with Los Zetas, the CDG went through a series of internal fractures that spread even more bloodshed. As a consequence of the high cost of being constantly at war, residents have also been victimized by a spike in extortions, carjackings, kidnappings, and home and business robberies.
Editor’s Note: Breitbart Texas traveled to the Mexican States of Tamaulipas, Coahuila, and Nuevo León to recruit citizen journalists willing to risk their lives and expose the cartels silencing their communities. The writers would face certain death at the hands of the various cartels that operate in those areas including the Gulf Cartel and Los Zetas if a pseudonym were not used. Breitbart Texas’ Cartel Chronicles are published in both English and in their original Spanish. This article was written by “A.C Del Angel” from Tamaulipas.
THE FINAL SOLUTION:
America surrenders its borders to the MEXICAN FASCIST PARTY of LA RAZA, now masquerading as UNIDOSus.
An American immigrant is not someone supported by government funds in a "relocation" center; flown over here at government expense; given a cash allowance, free housing, and medical care; and then eased onto local public assistance: Section 8 rental grants, food stamps, WIC, AFDC, clothes from one government-sponsored charity or another, Medicaid, and public schooling, with free lunch and breakfasts and even help with furniture. That's not an immigrant. That's a future Democrat voter. ----- RICHARD F. MINITER – AMERICAN THINKER COM
The pro-open borders Hispanic Caucus has “implored” President Trump’s administration to stop mentioning the process known as “chain migration,” whereby newly naturalized citizens are allowed under the current legal immigration system to bring an unlimited number of foreign relatives to the U.S.
A report by POLITICO revealed that members of the House Hispanic Caucus — which regularly advocates for more immigration to the U.S. despite its negative impact on America’s working and middle class — asked Trump’s Chief of Staff John Kelly to stop talking about chain migration, which has imported more than 9.3 million foreign nationals to the country since 2005.
POLITICO reported:
In the Hispanic Caucus meeting, Democrats said they implored Kelly and his aides to stop using the phrase “chain migration,” a term that minority lawmakers say is an offensive way to describe family reunification policies. [Emphasis added]
Democrats and the Republican establishment have become increasingly upset that the Trump administration has successfully educated the American public on the impact of chain migration and the millions of foreign nationals that the process has brought to the U.S.
For example, Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL) also asked the Trump administration to stop talking about chain migration, claiming the term, itself, is offensive to black Americans, despite being a term that Durbin, himself, used in the White House last week.
Durbin said in an interview:
That was the nature of this conversation. When it came to the issue of, quote, “chain migration,” I said to the president, do you realize how painful that term is to so many people? African-Americans believe they migrated to America in chains and when you talk about chain migration, it hurts them personally. [Emphasis added]
Democrats and the Republican establishment have been exceptionally unwilling to cut a deal with Trump on immigration, specifically on provisions that would end the wildly unpopular process of chain migration, as well as the Diversity Visa Lottery program.
Department of Homeland Security (DHS) data reveals that more than nine million foreign nationals have come to the U.S. as chain migrants between 2005 and 2016. In that same time period, a total of 13.06 million foreign nationals have entered the U.S. through the legal immigration system, as every seven out of ten new arrivals come to the country for nothing other than family reunification.
This makes chain migration the largest driver of immigration to the U.S. — making up more than 70 percent. As Breitbart News reported, five years of chain migration to the U.S. adds more people to the country than one year of American births.
In December 2017, the Trump administration popularized the term “chain migration” as a way to describe the massive inflow of foreign relatives to the U.S. in a campaign that revealed immigration data that had never been released before.
For instance, the number of chain migrants who have resettled in the U.S. in the last decade is greater than the total combined population of Los Angeles, Chicago, Dallas, San Francisco, and Cleveland, the White House noted in a series of graphs.
Since August 2017, Trump has demanded the Republican-controlled Congress end chain migration, thus cutting legal immigration levels to raise the wages of American workers and give workforce relief to working and middle-class communities – especially black Americans, who remain disproportionately more unemployed than other groups.
Before the Trump administration, the processes of mass legal and illegal immigration to the U.S. over the last few decades were hardly known to the American public, as the Bush and Obama administrations did not seek to reduce legal immigration to benefit U.S. workers.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder.
Family Unit Border Crossings Up 625 Percent from April 2017 Low
The number of families apprehended by Border Patrol agents grew by 625 percent from a low point in April 2017. The figure fell sharply during the first four months of the Trump Administration but has risen steadily thereafter.
In April 2017, Border Patrol agents apprehended 1,119 Family Unit Aliens (FMUA), Breitbart Texas reported. The number of FMUA apprehensions rose nearly every month since the his low point to 8,121 in December, according to the Southwest Border Migration report released by U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) on Tuesday. This number represents an increase from April of more than 7,000 FMUAs (625 percent). CBP defines FMUA as the “number of individuals (either a child under 18 years old, parent or legal guardian) apprehended with a family member by the U.S. Border Patrol.”
CBP officials released the shocking numbers on the same day President Donald Trump met with Congressional leaders to discuss amnesty for illegal alien minors brought to the U.S. by their families under the same circumstances as the FMUAs currently entering the country. The meeting addressed Congressional plans to replace President Barrack Obama’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program. Shortly after the meeting, a judge in the Ninth Circuit ordered the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to largely reinstate DACA.
U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions rescinded the DACA program in September, Breitbart News reported. He said there would be an “orderly and lawful wind-down.” His announcement followed a threat from Texas and nine other states to add the DACA program to an already successful lawsuit that effectively ended President Obama’s Deferred Action for Parents of Americans (DAPA) program.
“For these same reasons that DAPA and Expanded DACA’s unilateral Executive Branch conferral of eligibility for lawful presence and work authorization was unlawful, the original June 15, 2012 DACA memorandum is also unlawful,” the letter from the states explained. “
Following the DACA rescission by Sessions, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton announced the states would drop their threatened lawsuit, Breitbart Texas reported.
DACA is seen by many as a magnet that draws FMUAs and Unaccompanied Alien Children to risk their lives to come to the U.S. illegally. These groups pay large sums of money to cartel-connected human smugglers to bring them to the U.S. in hopes they will be included in a DACA replacement amnesty program.
FMUAs and UACs represented nearly 40 percent of all illegal aliens apprehended by Border Patrol agents during Fiscal Year 2017. Agents apprehended a total of 117,057 FMUAs and UACs during the FY2017 which ended in September. Between the beginning of the new fiscal year on October 1 and December 30, agents apprehended 31,209 additional families and unaccompanied minors.
The UACs are reported to be coming from Guatemala (5,697), Mexico (2,433), Honduras (1,740), and El Salvador (993). Guatemala also leads the list of countries sending FMUAs to the U.S. with 10,650 during the first three months of FY2018. This is followed by Honduras (5,545), El Salvador (3,136), and Mexico (481).
Bob Price serves as associate editor and senior political news contributor for Breitbart Texas. He is a founding member of the Breitbart Texas team. Follow him on Twitter @BobPriceBBTX, Gab, and Facebook.
Kris Kobach: Border Surge of Potentially 1M Illegal Aliens ‘Guaranteed’ Following DACA Amnesty
A surge of illegal immigration at the U.S.-Mexico border that could reach up to one million border-crossings is “guaranteed” following a possible amnesty for nearly 800,000 illegal aliens, says Kansas Secretary of State and gubernatorial candidate Kris Kobach.
In an interview on SiriusXM’s Breitbart News Sunday, hosted by Breitbart News Political Editor Matt Boyle and Deputy Political Editor Amanda House, Kobach warned President Trump against negotiating a deal wherein illegal aliens shielded from deportation by the President Obama-created Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program are given amnesty, saying such a plan would trigger a massive border surge.
KOBACH: And there will be a surge, it is guarenteed. If there is a DACA amnesty, there will be a massive surge of hundreds of thousands, if not more than a million, new illegal aliens.
HOUSE: Right, we saw that in the ’80’s and the ’90’s, as well, following the 1986 amnesty.
KOBACH: That’s exactly right. And as some Breitbart readers may know, if they’ve seen my piece this week, I put some statistics in there. Yeah, that ’86 amnesty, it ended up being for 2.7 million people which was a larger number than was expected by Congress and by President Reagan’s administration when it happened. And the reason its a larger number is its estimated that about 700,000 people came in or applied for the amnesty who were not eligible for it. And so… what happens when you grant amnesty is immediately people flood across the border because they want to falsely claim that they were already here and get the new amnesty or they want to at least get here and wait for the next amnesty.
An amnesty for DACA illegal aliens has the potential to trigger a border surge that could triple the current level of border-crossings, which under President Trump, have ticked back up to Obama-era levels due to border wall construction being stalled in the prototype stage for months.
As the Migration Policy Institute has chronicled, previous border surges from amnesty programs have brought hundreds of thousands across the U.S.-Mexico border:
While the flow of Unaccompanied Alien Children (UACs) has been climbing steadily since 2012, a dramatic surge has taken place in the last six months, with the Rio Grande Valley in South Texas as the principal place of entry. The Border Patrol there has converted entire stations to house unaccompanied minors and families.
According to the Border Patrol, apprehensions of unaccompanied children increased from 16,067 in fiscal year (FY) 2011 to 24,481 in FY 2012 and 38,833 in FY 2013. During the first eight months of FY 2014, 47,017 such children were apprehended by the Border Patrol. If the influx continues apace—and it shows no signs of slowing—the administration predicts that by the end of the fiscal year on September 30, totals could reach 90,000.
Ninety-eight percent of unaccompanied minors currently arriving at the border are from Honduras (28 percent), Mexico (25 percent), Guatemala (24 percent), and El Salvador (21 percent). This breakdown represents a significant shift: prior to 2012, more than 75 percent of UACs were from Mexico.
In recent days, Trump has said that negotiations for a DACA amnesty — that would include cutting legal immigration levels to benefit America’s workers and immediately constructing the border wall — are “probably dead” due to Democrats’ unwillingness to cut legal immigration and bar employers from hiring illegal aliens over U.S. citizens.
Listen to the full Breitbart News Sunday interview here:
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder.
US to set up 30,000-strong “border force” in Syria
By Peter Symonds 16 January 2018
In a provocative step that immediately fuelled tensions with Turkey and Russia, the US announced last weekend the establishment of a 30,000-strong Border Security Force (BSF) in enclaves of Syria under the control of the American proxies fighting to topple the Syrian government of President Bashar al-Assad. The BSF will be dominated by fighters from Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG), alongside elements from various Islamist militias.
Having proclaimed the defeat of Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS), Washington has no intention of leaving Syria. It is determined to carve out a swathe of territory from which to prosecute its goal of ousting Assad. The latest move will not only intensify the civil war in Syria but bring the US into direct conflict with Russia and Iran, which back the Assad regime, and Turkey, which regards the YPG as a direct military threat.
Colonel Thomas Veale, a spokesman for the US-led coalition against ISIS, announced that the 15,000 troops of the US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) would form the core of the new army. “Currently, there are approximately 230 individuals training in the BSF’s inaugural class, with the goal of a final force size of approximately 30,000,” he said.
Testifying to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee last Thursday, David Satterfield, acting US assistant secretary of state for near eastern affairs, revealed that the Trump administration’s aims, beyond the continued suppression of ISIS, involve the consolidation of the SDF in the north and northeast of Syria, and the countering of Iranian influence.
The war against ISIS was only ever a pretext for advancing US plans for regime change in Damascus as the means for combatting Iranian and Russian influence in Syria. Far from destroying ISIS, the US, which maintains 2,000 troops in Syria, and its local proxies ensured the safety of thousands of armed ISIS fighters. According to Russia, these ISIS fighters are being trained and integrated into anti-Assad forces.
At the same time, the US is facing possible Turkish military action that could destroy plans for a pro-American zone in Syria. Turkey, a NATO ally, is deeply concerned about linkages between the YPG and the separatist Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), which it brands a terrorist group and has long sought to suppress. Three months ago, Turkish troops crossed the border into Syria near the YPG-controlled Idlib enclave in northern Syria.
Ibrahim Kalin, a spokesman for Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, accused the US over the weekend of “taking worrying steps to legitimise this organisation [YPG] and make it lasting in the region.” He warned: “It is absolutely not possible for this to be accepted.” Turkey would “continue its fight against any terrorist organisation regardless of its name and shape within and outside its borders.”
Erdogan condemned US support for the YPG, declaring on the weekend: “The US sent 4,900 trucks of weapons in Syria. We know this. This is not what allies do.” At a rally yesterday he reiterated his determination to “vanquish” the Kurdish militia. “We have finished our preparations,” he said. “The operation can start any time.” Erdogan accused the US of “creating a terror army on our border,” adding: “What we have to do is nip this terror army in the bud.”
The Syrian government denounced the planned pro-US border force as a “blatant assault” on the country’s sovereignty. The state-run news agency, SANA, cited a foreign ministry spokesperson as insisting that the army was determined to thwart the US “conspiracy, end the presence of the US, its agents and tools in Syria, establish full control over the entire Syria territory and preserve the country’s sovereignty.”
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov yesterday accused the US of seeking to split up Syria, saying it “does not want to keep Syria as a state in its current borders.” Washington was helping “the Syrian Democratic Forces to set up some border security zones.”
Lavrov stated: “What it would mean is that vast swathes of territory along the border of Turkey and Iraq would be isolated. It’s to the east of the Euphrates River. There are difficult relations between Kurds and Arabs there. There is a fear they are pursuing a policy to cut Syria into several pieces.”
Vladimir Shmanov, chairman of the Russian State Duma’s defence committee, warned that Russia would respond to the planned Syrian border force. “[It] stands in direct confrontation [with Russia’s interests] and we and our colleagues will certainly undertake certain measures on stabilisation of the situation in Syria,” he said.
The US announcement that it will train and equip a 30,000-strong military force is a desperate attempt to shore up its position in Syria. Diplomatically, it is Moscow, not Washington, that appears to be dictating the terms of negotiations over Syria, with plans for a conference in Sochi later this month to discuss the country’s future.
Militarily, the US-backed anti-Assad militias have suffered one defeat after another, not only because of Russian and Iranian support for the Syrian army, but because of widespread popular hostility, particularly to the reactionary Al Qaeda-linked elements supported by Washington.
The last remaining major Syrian opposition enclave of Idlib has been the focus of a major government offensive since the beginning of year. Into this volatile mix, the US has declared that it intends to stake out a claim by funding, training and arming a large new proxy army, only compounding the danger of a wider war.
WASHINGTON SECRETS
Criminal illegals, tax cheats, sanctuary cities OK'd in Gang of Six immigration deal
by Paul bEdard | From left, President Donald Trump, accompanied by Secretary of Homeland Security Kirstjen Nielsen, Sen. Thom Tillis, R-N.C., Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., Vice President Mike Pence, Senate Majority Whip Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas., and Sen. James Lankford, R-Okla., speaks during a meeting on immigration in the Roosevelt Room at the White House, Thursday, Jan. 4, 2018, in Washington. (AP Photo/Andrew Harnik)
No comments:
Post a Comment