Syrian army may use kamikaze pilots against west, Assad officer claims
- The Guardian, Wednesday 28 August 2013 14.32 EDT
An American F-16 Fighting Falcon warplane, flying in Jordan during 2007. Photograph: Wolfram M Stumpf/AFP/Getty Images
The officer said 13 pilots had signed a pledge this week saying they would form "a crew of suicide martyrs to foil the US warplanes".
The Assad loyalist, in his 30s and serving with the Syrian army's air defence section 10 miles from the capital, said: "If the US and British armies launch a single rocket we will launch three or four, and if their warplanes raid our skies they will face hell fire.
"If we are unable to shoot down their warplanes with artillery, we have military pilots who are ready to attack these foreign warplanes by their own warplanes and blow them up in the air."
The Guardian has been unable to verify the information. The officer has been in contact with the paper on several occasions over the last 12 months during which time he provided reliable information about battles between the troops of Bashar al-Assad and rebel groups. He has declined to provide accounts of events where he has not served.
He claimed: "We have more than 8,000 suicide martyrs within the Syrian army, ready to carry out martyrdom operations at any moment to stop the Americans and the British. I myself am ready to blow myself up against US aircraft carriers to stop them attacking Syria and its people."
Speaking about the chemical attack last week on the outskirts of Damascus, he denied the involvement of government forces and said news of the gassing had come as a shock.
Read More Here
******************************************************
Assad’s Newest Ally: Venezuelan Congressman Goes to Syria to Fight Rebels, the U.S.
Khaled al-Hariri / REUTERS
Venezuela's
late President Hugo Chavez delivers a speech during a visit to Sweida
city, south of Damascus, in Syria, on Sept. 4, 2009.
“Syria
needs full support against these criminals,” wrote Venezuelan lawmaker
Adel el-Zabayar in a letter to his country’s National Assembly this
week. He was requesting indefinite leave from office in order to fight
alongside the Syrian army, having arrived in the country two weeks ago
to visit his ill mother. With the upcoming threat of military attack by
the US, he has decided to stick around and fight. “Without doubt, I’ll
have a weapon,” he told TIME by telephone early on Friday morning local
time from a site he said was around 50 miles south of Damascus near the
city of Sweida. “I’m on the battlefield now.” Zabayar has no formal
weapons training and is currently carrying out more administrative tasks
on the battlefield, he says, alongside government fighters.The 49-year-old congressman, who is of Syrian descent though was born in Venezuela’s central city of Ciudad Bolívar, seems to have put himself in the firing line in accordance with his own government’s long-standing policy of friendship with the world’s pariahs. Former President Hugo Chávez, always keen to be a thorn in the side of Washington, made a point of overt friendliness with leaders despised by the West: Saddam Hussein, Muammar Gaddafi, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. He supplied diesel fuel to Syrian authorities as the unrest escalated into a full-blown civil war last year. Echoing the doctrine that “my enemy’s enemy is my friend,” Zabayar, a member of Chávez’s socialist party, insisted that he was “not fighting alongside the Syrian government. I’m fighting against the government of the United States.”
Zabayar expresses no remorse about the violence and casualties of the war in Syria—which has claimed more than 100,000 lives so far—and blames the US for inciting hostilities as well as engineering the Aug. 21 chemical weapons attack that has pushed Washington toward launching missile strikes against the regime of Syrian President Bashar Assad. “This is a war fabricated by countries outside. All of this was planned… The opposition launched a chemical attack in order to accuse the Syrian government of doing it.”
Zabayar appears to see Syria through rose-tinted glasses. “Despite this great international campaign against Syria, I can assure you that the Syrian people are very tranquil and getting on with life as normal,” he says. “There is total confidence in the Syrian army and government. Assad is going to survive.”
The congressman harped on the hypocrisy of US foreign policy. “They’ve used chemical weapons themselves in Vietnam and other places,” he says. “There is no sincerity in the fight against terrorism on the part of the US. Al-Qaeda is good for the US in Syria but bad in other countries,” he says, referring to the presence of extremist militias amid the Syrian opposition. He gestures to the American experience in Iraq following its 2003 invasion: “They know how to start a war in Syria but don’t know how to end it.”
(MORE: Obama Prepared to Attack Without Britain)
If the shadow of Tony Blair — the former Prime Minister who led the U.K. into the Iraq war — influenced proceedings Thursday in the British parliament, the ghost of Chávez still presides over Venezuela’s current foreign policy. Chávez’s successor, President Nicolás Maduro, has spent the week decrying American plans for intervention in Syria, after his government said it thwarted an assassination plot against him. “The plan is to eliminate me as they attack Syria,” he said speaking on state television. “Enough already of these imperial wars of conquest,” he added on Twitter. “The conscience of the world must wake up and stop this war!”
Read More Here
Related articles
No comments:
Post a Comment
Hello and thank you for visiting my blog. Please share your thoughts and leave a comment :)