Russia/Hezbollah/Assad on verge of taking Raqqa from U.S.A backed ISIS rebels

[Ghazi]

:lol United States
:lol proxy army FAIL
:lol losing the Cold War
:lol can't do a damn thing to Iran
:lol 3 lost wars in a row

http://sputniknews.com/politics/20160608/1041018747/russia-us-syria-raqqa.html

This will be the end of ISIS as we know it when it's self-proclaimed capital is taken back by Assad thanks to the help of Russia and Iran. It will also expose that the USA, which hasn't dropped a single bomb on Raqqa, has been lying all along about it's so called war on ISIS.

ISIS was and always has been a friend of the United States.

[Ghazi]

:lmao Turkey, :lmao Saudi Arabia.

Saudi Arabia cannot touch Iran anymore, this proxy war was evident. ISIS is literally on the run, and it's no thanks to the United States which is Daesh's #1 friend.

[Ghazi]

Khomeini: America cannot do a damn thing to us

[FuzzyLumpkins]

I prefer the hater account when you post sputnik news.

ISIS controls Raqqa and both sides are moving in on ISIS territory. People around here are savvy enough to understand that Russian news is the most unreliable outside of North Korea. They pioneered the social control techniques in the Soviet era. What was Putin during that time period btw? They even have a slogan to sell it: the race to Raqqa.

Regardless here is a Canadian News source on the issue:


Syrian government, U.S.-backed fighters advance against Islamic Sate

Syrian government troops backed by Russia and fighters backed by the United States made separate advances against Islamic State on Friday, gaining ground in new offensives that have put unprecedented pressure on the self-declared caliphate.

In neighboring Iraq, government troops also fought for territory in an Islamic State bastion near Baghdad. There was no confirmation of an Iraqi media report that Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi had been wounded in U.S.-led air strikes.

Two years after the ultra-hardline group proclaimed its caliphate to rule over all Muslims from swathes of territory in Iraq and Syria, its many foes are advancing on a number of fronts in both countries, with the aim of closing in on its two capitals, Raqqa in Syria and Mosul in Iraq.

A U.S.-backed militia, the Syria Democratic Forces (SDF), launched an offensive last week to capture the last stretch of Turkish-Syrian border still in Islamic State hands and have surrounded the main city in the area, Manbij.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights monitoring group said the SDF, which is backed by U.S. air support and special forces, took control of the last route into Manbij on Friday.

Further south, government troops and their allies, backed by Russia, captured a crossroads in Raqqa province that controls a highway leading to Tabqa, an Islamic State-held city on the Euphrates River, and Raqqa city itself, the Observatory and the army said.

The army also launched its advance last week in what media sympathetic to Damascus have described as a "race to Raqqa" - to take territory in Islamic State's heartland before the U.S.-backed militia get their first.

http://www.reuters.com/article/us-mideast-crisis-syria-army-idUSKCN0YW1QJ

[Ghazi]

Russian news can't be as bad as American cable news, tbh. IMO FWIW

[FuzzyLumpkins]

Russian news can't be as bad as American cable news, tbh. IMO FWIW


Among others, Ostrovsky deftly portrays Yegor Yakovlev, who was appointed editor of Moscow News, once a Soviet propaganda sheet that he transformed into a beacon of perestroika. Circulation soared, and it became the most sought-after newspaper in the Soviet Union. In 1991, Yakovlev courageously defied the coup plotters who tried to oust Gorbachev and shut down the press. “This was his finest and most heroic hour — something that he had waited and longed for all his life,” Ostrovsky recalls.

But the triumph was short-lived. A tense, poignant turning point in Ostrovsky’s story comes when Yakovlev published his last issue of Moscow News in 1991, carrying an interview he conducted with his own son, Vladimir, founding editor of Kommersant, the first and most formative newspaper of the nascent capitalist era. While the father hoped to save socialism, the son wanted to bury it. Kommersant became a flagship of the new Russia under President Boris Yeltsin, “a wild and entrepreneurial time, when anything seemed possible,” Ostrovsky recalls. A central role was played by NTV, the independent television channel owned by the oligarch Vladimir Gusinsky that broadcast the truth about war in Chechnya, breaking through the Kremlin’s lies and coverups. “For a second,” Ostrovsky recalls, “Russia seemed almost like a normal country, where the ability to criticize and ridicule politicians is a sign of a healthy democracy.”

In retrospect, there was a fatal weakness. In normal countries, democracy is built on institutions. But in Russia, “freedom of speech rested on the goodwill of just one man — Yeltsin — who, for some reason, believed it to be a valuable thing.” Yeltsin shrugged off criticism, saw journalists as allies against the implacable communists and won their support for his 1996 reelection. Yet he alone was the guarantor of freedom, and it had little foundation once he was gone. The raucous, inventive spirit of the 1990s turned to gloom as rival oligarchs went to war over the privatization of a telecommunications company. “Giddy with their own wealth and power,” Ostrovsky writes, the tycoons and Yeltsin’s young reformers “were destroying their own futures and the future of the country.”

Yeltsin, tired and sick, handpicked as his successor a little-known KGB man, Vladimir Putin, who had been stationed in Dresden during the late 1980s. Putin saw the great quest for democracy and freedom from a distance and from the sidelines, and never shared its aspirations. He believed above all in the restoration of a strong state. He burst into public view in 1999, after a series of terrorist bombings of apartment houses in Moscow and other cities killed more than 300 people. The Kremlin blamed the attacks on Chechen rebels. In response to the violence, Putin launched a new military campaign in Chechnya, soothing a rattled nation. (Those who organized and carried out the bombings were never found; the late tycoon Boris Berezovsky once charged that the attacks were a deliberate provocation by the Russian special services.) Ostrovsky shows how Putin also became obsessed with television as an instrument of power and manipulation.

Under Putin, the 1990s were portrayed “as an era of total chaos and banditry,” an image formed as much by the programming of the 2000s as by the reality. Putin crushed independent NTV, expelled and jailed oligarchs, and imposed a make-believe politics with the patina of democracy but the reality of “a mechanism for retaining power.” He didn’t replace the system of oligarchic capitalism, just the recipients. His coterie helped themselves to the riches of the state.

When protests by the young and middle class broke out in Moscow against Putin in 2011, he was “angry and rattled.” His subsequent war in Ukraine was accompanied by an ever-more-destructive propaganda campaign on television and elsewhere in which anti-Americanism was drilled into the minds of the Russian people. “This hell cannot end peacefully,” the reformer Boris Nemtsov, who opposed the war, wrote on Facebook in May 2014. Ten months later he was murdered, shot in the back, just beyond the Kremlin walls.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/when-russia-glimpsed-freedom-for-a-moment/2016/06/09/0ba58d8c-0192-11e6-b823-707c79ce3504_story.html

Yeltsin is missed greatly.