Bharat Rakshak

I understand the water-downed resolution suits india as we dont any sort of regime change/Sanctions etc being discussed in the UN due to Kashmir etc. I understand we have commercial links with the country. However traditionally any idea what has been India's relation vis a vis the Syrian regime or to put it in a better way what has been the syrian regime's attitude towards India ?

Its good to see China come in open and oppose the resolution without fear or favour ..... it is not easy when there is no much opposition from Western nation and Arab league for a unconstitutional regime change to stand up and speak.

Kudos to Russia and China for sticking to their grounds and taking every thing to their stride.

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Your understanding is incorrect. stop posting irrelevant points of view.

India doesn't want use of force authorization by UNSC as a cover for aggression which is outlawed by UN Charter.

Its not a case of what Syria did or will do for India.

....You'll recall that UN Security Council Resolution 1973 authorized military action in Libya to protect civilians. The resolution was directly inspired by the fear that Qaddafi loyalists laying siege to the rebel town of Benghazi were about to conduct some sort of massacre there. In response, Res. 1973 authorized member states "take all necessary measures…to protect civilians and civilian populated areas under threat of attack in the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya, including Benghazi, while excluding a foreign occupation force of any form on any part of Libyan territory." France, the United States and other foreign powers quickly went beyond this mandate, using airpower and other forms of assistance to help the rebels defeat Muammar Qaddafi's forces and oust him from power.

One can argue that this was the right course of action anyway, because getting rid of a thug like Qaddafi was worth it. That's a debate for another day, although I would note in passing that post-Qaddafi Libya remains deeply troubled and the collapse of the regime seems to be fueling conflicts elsewhere. But what if the Libyan precedent is one of the reasons why Russia and China aren't playing ball today? They supported Resolution 1973 back in 2011, and then watched NATO and a few others make a mockery of multilateralism in the quest to topple Qaddafi. The Syrian tragedy is pay-back time, and neither Beijing nor Moscow want to be party to another effort at Western-sponsored "regime change." It is hardly surprising that Russian U.N. Ambassador Vitaly Churkin condemned the failed resolution on precisely these grounds. In short, our high-handed manipulation of the SC process in the case of Libya may have made it harder to gain a consensus on Syria, which is arguably a far more important and dangerous situation. ..

This might be an inflection point. Let's see.

Syria: Special comment. Readers are rightly perplexed about conditions in Syria. Syrian press restrictions inhibit any neutral or balanced coverage. Everything reported from opposition sources and activists is biased and some reports of massacres include manufactured images, according to eyewitnesses.


International news descriptions of a worsening crisis receive no offsetting coverage of testimony
from non-Sunni and non-opposition sources that little is occurring. The massacres are not taking place, or occurring to sources that receive messages from Orthodox Christians living in Homs, for example. Life goes on in all of the towns and ports.


Skirmishes at checkpoints are the most common form of clash. That means four or five people fire a few rounds at four or five soldiers or policemen. Defectors are Sunni conscripts. The Syrian Army is about 60% conscript. Desertion is common in conscript armies. Defectors from the professional, full-time, non-conscript core of the force, most of whom are Alawites, have not been reported.


The point is that western media present one side of the struggle -- that of the exiled Sunni politicians and activists with cell phones. Clips from social networking media are heavily one-sided and some are not authentic.


Limited communications from people caught in the middle, non-Muslims, suggest there is a lot less fighting and fewer deaths. Reports of carnage and massacres of hundreds do not seem to be accurate, except in opposition propaganda media.


The truth of the security situation is difficult to deduce from open source materials. Nevertheless, Readers should know that Russia and China have first rate intelligence services. The Russians in particular have deep roots in Syria. They apparently have advised their leaders that the situation in Syria is not as described by the US at the UN, reflected in the Russian and Chinese veto of the UN resolution over the weekend.


NightWatch has seen this situation before, in Afghanistan in 1989. The Soviets withdrew the 40th Army, judging that the Najibullah government would survive. The US policy elite were convinced the pro-Soviet Afghan government would collapse in violence within months after Soviet combat forces withdrew. In fact it lasted three years.


Two important rules of intelligence analysis are never underestimate the intelligence capabilities of the opposition and always question critically the influence of bias in US information channels. The other guys always know things the US cannot know.


The situation in Syria is not yet as dramatic and dire as US nightly news reports. The end game for the Asad regime has begun, but that does not mean its end will be swift. The opposition apparently actually "controls" very little and is much less robust than the UN debate suggested. The actual security situation in Syria is unknown, based on open source reporting. What is clear, however, is that the US media presentation of the Syrian security situation is grossly distorted.


Russia-US: For the record. Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov described as "nearly hysterical" the US Ambassador's and the US Secretary of State's reactions to the Russian veto of the UN resolution on Syria. Lavrov is to visit Damascus this week.


Comment: The US closed its embassy in Damascus, but not because of security conditions or a dangerous security situation in Damascus. There have been no reports of violence there in days. Normal diplomacy and air travel continues. Even the Syrian road safety advisory network is working and reportedly told travelers over the weekend that the route to Homs was safe. And it was.


A US spokesperson said the Syrian regime is isolated, but such remarks are inane when Russia and China both back the Syrian regime. Holding more than a $ trillion in US sovereign debt, China is in no danger of isolation by anyone, especially the US.

Efraim Halevy, a former Israeli national security adviser and ambassador, was director of the Mossad from 1998 to 2002.

NEW DELHI -- Iran's envoy in New Delhi says India will make 45 percent of payments for Iranian oil in rupees as Western sanctions hinder international bank transactions.Seyed Mehdi Nabizadeh said Tuesday the central banks of the two countries also agreed Iran would use the currency to buy goods from India.An Indian external affairs ministry official in New Delhi said he was not aware of the purported agreement. The official who spoke on condition of anonymity said India was exploring all options to ensure oil supplies are not disrupted.The United States and European Union recently imposed tougher sanctions on Iran over its nuclear program. Past sanctions delayed payments as Indian oil importers have had to scramble to find banks willing to handle transactions with Iran.

- Regional situation is very serious - Code Red Alert
- Hezbollah is ready to fire missiles into Israel if Syria falls. Syria said it will transfer SCUDs to hezbollah. However even Khaled Meshaal (the nutcase) is against going to war with Israel now.
- GCC is not ruling out a pre-emptive response with air/ground strike by the Israeli's. Turkey could also conduct a pre-emptive strike in Syria

Beijing says Assad can no longer survive according to IOL.

THe PRC want an FTA with the GCC to be concluded asap, probably being offered in exchange for reducing ties with Iran.

LONDON (Dow Jones)--India has boosted its imports of Iranian oil, becoming the Islamic Republic's largest customer last month and largely offsetting a cut in Chinese purchases as sanctions fail to dent Tehran's sales for now, people within the oil industry said this week.

"India scooped much of the crude the Chinese didn't want," one person said.

Indian exporters have begun marketing potatoes, the county's second largest vegetable crop in terms of volume, in the Middle East and in South East Asia.
This is as a result of the second consecutive bumper crop of 37 million tonnes this year, reported indiatimes.com.Currently around 2 million tonnes are exported to Singapore, Pakistan and Dubai.Farmers have been seeing reduced incomes from potatoes as the large volumes have driven down prices to below the cost of production, forcing them to seek alternative markets."We are planning to sell potato seeds to Egypt and other the Middle East countries. A clear idea of the potato crop will be there by a fortnight," said Jalandhar-based Confederation of Potato Seed Farmers chief Sukhjit Bhatt.

Russia has decades-old interests in the Middle East, in Syria in particular.hint in the air of a revived Cold War.
The Syrian crisis has, in fact, been a two-stage affair from the very beginning -- internal as well as international. On the internal level, the uprising has aimed to topple the regime on the model of Tunisia, Egypt, Libya and Yemen. In this increasingly ugly struggle, both sides -- government and opposition -- have made serious mistakes. The government’s mistake was to use live fire against street protesters who were -- at first at least -- demonstrating peacefully. The crisis could perhaps have been defused with the implementation of immediate reforms. Instead, mounting casualties have created enormous bitterness among the population, reducing the chance of a negotiated settlement.The opposition’s mistake has been to resort to arms -- to become militarised -- largely in the form of the Free Syrian Army, a motley force of defectors from the armed services, as well as free-lance fighters and hard-line Islamists. It has been conducting hit-and-run attacks on regime targets and regime loyalists.No regime, whatever its political colouring, can tolerate an armed uprising without responding with full force. Indeed, the rise of an armed opposition has provided the Syrian regime with the justification it needed to seek to crush it with ever bloodier repression.
At the same time, Iran, Syria and Hizballah -- partners for the past three decades -- have managed to make a dent in Israel’s military supremacy. They have in recent years been the main obstacle to US-Israeli regional dominance.
Israel has for years demonised Iran’s nuclear programme as an ‘existential’ threat to itself and a danger to the entire world, and has repeatedly threatened to attack it. Its fevered gesticulations have pressured -- some might say blackmailed -- the United States and the European Union into imposing crippling sanctions on Iran’s oil exports and its Central Bank.he real issue, however, is one of regional dominance. Iran’s nuclear programme poses no particular danger to Israel. With its large nuclear arsenal, Israel has ample means to deter any would be aggressor. Nor would Iran willingly risk annihilation in a nuclear exchange. However, a nuclear-capable Iran -- even if it never actually built a bomb -- would limit Israel’s freedom of action, notably its freedom to strike its neighbours at will.The United States has also suffered grave setbacks in the region: its catastrophic war in Iraq; its unfinished conflict in Afghanistan; the violent hostility it has aroused in the Muslim world, particularly in Pakistan, Yemen and the Horn of Africa. It, too, is striving to retain its pre-eminence over the oil-rich Gulf States. Some Washington hawks may think that the overthrow of the Mullahs in Tehran would put the United States and its Israeli ally back on top. Because of their own apprehension of Iran, the Arab states of the Gulf have allowed themselves to be drawn into the conflict. They seem to fear that Iran may endanger the existing political order by stirring up local Shi‘a communities. With Qatar in the lead, they joined the United States and Israel in their assault against Damascus and Tehran. Perhaps belatedly aware that a regional war could be catastrophic for them, there are signs that they are having second thoughts

Jhujar, What next now that allo is exported?

Ande?

Lack of UNSCR resolution 'encouraged Syrian government to step up its war on its people', says secretary general

Julian Borger, Luke Harding, Chris McGreal in Washington, and Peter Walker
guardian.co.uk, Thursday 9 February 2012

The UN secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, says the shelling of Homs is a 'grim harbinger of worse to come' Link to this video

The UN's failure to agree a resolution on Syria is "disastrous" for the country's people, the UN secretary general, Ban Ki-moon has said as President Assad's government launched its most intense bombardment so far of rebel-held areas.

Speaking at the UN headquarters in New York, Ban said he had briefed the security council about a plan proposed by the head of the Arab League, Nabil al-Araby, for a possible joint UN-Arab League observer mission to Syria.

But as witnesses in the opposition stronghold of Homs reported an unprecedented assault involving tanks and heavy artillery, with more than 200 rockets falling in the space of three hours on the opposition-controlled suburb of Baba Amr, Ban said the situation was becoming desperate.

"For too many months we have watched this crisis deepen. We have seen escalating violence, brutal crackdowns and tremendous suffering by the Syrian people. I deeply regret that the security council has been unable to speak with one clear voice to end the bloodshed," he said in a brief statement.

The failure of a UN security council resolution calling for the departure of the president, Bashar al-Assad, which was vetoed by Russia and China, was "disastrous for the people of Syria", Ban said.

He added: "It has encouraged the Syrian government to step up its war on its own people. Thousands have been killed in cold blood, shredding President Assad's claims to speak for the Syrian people."

The situation in Homs was "unacceptable to humanity" and "a grim harbinger of worse to come", the UN chief added, warning the instability would inevitably spread around the region.

Ban said he had briefed the security council about his talks with Araby and the proposal for an observer mission, which could involve a joint official envoy.

"We stand ready to assist in any way that will contribute towards improvement on the ground and to the overall situation," he said.

The Guardian has been unable to independently verify eyewitness accounts or casualty figures from Homs, but similar reports came from rebel areas around the country as Assad, spared from the UN resolution, appeared to speed up attempts to eliminate the threat to his regime.

One activist, Raji, speaking from a basement inside Baba Amr, said Syrian forces had begun using heavier artillery rounds with devastating effect. In addition to the 27 killed, he said many people were lying dead under the rubble of their houses. There were also reports that 18 premature babies had died in hospital after power cuts caused their incubators to fail, according to the BBC. State TV denied the reports.

In the face of the increase in violence, western and Arab governments urgently sought a fresh response. The Pentagon was reported to be reviewing contingency plans for intervention in Syria, from providing humanitarian relief to direct military action. There was no sign the Obama administration was seriously contemplating military options, but the president is under increasing pressure in an election year to respond decisively to the reports of mass killing in the country.

"We are seriously dying here. It is really war," Waleed Farah told the Guardian via satellite phone from al-Khaldiyeh, another rebel-held neighbourhood in Homs.

Hopes of quickly healing the global rift caused by the weekend's security council vote came to nothing. When William Hague spoke to the Russian foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, to ask Moscow to reconsider its vote and its arms sales to Damascus, Lavrov said there was no independent confirmation of the regime's use of heavy weaponry in Homs and elsewhere and insisted that the supply of Russian arms was legal, according to British officials. After visiting Damascus on Tuesday, Lavrov called for a political dialogue and a UN resolution backing the deployment of more observers in Syria, but the opposition Syrian National Council has rejected Moscow as a broker and is insisting Assad step down in line with an Arab League peace plan.

Vladimir Putin, the Russian prime minister, said: "We of course condemn all violence regardless of its source, but one cannot act like an elephant in a china shop. Help them, advise them – limit, for instance, their ability to use weapons – but do not interfere under any circumstances."

China also defended its decision to veto the UN resolution and rejected Hague criticism of the vote as "extremely irresponsible" and "totally unacceptable".

With no sign of a break in the diplomatic deadlock, urgent efforts were under way aimed at building as broad an international coalition as possible to keep up the diplomatic pressure on Damascus. A "friends of Syria" conference is expected to be called in the next few days to agree joint measures, including fresh sanctions, anti-Assad resolutions at the UN general assembly, and diplomatic support for the opposition Syrian National Council with the aim ofcreating a credible alternative to the Assad regime. The next steps will be decided at meetings of the Gulf Co-operation Council on Saturday and the Arab League on Sunday. Most observers, however, believe Assad can weather such pressure as long as he can rely on backing from Moscow and Beijing.

Turkey declared it was launching its own initiative to confront what it warned was becoming a grave political and humanitarian crisis. The prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, has spoken by telephone to the Russian president, Dmitry Medvedev, and the foreign minister, Ahmet Davotuglu, flew to Washington to press for an emergency international conference. Western capitals support the Turkish initiative but argue the leading role and venue is better left to Arab states.

Turkey's ambassador to London, Ahmet Ünal Çeviköz, said Turkey would not insist on hosting a conference. He said: "The important thing is to form as wide as possible an international platform of like-minded countries to show the determination of the international community that there is no possibility of a return to the status quo ante. Assad thinks he can buy time but we have to show we have no more confidence in him."

Çeviköz said his government believed the death toll was "much more severe" than the 5,000-7,000 reported, and argued that priority should be given to ending the violence and addressing the humanitarian needs of the Syrian people.

"The people of Homs are facing not just bombardment but a blockade of the city, with a serious lack of food and medicine," the ambassador said. "There needs to be contingency planning on ways of reaching out to people and regions in Syria which are facing this crisis."

Turkey has floated the idea of a humanitarian corridor or a safe zone for displaced populations, but Çeviköz said those decisions would have to be taken at the proposed international conference.

If Russia and China continued to oppose such concerted action, he added: "They will have the responsibility of being the culprits in a humanitarian crisis."

My partner has been exporting ande for a long time. He is also doing salt and now got contracts for nellore rice.

Along with Lebanon, Syria is the only Arab country where Islam is not formally described as the state religion in the Constitution and faith is not listed in citizens’ ID cards.

However, in recent weeks, fears have begun to grow about a sectarian element to the violence. In Homs, where the population is split between Sunni and Alawi, these fears are fueled by the memory of the exodus of Iraqi Christians.

AN elite unit of Israeli commandos called the Depth Corps has been secretly created to stop Iran’s nuclear weapons programme.

Mossad hit squads have already carried out assassinations on key Iranian scientists and the Depth Corps has been sent deep inside Iran to prepare an all-out strike against its nuclear programme.

Israel fears Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad could order the facilities to be buried hundreds of feet underground out of reach of air strikes.

And a senior source in Tel Aviv warned: “We will reach the point where Iran gets delivery systems to fire weapons of mass destruction. The time to act is now.”

Five Iranian nuclear scientists have been assassinated in recent years, but Israel is now gearing up operations against Tehran which has refused to abort its nuclear programme.

Trained in SAS-style covert operations, the Depth Corps was launched just a few weeks ago.

Israel refuses to officially discuss the Corps or the assassinations. Dan Meridor, minister for Intelligence and Nuclear Affairs, told the Mirror about the killings: “Are they natural, are they unnatural? I do not know what to tell you.”

Plans for an Israeli-led assault include air strikes against up to 12 key suspected nuclear sites backed by salvos fired from Dolphin Class subs in the Gulf.

President Obama wants to try sanctions before military action, but Israel hopes America and Britain could be drawn into a conflict and there are claims that Mossad is plotting to do that.

A well-timed Israeli strike against Iran, with US and UK warships in the Gulf may mean Tehran fires upon our forces, an act of war forcing us to act.

Mostafa Ahmadi-Roshan was the latest Iranian scientist killed in a bomb blast on January 11.

The killings – many by motorbike assassins – were carried out by dissidents recruited by Mossad then smuggled into a covert desert base in Northern Iraq and trained in spy tradecraft and explosives.

Mossad agents have also launched a successful false flagging campaign to recruit Sunni Muslim dissidents to act against largely Shia Muslim Iran.

False flagging is when spies persuade recruits that they are from a different country in order to make missions appealing.

To do this they may have posed as officers from the CIA or MI6 to trick the agents into thinking they were working for America or Britain and not Israel.

Our source said: “Mossad officers are the most aggressive at false flagging since many in the Muslim world are nervous about dealing with Jewish spies.

“So spies sign up dissidents to do their dirty work for them.”

AK Antony will be in KSA on Feb 13th. Rescheduling the previous visit where he felt ill. Taliban talks will be on agenda looks like.

Defence Cooperation between India and Saudi Arabia is set to get a big boost with the Defence Minister Shri AK Antony embarking on a two- day visit to Riyadh, beginning Monday. This is going to be the first ever visit by an Indian Defence Minister to Saudi Arabia.

Shri Antony will be accompanied by a high level delegation including the Defence Secretary Shri Shashi Kant Sharma, Vice-Chief of Army Staff Lt Gen SK Singh, Deputy Chief of Naval Staff Vice Admiral Satish Soni and Air Vice Marshal MR Pawar.

In Riyadh, Shri Antony will hold discussions with his counterpart Prince Salman bin Abdul Aziz Al Saud, besides meeting other leaders.

Current defence cooperation between the two countries include training exchanges, ship visits and high level visits. The visit of Shri Antony is expected to enable both sides to engage in discussions on areas where such cooperation can be expanded to mutual benefit.

Shri Antony will also be interacting with representatives of the Indian community in Saudi Arabia.