IRAQ

MoA—On Sunday March 15 at 1:50 am Netanyahoo announced that the courts would be closed for public health reasons. His trial has been moved to late May. He also ordered the internal security service to secretly track the cellphone data of those suspected of possible infections. His Health Ministry prohibited any gathering of more than 10 people and instructed the parliament to also follow that rule.

ERIC ZUESSE—The reason why “they feel they’ve been betrayed” by Trump’s bar against any Iraqi relocating to America is that many of these Iraqis had been hired by U.S. firms to do translating or other essential assistance to the invaders, and so they are themselves now hated by the locals, their own countrymen, and they think that the only safety for them and their families would be to move, along with their families, to America. They are therefore now terrified, at finding themselves stranded in Iraq, where they are very reasonably considered to be traitors.

ERIC ZUESSE—n March 7th, Al Qaeda’s now largest branch, which is its Syrian organization that used to be called Al Nusra, praised Turkey’s President Tayyip Erdogan because his Government stands up for Al Qaeda, and for other jihadist organizations which are trying to overthrow Syria’s secular Government, which is led by Bashar al-Assad. Al Qaeda in Syria now calls itself Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham, and their announcement basically reaffirms their continuing 9-year war against Syria’s Government (which war has been armed and funded mainly by the U.S. and the Saud family), and it especially damns Russia for assisting that secular Government’s efforts to destroy Al Qaeda and all other jihadist groups in Syria, which fight to eliminate all secular government and to replace it with God’s government.

It was a slap from Iran in the face of the United States, in a preliminary response to their crime. Resistance movements in the region must take additional punitive measures. The balance of losses is unknown. We are very pessimistic towards the enemy, and if they make the slightest mistake, our response will certainly not be as modest as this strike; on the contrary, our response will certainly be decisive. It was a major operation, disarming one of its largest military bases, and there obviously were some fatalities.

AARON MATE—s the Trump administration’s stated rationale for killing Qasem Soleimani and Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis collapses, journalist Gareth Porter has pieced together the overlooked background. Porter reports that the assassination was in fact the culmination of a lengthy provocation campaign involving Mike Pompeo, John Bolton, and the Israeli government, which carried out a number of under-reported bombings inside Iraq and Syria in the months prior.