Bootlicking for Dollars: Israel’s US Sycophant, Marco Rubio

Marco Rubio Is Running Out of Time to Deliver Middle East Return on Investment for Big Donors

   Florida Sen. Marco Rubio speaks to voters before the Michigan presidential primary. (Steve Lagreca / Shutterstock.com)

This column is the first in a series about the presidential candidates on Israel and Palestine.

Donald Trump’s recent suggestion that he’d like to be “kind of a neutral guy” when it comes to Israel produced a lot of seething and squirming among the extreme pro-Israel GOP crowd (read: nearly every member of the party), especially those accustomed to loyalty oaths that would make Joe McCarthy blush.  

One of the indignant sycophants, Marco Rubio, will never be accused of neutrality, evenhandedness, reason, or any other value that might actually contribute to a meaningful solution in Israel/Palestine. Trump’s position “is an anti-Israel position,” Rubio spat during the debate in Houston. “You cannot be an honest broker in a dispute between two sides in which one of the sides is constantly acting in bad faith.”

West Bank Jewish settlers tripling since the beginning of the Oslo “peace process”? Arab East Jerusalem surrounded by 17 Jewish settlements? A 400:1 ratio in civilian casualties in the 2014 Gaza war? Israel’s explosive power in that war equal to 1,500 times that of all the Hamas rockets fired into Israel? No matter. Of course, Sen. Rubio is talking about Palestinian bad faith.

This is hardly a surprise. Rubio is a prime candidate in the so-called Sheldon Adelson primary, also known as Bootlicking for Dollars. The billionaire casino mogul, funder of settlements and of GOP candidates, who once advocated nuking Iran, is now said to be favoring Rubio.  

But Rubio does not even need Adelson’s support to achieve front-runner status as Bootlicker in Chief.  For years he has happily had his pockets lined by Paul Singer, another neocon billionaire and a board member of the Republican Jewish Coalition, which is strongly allied with Benjamin Netanyahu and the hard right in Israel. Singer, principal of the hedge fund Elliott Management, was the second-largest source of Rubio’s campaign contributions between 2009 and 2014, according to Eli Clifton of the excellent Lobelog. Rubio, in turn, did Singer’s bidding in Argentina, where the billionaire’s hedge fund stood to make more than $2 billion by maintaining a hard line on the country’s debt crisis. (Argentina negotiated partial repayment with nearly all creditors, but the Wall Street hedge funds, led by Singer, held out for full payment—even though they had bought the debt for pennies on the dollar—earning them the lovely moniker of “vulture funds.”)  

Singer’s strategy, according to Lobelog, involved demonizing leftist President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, who had pledged not to repay the “vulture funds” in full. Rubio, recipient of more than $122,000 from Singer, repaid him with a Senate resolution accusing the Argentine president of conspiring “to cover up Iranian involvement in the 1994 terrorist bombing” at a Jewish center in Buenos Aires, and calling for a “full and transparent” investigation into the alleged Iranian connection.

  

Five months later, Singer endorsed Rubio for president. And on Monday, with a new, more conservative president in place in Argentina, Singer’s hedge fund finally got the deal it wanted, cashing in at $2.28 billion, or 369 percent of what it originally paid at the height of Argentina’s debt crisis in 2001.

Yet the billionaire nearest and dearest to the Rubio family is neither Adelson nor Singer. It’s a Miami car dealer, Norman Braman, former owner of the NFL’s Philadelphia Eagles, who donated more than $300,000 to bolster Ariel, a settlement of 20,000 Israelis smack in the center of the Palestinian West Bank. Ariel has long been one of the single biggest obstacles to a peace deal.  

Braman has been underwriting both the settlements and the Rubios for years. A New York Times profile of Braman declared that the billionaire “has bankrolled Mr. Rubio’s campaigns … financed Mr. Rubio’s legislative agenda … [and] subsidized Mr. Rubio’s personal finances.” Braman, the article continued, “hired Mr. Rubio, then a Senate candidate, as a lawyer; employed his wife to advise the Braman family’s philanthropic foundation; helped cover the cost of Mr. Rubio’s salary as an instructor at a Miami college; and gave Mr. Rubio access to his private plane. The money has flowed both ways. Mr. Rubio has steered taxpayer funds to Mr. Braman’s favored causes, successfully pushing for an $80 million state grant to finance a genomics center at a private university and securing $5 million for cancer research at a Miami institute for which Mr. Braman is a major donor.”

And of course, there is Braman’s love of the Israeli settlements, a love he has helped foster in Rubio. On Rubio’s first trip to Israel, shortly after his election to the Senate in 2010, Braman and his wife were there to show Marco and his wife around. “Specific details” of the trip, Rubio’s people said, “will be kept private.” Oh. Sorry for asking. It’s really not that important. The fact that a just-elected senator was to be escorted through the Holy Land by an extremist representative of the hard right of one side of a conflict that pits the U.S. against most of the world—sure, that’s really none of our business. Pardon us for the inquiry.  

  

So we can’t say for sure where the billionaire car dealer and ex-NFL owner took the incoming tea party senator on his first trip to the Holy Land. But there’s little doubt that the billionaire schooled the senator-elect on the ways of the settlements. Now, when Rubio takes to the Senate floor to denounce Palestinians and praise Netanyahu, he uses settler language—“Judea and Samaria,” rather than the occupied Palestinian territories, or even just “the West Bank”—to prove his allegiance, and his disdain for neutrality.

In the end, really, it doesn’t matter which Marco billionaire you focus on. Like politicians everywhere, Sen. Rubio is well trained in the art of political indebtedness. His predictable hard lines—more weapons for Israel, roll back the Iran deal, silence Israel’s critics, and end Palestinian dreams of statehood by moving the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem—are straight out of the neocon playbook. And no one will be a more loyal player, and more deeply on the hook, than Marco Rubio.

Turkish police have raided the offices of the opposition Zaman newspaper, hours after a court ruling placed it under state control

Turkish police raid opposition Zaman daily HQ, unleash tear gas & water cannon on protesters

Turkish police used water cannon and tear gas to disperse crowds protesting outside the headquarters of the opposition Zaman newspaper. They moved in to secure the premises following a government decision to take over the management of the media group.

Part of the crowd appears to have taken cover inside of the building, as riot police moved in on protesters, according to live feed from the scene.

WATCH LIVE: Turkish police disperse protesters at Zaman daily HQ

After clearing their way through the crowd in front of the newspaper’s HQ, the officers pushed their way inside the building.

Zaman Editor-in-Chief Sevgi Akarcesme said that during the raid she was pushed by police as authorities tried to take her out of the building.

“A police officer grabbed my phone forcefully while I was broadcasting on Periscope. I'll sue him when the rule of law is back. Unbelievable!” she tweeted. “This is beyond comprehension! Such a sad day in Turkey!”

The daily confirmed that police had gone to the management floor in the building, and were preventing editors from entering their offices. The journalists were shut out of their offices while police allegedly confiscated their cell phones, according to reports on social media.

The raid began shortly before midnight after a day of standoffs between police and opposition protesters furious about what they call a government crackdown on the free press.

The biggest opposition publication is being accused by the state of alleged links to America-based Muslim cleric Fethullah Gulen, whom the government accuses of attempting to topple the regime.

The decision by Istanbul 6th Criminal Court of Peace to de facto censor the publication was granted after the request of the Istanbul Chief Public Prosecutor's Office, that accused the publication of taking orders from what it called the “Fethullahist Terrorist Organization/Parallel State Structure (FETO/PDY).”

The prosecutor said that the alleged terrorist group is working together with the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) with the aim of toppling the Turkish government.

To remedy the so-called “terrorist threat,” the court ruled to sack the entire management and the editorial team of Feza Media Group companies and to replace the entire group’s administration with a three-member board appointed by the state court.

READ MORE: Court orders Turkish Zaman daily into administration, raising concerns of free press abuse

Following the court ruling the newspaper editorial team released a statement through its English-language sister publication, Today’s Zaman, calling the takeover the “darkest and gloomiest” for the freedom of the press.

The statement added that “media organizations and journalists are being silenced via threats and blackmail.”

After the ruling, hundreds of people gathered outside the newspaper’s offices in Istanbul protesting against the move, before police allegedly fired tear gas at protesters as they stormed the head office building.

Amnesty International has condemned the move to silence the opposition press.

“By lashing out and seeking to rein in critical voices, President Erdogan’s government is steamrolling over human rights,” said Andrew Gardner from Amnesty International’s Turkey.

Who Had The Worst Day Today?

QuirkThu Mar 03, 02:11:00 PM EST

.

“You can't really deny the criticisms of Trump that Romney outlined."

The problem, of course, is that the comments come from Romney one of the GOP's many past presidential wannabes and losers. There is no one who better represents the establishment that a good portion of the public appears to reject. His foreign policy views are shaped by his simplistic neocon philosophy. As for his charges of Trump bankruptcy hurting workers, he had no problem benefiting financially from the Delphi bankruptcy. And if it was up to Romney, there would have been no auto bailout. He argued for bankruptcy. And does anyone remember Bain Capital.

As for his judgment, remember Seamus. Romney caged the family dog and strapped him to the roof of his car for a 12 hour trip from Massachusetts to Ontario. Along the way, he had to stop along the way to wash the dog shit off the cage, the dog, and the car as his dog had diarrhea. Pure genius.

At any rate, IMO, ol' Mitt is a rather flawed vessel to be taking on Trump. To me, it appears to be an attempt to somehow gain some type of relevance within a party that seems to be falling apart. I doubt it will work. This is the same guy who in 2012, was unable to turn out the vote as 5 million less Republicans showed up to vote.

Romney's speech may not make much difference in the primaries but it was sound-bite rich and those sound-bites are guaranteed to show up in Democratic ads in the general.

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Which of the Two Romney’s Is Full of Shit?

(CNN) Mitt Romney delivered a sweeping broadside against Donald Trump on Thursday, laying into the Republican presidential front-runner with a sharper attack than any of the party’s 2016 contenders have made against the billionaire business mogul.

"Here's what I know: Donald Trump is a phony, a fraud," Romney said. "His promises are as worthless as a degree from Trump University. He's playing members of the American public for suckers: He gets a free ride to the White House, and all we get is a lousy hat."

The Big Lying FBI - The Power and Information Grabbing War Against Us and Apple

The Ongoing Disaster of The US Security State - Putting Us All At Risk




The Technical Explanation of The Truth & The Ignorance  of a Federal Judge & Donald Trump

‘Unlocking cellphone is trivial, FBI should stop deceiving public & tell truth’ – John McAfee

The US public doesn’t need a Digital Security Commission, they need the FBI to stop deceiving everyone and tell the truth that it wants to spy on Americans, John McAfee, developer of the first commercial anti-virus program told RT’s Ed Schultz.

Republican Michael McCaul, Chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee and Senator Mark Warner, a member of the Senate's Select Committee on Intelligence have introduced a draft bill that would create a ‘Digital Security Commission.’ It is supposed to help the US federal government better manage issues with encryption and better control the competing interests of law and technology companies.

The proposal came amid the ongoing legal standoff between Apple and the FBI over a San Bernardino attacker’s cellphone the feds want to decrypt.

US govt can’t force Apple to unlock iPhone in drug case – NY judge

RT: When you hear ‘The Digital Security Commission,’ what comes to mind?

John McAfee: Well, more spying – that’s what comes to mind to me. Let me try to make this issue simple for the American public and for the FBI, who clearly doesn’t understand. These devices are computers, whether it is an Android phone, iOS phone, or whatever. Inside - is a processor, which is a computer, the instruction set, which is the iOS, and all the applications that you run and the memory - in which you store your data.

Let’s take the FBI case. The FBI wants Apple to change their software, so that it removes the check for security, so that we don’t check for security anymore. Once it has that software, they can use that software on any phone. But they say they only need it for one phone.

I am going to tell the world exactly how we do this. Now I’ll probably lose my admission to the world hackers’ community, however I want to tell you. You need a hardware engineer and a softer engineer. The hardware engineer takes the phone apart, and copies the instruction set, which are the iOS and applications and your memory. And then you run a program called a disassembler, which takes all the ones and zeros and gives you readable instructions. Then the coder sits down and he reads through. What he is looking for is the first access to the keypad, because that is the first thing you do, when you input your pad. It’ll take half an hour. When you see that then he reads the instructions for where in memory this secret code is stored – it is that trivial – a half an hour.

… The FBI knows this, Apple knows this. And this is not an indictment of Apple. Any computer that falls into someone’s hands, anybody can do it, which is why corporate datacenters keep their computers locked up; and this is why we ought to keep our own phones locked up…

In either case if they (the FBI) don’t know – that is tragic; if they do know it – then they are deceiving  the American public and Apple and everyone else by asking for a universal key.

RT: Does a Digital Security Commission complicate the process, or does it get in the way? Is it an avenue of the solution, in your opinion?

JM: It certainly gets in the way. Why do you need a ‘Digital Solutions Commission,’ when the FBI should be able to take a hardware engineer and a software engineer and get exactly what they need? I can do it; anybody can do it. We don’t need a commission, what we need is the truth…

The FBI needs to get its act together and tell the truth: “We need it, because we want to spy on Americans!” Cool, let’s talk about that, but please don’t try to deceive us by pretending we are idiots. We aren’t. I just explained to you and I am sure you understood it, and your entire audience understood the simplicity of getting access to that secret code.

A vote for Hillary is a vote for war

Even critics understate how catastrophically bad the Hillary Clinton-led NATO bombing of Libya was

SALON

The New York Times published two lengthy pieces this week detailing Hillary Clinton’s role in the 2011 NATO bombing of Libya. Both are important documents, and provide much insight into how, as secretary of state for the Obama administration, Clinton played a uniquely hands-on role in the war.

Sec. Clinton pressured a wary President Obama to join France and the U.K. in the war, the Times reported. Vice President Biden, National Security Adviser Tom Donilon and Defense Secretary Robert Gates, among others, opposed the war effort. Numerous government officials recalled that her hawkish enthusiasm was decisive in the “51-49 decision.”

The Times spoke of “Clinton’s deep belief in America’s power to do good in the world,” but did not stress that this belief is rooted in an aggressive militarism. It did quote French President Sarkozy, who fondly remembered how the secretary of state “was tough, she was bullish,” but the Times’ reporting understated Clinton’s belligerence.

At 13,000 words in length combined, the articles are important contributions to the historical record. Yet although they are critical of Clinton and her leadership in the conflict, they fail to acknowledge the crimes of U.S.-backed rebel groups, and ultimately underestimate just how disastrous the war was, just how hawkish Hillary is and just how significant this will be for the future of the United States — not to mention the future of Libya and its suffering people.

The U.S. president does not have as much control over economic and social issues as many pundits, analysts and even voters often insist. One must not forget that the head of state does not control the Congress or the judiciary. But the president does have enormous power when it comes to international affairs, diplomacy and war. This makes foreign policy one of the most crucial issues in any presidential campaign.

Clinton’s leadership in the catastrophic war in Libya should ergo constantly be at the forefront of any discussion of the presidential primary.

Throughout the campaign, Clinton has tried to have her cake and eat it too. She has flaunted her leadership in the war as a sign of her supposed foreign policy experience, yet, at the same moment, strived to distance herself from the disastrous results of said war.

Today, Libya is in ruins. The seven months of NATO bombing effectively destroyed the government and left behind a political vacuum. Much of this has been filled by extremist groups.

Millions of Libyans live without a formal government. The internationally recognized government only controls the eastern part of the country. Rivaled extremist Islamist groups have seized much of the country.

Downtown Benghazi, a once thriving city, is now in ruins. Ansar al-Sharia, a fundamentalist Salafi militia that is designated a terrorist organization by the U.S., now controls large chunks of it. ISIS has made Libya home to its largest so-called “caliphate” outside of Iraq and Syria.

Thousands of Libyans have been killed, and this violent chaos has sparked a flood of refugees. Hundreds of thousands of Libyan civilians have fled, often on dangerous smuggling boats. The U.N. estimates more than 400,000 people have been displaced.

A disjointed peace process, mediated by the U.N. and other countries, drags on, with no signs of the war ending anytime soon.

Hillary has, understandably, said little of these consequences. Yet, in debate after debate, with her call for more aggression on Syria and Iran, Clinton has only continued to demonstrate that she is an unabashed war hawk.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, then, looking back, the facts show that she did not just push for and lead the war in Libya; she even went out of her way to derail diplomacy.

Little-discussed secret audio recordings released in early 2015 reveal how top Pentagon officials, and even one of the most progressive Democrats in Congress, were so wary of Clinton’s warmongering that they corresponded with the regime of Libyan dictator Muammar Qaddafi in hopes of pursuing some form of diplomacy.

Qaddafi’s son Seif wanted to negotiate a ceasefire with the U.S. government, opening up communications with the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Clinton later intervened and asked the Pentagon to stop talking to the Qaddafi regime.

Rep. Dennis Kucinich wrote a letter to Clinton and Obama in August 2011, warning against the war. “I have been contacted by an intermediary in Libya who has indicated that President Muammar Gadhafi is willing to negotiate an end to the conflict under conditions which would seem to favor Administration policy,” the Democratic lawmaker said. His plea was ignored.

A Pentagon intelligence official told Seif Qaddafi that his messages were falling on deaf ears. “Everything I am getting from the State Department is that they do not care about being part of this,” he explained.

“Secretary Clinton does not want to negotiate at all,” the U.S. intelligence official added.

And not negotiate is indeed what she did. In fact, after Qaddafi was brutally killed — sodomized with a bayonet by rebels — Clinton gloated live on TV, “We came, we saw, he died!”

The Pentagon’s correspondence with Libya before and during the war has rarely been mentioned in media reports (it is not discussed in either of the two New York Times pieces) since the Washington Times originally reported it.

The irony in the media coverage of Libya is that the right-wing media, which tends to be more pro-war, has actually been more careful and diligent in its assessment of Clinton’s legacy in Libya. In a dogmatic bipartisan political system, perhaps these kinds of double standards have come to be expected.

Those to the left of the Democratic Party certainly took notice too, nonetheless. Jacobin, a firmly leftist magazine, published one of the most careful and scathing critiques of Clinton’s role in the war. Journalist and author David Mizner meticulously detailed the uncomfortable facts in a piece appropriately titled “Worse Than Benghazi.”

Hillary’s war in Libya is the real Benghazi scandal. As Salon has previously reported, mere hours after Clinton’s day-long Benghazi interrogation by Republicans in October, at least six Libyans were killed and dozens more were wounded when militants in Benghazi fired rockets at a protest against a U.N. proposal for a unity government.

Benghazi the city remains roiled in violence, and, in the words of the Associated Press, “shattered.”

In “Worse Than Benghazi,” Mizner shows how many of the excuses, especially the allegation — spread forcefully by Clinton — that Qaddafi was on the verge of carrying out genocide against his people, were largely baseless.

U.S. intelligence officials told The Washington Times that the government had “gathered no specific evidence of an impending genocide in Libya in spring 2011, undercutting Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton’s primary argument for using the U.S. military to remove Col. Moammar Gadhafi from power, an event that has left his country in chaos.”

The New York Times’ lengthy stories do call “into question whether the intervention prevented a humanitarian catastrophe or merely helped create one of a different kind.” They do also point out that Human Rights Watch reports later showed that media claims about Qaddafi’s repression of protesters, which were used to sell the war to the public, were grossly exaggerated, by an order of magnitude.

Yet the two articles devote little attention to what they acknowledge were “the rebels’ human-rights abuses.” U.S.-backed militants committed their own share of atrocities. In particular, Libyan rebels targeted dark-skinned, sub-Saharan Africans and minority groups.

Human Rights Watch warned in 2013, in the wake of the Clinton-led war, of “serious and ongoing human rights violations against inhabitants of the town of Tawergha, who are widely viewed as having supported Muammar Gaddafi.”

Tawergha’s inhabitants were mostly descendants of black slaves, and were very poor. Rebels ethnically cleansed the city of the black Libyans. Human Rights Watch reported that militant groups carried out “forced displacement of roughly 40,000 people, arbitrary detentions, torture, and killings are widespread, systematic, and sufficiently organized to be crimes against humanity.”

Moreover, there were reports that rebels put black Libyans, whom they accused of being mercenaries for Qaddafi, in cages, forcing them to eat flags and calling them “dogs.”

These horrific, racist crimes were not mentioned in the prolix New York Times pieces on Clinton’s legacy in Libya. Yet the U.S. backed many of the rebels who would go on to commit atrocities like this.

Other rebels groups who were at least indirectly supported by the U.S. have gone on to become its present enemies.

Many liberals simply assumed Clinton’s Libya escapade was a success because it led to the fall of a despot, to regime change. Qaddafi was certainly a repressive dictator. But so was Saddam Hussein, and we see few liberals eager to defend Bush’s war in Iraq. The ruins left of both countries is hard to overstate.

Removing a dictator is the easy part. The proof of the pudding is in the eating, and the proof of the abject failure of the NATO war in Libya is what we can see today: the chaos that reigns across much of the North African nation.

The war in Libya is often depicted by both Democrats and Republicans as an ostensible act of American benevolence. NATO, the putative preserver of democracy, violently overthrew a dictator, with Clinton at the helm. What is rarely ever interrogated about this trite trope, however, is the fact that the U.S. is simultaneously aligned with some of the most authoritarian countries in the world, in neighboring Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Qatar, Oman, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates.

If the U.S. was truly so concerned with overthrowing a dictatorship and bringing democracy to the Middle East, why doesn’t it start with the planet’s most dictatorial nations? That is to say, its own allies in the Gulf.

Could the fact that Libya has enormous oil reserves, and was one of the world’s largest oil producers before the bombing, be a factor? Or its billions of dollars in gold reserves? Or Qaddafi’s history of supporting militant left-wing and anti-imperialist movements?

Many Americans are not very interested in international affairs. This could be due to a variety of factors (e.g., widespread acceptance of the notion that foreign policy does not directly influence one’s life, or the U.S.’s uniquely narcissistic demeanor, exemplified by the prevalence of “American exceptionalism”), but, regardless of why this is the case, poll after poll shows that foreign policy is frequently low on the list of average Americans’ concerns.

Clinton’s disastrous history in Libya shows precisely why this is folly, and why it is so dangerous to give short shrift to foreign policy.

The U.S. government spends an enormous amount of tax dollars on the military. The U.S. is responsible for more than one-third of the entire world’s military expenditure — even while it has just one-twentieth of the global population — and spends more on the military than the planet’s next nine-largest militaries combined.

Critics histrionically ask where the government would possibly get funds for social programs like universal health care, free higher education or social security (while ignoring the fact that every other country in the industrialized world already has universal health care and it works just fine, not to mention the widespread incidence of free or very cheap public higher education), yet look over this Brobdingnagian elephant in the room: military spending.

If Americans are concerned with these problems, they should be equally concerned with the prospect of a Clinton presidency. A vote for Hillary is a vote for war. Or, as economist Jeffrey Sachs put it in a recent article, Clinton “is the candidate of the military-industrial complex” and “the war machine.”

If Americans do not want to be marched toward more and more war, if Americans do not want the majority of their tax dollars spent on death and destruction, they should be very suspicious of Clinton and her record.

The destruction of Libya is the capstone of Hillary Clinton’s foreign policy record. And this singular symbol of her legacy is one of abject failure, indefensible atrocities and tragic destruction.

Neocon Freakout Over Trump

The Russian US Ceasefire in Syria is Holding - It is Time To Reassess The War Party in Washington

Syria civil war: State-of-the-art technology gives President Assad’s army the edge 

| Middle East | News | The Independent

Robert Fisk | The Independent | Feb 27, 2016, 08.54 AM IST

You can see the Syrian army’s spanking new Russian T-90 tanks lined up in their new desert livery scarcely 100 miles from Isis’s Syrian “capital” of Raqqa.

There are new Russian-made trucks alongside them, and a lot of artillery and – surely Isis’s spies are supposed to see this – plenty of Syrian soldiers walking beside the perimeter wire beside Russian soldiers wearing floppy military hats against the sun, the kind they used in the old days in the summer heat of Afghanistan in the 1980s. There’s even a Russian general based at the Isriyah military base, making sure that Syrian tank crews receive the most efficient training on the T-90s.

No, Russian ground troops are not going to fight Isis. That was never the intention. The Russian air force attacks Isis from the air; the Syrians, the Iranians, the Afghan Shia Muslims from north-eastern Afghanistan, the Iraqi Shias and several hundred Pakistani Shias must attack Isis and Jabhat al-Nusra on the ground. 

But the Russians have to be up in the desert to the east of the Aleppo-Hama-Homs-Damascus axis, both to train the Syrian tank crews and maintain an eastern base of forward air controllers to guide the Sukhoi bombers on to their night-time targets.

Everyone on the Syrian front lines will tell you that the Syrian air force bombs its enemies only in clear weather. When the winter clouds descend and the rain falls across northern and eastern Syria, the Russians take over. 

“The Syrians are low enough to see – the Russians, when they come, you never see them,” as one constant visitor to the war fronts put it with military simplicity. No wonder senior Russian officers are now also attached to the Syrian army command in Aleppo.  Vladimir Putin doesn’t do things by halves.

Russian warplanes fly in the sky over the Mediterranean coastal city of Latakia, Syria

Yet the most important military support  the Russians have given to the Syrians is not the tanks – impressive though they look – but the technology that goes with them.

Syrian officers have been shown how the new T-90 anti-missile system causes rockets to veer off course only yards from the tanks when fired directly at them. Is this the weapon that might defeat the mass rocket assaults of Isis and Nusra? Perhaps. Even more important for the Syrians, however, are the new Russian night-vision motion sensors, and the electronic surveillance-reconnaissance equipment which enabled the government army to smash through the Nusra defences in the mountainous far north-west of Syria, breaking the rebel supply lines from Turkey to Aleppo.

In an army that has lost well over 60,000 dead in almost five years of hard fighting, Syria’s officers have suddenly discovered that the new Russian technology has coincided with a rapid lowering of their casualties. This may be one reason for the steady trickle of old “Free Syrian Army” deserters back to the ranks of the government forces, depleting even further David Cameron’s 70,000-strong army of “moderate” ghost soldiers. Intriguingly, since the start of the war in 2011, a far higher percentage of Syrian police and political security personnel have gone across to Bashar al-Assad’s enemies than have soldiers in the regular army. There have been 5,000 security personnel defections out of a total force of 28,000 police.

The Russians are in a unique position among Syrian ground forces; they can train the Syrians how to use the new tanks and then watch how the T-90s perform  without having to suffer any casualties themselves. Originally, there were plans to recapture Palmyra, the Roman city already partly vandalised by Isis, but the difficulties of the flat desert terrain have persuaded the Syrians that offensives in the north to cut off all rebel routes from Turkey into Syria will be far more worthwhile.

No wonder the Turks are now laying down shellfire amid Syrian forces along their mutual border. The Russians, of course, find it far easier to train men to fight in cities or mountains – environments in which they themselves have fought – than in deserts, in which no Russian military personnel have had experience since Gamal Abdel Nasser’s war in Yemen. 

The offensives that retook the Shia villages of Nubl and Zahra last month were of great interest to the Russian military. For the first time, Syrian army Special Forces, Iranian Revolutionary Guards and Lebanese Hezbollah fighters operated together with Syrian tanks and helicopters, blasting their way through 20 miles of villages and open countryside in just eight days.

But the statistics of foreign forces fighting for the Syrian regime appear to have been grossly exaggerated in the West. There are fewer than 5,000 Iranian Revolutionary Guards in Syria – this includes advisers as well as soldiers – and the other 5,000 foreign fighters include not only Afghans and Hezbollah but Pakistani Shia Muslims as well.

Despite all the boasts of Saudi Arabia that it has formed a massive, if hopelessly untrained, “coalition against terror”, it seems that the Syrians, Iranians and Hezbollah have managed to operate together in difficult, rainy terrain and win their first major joint battle. Iranian forces are now being used on the front lines for the first time, principally around Aleppo. Their first advance began in the south Aleppo countryside in November. Officially, they and the Syrians were said to be planning to open the old international highway from Aleppo to Hama, but the real plan was to break the sieges of the Shia villages of Fuah and Kafraya.

In the eastern countryside, Colonel Suheil Hassan, the “Tiger” whom some of the Syrian military regard as their Rommel, has been heading north to end an Isis siege on a Syrian airbase.

But what of the Kurds, whose advance southwards has also endangered those rebel supply routes to Aleppo?  The Syrians are grateful for any Kurdish help they can get. But few in the military have forgotten the chilling events of 2013, when retreating Syrians sought refuge with Kurdish forces after the battle for the Mineq airbase. The Kurds demanded a vast tranche of weapons from the Syrian army in return for their men – soldiers for ammunition – in which millions of rounds of AK-47 and machine-gun ammunition and thousands of rounds of rocket-propelled grenades were sought in return for the release of the soldiers.

But the Kurds wanted to persuade Nusra to return Kurdish prisoners, and offered the senior Syrian officers from Mineq to Nusra in return for the captives. Nusra agreed, but once the Kurds handed over the Syrian officers, the Islamist rebels – who had lost around 300 of their own men in the Mineq battle – at once killed all the Syrian officers the Kurds had given them, shooting them in the head.

Among them was the acting Syrian commander at Mineq, Colonel Naji Abu Shaar of the Syrian army’s 17th Division. Events like these will not endear the Kurds to the Syrian army in future years.

Meanwhile, the Syrians continue to lose high-ranking officers in battle. At least six generals have been killed in combat during the Syrian war, allowing the army to proclaim that their top men lead from the front. 

The commander of Syria’s Special Forces was killed in Idlib, and the commander of Syrian military intelligence in the east of the country was killed in Deir al-Zour. Major-General Mohsen Mahlouf died in battle near Palmyra. General Saleh, a close friend and colleague of Colonel “Tiger” Hassan, took on the suicide bombers of al-Qaeda in the Sheikh Najjar Industrial City outside Aleppo a year ago.

He told me that suicide bombers killed 23 of his men in one vast explosion there. I met him afterwards, and thought at the time that he had adopted a blithe – almost foolhardy – disregard of death.  Just a month ago, he drove over an IED bomb which blew off the lower half of his right leg. These are hard men, many of whom trained in a Syrian military college whose front gate legend reads: “Welcome to the school of heroism, where the gods of war are made.” Chilling stuff.

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