Jerusalem News (29 May, 2015, 11 Sivan, 5775)
Contents:
1. No army in Mid East is challenging ISIS. Iran regroups to defend S. Iraqi Shiites, Assad to save Damascus by DEBKAfile Exclusive Analysis
2. Is Turkey Still Arming Islamic State? by Burak Bekdil
3. Mark Williams: Potheads in Holland Turn anti-Jewish
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1. No army in Mid East is challenging ISIS. Iran regroups to defend S. Iraqi Shiites, Assad to save Damascus
DEBKAfile Exclusive Analysis May 25, 2015, 5:20 PM (IDT)
 http://debka.com/article/24619/No-army-in-Mid-East-is-challenging-ISIS-Iran-regroups-to-defend-S-Iraqi-Shiites-Assad-to-save-Damascus-
Extracts:
Hassan Nasrallah Saturday, May 23, called his Lebanese Shiite Hizballah movement to the flag, because 'we are faced with an existential crisis' from the rising belligerence of the Islamist State of Iraq and the Levant. His deputy, Sheik Naim Qssem, sounded even more desperate: 'The Middle East is at the risk of partition' in a war with no end in sight, he said. 'Solutions for Syria are suspended. We must now see what happens in Iraq.'
The price Iran's Lebanese proxy has paid for fighting alongside Bashar Assad's army for four years is cruel: some 1,000 dead and many times that number of wounded. Its leaders now understood that their sacrifice was in vain. ISIS has brought the Syrian civil war to a new dead end.
This week, a 15-year old boy was eulogized by Hizballah's leaders for performing his 'jihadist duty' in Syria.
Clearly,for their last throw in Syria, the group, having run out of adult combatants, is calling up young boys to reinforce the 7,000 fighting there.
The Syrian president Bashar Assad is in no better shape. He too has run dangerously short of fresh fighting manpower. Even his own Alawite community has let him down. Scarcely one-tenth of the 1.8 million Alawites have remained in Syria. Their birthrate is low, and those who stayed behind are hiding their young sons to keep them from being sent to the front lines.
Assad also failed to enlist the Syrian Druze minority to fight for his regime, just as Hizballah's Nasrallah was rebuffed when he sought to mobilize the Lebanese army to their cause. This has left Hizballah and the Syrian ruler alone in the battlefield with dwindling strength against two rival foes:Â ISIS and the radical Syrian opposition coalition calling itself Jaish al-Fatah, Â the Army of Conquest - which is spearheaded by Al Qaeda's Nusra Front and backed to topple Assad by Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkey.
The Iraqi army, for its part, has been virtually wiped out, along with the many billions of dollars the US spent on training and weapons. There is no longer any military force in Iraq, whether Sunni or Shiite, able to take on ISIS and loosen its grip on the central and western regions.
The Kurdish peshmerga army, to whom President Barack refused to provide armaments for combating the Islamists, has run out of steam. An new offensive would expose the two main towns of the semi-autonomous Kurdish Republic, Â the capital Irbil and the oil city of Kirkuk, Â to the depredations of the Islamist belligerents.
A quick scan of Shiite resources reveals that in the space between the Jordan River and the Euphrates and Tigris, Iran commands the only force still intact in Iraq - namely, the Iraqi, Afghan and Pakistani Shiite militias, who are trained and armed by the Revolutionary Guards.
The Shiite militias flown in by Tehran from Pakistan and Afghanistan have demonstrated in Syria and Iraq alike that they are neither capable nor willing to jump into any battlefields.
The upshot of this cursory scan is that not a single competent army capable of launching all-out war on ISIS is to be found in the Middle East heartland, Â in the space between the 1,000km long Jordan and the Euphrates and Tigris to the east, or between Ramadi and the Saudi capital of Riyadh to the south.
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2. Is Turkey Still Arming Islamic State?
by Burak Bekdil
The Gatestone Institute
May 25, 2015
http://www.meforum.org/5268/turkey-islamic-state
On Jan. 19, 2014, the Turkish gendarmerie command stopped and searched three trucks in southern Turkey, heading for Syria. Accompanying the trucks were Turkish intelligence officers, and the trucks had a bizarre cargo: In the first container, 25-30 missiles or rockets and 10-15 crates loaded with ammunition; in the second, 20-25 missiles or rockets, 20-25 crates of mortar rounds and anti-aircraft ammunition in five or six sacks. The crates had markings in the Cyrillic (Russian) alphabet.
After a brawl, a prosecutor arrested the men and seized the cargo. The search was videotaped by the law enforcement officers.
The local governor rushed to the scene and declared that the trucks were moving upon orders from then Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan (now President). The trucks were handed back to the Turkish intelligence agency, MIT.
Erdogan sees Islamic State as a potential ally to topple his regional nemesis, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.
One of the drivers testified that the cargo had been loaded onto the trucks from a foreign airplane at Ankara's Esenboga Airport and that "we carried similar loads several times before."
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3. Mark Williams: Potheads in Holland Turn anti-Jewish
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Subject: Oh Dear, Holland.
Shalom Yair
They may be Zebulon, but they may also be incredibly thick.
http://www.jerusalemonline.com/news/world-news/the-israeli-connection/new-dutch-history-textbook-is-absurdly-anti-israel-13707
I blamesh all the pot schmoking myschelf.Â