Boots on the Ground 070814

‘Abandoned’ barrels containing deadly sarin seized in rebel-held Syria

UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon informed Security Council members on Monday that two cylinders reportedly seized by Syrian government forces in an opposition-held region appeared to contain the deadly nerve agent sarin.
According to the letter dispatched by Ban to the UNSC, on June 14 the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) analyzed the contents of the barrels, reported Reuters. The UN Joint Mission is currently overseeing the destruction of Syria’s chemical weapons stockpiles under the umbrella of the OPCW.
Syria has declared a total of 1,300 tons of chemical agents, and handed over the last portion of its stockpile on June 23 under the agreement reached in September.
"The Joint Mission confirmed that these contained sarin," read Ban's letter. The Syrian government declared the barrels “as abandoned chemical weapons,” which were reportedly seized by government forces in August 2013 within an area under the control of armed rebel groups.
OPCW chief Ahmet Uzumcu did not include in his report the precise date the Syrian government had handed over the two cylinders
On Monday the US container ship Cape Ray began to neutralize chemical weapons materials according to the Pentagon. Some 600 metric tons of materials, including components for mustard gas and sarin, were transferred earlier in July to the Cape Ray from a vessel that initially transported them from Syria.
The Syrian government agreed last year to dispose of its chemical weapons stockpile, part of a disarmament deal brokered between Assad, the US and Russia following allegations of the regime’s use of deadly agents against civilians. That crisis was triggered after evidence emerged of a potential sarin gas attack last August which killed hundreds of civilians on the periphery of the capital of Damascus.

Jerusalem Under Fire From Gaza in Rare Launch on Holy City

Rocket sirens rang out in Jerusalem today as Israel faced Gaza backlash during Operation Protective Edge.
Media reported three explosions were also heard in the city.
Rocket launches on Jerusalem are an incredibly rare occurrence. The attack came just minutes after a rocket launch on Tel Aviv, which was the second assault on that city in three hours.
The last time Jerusalem and Tel Aviv were fired on was in 2012′s Operation Pillar of Defense. That attack marked the first missile launch on the large cities in near decades.

Muslim Brotherhood Org that Met with Obama WH Calls for Islamic War Against Israel

The head of the International Union of Muslim Scholars (IUMS), a Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated group, called upon fellow Islamists and Arabs to declare holy war against Israel “for the sake of Palestine.”

According to a translation provided by the Center for Security Policy:

Dr. Ali Al-Qaradaghi – the Secretary General of the International Union of Muslim Scholars – called on the Islamic and Arab peoples to rise up in all parts of the world for the sake of Palestine and Jerusalem since it is the central issue of the nation, and therefore pressure must be placed on the governments and institutions to carry out their duty towards stopping the Zionist terrorism that is occurring in the land of Palestine, stressing that the peoples are more powerful than they imagine and that they are capable of making the difference if they were to act to support the Umma’s just causes.

Al-Qaradaghi also declared that the Union stands with the popular outburst in Jerusalem and the West Bank, and condemns the crimes against the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, and cautions the Zionist settlers who are raping the land from targeting Palestinians, and the Umma will not idly refrain forever from aiding their brethren that are being murdered by Zionist hands, which also usurps their lands and money.

IUMS was founded by Egyptian cleric Yusuf Qaradawi, a Muslim Brotherhood leader described by National Review’s Andrew McCarthy as “The most influential Sunni Islamist in the world.”
In 2003, Qaradawi issued a fatwa (religious declaration) that called for the killing of US soldiers in Iraq. He wrote:

Those killed fighting the American forces are martyrs given their good intentions since they consider these invading troops an enemy within their territories but without their will... Although they are seen by some as being wrong, those defending against attempts to control Islamic countries have the intention of Jihad and bear a spirit of the defense of their homeland.

In June 2013, Bin Bayyah, the Vice President of the International Union of Muslim Scholars, met with members of the White House National Security Council. According to Bayyah, it was not his organization but the Obama administration that had initially reached out and sought a meeting. "We asked for this meeting to learn from you, and we need to be looking for new mechanisms to communicate with you and the Association of Muslim Scholars,” Gayle Smith, Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director of the National Security Council, reportedly said about IUMS.

Ukraine gas debt exceeds $5bn, no June payments made - Gazprom

Ukraine’s gas bill has risen another $838 million, after Kiev failed to make a payment for 1.7 billion cubic meters of Russian gas supplied in the first half of June.
“The deadline for paying June bills expired yesterday; we again didn’t receive the money from Naftogaz Ukraine. As a result Ukraine’s debt to Gazprom for the 1.7 billion cubic meters supplied from June 1 through June 16 rose to $5.296 billion,” Gazprom CEO Aleksey Miller said on Tuesday.
Miller added that Ukraine needs to pay for 11.535 billion cubic meters of Russian gas, which is a “gigantic” volume, comparable to the total supplied to Poland.
“Ukraine’s principle unwillingness to pay for Russian gas is becoming chronic, and once again shows the transition to aprepayment system, included in the contract, was the only correct decision,” Miller added.
The new bill is calculated on a price of $485 per thousand cubic meters that came into effect in April.
Ukraine has insisted it would pay the debt if it was charged $326, saying the new Gazprom price was unfair and politically motivated.
On June 16, when Ukraine’s gas debt stood at $4.458 billion, Gazprom moved Ukraine to a prepayment system, which meant Kiev had to pay in advance for any new supplies of Russian gas.
Ukraine has recently increased its effort to find alternative sources of gas to substitute Russian supplies. On Friday Ukraine’s Finance Ministry put forward an eight point plan to escape Russian gas dependence, through developing its own production as well as looking for other suppliers.
The new plan included switching from boiler heating to biofuels, as well as getting more out of coal, and building sea terminals for liquefied natural gas (LNG).
Ukraine also says it could get up to 20 billion cubic meters in reverse flow from neighboring Slovakia, Poland and Hungary, which it expects to compensate for part of the “lost” Russian gas. However Gazprom and RT experts doubt that even having the equipment to reverse the gas flow, the scheme would be legal.
Russian President Vladimir Putin called such supplies artificial saying there’s no way one pipe could be used to supply gas in both directions.
The President said that Russia “sees everything”; however the country is not responding, only because it doesn’t want the situation to worsen.

European Gas Jumps Most Since March as Russia Cuts Ukraine Flows

U.K. and Dutch natural gas prices climbed the most in more than three months as Russia’s pipeline-gas export monopoly OAO Gazprom (GAZP) cut shipments to Ukraine, threatening flows to the European Union.

U.K. front-month gas jumped as much as 8.8 percent on ICE Futures Europe, the biggest increase since March 3, the first trading day after Russian President Vladimir Putin got approval from lawmakers to send troops into Ukraine’s Crimea region. Dutch prices rose 10 percent to their highest level since May 12, according to broker data compiled by Bloomberg.
The EU tried in vain to broker an accord between the two nations that would avoid disrupting supplies to the bloc, which gets about 15 percent of its gas via Ukrainian pipelines from Russia. The reduction follows similar cuts in 2006 and 2009. 
“The response of European natural gas prices is coherent in face of the risk of Europe seeing 15 percent of its natural gas supplies at risk,” Lysu Paez-Cortez, an analyst at Natixis SA in Paris, said today by e-mail. “I think the market expected the European Energy Commission to succeed in its attempt to try and make the two parts to find an exit to the differences.”
U.K. next-month gas rose as high as 45.55 pence a therm ($7.69 a million British thermal units) on ICE, the highest since May 13, and traded at 42.90 pence at 1:03 p.m. in London. Dutch prices for July, which also increased the most since March 3, climbed as high as 20 euros ($27) a megawatt-hour on the TTF hub and were recently at 18.50 euros.
Russia cut flows to Ukraine and is providing only gas destined for the EU, Andriy Kobolyev, chief executive officer of Ukrainian energy company Naftogaz Ukrainy, said today, adding that a “fair price” would be sought via arbitration.

Russia's swashbuckling military intelligence unit is full of assassins, arms dealers, and bandits. And what they pulled off in Ukraine was just the beginning.

Russia's swashbuckling military intelligence unit is full of assassins, arms dealers, and bandits. And what they pulled off in Ukraine was just the beginning.

There are two ways an espionage agency can prove its worth to the government it serves. Either it can be truly useful (think: locating a most-wanted terrorist), or it can engender fear, dislike, and vilification from its rivals (think: being named a major threat in congressional testimony). But when a spy agency does both, its worth is beyond question.

Since the Ukraine crisis began, the Kremlin has few doubts about the importance of the GRU, Russia's military intelligence apparatus. The agency has not only demonstrated how the Kremlin can employ it as an important foreign-policy tool, by ripping a country apart with just a handful of agents and a lot of guns. The GRU has also shown the rest of the world how Russia expects to fight its future wars: with a mix of stealth, deniability, subversion, and surgical violence. Even as GRU-backed rebel groups in eastern Ukraine lose ground in the face of Kiev's advancing forces, the geopolitical landscape has changed. The GRU is back in the global spook game and with a new playbook that will be a challenge for the West for years to come.

Recent years had not been kind to the Main Intelligence Directorate of the General Staff, the Glavnoe razvedyvatelnoe upravlenie (GRU). Once, it had been arguably Russia's largest intelligence agency, with self-contained stations -- known as "residencies" -- in embassies around the world, extensive networks of undercover agents, and nine brigades of special forces known as Spetsnaz.

By the start of 2013, the GRU was on the ropes. Since 1992, the agency had been in charge of operations in the post-Soviet countries, Russia's "near abroad." But Russian President Vladimir Putin appears to have seen it as increasingly unfit for that purpose. When the Federal Security Service (FSB), Russia's domestic security agency, was allowed to run operations abroad openly in 2003, one insider told me that this was because "the GRU doesn't seem to know how to do anything in our neighborhood except count tanks." (It may not even have done that very well. Putin regarded the GRU as partly responsible for Russia's lackluster performance in the 2008 invasion of Georgia.) There was a prevailing view in Moscow that the GRU's focus on gung-ho "kinetic operations" like paramilitary hit squads seemed less relevant in an age of cyberwar and oil politics.

US-Backed 'Moderate' Free Syrian Army Factions Join ISIS Terror Group

Reports coming out of eastern Syria Monday revealed that several factions within the Syrian opposition force known as the Free Syrian Army (FSA) have pledged services to the Islamic State, the group formerly known as the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS). Sources and eyewitnesses said that the FSA has handed over its weapons to the Islamic State in large numbers.

The Free Syrian Army was said to be a “moderate” and “secular” force, which was used as the rationale by U.S. officials to supply the opposition force with weapons and training.
Sources told Homs, Syria-based Zaman Alwasl newspaper that several factions within the FSA, including Ahl Al Athar, Ibin al-Qa’im, and Aisha have pledged to support the Islamic State.
On Tuesday, a spokesman for the Free Syrian Army said all of the area between Deir Ez-Zor, Syria, and the Iraqi border - a 90 mile stretch - has fallen to the Islamic State. The spokesman said that they not only controlled the territory, but had also taken over six Syrian oil and gas fields, along with a major pumping station that delivers oil to both Iraq and Syria. One of the captured oil fields included the al-Omar field, capable of producing 75,000 barrels of oil per day.
In a video proclamation, leaders in the town of al-Sahil said they “decided to swear allegiance” to the Islamic State and its leader: Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.
The Obama administration has delivered weapons, supplies, and CIA-sponsored training to the Free Syrian Army. United States intelligence analysts estimate that the U.S. has had a hand in training as many as 20,000 FSA rebels. The U.S. reportedly provided the FSA with weapons such as rockets and TOW anti-tank missiles, which were supplied through back-channels in Qatar and Saudi Arabia.
The Free Syrian Army originally formed in July, 2011, at the start of the Syrian civil war. The group was initially composed largely of defectors from Bashar al-Assad’s Syrian Armed Forces.


Nearly 500 cops call in sick to protest healthcare cuts in Memphis

The Memphis, Tennessee Police Department is hemorrhaging officers as hundreds of cops continue to call in sick as part of a growing act of protest.
On Monday this week, MPD spokesperson Sgt. Karen Rudolph confirmed to the Knoxville News Sentinel that 472 officers were off of work that afternoon after claiming to be sick. One day earlier, Mayor A C Wharton said at a news conference that 308 officer had called out of work since the previous Monday, causing a noticeable strain on the department’s ability to patrol the streets. Now if the trend continues in this manner, the number of active cops on the MPD may be obliterated even further.
Over the weekend, Police Director Toney Armstrong acknowledged that the growing number of officers calling out of work was the result of an effort waged after the City Council voted recently to reduce health care subsidies for city employees. According to the Memphis Flyer, city officials approved those changes when they agreed to pass a new budget last month. Now ahead of a July 15 vote where changes to the city employee pension plan are expected to be approved, officers are striking en masse by using up their sick days to express their outrage.
Officer Mike Williams, the president of the local police union, told a Memphis CBS News affiliate recently that a potential strike seemed to be among the only options the cops had left to speak up.
“Sometimes there’s a ground swell and sometimes you can only kick a dog for so long before it bites you,” Williams said.
Speaking to Memphis Commercial Appeal, however, Williams explained that his union isn’t necessary endorsing the strike.
"This is not something that the MOA (Memorandum of Agreement) orchestrated or condoned," he said. "I don't necessarily agree with this because we were getting support from the citizens and smaller businesses in the community."
Meanwhile, the toll of the ever increasing list of officers on sick-leave is all too apparent in Memphis, where law enforcement officials from neighboring towns have been forced to assist in recent days. According to Commercial Appeal, around 50 Shelby County Sheriff’s deputies assisted with law enforcement procedures on Saturday, when 181 members of the MPD called in sick.
"I would like to publicly thank the sheriff and Shelby County Sheriff's Office, as they always have, for being right there, our law enforcement brothers for being right there. They always have for us," added Armstrong.
As of earlier this year in May, the total number of officers working for the MPD was just below 2,280. At the time, Armstrong said he needed at least 2,400 officers “to continue full services” for the city.

Illegal Unaccompanied Minors Being Held For Placement in U.S. Admit to Engaging in Torture and Murder

Despite Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson vowing to "stem the tide" of unaccompanied illegal minors across the southern border with Mexico, thousands more are expected to enter the United States by the end of the year. With the system being overwhelmed, Border Patrol agents are concerned about minors who have admitted to being MS-13 members, a brutal street gang from El Salvador that has been successful in infiltrating American communities. Agents are also concerned about minors who have committed acts like torture and murder in their home countries before heading north to the United States.
"We have six minors in Nogales who have admitted to killing and doing grievous bodily injuries. One admitted to killing as young as eight years old," an agent tells Townhall anonymously for fear of losing his job for speaking out. "They are being held for placement in the U.S."
By U.S. legal standards many gang members operating in Central American countries and traveling north are classified as minors due to being under the age of 18. However, many young males are actively engaged in violent cartel and criminal activity, yet are treated as children when processed through the Department of Human Services or Department of Homeland Security systems.
"But remember, this is a 'humanitarian crisis.' They are just kids," he said in a frustrated and sarcastic tone. "They are MS-13 gang members. They've done everything from torture to murder. They act as teenage 'enforcers.'"

Video: ISIS destroys the tomb of the Prophet Jonah

The Prophet Jonah is one of the most famous figures of the Old Testament. The story of the reluctant prophet who was swallowed by a whale (or a giant fish depending on translation) was even referenced by Jesus Christ as recorded in the Gospel of Matthew:

But he answered and said unto them, An evil and adulterous generation seeketh after a sign; and there shall no sign be given to it, but the sign of the prophet Jonas:
For as Jonas was three days and three nights in the whale’s belly; so shall the Son of man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth.
The men of Nineveh shall rise in judgment with this generation, and shall condemn it: because they repented at the preaching of Jonas; and, behold, a greater than Jonas is here.
—Gospel of Matthew, chapter 12 verses 39–41

In Mosul, which is now where Nineveh once stood, a shrine and tomb stood for the prophet. According to Wikipedia:

On one of the two most prominent mounds of Nineveh ruins, rises the Mosque (an Nestorian-Assyrian Church before) of prophet Younis "Biblical Jonah", the son of Amittai, from the 8th century BC which is believed to be the burial place of him, and where King Esarhaddon had once built a palace.
This old shrine standing on the site of a Christian church is a stone’s throw from the built-up walls and gates of Nineveh. In the middle of the mosque stood a sepulcher, covered with a Persian carpet of silk and silver, and at the four corners, great copper candlesticks with wax tapers, besides several lamps and ostrich shells that hung down from the roof. A whale’s tooth, appropriate to Jonah’s well-known adventure at sea, is said to be preserved there.
It is one of the most important mosques in Mosul and one of the few historic mosques that are found in the east side of the city.

Now, ISIS has destroyed the tomb. According to a report via Shoebat.com:

On Friday a local Nineveh official, Zuhair al-Chalabi said that there is information that almost certainly confirms that members of the organization of the Islamic state in Iraq and the Levant dug up the grave of the Prophet Younis in the east of Mosul.
Al-Chalabi said in an interview for IraqiNews.com, that “The elements of ISIL controlled the mosque of the Prophet Younis in Mosul since they invaded the city. It is still held by them until now,” pointing out that “elements of ISIL engaged in the process of tampering with the contents of the Mosque.”
Al-Chalabi added that “there is almost certain information stating the fact that the elements of ISIL dug up the grave of the Prophet Younis.”

Louisiana Gives Away $1.3 Million in Food Stamps to Dead People

Louisiana spent about $1.3 million on food stamps for people who were already dead between 2009 and 2013, the Times-Picayune reports.
A report issued by the Louisiana Legislative Auditor Monday revealed the government waste:

In all, state benefits went out to 3,938 deceased people over the four-year period examined by the auditor. The Louisiana auditor only reviewed records concerning single people who had died. The total amount of money spent on food stamps for single people in Louisiana during this time was $1.08 billion.
Much of the money — $556,000 — was spent on people who had been dead for at least four months. A fair amount of money — $272,951 — was also spent on people who had only been dead one month.

The money was being spent by “someone not qualified to receive those benefits,” a WBRZ reporter explained. The audit found the discrepancy back in April and revealed the problem to the Department of Children and Family Services (DCFS). The Times-Picayune reported the DCFS said “it is difficult to cut off people’s benefits in the month after they die because there can be a lag in the reporting of their death. The state also can’t revoke food stamps unless they go unused for a year, which means they could easily be acquired and spent by another person.” 

Muslims Rape Christian Women, 600 Christians Take Up Arms And Make One Final And Heroic Stand Against Muslim Jihadists

After so much rape has been done against Christian women in Iraq, 600 Christians in Iraq have now taken up arms to make one final stand against Muslim Jihadists, members of the ISIS terrorist group, at the frontiers of the Christian settlement of Bartella on the outskirts of Mosul.
These 600 Christians, “all mighty men of valour” (1 Chronicles 12:21), are led by Capt. Firaz Jacob, a Christian warrior who has himself declared with the utmost of apostolic zeal:

I stand here waiting for my destiny… We will stay here despite everything… All these armed groups we have seen, but nevertheless we will remain. We love our Christian way of life, we love our churches and we love our community.

Bartella was suppose to be protected by the Iraqi government, but state soldiers fled from ISIS, leaving the Christians to take up their cross and commence a crusade to keep the jihadists away from their lands. According to one report:

The Iraqi government soldiers who were supposed to be protecting this area ran away from the Islamic extremists. Now, Bartella is defended by about 600 lightly armed Christian militiamen.