Jordanian air strike destroyed al Qaeda force aiming for US target

Jordanian air strike destroyed al Qaeda force aiming for US target 

Debka 17-Apr-14 

The Jordanian air strike Wednesday April 16 against an armored vehicle convoy from Syria destroyed an Al Qaeda raider force on its way to attack a US military target, debkafile reveals. Jordan’s first assault on a target outside the country took place on the Syrian side of the border opposite the eastern Jordanian town of Ruwaished. At a secret base nearby, Iraqi troops are being instructed by US and Jordanian instructors in counter-terror combat tactics. This episode dramatizes the escalating Al Qaeda-Iraq threat to Jordan, the US forces based there and Israel. 

Israel-Palestinian Talks Back to Nowhere. How Abbas’s Unity Pact with Hamas Caught US and Israeli Intelligence Napping

Israel-Palestinian Talks Back to Nowhere. How Abbas’s Unity Pact with Hamas Caught US and Israeli Intelligence Napping 

Debka 25-Apr-14 

The reconciliation pact signed by the two rival Palestinian factions, Mahmoud Abbas’s Fatah and the Hamas rulers of the Gaza Strip Wednesday April 23, more or less wiped the US-sponsored Middle East peace process off the Obama administration and the Netanyahu government’s agendas. 

Instead of playing on the international stage as he has for decades, Palestinian Authority Chairman Abbas, has reduced his role to the parochial level on an issue which no longer holds much interest - even for the Arab world. 

US Secretary of State John Kerry, who invested so much energy and prestige into a huge effort to bring Israel and the Palestinians to a final peace agreement, will no doubt now call off the visit he planned to make next week for another bid to narrow the gap between the two sides. If he comes after all, it will be to attend the funeral of his peace mission. 

President Barack Obama has thus joined his predecessors, including Bill Clinton and George Bush, who eventually despaired of resolving the unending Israeli-Palestinian dispute. 

US and Israel intelligence caught by surprise 

According to DEBKA Weekly’s sources, US and Israeli intelligence services were both caught napping by the reconciliation ceremony in Gaza City Wednesday. They had no notion that Abbas (Abu Mazen) had completed the drafting in secret of a unity pact and had it ready for signing on the spot by Wednesday, after it was carried to Gaza City by Fatah officials whom Israel permitted to reach Gaza without scenting what was afoot. 

This raises hard questions: If John Kerry was not clued in on what the Palestinians were up to - even after setting up a 200-member task force for the negotiations headed by Martin Indyk; and if Netanyahu was not properly briefed on Palestinian steps by his intelligence services – then on what basis did they conduct negotiations for more than a year? 

Their lack of knowledge apart, there is another question: What on earth impelled Abbas to pull this April surprise out of his hat? 

The short answer is that he was desperate to raise his sagging prestige on the Palestinian street and hit on the popular slogans of national reconciliation and a unified government to give his prestige a boost. 

The Hamas rulers of the Gaza Strip were just as needy 

The unity pact was meant to give both regimes a shot in the arm – at least for the short term. 

Fatah-Hamas divisions are papered over 

The odds of the deal surviving up to the formation of a national unity government within five weeks and elections within six months are poor. 

Aside from those two measures, Fatah and Hamas agree on nothing – not even on the name of a prime minister. 

What will happen to Hamas’s massive arsenal of rockets aimed from Gaza at Israel? Will its military arm, the Izz e-Din Al Qassam Brigades, be disbanded and merged into the National Security Force the Americans established for the Palestinian Authority on the West Bank? 

The document signed in Gaza is fundamentally no more than a letter of intent with no attempt to highlight divisions by trying to fill in these blanks. The signatories hope that their pact will survive better than pacts between the strong because it is the only life belt they have to cling to. 

Of immediate concern is finding the money to fill their empty coffers and cover administration payrolls. For Western donors, one half of the unified Palestinian entity is a designated terrorist organization. 

The Arab League secretary said Thursday, April 24, that Ramallah would be provided with a safety net if Washington and Jerusalem cut off funds. 

Abbas dropped from the peace process loses international legitimacy 

However, by allying himself with Hamas, Abu Mazen has not only alienated the West, but also the most important Arab League members, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the UAE. Their energies are devoted to fighting the Muslim Brotherhood and are hardly likely to put up funds for its offspring Hamas and new partner. 

Abbas’s action has also put a spanner in his application for Palestinian membership of a list of UN bodies in the capacity of an independent state. For as long as the Palestinian Authority was engaged in US-sponsored peace talks with Israel, his efforts gained a measure of international legitimacy. But now that Israel and the US have dropped him as a peace partner, he will meet a cold shoulder in many of the capitals which once made him welcome. 

In any case, the peace process has long been more dead than alive. For months, it was kept going on artificial life support. This time, it looks as though it has given up the ghost for good. 

US Irked by Israel’s “Neutrality” on Crimea. Netanyahu Orders 'Intelligence Blackout' on Ukraine Input

US Irked by Israel’s “Neutrality” on Crimea. Netanyahu Orders 'Intelligence Blackout' on Ukraine Input 

Debka 25-Apr-14 

The Obama administration has been sending Jerusalem irritable complaints for more than a month about Israel’s neutral posture on the Ukraine issue between Washington and Moscow. This is not the attitude the US has come to expect from its senior Middle East ally. 

However, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu opted for this position after careful thought, shortly before Russian forces were reported to have invaded Crimea, and after exhaustive secret consultations with Israel’s intelligence chiefs, including the Mossad’s Tamir Pardo, and senior diplomats experienced in dealing with Moscow. 

Those consultations took place in the third week of February. 

One piece of information revealed to him then was that the Russian army had invaded and seized the Crimean Peninsula on February 20, i.e., 10 days before the event’s official date. This was subsequently confirmed by the Russian Defense Ministry’s award of the Crimean Peninsula Medal to all those who took part in the Russian military operation. 

The date on that medal is February 20. 

Most of meeting’s participants urged the government to keep Israel out of US-Russian rivalry over Ukraine and refrain from taking sides. 

Netanyahu hopes Putin will be receptive to Israel on Iran and Syria 

As the Obama administration distances itself from the Middle East, Russia is drawing closer, filling the void with growing stature and influence. 

Israel decided therefore it was necessary to take Moscow into account in its policy-making - especially in the hope that President Vladimir Putin continues to be approachable on matters of supreme security import for Israel, such as Iran’s nuclear program and the flow of Russian arms to Bashar Assad’s army. 

Netanyahu told the meeting that through his personal rapport with Putin, whom he called a friend, he obtained his consent to withhold the advanced S-300 anti-tank missiles from Iran and Syria. “Putin is a man of his word who keeps his promises,” he said. 

He hoped that the Russian leader would be equally receptive to Israeli requests for restrictions on the quantities and types of advanced weaponry Russia supplies to Syria – and thence to the Lebanese Hizballah. 

In Netanyahu’s view, Israel has nothing to gain in diplomatic terms from publicly castigating the Kremlin’s actions in Ukraine, as Washington expects it to do. 

He was sure that Israel’s friendship with America would survive, irrespective of its row with Russia. Israel had no need to make the sacrifice of antagonizing Moscow at the expense of its own national security interests. 

Israel applies neutrality to intelligence-sharing on Ukraine 

A month after this decision was reached in Jerusalem, Israel found a pretext for absenting itself from the US-led vote against Russia at the UN Assembly on March 28. 

The non-binding resolution, which passed by a 100-11 vote with 58 abstentions, called on member states “to desist and refrain from actions aimed at the partial or total disruption of the national unity and territorial integrity of Ukraine, including any attempts to modify Ukraine’s borders through the threat or use of force or other unlawful means.” 

The Crimean referendum confirming the peninsula’s annexation to Russia was declared invalid. 

Canada and Poland, which maintain strong ties with Israel, were among the nations which supported the resolution. 

DEBKA Weekly's intelligence sources add that Israel’s policy of neutrality on Ukraine is also applied to cooperation with US intelligence agencies. Israel’s undercover services are well-established in Ukraine – their mission primarily to preclude the sale of advanced weaponry by Ukrainian army officers and arms dealers to hostile Middle East parties. Those agents have good ties with some of Ukraine’s oligarchs who let drop reliable information on events in Kiev and other Ukraine cities. 

US-Israel intel partnership goes back 60 years 

Those agencies are now under orders from the prime minister to maintain an “intelligence blackout” – a term they use for putting on ice sensitive matters and making them accessible to no one aside from the prime minister. 

This non-cooperation has drawn several complaints from Washington, on the grounds that highly sensitive and controversial episodes have never in the past impaired intelligence-sharing between the US and Israel and there is no reason why Israel should start being cagey about the information it gathers in Ukraine. 

Israel replied that the interchange of intelligence on weapons and terrorist movements continues as usual, leaving out only input that would place the country in the middle of the US dispute with Russia. 

This attitude is a completely new ball-game in the long history of US-Israeli intelligence relations. 

In the early 1950s, the heads of Israel’s fledgling clandestine services went to Washington to place all their assets in the Soviet Union and European satellites at the US disposal for the effort to win the Cold War. 

This undercover partnership, details of which still a closed guarded secret in Washington and Jerusalem, became the bedrock for the close cooperation between their spy agencies in the decades which followed and up until the present day. 

Israel feels Obama isn’t coming clean on Iran’s nuclear secrets 

Yet in the case of Ukraine, Netanyahu decided to partially break with this cherished tradition for three reasons: 

1. He is getting back at the Obama administration for blocking Israel’s access to certain pieces of information on the Iranian nuclear program - a departure from the intelligence-sharing that was promised in the course of the world powers’ nuclear negotiations with Tehran. 

2. He has information confirming that certain fascist factions from the Baltic participate in the provisional Kiev regime. Israel wants no part in maintaining these unsavory elements in power. 

3. In a long telephone conversation with Putin on April 16, Netanyahu gave his word that Israel’s Ukraine policy would not change. 

The communiqués issued later in Moscow and Jerusalem disclosed that the Israeli prime minister had requested - and received - the Russian president’s evaluation of the Ukraine crisis. The two leaders also discussed Iran at length. 

It has been a long time since Obama has held a phone conversation of comparable length and breadth with Netanyahu. 

Yabroud Victory Erases Syrian-Lebanese Border. Assad Rewards Hizballah for Yabroud with the Gift of Syria’s Qalamoun Mountains

:Yabroud Victory Erases Syrian-Lebanese Border. Assad Rewards Hizballah for Yabroud with the Gift of Syria’s Qalamoun Mountains 

Debka 21-Mar-14 

The Battle of Qalamoun was the longest and fiercest battle in Syria’s three-year civil war. The rebels held tenaciously on to their last stronghold of Yabroud for five months under cruel battering, until the victorious Syrian and Hizballah forces finally marched into the town on Sunday, March 16. 

The Syrian army first launched air strikes on Nov. 15, 2013, to soften up rebel positions in the town of Qara in the strategic Qalamoun Mountains and cut their supply lines from Lebanon to Damascus. Syrian rebels were using the mountain range as their rear base for operations around Damascus. 

For its part, government forces had been using the nearby highway No. 5 to connect Damascus with the central Homs province. Many of their weapons depots were located in the area 

The Qalamoun Mountains - the northeastern section of the Anti-Lebanon Mountains (the Western name for the Eastern Lebanon Mountain Range) - lie northwest of the Syrian capital of Damascus. Their geography endows them with unique strategic value. 

On 14 March, in the last stretch of the battle for Yabroud, the gateway to Qalamoun, Hizballah fighters approached the town from the west as a diversion, while Syrian Army troops attacked from the east, each side providing the other with covering fire support. 

The rebels were caught in this pincer movement under heavy bombardment. 

Supply lines cut off to Syrian rebels in rural Damascus 

Fighting raged at the eastern entrance of the city, which suffered 15 air strikes that day. The rebels brought in reinforcements and regrouped – to no avail. The first Hizballah and government forces had already burst into the town. 

Although one of the strongest rebel groups was posted at Mar Maroun hill east of Yabroud, it fell to the Syrian army without notable resistance, along with all the hills surrounding the key town. 

Syrian forces then seized control of Yabroud’s eastern approaches and northeastern boundary and advanced into the city. 

That evening, rebel commanders met and decided to abandon the town, their last stronghold in the Qalamoun range, leaving only the Islamist Al-Nusra front to fight on. 

On 16 March, Syrian and Hizballah fighters entered the town from the east. 

The loss of Yabroud has cut rebel supply lines to the forces still holding out in rural Damascus against a government army siege which is starving these areas of food, power and clean water. 

Straight after their triumph, DEBKA Weekly's intelligence sources report that Syrian President Bashar Assad and Hizballah chief Hassan Nasrallah spoke on the phone. 

The agreed that their armies would start executing the secret deal to which Iran was a party which they struck last September before embarking on the Qalamoun campaign. 

Victory celebrated by the gift of a mountain range for Hizballah 

Under that deal, our sources reveal, the 8,000 square-kilometer area of the Syrian Qalamoun range was promised by the Syrian ruler to Hizballah as a reward for its sterling contribution to the Assad regime’s war. 

Our military sources outline the strategic implications of the transfer of this piece of Syrian territory to Hizballah ownership, as a sort of statelet. 

1. A long section of the Syrian-Lebanese border is erased and shifted eastward to a new line, which parallels Syrian Highway 5. This highway links Damascus to the northern Syrian town of Homs and Latakia in the West. 

The Syrian-deal with Hizballah therefore has the historic effect of redrawing the 98-year old boundaries laid out between Syria and Lebanon in the 1916 Sykes-Picot Agreement between Great Britain and France with Russia’s assent for the dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire. 

2. Hizballah has gained a realm of its own for the conduct of its affairs independently of central governments in Damascus or Beirut. 

3. The Qalamoun range is transformed into a barrier separating Syria from Lebanon, the while endowing Hizballah with a superb strategic vantage point for monitoring events in Lebanon. The area under its lofty oversight arches out from its new mountain fief to South Beirut and southern Lebanon and further east to the Shebaa Farms, the disputed Hermon strip controlled by Israel – a crescent encompassing Lebanon from the south, east and north. 

Hizballah moves its military strength and weapons out of South Lebanon 

4. Hizballah’s grip on southern Lebanon and the Beqaa Valley abutting on the Syrian border will be reinforced form the east. Furthermore, its missile pads, logistic bases and arsenals can be moved to safer, more easily defensible sites in the new Hizballah possession. 

5. By removing most of its military forces to this stronghold, Hizballah can also reduce its dependence on South Lebanon and use it as a buffer zone against Israel. 

6. Up until now, Hizballah kept its main arms depots stored in Syrian bases out of reach of Israeli attacks. Those stores can now be relocated safely to the Qalamoun Mountains. 

For Israel this is a major setback. Its tactics for keeping advanced Iranian arms out of Hizballah’s hands hitherto were to bomb the shipments on their way from Syria to Lebanon as they crossed the border. That border has now shifted and the bulk of Hizballah personnel and weapons will be cached in the Qalamoun mountains which is formally sovereign Syrian territory. 

7. The mountainous terrain in any case presents a difficult target to reach.