One informer said he hid the sim card from his mobile phone in a water filter to avoid detection by Daesh. Another concealed his in a sack of rice and made calls to his Iraqi handlers from a basement.

They were among several hundred Mosul residents who provided information on Daesh targets during the victorious nine-month battle for Iraq’s second biggest city, Iraqi military and Kurdish intelligence officials said, like reported by gulftoday.ae.

They included taxi drivers, Iraqi soldiers and defectors from Daesh.

Without their help, officials say, the fighting would have dragged on longer, snared in Mosul’s narrow alleys.

“I was really afraid the whole time. Because you paid with blood, you paid with your life if you were caught,” said one of the informers, 30-year-old former army sergeant Alaa Abdullah, who remained in Mosul after its capture by Daesh in 2014.

“My mother used to say, you’re still young. But I’d tell her, every time I see a Daesh fighter, I get a grey hair,” he said. “And you can see all my greys now. From all that hatred and fear.”

The city, which was home to about two million people before the war, was liberated in July.

In interviews with Reuters, nine Iraqi and Kurdish military officials, informers and their relatives detailed how their battle for Mosul unfolded.

As Iraqi army commanders and US advisers were preparing the ground offensive, intelligence officers were recruiting informers, building alliances with the region’s Sunni tribes and infiltrating Daesh leader Abu Bakr Al Baghdadi’s inner circle.

Iraqi intelligence had tested using informers in the successful operation to retake another Daesh stronghold, Fallujah, in June 2016. Now it was time to apply the tactic on a bigger scale in Mosul.

Reuters couldn’t independently confirm every detail of the informers’ accounts. But key elements supplied by these sources, who mostly didn’t know each other, were consistent.

“We were working hard to penetrate networks and establish connections that would be beneficial once the military phase began, and it paid off,” a senior Kurdish counter-terrorism official, Lahur Talabany, said.

“We were able to connect to people close enough to aid us in our efforts.”

Many people became informers because “they truly believed in the cause of eradicating Daesh,” Talabany said.

When Russia entered the Syrian civil war in September 2015 the then US secretary of defense, Ash Carter, predicted catastrophe for the Kremlin. Vladimir Putin was ‘pouring gasoline on the fire’ of the conflict, he said, and his strategy of fighting Isis while backing the Assad regime was ‘doomed to failure’. Two years on, Putin has emerged triumphant and Bashar al-Assad’s future is secure. They will soon declare victory over Isis inside the country, like reported by spectator.co.uk.

The dismal failure turned out to be our cynical effort to install a Sunni regime in Damascus by adopting the Afghanistan playbook from the 1980s. We would train, fund and arm jihadis, foreign and domestic, in partnership with the Gulf Arab despots. This way we would rob Russia of its only warm-water naval base, Tartus, on Syria’s Mediterranean coast. In the process we would create a buffer between Iran and its Lebanon-based proxy, Hezbollah, to divide the anti-Israel Shia axis. And we would further marginalise Iran by extending the influence of our Sunni Gulf allies from Lebanon deeper into the Levant. Half a million Syrians were slaughtered as a consequence of this hare-brained scheme, which geo-politically has resulted in the exact opposite of the intended outcome.

Putin, though, had grasped the reality at the outset. Unlike Afghans, ordinary Syrians were used to living in a liberal, diverse culture that, while politically repressive, championed peaceful religious co-existence. Most of them were nervous about seeing their country transformed into a Wahhabi theocracy. Assad, for all his faults, was the buffer between them and internecine carnage. They stuck with the devil they knew, and there was no popular revolution against Assad — nothing compared to the Tahrir uprising that ousted the hated Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak. The millions-strong demonstrations in Damascus were pro-regime. Among the two-thirds of the Syrian population now living in government–controlled parts of the country, Assad is more popular than ever, and Putin is a hero.

Small wonder Putin recently mocked Washington for ‘not knowing the difference between Austria and Australia’. The same charge could, alas, be levelled at Nato leaders generally. At a UN meeting last month, the Orwellian-named Friends of Syria group — the western and Gulf Arab alliance that unleashed jihad — stated they would not engage in reconstruction efforts until (in Boris Johnson’s words) there was a political ‘move away from’ Assad. But weeks earlier, a massive international conference on reconstruction had taken place in Damascus. During it, Assad had ruled out awarding the multi-billion-dollar contracts up for grabs to hostile western and Arab countries on the grounds that they had destroyed his country. Instead, Syria would look east, and especially to Russia, Iran and China. Already Moscow is busy shipping thousands of tons of materials and more than 40 pieces of construction equipment — including bulldozers and cranes — to Syria, which does not want or need our assistance.

An inability to acknowledge, still less confront, Russia’s expanding regional role on the back of Syria was similarly highlighted during a whirlwind trip Johnson made to Libya in August. There, he had a brief meeting with secular strongman Khalifa Haftar, a former general in Gaddafi’s army whose forces now dominate eastern Libya — including Benghazi and most of the country’s major oil fields. He is determined to overrun Tripoli, and probably will. Haftar has ties with Moscow going back to the early 1970s and has been in Putin’s pocket for at least two years, repeatedly meeting with Russian officials on an aircraft-carrier off the Mediterranean coast. A week before shaking hands with Johnson, Haftar had visited Moscow to hold extensive discussions with top officials from the defence and foreign ministries. They cemented plans to move fragmented Libya towards statehood under Haftar as an all-powerful defence minister, with direct Russian military aid. The Kremlin has already deployed troops and fighter jets to western Egypt to join that country and the UAE, which is also backing Haftar in his unifying fight against the Islamists. As with Syria, for decades before the fall of Gaddafi, Russia was Libya’s biggest arms supplier and closest international ally, and Moscow has long been eyeing a naval base on the Libyan coastline to complement its (now much beefed-up) base in Tartus. Given all this, as Johnson suggested that Haftar may have a ‘role to play’ in any future political reconciliation, while insisting that he abide by an internationally brokered ceasefire, the latter must have found it hard to contain his laughter.

Syria and Libya, though, are just two examples of how Russia is running rings around the West in its determination to achieve superpower status in the Middle East. Putin has just inked a deal with Turkey — which has Nato’s second-largest standing army — to sell the latter its most advanced S-400 air defence system. (The S-400 has already been deployed across Syria, while Iran has been given the less advanced but still formidable S-300.) Shortly after Russia entered the Syrian war, Turkey had shot down one of its planes. It was a deliberate attempt to provoke a wider war by President Recep Erdogan, who was furious that Putin was, by way of a relentless bombing campaign, putting an end to his support for Isis foot soldiers inside Syria and his purchasing of oil from the caliphate. (Nato had ignored all this duplicity in the hope that Isis would weaken Assad.) It is testament to Putin’s extraordinary diplomatic skills that Russia and Turkey are these days singing each other’s praises as never before. And under Russian auspices, Turkey is working with Iran and Iraq to contain the fallout from the Kurdish referendum on independence.

When King Salman arrived in Moscow this week, it was the first time that a Saudi leader paid an official visit to Russia — but just the latest in more than two dozen face-to-face meetings Putin has had with Middle Eastern leaders. Russia, of course, is not the Soviet Union, and it is easy to see why the Saudi and other Gulf tyrannies believe they can do business with an authoritarian leader like Putin. He shares their contempt for western-style democracy; and, unlike whoever happens to inhabit the White House, he is a man of his word, promotes stability not chaos, and has no complicating human rights agenda.

On the Saudi agenda in Moscow: the rise of Iran as a dominant regional player, Syria’s de-escalation zones, and billions of dollars in Russian arms sales and direct mutual economic investment. Riyadh is still outraged that the Obama administration had agreed a nuclear deal with Iran, the Saudis’ rival for regional hegemony, and is sulking over the Syria debacle. They have only Russia to turn to in an effort to limit Tehran’s influence in Syria. For the same reason, the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been holding meetings with Putin. During one, he was almost in tears as he, like the Saudis, begged the Russian leader to rein in Iran and Hezbollah, which seek the Jewish state’s destruction.

In a desperate last-ditch effort to stop the Putin power grab in his tracks, the Trump administration will almost certainly decertify the Iranian nuclear deal on October 15, despite the International Atomic Energy Agency, EU and UN being adamant that Tehran is abiding by its terms. The aim is to provoke military confrontation with Iran, or at the least create more regional turmoil to undermine the Kremlin. The reckless and unjustified move will throw a spanner in the works, but in the long-term is — like intervention in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria — doomed to failure.

Putin is well ahead of the curve, having pulled off the seemingly impossible diplomatic feat of fighting alongside Hezbollah in Syria while allowing Israel to bomb Hezbollah and Syrian regime targets inside the country. Last week, a delegation from the Palestinian terror outfit Hamas visited Moscow for talks on the peace process after reconciling with arch-rival Fatah following yet another successful direct intervention by Putin. And Netanyahu has been told that, although Russia considers Israel an important partner, Iran will, come what may, remain its indispensable ally. Putin might therefore already have the diplomatic leverage needed to defuse tensions between Iran and Israel, once again leaving Washington sidelined and humiliated. For while the consequences of Netanyahu beating the war drums over Iran used to be non-existent, now Moscow could give the green light to battle–hardened Iran, Syria and Hezbollah to unleash hellfire against the Jewish state.

It is easy to understand why Netanyahu is quaking in his boots, but should we in Europe be alarmed at Putin’s Middle East triumph? Not unduly so. You do not have to be a Putin groupie to acknowledge that it isn’t him who has been launching one illegal invasion after another in the region, leaving millions dead, maimed and displaced. And he has not only stemmed the flow of Syrian refugees into our continent, but started to reverse the trend. Half a million Syrians have returned to their country this year alone.

And while no side has emerged with their hands clean from one of the most brutal civil wars in modern history, it is also hugely heartening that there were so few defections from a Syrian army overwhelmingly made up of Sunni Muslims (80 per cent by some accounts). They were battling against myriad Sunni jihadi groups in the name of an Alawite-dominated regime, alongside Russian soldiers appalled (unlike us) by the carnage unleashed against their fellow Christians, as well as hardline Shia militias sent by Iran and Hezbollah likewise determined to protect their own sect. Given how Tunisia and Turkey — the two historically secular Muslim countries in the region — are fast embracing Islamism, and how Sunni–Shia infighting continues to tear apart much of the rest of the Middle East, the victory of pluralism and secularism over the wicked Wahhabi jihad in Syria is ultimately uplifting.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hMHahYapv7I

Two suspected mercenaries from a ‘private army’ used by Vladimir Putin in Syria have been captured by ISIS, according to video claims.

ISIS news agency Amaq claims the men, named as Roman Vasilievich Zabolotny and Grigory Mikhailovich Surkanov, were seized near the eastern city of Deir Ezzor.

They can be seen wounded and handcuffed in a video, explaining where they are from in Russia and where they were captured.

They are believed to be mercenaries belonging to the so-called Wagner private army, allegedly deployed by Moscow in hot spots to lower casualty numbers among regular forces. However, the Russian Defence Ministry has strenuously denied losing two soldiers.

Lebanon’s militant Hezbollah group says one of its top commanders has been killed while fighting Islamic State militants in Syria, like reported by stripes.com.

The 44-year-old Ali Al-Hadi Al-Ashiq is the latest fatality for the Shiite group that has fought alongside Syrian government forces in the civil war next door since 2012.

Hezbollah said that he was killed fighting IS in the central desert of Palmyra.

Hezbollah sent thousands of fighters to Syria, helping government forces in major battlefields victories against armed opposition and Islamic militants.

More than 1,000 Hezbollah fighters have been killed there.

Al-Ashiq, also known by his nickname Alhaj Abbas, was among first Hezbollah commanders sent to Syria and he took part in the key battle in al-Qusair, near the Lebanese border.

A drone strike on Monday killed at least eight members of Hizbullah in Syria, where the Lebanese group is fighting alongside the regime, a Britain-based monitor said according to naharnet.com.

An unidentified “drone hit a Hizbullah position near the town of Sukhna (in central Homs province) killing eight fighters, and injuring more than 20,” said Rami Abdel Rahman, head of the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights monitor.

A source on the ground confirmed the strike, giving a toll of seven dead from Hizbullah, and said it was still unclear who had carried out the attack.

A Hizbullah official confirmed the attack but could not confirm the toll. The official was not authorized to speak to the media so spoke on condition of anonymity.

Hizbullah is a key force multiplier for Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, and has fought alongside his troops across the country against rebel forces.

Assad’s forces and allied fighters are currently waging a campaign in Syria’s vast Badiya desert region against the Islamic State group.

The campaign backed by Assad ally Russia has captured large swathes of territory from the jihadists, but they have launched deadly counterattacks on regime positions.

On Sunday, IS fighters recaptured the town of Al-Qaryatain in Homs province, which regime forces took from the group in April 2016 after eight months of jihadist control.

More than 330,000 people have been killed in Syria since the conflict began in March 2011 with anti-government protests.

In clashes spilling over into the morning in Raqqa last night, 13 ISIS members were killed and 5 bodies were recovered by the fighters, like reported by anfenglish.com

The Operation to Liberate Raqqa continues. Intense clashes between SDF fighters and ISIS gangs continued through last night in the Nahda neighborhood to the west of Raqqa and the Kurdan neighborhood to the north. In these clashes, 13 ISIS members were killed and 5 bodies were recovered by the fighters.

Meanwhile in the Nahda neighborhood, fighters confiscated 117 radio devices.

Another group of gang members were killed during their attempt to infiltrate the Reqa Semra village to the east of the city.

Earlier this month, in Syria’s Idlib governorate, 29 Russians found themselves encircled by fighters from the rebel front Tahrir al-Sham (which Moscow still calls its old name, Jabhat al-Nusra). Moscow responded with a characteristic extravagance of firepower, like reported by warontherocks.com. The attack submarine Veliky Novgorod launched Kalibr cruise missiles. Su-25 ground attack aircraft flew sorties, while helicopters laden with Syrian and Russian commandos (including men from the elite Special Operations Command) flew in to extract the soldiers and then punish Tahrir al-Sham. Only three Russians were wounded and none died. What was unusual was that the men of this platoon serving in an exposed position were not Spetsnaz special forces, but members of the Voennaya politsiya, Russia’s military police.

Formed only in 2011, this military police force is now 20,000 strong and increasingly professional. With distinctive red berets and black brassards, they fill a long-discussed need in addressing crime and indiscipline within the ranks. Under Lt. Gen. Vladimir Ivanovskii, head of the Ministry of Defense’s Main Directorate of Military Police, their effectiveness is still the subject of some public debate, especially as they have no real role investigating the massive levels of corruption and embezzlement in the military. However, as their growing role in Syria shows, they do represent a different face of the Russian army, and a potential instrument of a robust kind of soft power.

The North Caucasian Battalions

The first deployment of these military police to Syria began in December 2016 with a force of Chechens, drawn largely from the so-called “Kadyrovtsy” — the security forces loyal to republican strongman Ramzan Kadyrov. Although some accounts put their number as high as 500, their real strength was probably just under 400. The Chechens filled a variety of roles, ranging from convoy security to hearts-and-minds aid distribution missions in the ruins of Aleppo. Much was made of their ability to find common ground with the locals because of their Muslim faith, but their presence also represented two more cynical calculations: To Moscow, they represented a more disposable asset than ethnic Russian soldiers, given sensitivities at home about the political costs of casualties. To Grozny, they represented a token of loyalty. Kadyrov was being regarded with suspicion and concern by the Russian security elite after the embarrassing murder in Moscow of opposition politician Boris Nemtsov. This way, he could demonstrate his value to Vladimir Putin, and also justify his continued control of Chechnya’s security troops (for all that, they were formally now part of the new National Guard).

They were withdrawn in March 2017, their tour having partly overlapped with a battalion of military police from neighboring Ingushetia. The Ingush troops, who were especially visible guarding Hmeymim Air Base and in Damascus, including fighting alongside Syrian Arab Army troops in its Jobar neighborhood, were also there because of politics at home. Ingush leader Yunus-bek Yevkurov, acutely conscious of Kadyrov’s ambitions to extend his authority (until 1992, Chechnya and Ingushetia were conjoined), wanted also to show Moscow his value and loyalty.

The Military Police in Syria Today

This was the first time Russia had deployed military police abroad. The experiment was clearly considered a success, and Moscow is now deploying battalion-strength scratch military police units created from several constituent elements but with no particular ethnic identity. By July, four battalions were operating in Syria, for a total of almost 1,200 effectives. Their primary missions are providing security for Russian facilities and personnel, and manning checkpoints and observation stations monitoring the “de-escalation zones” being established in line with an agreement reached in Kazakhstan in May between Russia, Iran, and Turkey.

According to the accounts of both journalists and others I have spoken to who have seen them on the ground, these military police appear to be relatively effective and professional, and they are likely to stay. (Recent photos of their Tigr light armored vehicles have shown them labeled in both Russian and Arabic.) The military police units offer Moscow several specific advantages. The units are disproportionately made up of professionals, making it easier to form contingents for overseas deployment, as they must be volunteers by law. It also means that the valuable experience they are gaining — especially useful for such a new force — is not going to be bled away quickly by conscripts ending their terms of service.

This is also part of Russia’s domestic and foreign PR campaign for a war that is not especially popular at home (in a recent survey, half wanted Russian forces pulled out of Syria). The presence and activities of the military police have been hyped heavily for domestic consumption, not just playing to the general militarist and nationalist agenda of the state-controlled media but also suggesting that Russia’s role is both humanitarian and relatively casualty-free. With the bulk of combat casualties being sopped up by the “Wagner” pseudo-mercenary force (which is actually a government front, manned almost entirely by Russians, whose losses need not be acknowledged by Moscow), this is meant to assuage public concerns about their boys dying in a war about which they care relatively little.

Future Prospects and Implications

Finally, using military police allows Moscow to send soldiers able to fight if need be — although their primary role is not to be front-line grunts — but also burnish its battered reputation. Russia is considered in many countries in essentially negative terms, as an agent of anarchy on the global scale. However, the use of forces such as the military police which also have a potentially positive, even humanitarian, role is considered a way in which the Kremlin can balance deploying hard power assets with maintaining a soft power capacity.

Since the 1990s, the Kremlin has looked to either deniable or legitimate instruments of coercive influence abroad. In the 1990s, it relied on proxy warriors such as rebels in Transnistria, often in order to create precisely the kind of situation into which Russian “peacekeepers” could then be deployed. Russia’s 15^th Independent Mechanized Brigade, based at Samara, is designated as a specialized peacekeeping force, although the presence of elements of the 15^th in the Donbas during the winter of 2014 and spring of 2015 sheds doubt on whether this means anything practice. Nonetheless, these Mirotvorcheskie sily elements were deployed in Bosnia and Kosovo, and a battalion is still present in Transnistria.

Since Putin came to power in 2000, and as his policy became increasingly aggressive, this became a growing priority, and fits into a wider approach of mobilizing a wide range of different instruments for both hard and soft power purposes. Proxies, from warlords to gangsters, were used in Georgia in 2008 and Ukraine from 2014, but they are often of limited operational effectiveness and also hard to control. The creation of pseudo-mercenary organizations, first the ill-fated “Slavonic Corps” and then “Wagner”, is precisely intended to create forces able to operate with a minimal level of deniability both to the outside world and to Russia’s population. In this context, while the military police are first and foremost exactly what they seem, a long-needed response to a need within the Russian armed forces, they also provide another source of “hard soft power.” Ostensibly providers of law, order, and security, they are also combat assets, and their presence in harm’s way can even — if one is working on a very ruthless calculus — justify the injection of more conventional military force when they come under threat.

Certainly the incident recounted above in Syria was used as the pretext for a massive and much wider military assault which, according to Russian sources, killed hundreds of rebels, including five commanders. It also acquired a geopolitical dimension, as the Russian media lost no time in blaming Washington for the attack on its forces, asserting that the Americans controlled the al-Nusra Front and that the attack was “initiated by U.S. secret services to stop the successful advance of the government troops to the east of Deir ez-Zor.” Meanwhile, the Russians are angry about the death of Lt. Gen. Valery Asapov in shelling near Deir ez-Zor, which Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov called “the price paid with blood for the hypocrisy of American policy in Syria.” The combination of these has meant that the military police have suddenly become the poster children of the Russian “assistance mission” to the Middle East.

Israeli officials believe that Iran is winning its bid for dominance in the Middle East, and they are mobilizing to counter the regional realignment that threatens to follow. The focus of Israel’s military and diplomatic campaign is Syria. Israeli jets have struck Hezbollah and Syrian regime facilities and convoys dozens of times during Syria’s civil war, with the goal of preventing the transfer of weapons systems from Iran to Hezbollah. In an apparent broadening of the scope of this air campaign, on Sept. 7 Israeli jets struck a Syrian weapons facility near Masyaf responsible for the production of chemical weapons and the storing of surface-to-surface missiles, like reported by meforum.org.

The strike came after a round of diplomacy in which Israeli officials concluded that their concerns regarding the developing situation in Syria were not being addressed with sufficient seriousness in either the United States or Russia. A senior delegation led by Mossad chief Yossi Cohen visited Washington in late August, reportedly to express Israel’s dissatisfaction with the emerging U.S.-Russian understanding on Syria. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu visited Russian President Vladimir Putin in Sochi to raise similar concerns with Moscow.

In both cases, the Israelis were disappointed with the response. Their overriding concern in Syria is the free rein that all the major players there seem willing to afford Iran and its various proxies in the country. And as long as nobody else addresses that concern in satisfactory, Israel is determined to continue addressing it on its own.

Iranian forces now maintain a presence close to or adjoining the Israeli-controlled portion of the Golan Heights and the Quneitra Crossing that separates it from the Syrian-controlled portion of the territory. Israel has throughout the Syrian war noted a desire on the part of the Iranians and their Hezbollah clients to establish this area as a second line of active confrontation against the Jewish state, in addition to south Lebanon.

“Syria,” of course, hardly exists today. The regime is in the hands of its Iranian and Russian masters, and half of the country remains outside its control. But the Iran-led bloc and its clearly stated intention to eventually destroy Israel certainly do exist, and the de facto buffer against them may be disappearing. Hezbollah Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah recently declared “victory” in the Syrian war, adding that what remained was “scattered battles.”

With the prospect of pro-Iranian forces reaching Bukamal on the Syrian-Iraqi border, this opens up the possibility of the much-reported Iranian “land corridor” stretching uninterrupted from Iran itself to a few kilometers from the Israeli-controlled Golan. Earlier this month, Israel shot down an Iranian drone over the Golan Heights. It was the latest evidence of Iran’s activities on the border. Syrian opposition reports have noted an Iranian presence in Tal Al-Sha’ar area, Tal Al-Ahmar, and Division 90 headquarters, all in the vicinity of the border.

Pro-Iran forces, meanwhile, are open in their ambitions. Hezbollah al-Nujaba, an Iraqi Shiite force supported by Iran, has formed a “Golan Liberation” unit and declared itself “ready to take action to liberate the Golan.” Senior figures from the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and the Basij have been photographed in areas close to the border.

Israel has so far thwarted these ambitions in two ways. First, it has launched attacks to frustrate and interdict attempts to build a paramilitary infrastructure in the area. Most famously, the killing of Jihad Mughniyeh, son of Hezbollah military chief Imad Mughniyeh, in a targeted strike at Mazraat Amal in the Quneitra area in January 2015 was part of this effort. Five other Hezbollah members and a general of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards, Mohammad Allahdadi, were also killed in the strike.

Second, Israel has developed pragmatic working relations with the local rebel groups who at the moment still control the greater part of the border, such as the Fursan al-Joulan group. This cooperation focuses on treating wounded fighters and civilians, and providing humanitarian aid and financial assistance. There has also probably been assistance in the field of intelligence, though no evidence has yet emerged of direct provision of weapons or direct engagement of Israeli forces on the rebels’ behalf.

On July 9, a ceasefire agreement directly brokered by the United States and Russia for southwest Syria was announced. It posits the establishment of a de-escalation zone in Syria’s southwest, in the area of the Quneitra and Daraa provinces. The details of the de-escalation zone are still being negotiated. But Israel has been deeply concerned that it could seriously complicate the de facto Israeli safeguards in place against Iranian infiltration of the border. If the fighting ends, physical resistance to encroachment will become more complicated and sponsorship of rebels potentially no longer relevant. As of now, Russian attempts to assure Israel that the terms of the ceasefire adequately address its concerns in this regard have evidently failed to persuade. The latest media reports on the negotiations for the zone suggest that the United States has reached an agreement with Moscow that pro-Iranian militias will be kept 25 miles from the border.

But the issue goes beyond arrangements at the southwestern edge of Syria. Israel is concerned by Iran’s overarching regional ambitions. Recent comments by Nasrallah, the Hezbollah leader, that a future war with Israel might involve additional pro-Iranian militia forces to the Lebanese groups have been well noted in Jerusalem. Israeli Intelligence Minister Yisrael Katz recently told a security conference in Herzliya, as reported by Reuters, that in a future war between Israel and Hezbollah the latter may be able to make use of an Iranian naval port, bases for Iran’s air and ground forces, and “tens of thousands of Shiite militiamen being brought in from various countries.”

A recent report in the London-based Al-Quds al-Arabi described Iranian plans to thin out the Sunni Arab population between Damascus and the border with Lebanon, expelling Sunni residents and replacing them with pro-government Shiites from elsewhere in the country or outside it. Israeli strategic culture tends to emphasize addressing immediate threats, but these potential demographic developments are also being watched closely in Jerusalem.

From an Israeli point of view, we are back to the pre-2010 Middle East, when Israel and pro-western Sunni powers understood they were in a direct faceoff with the Iranians and their allies. But in 2017, there is the additional complicating factor of a direct Russian physical presence in the Levant, in alliance or at least in cooperation with Israel’s enemies.

U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration, which remains exclusively focused on the war against the Islamic State, has done little to assuage Israeli concerns. Trump and those around him, of course, share the Israeli assessment regarding the challenge of Iranian regional ambitions.

The impression, however, is that the administration may well not be sufficiently focused or concerned to actually take measures necessary to halt the Iranian advance — both military and political — in Syria, Iraq, or Lebanon.

Where does this leave Israel?

First, Israel’s diplomatic avenues to the international power brokers in Syria remain open. When it comes to Washington, Israel’s task is to locate or induce a more coherent American strategy to counter advance of the Iranians in the Levant.

Its goal when it comes to Moscow is to ensure sufficient leeway from Putin, who has no ideological animus against Israel and no special sympathy for Tehran, so that Israel can take the measures it deems necessary to halt or deter the Iranians and their proxies.

Second, Israel will continue to rely on its military defenses, which remain without peer in the region. And as shown in Masyaf, they can be employed to halt and deter provocative actions by the Iran-led bloc where necessary. Nevertheless, as seen from Jerusalem, the shifting regional tectonic plates are producing a new situation in which the Iran-led alliance is once again directly facing Israel, consequently raising the possibility of direct confrontation. Masyaf was not the first shot in the fight between Israel and its proxies in the Levant — and it is unlikely to be the last.

The U.S.-led coalition fighting Islamic State militants in Iraq and Syria said Thursday that three of the terror group’s drone experts were killed in Syria this month, like reported by voanews.com.

U.S. Army Col. Ryan Dillon, the spokesman for the counter-Islamic State coalition, said Abu Muadh al-Tunisi was killed on September 12 and Sajid Farooq Babar was killed on September 13 by coalition airstrikes near Mayadin, Syria, in the Middle Euphrates River Valley.

Speaking to reporters via videoconference from Baghdad, Dillon said the two Islamic State fighters “were responsible for manufacturing and modifying commercially produced drones.”

Separately, on September 14, two airstrikes in Syria targeted Islamic State drone developer Abu Salman near Mayadin and destroyed his research lab in Ashara, Syria.

Salman and “a terrorist associate” were killed while traveling in a vehicle from Mayadin to Ashara, according to Dillon.

“The removal of these three highly skilled ISIS officials disrupts and degrades ISIS’s ability to modify and employ drone platforms as reconnaissance and direct-fire weapons on the battlefield,” Dillon said, using an acronym for the terror group.

The Peshmerga continue to be involved in the fight against the Islamic State (IS), and they continue their coordination with the Iraqi Security Forces (ISF) in battling the terrorist organization, like reported by kurdistan24.net.

Col. Ryan Dillon, Spokesman for Operation Inherent Resolve (OIR), described to the Pentagon press corps on Thursday the ongoing engagement of Kurdish forces in the anti-IS fight despite the controversies raised by the Kurdistan independence referendum and the reaction of others, most notably Baghdad, to that vote.

“The Kurdish independence referendum occurred this week,” Dillon, speaking via teleconference, noted in his opening remarks. “While there’s been much coverage of this event, the coalition and the ISF have stayed focused on operations to defeat (IS.)”

Hawija, some 45 kilometers west of Kirkuk, is the center of the current fighting.

Dillon explained that the role the Peshmerga are playing now in Hawija is similar to the part they played in the liberation of Tal Afar a month ago.

“They did not play a role in the attacking force in Tal Afar,” he explained. “However, they did play a role—a vital role” in stopping IS members who were “attempting to flee north” from the city.

“They killed several hundred and captured several hundred [IS] fighters as a result,” Dillon said. “We see them playing a very similar part in the Hawija operation.”

Responding to a question from Kurdistan 24, Dillon affirmed that coordination between the ISF and Peshmerga continues.

“There was talk about movement of Iraqi Security Forces between the Kurdistan defensive line, so they can maneuver and get into positions to attack Hawija,” said the Baghdad-based Spokesman. “As far as I know, that coordination continues.”

He explained that the battle to liberate Hawija had gone more quickly than expected. The ISF had estimated that the first phase would take one week but was completed within 72 hours.

The issue of the referendum was a political matter, Dillon stressed, as he cited the efforts of Special Presidential Envoy for the Global Coalition to Counter ISIS, Brett McGurk, to dissuade the Kurdistan Regional Government from holding the vote—efforts which ultimately failed.

In contrast, the coalition was “focused on the military efforts” to defeat IS, Dillon said. There haven’t been “any kind of conversations” among military people, “trying to talk about the referendum,” at least as far as he knew.

The Spokesman described the effect of the referendum in terms of a diffusion of the focus on IS. Beyond that, it had had no impact on the anti-IS fight at the military level.

“Prior to the referendum, there were no questions about where the focus was,” Dillon explained. Now, however, “There is a lot of posturing and a lot of things that have been said about what could or may happen.”

On Thursday, former US Ambassador to Iraq, Ryan Crocker, who worked with Gen. David Petraeus during the US “surge” there, suggested that Washington bore some responsibility for the situation.

Crocker told CNN that he thought it had been “a mistake” for the US to have taken such a strong stand against the referendum and that the US stance “may have emboldened Baghdad to take a harsher posture” toward the referendum “than they otherwise would [have].”