RUTHFULLY YOURS

If ISIS is retreating in Mosul, it is rapidly advancing in Manchester. The Caliphate is winning its war in Europe. Six months ago in Britain, the rise of Jeremy Corbyn, the ultra-pacifist Labour party leader who blamed the “war on terror” for the recent attacks in Manchester and London, would have been unthinkable.

As the Caliphate razed to the ground everything in its path, Europe reacted as if that were just the result of regrettable manners that should not concern her. The Islamists, however, had other plans.

“Why, in August 2015, did ISIS need to blow up and destroy that temple of Baalshamin? Because it was a temple where pagans before Islam came to adore mendacious idols? No, it was because that monument was venerated by contemporary Westerners, whose culture includes an educated love for ‘historical monuments’ and a great curiosity for the beliefs of other people and other times. And Islamists want to show that Muslims have a culture that is different from ours, a culture that is unique to them”. — Paul Veyne, archeologist.

The Islamic State is crumbling — if too slowly. More than two years have passed since French President François Hollande promised, “We will bomb Raqqa”. Sooner or later, ISIS will probably be reduced to a small enclave with no territorial continuity, and its chief, Abu Bakr al Baghdadi, will be eliminated. It would, nevertheless, be most dangerous to dismiss these three years as a short parenthesis: Nazism did not last as long: “just” 12 years in power and five at war with the rest of Europe. The physical and cultural consequences of the Nazi tyranny are, unfortunately, still visible in Europe. The same will be said of the Islamic State. Three years of terror and conquests are not bad in for a war between the Caliphate vs. everyone else.

ISIS will leave behind an unprecedented terrorist infrastructure (277 Europeans killed on European soil in two years). If ISIS is retreating in Mosul, it is rapidly advancing in Manchester. The Caliphate is winning its war in Europe. Six months ago in the Britain, the rise of Jeremy Corbyn, the ultra-pacifist Labour party leader who blamed the “war on terror” for the recent attacks in Manchester and London, would have been unthinkable. His success is clearly linked to the recent bloodshed in British streets.

In the West, ISIS has assailed parliaments in Ottawa, cafés in Copenhagen, beaches in Nice, social centers in San Bernardino, metros and airports in Brussels, music festivals in Manchester, theaters, sports stadiums, restaurants and kosher markets in Paris, churches in Rouen, Christmas markets in Berlin, malls in Stockholm. Not bad for a “JV team”, as Barack Obama called the Caliphate.

ISIS has been an unparalleled attraction for the umma, the world community of the Islamic faithful: about 30,000 Muslims around the world — 6,000 from Europe — have left their homes to fight under the deadly black flag of the Caliph. ISIS was able to build a global network of terror. Jihadist groups such as Ansar Bayt al-Maqdis in Egypt, Abu Sayyaf in the Philippines, Ansar al-Sharia in Libya, Boko Haram in Nigeria, the Caucasus Emirate in Russia, and the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, along with others, have all pledged allegiance to ISIS. The Caliphate has also become the wealthiest terror group in history. Sebastian Gorka, a White House advisor on radical Islam, said: “The attacks of September 11, 2001, cost barely $500,000. ISIS makes that in six hours! Do you feel safe?”

ISIS has made evil viral. The world was stunned when ISIS submerged the Western imagination in the public executions of journalists, the massacres of captured troops, markets for sexual slavery, executions of gays, and public drownings, burning people alive and crucifixions. “Never before in history have terrorists had such easy access to the minds and eyeballs of millions”, wrote Brendan Koerner, noting that “ISIS is winning the social media war”. Often, evil works. A few weeks ago, in Paris, a Jewish woman, Sarah Halimi was killed by a Muslim shouting “Allahu Akbar”. The case was barely covered by the mainstream press. Then several French intellectuals demand the authorities to denounce it as a case of anti-Semitism. ISIS’s threats are now so intense that even academic experts of Islam, such as Gilles Kepel, are under police protection.

In a few months, the Islamic State cleared the historic colonial border of Sykes-Picot, conquered half of Syria, destroyed entire cities of prices antiquities such as Palmyra, reached the periphery of Baghdad, and kicked out the Iraqi army, in which the United States had invested 25 billion dollars. That is why many counter-terrorism analysts are intelligently asking if “ISIS is winning”.

ISIS’s main legacy, however, is devastation — both cultural and human. ISIS has been successful in making a blank slate, a sort of Islamic “year zero,” in which, after an apocalypse, history will start again — supposedly virgin and pure. The Caliphate will leave behind a Middle East more and more Islamic, not only in the landscape, but also in demography. ISIS swept away entire non-Muslim communities that will never return. Many Christian and Yazidi towns within its orbit will remain permanently empty due to the slaughter, the exile and the disappearance of survivors. The Islamic State has been able to destroy the ancient Christian community of Mosul.

A new study published in the weekly magazine Plos Medicine concluded that around 10,000 members of the ethnic and religious Yazidi minority were killed. The researchers estimated that 6,800 other Yazidis were kidnapped, with more than one third still missing.

“Christianity in Iraq is over”, said Canon Andrew White, the great Anglican vicar of Baghdad. ISIS succeeded, for the first time in 2000 years, in cancelling Christian communion in Nineveh. Professor Amal Marogy, a native of Iraq, said, at a conference at the Hudson Institute, that while infrastructure such as the Mosul Dam can be saved from ISIS, the eradication of the Christian presence in Iraq means “the end of a peaceful civilization”. There are commentators who are now noting that “ISIS wins when Christians leave the Middle East”.

The jihadist recently vandalized ancient Roman statues and artifacts at the Syrian archaeological site of al-Salhiye, known as Dura Europos. ISIS devastated the most famous capitals of ancient Mesopotamia, from Nimrud to Hatra. “This destruction is unprecedented in recent history”, according to Marina Gabriel, coordinator of the American Schools of Oriental Research Cultural Heritage Initiatives, an institute that tracks the destruction of Islamic State.

The Nimrud ziggurat, built almost 2900 years ago — the most spectacular sacred structure known in ancient Mesopotamia — does not exist anymore. ISIS terrorists devastated the Mosul Public Library, where 10,000 manuscripts were burned or stolen. ISIS also managed to erase of the entire Jewish history of Mosul, including the tombs of Jonah, Seth and Daniel. The Caliphate destroyed the first Assyrian city, Khorsabad. The greatest devastation, however, took place in Palmyra, the most important archaeological jewel of the Middle East. Palmyra delenda est. The Islamic State also eliminated thousands of years of Syrian and Iraqi history, pulverizing exquisite ancient treasures such as the temple of Bal.

As the Caliphate razed to the ground everything in its path, Europe reacted as if that were just the result of regrettable manners that should not concern her. The Islamists, however, had other plans. Professor Paul Veyne writes in his book on Palmyra:

“Why, in August 2015, did ISIS need to blow up and destroy that temple of Baalshamin? Because it was a temple where pagans before Islam came to adore mendacious idols? No, it was because that monument was venerated by contemporary Westerners, whose culture includes an educated love for ‘historical monuments’ and a great curiosity for the beliefs of other people and other times. And Islamists want to show that Muslims have a culture that is different from ours, a culture that is unique to them. They blew up that temple in Palmyra and have pillaged several archaeological sites in the Near East to show that they are different from us and that they don’t respect what Western culture admires”.

That is why, after Palmyra, the Islamic State attacked music halls and other Western symbols in Europe. The “JV team” might be losing ground, but so far it is winning the war of civilizations. Will the West be able not only to free Raqqa and Mosul, but also to reverse this cultural avalanche trying to crush it?

In a previous era, the death of Otto Warmbier, a 22-year-old American student, at the hands of the regime in North Korea likely would have been considered an act of war. On January 2, 2016, Warmbier was detained by regime officials, allegedly for attempting to steal a propaganda poster. Convicted of a “hostile act” against the state, he was sentenced to 15 years of hard labor. Upon his release into U.S. custody last week, regime officials said that he had been in a coma for nearly 15 months, and blamed a case of botulism. In reality, Warmbier was almost certainly tortured to death by the regime.

What happened to Otto Warmbier is what has been happening to North Korean citizens for more than 70 years, since Kim Il-sung transformed the new country into what it is today: a hermetically sealed prison state operated by a hereditary dictatorship that some scholars estimate has murdered around 1.5 million people in its network of concentration camps. Those not executed by the regime have fared little better: The country is beset by malnourishment and starvation (a famine in the mid 1990s killed half a million people); its GDP per capita is somewhere south of $1,000, putting North Korea behind Rwanda, Haiti, and Sierra Leone globally; and its shoddy infrastructure causes fires that can be seen from space.

None of these issues has ever been of much concern to the Kim regime, now in its third generation. Kim Jong-un, like his father and grandfather, is dedicated to building up North Korea’s nuclear arsenal. Pyongyang has been alarmingly successful in pursuing that end. The regime has missiles that can reach Japan, and reportedly is not far from being able to strike the continental U.S. North Korea is also already exporting terror in less explosive ways. The regime is responsible for several devastating cyber attacks (recently, North Korean hackers paralyzed the United Kingdom’s National Health Service, as well as industries in 150 other countries), and Kim Jong-un successfully had an estranged member of the family assassinated in Kuala Lumpur in February, in broad daylight. Meanwhile, Pyongyang maintains friendly, mutually beneficial relationships with other terror-loving regimes, including Iran and Cuba.

The fact that North Korea is now a nuclear-armed state is in no small part a consequence of nearly three decades of ill-conceived American and international policy. The last three administrations all hoped to engage the regime in constructive agreements, usually providing some form(s) of aid in exchange for promises to halt the construction of nuclear weapons. The theory was that the aid would help to facilitate economic and ultimately political liberalization.

It has not worked out that way, largely because the regime in Pyongyang is not a trustworthy partner. The Kim regime cheated on the 1994 Agreed Framework, under which it received aid in exchange for halting plutonium and uranium enrichment; in 2002, it unilaterally withdrew from the 1968 Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty; the regime reneged on its part in an agreement hammered out by the Bush administration in 2007 after less than a year; and Kim Jong-un violated the terms of the 2012 Leap Day agreement after just six weeks by testing a long-range missile.

But it’s also been a case of inconsistent, and often incoherent, American policy. Given the fact that the North Korean economy is almost entirely administered by the regime, these agreements have frequently meant that the U.S. is simultaneously sanctioning and subsidizing Pyongyang, and irregular enforcement by the U.S. Treasury Department took much of the bite out of the sanctions side.

North Korea’s brazen murder of an American citizen is reason to reevaluate.

Last year, Congress passed and President Obama signed into law the North Korea Sanctions and Policy Enhancement Act, which mandated sanctions on entities that have contributed to North Korea’s nuclear program or are complicit in its human-rights abuses, and on the country’s mineral and metal trade (a key source of the regime’s hard currency). The Trump administration should expand on this foundation.

Start with the banks. Since 2007, the U.S. has allowed North Korean financial transactions to flow more or less unencumbered through the U.S. banking system. Because almost all transactions in U.S. dollars pass through U.S. banks, the Treasury Department could, if it wishes, effectively end North Korea’s access to the dollar system, by supplementing the sanctions on North Korean banks imposed by current law with secondary sanctions on any banks that transact with North Korea. When the U.S. did this from 2005 to 2007, banks around the world — including in China — froze or closed North Korean accounts rather than risk their access to the U.S. financial system. Secondary sanctions are crucial to squeezing the regime. Pyongyang’s power relies on a network of bad actors: China launders its money, Iran buys its weapons, Cambodia re-flags its ships (which are smuggling the weapons). The U.S. must be willing to enforce sanctions against these actors, too.

While the U.S. more aggressively goes after the assets of North Korea’s elites — currently, only about 200 North Korean entities have had their assets frozen, compared to about 400 in Cuba and more than 800 in Iran — it could also agitate to have North Korean banks kicked out of the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication, reducing its access to the global financial infrastructure. In 2012, the U.S. successfully pressured SWIFT to expel Iran. Meanwhile, the U.S. should be pressuring Europe, as well as countries in Africa and Asia, to stop employing North Korean slave laborers. As many as 100,000 North Koreans have been sent abroad by the regime (guess who’s building stadiums for the 2022 World Cup in Qatar?), and defectors report that the regime confiscates 90 percent of their wages when they return home.

On the diplomatic front, North Korea receives an undeserved imprimatur as a member of the United Nations; the Trump administration should work to expel it, as well as from its other international memberships (e.g., the ASEAN Regional Forum and the International Olympic Committee). The State Department should also restore its designation as a state sponsor of terror, removed by the Bush administration in 2008.

And militarily? There are no good military options when it comes to North Korea, it’s true; setting aside the threat of a nuclear response, the North could wreak havoc on some of its neighbors just with conventional arms. But the U.S. can still wield a big stick. The idea that North Korea will stand down if the U.S. reduces its activity around the Korean Peninsula has been decisively proven false, so the U.S. should not hesitate to flex its muscle. The U.S. and South Korea should continue with joint military exercises. Meanwhile, the White House should work to strengthen missile-defense capacities throughout the region. The decision by South Korea’s newly elected president Moon Jae-in to suspend further deployment of the U.S. Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) system pending an environmental-impact assessment may be a precursor to rejecting THAAD altogether; the White House should work with President Moon to make sure that does not happen. The administration should also be working to strengthen its relationship with Japan.

Finally, it should go without saying that the United States should be working from the inside to subvert the regime.

It is persistently remarked that North Korea will never change until China stops shielding it, and there’s truth to that. But the United States has leverage, nonetheless, and especially now. And China’s position may be wavering: There are reports that Beijing is considering distancing itself from Pyongyang, and a younger generation of leaders in the Communist party is not at all convinced that bolstering North Korea is, in the long run, worth the trouble. These are pressure points that the United States can exploit.

There is no such thing as a “manageable” nuclear North Korea; ultimately, the Kim family and its crime syndicate must go. The U.S. should recognize the murderous regime in Pyongyang for what it is, and respond accordingly.

There are reports of two explosions at Brussels Central Station, where a man wearing what appeared to be an explosive belt has been “neutralized” in what Belgian authorities are calling a terror attack:

Local media reports indicate the suspect shouted “Allah akhbar” before being shot:

Belgian authorities won’t confirm if the suspect is dead or alive, but are saying there are no further injuries.

The Independent reports:

The main square and central station in Belgium’s capital Brussels have evacuated by place after reports of a blast.

Witnesses said La Grande Place was cleared in seconds, while others took pictures of a fire in the nearby Central Station.

Belgian media have reported a man wearing a explosive belt has been “neutralised” by police.

Local police tweeted about an “incident with an individual at Brussels Central station”.

It said: “The situation is under control but please follow the instructions [of police]”.

Kenneth Bae was seized by North Korean officials in November 2012. Two years later, after suffering myriad health problems brought on by forced labor, Bae’s 15-year sentence was cut short and he headed home to Washington state.

The Christian missionary thought he could help suffering North Koreans in part by leading a tour company in the special economic zones that would help reveal the people’s plight. Pyongyang accused Bae of trying to topple the communist regime.

After the release and death of University of Virginia student Otto Warmbier, Bae said he was grieving with and praying for the young man’s family.

Bae called attention to the many people “living without freedom in the country of 24 million people – enduring horrible circumstances and forced labor – and we do not even know their names.”

“We plead with the U.S. government, the international community, and leadership in North Korea to value human lives. Every life is important — Otto’s life, lives of the American detainees, and the lives of each person in North Korea. I am a Christian, and part of what that means is to act justly and to have mercy on the innocent. Although we don’t know everything about life in North Korea, this much is sure: innocent people like Otto are suffering. I pray that these innocent people suffering in North Korea are not forgotten in this high-stakes game of weapons, sanctions, and international diplomacy,” Bae’s statement continued.

“Please join me in prayer and be a voice for the innocent. Please join me in praying for Otto’s family. This did not have to happen and should never happen again.”

Bae was released at the same time as Matthew Todd Miller, who had been arrested after entering North Korea in April 2014. In October 2014, Jeffrey Fowle, an Ohio tourist arrested after a Bible was discovered in his hotel room, was released — a month after being sentenced to six years of hard labor. The Pentagon sent an aircraft to pick up Fowle at North Korea’s request.

Ten Americans were detained and released by North Korea during the Obama administration, with Bae serving the longest period in captivity. Warmbier was seized in January 2016, and is believed to have suffered the brain damage that left him in an unresponsive state soon after being sentenced that March.

In June 2016, North Korea’s Korean Central News Agency blamed Bae’s

“babbling” about the regime for the prisoners’ plight, claiming Pyongyang would “not proceed with any compromise or negotiations with the United States on the subject of American criminals, and there will certainly not be any such thing as humanitarian action” as long as the former hostage spoke out about his experiences and advocated for those still suffering.

“As we grieve Otto’s passing, I also want people to know that other Americans remain detained in North Korea right now,” Bae added in his statement this week. “There are three Americans — Kim Dong Chul, Tony Kim, Kim Hak-Song — and the Canadian pastor Hyeon Soo Lim.”

In an article entitled “Just Terrorist Tactics: Hostage Taking,” the recently released issue of ISIS’ online magazine, Rumiyah (Rome), features new techniques to terrorize non-Muslims.

Volume 9 of the terrorist group’s recruitment and propaganda tool introduces several new ideas of note for aspiring jihadists which involve 1) advertising for fake jobs, 2) falsely advertising property for rent and 3) participation in online sales sites such as Craigslist, Gumtree and eBay.

The advertising of a job at a local unemployment center is presented as a way to lure a particular type of target for “job interviews” (i.e. any male kafir). The “soldier of Allah” is informed that this should take place at various locations and times in order to eliminate the victims as they arrive by “attacking, subduing, binding and then slaughtering them.”

Falsely advertising a property for rent in the local classified section or with “For Rent” advertisement posters is suggested as another effective ploy. Perpetrators are instructed to describe the available property as a single room or studio so potential “tenants” will likely come alone to view the rental.

As the collection of goods is often conducted in person, the use of buy and sell websites is encouraged as well by the latest Rumiyah feature. The writer specifies that the viewing and collecting of the item in question should be arranged at a suitable location for carrying out a terrorist operation.

The recent Rumiyah article cautions Muslims to remind themselves that these actions constitute “worship” and that “Allah has obliged us to “kill the mushrikin*” wherever we find them and to “fight the disbelievers who are closest**” to us.” It stresses the importance of having a room specifically reserved for the disposal of bodies so that future victims are not alerted to any danger. The use of background noise to drown out sounds of a struggle is encouraged. It is suggested that in order to maximize the “terror in the hearts of the disbelievers***” and enhance the publicity value of the operation, some victims should be kept alive and used as hostages. The “ideal scenario” is depicted as the storming of the site by armed forces as the jihadist is killed as a shahid or martyr.

In issues of a prior ISIS publication, Dabiq, Muslims were urged to kill children and attack Christians.

“Bangladesh is a Muslim country, no culture of statue establishment would be allowed by the people here… all of them must be removed.” — Nur Hossain Quashemi, president, Dhaka branch of Hefazat-e-Islam.

“The Quran says: You [women] should stay at your home… Your duty is to stay at the husband’s house and safeguard property. Your primary duty is to stay home and look after your family and children only. Do not go out even for shopping.” — Shah Ahmed Shafi, chief of Hefazat-e-Islam.

Millions of Bangladeshi youths are increasingly wearing Islamic attire; and freedom of speech and freedom of movement are fast becoming a luxury — if not a threat to the safety — of Bangladesh’s more secular-minded people, already feeling themselves a minority of sorts.

The government of Bangladesh, led by historically known secular political party Awami League, has completely surrendered to the country’s radical forces regarding the demands, made by Hefazat-e-Islam and some other Islamic political and religious organizations, including the removal of the sculpture that was designed with the theme of the Greek goddess of justice. The statue was installed in last December following a decision taken by the Chief Justice. On May 26, at night, Bangladeshi authorities, in the name of the “consent of the chief justice”, removed the sculpture from the front side of the Supreme Court. The current chief justice, incidentally, is the ever first non-Muslim to hold the constitutional post.

In reaction, the next day, after Friday prayers, Islamists, led by Hefazat-e-Islam, arranged a rally and expressed joy and satisfaction over removal of the sculpture and demanded further removal of all existing idols/statues/sculptures — whatever one might call them — across the country. “Bangladesh is a Muslim country, no culture of statue establishment would be allowed by the people here… all of them must be removed,” said Nur Hossain Quashemi, the president of Dhaka branch of Hefazat-e-Islam, to the media.

They’re falling like dominoes, starting with the great Robert E. Lee, whose statue went down with a yank of a crane in a jiffy, after standing tall on his New Orleans perch for 133 years. Jefferson Davis is also down, and the great Confederate general P.G.T. Beauregard, who partnered the heroic General Johnston on his left flank in the battle of Shiloh, has also bitten the dust.

Removing statues of great American generals who fought for, er…the wrong cause is the latest trendy thing to do. In fact, the virus has spread as far away as Australia, where the politically correct in cahoots with the gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender brigades are demanding that a tennis legend’s name be removed from a stadium named after her. Margaret Court won 24 Grand Slam titles in her time during the ’60s and early ’70s, one more than Serena Williams, but a couple of years ago committed the greatest crime ever: She criticized same-sex marriage from the pulpit of her church in Perth, where she is a pastor. Her name has been mud ever since, at least among those who think it’s normal for people of the same sex to marry.

So far so bad, and I will get back to Margaret Court in a minute, but here are a few predictions of my own concerning these latest outrages by the PC crowd: Old Hickory is history, as far as the $20 bill is concerned, Malcolm X or Muhammad Ali will take his place. Andrew Jackson killed too many Indians and never apologized for it, so there. Poor old Alexander Hamilton had a close call, but the Broadway play depicting him as black and speaking rap has saved him on the tenner, at least for now. The next big bad guy is going to be Thomas Jefferson, who not only owned slaves but also slept with them. I expect my old alma mater the University of Virginia, whose founder he was, will deal with him rather sternly. The big one, of course, will be when the PC Nazis demand old George be struck off the dollar bill for owning and freeing his slaves only after he met his maker.
“America has started the trend by taking down the greatest general ever, Robert E. Lee.”

Back in the old country, Greece, people are in a tizzy over the removal of past heroes in order to satisfy present trends. “The Parthenon was not exactly built by rich Athenians, only financed by them,” was the way a nephew of mine put it. “It was the slaves, under a merciless whip, who put it up. Should we dynamite it?” The Parthenon is known as the most perfectly symmetrical and beautiful edifice ever built by man, but it was slave labor that put the marble pieces together. And what about the pyramids down south? Did free rich Egyptians carry those stones all the way up to the top during the permanent heat wave that is Egypt? We’ll need a lot of TNT to blast those monuments to smithereens, but what the hell, as long as the PC bunch is satisfied, who are we old-timers to object?

When I was young and on the tennis circuit I met Margaret Court, Smith as she then was, and she could not have been nicer. We were not close by any means, but I remember her standing out because of her winning ways and—let’s face it—her refusal to join the crowd of female competitors who were mostly lesbian, although extremely discreet. Fifty years later she has become a hated figure despite the fact that there are members of the LGBT community in her church who admit that she is not homophobic. In one of her sermons, Margaret included that “a lust for the flesh leads people to destroy their lives.” Which rang a bell. I remembered during a tournament in Rome when I was in hot pursuit of an American female tennis player, Margaret told me words to that effect. “I hope I’m destroyed sooner rather than later,” I answered her, and she gave me a rueful smile and dropped it.

So here we are, with Martina Navratilova, as great a champion as she was a predator, pressing for the name of Margaret Court Arena to be changed, describing Margaret as racist and homophobic. The latter is neither, but you know how it is—if you believe in God too much, you must also be someone who wants to boil all gay people and all black people, and all brown people, and all those with slitty eyes. The fact that in her church Margaret Court has people from ten different African countries is neither here nor there. Navratilova knows better. Heaven help us.

The U.S. has shot down a Syrian Su-22 near Ja’Din and close to the strategic dam at Al Tabqa. The Sukhoi 22M series, the model in the Syrian inventory, is an old and relatively slow aircraft primarily used for bombing targets. First produced in 1970, the Russians improved the model over the twenty years it was manufactured (until 1990). It is entirely noncompetitive against top U.S. jet fighters including the F-18 that shot down the Syrian Sukhoi.

It is unlikely the Syrian pilot had any warning before being shot out of the sky. Indeed, the warning issue is what is at the heart of the dispute between Russia and the United States, and it may tell us more than the Russians would like us to know about their unstable relationship with Syria.

According to the Combined Joint Task Force official report, at around 4:30 P.M. Syria time, there was a Syrian attack on Ja’Din which was held by the Syrian Democratic Forces, or SDF. The SDF is “multi-ethnic and multi-religious alliance of Kurdish, Arab, Assyrian, Armenian, Turkmen and Circassian militias.” The SDF took a number of casualties before Coalition aircraft chased the Syrians away. Immediately on the heels of the Syrian attack, the U.S. made use of what is called the deconfliction hotline and called the Russians. A little more than two hours later, another Su-22 was bombing in the same area and this is the plane that the U.S. shot down. There was no further call to the hotline, and while not precisely stated it is nearly certain that the Su-22 was not warned in any way by the approaching F-18.

The U.S. action is consistent with the agreements reached with the Russians. However, the Russians are claiming the U.S. did not use the hotline. Without saying so, they are likely treating the second incident as one that was separate from the first. Of course, this is something of a reach on their part, but it is probably the only response the Russians could have given under the circumstances because the Syrians went ahead with another airstrike on their own after the deconfliction warning was initially given.

Why would the Syrians do this? It boils down to an argument between the Russians and the Syrians over how to treat the Kurds. Last year, the Russians sponsored a peace proposal for the Kurds that would have given them autonomy inside a new Syrian constitution that ultimately would have divided the country into cantons, keeping the appearance of central Syrian Alawite control but in reality changing the nature of the existing unitary state into something different and perhaps acceptable to all sides in the conflict. Moscow flew in a delegation of experts from the Foreign Ministry and Defense Ministry to meet with the regime and Kurdish representatives. It appears to have been Moscow’s view, which is largely President Putin’s idea, that this solution would achieve a number of important goals: move the peace process forward and separate the Syrian Kurds from the Americans. Apparently, the Russians failed to do their homework, for while the Syrian Kurds appeared to be onboard, the Assad regime was contemptuously against the deal and rejected it out of hand, the result being the Moscow delegation was sent home emptyhanded or worse. The current Syrian regime attack on the Kurds near Ja’Din should be seen exactly in this context.