There were
more clashes between late last week between Turkey
and the forces of Syrian tyrant Bashar Assad as Turkey has been supporting a group
of rebels in the Syrian Civil War, as well as Turkish strikes on military
targets of their Russian allies.
Assaults by Syrian forces and their Russian allies have created another
wave of refugees.
The nearly-nine-year-long war,
which has killed several hundred thousand, has displaced millions, creating at
one point the largest refugee crisis for Europe
since the Second World War. Non-Islamist
and Islamists are battling the Syrian regime.
In addition to Russia ,
Iran
and the Iranian-sponsored Lebanese Shi’ite terrorist organization Hezbollah are
on Assad’s side. The United States and an international coalition has
been fighting Islamists while the U.S. had supported some
non-Islamist and Kurdish allies.
There was a
protest march yesterday in Russia
on the fifth anniversary of the assassination of the main democratic opposition
leader, Boris Nemtsov, near the Kremlin. Over ten thousand protestors demonstrated
against proposed constitutional reforms by tyrant Vladimir Putin that could
allow him to remain in power. They also
called for the release of political prisoners.
Earlier protests have led to arrests of opposition leaders like Alexei
Navalny and even to mass arrests of peaceful protesters, as no criticism of the
regime is tolerated.
A deal
between the Trump Administration of the United States and the Taliban was
reached late last week for a withdrawal of American troops by mid-2021, in
exchange for a power-sharing agreement between the Taliban and the Afghan
government. But the deal has already hit
a snag on the release of prisoners by the Afghan government, which was recently
re-elected in a close, disputed election, as there are concerns that the deal
would be a dangerous surrender. The
Taliban had harbored al-Qaeda, the Islamist organization responsible for the
September 11, 2001 Terrorist Attacks on the United States, as well as many
other acts of terrorism before or since, until it was overthrown by the U.S. in
the War on Terrorism by early 2002. A
return to power of the Taliban could lead to Afghanistan becoming a safe harbor
again for terrorists. The U.S. maintains
a relatively small level of troops in the Afghan theater of the War on
Terrorism and is usually engaged in only sporadic and small-scale combat. The small price of American presence in Afghanistan has
safeguarded the world from another September 11-scale attack.
No comments:
Post a Comment