WASHINGTON: Moscow accused the US on Tuesday of reducing its airstrikes on Daesh in Iraq to allow terrorists to enter Syria and fight Bashar Assad’s army.
The Syrian regime was trying to drive radical fighters out of eastern Deir Ezzor province, but arrivals from Iraq were boosting their numbers, military spokesman Igor Konashenkov said.
The US-led coalition sharply reduced its strikes on Iraq in September, as Syrian forces were beginning to retake Deir Ezzor, Konashenkov said. “Is this change in approach from the US and the coalition a bid to cause maximum disruption to the Syrian Army, backed by the Russian air force, as it seeks to free Syrian territory to the east of the river Euphrates?”
It is not the first time Russia has accused the US of “pretending” to fight Daesh. “This is a case of the pot calling the kettle black,” Anna Borshchevskaya, Russian scholar at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, told Arab News.
In fact, she said, Russia had been “pretending to fight Daesh since September 2015,” while its real aim was to protect President Bashar Assad. “Russia’s presence in Syria, in general, made military operations more difficult by raising the risk of clashes, while the US objective in Syria has always been to fight Daesh.”
Mark N. Katz, professor of government and politics at Schar School of Policy and Government, George Mason University, told Arab News: “The Russian logic here does not make sense. How does the US bombing Daesh less in Iraq, if that is what is happening, serve to push Daesh forces into Syria? It seems to me that more US bombing in Iraq would be more likely to do this. Less US bombing in Iraq, by contrast, might allow Daesh forces to remain in Iraq.”
Moscow was accusing the US of doing what Russia itself had done, Katz said. “When Putin first intervened in Syria in September 2015, he claimed that Russian forces were targeting Daesh. Instead, they targeted the non-Daesh fighters that were then more of a threat to the Assad regime.
“Now that Daesh seems to be on the decline in Syria, Russia has turned its attention to it, because it doesn’t want the territory Daesh loses to be taken over by US allies.”
Russian thinking reflected a tendency to impute to others the Machiavellian strategies that they themselves employed, Katz said. “In other words, the Russians are accusing the US of aiding Daesh because this is what they themselves have done, and may well do again if they thought it would benefit them against their other adversaries.”
Moscow has repeatedly accused the US in the past month of hindering the Russian-backed regime offensive in the east of Syria. Russia has been conducting an aerial bombing campaign in Syria since 2015, when it intervened to support Assad’s rule and tipped the conflict in his favor.
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Russia accuses US of helping Daesh
Russia accuses US of helping Daesh
Trump says he doesn’t know if aliens are real but directs government to release files on UFOs
- Former President Obama recently suggested in a podcast interview that aliens were real
- Trump’s daughter-in-law Lara Trump suggested this week that the president was ready to speak about it
WASHINGTON: President Donald Trump said Thursday that he’s directing the Pentagon and other government agencies to identify and release files related to extraterrestrials and UFOs because of “tremendous interest.”
Trump made the announcement in a social media post hours after he accused former President Barack Obama of disclosing “classified information” when Obama recently suggested in a podcast interview that aliens were real.
Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One, “I don’t know if they’re real or not,” and said of Obama, “I may get him out of trouble by declassifying.”
In a post on his social media platform Thursday night, Trump said he was directing government agencies to release files related “to alien and extraterrestrial life, unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP), and unidentified flying objects (UFOs), and any and all other information connected to these highly complex, but extremely interesting and important, matters.”
Obama, who made his comments in a podcast appearance over the weekend, later clarified that he had not seen evidence that aliens “have made contact with us,” but said, “statistically, the universe is so vast that the odds are good there’s life out there.”
Trump told reporters Thursday that when it came to the prospect of extraterrestrial visitors: “I don’t have an opinion on it. I never talk about it. A lot of people do. A lot of people believe it.”
Trump’s daughter-in-law Lara Trump suggested this week that he was ready to speak about it, however, when she said on a podcast that the president had a speech prepared to deliver on aliens that he would give at the “right time.”
That was news to the White House. Press secretary Karoline Leavitt responded with a laugh when she was asked about it Wednesday and told reporters, “A speech on aliens would be news to me.”
Public interest in unidentified flying objects and the possibility of the government hiding secrets of extraterrestrial life re-emerged in the public consciousness after a group of former Pentagon and government officials leaked Navy videos of unknown objects to The New York Times and Politico in 2017. The renewed scrutiny prompted Congress to hold the first hearings on UFOs in 50 years in May 2022, though officials said that the objects, which appeared to be green triangles floating above a Navy ship, were likely drones.
Since then the Pentagon has promised more transparency on the topic. In July 2022 it created the All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office, or AARO, which was intended to be a central place to collect reports of all military UFO encounters, taking over from a department task force.
In 2023, Dr. Sean Kirkpatrick, the head of AARO at the time, told reporters he didn’t have any evidence “of any program having ever existed as a to do any sort of reverse engineering of any sort of extraterrestrial (unidentified aerial phenomena).”
The information that has been made public shows that the vast majority of UFO reports made by the military go unsolved but the ones that are identified are largely benign in nature.
An 18-page unclassified report submitted to Congress in June 2024 said service members had made 485 reports of unidentified phenomena in the past year but 118 cases were found to be “prosaic objects such as various types of balloons, birds, and unmanned aerial systems.”
“It is important to underscore that, to date, AARO has discovered no evidence of extraterrestrial beings, activity, or technology,” the report stressed.
Trump made the announcement in a social media post hours after he accused former President Barack Obama of disclosing “classified information” when Obama recently suggested in a podcast interview that aliens were real.
Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One, “I don’t know if they’re real or not,” and said of Obama, “I may get him out of trouble by declassifying.”
In a post on his social media platform Thursday night, Trump said he was directing government agencies to release files related “to alien and extraterrestrial life, unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP), and unidentified flying objects (UFOs), and any and all other information connected to these highly complex, but extremely interesting and important, matters.”
Obama, who made his comments in a podcast appearance over the weekend, later clarified that he had not seen evidence that aliens “have made contact with us,” but said, “statistically, the universe is so vast that the odds are good there’s life out there.”
Trump told reporters Thursday that when it came to the prospect of extraterrestrial visitors: “I don’t have an opinion on it. I never talk about it. A lot of people do. A lot of people believe it.”
Trump’s daughter-in-law Lara Trump suggested this week that he was ready to speak about it, however, when she said on a podcast that the president had a speech prepared to deliver on aliens that he would give at the “right time.”
That was news to the White House. Press secretary Karoline Leavitt responded with a laugh when she was asked about it Wednesday and told reporters, “A speech on aliens would be news to me.”
Public interest in unidentified flying objects and the possibility of the government hiding secrets of extraterrestrial life re-emerged in the public consciousness after a group of former Pentagon and government officials leaked Navy videos of unknown objects to The New York Times and Politico in 2017. The renewed scrutiny prompted Congress to hold the first hearings on UFOs in 50 years in May 2022, though officials said that the objects, which appeared to be green triangles floating above a Navy ship, were likely drones.
Since then the Pentagon has promised more transparency on the topic. In July 2022 it created the All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office, or AARO, which was intended to be a central place to collect reports of all military UFO encounters, taking over from a department task force.
In 2023, Dr. Sean Kirkpatrick, the head of AARO at the time, told reporters he didn’t have any evidence “of any program having ever existed as a to do any sort of reverse engineering of any sort of extraterrestrial (unidentified aerial phenomena).”
The information that has been made public shows that the vast majority of UFO reports made by the military go unsolved but the ones that are identified are largely benign in nature.
An 18-page unclassified report submitted to Congress in June 2024 said service members had made 485 reports of unidentified phenomena in the past year but 118 cases were found to be “prosaic objects such as various types of balloons, birds, and unmanned aerial systems.”
“It is important to underscore that, to date, AARO has discovered no evidence of extraterrestrial beings, activity, or technology,” the report stressed.
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