Joby Warrick, Red Line

At Amazon, Joby Warrick, Red Line: The Unraveling of Syria and America's Race to Destroy the Most Dangerous Arsenal in the World.

Allison Fluke-Ekren, American Battalion Commander for Islamic State in Syria, Charged with Providing Material Support to Terrorist Organization (PHOTO)

The Department of Justice filed charges in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia.

Man this is wild.

A mild-mannered Kansas school teacher? (On right at the photo.)

Pretty mind-boggling. 

At the New York Times, "American Woman Accused of Prominent Role in Islamic State":

The F.B.I. has arrested an American woman who federal prosecutors said had risen through the ranks of the Islamic State in Syria to become a battalion commander, training women and children to use assault rifles and suicide belts, the Justice Department disclosed on Saturday.

The woman, Allison Fluke-Ekren, 42, a former teacher from Kansas, was charged with providing material support to a terrorist organization. The circumstances of her capture in Syria were not immediately known, but the F.B.I. flew her to Virginia on Friday to face prosecution.

Prosecutors described Ms. Fluke-Ekren as playing an unusually outsized role in the Islamic State as a woman and an American. Charges against American women involved with the Islamic State have been rare.

Investigators said Ms. Fluke-Ekren was smuggled into Syria in 2012 from Libya. She traveled to the country, according to one witness, because she wanted to wage “violent jihad,” Raj Parekh, a federal prosecutor, wrote in a detention memo that was made public on Saturday.

According to a criminal complaint that was filed in 2019, a witness told the F.B.I. that Ms. Fluke-Ekren and her husband brought $15,000 to Syria to buy weapons. Her husband, the witness said, eventually rose to be the commander of all snipers in Syria in 2014. He later died in an airstrike while conducting a terrorist attack on behalf of the Islamic State, investigators said. Ms. Fluke-Ekren met her husband in the United States, according to court documents.

The same witness also told the F.B.I. that Ms. Fluke-Ekren had a plan in 2014 to attack a college in the United States using backpacks filled with explosives. Prosecutors did not reveal which college she had wanted to target. The criminal complaint said her plan was presented to Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the leader of the Islamic State at the time, who approved it for funding. The witness said the attack was put on hold after Ms. Fluke-Ekren learned she was pregnant. Ms. Fluke-Ekren had multiple children, but it is not clear how many.

Prosecutors said Ms. Fluke-Ekren moved to Egypt in 2008, lived there for about three years and then traveled to Libya, where she stayed for about a year before sneaking into Syria. According to one witness, Ms. Fluke-Ekren departed Libya because another terrorist organization, Ansar al-Sharia, was no longer conducting attacks in that country and she wanted to wage violent jihad.

In his memo arguing to keep Ms. Fluke-Ekren behind bars while she awaits trial, Mr. Parekh said she had been a “fervent believer in the radical terrorist ideology of ISIS for many years.” The prosecutor said the government had numerous witnesses who were prepared to testify against her.

According to the detention memo, the mayor of the Syrian city of Raqqa, the Islamic State’s self-proclaimed capital, approved the opening of a military battalion to train women to help defend the city. Ms. Fluke-Ekren, investigators said, soon became the leader and organizer of it.

Witnesses said that Ms. Fluke-Ekren taught classes for members of the battalion, and on one occasion, a young child of hers was seen holding an assault rifle. One witness said that more than 100 women and girls had received training from Ms. Fluke-Ekren. She had hoped to create a cadre of suicide bombers that could infiltrate enemies’ positions, but the effort never materialized, according to the complaint. Ms. Fluke-Ekren told another witness about her desire to attack a shopping mall using a remote-detonated vehicle full of explosives. The witness said she wanted to kill large numbers of people.

Court documents said that after the death of her husband, Ms. Fluke-Ekren married another Islamic State terrorist, a Bangladeshi man who specialized in drones and was working on a plan to drop chemical bombs from the air. He also died. She then married an Islamic State military leader who was responsible for the defense of Raqqa, a witness said.

A witness also said that Ms. Fluke-Ekren claimed to have tried to send a message to her family with the goal of tricking them into believing she was dead so the U.S. government would stop trying to find her. She told the witness that she never wanted to return to the United States and wanted to die a martyr in Syria.

Federal prosecutors in Virginia have mounted an aggressive effort to prosecute terrorists captured overseas. The cases can be extremely difficult because witnesses and other evidence can often only be found in war zones, as well as because of geopolitical considerations...

And at the DOJ's page, "American Woman Who Led ISIS Battalion Charged with Providing Material Support to a Terrorist Organization" (via Memeorandum).

Once a Backer of Military Force, Biden Nominee Now Embraces Soft Power

Well, this is the New York Times again, so feel free to click over to the next blog on your own personal blogroll if you'd prefer not to read this below (and I wouldn't blame you, frankly).

But, I do feel it's of interest, and perhaps of great importance (not good importance, sadly), so here you go:

At NYT, "If confirmed to oversee the U.S. Agency for International Development, Samantha Power will confront adversaries by bolstering democracy and human rights. China is an early focus."

I know, she's a "very bad woman!", though the quote's not mine, as I'm one-quarter-quoting from the Twilight Zone's old episode, "You're a Bad Man!"

And here's the obligatorily video of our former Ambassador the the United Nations, and who is the former Anna Lindh Professor of the Practice of Global Leadership and Public Policy at the John F. Kennedy School of Government, at Harvard University (or she still may in fact be a current professor there, because evil dolts like this lady don't give a crap about ethics nor morals, or all those "bourgeois" things that us "backward rubes" in "flyover country" might think are important, as those "old-fashioned" kind of things are what're actually "keeping the republic," and dang, that's a miracle at this point, sheesh):  

Nine-Hundred U.S. Troops Still Deployed to Syria. Oh. Why? And Who Lied About It?

At LAT, surprisingly, "Inside U.S. troops’ stronghold in Syria, a question of how long Biden will keep them there":

KHSHAM, Syria — At a makeshift military outpost abutting a natural gas field in eastern Syria, the signs of the country’s violent upheaval are everywhere. Bombed-out concrete buildings lie in ruins. The pipes that once carried liquefied natural gas are shredded and twisted. A tattered U.S. flag strung between 40-foot-tall gas processing towers flies high over the base, a visible symbol that American troops are here — and not planning on leaving soon.

“We’ve got the flagpole planted,” said Army Lt. Alan Favalora, a Louisiana National Guard soldier at Conoco, the name the base acquired from the long- departed U.S. oil and gas firm that once operated the wells. “We want them to know we are committed to this region.”

How committed President Biden will be to keeping troops in Syria is uncertain, however.

The Biden administration does not appear to be in any rush to pull out the 900 U.S. troops who remain in the country, a relatively small force that some White House officials see as key to preventing a resurgence of Islamic State and a rush to reclaim the area’s oil fields by Syrian President Bashar Assad and his Russian and Iranian allies.

But White House officials have said they are reviewing the troop presence in Syria — an announcement that has raised concerns that Biden could reconsider the deployment as part of a larger scaling back of U.S. troops in the Middle East and a planned shift of Pentagon focus to Asia.

What Biden is going to do “is the one question I got from everybody,” Gen. Kenneth “Frank” McKenzie Jr., the top U.S. commander in the Middle East, said in an interview after visiting eastern Syria on Friday. “I think the new administration is going to look at this, and then we’re going to get guidance.”

Robert Ford, who was an ambassador to Syria during the Obama administration, called the U.S. strategy “deeply flawed” and said Biden should withdraw the remaining troops who have helped the Syrian Democratic Forces — a Kurdish-led militia — carve out a semiautonomous enclave in the country’s northeast.

“I don’t think it’s worth it,” Ford said about the American deployment in an interview. Islamic State “is largely contained and not in a position to threaten the U.S. homeland or even to send fighters to Europe.”

The Arab population in northeastern Syria initially supported Kurdish militias’ efforts to oust Islamic State. But many Arabs now resent being under the Kurds’ governance, creating a new source of recruits as Islamic State tries to recover, Ford added...

Well, of course Biden's policy is "deeply flawed," because his foreign policy advice has been "deeply flawed" all around, particularly during the Obama administration, when the "red line" fiasco basically put Russia in the driver's seat, giving that neo-imperialist power strategic advantage, of which it hasn't wasted, to the disadvantage of U.S. interests. Now Biden's just trying to salvage his own reckless legacy and save whatever loss of face he can for all the f*cked up Democrat foreign policy fiascos. These people are liars and hacks. 

The Strike Against Islamic State's Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi Complicated Leftist Efforts to Destroy President Trump

From Mollie Hemingway, at the Federalist:

Here Are The Real Reasons Media Lost Their Minds When Baghdadi Died https://t.co/J2U5xEVSB2

— Mollie (@MZHemingway) October 28, 2019

The Final Humiliation of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi

It's Graeme Wood, at the Atlantic:

My thoughts on the death of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the hirsute rapist who was the absentee Caliph of the Islamic State: https://t.co/f27Vwi7hkW (in @TheAtlantic/@TheAtlIdeas)

— Graeme Wood (@gcaw) October 27, 2019

Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, thanks for the memories https://t.co/KkVHW6753S

— Graeme Wood (@gcaw) October 27, 2019

Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi Killed

President Trump teased the news last night, and this morning he's got the far-left media in a psychotic tizzy.

At the Other McCain, "Al-Baghdadi ‘Died Like a Coward’."

And the New York Times, via Memeorandum, "Special Operations Raid Said to Kill Senior Terrorist Leader in Syria."

Searing Moment in the Middle East

For the record, I'm not pleased with President Trump's handling of Syria and Turkey this past week or so. Not pleased at all. Yeah, I can dig the current public sentiment to wind things down, and end "regime change wars," but previous commitments should be honored and our dealings with allies should be respectful and up and up. It's especially disgraceful to cough up territory and control in places Americans have shed blood, to say nothing of fierce fighters like the Kurds.

Oh well.

At WaPo, "The hasty U.S. pullback from Syria is a searing moment in America’s withdrawal from the Middle East":

The hasty U.S. pullback from Syria is a searing moment in America’s withdrawal from the Middle East https://t.co/Gk8dYbpM2N

— Claire Berlinski (@ClaireBerlinski) October 17, 2019

BEIRUT — The blow to America’s standing in the Middle East was sudden and unexpectedly swift. Within the space of a few hours, advances by Turkish troops in Syria this week had compelled the U.S. military’s Syrian Kurdish allies to switch sides, unraveled years of U.S. Syria policy and recalibrated the balance of power in the Middle East.

As Russian and Syrian troops roll into vacated towns and U.S. bases, the winners are counting the spoils.

The withdrawal delivered a huge victory to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, who won back control of an area roughly amounting to a third of the country almost overnight. It affirmed Moscow as the arbiter of Syria’s fate and the rising power in the Middle East. It sent another signal to Iran that Washington has no appetite for the kind of confrontation that its rhetoric suggests and that Iran’s expanded influence in Syria is now likely to go unchallenged.

It sent a message to the wider world that the United States is in the process of a disengagement that could resonate beyond the Middle East, said Hussein Ibish of the Arab Gulf States Institute in Washington.

“There’s a sense that the long goodbye has begun and that the long goodbye from the Middle East could become a long goodbye from Asia and everywhere else,” he said.

Images shared on social media underscored the indignity of the retreat. Departing U.S. troops in sophisticated armored vehicles passed Syrian army soldiers riding in open-top trucks on a desert highway. An embedded Russian journalist took selfies on the abandoned U.S. base in Manbij, where U.S. forces had fought alongside their Kurdish allies to drive out the Islamic State in 2015.

“Only yesterday they were here, and now we are here,” said the journalist, panning the camera around the intact infrastructure, including a radio tower and a button-powered traffic-control gate that he showed was still functioning.

“Let’s see how they lived and what they ate,” he said, before ducking into one of the tents and filming the soldiers’ discarded snacks.

On Arab news channels, coverage switched from footage of jubilant Syrian troops to scenes of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s lavish receptions by the monarchs of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, Washington’s most vital Arab allies in the Persian Gulf. The visits had been long planned, but the timing gave them the feel of a victory lap.

“This has left a bad taste for all of America’s friends and allies in the region, not only among the Kurds,” said a former regional minister who spoke on the condition of anonymity in order to not embarrass his government, an American ally. “Many will now be looking for new friends. The Russians don’t abandon their allies. They fight for them. And so do the Iranians.”

It was the manner of the withdrawal, hastily called amid chaos on the battlefield as Turkish forces pushed deep into Syria, that gave the event such impact in the region, analysts said. Few had anticipated that the most advanced military in the world would make such a scrambled and hasty departure, even after President Trump signaled he would not endorse a war on behalf of the Kurds against a U.S. NATO ally.

Less than 48 hours before the withdrawal announcement, U.S. Gen. Mark A. Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, had given assurances that the troops would remain indefinitely, standing by their Kurdish partners to continue to hunt down the Islamic State.

 But the Turks’ capture Sunday of a key highway that served as the U.S. troops’ main supply line revealed the fragility of a mission that had narrowly focused on the Islamic State fight while neglecting regional dynamics, including the depth of Turkish animosity to the Kurdish militia with which the United States had teamed up...

More.

After Fighting Islamic State, Civilian Life Takes Toll

At the Los Angeles Times, "Two buddies survived fighting Islamic State, but for one civilian life was too much":

Please read this story. I’m hoping it makes you think about those at risk who we can all help. I’ve never covered a story like this. https://t.co/wLfCX26ovj

— Molly Hennessy-Fiske (@mollyhf) June 20, 2019

He was dashing up the mountain into darkness, chasing a friend armed with a shotgun.

Taylor Hudson yelled for his friend to wait, to stop.

They had rushed together toward danger so many times before on the battlefields of Syria. They had protected each other, made it home safe.

Cactus pierced Hudson’s sides as he scrambled up to save his buddy.

Then he heard the gunshots.

Hudson had met Kevin Howard three years earlier in eastern Syria, where they discovered they both had volunteered for the French Foreign Legion.

Hudson, 35, was an idealist raised in Pasadena, a lanky college dropout and ironworker kept out of the Marines because of a wrist tattoo he unsuccessfully tried to burn off with battery acid.

Howard, 27, was his opposite: short, with a blond crew cut and tattoos up to his eyebrows. Adopted at birth, he’d been rejected by his new parents at 12, then raised in a San Francisco orphanage. He left at 17 to join the Marines, trained at Camp Pendleton and served from 2006 to 2010, deploying twice to Iraq as an anti-tank missileman.

The men had both joined the French Foreign Legion for adventure, Howard training as a sniper, Hudson as a medic. They adopted noms de guerre: Howard chose Kane Harlly; Hudson became Paul “Doc” Hetfield. Howard had the title of the legion’s anthem tattooed above his right eyebrow: “Rien n’empeche.” Unstoppable.

But they became disillusioned as superiors confined them to southeastern France and enviously followed news of the war raging in Syria. In 2016, each joined U.S.-allied militias to fight Islamic State.

“The war was like a sanctuary, as crazy as that sounds,” Hudson said as he sat in his spare Tucson ranch house. “It was black and white, good and evil, the most pure fight in modern times. That feels so good to be with people in a righteous cause. When that’s over, what has meaning in civilian life?”

A month after Hudson arrived in eastern Syria, he met Howard. Howard served with a poorly outfitted group of Kurdish fighters, who had stopped to visit Hudson’s unit bivouacked in the cow shed of an abandoned cheese factory. Hudson noticed Howard’s camouflage legionnaire pants and struck up a conversation.

The pair soon began working as a team: Howard as a sniper; Hudson, his lookout.

“I knew we were always going to stick together,” Hudson said.

They shifted to an allied Christian militia, the Syriac Military Council. Before an important battle, their commander left and the unit voted unanimously for Howard to replace him. Hudson became chief medical officer. They were reluctant leaders, Hudson said, but “sometimes you find yourself in situations where you know you have a responsibility.”

In summer 2017, the unit moved to the outskirts of Raqqah, capital of Islamic State’s caliphate, for the start of a siege. They remained holed up in abandoned, bombed-out buildings for months.

That July, during an interview in a crumbling house they had converted into a sniper’s roost, Howard and Hudson appeared weary but committed. They pointed out Islamic State strongholds a few yards away and warned that drones sometimes buzzed nearby, dropping bombs.

They never felt safe. Their fellow fighters had scant training and could be careless with guns. The pair looked out for each other, sleeping in shifts.

Howard recalled his time as a Marine, battling Muslim extremists in Kurdish northern Iraq. He had tried returning to civilian life, but “it just didn’t work out.” Staying home as a war raged felt wrong, he said.

He divided western volunteers in Syria into four groups: politically motivated anarchists and socialists; “starry-eyed” dreamers; those fleeing their past; and the “legitimately crazy.”

Hudson noted that his friend hadn't classified himself, and Howard laughed.

Hudson took breaks from the front lines, staying with a Christian Syrian couple. He fell in love with their daughter, got engaged and started planning a future.

Howard had two words tattooed on his knuckles: “love” and “lost.” He stayed in Raqqah and embraced the Assyrian Christian cause, including a new nom de guerre: Hawro, or “Brother,” Christian.

“They are arguably the most oppressed people in the world right now,” Howard said. “I believe in staying and helping them fight because it’s what I’m good at.”

In time, both men soured on the militia.

Hudson, wounded by shrapnel and a drone bombing, left the front line to get treatment. His fiancee broke off their engagement. Commanders refused to allow him to return to battle, he said, even as they pushed Howard south toward the worsening battle in Dair Alzour.

Each of the men heard the other had been killed. When they were reunited weeks later, they decided it was time to leave the militia — and Syria.

Eventually, Howard and Hudson returned home after harrowing months detained by their own militia. Howard was also held by authorities after crossing the border into Iraq, released only after U.S. officials intervened.

Years would pass before they reunited.

*****

Howard floundered in the U.S., stripped of his gun, his unit and his cause.

He visited friends in California and Idaho; reconnected with his birth mother in Grants Pass, Ore.; worked oilfield jobs in North Dakota and west Texas. For a time, he ran with the Hells Angels in Oakland.

Last year, he became homeless in the Dakotas, unable to claim veteran’s disability benefits because he couldn’t find the necessary paperwork until he asked friends to help.

Hudson had built an extra room in his house for Howard, and urged him to visit. Howard initially demurred. Then one day he texted Hudson a photo of pill bottles, threatening suicide. Hudson wired him plane fare. Howard flew to Arizona the next day.

There Hudson helped him rent a nearby house, a life goal Howard had written on a list he carried in his pocket.

Howard went to doctor’s appointments at the Department of Veterans Affairs for post-traumatic stress disorder and got a caseworker. He adopted a cat. He met a woman. Three months ago, at an iconic mountain west of downtown known as Sentinel Peak, he proposed. She said yes.

Hudson thought his friend was healing.

But after Howard’s girlfriend moved in, the couple fought. He suspected her of cheating. His caseworker knew he had been drinking too much and tried to get him into rehab.

Howard told friends he missed Syria.

Hudson understood how Howard felt: “That was where we belonged. That was our place and our time in history. We were motivated and focused and knew what we had to do. That’s what’s missing when you get home, that mission-oriented way of thinking.”

Half of their former unit was fighting alongside rebels in Ukraine. But Howard didn’t want to join them.

“It wasn’t really his fight,” Hudson said. “He did love the lifestyle — the camaraderie, the guys. But he wasn’t willing to join a cause he didn’t believe in.”

Howard considered going back to Syria, or joining rebels in Myanmar. Hudson found that odd.

“He didn’t even know what side he was going to fight on,” Hudson said. “It made him seem suicidal, like, ‘I’m just going to roll the dice.’”

Howard admitted he still contemplated suicide. So the two friends made a pact: If one decided to kill himself, he would call the other first...

Excellent piece.

Keep reading.

Åsne Seierstad, Two Sisters

Available April 3rd, at Amazon, Åsne Seierstad, Two Sisters: A Father, His Daughters, and Their Journey into the Syrian Jihad.

After Five Failed Attempts to Escape Islamic State, This Yazidi Woman Tried One Last Time

At the Washington Post, "After five failed attempts to escape ISIS slavery, she tried one last time":

After five failed attempts to escape ISIS slavery, this Yazidi woman tried one last time: The details in this story are so horrific they are hard to read, but thank you @leloveluck for telling her important story. https://t.co/Y67iaE9rVq pic.twitter.com/uPspM02LRF

— Anna Fifield (@annafifield) February 25, 2019

AMUDA, Syria — The walk to freedom lasted 53 hours, and the little boy cried all the way. It wasn’t their first escape attempt — she’d tried five times before to flee the Islamic State — but they would be shot on the spot if the militants caught them now.

They passed corpses in the darkness, and when exhaustion overwhelmed them, they huddled together and slept on the dusty path. Faryal whispered reassurances to her 5-year-old son, telling him that his grandparents were waiting and that, after four years as prisoners of the Islamic State, they were finally going home. He wouldn’t believe her.

“He was terrified,” she said, recounting their escape this month. “I held his hand and we just kept walking.”

As members of Iraq’s Yazidi minority, a largely Kurdish-speaking religious group, the pair had escaped what the United Nations has called a genocide. Islamic State militants kidnapped thousands of Yazidis on a single day in August 2014, massacring the men and dumping them in mass graves, and forcing the women into sexual slavery.

During her captivity, Faryal said she had six different owners, at times being passed on when a fighter wanted a new sexual partner or simply to settle a debt. “Monsters who treated us like animals,” is how she described them.

The atrocities committed against the Yazidis had initially prompted the United States to launch airstrikes against the militants and begin a military campaign to roll back the Islamic State’s caliphate that now, four years later, could end within days. U.S.-backed forces have the last Islamic State holdouts surrounded in the eastern Syrian hamlet of Baghouz.

In photographs, taken by aid workers on the night of her escape, a male companion hides his face but Faryal looks straight out at the camera. Her hazel eyes are fixed in a quiet stare. Her son’s face is wet with tears, and he’s sobbing. “I can’t put into words how I was feeling at that moment,” she said. “All I could think was: ‘Please, take me away from here.’ ”

Faryal, 20, told her story last week in the northern Syrian town of Amuda after being transferred there by the U.S.-backed Kurdish forces that rescued them. Throughout the interview, she kept a watchful eye on Hoshyar, her son, pulling him close as he cried and then trying, without success, to make him laugh. Details of her account were corroborated by members of her family in northern Iraq and through a team of Yazidi activists that had communicated with her secretly for months before the escape in attempts to smuggle her to safety.

Young child brutalized

The day before Faryal’s life changed forever in 2014 had dawned like any other in the Iraqi village of Tel Banat. She puttered around the house looking after her infant son Hoshyar, she recalled. By midday, the sun was roasting, and although rumors had swirled for weeks that Islamic State forces were drawing closer, few in Tel Banat were aware of the coming storm.

The Islamist militants arrived at dusk.

“We couldn’t run fast enough,” Faryal remembered, describing how she and 10 members of her extended family had piled into a car and joined an epic exodus. Yazidi towns and villages around Mount Sinjar in northern Iraq emptied within hours as more than 100,000 people fled to higher ground. Faryal and her husband, Hashem, made it only a few miles before militants blocked their path.

Yazidis have long faced persecution from more powerful religious groups for their beliefs, in part because of a false but commonly-held impression that they worship the sun, or the devil. There are fewer than 1 million Yazidis worldwide, and according to the United Nations, the Islamic State had intended to entirely wipe out those within their reach.

Yazidi men and boys who had reached puberty were separated from the women and other children and often shot dead at roadsides. Women were bused to temporary holding sites and then sold to Islamic State fighters at slave markets.

Islamic State clerics had decided that having slaves was religiously sanctioned, institutionalizing sexual violence across their caliphate. Women have reported being tied to beds during daily assaults. They were sold from man to man. Gang rape was common.

Many women and girls committed suicide in the opening months of captivity, according to Yazidi rights groups. Others harmed themselves to appear less appealing to fighters who might consider buying them.

Faryal recalled that an Islamic State fighter who was Iraqi and called himself Abu Kattab was her worst abuser. Hoshyar was abused, too, Faryal said. Abu Kattab beat him so badly there were hand prints on his face. Another had forced the boy’s arm onto a hot plate.

“He was so small, but for some reason the fighters hated him,” Faryal said. “I could never explain to him why.”

As the boy sat beside his mother last week, his eyes moved slowly from side to side as if scanning the room for threats. His blond hair was cut in jagged chunks. He did not speak and he did not smile...

More.

President Trump Still Committed to Syria Withdrawal

At LAT, "Trump still committed to Syria troop withdrawal, despite mixed signals":

Lindsey Graham outlined three conditions he said Trump had set down for a full withdrawal:
-permanent destruction of the Islamic State militants
-protection for Syria’s Kurds
-curbs on Iran
Those requirements would be extremely difficult to meet. https://t.co/eqnQGgtJ1I

— Los Angeles Times (@latimes) January 1, 2019

President Trump’s already confusing policies toward Syria have become even more difficult to parse, both in Washington and in the region convulsed by nearly eight years of civil war, after a flurry of contradictory statements over the last 72 hours.

On Sunday, Trump met with Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), a vocal critic of the president’s plan to pull troops out of Syria. After the meeting, Graham said he “felt a lot better” about the situation, describing the withdrawal plan as being “in a pause situation.”

Graham later outlined three conditions he said Trump had set down for a full withdrawal: permanent destruction of the Islamic State militants; protection for Syria’s Kurds, whose militias have been the main U.S. ally in the fight against Islamic State; and curbs on Iran. Those requirements would be extremely difficult to meet.

On Monday, Trump tweeted praise for himself, claiming he should be getting more plaudits for the decision to pull out — a move that has spooked Republican foreign policy hawks and prompted Defense Secretary James N. Mattis’ sudden resignation.

In his tweets, the president alluded for the first time to a timetable that could be slower than the 30-day withdrawal he first suggested.

“If anybody but Donald Trump did what I did in Syria, which was an ISIS loaded mess when I became President, they would be a national hero,” Trump wrote, referring to Islamic State.

“ISIS is mostly gone, we’re slowly sending our troops back home to be with their families, while at the same time fighting ISIS remnants......”

According to multiple administration officials, however, neither Graham’s comments nor Trump’s tweet mean that the president is abandoning his plan to withdraw the 2,000 U.S. troops from Syria.

What remains unsettled is how and when the withdrawal will take place, matters that national security advisor John R. Bolton will take up with the leaders of Israel and Turkey when he travels to the region for meetings this week. The administration’s special representative for Syria, James Jeffrey, is scheduled to accompany Bolton.

In the region, meanwhile, all the warring factions already have begun repositioning themselves for a Syria without the United States — while keeping an eye on the mixed signals from Washington.

Iran, which sees Syria as a crucial link to its allies in Lebanon, stands to gain from having U.S. forces out of the area. Its officials expressed satisfaction with Trump’s move.

A U.S. withdrawal will lead to “strengthening stability in the region,” Maj. Gen. Mohammad Bagheri, the Iranian armed forces chief of staff, said.

“America's withdrawal from Syrian territories is a humiliating retreat for Washington, which had put its forces in Syria without the permission of its government or people,” he said.

“Americans cause chaos everywhere they go,” he added.

By contrast, America’s main ally in the Syrian fighting, the Kurdish militia groups, have much to fear.

Under U.S. protection, the Kurds have carved out a de facto state covering a large swath of northern and eastern Syria, territory that includes roughly 90% of the country's gas as well as essential water and hydroelectric resources.

But they fear attack from Turkey, which is also a U.S. ally, but which sees the Kurds as a national security threat because of the large Kurdish minority in its territory.

The Kurdish areas are now under threat from all sides, which has caused Kurdish militia leaders to move closer to Syria’s president, Bashar Assad, who is allied with Iran and Russia and whose forces the U.S. has fought.

Protecting the Kurds has been a chief concern for U.S. military officials and for Graham.

After his meeting Sunday, Graham suggested that Trump would slow down the withdrawal to make sure the Kurds were not harmed.

“I think we’re in a pause situation where we are reevaluating what’s the best way to achieve the president’s objective of having people pay more and do more,” Graham said, referring to Trump’s call for Middle Eastern countries to pay the cost of rebuilding Syria after nearly a decade of war...

Still more.

Liz Cheney on 'Face the Nation' (VIDEO)

I don't know about Ms. Liz's hairdo. It makes her look older. She's a good looking woman, and a hard-headed conservative. She's matronly now, wtf?

I guess it's good for her reelection efforts. House members run for reelection every two years, so you're never really off the campaign cycle.

With Margaret Brennan this morning:

Syria Withdrawal and Push for Border Wall Demonstrate Trump's 'America First' Worldview

Leftist media outlets have been slobbering all over themselves the last 24 hours, with a concatenation of news events they hope will damage the White House.

Actually, a lot of this is good news. The Mattis resignation isn't out of the ordinary at all. The economy's actually strong and markets are betting on the future, especially Federal Reserve moves that could dampen growth. Fact is, final 3rd quarter numbers show the economy humming along at 3.5 percent growth. Travel numbers for the season are at record numbers and it should be a booming Christmas shopping season.

For the leftist establishment take on Mattis see NYT, via Memeorandum, "Defense Secretary Jim Mattis Resigns, Rebuking Trump's Worldview."

And for the America First viewpoint, make sure you're following Diana West on Twitter:

There is nothing to win in the Islamic world and everything to lose at home. https://t.co/398cEasuM7

— Diana West (@diana_west_) December 21, 2018

And at the Los Angeles Times, "Trump's decision to withdraw from Syria and build a border wall instead marks a key moment for his 'America first' view":

Trump's decision to withdraw from #Syria and build a border wall instead marks a key moment for his '#AmericaFirst' view: #ThankYouTrump #SyriaWithdrawal https://t.co/15SlZSdHwM @diana_west_

— Donald Douglas (@AmPowerBlog) December 21, 2018

President Trump, in a pair of tweets Wednesday summarizing his worldview, justified his decision to order American troops withdrawn from Syria while promising that the military would instead put resources into building the wall he’s long espoused along the U.S.-Mexico border.

“We have defeated ISIS in Syria, my only reason for being there during the Trump Presidency,” Trump tweeted, shortly before his press secretary announced that “we have started returning United States troops home as we transition to the next phase of this campaign.”

That declaration from Trump came shortly after another Twitter missive in which he declared that “because of the tremendous dangers at the Border, including large scale criminal and drug inflow, the United States Military will build the Wall!”

The joint tweets offered perhaps the clearest distillation to date of Trump’s “America first” policy: a simple and abrupt vow to disengage from one of the world’s most nettlesome conflicts, with a potentially premature declaration of victory over the militants of Islamic State, also known as ISIS, coupled with an unlikely promise that the world’s most sophisticated fighting force would be deployed to build a literal fortification around the homeland.

The order to withdraw the roughly 2,000 troops currently in Syria provided the latest example of how Trump’s instinct to turn inward, whatever the risk and costs to the United States’ influence and reputation abroad, may clash with the views of the generals and foreign policy experts who serve inside and outside his administration.

Defense Secretary James N. Mattis, for example, a retired four-star general who once commanded American forces in the Middle East, was pushed aside by President Obama for advocating more forceful engagement in the region. Pentagon officials over the last two years have repeatedly clashed with Trump’s desires to limit the kind of muscular U.S. role in the Mideast that Mattis has advocated in the past.

Trump’s announcement raised fears among national security professionals that he might follow the Syria decision with a troop drawdown in Afghanistan, something he has long wanted to do.

Either exit involves a strategic gamble by Trump and could also cost the president politically if Islamic State violence resurges or the region destabilizes during the 2020 election campaign.

“It is a major blunder,” said Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.). “If it isn’t reversed, it will haunt this administration and America for years to come.”

As is often the case, many officials worked Wednesday to mitigate the immediate impacts of Trump’s declaration, by slowing the withdrawal timeline and following his instructions only approximately. Others who have grown accustomed to Trump’s splashy promises and the fluidity of his decision-making cautioned that Wednesday’s announcement may not come immediately to fruition or could be tempered by the time the military implements it.

Trump’s about-face came only weeks after some of his own advisors said U.S. troops would remain in Syria until Iran, a key backer of Syrian President Bashar Assad, agreed to remove its own troops from the country. That expanded mission appeared to reflect the wishes of anti-Iran hard-liners, including national security advisor John Bolton, rather than Trump’s views.

A senior administration official who briefed reporters on the condition of anonymity put the matter bluntly. Asked about the cascade of recent statements by Bolton and others vowing to stay in Syria as long as Iran remained engaged, the official said that Trump is doing what Trump wants to do.

“The issue here is that the president has made a decision,” the official said. “He gets to do that. It’s his prerogative.”

The official conceded that the Islamic State threat has not been eliminated from the region beyond Syria’s borders, even if the militants have been significantly hobbled inside.

Some of Trump’s closest allies in the Republican Party oppose his plan...

Still more.

Sebastian Gorka: President Trump is Not an Interventionist (VIDEO)

I, for one, am happy we're bombing in Syria. It reverses the previous administration's red line and puts Russian and Iran on notice.

I like Sebastian Gorka, in any case. He's a good guy and well spoken.

At Fox & Friends:

U.S. Launches Military Strike on Syria

The leftist hypocrisy on Syria is mind-boggling.

#Trump says U.S. is striking #Syria over its use of chemical weapons https://t.co/jIt6Zz378q

— Donald Douglas (@AmPowerBlog) April 14, 2018

Congressional Democrats blasted President Trump for circumventing Congress in authorizing U.S. strikes against Syria, calling it "unconstitutional" and questioning the strategy. https://t.co/1rJ1hBJx2S

— NBC News (@NBCNews) April 14, 2018

It's as if 2009-2017 never happened. https://t.co/o5emKk1ly8

— Instapundit.com (@instapundit) April 14, 2018

Far-left conspiracy theorist Rachel Maddow suggests President Donald Trump launched the strike against Syria to divert attention away from a "catastrophic domestic scandal."pic.twitter.com/sr81UnpryL

— Ryan Saavedra 🇺🇸 (@RealSaavedra) April 14, 2018

Ana Navarro Accuses Trump Of Striking Syria To Distract From Comey And Cohen News https://t.co/1lnUfGdLEr pic.twitter.com/mUixObJck2

— The Daily Caller (@DailyCaller) April 14, 2018

The Rotting Soulless Moral Abomination That is Ben Rhodes

Ben Rhodes was Obama's Deputy National Security Adviser.

Seth Mandel excoriates him:

HOLY CRAP. Obama officials hijacked the freaking Holocaust Museum and wrote a "study" absolving Obama for Syria https://t.co/qJm8KjKB93

— Seth Mandel (@SethAMandel) September 6, 2017

There are no words to aptly describe the rotting soulless moral abomination that is Ben Rhodes https://t.co/qJm8KjKB93

— Seth Mandel (@SethAMandel) September 6, 2017

Out in Paper: J. Kael Weston, The Mirror Test

*BUMPED.*

In paperback, available at Amazon, J. Kael Weston, The Mirror Test: America at War in Iraq and Afghanistan.

U.S. Risks Escalation in the Middle East

I'm not that worried about it. I'd say the paleocon obsession with isolationism is bad for American vital interests.

And I'm pleased by Trump's foreign policy approach thus far, as it's not tied down to alt-right dogmas (to the everlasting condemnation of the alt-right idiots).

At the Los Angeles Times, "'The closer we get, the more complex it gets.' White House struggles on strategy as Islamic State nears defeat in Iraq and Syria":

With American-backed ground forces poised to recapture Mosul in Iraq and Raqqah in Syria, Islamic State’s de facto capitals, U.S. commanders are confident they soon will vanquish the militant group from its self-declared caliphate after three years of fighting.

But the White House has yet to define strategy for the next step in the struggle to restore stability in the region, including key decisions about safe zones, reconstruction, nascent governance, easing sectarian tensions and commitment of U.S. troops.

Nor has the Trump administration set policy for how it will confront forces from Iran and Russia, the two outside powers that arguably gained the most in the bitter conflict — and that now are hoping to collect the spoils and expand their influence.

Iran, in particular, is pushing to secure a land corridor from its western border across Iraq and Syria and up to Lebanon, where it supports Hezbollah militants, giving it a far larger foothold in the turbulent region.

“Right now everyone is positioned” for routing Islamic State “without having the rules of the road,” said Michael Yaffe, a former State Department envoy for the Middle East who is now vice president of the Middle East and Africa center at the U.S. Institute of Peace. “That’s a dangerous situation.”

The risk of a broader confrontation was clear in recent weeks when a U.S. F/A-18 shot down a Syrian fighter jet for the first time in the multi-sided six-year war, provoking an angry response from Russia, which supports Syrian President Bashar Assad.

U.S. warplanes also destroyed two Iranian-made drone aircraft, although it’s not clear who was flying them. The Pentagon said all the attacks were in self-defense as the aircraft approached or fired on American forces or U.S.-backed Syrian fighters.

“What I worry about is the muddled mess scenario,” said Ilan Goldenberg, a former senior State Department official who now heads the Middle East program at the nonpartisan Center for a New American Security. “When you start shooting down planes and running into each other, it quickly goes up the escalation ladder.”

The clashes occurred in eastern Syria, where Russian-backed Syrian and Iranian forces are pushing against U.S. special operations forces and U.S.-backed Syrian opposition fighters trying to break Islamic State’s hold on the Euphrates River valley south of Raqqah and into Iraq.

Except for a few towns, Islamic State still controls the remote area, and U.S. officials fear the militants could regroup there and plan future attacks. Many of the group’s leaders and operatives have taken shelter in Dair Alzour province...

Still more.

Holly Williams Reports from Raqqa, Syria (VIDEO)

For CBS "Face the Nation":



Also, at the New York Post, "A series of car bombs rocked the Syrian capital, killing at least eight people and wounding a dozen more."