Terrorism – War on Terror

Aleppo, December 2016 © Jan Oberg Kevork Almassian, Syriana Analysis & Kim Iversen December 13, 2024 We highly recommend Kevork Almassian’s extraordinarily well-informed and independent channel. An hour with him will teach you more relevant things than 10 hours with mainstream media in the – complicit and interventionist – West. Watch more videos on TFF Substack Video sections; here is the one on Syria.

TFF is also your go-to source for understanding the Syria catastrophe in the making from now on. Introduction: The colonialist mentality Few things should surprise us anymore regarding the un-principled nature of the contemporary Western world. One day it sees a genocide and keeps supporting its ongoing barbarism. The next day – actually December 8 in the early morning – it fully supports terrorism, which, allegedly, it has been fighting since September 11, 2001. NATO countries such as the US and Turkey are the main supporters of the terrorist movements that have now occupied the cultured country, Syria, home to 25 million extremely mixed people. As far as I have looked into it, no Western leader has pointed out that taking over an entire country and sending its leadership fleeing is a violation of international law; Russia did not even plan to do so in Ukraine, but its invasion was...

The collective cynicism is ugly. The innocent Syrian people are now doomed. The author hopes that his predictions shall soon be proven wrong… This article was published at 02:36, about 4 hours before the HTS terrorists occupied Damascus. • Lebanon-based al-Mayadeen reports tonight, December 8, 2024, that Russia, Iran, Turkey call for immediate end to hostilities in Syria. My cynical interpretation of this – beyond pathetic – “call” is the following: Turkey knew and did/does all it can – again – to destroy Syria. Russia and Iran were surprised or act surprised; they can do nothing given their own malaise. Or their “intelligence” services failed miserably? Their common statement is devoid of constructive steps in this uniquely urgent situation. It does not even mention the Syrian government or its President. They “call for” terrorists who are approaching the outskirts of Damascus and have declared long ago that they want to...

Relatives mourn as bodies of Iraqi residents of west Mosul killed in an airstrike are placed and covered with blankets on carts on March 17th, 2017. Photo: Aris Messinis/AFP/Getty Images Imogen Piper & Joe Dyke October 31, 2021 Airwars tally offers assessment of the direct civilian impact of 20 years of US strikes Originally posted on Airwars homepage on September 6, 2021 You often find a similar refrain in US media reporting of the cost of two decades of the so-called ‘War on Terror.’ The trope goes something like this: “more than 7,000 US service people have died in wars since 9/11,” an article or news report will say. In the next line it will usually, though not always, try to reflect the civilian toll – but almost exclusively in generalities. Tens, or even hundreds, of thousands. Ahead of the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist atrocities, and the subsequent launch of the...

Handover ceremony at Camp Anthonic, from US Army to Afghan Special Forces, Helmand province, Afghanistan, May 2, 2021. Tom Engelhardt October 27, 2021 They weren’t kidding when they called Afghanistan the “graveyard of empires.” Indeed, that cemetery has just taken another imperial body. And it wasn’t pretty, was it? Not that anyone should be surprised. Even after 20 years of preparation, a burial never is. In fact, the shock and awe(fulness) in Kabul and Washington over these last weeks shouldn’t have been surprising, given our history. After all, we were the ones who prepared the ground and dug the grave for the previous interment in that very cemetery. Originally published at Countercurrents That, of course, took place between 1979 and 1989 when Washington had no hesitation about using the most extreme Islamists — arming, funding, training, and advising them — to ensure that one more imperial carcass, that of the Soviet Union, would be buried...

CGTN Think Tank October 3rd, 2021 Images of Afghans chasing a U.S. transport plane at Kabul airport shocked the world after Taliban took over Kabul on August 15. As for the costly and longest-ever war waged by the U.S., 84.6 percent of global poll respondents believe it failed. Originally posted on CGTN on August 27, 2021 here The CGTN Think Tank conducted a global survey in Chinese, English, Spanish, French, Arabic and Russian on social media platforms including Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and Weibo from August 20 to August 26. There have been more than 140,000 responses including liking, sharing and commenting on this online poll consisting of three questions. 80% say U.S. failed Afghanistan War The United States launched the Afghanistan war in the name of counterterrorism in 2001 and made a hasty troop withdrawal in 2021. The first question is, do you think the U.S. war against terrorism in...

Neta C. Crawford Listen to this article here September 24, 2021 The U.S. invaded Afghanistan in late 2001 to destroy al-Qaida, remove the Taliban from power and remake the nation. On Aug. 30, 2021, the U.S. completed a pullout of troops from Afghanistan, providing an uncertain punctuation mark to two decades of conflict. For the past 11 years I have closely followed the post-9/11 conflicts for the Costs of War Project, an initiative that brings together more than 50 scholars, physicians and legal and human rights experts to provide an account of the human, economic, budgetary and political costs and consequences of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. Originally published by The Conversation Of course, by themselves figures can never give a complete picture of what happened and what it means, but they can help put this war in perspective. The 20 numbers highlighted below, some drawn from figures released on Sept. 1, 2021,...

Listen to this article here With the end of the failed ‘forever war’ in Afghanistan, the US military-industrial complex needs to find another struggle to further enrich itself, and China now fits that bill Alex Lo September 24, 2021 “In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.” – President Dwight D. Eisenhower, farewell address, 1961 The “potential” of the military-industrial complex for mischief that Eisenhower warned against in his famous speech is now actual; indeed, it has been for some time now. Much of the “war on terror”, including the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan, have been a gravy train for private contractors and arms makers. “The Forever War” may not have made America and Americans safer, but it has made the military-industrial complex...

September 11, 2021 Can be read together with this article which contains all the documentation When people ask me what I think of “9/11” my answer has always been: “I have not done any research on it myself but to me the official explanation leaves too many questions unanswered, such as: 1 • Why was the discussion only about who did it and how did they do it but never about why did someone do this? If you look at the fact that the objects of the attacks were the centers of the US/world’s financial, military and political power – and not just a train station or some infrastructure – you’d have a diagnostic indicator. 2 • Why did no US Airforce plane take off from St. Andrews Air Base? The standing mission of it is to keep the air space over Washington clean and shoot down anything that should...

Pepe Escobar August 25, 2021 The Persian Gulf harbors an array of extremely compromising secrets. Near the top is the Afghan heroin ratline – with the United Arab Emirates (UAE) positioned as the golden node of a transnational, trillion dollar heroin money laundering operation. Originally posted on LewRockwell homepage on January 18, 2021 In this 21st century Opium War, crops harvested in Afghanistan are essentially feeding the heroin market not only in Russia and Iran but especially in the US. Up to 93% of the world’s opium comes from Afghanistan. Contrary to predominant Western perception, this is not an Afghan Taliban operation. The key questions — never asked by Atlanticist circles — are who buys the opium harvests; refines them into heroin; controls the export routes; and then sell them for humongous profit compared to what the Taliban have locally imposed in taxes. The hegemonic narrative rules that Washington bombed Afghanistan in 2001 in “self-defense” after 9/11; installed a “democratic” government; and after 16 years never de facto left because this is a key node...

When it comes to Western mainstream media’s coverage of international affairs, I would today dare the hypothesis that 10-20% is truthful, 20-30% is fake and narratives and 50-70% is omitted (see definition in point 2 below). This is not a scientific statement or hypothesis that I have tested empirically; rather, it is my judgement based on two things: a) witnessing over some forty years the decay of the mainstream media’s international affairs coverage and b) my experiences from conflict zones such as e.g. all parts of former Yugoslavia, Georgia, Iraq before it was occupied, Iran, Syria and China and comparing them with the media images conveyed by the mainstream Western press. Originally written as an editorial for Transcend Media Service, TMS, here In TFF’s recent analysis ”Behind The Smokescreen. An Analysis of the West’s Destructive China Cold War Agenda And Why It Must Stop”, we make use of the following...

TFF Associate I do not wish to rub salt into the wounds of US and British officials who are responsible for the humiliating debacle in Afghanistan, but there is no way of sugar-coating this appalling tragedy, especially for hard-pressed Afghans who have experienced war and occupation for over 40 years. In my contacts with various senior Afghan officials and ordinary civilians, especially women, during the past 40 years, I had been very encouraged and impressed by how they used a short period of peace to get educated, to establish a civil society, to serve their country and to assume positions of responsibility with relative ease, only for all those hopes and dreams to come tumbling down in a matter of few weeks. The hasty withdrawal of US forces from Afghanistan in the dead of night, the hurried departure of US personnel and a few Afghan helpers under fire from Kabul...