Tag: war

Al-Qaida’s power base in Afghanistan now ‘worse’ than before 9/11

WND Staff – July 12, 2022

When Joe Biden abruptly withdrew all American troops from Afghanistan last year, he left behind billions of dollars worth of American war machinery for the Taliban – the terror organization then taking over the country – to have and to use.

He also left behind hundreds of Americans, despite his promise that he would see to it that every one got out.

Further, there were thousands of nationals who had worked with the U.S. during its years-long presence there, and who were likely to face the wrath of the terrorists who took control of the nation, and installed themselves as the government.

The U.S., of course, originally had gone in because of the Islamic extremists who were threatening and killing people and destabilizing that part of the world. And carrying out 9/11.

Bill Roggio, senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and editor of the Long War Journal, said in a report at Just the News that now the Taliban controls all 34 provinces – as opposed to about three-quarters as of the 9/11 date when Muslim extremists commandeered four jets and created terror in Washington and New York, costing nearly 3,000 American residents their lives.

“The State Department’s policy essentially normalizes Taliban control of Afghanistan,” he explained. “This is absolutely insane. If the U.S. is unwilling to support the Afghan resistance, then it’s effectively ceding Taliban control to Afghanistan.”

https://www.wnd.com

Hizballah drones were the opening shot of a maritime energy war vs Israel

– July 7, 2022

The IDF’s revelation on Wednesday, July 6, of a fourth Hizballah drone that was intercepted heading for Israel’s Karish gas rig, confirmed an assessment that the Lebanese terrorist organization was bent on starting a war, initially over this offshore gas platform. This hitherto undisclosed drone was intercepted three days before the three that were shot down on July 2 by Barak missiles. This one was downed by advance electronic warfare measures after being identified at a distance from Israel’s maritime economic zone, while still over Lebanese waters. No reason for the disclosure of this fourth drone at this time was offered by the military.

DEBKAfile’s Mid-East sources have concluded that Hassan Nasrallah, leader of Iran’s terrorist proxy Hizballah, has decided to go to war against Israel over its newest gas rig. In his words, “Lebanon’s oil and gas resources must be freed from Israeli control, just as the south was freed [in 2000] and Israel’s ‘security zone’ dismantled by force of arms.”

The drone tactic is the opening shot, say our sources, for three objectives:

  1. To scare the staff employed on Israel’s offshore gas and oil rigs in the eastern Mediterranean into fleeing for fear of their lives.
  2. Nasrallah included Greece’s maritime energy projects in his declaration of war.
  3. As a strong message that the management of gas exploration in the eastern Mediterranean had passed from the Lebanese government to Hizballah control. The intention was to nullify the Lebanese prime minister’s condemnation of the drones as “unacceptable” and as jeopardizing ongoing US-brokered negotiations on the drawing of a maritime border between Lebanese and Israeli economic zones.

The interception of the three Hizballah unarmed UAVs was presented by the Israeli military as an important feat, although the Barak missiles were highly expensive compared with the cheap drones. However, Hizballah, did not care about recovering the drones but aimed at this stage for a psychological advantage. This was meant as a declaration that a new page had been opened in its contest against Israel over the oil and gas fields of the Mediterranean.

https://www.debka.com

Global Food Crisis ‘Will Kill Millions’ By Disease, Health Executive Warns

AFP –   June 23, 2022

The global food crisis sparked by the war in Ukraine will kill millions by leaving the hungriest more vulnerable to infectious diseases, potentially triggering the world’s next health catastrophe, the head of a major aid organisation has warned.

A Russian naval blockade of Ukraine’s Black Sea ports has stopped grain shipments from the world’s fourth-largest exporter of wheat and corn, raising the spectre of shortages and hunger in low-income countries.

The knock-on effects of the food shortages mean many will die not only of starvation but from having weaker defenses against infectious diseases due to bad nutrition, Peter Sands, executive director of the Global Fund to Fight Aids, Tuberculosis and Malaria told AFP this week.

“I think we’ve probably already begun our next health crisis. It’s not a new pathogen but it means people who are poorly nourished will be more vulnerable to the existing diseases,” he said in an interview on the sidelines of a G20 health minister meeting in the Indonesian city of Yogyakarta.

“I think the combined impact of infectious diseases and the food shortages and the energy crisis… we can be talking about millions of extra deaths because of this,” he said.

World governments should minimize the impact of the food crisis by providing frontline healthcare to their poorest communities, who will be the most vulnerable, said the British former banker who now heads the $4 billion fund.

“That means focusing on primary healthcare so the healthcare that is delivered in the villages, in the communities. Hospitals are important but when you are faced with this kind of challenge, the most important thing is primary healthcare.”

“It’s been a disaster for TB,” said Sands.

https://www.barrons.com

How Israel foiled attempts to poison its water supply, disrupt US power plants

Israel National News – June 29, 2022

The deputy commander of the IDF’s signal intelligence, or “SIGINT” unit, also known as Unit 8200, spoke at the Cyber Week Conference hosted by Tel Aviv University this week.

The address marked the first time an officer from the unit has made a public appearance, though military censors barred publication of the officer’s full name, referring to him only by his first name, Uri.

Uri described Unit 8200’s cyber defense operations, citing two recent examples, including a foiled attempt – widely attributed to Iran – to gain control of Israel’s water distribution system and poison the water supply, as well as a planned attack on American power plants.

“Once we obtain superiority over the attacker, we then act to deny their capabilities,” said Uri. “By collaborating with industry or if necessary, we do it on our own – implementing our tools at some point along the attack stream. Be assured – 8200 won’t rest until the threat is removed.”

“When do we apply these methods? I’ll mention two examples from recent years. In the first case an adversary attacked water treatment facilities in Israel. We saw this careless attacker attempting to poison the water in order to claim human lives. We mitigated that threat far ahead.”

“Another adversary, from this region, attacked in Israel. We initialized a CCO, and found out they are also trying to attack power plants in the US. This was the first indication for that attack. It enabled preventing this threat through our tight collaboration with our US partners.”

https://www.israelnationalnews.com

Covert War Between Iran, Israel Emerges from the Shadows

Chris Mitchell – June 23, 2022

JERUSALEM, Israel – For years, what’s called a “war between wars” has existed between Israel and Iran, where much of the fighting takes place in the shadows. This shadow war is coming more and more out into the open.

Recently, Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett announced new rules of engagement with Iran called “Operation Octopus.”

He said, “In the past year, the State of Israel has taken action against the head of the terrorist octopus … the days of immunity, in which Iran attacks Israel and spreads terrorism via its regional proxies but remains unscathed, are over.”

Middle East analyst Ellie Cohanim sees the region shifting.

“I think it’s well overdue for Israel and Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, the Bahrainis. All of these countries that have been the victims of the Iranian regime proxy activity start to hold Iran responsible rather than the proxies,” she told CBN News.

Some see a ratcheting up of Israel’s covert and even overt operations to thwart Iran’s nuclear, and conventional missile and drone programs. It could explain the mysterious deaths of a number of Iranian nuclear scientists and military leaders recently.

Another example is Israel’s recent attack on the Damascus airport, which Israel sees as a major conduit of Iranian weapons on their way to Hezbollah in Syria.

Now, Israel says Iran is threatening to retaliate by kidnapping or killing Israelis in the region and especially in Turkey.

“We are currently witnessing Iranian attempts to attack Israelis in various overseas locations. The security services of the State of Israel are working to thwart attempted attacks before they are launched. We will continue to strike those who send the terrorists and those who send those who send them. Our new rule is: whoever sends, pays,” said Bennett.

https://www1.cbn.com

The risk of a nuclear conflict is now at the highest point since the height of Cold War

Ricky Scaparo – June 15, 2022

The risk of a nuclear conflict is the highest it has been since the times of the Cold War, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI).

The “SIPRI Yearbook 2022,” a report published Monday assessing the current state of armaments, disarmament, and international security around the world, stated that nuclear arsenals are expected to grow over the coming decade.

Despite the fact that the total number of nuclear weapons in the world has slightly declined between January 2021 and January 2022 (just before the beginning of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine), the number is likely to increase in the near future, according to SIPRI.

Some 90 percent of the world’s nuclear arsenal is owned by Russia and the United States, with a total inventory of respectively 5,977 and 5,428 nuclear weapons as of 2022. The nine nuclear-armed states—the U.S., Russia, Britain, France, China, India, Pakistan, Israel, and North Korea—continue to modernize their nuclear arsenals.

The weapons that have been dismantled in the U.S. and Russia last year were already “retired” from military services, leaving the arsenal of useable nuclear weapons of the two countries virtually unchanged.

“Although there were some significant gains in both nuclear arms control and nuclear disarmament in the past year, the risk of nuclear weapons being used seems higher now than at any time since the height of the Cold War,” said SIPRI Director Dan Smith.

https://endtimeheadlines.org

Russian Pundit: ‘Next Comes World War III; Nuclear War Is Coming’

Eric Mack – June 5, 2022

A Russian political science pundit says the West boasting about the continued shipping of lethal aid to Ukraine is going to ultimately lead to World War III and nuclear war.

“[The West] talks about how many more weapons are being sent and how frightening these weapons are, they don’t understand what happens next,” political scientist Sergey Mikheyev told Russia’s Channel 1, according to an Express translation. “They all say ‘terrible weapons are arriving over there, they keep coming and coming.'”

Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy told Newsmax in an exclusive sitdown interview in Kyiv this week that he has promised the medium-range HIMARS (High Mobility Artillery Rocket System) will only be used in Ukraine to defend their territory – and not to launch attacks in Russia.

“I know some of the people in the United States are saying, or people in the White House are saying we might be using them to attack Russia: Look, we’re not planning to attack Russia,” he said. “We’re not interested in the Russian Federation. We’re not fighting on their territory.

“We have the war on our territory. They came to our country. We want to de-block our cities.”

But the Russian pundit is skeptical.

“They promised not to use them a certain way, but most likely they will do it anyway, and that will lead to World War III,” Mikheyev continued. “Then we’re being told ‘calm down, comrades, everything will be alright.’

https://www.newsmax.com

Globalists Try to Sell ‘European Unity’

Bruce Thornton – June 9, 2022

The sponsors of “moralizing internationalism,” as historian Corelli Barnett called it, are busy trying to spin the Russo-Ukrainian war as a crisis that has renewed European unity. For globalists, Russia’s return of Europe to its benighted past of invasions, destruction, and slaughters––horrors that the “rules-based international order” supposedly ended––has instead strengthened and highlighted two show-case institutions of that order, the European Union and NATO. Globalists claim that rather than an indictment of globalism’s failures, the war is restoring both institutions and confirming the superiority of supranational institutions in keeping order and creating prosperity.

But all the spin can’t hide the real lesson of the war: that the centrifugal, conflicting nationalist self-interests that wrecked the League of Nations and reduced the UN to an arena for maximizing those interests, remains the critical factor in interstate relations.

A good example of this dubious happy-talk about “unity” appears in a recent column by Thomas Freidman, a long-time Davos man and cheerleader for technocratic, antinationalist globalism. Take this sentence: Russia’s brutal invasion “explains why practically overnight, Germany’s government dispensed with nearly 80 years of aversion to conflict and maintaining the smallest defense budget possible, and announced instead a huge increase in military spending and plans to send arms to Ukraine.”

https://www.frontpagemag.com

100 Days, A Grim Milestone in the Russia-Ukraine War

JAMEY KEATEN and YURAS KARMANAU – June 3, 2022

GENEVA (AP) — One hundred days into Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the war has brought the world a near-daily drumbeat of gut wrenching scenes: Civilian corpses in the streets of Bucha; a blown-up theater in Mariupol; the chaos at a Kramatorsk train station in the wake of a Russian missile strike.

Those images tell just a part of the overall picture of Europe’s worst armed conflict in decades. Here’s a look at some numbers and statistics that — while in flux and at times uncertain — shed further light on the death, destruction, displacement and economic havoc wrought by the war as it reaches this milestone with no end in sight.

THE HUMAN TOLL

Nobody really knows how many combatants or civilians have died, and claims of casualties by government officials — who may sometimes be exaggerating or lowballing their figures for public relations reasons — are all but impossible to verify.

Government officials, U.N. agencies and others who carry out the grim task of counting the dead don’t always get access to places where people were killed.

And Moscow has released scant information about casualties among its forces and allies, and given no accounting of civilian deaths in areas under its control. In some places — such as the long-besieged city of Mariupol, potentially the war’s biggest killing field — Russian forces are accused of trying to cover up deaths and dumping bodies into mass graves, clouding the overall toll.

With all those caveats, “at least tens of thousands” of Ukrainian civilians have died so far, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Thursday in comments to Luxembourg’s parliament.

https://www1.cbn.com

Russian TV warns that nuclear war is the only alternative to Russia obtaining victory in Ukraine

Ricky Scaparo – May 22, 2022

(OPINION) New threats of a nuclear strike were made on Russian state TV, as the head of state-controlled Russia Today (RT) Margarita Simonyan said on air that the war in Ukraine will either end with Russia’s victory or a catastrophe for all humanity.

“They all believe we’ll definitely lose, and the West will definitely win,” Simonyan said. “They say this, not understanding that it’s impossible. It’s just not possible, it will not happen. Either this ends badly for all humanity or we win. There’s no third option.”

It’s not the first time Simonyan made a nuclear threat on air. In late April, the RT editor-in-chief said that British support of Ukrainian strikes on Russian soil is leaving Moscow short of options besides the “complete destruction” of Ukraine and “a nuclear strike.”

On that occasion, there was no evidence that the Kremlin supported the threat made by the journalist on state TV. But the most recent comment by Simonyan comes as the head of Russia’s space agency has announced that Moscow will soon have 50 new nuclear missiles.

“The Anglo-Saxons are publicly calling on Ukraine to take the combat activity into Russian territory. And giving them the ammo to carry out that plan,” she said. “What choice are you leaving us, idiots? Complete destruction of what remains of Ukraine? A nuclear strike?”

There is no evidence that the Kremlin shares the same views as Simonyan on a nuclear attack, although it’s sure that Moscow is equally as annoyed with Britain for its recent statements in support of Ukraine.

https://endtimeheadlines.org