Operation Featherweight: Month 14, Week 4, Day 4.

On Friday (18/9/15) night through to Saturday (19/9/15) 75 US backed insurgents crossed into Syria's Aleppo province via from Turkey. Exact details what US supplied equipment these carried with them are hard to come by it is believed they travelled in 12 machine gun armed pick-up trucks (Technicals) carrying ammunition and advanced guided anti-tank missiles such as the BGM-71 TOW system.

Some of these fighters are believed to be members of the Division 30 (D30) group while others are suspected of being members of the Falcons of the Mountains/Suqur al-Jabal group. If this is the case then it is extremely alarming that the US is supporting such a group because they are closely linked with the Falcons of the Levant/Suqur al-Sham that went on to become the Islamic Movement of the Freemen of the Levant/Harakat Ahrar ash-Sham al-Islamiyya. Sharing obvious ideological similarities with the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) FML are the second largest faction within the Army of Conquest/Jaish al-Fatah (JAF) alongside Al Qaeda's Syrian affiliate Al Nusra Front (ANF).

The timing of this announcement really couldn't have come at a more embarrassing moment for the US. On Wednesday (16/9/15) General Lloyd Austin who commands US Central Command (CENTCOM) which in turn commands the US-led coalition - Combined Joint Task Force: Operation Inherent Resolve (CJTFOIR) - was forced to inform the US Senate Armed Services Committee that the US' backed anti-ISIL ground force which was supposed to number 4 to 5,000 by this point in fact numbered just 4 to 5.

The main reason for that General Austin had been asked to testify was to answer long standing allegations that much like the intelligence dossier that led to the 2003 invasion of Iraq CENTCOM's intelligence reports into Syria and ISIL had been "Sexed Up."

Essentially the allegation is that even as far back as 2012 the White House made clear to CENTCOM that US President Barack Obama had no interest in reading reports that contradicted his claim that there had been a popular uprising rather then a foreign backed insurgency against the Syrian government or showed that his anti-ISIL strategy was failing.

As such more then 50 intelligence analysts have formally complained that their reports were re-written at the command level to reflect Obama's political position rather then the actual situation. In response to these complaints it is said that several analysts were instructed to resign. The matter is currently under investigation by the Department of Defence's Inspector Generals Office.

Aside from the war itself there is the refugee crisis that it has created which the European Union (EU) is chaotically struggling to deal with.

On Monday (14/9/15) Interior Ministers from EU nations held an emergency meeting in Brussels, Belgium. This meeting agreed in principle for the EU to accept 120,000 refugees from Syria and distribute them in quotas across the 28 EU member states. Despite not being a member of the EU on Friday (18/9/15) Switzerland stepped up to do it's part announcing that it would accept 1,500 refugees as part of the quote system.

If this EU quota system were to get up and running in practice the next step would be to adopt the British plan of accepting the refugees directly from camps in or on the border with Syria. The main advantage of this approach is that it would remove the need for the refugees to make the crossing into Syria themselves removing the need to people smugglers.

With us all being familiar with the photographs of Aylan Kurdi drowned on a Turkish beach I don't think I need to explain how dangerous this journey is. However on Friday (18/9/15) another Syrian of about 4 or 5 washed up drowned on another Turkish beach and on Saturday (19/9/15) yet another 5 year old girl was found drowned on a beach on the Greek island of Lesbos on the otherside of the Aegean Sea. The death toll of refugees making that crossing currently stands at around 8 per day, every day. As we move towards winter and the rougher seas it brings that death toll is only going to increase.

The other main advantage of accepting refugees directly from the camps is that it allows them to be screened before they ever set foot within the EU. In the first instance this allows us to make sure that they are actually refugees fleeing persecution and war rather then economic migrants who are simply trying to cheat the system.

It also allows for background/security checks to be performed in order to make sure that no terrorist fighters are disguising themselves as refugees in order to carry out attacks in the EU. Although I think the risk of this has been massively overstated - particularly in the US - it is both prudent a necessary to carry out such checks and over the weekend we were given a prime example of why.

You may remember that on September 9th (9/9/15) the world was shocked when footage emerged showing a Hungarian journalist kicking a Syrian refugee - Osama Abdul Mohsen - who was carrying his 8 year old son to the ground. Despite being sacked from the news channel she worked for the camerawoman - Petra Laszlo - took to Facebook to claim that all the Hungarian people supported her. She signed off the statement with the words' "Heil Hitler."

As part of the outrage Abdul Mosen and his family were not only granted entry to Spain but the giants of the football world Real Madrid offered him a job at their training academy. On Saturday (19/9/15) the 8 year son - Ziad - was welcomed onto the pitch ahead of the game against Granada by global superstar Christiano Ronaldo.

It has since emerged that Osama Abdul Mohsen is not a refugee. Instead he is a fighter for ANF who fought in many battles against the Kurdish People's Protection Forces (YPG) - most notably in the battles of Serekanyie. He only fled from Syria following the YPG's liberation of the town of Tel Abyad in June. As such he is most certainly not a refugee entitled to asylum.

Unfortunately the UK has spent the last year campaigning against the EU in an effort to get it to scrap its protections on things like human rights and workers rights. So despite having a good idea rather then working within the EU to make this idea official policy the UK is instead using it's opt out from the quota system rather then counting the 20,000 Syrian refugees it is accepting towards its quota of around 5,000.

The much more significant barrier to an EU-wide response to the the refugee crisis though is the refusal to participate by Hungary, Poland, Slovakia and the Czech Republic. Unlike the UK exercising it's opt out these nations refusal prevents the program becoming policy and therefore any EU nation taking part.

Hungary's resistance to a common EU refugee policy has been particularly aggressive. On Monday (14/9/15) Hungary completed a massive fence along its border with Serbia and implemented new laws that made it illegal to enter the country without a visa. On Wednesday (16/9/15) this new policy exploded into violence as Hungarian police used tear gas, stun grenades, water cannon and armoured vehicles to attack refugees who had become trapped on the Serbia side of the border.

This Hungarian policy is wholly illegal under both EU and wider international law.

The EU is defined by its constitution as a union of members who share the values of human dignity, freedom, democracy, equality, the rule of law and respect for human rights (Article I-2). On the issue of asylum the constitution further defines these shared values as being in accordance with the 1951 Geneva Convention on the Status of Refugees as interpreted by the European Court of Human Rights (Article II-78).

Article 31 (1) of the 1951 convention prohibits nations from imposing penalties on refugees for entering their country illegally. Hungary's law imposing a two year prison sentence for illegal entry by refugees is clearly in violation of this article. Instead what Hungary must do is conduct an investigation/hearing to determine if the person is a refugee as defined by the 1967 revision to Article 1 of the convention. Under Article 16 of convention the person must be granted the full legal protections of any citizen during that investigation/hearing. In an EU member state that means the 1953 European Convention on Human Rights.

Article 6 of the 1953 convention lays out the rights of a fair trial/hearing and these include being granted adequate time and facilities to prepare their case. In June 2015 the UK governments policy of fast-track asylum policy was ruled to be illegal under the act because detention denied applicants the facilities to prepare their cases and the assessment based on a single interview was deemed insufficient for applicants to present their case. Therefore Hungary's system of detaining and then deporting asylum seekers after a single interview is equally illegal.

As such if Hungary continues with these policies it could be deemed to be in breach of the EU's values. Under Article I-59 of the constitution this could lead to Hungary being suspended from the EU. This would mean that any financial aid that Hungary receives from the EU would also be suspended and import tariffs would be re-imposed. It also means that any Hungarian citizens living in other EU member states under it's principle of the free movement of people would be deemed as illegal immigrants and be forced to apply for visas or be deported back to Hungary. As a lot of the anti-immigrant feeling within the EU stems from economic migrants from nations such as Hungary rather then refugees this might not be such a bad idea.

Tomorrow EU leaders are holding an emergency meeting to discuss the refugee crisis. One thing they should consider is whether the crisis constitutes a man-made disaster and/or a terrorist threat. If either of those things are the case it would invoke the Article I-43 solidarity clause which would suspend things like opt outs and individual nations ability to block policy.


21:30 on 21/9/15 (UK date).