Operation Featherweight: Month 10, Week 3, Day 3.

Due to time pressures I am rather going to have to rush over events on the ground in Iraq and Syria. However they remain largely unchanged.

Over the past week the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) launched yet another attack on the Baiji oil refinery which sits around 40km (24 miles) north of the city of Tikrit. According to the most recent reports ISIL now control between 40-50% of the facility although the Iraqi Security Forces (ISF) continue to resist their advance. You may remember that Baiji was one of the staging points for March's operation to liberate Tikrit. That operation saw ISIL flee Tikrit for the al-Hawaja district that sits between Baiji and Kirkuk some 100km (60 miles) to the north-east. Therefore I wouldn't have considered the Tikrit operation to be fully completed until ISIL had been cleared from al-Hawaja district fully securing Baiji, Tikrit and Kirkuk.

Unfortunately in their haste the Iraqi Shia Popular Mobilisation Force (PMF) militia started demanding that a fresh operation was started to force ISIL from Anbar province. This provoked ISIL into launching a pre-emptive offensive around the town of al-Baghdadi and the cities of Fallujah and Ramadi which all sit in a line some 100km (60 miles) to the west of the Iraqi capital of Baghdad. Over the past month or so this ISIL offensive has forced to ISF to desperately reinforce their positions in those areas. Today ISIL launched another big push with 12 ISF troops being killed in Vehicle Borne Improvised Explosive Device (VBIED) attacks in al-Baghdadi and 150 being killed in VBIED attacks in Ramadi. As I write the situation is Ramadi is extremely chaotic with reports that ISIL have seized the centre of the city and ISF troops are in the process of withdrawing.

The big news though comes of the diplomatic front where on May 7th (7/5/15) the US announced that it was pressing ahead with long delayed plans to train and equip Syrian insurgents in Jordan and Turkey to fight ISIL. This presents two substantial problems. Firstly with the defection of the Syrian Revolutionary Front (SRF) and Harakat Hazm - both supposedly members of the 'moderate' Free Syrian Army (FSA) - to the Al Qaeda affiliate Al Nusra Front (ANF) in the battles of Jabal al-Zawiya and Bab al-Hawain in November 2014 there is substantial doubt over the reliability of these insurgents and no guarantees that the weapons and equipment they are being provided with won't end up with either ANF or ISIL.

Secondly the US along with coalition partners such as Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar have been supplying Syrian insurgents with training, weapons and equipment for the best part of 4 years now. The May 7th announcement merely substantially scales up the operation. So far none of these insurgents have shown any interest in fighting ISIL and instead have focused on fighting the Syrian government. As a result a coalition of the insurgents led by ANF which now goes by the name Jaish al-Fatah (Army of Conquest) has made significant gains in Idlib City and the town of Jisr al-Shughour and is now within heavy weapons range of the coastal city of Latikia.

This presents a huge legal and moral problem for the coalition because the foreign backed overthrow of the Syrian government would be wholly illegal under international law even going so far as to violate the United Nations (UN) own charter. This creates a crisis similar to the one faced by the League of Nations when it found itself unable to face up to Nazi Germany's aggression leading to the start of the Second World War and the collapse of the League of Nations.

It also presents a huge practical challenge to the coalition because the collapse of the Syrian government is not going to bring peace, stability and harmony to Syria. Instead it is going to bring further chaos and destruction as the disparate militia groups do battle with each other much as they have been doing in Libya since the overthrow of the Qaddafi government. The already difficult task of isolating and eliminating ISIL could well become impossible amid that chaos. In fact ISIL are already clearly growing in strength in Libya.

As a result the US' decision to go ahead with the plan in defiance of all rational advice is unlikely to make it popular with its NATO allies who are participating in the coalition. However the US' failure to go even further to overthrow the Syrian government more quickly will make it unpopular amongst it's Gulf Arab allies plus Turkey. Wednesday (13/5/15) and Thursday (14/5/15) saw both a NATO Foreign Ministers meeting in Turkey and a a supposed Heads of State meeting between the US and the Gulf Co-operation Council (GCC) although it seems clear that the GCC only agreed to that so they could snub the US in order to show that they hold the power and US President Barack Obama is nothing but their servant.

Needless to say the US prepared for these twin meetings by chucking the proverbial kitchen sink at the problem. This began with US Secretary of State John Kerry making his first visit to Russia since the conflict in Ukraine broke out. The US of course engineered the conflict in Ukraine as a way to punish Russia for its support for the Syrian government and the concept of international law really. As such this visit could be interpreted as a sign of a thaw in the US' position towards Russia and by extension Syria. 

The visit was accompanied by news that the US Congress had temporarily blocked the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade agreement. This is not to be confused with the Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) trade agreement that the US is currently negotiating with the European Union (EU).  It is this negotiation which is making it extremely difficult for the EU to tell the US no at the moment which is having far reaching consequences from Libya through the middle-east to Ukraine because Obama is incapable of saying no to Turkey let alone Saudi Arabia at the moment.

Next up came riot hit Baltimore Mayor Rawlings-Blake giving a press conference about the cities "Red Line" subway system. Obama of course foolishly said that the overthrow of the Syrian government was a Red Line for him. It was perhaps even more foolish of him to actually believe it.

Next up came the news that there would be no charges in the police involved death of Tony Robinson. As the US police are apparently no longer allowed to use force to maintain order this created fears that it would trigger yet another night of rioting. Also "Tony Robinson" sounds dangerously close to "Tommy Robinson" the assumed name of the founder of the English Defence League (EDL). Although bringing up the EDL doesn't portray the UK as particularly pro-Muslim I still don't understand the connection. However I think that was entirely the point.

The EDL actually held a protest in London on Sunday (10/5/15) where one of the police officers was photographed sporting a rather spectacular beard and moustache combination. This led to him being dubbed "#HipsterCop" creating a bit of a frenzy on Twitter. It turns out this tapped into a bit of a protest sub-culture because at the Occupy Wall Streets protests in 2011 the New York Police Department (NYPD) took to deploying a detective with a particularly Hipster fashion sense including tweed suits. According to my brother who I happened to meet on Sunday the police in Shoreditch/Hoxton area which is very much London's Hipster capital have been playing the game for a long time occasionally patrolling in vintage 1950's police cars. However I'm not sure what any of us are meant to do with any of this information. 

The big play though which meant to carry us through Wednesday and Thursday was the Amtrak 188 crash in Philadelphia. Obama's race baiting war on cops agenda is clearly doing him huge amounts of damage. It not only cost the Democrats the 2014 mid-term elections but also seemed to damage their UK partners Labour at the recent General Election. Despite having to deploy troops to quell their own waves of racist violence even the South Africans have likened Obama's policy to "a train wreck." The challenge of the 188 crash was to try and work out from all the random details whether Obama ordered the incident or whether the US Establishment had ordered it to brief against Obama. 

All of this performance seems to have had little effect because glancing over the outcome of the GCC meeting Obama appears to be continuing his position of just doing everything the Saudis tell him to do. 

14:40 on 15/5/15 (UK date).

Edited at around 18:55 on 16/5/15 (UK date) to add;

In my rush this up I didn't do any of it much justice particularly the Philadelphia train crash.

The big random detail you would have to work through is that on the day after the crash the House of Representatives Appropriations Committee voted to cut Amtrak's funding by about a 5th. Although I wasn't following it in detail I understand that the Republican controlled House had no other option under the Obama authored Bipartisan Budget Act of 2013. This of course goes right to the heart of whether the Republicans are to blame or whether Obama is to blame.

The other big detail is Philadelphia itself which up until recently was known as "Killadelphia" due to it having the highest murder rate in the US. Although Honduras is widely considered to be the most murderous nation on earth it's murder rate is far exceeded by many US cities. In fact with a murder rate of 97 per 100,000 if Baltimore was a nation rather then a city the US State Department would simply advise people not to go there. A large part of the way that Philadelphia managed to bring down it's murder rate is by introducing zero-tolerance policing which is sometimes called "Broken Windows Policing" and makes extensive use of Terry Test stop and frisk tactics. This is exactly the type of policing that Obama and his cronies are trying to do away with. 

Also in that TV show "Oz" that I keep going on about it's never quite made clear which US state it's set in. So although it's clearly set on the east coast it could be New York State, New Jersey, Maryland, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania or Illinois. So basically any one of the areas served by the train that crashed. In another obscure pop-culture reference the train number 188 is just one number out from 187 which a lot of people rightly or wrongly think is the Los Angeles police radio code for murder.

In the immediate aftermath of the crash a lot of focus has fallen on the engineer who was driving the train -  Brandon Bostian. To a non-native ear the name "Bostian" could have sounded a lot like "Bostonian" meaning "Son of Boston." At the time the city of Boston was gripped by the death penalty portion of the trial of Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. Although the US ended up going in a more Ukrainian direction I suspect that Tsarnaev's Chechen roots were intended as a threat to Russia that if they continued to support the Syrian government calamities could be arranged.

Since writing the above Tsarnaev has been sentenced to death. I honestly don't have much of an opinion about that beyond thinking that it's time to draw a line under the saga and let the dust settle.

One aspect of the focus on the engineer who I suspect took quite a bang on the head during the crash is whether he would give the authorities to check his cellphone record or whether they would have to apply for a warrant. The day after the crash the House also debated and passed a bill restricting the National Security Agency's (NSA) bulk surveillance of cellphones. This was of course something that was revealed by Edward Snowden and caused a lot of tension particularly between the US and Germany. However with it forcing foreign intelligence agencies to confirm what they already knew about US spy programs rather then revealing anything new I've always thought that the Snowden leaks were another effort to put pressure on Russia over its support for the Syrian government.

Finally although a train crash is hardly an effective mechanism for a targeted assassination and I certainly see no indication of it you would also have to search through the identities of those killed to rule out links to political or espionage activities.