Operation Featherweight: Month 15, Week 1, Day 5.

Almost as has become a reflex since the Sochi Winter Olympics the propaganda war has churned into action following Russia's air-strikes against Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) and associated groups yesterday.

The main allegation being thrown out there is that Russia is not targeting ISIL but moderate rebel groups. An example cited are the strikes against Jisr al-Shughour.

This is a Syrian town that sits around 30km (18 miles) south-east of Idlib City on the border between Idlib and Latakia provinces. It also sits on the crossroads of the M4 motorway that runs into Latakia City and the H6 highway that runs to the City of Homs around 130km (75 miles) to the south.

The claim that Jisr al-Shughour is not under ISIL control is entirely true. It was captured from Syrian government on June 14th (14/6/15) by the Army of Conquest/Jaish al-Fatah (JAF) coalition who remain in control. Far from being a some little known fact this battle of Jisr al-Shughour has it's own Wikipedia page.

The largest group within JAF are the Al Qaeda affiliate the Al Nusra Front (ANF). This group are specifically listed under United Nations Security Council (UNSC) resolution 2170 (2014) authorising the use of military force against them or any group allied with them.

The second largest force within JAF are the Islamic Movement of the Freemen of the Levant/Harakat Ahrar ash-Sham al-Islamiyya (FML/Ahrar ash-Sham). As their name suggests the FML share ISIL ideological goal of establishing a Sunni Islamic state in the Levant region cleansed of those the view as "infidels" including Shia Muslims, Christians, Druze and the Yezidi.

Amongst the smaller groups making up the JAF coalition are the Jaish al-Islam/Army of Islam (JAI) and what remains of the Free Syrian Army (FSA) outside of the Kurdish control north of Syria.

Shortly after Jisr al-Shughour was seized - roughly June 19th (19/6/15) - other units of the FSA and JAI acting as part of the JAF coalition captured the Druze town of Khader on the Syrian side of the Golan Heights. They then proceeded to massacre dozens of civilians. This prompted the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) to give them a cold, hard stare which seems to have deterred any further advances into Druze areas.

On July 1st (1/7/15) the JAI part of the JAF coalition released a 20 minute video in which they executed 18 prisoners. It was claimed that the prisoners were ISIL fighters and the killings had been carried out because as far as JAF are concerned ISIL are not extreme enough in their hatred of or violence towards the Levant's religious minorities.

So to my mind the question isn't "Why was Russia bombing Jisr al-Shughour?" but "Why haven't Combined Joint Task Force: Operation Inherent Resolve (CJTFOIR) - the US-led coalition - been bombing Jisr al-Shughour?"

Russia have also been accused of striking a CIA backed group in Homs. The group in question is the Falcons of the Mountains/Suqour al-Jabal.

This is the group that the US inserted into Syria on September 19th (19/9/15). Last Friday (25/9/15) it was confirmed by the US that the group had immediately handed half its weapons over to ANF. If the group are now operating in Homs it would suggest that they have completely abandoned their mission of fighting ISIL and headed in completely the opposite direction to fight the Syrian government.

So if this allegation is true then it is a huge scandal. It shows that the US has supported unlawful combatants in contravention of the Geneva Conventions. Not only is this considered a war crime it is considered one of the most serious war crimes because it makes it impossible to distinguish between combatants and civilians.

It also shows that the US has committed this war crime not as part of an UN sanctioned effort to defeat ISIL but in a wholly unlawful act of regime change against Syria.

Either of these two things raise serious questions as whether the US can continue as a member of the United Nations. The fact the group now appears to be fighting alongside Al Qaeda - a declared enemy of the US - also raises serious questions as to whether Barack Obama can continue as President of the United States having committed an act of treason against the United States.

The bulk of ISIL's forces continue to remain to the north-east of the Euphrates River around the city of Raqqa. Beneath the protective dome that CJTFOIR are providing for them.

It is also alleged that the Russia strikes killed 36 civilians. However Turkish media have already inflated this figure to a more vague sounding "More then 40 civilians."

This issue of civilian deaths is one where you have to be extremely careful. That's because even when Nazi Germany were doing it in Czechoslovakia the purpose of this type of warfare is to create what is termed "Atrocity Propaganda." These very emotive claims of atrocities are then used to justify invasion and regime change on humanitarian grounds.

The easiest trick of course is to simply inflate the number of civilians killed and there has been plenty of evidence of this in the Syria conflict. For example back in April 2012 the UK based Syrian Observatory of Human Rights (SOHR) which has made today's allegations claimed that 80,000 civilians had been killed by the Syrian government. This was nearly more then 10 times the UN estimate of all deaths - including government troops.

It also gave a death rate of 1,500 civilian deaths every month. If the conflict had continued at this level rather then escalating this death rate would mean that all of Syria's roughly 23 million population would have been killed by late 2014/early 2015. As we are now getting towards the end of 2015 that has clearly not happened.

Another common trick is to deny that those killed were combatants and count them instead as civilians. The main purpose behind the insurgent groups in Syria acting as unlawful combatants by refusing to wear uniforms or display insignia is to make it easier to claim that all those killed were civilians.

We were actually given an example of both of these tactics at work recently. Back in mid-August SOHR claimed that 110 civilians had been killed by Syrian government in Douma just outside Damascus. This claim was repeated as fact the US government.

However other intelligence agencies investigated the incident and concluded that the death toll was actually closer to 55. Not only that but all those killed were members of a several insurgent groups who'd gathered together to plan how to intensify artillery strikes on genuinely civilian neighbourhoods in Damascus.

If inflated civilian death tolls is not sufficient to trigger an invasion it seems the next step is to carry out atrocities yourself in the hope they will be blamed on your opponent. Those of you with long memories will remember that in May 2012 the world was rocked by allegations that the Syrian government had stormed the village al-Houla and massacred 116 civilians.

As at the time Syria was much more stable both the UN and the human rights charity Amnesty International (AI) were able to travel to al-Houla and conduct an investigation. This found that the death toll was significantly lower then the 116 claimed. It also found that 20 of those killed were Syrian army soldiers who had been killed when their checkpoint had been over-run by an attacking force.

It also found that the 30 or so civilians who had been killed were all members of the Mashlab, Al-Sayed and Abdul Razak families all of whom were Sunni Muslims. The head of the Mashlab family -  Abdul-Moa'ti - had been a member of the Syrian Parliament who had recently refused to defect from the predominately Shia Assad government to join his fellow Sunnis in rebellion.

In short the families massacred in al-Houla were exactly the type of people that the Syrian government needed to keep onside in face of the growing insurgency. Once this detail had been discovered the international outrage suddenly disappeared.

Then of course there was the Sarin gas attack on the Damascus suburb of Ghouta on August 21st 2013 (21/8/13). This came almost a year to the day after US President Barack Obama declared that the use of chemical weapons would be a "red-line" that would trigger a US invasion of Syria.

The very next day highly organised protesters began appearing on the streets of western capitals demanding that the US followed through on it's promise to invade Syria. All of these protesters wore yellow baseball caps, t-shirts, windbreakers and carried placards carrying the same logo of the symbol for chemical weapons.

To this day the US continues to blame the Syrian government for the attack while resisting all attempts to investigate it. The recently passed UNSC resolution setting up a panel of inquiry has ground to a halt after the US objected to it being able to examine widespread chemical weapon use by insurgent groups in both Syria and Iraq.

With this sort of behaviour going unchecked in Syria is has now begun to become common place across the region. One particular example that sticks in my memory comes from the 2014 Gaza war. On August 3rd (3/8/14) Israel were accused of bombing a United Nation Relief Works Agency (UNRWA) school in Rafah.

However footage of the air-strike and it's aftermath quickly revealed that Israel had struck motorcycles transporting named members of Islamic Jihad on the road outside of the school. No civilians were killed in the strike and the school was not damaged.

This contagion from Syria has had a particularly destructive effect on the peace process between Israel and Palestine. As recently as 2010 one of the big challenges was a rivalry between the secular but corrupt Fatah and the Islamist Hamas as the representatives of the Palestinians. It is now a three way rivalry between Fatah, Hamas and ISIL. It is clear that ISIL do not want peace.

As a result apart from yesterday's raising of the Palestinian flag no-one at the UNGA is talking about the peace process because they know the presence of ISIL makes it impossible. The negative effect of ISIL's nihilism was on clear display in Abbas' speech in which he announced Fatah was withdrawing from the Oslo peace accords. You only need to take a look around Gaza at the moment to see how that's going to go for them.

You can even see the chilling effects of the tactics used in Syria as far away as Ukraine. As part of that conflict the US has been desperate of making a poster girl of Nadezhda Savchenko - a Ukrainian military helicopter pilot who is currently awaiting trial in Russia

What Ms Savchenko is accused of is being a member of black operations mortar team. This team operated behind the frontline in eastern Ukraine and was tasked with carrying out attacks on civilians. The hope was that these civilian deaths would then be blamed on the rebels and by extension Russia. This would provide an excuse for more sanctions against Russia.

It almost goes without saying that the US are absolutely desperate for Ms Savchenko to be freed before any of the evidence against her is heard in court.


21:00 on 1/10/15 (UK date).