ISIS/ISIL conflict in Syria/Iraq (No OpEd, No Politics)

5 December 2014 Last updated at 15:56 GMT

Mark Urban, Diplomatic and defence editor, Newsnight Article

'Morale poor' among UK crews at RAF Akrotiri, Cyprus

Raids against Islamic State are being conducted from RAF Akrotiri in Cyprus "with broken jets and tired and fed-up people", BBC Newsnight has been told.

In a letter, a serviceman said the base was being neglected, morale was poor and ground crews had taken to eating humanitarian rations meant for Iraqis.

Newsnight also understands only 16 of 102 RAF Tornado jets still meet full combat standards.

An RAF spokesman dismissed many of the claims as "factually inaccurate".
Raids against Islamic State are being conducted from RAF Akrotiri in Cyprus "with broken jets and tired and fed-up people", BBC Newsnight has been told.

In a letter, a serviceman said the base was being neglected, morale was poor and ground crews had taken to eating humanitarian rations meant for Iraqis.

Newsnight also understands only 16 of 102 RAF Tornado jets still meet full combat standards.

An RAF spokesman dismissed many of the claims as "factually inaccurate".

But a Ministry of Defence source confirmed an incident in which ground crew had been given rations had happened.

Exhausted personnel

The letter writer's identity is known to the BBC, but we are protecting his anonymity.

He also detailed how there is no hospital at RAF Akrotiri, even though there are daily operations involving live ammunition.

And he alleged that the placing of services with contractors meant that Cypriot cleaners at the base were being charged to the UK taxpayer at three times the annual cost of an airman's salary.

An RAF spokesman responded: "In our opinion this letter is factually inaccurate. In layman's terms, it is completely full of holes."

A source at the MoD said the facilities, as well as conditions of service, at Akrotiri are comparable with all RAF stations around the world.

Despite the response, there is little doubt the conditions at Akrotiri are not as good as those service personnel had got used to on operations in Afghanistan, and that many of the RAF's people are exhausted after years of continuous deployments.

The serviceman alleged that "the costs and quality of the catering and retail support are a disgrace" and that crews there are led by a chain of command, "so laced with budgetary fear... that no one knows what the plan is".

Newsnight has established that during a recent visit by an air vice marshal, one sergeant from II Squadron complained about the quality of the food available to crews working overnight on Tornado jets.

Contracts at the base provide only for hot meals during the day, with snacks laid on at night.

The air vice marshal, on hearing the complaints, went to a pallet of rations intended for air dropping to refugees in northern Iraq.

Cheese sandwiches

He was "so disgusted by the 'cheese sandwiches' offered as meals to the night shift, he went and broke into a pallet of aid and handed it out as it was better than what we were feeding our airmen", said the serviceman's letter.

The MoD source said "crews were offered a small number of excess [Department for International Development] rations [a vegetarian curry] as a one-off gesture during a testing deployment", and argued there was no question of the crews needing the humanitarian rations in order to be "adequately fed".

Shortly after operations began against Islamic State in September, the detachment of Tornado strike aircraft was increased from six to eight.

Newsnight understands this increase was necessary in order to ensure there were always two aircraft available for bombing missions.

Only 16 of the RAF's 102 Tornado GR4s meet "diamond fleet" standard, which is the aircraft fitted with all of the equipment necessary for combat.

Many of the remainder are now mothballed.

Half of these top specification jets are now in Akrotiri, but Newsnight has learned that due to their age and long use, the battle to keep them airworthy requires long hours of work by ground crews, particularly on the engines.

On many days, just two or three of the Tornadoes are available for missions over Iraq.

The MoD source insisted: "The Tornado GR4 continues to offer good serviceability and is meeting required tasking."

Few in the RAF doubt that II Squadron, which has been flying operations over Afghanistan, Mali, and Iraq during the past year, has been under great pressure.

It was due for disbandment next spring but has been reprieved because of the need to support Operation Shader, the UK effort against IS in Iraq.

'Op Till We Drop'

T shirts worn by II Squadron members at Akrotiri bore the legend "Op Till We Drop".

Defence sources argued this unofficial motto was more banter than anything else.

The unit has now returned to Scotland for Christmas and the MoD said its members had been given an extra week's leave, in recognition of their recent efforts.

In recent years the Tornados flew from Kandahar air field, in Afghanistan where there was a choice of canteens, gyms, and other fast food outlets.

Both it and Camp Bastion, in Helmand, had hospitals.

Many in the forces concede that these facilities were of a higher standard than those available on UK bases, and that the UK cannot afford to match them.

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​Syrian al Qaeda off-shot announces killing of Lebanese soldier

Militants from the Nusra Front have announced the killing of a Lebanese soldier in retaliation for the arrest of Islamists’ family members by Lebanese authorities. The soldier shot dead, Ali Bazzal was one of more than two dozen troops taken captive in a joint attack by Nusra Front and the Islamic State on the Lebanese border town of Arsal in August. Earlier this week, Beirut announced the arrest of a wife and a child of the Islamic State leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, as well as the wife and two children of militant commander Abu Ali al-Shisha.

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Al-Qaeda group’s gains in Syria undermine U.S. strategy

By Liz Sly December 5 at 6:56 PM

ANTAKYA, Turkey — The main al-Qaeda affiliate in Syria is extending its control over a swath of territory that was until recently held by the collapsing moderate opposition, jeopardizing U.S. plans to form a new rebel force to fight extremists.

Since routing two of the biggest Western-backed rebel movements last month from the province of Idlib, Jabhat al-Nusra has been steadily consolidating its position as the single most powerful military force in northwestern Syria.

The group has overrun towns and villages throughout the province, secured supply routes into neighboring Turkey and potentially paved the way for the establishment of an Islamic “emirate” — a competing entity to the “caliphate” declared last summer by the Islamic State in northeastern Syria and western Iraq.

The al-Qaeda affiliate’s expanding footprint risks further complicating the U.S.-led effort to contain and destroy the far more powerful Islamic State, a fierce rival to Jabhat al-Nusra that ejected the al-Qaeda loyalists from its territories last summer.

If the fighting in Syria continues on its current trajectory, the country soon will be partitioned almost entirely between jihadist forces and those of the Assad regime, leaving the moderate rebels without territory and the United States without allies in the strategically important country, rebel commanders and analysts say.

Aid in the planning stages

Meanwhile, Pentagon plans to train and equip a force of 5,000 rebels in northern Syria to fight the Islamic State are still being formulated. A location south of the Turkish capital, Ankara, has been identified as a base for training the first 2,000 rebels, and the opposition has been given a date — Feb. 1 — for the first classes to begin, according to Syrian opposition representatives.

But U.S. officials have yet to meet with Syrian opposition leaders to discuss the program. They are still debating with Turkey which groups will be picked and have not yet finalized the questions to be asked in the vetting process.

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Rear Adm. John Kirby, the Pentagon spokesman, said Thursday that officials are still waiting for funds to implement the program. The money was authorized later that day with the passage by Congress of a defense authorization bill.

By the time the process gets underway, there may not be any moderate rebels left to aid, said Yezid Sayigh of the Carnegie Middle East Center in Beirut.

The policy “assumes a continued viable presence of the moderate opposition inside Syria. The fact of the ascendence of Jabhat al-Nusra is rendering these ideas moot,” he said. “By the time these things become a reality on the ground, Nusra will have already acquired such a degree of control the policy will no longer be feasible.”

Rebel commanders say there is still life in the Free Syrian Army, the umbrella name used by moderate groups, even as it fights for its survival on two fronts, against the government and against the Islamic State. A covert CIA-run program to aid moderate rebels has helped hold off a government advance that threatens to dislodge them from Aleppo, their most important stronghold, located to the east of Idlib.

U.S. officials have said they are considering expanding that program in light of the recent setbacks, acknowledging the need for what one official called “a little more urgency.”

But while some rebel leaders say they have been promised increased resources, others say their support has been suspended since the Jabhat al-Nusra offensive. All say the limited aid in any case never amounted to enough to ensure their survival.

“If we see our support continue at the same levels we’ve had in the past, in the next three to six months we will see the moderate rebels disappear,” said Khalid Saleh, the spokesman for Harakat Hazm, the biggest recipient of U.S. support, which was ousted from its headquarters in Idlib last month by Jabhat al-Nusra.

Harakat Hazm is still fighting in Aleppo, alongside other moderate U.S.-backed groups such as Jaish al-Mujahideen, which was also recently vetted for assistance by the CIA and has received training and American-supplied weapons, including TOW antitank missiles, according to Abu Abdosalabman, one of the group’s leaders.

But the support is not enough, he said. “We’re on the borderline between staying alive and dying, and our immunity is low. If we are hit by a strong disease, we might not be able to survive.”

Jabhat al-Nusra’s hegemony

In the strategically vital province of Idlib, which borders Turkey, the moderates are all but vanquished, he and other commanders acknowledged.

Jabhat al-Nusra, which began as the Syrian offshoot of the Islamic State in Iraq before evolving into a separate Syrian entity after the Islamic State broke ranks with al-Qaeda, does not control all of the province’s territory. Numerous small moderate groups are still present, as are several larger Islamist formations that bridge the divide between moderates and extremists.

Most, however, have accepted Jabhat al-Nusra’s hegemony, at least for now, by staying neutral or forming alliances, said Abu Mohammed, a commander with the small Ansar al-Sham group, which has chosen neutrality in the fight between Jabhat al-Nusra and other rebel groups rather than risk annihilation.

“The situation in Idlib is very difficult now,” he said at his group’s office in the southern Turkish town of Antakya. “All of the remaining Free Syrian Army groups are afraid they will be kicked out.”

Although formally affiliated with al-Qaeda, Jabhat al-Nusra has earned a reputation among Syrians as the most effective force in the fight against Assad. It has also branded itself as a more disciplined and principled presence in local communities than the often unruly and sometimes outright criminal Free Syrian Army battalions.

The group has so far refrained from implementing the harshest forms of Islamic law associated with the Islamic State. Though Jabhat al-Nusra has declared its aim to create an Islamic “emirate” to rival the Islamic State’s “caliphate,” it has not yet done so, perhaps for fear of creating a backlash among Syrians whose main goal is to replace the Assad regime with a more democratic one.

The perception that U.S. airstrikes are helping Assad hold on to power has further served to increase sympathy for Jabhat al-Nusra at the expense of Western-backed groups, Syrians say.

Rebel commanders say it was all but inevitable that Jabhat al-Nusra would take on the moderates after President Obama announced the train-and-equip program in July, thereby creating an incentive to dispense with U.S.-backed groups before they received the infusion of support.

Their fate may have been sealed when U.S. airstrikes targeted Jabhat al-Nusra positions on the first day of the air war in Syria, signaling that the group was indeed on the American target list, said Aron Lund, who edits the Syria in Crisis blog for the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

“Nusra are not stupid. They know — first it’s Daesh and then we’re next,” he said, using an Arabic acronym for the Islamic State.


Liz Sly is the Post’s Beirut bureau chief. She has spent more than 15 years covering the Middle East, including the Iraq war. Other postings include Africa, China and Afghanistan.

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Syria: Israeli warplanes strike targets near Damascus

Strikes reportedly target positions near Damascus airport and in Dimas, near Lebanese border; strikes allegedly targeted S-300 missile launchers en route to Hezbollah.

Syrian state television said on Sunday that Israeli jets had bombed areas near Damascus international airport and in the town of Dimas, near the border with Lebanon.

"The Israeli enemy committed aggression against Syria by targeting two safe areas in Damascus province, in all of Dimas and near the Damascus International Airport," state television said, adding that there were no casualties.

Residents in Damascus said they heard loud explosions.The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which tracks the conflict, said that 10 explosions were heard near Dimas.
According to foreign reports the attack targeted a warehouse of advanced S-300 missiles, which were en route from Syria to Hezbollah in Lebanon.

The IDF does not comment on such operations.

In January, Israeli fighter planes bombarded S-300 missile launchers in the Syrian port city of Latakia, Syrian opposition groups said.

Despite Syrian opposition claims, it is unclear if Syria has even acquired the S-300 system. Russian President Vladimir Putin revealed last September that the delivery was suspended, even though some components had been delivered.

Israel has repeatedly warned that it is prepared to use force to prevent advanced weapons, particularly from Iran, reaching Hezbollah through Syria. According to foreign reports, Israel reportedly carried out several air strikes on Syria earlier this year.

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Broccoli said:

IAF destroyed weapons what were supposed to go for Hezbollah and this wasn't first time. Israelis destroyed two large Hezbollah/SAA convoys last year what were hauling weapons to Lebanon.

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thunderchief said:

That is an official (or semi-official) explanation. Reality is most likely much different .

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Broccoli said:

Rebels in Damascus belong to same groups who have been fighting IS since 2013 and Israelis have already said that if Syrian regime tries to give weapons for Hezbollah terrorists IAF will annihilate those convoys.

If you have conspiracy theories then you have to prove them.

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