Sunday, June 18, 2017

Last Call For Meanwhile In Syria...

As if things weren't already bad enough in the Middle East this month with the continuing blockade of Qatar by Saudi Arabia and the continued diplomatic reverberations from Trump's disastrous trip to Jerusalem that required more than a dozen political operatives from both parties more than a week to stabilize (because State Department? We outsourced that!) it appears now Tehran is causing major problems in Syria.

Iran's military announced on Sunday that it launched several missiles into Syria, targeting Islamic State fighters in retaliation for the attacks in Tehran on June 7. 
The missile strikes are the first reported ground-to-ground attack from Iran into Syria since the Arab country descended into a civil war in 2011. 
"In this operation, several ground-to-ground midrange missiles were fired from IRGC bases in Kermanshah Province and targeted Takfiri forces in the Deir Ezzor region in Eastern Syria," the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps said on its official news website, Sepah News. The IRGC uses the term Takfiri to describe ISIS. 
Tehran was rocked by two deadly attacks on June 7targeting Iran's Parliament building and a shrine dedicated to the republic's revolutionary founder Ayatollah Khomeini. 
Six assailants killed at least 16 people in the twin attacks, which ISIS claimed. It was the first time that ISIS, a Sunni Muslim group fighting Iranian-backed militias in Syria, has claimed responsibility for an attack in Iran. 
The IRGC had vowed revenge for the attacks and accused Saudi Arabia of supporting ISIS in the operation. 

At this point we're on the edge of an impressively serious regional conflagration in the Middle East, and we barely have a functioning State Department, let alone a real diplomatic corps right now.  Trump is running around attempting to loot the US Treasury and while Syria, Yemen, Afghanistan and Iraq have been various levels of awful for the last fifteen years, we're close to a full-out royal rumble.

Stay tuned.  Things are about to go from bad to much worse.



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