Headlines:
- America Increases Sanctions against Russia
- America continues to be active in Syria despite Trump’s talk of pulling out
- Russia supports Assad against Muslims in Douma
America Increases Sanctions against Russia
The American political establishment is pleased to see US President Donald Trump increasing pressure on Russia. According to Bloomberg:
President Donald Trump is ramping up the economic and diplomatic pressure on Russia after more than a year of bipartisan criticism — including from his own top aides — that he hasn’t done enough to confront Moscow over meddling in the 2016 election.
Trump’s move on Friday to sanction dozens of Russian tycoons, companies and key allies of President Vladimir Putin are among the most significant actions to date and add to a succession of moves by the U.S. and its allies in recent weeks. The latest sanctions hit Putin allies including Oleg Deripaska, the billionaire founder and majority shareholder of En+ Group Plc, the man once married to Putin’s daughter and key public companies.
“Today’s action is far and away the most significant sanctions action against Russia since the imposition of sectoral sanctions in 2014,” when Russia annexed Crimea, said Brian O’Toole, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council who previously worked in Treasury’s sanctions unit.
The move bolsters Trump’s claims this week that no one has “been tougher” on Moscow than his administration, even while he continues to avoid publicly criticizing Putin or Russia’s actions in 2016. And they follow a concerted effort by Western nations to punish Putin for the nerve-agent poisoning of a former Russian spy in the U.K. earlier this year. In response to that attack, which Russia denies, the U.S. expelled 60 Russian diplomats and closed the country’s consulate in Seattle.
Until Friday, however, Trump had even faced criticism from some of his own top advisers over his approach to Russia. National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster, in a withering speech before his departure this week, said “we have failed to impose sufficient costs” on Russia for its actions. Admiral Michael Rogers, Trump’s head of the National Security Agency and Cyber Command, told senators in February that “we’re probably not doing enough.”
“They haven’t paid a price at least that’s sufficient to get them to change their behavior,” Rogers said.
The White House pushed back Friday with a fact sheet highlighting actions it has taken. They include banning government agencies from using software produced by Russia-based Kaspersky Lab Inc. and maintaining the closure of two Russian diplomatic compounds enacted by President Barack Obama in his final days in office.
For most of the twentieth century CE, the West maintained a ‘cold war’ with the Soviet Union alleging that this was because of its adoption of the Communist ideology in contrast to the West’s secular liberalism. But long after the Soviet Union’s dismemberment and Russia’s adoption of Capitalism in place of Communism, and Russia’s tacit cooperation with America, such as in Syria, the West continues to persecute the Russians.
America needs to maintain instability in the world, in accordance with the ‘balance of power’ world order that it inherited from the British Empire, which is dependent on building conflict between major world powers. This is in contradiction to the past policy of the Khilafah (Caliphate) State that worked to cool conflicts in the world and thus lead the world towards stability. It is this general stability that created the conditions in which European prosperity and advancement were able to take place, emerging out of the darkness following the collapse of the Roman Empire. The Prophet ﷺ said about the Quraish, when they sent out military forces to obstruct the Prophet ﷺ’s peaceful haj prior to the signing of the Treaty of Hudaibya:
“Woe to Quraysh, war has devoured them! What harm would they have suffered if they had left me and the rest of the Arabs to go our own way? If they should kill me that is what they desire, and if Allah should provide me with victory over them they would enter Islam in flocks. If they do not do that, they will fight while they have the strength, so what are the Quraysh thinking of? By Allah, I will not cease to fight for the mission with which Allah has entrusted me until He makes it victorious or I perish.” [Quoted in the book Islamic State in the chapter on the Treaty of al-Hudaybiyah]
America continues to be active in Syria despite Trump’s talk of pulling out
Last week, US President Donald Trump again called for American troops to be removed from Syria, saying that the fighting could be left to others, but the fact is that it is America that is directing and controlling every detail of the Syrian war, in order to ensure that the revolution is completely extinguished. According to the Daily Beast:
Even as President Donald Trump declared mission accomplished and said he will pull U.S. troops out of Syria, American forces moved this week into Manbij, one of the most contested Arab cities in eastern Syria, setting up night patrols, and establishing a visible presence.
Back in 2016, U.S. bombing enabled a Kurdish-led militia to capture Manbij from the so-called Islamic State, but Turkey has set its sights on taking over the city, as has the Assad regime. And now with Trump’s announcement, which undercut previous U.S. government plans to stabilize the northeast Syrian region following a devastating U.S.-backed military attack on Raqqa, Manbij appears to be up for grabs.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan Wednesday renewed his demand that the Kurdish forces—which are closely linked to the Kurdistan Workers Party at war with Turkey for over three decades—get out of Manbij.
Turkey “will not stop until all regions” under control of the Syrian branch of the PKK, primarily Manbij, “are secured,” he said following summit talks with Russian President President Vladimir Putin and his Iranian counterpart, Hassan Rouhani.
The U.S. and Turkey held high level talks Friday—including a Trump-Erdogan telephone call—about the issues now dividing the two NATO allies, including the future of Manbij. The prospect of a shift in overall control no doubt rattled the Kurdish forces on the ground.
Turkish state media and Syrian opposition media reported 300 U.S. troops arrived in the city on Monday in several convoys. They said U.S. forces, which had previously been stationed outside the town and made only occasional forays into the center, now are doing regular patrols, particularly at night, and may have set up an office in the city for the first time.
The Pentagon would not confirm the numbers but did not dispute reports of troop movements. It implied the decision was taken locally. “Commanders are delegated the authority and the responsibility to position the number of people and resources needed to accomplish the mission and to protect themselves,” said Eric Pahon, a Pentagon spokesman. “Occasional modifications to force size would therefore be normal.”
The revolution in Syria and in neighbouring countries has not only been a serious challenge to American hegemony but also a fundamental threat to the entire Westphalian world order of nation states. With Allah’s permission, and despite the malicious efforts of the West, Muslims will indeed rise to re-establish their state based on their Deen, restoring Islamic civilisation and bringing light to the entire world.
Russia supports Assad against Muslims in Douma
It is quite evident that America has given Russia an open hand in supporting the Assad regime in completely dominating south-western Syria. The region is being ‘ideologically cleansed’ with large sections of the population being forced to transport out of the region. According to the Washington Post:
Syrian government warplanes attacked the final rebel-held city near Damascus on Friday, killing dozens of people, as civilians who had spent days agonizing over whether to stay or go feared that their decision had been made for them.
Douma is the final Damascus-area city to remain in opposition hands after Syrian and allied Russian forces mixed punishing force and negotiations with individual rebel groups to force a withdrawal from what remained of their shattered suburban stronghold of Eastern Ghouta.
Friday’s airstrikes shattered a temporary cease-fire that had provided cover for the Russian authorities to negotiate with holdout rebels from Jaish al-Islam, a hard-line group.
The attack killed at least 32 people and wounded dozens more, according to the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a monitoring group.
Residents said the strikes had targeted civilian areas and left body parts strewn through the streets.
“Medical and emergency points are crowded with the wounded. Intensive care is crowded,” said a medical worker, speaking on the condition of anonymity, fearing retribution from both government and rebel forces.
Victory in Eastern Ghouta would effectively spell an end to the war between Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s forces and the opposition that rose up against them in 2011. Although a number of rebel strongholds remain, none are as strategically important as the enclave of Eastern Ghouta, where Douma is located.
More than 130,000 people have fled the once-besieged enclave in recent weeks, according to the United Nations, most of them to government-run reception centers in Damascus. But tens of thousands more have opted to stay under rebel control in the northern province of Idlib, an area that could become the next target of government bombardment.
A steady trickle of buses had been carrying residents from Douma for almost a week, apparently under the terms of an agreement struck between Jaish al-Islam and Russia. Many more people had stayed, fearing what might follow departure from home towns they had not abandoned through seven years of conflict.
With Allah’s permission, the Muslims of Syria will rise again, not through the groups that became captured by funding from the governments of Western agents, but through sincere, indigenous, ideological leadership, loyal to the Muslim Ummah and her Deen, that will take back control of the affairs of Muslims from the foreign disbeliever and the agents to the West that presently rule Muslim lands.