He added, “The time for intervention has passed.”

Syria was already on edge, braced for military retaliation from the United States, when missiles struck an air base near Palmyra in the east of the province of Homs in the pre-dawn hours Monday, prompting accusations from the Syrian government that U.S. forces were responsible. After the Pentagon issued a strong denial, Russia and Syria then said it was Israel that had attacked the T-4 base.

Iran’s Fars News Agency said four Iranians were among at least 14 people reportedly killed at the base, which also houses Russians and members of the Lebanese Hezbollah militia. According to Russia’s Defense Ministry, Israel carried out the attack by launching eight guided missiles from two F-15 planes, and Syria shot down five of the missiles.

Israel did not acknowledge carrying out the strike.

In Washington, Trump said his team was still debating how to punish Damascus for the alleged use of chemical weapons in the attack Saturday on the town of Douma, the last major rebel-held urban stronghold in the suburb of Eastern Ghouta.

Videos of the incident posted online showed piles of crumpled bodies, many of them women and children crammed together in an apartment building, wide-eyed and with foam on their mouths, suggesting that a poisonous gas had killed them. The Syrian American Medical Society said it had counted 49 people killed in the attack, and the toll could rise as more bodies are identified.

Russia and Syria deny that chemical weapons were used.

U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Nikki Haley accused Russia of having hands "covered in the blood of Syrian children" at a meeting of the Security Council April 9. (Reuters)

The main rebel group in the area, Jaish al-Islam, had been holding out for a settlement that would allow it to remain and join a peace process proposed by the Russians under which rebel-held territories would eventually reconcile with the Assad government.

After the alleged chemical attack, the rebels relented, agreeing to evacuate to rebel-held areas in the north and allow the government to retake control of the enclave, residents said. The attack came as the final straw following weeks of sustained airstrikes that killed hundreds of people and injured thousands. The bombardment had kept more than 100,000 people huddled in basements and shelters, said a medical student in Douma who has worked with the opposition and spoke on the condition of anonymity for safety reasons.

“When you know there is no one to support you and when you know that the whole world is going to be silent no matter how many times you have been targeted, your choice will be to say: ‘Okay, stop the killings and I will do whatever you like,’ ” the student said. “People can no longer handle it.”

On Monday, the rebels began boarding buses for northern Syria alongside several thousand civilians who fear being detained for their opposition activities once government control returns.

The departure was broadcast by state television and trumpeted as yet another major military victory for Assad over his opponents. Eastern Ghouta was the last significant area controlled by the rebels in the vicinity of the capital, and though a government victory was a foregone conclusion after troops launched a major offensive in February, the capitulation came as yet another milestone in the Assad government’s march toward defeating its opponents.

At the same time, Trump’s declaration last week that he wants to pull U.S. troops out of northeastern Syria further undermines the impact that strikes might have on slowing the government’s progress, said Faysal Itani of the Atlantic Council in Washington.

“A president who says he wants to get the hell out of Syria is not really in a position to threaten the military progress of the regime,” he said. “If Assad has boxed us into a position where we’ve got to throw some missiles at him, it doesn’t really change the picture.”

A small attack such as the one a year ago conducted in retaliation for a sarin gas attack that killed civilians in the northern Syrian town of Khan Sheikhoun wouldn’t make a difference, he said. A larger one would run the risk of confrontation with Iran and Russia, which have both repeatedly expressed their desire to see the United States leave Syria.

The small U.S. force of about 2,000 troops deployed in northeastern Syria alongside Syria’s Kurds is particularly vulnerable to revenge attacks from Iran and Syria, Itani said. Iran also could push back against the United States in places such as Iraq, where U.S. troops are present.

Russia has warned that U.S. strikes in Syria would have “grave consequences,” according to a Foreign Ministry statement on Sunday. Given the heightened tensions between Russia and the United States on other issues, Russian President Vladimir Putin may seize on U.S. strikes as an opportunity to leverage a confrontation and force the United States to the negotiating table, said Russian analyst Vladimir Frolov.

“The Cuban missile crisis might be the template Putin is looking at right now,” he said. “Force a military showdown, then call Trump to a summit to decrease tensions.

“Russia wants the U.S. out of Syria as soon as possible, so if we have a clash and Trump retreats, Putin scores twice,” he added.

Israel, meanwhile, which has repeatedly expressed concerns about the expanding Iranian military presence in Syria as the Syrian government consolidates its control, may have seen Trump’s threats on Sunday as an opportunity, said Michael Horowitz, a senior analyst at Le Beck International, a Middle East-based geopolitical and security consultancy.

“The timing of the strike isn’t coincidental,” he said. “By striking [Assad] and his Iranian allies just a day after Trump warned them of the price they would pay . . . Israel mitigates the risk of an Iranian response,” he said. “Israel has been trying to convince Washington to adopt a more pro-active, anti-Iran strategy in Syria, and certainly sees Trump’s rhetoric in the wake of the chemical attack as an opportunity.”

Russia and Syria have consistently denied all allegations of chemical attacks during the ­seven-year-long Syrian war, and in this instance they have accused the rebels of staging a “false flag” incident Saturday to trigger U.S. intervention. As Russian troops moved into the area Monday in the wake of the evacuating fighters, Syrian doctors visited the site of the alleged chemical attack and found no evidence that poisonous gases had been used, Russia’s Defense Ministry said in a statement.

The Eastern Ghouta area has been under rebel control for the past six years and completely surrounded by the government for nearly five years, making it impossible to independently verify the accounts of a chemical attack.

The suburb, a cluster of mostly rural towns and villages that was one of the centers of the 2011 uprising against Assad, was also the site of a 2013 sarin gas attack that killed as many as 1,400 people.

Cunningham reported from Istanbul. Ruth Eglash in Jerusalem and Suzan Haidamous and Asma Ajroudi in Beirut contributed to this report.

(The Washington Post)

When I was 18, Naomi Wolf’s The Beauty Myth shaped my ideas about sex, attractiveness, and life as a woman. To summarize: It’s all controlled by men! So I was alarmed to learn that the influential feminist scholar has turned to shaping ideas about who controls the weather — specifically, by tweeting relentlessly about covert chemical spraying, unfamiliar cloud patterns, and schemes to manipulate the weather. Wolf is a cloud truther.

Cloud Trutherism (my own term for it) is one of many conspiracy theories surrounding climate change. It is not your standard climate denial, but rather a persistent belief that airplanes are the real and ignored cause of climate change. It’s worth mentioning here that the carbon impact of air travel is to blame for asignificant portion of emissions, but that’s not the Cloud Truther cause.

Adherents’ beliefs range from the somewhat benign (cloud-seeding projects are having runaway and largely ignored effects on the climate) to the extreme (the government is secretly using aircraft for geoengineering and spraying its citizens with disease-causing chemicals), but it all boils down to: It can’t just be carbon emissions and other greenhouse gases. The scientists are wrong, and, depending on what part of the internet you land upon, part of a nefarious global plot to control the climate.

You basically have two choices when it comes to a daunting problem like climate change, says Stephan Lewandowsky, a professor at the University of Bristol who studies the psychology and cognitive theory of conspiracy theories. “You can either accept the science and say, ‘we have to deal with this problem,’ and then look for the solutions least offensive to your worldview. Or you say, ‘the problem doesn’t exist!’ You deny the problem. The moment you do that, you have to figure out how to justify that to yourself.”

Conspiracy theories are security blankets. They protect those that uphold them from their own responsibility in the crisis in question — mass shooting conspiracists don’t want to confront their attachment to guns, an anti-Semitic conspiracist wants to believe she lost her job because of a Jewish world domination plot, and climate conspiracists don’t want to change their behavior.

While it’s tempting just to mock this type of thinking, climate-related conspiracy theories are actively counterproductive to climate action. “Although often parodied as inconsequential fantasies entertained by disenfranchised people on the fringes of society, conspiracy theories can influence what ordinary people intend to do in important domains,” found one study by Karen Douglas, a psychologist at the University of Kent who studies conspiracy theories.

I wanted to talk to a Cloud Truther to understand the people behind these theories — and how they might respond to the point that said theories relieve them of any responsibility to, say, limit one’s carbon emissions.

Dave Dahl is the author of one website frequently cited by Wolf, artificialclouds.com. (He’s not Dave Dahl of “Dave’s Killer Bread” fame, nor Dave Dahl, the climate-denying Minnesota meteorologist.)

Dahl, a web designer in California with an implausibly perfect radio voice, doesaccept that climate change is real. While he doesn’t align with the more extreme beliefs within cloud trutherism, he finds the explanation of how climate change creates more extreme weather events to be “too abstract.” He believes climatologists aren’t paying enough attention to the role of cloud seeding — a real practice involving spraying clouds from above with silver iodide that (usually) local governments use to stimulate rain and snow in cases of, for example, extreme drought — and the water component of aircraft emissions, which he sees as the primary causes of climate change.

Dahl describes how his time as a former navigator in the Navy involved a lot of skygazing — and noticed, he says, more and more aircraft trails across the sky. He asks me whether I’ve ever seen a blue sky “become cloudy from jets,” which I tell him I have not, but I also admit that I don’t spend significant time staring upwards. He’s observed it happening before a rainstorm in California where he lives, he says — clear evidence that the clouds are being engineered to produce rainstorms.

Which is how we get to Hurricane Harvey: Clearly a product of cloud-seeding, Dahl tells me. This is the subject of a 20-minute YouTube video by cloud-seeding enthusiast Jim Lee. The evidence? According to a county memo, Culverson County, far on the west end of Texas, engaged in cloud-seeding on August 25, the day that Hurricane Harvey made landfall in Houston. Dahl explains that the storm passed through enhanced clouds — and probably “loads more in other Western states” — on its way to Houston, which is what made it so extreme.

“But Hurricane Harvey came through the Gulf,” I said. “It didn’t pass through West Texas or any other states on its way to Houston.”

“Aha — hmm,” Dahl responded. “Well, I guess if it came that way that’s probably not the case. But I wonder if that’s true?” (It is true.) “Maybe we should look a little more closely.”

If you sincerely believed that aircraft were the single greatest threat to the state of the planet, wouldn’t you avoid flying? Dahl, for one, does not. “We’re all part of the problem. I’m not sure the answer is flying less. Maybe the answer is stop weather modification and see what happens, but that would be very difficult to do,” he said. Nor does Dahl believe that individual changes — consuming less, driving electric, eating less meat — make enough of a difference to matter.

I asked Douglas, the University of Kent professor, whether conspiracy theories about climate change will proliferate as evidence of it becomes more and more difficult to ignore.

“People will strongly hold onto their beliefs even in the face of contradictory evidence, so it’s difficult to imagine conspiracy theorizing decreasing,” Douglas wrote to me. “But I’m not sure if it would increase.”

Lewandowsky, the University of Bristol professor, says that there’s evidence of a way to “inoculate” against conspiracy theories, and that’s instilling a sense of control.

“For example, even just saying: ‘We’ve already started to tackle the problem, but we need to increase our efforts even more.’ That is a more empowering message than, ‘It’s so big, it’s horrendous, and we haven’t even started solving it.’ If I tell you that, that’s very demotivating! That’s a tough ask!

“I think if people know what to do about climate change, and they feel they can do this without hurting too much, chances are they’re less skeptical, less in denial of the problem.”

To get back to Wolf: As Sarah Ditum pointed out in The New Statesman in 2014, The Beauty Myth was actually exposing a conspiracy — the patriarchy! — but that was one turned out to be real. And it’s yielded a healthy movement of women (and some men) who work to counteract the damaging forces of sexist advertising and media.

I felt a fair amount of guilt even writing this article. Our ecosystems are certainly changing, which elicits a real, documented sense of loss. And I get the sense, poring through endless documentations of cloud-streaked sky in the chemtrail community, that the people obsessed with the patterns of clouds are mourning a change they do not control. I don’t want to ridicule anyone who fears the same things I do — that the world is changing, and I can’t control it, and it only seems to be getting worse. I do wish they were better informed, a desire that will surely bring the fires of the cloud-seeding truther community down upon the inbox.

More than anything, I hope that a young woman like a teen me, who sees Naomi Wolf as a source of truth and authority, will not find herself waist-deep in the climate conspiracy theory internet and think: “Wow, there’s really nothing I can do about this.”

(GRIST)

This story was originally published by Wired and is reproduced here as part of theClimate Desk collaboration.

Scientists, environmentalists, and anyone who lives within a hundred miles of the winding Mississippi River will tell you — have told you, repeatedly, for 150 years — that efforts to tame the river have only made it more feral. But scientists would like more than intuition, more than a history of 18th-century river level gauges and discharge stations, more than written and folkloric memory. They would like proof.

Luckily, rivers inscribe their history onto the landscape. Which is why Samuel Muñoz, a geoscientist from Northeastern University, found himself balancing on a pontoon boat with a hole in the middle, trying to jam 30 feet of aluminum irrigation pipe into the muddy bottom of a 500-year-old oxbow lake. Muñoz and his team thought that if they could just pull up good cores of that mud, the layers would be a chronology of forgotten floods — a fossil record of the river’s inconstancy made not through petrification but implication.

Basically, the Mississippi meanders. Sometimes the river curves around so tightly that it just pinches off, cutting across the peninsula and leaving the bigger curve high, if not dry. That parenthesis of water alongside the main channel is an oxbow. In a flood, water churns up chunks of sediment and spreads into the oxbow. When the flood waters recede, the layer of coarse sediment sinks to the oxbow’s bottom, where it remains.

So Muñoz’s team humped their pontoon boat all the way from Woods Hole, Massachusetts to three oxbows whose birthdates they knew — one from about 1500, one from 1722, and one from 1776 — and jammed pipe into the lakebed with a concrete mixer. “It vibrates so hard, your hands fall asleep,” Muñoz says. “And then you have 300 or 400 pounds of mud you’re trying to get back up.” But it worked.

The cores were a map of time, with today at the top and the oxbow’s birthday at the bottom. In between: A peak of the radioactive isotope cesium-137 marked 1963, when humans started testing nuclear bombs. Using technique called optically stimulated luminescence to date, roughly, when a layer was last exposed to sunlight, they spotted classic floods, like 2011, which caused $3.2 billion in damages, and 1937, which required the largest rescue deployment the U.S. Coast Guard had ever undertaken.

The important part, though, was that the characteristics of the layers for floods they had numbers on could tell them about the magnitude of floods they didn’t. They got 1851, 1543, and on and on.

Then Muñoz’s team checked their work against another record: tree rings. Inundate an oak tree for a couple weeks and that year’s growth ring will show damage at the cellular level. So they took core samples from trees, living and dead, in the Mississippi flood plain — the oldest going back to the late 1600s. The ring damage matched. Not exactly, maybe, but close enough. They knew they were seeing floods for which no one had numbers. Muñoz’s team had created a record of Mississippi River floods two centuries older than any other. They published that work in the journal Nature on Wednesday.

Here’s where the fun part starts. Muñoz’s team then compared those floods with meteorological data — hunting for some link between flooding and climate. They especially looked at temperature changes on the oceans — El Niño events in the Pacific and Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation. “There’s this really obvious increase in both how often the river has been flooding over the last century and how big those floods were,” Muñoz says. “The default explanation is that there’s something going on with the climate that would explain that.” There was: More El Niño meant more floods.

So climate change causes floods, right? Hah! Too easy. Muñoz’s group ran a statistical model, based on the climate over the entire period of time they now had flood records for, estimating how much more worse flooding should have gotten based on climate change alone. “It comes up with a little bit of an increase, like a 5 percent increase in how big the biggest floods should be,” Muñoz says. “But not all the increase.”

Overall flood risk has gone up 20 percent, the team says. But 75 percent of that risk comes from human engineering of the Mississippi for navigation and flood control. In other words, it’s our fault.

After a particularly devastating flood in 1927 — 637,000 people lost their homes, perhaps up to 1,000 killed, $14 billion in period-adjusted damage — human beings deployed the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to wage all-out war on nature to protect industry, farms, and trade. People tried to warn the government even as construction began on the Mississippi’s infrastructure — channelization, dredging, dams in the upper stretch, and along the middle and lower levees, concrete mats along the banks called revetments, and gates.

“All that increases the amount of water and the speed that water goes during a flood. What we’re saying is, we can’t explain the increase we’re seeing with climate alone,” Muñoz says. “But for the first time, we can go back further, to a state in which the river wasn’t dominated by human activities. We can really show that the way the river behaves today is not natural.”

Even that look at the prelapsarian Mississippi may not change much. Warnings that flood control would lead to uncontrolled floods date back to at least 1852, when a famous engineer named Charles Ellet warned in a report to Congress that the whole idea was going to lead to disaster. Yet the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ Mississippi River and Tributaries Project remains in full, multi-billion-dollar effect. (Representatives for the Corps of Engineers did not return multiple requests for comment.)

Now, Muñoz’s inferential datasets don’t convince every river researcher. Bob Criss, a hydrogeologist at Washington University at St. Louis, says he doesn’t completely buy Muñoz’s team’s particle-size correlations and tree-ring cell biology. “It’s just a bunch of voodoo and sound bites,” Criss says. “I certainly don’t object to his conclusion. But I don’t think it’s robust.”

Criss definitely does buy the idea that engineering has made flooding worse, though. He says straight-ahead numbers like stage measurement (the height of the river) are enough to tell you that. Levees upriver send more water downriver. Revetments move that water faster. What might have been slow-spreading floodwaters when they were unconstrained turn into neighborhood-destroying mini-tsunamis when they burst all at once from behind failing levees.

“That’s what Charles Ellet was saying 160 years ago. This is the problem with the Army Corps. It’s like a protection racket. They just squeeze the river, make more floods, and then say, ‘Oh, let us help you, you need more help, the floods are worse,’” Criss says.

To be fair to Muñoz’s measurements, paleoflood hydrology on the Mississippi ain’t easy. (Hence the pontoon boats.) Rivers in the American Southwest that run through bedrock and canyons, for example, leave much more evident traces — sediments and other stuff that researchers can more easily excavate. That’s how paleohydrologists like Victor Baker, at the University of Arizona, can produce a2,000 year record of Colorado River floods and a 5,000-year record of floods on river systems in Arizona. (Perhaps it will not surprise you to learn that attempts to regulate those floods has worsened them, as has climate change.)

And Baker buys what Muñoz has come up with. “Levees protect against little floods. If you have a super big flood that exceeds the capacity of the levee, the levees make that worse,” he says. There have been bigger floods than people remember — but the landscape recorded them. And if humans learn to play those recordings back, maybe we can find a new way to get ready for the waters yet to come.

(GRIST)

The international community has condemned the poison gas attack on the Damascus suburb of Douma on April 7 that killed more than 40 people.

President Donald Trump’s promise to respond with force has raised the specter of direct confrontation between Washington and Moscow, with Russia warning against any U.S. military action.

While countries and the United Nations weigh up what to do next, Newsweek looks at the key questions surrounding the conflict in Syria, now entering its eighth year.

A child is treated in a hospital in Douma, in eastern Ghouta, in Syria, after what a Syrian medical relief group claims was a suspected chemical attack, on April 7.WHITE HELMETS/HANDOUT VIA REUTERS

How Did the Conflict Begin?

When Tunisian street vendor Mohamed Bouazizi set himself alight in January 2011 to protest against harassment by local officials, he lit a powder keg that became the Arab Spring. By April that year, the uprising had reached Syria, whose 22 million people had been living for 11 years under ruler Bashar al-Assad since the death of his strongman father, Hafez.

Following the lead of peaceful protests in Tunisia and Egypt, Syrians took to the streets to challenge the country's dictatorship. Syrian government security forces responded with brutality. The Syrian Army fired on demonstrators, and government forces were deployed around the country. The security crackdown by Assad’s forces morphed into an armed rebellion that was fueled by competing interests and sucked in regional allies.

Who is Fighting Whom?

This is where it gets complicated. While conventional warfare might see two sides pitted against each other, Syria's conflict fought along ethnic and sectarian lines, helped by proxy actors with their own agendas.

Assad's regime hails from the minority Alawite sect, a branch of Shiism, and the forces of Bashar al-Assad have regional support from Shiite powers, including Iran and the Lebanese militant group, Hezbollah.

The Syrian opposition includes the Free Syrian Army (FSA), backed by the United States. But also Tahrir al-Sham, formed from the remnants of the Nusra Front, which is an offshoot of al-Qaeda, another Islamist group. Until last year, one of the main military actors in Syria was the Islamic State militant group (ISIS), which was driven out of Raqqa in 2017 but still retains a presence in Syria.

Also thrown into the mix is Ahrar al-Sham, made up of militants who want to see the end of Assad but want a hardline Islamic government to replace him. They fight Assad’s forces and ISIS, which is useful for the FSA, but they also fight Tahrir al-Sham.

Didn’t Syria Give Up Its Chemical Weapons?

The poison gas attack last week cast people’s minds back to August 2013 when the nerve agent sarin was used in an attack in Ghouta near Damascus.

It was the deadliest use of chemical weapons since the Iran-Iraq war, and so the Obama administration agreed with Russia that Assad’s arms be removed peacefully.

In January 2016, the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) announced the destruction of all of Syria’s chemical weapons.

But those words have come back to haunt the organization and the international community, with the Center for Arms Control and Nonproliferation saying it was likely that the Syrian regime either lied about their chemical weapons or created new stockpiles.

Why Is Russia Being Blamed?

Russia has had strong ties with Syria going back to the Soviet era. Moscow supported Syrian independence in 1946 and established a naval base in Tartus, Syria, in 1971. Russia also has considerable investment with Damascus, with plans to build grain mills, pump gas and explore for oil.

The overthrow of Russia’s ally Libyan leader Muammar el-Qaddafi in 2011 was an affront to Moscow, which saw it as violating international law and requiring the Kremlin to seek other means to maintain its influence in the Middle East.

Putin said in January that Russian forces used 215 new types of advanced weapons systems in Syria, which included long-range air and sea-based systems like the Kalibr missile and X-101 missiles.

With little doubt that Assad would not have been able to stay in power without Moscow’s help, U.S. ambassador to the U.N. Nikki Haley said that after the most recent chemical attack, Russia’s hands “are covered in the blood of Syrian children.”

How Will Donald Trump Respond?

The U.S. president is nothing if not impulsive, and reports suggest his visceral response to images of gasping children was similar to the one that followed the chemical attack in April 2017. That incident prompted him to order 59 Tomahawk cruise missiles to be fire at Al Shayrat airfield, in western Syria.

This time around, Trump seems prime to respond with force, saying, “We cannot allow atrocities like that,” adding that “nothing’s off the table.”

Haley has said that there is liaison with French president Emmanuel Macron about what to do next, which brings us to the final question....

How Will the Rest of the International Community Respond?

The moral equation for countries of how to punish those responsible for a chemical weapons attack includes ensuring maintaining leverage with Washington and influence in the region.

The Times reported British government concerns that the U.K. could be sidelined and lose influence in Washington to France if it did not join Trump in a retaliatory strike against Damascus. Britain is said to be preparing Tomahawk missiles while the French president is “egging on” Trump to act against Assad.

Options for the U.K. could include a Royal Navy attack submarine armed with Tomahawk cruise missiles or Royal Air Force fast jets that can fire Storm Shadow cruise missiles.

However British prime minister Theresa May said there needed to be more evidence that Damascus was responsible and the U.K. will want to be seen to uphold international law.

And ties between the West and Russia, already at a historic low after the diplomatic fallout from the Sergei Skripal spy poisoning, could slump even further, after Russian U.N. ambassador Vassily Nebenzia said the incident in Douma was staged and that any military action in response could have "grave repercussions."


(newsweek)

April 10, 2018 at 10:14 am
Written by Tyler Durden

(ZHE) — The Harry S. Truman Carrier Strike Group (HSTCSG) is being deployed to the Mediterranean Wednesday, where it will join the USS Donald Cook off Syrian territorial waters.

The aircraft carrier will be accompanied by guided-missile destroyers USS Arleigh Burke (DDG 51), USS Bulkeley (DDG 84), USS Forrest Sherman (DDG 98) and USS Farragut (DDG 99), as well as the guided-missile cruiser USS Normandy (CG 60). The Destroyers USS The Sullivans (DDG 68) and USS Jason Dunham (DDG 109) will join the HSTCSG later, according to a statement by the US Navy.

The Sachssen-class German frigate FGS Hessen (F 221) will also operate as part of the strike group during the first half of the deployment.

Charles Lister

✔@Charles_Lister

In addition to USS Donald Cook, the U.S has now dispatched USN Carrier Strike Group 8 to the Mediterranean/#Syria:

- USS Harry Truman aircraft carrier
- Carrier Air Wing VII
- USS Hué City missile cruiser
- x6 Arleigh Burke-class Destroyers
- x1 Oliver Hazard Perry-class frigate

9:56 AM - Apr 10, 2018

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It is worth noting that it will take approximately 6-7 days for the group to cross the Atlantic at 30 knots, plus another 3-4 three days once it arrives in the Mediterranean, to reach Syria, suggesting a full-blown on attack may not take place until after April 22 or so.

The strike group, carrying 6,500 sailors and Carrier Air Wing One, will cruise alongside the German frigate FGS Hessen during the first half of the deployment. The German ship conducted a brief mission with the Harry S. Truman in 2010, the Navy said according to Stripes.com

This will be the first extended deployment for the Harry S. Truman since wrapping a 10-month maintenance period last July. The mission will include “maritime security operations and theater security cooperation efforts alongside allies and partners,” and they will “provide crisis response capability and increase theater security cooperation and forward naval presence” in the Middle East and Europe, according to the statement.

The Harry S. Truman will replace the USS Theodore Roosevelt strike group, which wrapped up its four-month deployment to the Middle East last month, and is operating in the Western Pacific.

The Harry S. Truman, which is assigned to the Navy’s Fleet Forces Command, last traveled to the Middle East in 2015 to join the anti-Islamic State mission Operation Inherent Resolve before returning home in 2016. –Stripes

Yesterday, guided missile destroyer USS Donald Cook armed with 60 Tomahawk cruise missiles anchored off of Syrian territorial waters, and has reportedly been “harassed” by low-flying Russian warplanes, which have buzzed the “Arleigh Burke” class warship at least four times according to CNN Turk.

It is claimed that the US Donald Cook-named destroyer left Cyprus ‘s Larnaca port and landed near Syrian territorial waters. It was claimed that the missile destroyer named “Arleigh Burke” class Donald Cook (DDG-75) reached Tallus 100 kilometers and had 60 Tomahawk fuses on board. –CNN Turk (translated)

A Navy source confirmed the deployment, saying that the guided-missile-destroyer had just completed a port call in Cyprus, while the Pentagon reportedly draws up plans for how to deal with the situation.

By Tyler Durden / Republished with permission / Zero Hedge