Thread: US carries out ‘precision defensive strikes’ in Iraq and Syria against Iranian-backed

Originally Posted by bsnub

no good at conventional warfare

"conventional warfare"? Is it such a warfare when playing with joystick when sitting in bolstered chair in front of a killing monitor?

Originally Posted by Pragmatic

I agree and that is why I think Iran will not retaliate to this latest incident. Time will tell.

Prag i disagree there, i think they will retaliate but not in the way all the hype from them suggests. The backdrop of course is their continued uranium enrichment and that what america is and should be worried about...

Originally Posted by NamPikToot

i think they will retaliate but not in the way all the hype from them suggests.

You may well be right. This expert agrees with your opinion.

Trump's New Year killing of Soleimani finally blows up the fake Russiagate narrative

Trump’s ordered assassination of General Qasem Soleimani, head of the Revolutionary Guards’ elite Quds force, not only means a dangerous escalation of tensions with Iran, but also ends fiction that Russia was controlling him.

Just imagine….. If Iran’s President Rouhani had authorised a New Year drone strike on General Mark Milley, the Chairman of the United States Joint Chiefs of Staff, as he was being driven to the airport in Canada.

Would anyone even be suggesting that the attack was done in ‘self-defense’? But that’s exactly the line we’re being fed now about the killing of Qasem Soleimani.

----
We’ve been told (ad nauseum) the past few years that Donald Trump was under the control of Putin. That he was a de facto Russian agent. A marionette of Moscow.

At least now, not even the most credulous inhabitant of planet Earth will believe that one. Iran is a key Middle Eastern ally of Russia, an important strategic partner. By assassinating Soleimani and putting us on a military collision course with Tehran, Trump is not only menacing the Islamic Republic, he is poking the Russian bear in the chest, back and face too. Today’s events, for anyone who still had any doubts, shows that the foreign country which have the greatest influence in US politics is not Russia, but Israel (and after Israel, Saudi Arabia).

Read more
https://www.rt.com/op-ed/477397-trum...ssiagate-fake/

Originally Posted by Klondyke

"conventional warfare"? Is it such a warfare when playing with joystick when sitting in bolstered chair in front of a killing monitor?

Yes, Boomer!

They don't use spears & slingshots anymore.

Originally Posted by Klondyke

Read more
https://www.rt.com/

no thanks, comrade.

you can spread your disinformation elsewhere.

Originally Posted by Klondick's propaganda

Just imagine….. If Iran’s President Rouhani had authorised a New Year drone strike on General Mark Milley, the Chairman of the United States Joint Chiefs of Staff, as he was being driven to the airport in Canada.

Would anyone even be suggesting that the attack was done in ‘self-defense’? But that’s exactly the line we’re being fed now about the killing of Qasem Soleimani.

Stupid comparison!
If General Mark Milley was in Canada to organise strikes against embassies and others, and also dumb enough to advertise it all on twitter, then yes it will be self-defense.


Go find some more intelligent propaganda from the Chinastan Times.

Originally Posted by TheRealKW

I think you underestimate Iran.

I think you overestimate them.

The US could turn the place to glass without setting foot in it.

Originally Posted by Plan B

Stupid comparison!
If General Mark Milley was in Canada to organise strikes against embassies and others, and also dumb enough to advertise it all on twitter, then yes it will be self-defense.

Go find some more intelligent propaganda from the Chinastan Times.

Cannot find nothing like this on Chinastan or similar...Perhaps this is better for you?

Robert Fisk @indyvoices 16 hours ago
113 comments

Just imagine what would happen if a leading American general – or two, since Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis was a leading pro-Iranian figure in Iraq – was blown up on a tour of the Middle East. There would be airstrikes, attacks on Iran’s nuclear centres, threats by Washington to close down all traffic between Iran and the outside world. The death of an American in Baghdad on Friday and the riots outside the US embassy scarcely justify American attacks on this scale.

Read more
https://www.independent.co.uk/voices...-a9269161.html

The death of an American in Baghdad on Friday and the riots outside the US embassy scarcely justify American attacks on this scale.

Again it's a stupid comparison.
It's also the attacks on shipping in the Gulf, the shooting down of a drone, bombing of an oil refinery and more importantly specific threats of continued attacks on Americans, allies, world shipping, embassies, oil refineries and whatever else.

Originally Posted by harrybarracuda

The US could turn the place to glass without setting foot in it.

in theory it could.....but we heard that in 2001 about afghanistan and 2003 about iraq.

yet the US is still mired in both countries after costing untold numbers of lives and wasting trillions of dollars.

Originally Posted by Plan B

If General Mark Milley was in Canada to organise strikes against embassies and others, and also dumb enough to advertise it all on twitter, then yes it will be self-defense.

what exactly do you think pompeo and esper are doing when they make their frequent trips to the middle east and europe?

if they were assassinated by a drone-fired missile at an airfield in qatar, bahrain or oman, you can bet the US would declare war on the country who came out and flatly said, "yeah, we did it".

despite your using an exclamation point, the comparison is apt.

http://www.reuters.com/article/us-ir...-idUSKBN1Z301Z

Inside the plot by Iran’s Soleimani to attack U.S. forces in Iraq

(Reuters) - In mid-October, Iranian Major-General Qassem Soleimani met with his Iraqi Shi’ite militia allies at a villa on the banks of the Tigris River, looking across at the U.S. embassy complex in Baghdad.

The Revolutionary Guards commander instructed his top ally in Iraq, Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, and other powerful militia leaders to step up attacks on U.S. targets in the country using sophisticated new weapons provided by Iran, two militia commanders and two security sources briefed on the gathering told Reuters.

The strategy session, which has not been previously reported, came as mass protests against Iran’s growing influence in Iraq were gaining momentum, putting the Islamic Republic in an unwelcome spotlight. Soleimani’s plans to attack U.S. forces aimed to provoke a military response that would redirect that rising anger toward the United States, according to the sources briefed on the gathering, Iraqi Shi’ite politicians and government officials close to Iraqi Prime Minister Adel Abdul Mahdi.

Soleimani’s efforts ended up provoking the U.S. attack on Friday that killed him and Muhandis, marking a major escalation of tensions between the United States and Iran. The two men died in air strikes on their convoy at a Baghdad airport as they headed to the capital, dealing a major blow to the Islamic Republic and the Iraqi paramilitary groups it supports.

Interviews with the Iraqi security sources and Shi’ite militia commanders offer a rare glimpse of how Soleimani operated in Iraq, which he once told a Reuters reporter he knew like the back of his hand.

Two weeks before the October meeting, Soleimani ordered Iranian Revolutionary Guards to move more sophisticated weapons - such as Katyusha rockets and shoulder-fired missiles that could bring down helicopters - to Iraq through two border crossings, the militia commanders and Iraqi security sources told Reuters.

At the Baghdad villa, Soleimani told the assembled commanders to form a new militia group of low-profile paramilitaries - unknown to the United States - who could carry out rocket attacks on Americans housed at Iraqi military bases. He ordered Kataib Hezbollah - a force founded by Muhandis and trained in Iran - to direct the new plan, said the militia sources briefed on the meetings.

Soleimani told them such a group “would be difficult to detect by the Americans,” one of the militia sources told Reuters.

Before the attacks, the U.S. intelligence community had reason to believe that Soleimani was involved in “late stage” planning to strike Americans in multiple countries, including Iraq, Syria and Lebanon, U.S. officials told Reuters Friday on condition of anonymity. One senior U.S. official said Soleimani had supplied advanced weaponry to Kataib Hezbollah.

White House national security adviser Robert O’Brien told reporters on Friday that Soleimani had just come from Damascus, “where he was planning attacks on American soldiers, airmen, Marines, sailors and against our diplomats.”

An official at the headquarters of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards declined to comment. A spokesperson for the Iranian foreign ministry was not available for comment.

The United States has grown increasingly concerned about Iran’s influence over the ruling elite in Iraq, which has been beset for months by protesters who accuse the government of enriching itself and serving the interests of foreign powers, especially Iran, as Iraqis languish in poverty without jobs or basic services.

Soleimani, leader of the Revolutionary Guards’ Quds Force, was instrumental in expanding Iran’s military influence in the Middle East as the operative who handles clandestine operations outside Iran. The 62-year-old general was regarded as the second-most powerful figure in Iran after Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

Muhandis, a former Iraqi lawmaker, oversaw Iraq’s Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF), an umbrella grouping of paramilitary forces mostly consisting of Iran-backed Shi’ite militias that was formally integrated into Iraq’s armed forces.

Muhandis, like Soleimani, had long been on the radar of the United States, which had declared Muhandis a terrorist. In 2007, a Kuwaiti court sentenced him to death in absentia for his involvement in the 1983 U.S. and French embassy bombings in Kuwait.

Soleimani picked Kataib Hezbollah to lead the attacks on U.S. forces in the region because it had the capability to use drones to scout targets for Katyusha rocket attacks, one of the militia commanders told Reuters. Among the weapons that Soleimani’s forces supplied to its Iraqi militia allies last fall was a drone Iran had developed that could elude radar systems, the militia commanders said.

Kataib Hezbollah used the drones to gather aerial footage of locations where U.S. troops were deployed, according to two Iraqi security officials who monitor the movements of militias.

On December 11, a senior U.S. military official said attacks by Iranian-backed groups on bases hosting U.S. forces in Iraq were increasing and becoming more sophisticated, pushing all sides closer to an uncontrollable escalation.

His warning came two days after four Katyusha rockets struck a base near Baghdad international airport, wounding five members of Iraq’s elite Counter-Terrorism Service. No group claimed responsibility for the attack but a U.S. military official said intelligence and forensic analyses of the rockets and launchers pointed to Iranian-backed Shi’ite Muslim militia groups, notably Kataib Hezbollah and Asaib Ahl al-Haq.

On Dec. 27 more than 30 rockets were fired at an Iraqi military base near the northern Iraq city of Kirkuk. The attack killed a U.S. civilian contractor and wounded four American and two Iraq servicemen.

Washington accused Kataib Hezbollah of carrying out the attack, an allegation it denied. The United States then launched air strikes two days later against the militia, killing at least 25 militia fighters and wounding 55.

The attacks sparked two days of violent protests by supporters of Iranian-backed Iraqi paramilitary groups who stormed the U.S. Embassy’s perimeter and hurled rocks, prompting Washington to dispatch extra troops to the region and threaten reprisals against Tehran.

On Thursday – the day before the attack that killed Soleimani - U.S. Defense Secretary Mark Esper warned that the United States might have to take preemptive action to protect American lives from expected attacks by Iran-backed militias.

“The game has changed,” he said.

For 40 years, there has been no formal diplomatic relationship between the two nations. Getty: Darwell


America and Iran have despised each other for decades.

But where does the bitter tension between the two nations come from?
Oddly enough, it began with the British in the Middle East during the first part of the 20th century.


It's a story about oil, the Cold War, the jostling for power in the region, and a hostage crisis with a diplomatic impact "somewhere near" that of 9/11.


Oil, the Soviets and 'a menace to Western interests'

Before World War II, Britain essentially dominated Iran's oil industry through what was then called the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company.
But the war left a greatly weakened Britain in its wake.




The CIA plans to overthrow a 'demagogue'

In 1952 the British were expelled from Iran, and diplomatic relations ground to a halt.
The next year, the CIA mounted a covert operation to overthrow Mosaddegh.



A staunch ally

"After Mosaddegh is overthrown, the United States now takes a major interest in Iranian oil, in a way that they didn't have before," Mr Khalil says.
"In this consortium that's created after the coup, the United States now takes something in the area of 40 per cent of the profits."
Mr Byrne says the Shah "clearly felt he owed his remaining in power to the US", and the Americans in turn felt they now had a loyal partner in the region.



The turning point

Mass protests eventually erupted into a revolution in 1979, and the Shah fled to America.
"Things begin to unravel very, very quickly and the Americans are left between a rock and a hard place," Professor Ehteshami says.
"Whether they support this transitional government of Shapour Bakhtiar that the Shah had put in place, or whether they try and reach out to the opposition and therefore undermine the government of Iran."



'Somewhere near the impact of 9/11'


The British and US flags are burned outside the former US embassy in Tehran in 2014, marking 35 years since Islamist students stormed the compound.

The American reluctance to return the Shah caused outrage, and led to a hostage situation at the US embassy.

Some 400 armed students took 52 diplomats hostage, demanding the return of the Shah, who was undergoing cancer treatment.
The crisis lasted for 444 days.




From Obama to Trump

During the Obama administration, a nuclear agreement was reached between Iran and the permanent members of the United Nations Security Council, including America.
"When a more accommodationist approach is taken, as we saw under Obama in the second term, it opens up a window for the reformists to emerge, and that's effectively what we get when we get the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action," Mr Byrne says.




So where to from here?


President Vladimir Putin has a strategy for Iran and sticks to it


"Our problem in the West has been that largely we've tended to be very reactive, we haven't really had the patience to deal with this as a strategic issue, which I have to say the Russians do.


"I mean, the one advantage of Putin, as unpleasant as he is, is that certainly for those rulers in the Middle East is he seems to have a strategy and he sticks to it, whereas the West seems to be at sixes and sevens about what it's planning to do and doesn't really have a plan."



Lot's more here ... https://tinyurl.com/qkuahcr

^
Russia and the West both have plans...

Russia sells weapons to Syria and the Persians, the West sells weapons to Israel and the Arabs. Both sides like to stir up a bit of controversy every now and then. That's how you get repeat customers.


Simple but effective.

It’s killing for cowards.

Which makes perfect sense of course, but the hypocrisy of calling suicide bombers ‘cowards’ remains utterly laughable.

As laughable as the prik not being able to get me off his tiny mind.

It's on.
Must be an election coming up.

WASHINGTON — Iran’s supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, vowed to exact “severe revenge” for the Thursday night U.S. airstrike that killed the country’s most famous general, but the Iranian regime will have to walk a fine line to respond strongly without provoking a war with the United States, former intelligence officials familiar with the region said Friday.

Qassem Soleimani headed the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps’ Quds Force, which combines intelligence gathering, covert action and special operations. He died when a U.S. missile struck his vehicle near Baghdad International Airport. Also killed in the airstrike, which hit two vehicles, was Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, the leader of the Iraqi Shiite militia group Kataib Hezbollah, along with several other Quds Force and militia members.

Soleimani was a charismatic leader who for 20 years had played a key role in orchestrating Iran’s foreign policy in the Middle East, particularly with regard to its use of proxy militia forces such as Lebanese Hezbollah, numerous Iraqi Shiite armed groups and the Houthi militia in Yemen. He directed the killing of more than 600 U.S. troops during the Iraq War by Shiite militias using a particularly lethal sort of roadside bomb called an explosively formed penetrator. More recently, he commanded Iran’s military efforts to shore up its ally Bashar Assad in the Syrian war. “He was the most famous intel figure on the planet,” said Marc Polymeropoulos, a former senior CIA operations official.

A boy in Tehran carries a portrait of Iranian Revolutionary Guard Gen. Qassem Soleimani, who was killed in a U.S. airstrike in Iraq early on Friday. (Photo: Vahid Salemi/AP)
A boy in Tehran carries a portrait of Iranian Revolutionary Guard Gen. Qassem Soleimani, who was killed in a U.S. airstrike in Iraq early on Friday. (Photo: Vahid Salemi/AP)
More
But that fame has now put the Iranian regime in a bind, according to Norman Roule, who was the national intelligence manager for Iran until 2017. Because of Soleimani’s iconic stature, it will have to be seen to strike back itself, rather than merely through proxies, he said. But Iran must do so with enough “implausible deniability” to avoid giving the United States an excuse to launch a war that could lead to the collapse of the Islamic Republic. Iran will also want to avoid antagonizing Europe, China or Russia in its response, Roule said.

So the regime will have to pick and choose carefully among its panoply of weapons. “Iran has many cyber, drone and missile tools and may decide to employ all of them at some point,” Roule said. “Iran’s proxies will want to show that they are loyal to Iran, but the ease by which the U.S. killed Soleimani and struck Kataib Hezbollah targets will make them wonder how quickly Washington will be able to locate and kill them following any attack on U.S. interests.”

A vehicle burns at the Baghdad International Airport following the U.S. airstrike early Friday morning. (Photo: Iraqi Prime Minister Press Office, via AP)
A vehicle burns at the Baghdad International Airport following the U.S. airstrike early Friday morning. (Photo: Iraqi Prime Minister Press Office, via AP)
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Despite speculation that Iran or its proxy Hezbollah will retaliate by launching terrorist attacks against U.S. or allied targets, Roule said that was unlikely in the near term, in part because a terrorist attack on a specific individual or facility requires a significant amount of preparation. “Iran will need to identify a target and understand its security profile,” he said. “If it is a person, it will need to understand the target’s pattern of life. Iran will need to locate weapons and prepare an egress plan for its people. The complexity and resource demands of such an operation make it difficult to undertake [at short notice] unless such an operation had been developed prior to Soleimani’s death.”

And Tehran has to come up with a plan without the person who was best able to devise and execute one: Soleimani himself. “The Iranians are in a hard spot because the person they need to manage and execute a response is a guy like Soleimani,” said Douglas Wise, a former deputy director of the Defense Intelligence Agency and longtime former senior CIA official. “That’s the trick box the Iranians are in: The individual they need to respond at this point is dead.”

Less than 24 hours after the strike, the Middle East appeared to be teetering on the brink of war. Royal Jordanian Airlines suspended its flights to Baghdad. The Defense Department followed up its recent deployment of a battalion from the Army’s 82nd Airborne Division by announcing Friday that it would deploy the rest of the 82nd’s division ready brigade — a total of about 3,500 soldiers. Other reports indicated that 1st Ranger Battalion departed its home post of Hunter Army Airfield in Georgia en route to the Middle East.

The State Department meanwhile appeared to send mixed messages to U.S. citizens in Iraq Friday. Pompeo told CNN that killing Soleimani had made Americans “safer in the region.” But the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad advised all Americans to avoid the embassy and “depart Iraq immediately.” Seemingly anticipating a shutdown of commercial air traffic in and out of the country, the embassy told Americans they should leave via airline “while possible,” and otherwise should depart over land.

“Iranians, to feel they have avenged Soleimani’s death, will strike first at elements of American government,” said Wise. “This is a strike by the American government, and they’re going to want to strike back at the U.S. government first.”

Foreign employees of oil companies are seen leaving Iraq at the airport of Basra on Friday. (Photo: Reuters)
Foreign employees of oil companies are seen leaving Iraq at the airport of Basra on Friday. (Photo: Reuters)
But that attack may not come in Iraq or even in the Middle East, according to Wise. “The Iranians will strike at soft targets, say, an individual working at a U.S. embassy getting in or out of their car in some embassy in South America or Africa — they’ll go to soft targets at the edges of the U.S. empire.”

A former CIA official with knowledge of Iran and terrorism also predicted that the Islamic Republic was more likely to target U.S. government facilities far from the Middle East. “If they want to hit military facilities in Iraq, Kuwait, Doha, Jordan, all of that area is going to be on heightened alert,” the former CIA official said. “But I don’t know if we’re going to be on such high alert in Lima, Buenos Aires, Asunción, Malaysia, West Africa and Europe — places where there is a known Hezbollah presence, but we may not be able to step up security procedures for all embassies everywhere and expect the same level of protection.”

Retired Army Col. Chris Costa, the executive director of the Spy Museum, cautioned that Iran might take its time before retaliating. “Short term I suspect we’re going to hear threatening rhetoric, but Iran can seek revenge on their own timetable,” he said.

A former State Department official who specialized in Iraq and Iran warned that Iran’s response was unlikely to be a simple case of tit for tat. “What comes next will not be a single strike,” the former State Department official said. “The worst move we can make is to underestimate Iran.”

_____

https://news.yahoo.com/iran-faces-di...230551178.html

Originally Posted by Cujo

It's on. Must be an election coming up.

The Doggie bloke will be along to correct you on that shortly....

Originally Posted by Cujo

It's on.
Must be an election coming up.

.....

Originally Posted by raycarey

for a jr. high social studies class that would almost be considered thoughtful analysis.

almost.

keep plugging away

Never in the history of human conflict has a good war been seen as good for ratings.

NYT knows better and earlier than a POTUS...

Hypersonic Missiles Are a Game Changer
No existing defenses can stop such weapons — which is why everyone wants them.

Jan. 2, 2020

Moreover, hypersonics are a weaponized moral hazard for states with a taste for intervention, because they erase barriers to picking fights. Is an adversary building something that might be a weapons factory? Is there an individual in an unfriendly country who cannot be apprehended? What if the former commander of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards, Qassim Suleimani, visits Baghdad for a meeting and you know the address? The temptations to use hypersonic missiles will be many.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/02/o...-missiles.html

Originally Posted by OhOh

They don't need no justification
They're controlled by thought control
No dark forces in the Moscow Kreml

President Putin has described the man shot dead by suspected Russian agents in a Berlin park as a “bloodsmeared” killer who organised terrorist attacks in Moscow.
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/z...utin-gk76gq0k9


I thought I fix that for you so your red glasses don't crack.

A good piece here. Pretty interesting to see that the Iranians are pumping Iraq full of meth...