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World War 3

Pesqueeb

bicycle in airplane hangar
Feb 2, 2007
40,145
16,539
Riding the baggage carousel.
Is this where it starts? :tinfoil:

Turkey's parliament has authorised troops to launch cross-border action against Syria, following Syria's deadly shelling of a Turkish town.

The bill, passed by 320 to 129, also permits strikes against Syrian targets.

But Deputy Prime Minister Besir Atalay insisted this was a deterrent and not a mandate for war.

Turkey has been firing at targets inside Syria since Wednesday's shelling of the town of Akcakale, which killed two women and three children.

Ankara's military response marks the first time it has fired into Syria during the 18-month-long unrest there.

Several Syrian troops were killed by Turkish fire, a UK-based Syrian activist group said. Damascus has not confirmed any casualties.

Apology
The Turkish parliament passed the bill in a closed-doors emergency session.
It permits military action, if required by the government, for the period of one year.

However, Mr Atalay insisted the priority was to act in co-ordination with international bodies.

He told Turkish television: "This mandate is not a war mandate but it is in our hands to be used when need be in order to protect Turkey's own interests."

He said Syria had accepted responsibility for the deaths.

"The Syrian side has admitted what it did and apologised," Mr Atalay said.

Zeliha Timucin, her three daughters and her sister died in Akcakale when a shell fell in their courtyard as they prepared the evening meal.

They were buried in a local cemetery on Thursday.

Turkey had called for the UN Security Council to meet and take "necessary action" to stop Syrian "aggression".

However, Mr Atalay said that UN and Syrian representatives had spoken on Wednesday evening.

He said: "Syria... said nothing like this will happen again. That's good. The UN mediated and spoke to Syria."

The UN Security Council drafted a resolution on Thursday condemning the Syrian shelling "in the strongest terms", calling it a "violation of international law".

However, Russia, Syria's main ally, has blocked the text and instead proposed one that does not refer to international law, and which calls on all parties to "exercise restraint".
Nato has held an urgent meeting to support Turkey, demanding "the immediate cessation of such aggressive acts against an ally".

The US, the UK, France and the European Union have already condemned Syria's actions.

The BBC's Jim Muir in Beirut says neither Turkey nor Syria wants this to develop into a war. He says there is no appetite in Nato or the West for military conflict and that it is noticeable how conciliatory Syria has been since the news of the shelling broke.

Many social media users in Turkey have been reacting strongly against the possibility of war with Syria.

Hashtags such as #notowar drew a lot of attention.

One user, coymak, tweeted: "There is no victory in war, only victory is the happiness in the eye of the children when it is ended!"

There were many tweets referring to the call for an anti-war rally in central Istanbul on Thursday evening.

In Syria itself as many as 21 members of Syria's elite Republican Guards have been killed in an explosion and firefight in the Qudsaya district of Damascus, the UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR) told the BBC.

The SOHR is one of the most prominent organisations documenting and reporting incidents and casualties in the Syrian conflict. The group says its reports are impartial, though its information cannot be independently verified.
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-19830928
 

DaveW

Space Monkey
Jul 2, 2001
11,162
2,686
The bunker at parliament
Given the rebellion, I'd say Syria is also finding that smaller people also hit back.
But I don't think that government is really all that great at learning anything at all.
 

Pesqueeb

bicycle in airplane hangar
Feb 2, 2007
40,145
16,539
Riding the baggage carousel.
Getting worse.
We are standing on a roof, leaning back against the wall because of the snipers. We're right at the Syrian-Lebanese border, looking into the Syrian town of Jusiyah, standing with a rebel fighter who has his walkie-talkie going.

The rebel is part of a group fighting against the Syrian regime's army. The rebels have controlled a route into and out of Jusiyah for nearly a year.

It's a tiny village, but extremely important. To hold this little village is to hold the gateway so fighters can bring weapons, fighters, food and aid into Syria, and take refugees and injured fighters out of Syria.

The Syrian regime is trying to take Jusiyah. In the 10 minutes we stood on that roof, we saw at least 10 mortar rounds hit the village, if not more.

If the Syrian rebels had their way, they would hold on to Jusiyah and use it to create a kind of safe zone at the Lebanese-Syrian border, much like they have on the Turkish-Syrian border where fighters can easily move back and forth into the country and refugees find a haven in neat tent cities. Much of that is because the Turkish government, once an ally of Syrian President Bashar Assad, is now staunchly against his regime.

But this is Lebanon — and not just any part of Lebanon. It's a part of Lebanon that's mostly controlled by the militant group Hezbollah, which backs the government of Syrian President Bashar Assad.

For months, Syrian rebels have accused Hezbollah of sending fighters into Lebanon, but they had no real evidence this was happening. That evidence seemed to appear earlier this month, when Syrian rebels claimed they killed a Hezbollah leader inside Syria.

One rebel fighter, who goes by the name Abu Ahmed, says the killing was actually a mistake. He says the real target was a Syrian security officer who ran a detention center located in a school. Rebels say those who opposed the government were detained and tortured.

Abu Ahmed says the rebels laid a homemade bomb on the road, in hopes of hitting the Syrian security officer's car. Instead, they hit what they now believe was the Hezbollah leader's car.

Hezbollah itself acknowledged the leader's death but denied he was in Syria.

Imad Salamey, a political science professor at the Lebanese American University who studies Hezbollah, says there's a misperception in the region about the role the Shiite militant group is playing in Syria. He says that while many believe the group is engaged in a broad battle to help the Syrian army maintain control of the country, "I believe that Hezbollah selects its targets and selects its battles, inside or on the border area with Syria."

He says that includes making sure villages like Jusiyah do not fall into Syrian rebel hands, and that major swaths of Lebanon do not become a safe haven for rebels or their supporters. The problem, Salamey says, is it doesn't take much for limited engagement in a conflict to spin out of control and become something bigger.

But for now, Hezbollah's plan seems to be working. When we called the Syrian rebels fighting for Jusiyah late Thursday, they told us Syrian regime — with Hezbollah's help — had regained control of the village.

http://www.npr.org/2012/10/19/163206679/in-syrian-conflict-hezbollah-rears-its-head
Up to 28,000 Syrians have disappeared over the past 19 months, with civilians snatched from the streets or forcibly abducted by government troops or security forces, human rights groups say.

Relatives had been unable to discover the fate of their loved ones. Many of those abducted were almost certainly dead, while others were alive and being held in Syrian prisons or secret detention centres where they were tortured, the groups claimed.

Since the uprising against President Bashar al-Assad began in March 2011, government forces had "disappeared" peaceful protesters on an unprecedented scale, the groups said. Some campaigners have estimated the number of those who have vanished could be as high as 80,000.

A harrowing film released on Thursday by the global campaign network Avaaz shows disturbing footage of forced disappearances. In one incident, three soldiers grab two women dressed in black abayas walking down a street. They hit them and drag them away. In another, soldiers abduct a Syrian man, yanking him by the hair past a tank.

Alice Jay, Avaaz's campaign director, said: "Syrians are being plucked off the street by Syrian security forces and paramilitaries and being 'disappeared' into torture cells. Whether it is women buying groceries or farmers going for fuel, nobody is safe.

"This is a deliberate strategy to terrorise families and communities – the panic of not knowing whether your husband or child is alive breeds such fear that it silences dissent. The fate of each and every one of these people must be investigated and the perpetrators punished."

Victims were not members of the rebel Free Syrian Army (FSA), which is fighting government forces on numerous fronts. Instead, they were civilians or peaceful protesters whom the authorities suspected of sympathising with the opposition. Some were abducted from their homes after midnight, others seized at military checkpoints. None were seen again.

Fadel Abdulghani, of the Syrian Network for Human Rights which has been monitoring the death toll in Syria since the protests began, said the group had collected 18,000 names of people who had disappeared. It had information but no names for 10,000 more cases, as the families had been too afraid to share them, it said.

Muhammad Khalil, a human rights lawyer from the city of Hasaka in north-eastern Syria, said: "While there is no precise figure, thousands of people have disappeared since March last year. The regime is doing this for two reasons: to directly get rid of the rebels and activists, and to intimidate the society so that it won't oppose the regime."

Avaaz said it had spoken to numerous friends and relatives of people who had been forcibly disappeared. It said it would hand over these cases to the UN human rights council, which investigates such abuses. Forced disappearances are a crime against humanity and can be tried in the international criminal court.

Many people talk about the uncertainty of not knowing their relatives' fate. Mais, whose husband Anas was forcibly disappeared in Talkalakh in February this year, said: "The children need a father in their lives. It has been difficult to adapt. I have had a very hard time explaining his absence. They always ask me: 'Where is Dad? Who took him?' And I don't know how to respond. I have to lie to them. I tell them he is at work, that he is OK."

Others describe how their loved ones went missing. Ahmad Ghassan Ibrahim, 26, from the village of Qala'at al-Hosn, near Homs, vanished on 27 February. His mother, Fayzeh al-Masri, said: "My son drove his car from Qala'at al-Hosn to the city of Talkalakh. It was then when we lost contact with him. He called his aunt at 10.30pm from a number other than his …We later found out that the number Ahmad called us from belongs to the military security branch in Homs. We asked almost every security branch about him, to no avail.

"A month and a half ago we called his cellphone and someone answered, saying that Ahmad was killed by a regime sniper and buried in Rastan, but we were not able to confirm this information. We have been seriously concerned for six months. We are certain that he would not have left us or his wife, who is expecting twins. We only want to know his fate."

The tactic of forced disappearances is not new. Assad's father, Hafez, carried out a bloody crackdown between 1979 and 1982 – about 7,000 of those victims are still missing. During the "dirty war" in Argentina from 1977-83, it is estimated that as many as 30,000 people disappeared under the ruling military junta. Throughout the Algerian civil war from 1992-97, it is claimed as many as 17,000 people were forcibly disappeared.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/oct/18/28000-syrians-disappeared-uprising
 

Andyman_1970

Turbo Monkey
Apr 4, 2003
3,105
5
The Natural State
There was a segment on 60 minutes last week about Syria, it's very bad. Essentially since the west has "abandoned" the rebellion, they have turned to Islamic fundamentalist for help. One region in Syria is under the equivalent of "Taliban" control. 60 minutes showed captured gov't troops being executed without trial......it's brutal stuff.
 

ALEXIS_DH

Tirelessly Awesome
Jan 30, 2003
6,147
796
Lima, Peru, Peru
at least, back in the day, world wars could only be started by a handful of huge countries in the world...
now, pretty much any psycho in control, has the ability to send us back to the stone age.
 

Pesqueeb

bicycle in airplane hangar
Feb 2, 2007
40,145
16,539
Riding the baggage carousel.
Fascism is making a comeback in Europe as well.

"Personally, I'm amazed there hasn't been a revolution," said Panaghiotis Varotsos, a computer programmer.

"In Portugal they're rioting over one measure when here we've been made to accept countless cuts and tax increases. And the worst thing about being ground down is that it breeds extremism," said the silver-haired leftist. "In the case of Greece it is extremism that is going to the right because [the neo-Nazi party] Golden Dawn has managed to exploit people's despair. But it won't just stay here. It will spread, like this economic crisis, to other parts of Europe, too."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/oct/18/greece-protests-general-strike-austerity
 

bean

Turbo Monkey
Feb 16, 2004
1,335
0
Boulder
at least, back in the day, world wars could only be started by a handful of huge countries in the world...
now, pretty much any psycho in control, has the ability to send us back to the stone age.
That's not entirely true. WW1 was initiated by Austria-Hungary and Serbia.

Then the larger countries joined the fight.
 
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dante

Unabomber
Feb 13, 2004
8,807
9
looking for classic NE singletrack
at least, back in the day, world wars could only be started by a handful of huge countries in the world...
now, pretty much any psycho in control, has the ability to send us back to the stone age.
Meh, wouldn't go that far. "World Wars" of any consequence can still only be started (or elevated) by countries with the industrial capabilities and technological know-how to do so. The biggest threat would be a short to medium range nuclear attack, whether it's Iran vs Israel, India vs Pakistan or North vs South Korea (or North Korea vs Japan). For a small event to truly get out of hand would require specific involvement of those major powers, something that they've been reluctant to do (see: Korea in the '50s, Vietnam in the 60s/70s, Afghanistan in the 80s). Even though Russia/China is supporting Syria, if the Western powers went on a full-scale attack as in Libya chances are Russia/China wouldn't intervene militarily. The most drastic action would probably be supplying the Syrian army, something that they did in Vietnam and we did in Afghanistan.

We're at the point where any large-scale war would be far more economically devastating (even for the winner) than maintaining the status quo.
 

rockofullr

confused
Jun 11, 2009
7,342
924
East Bay, Cali
That's not entirely true. WW1 was initiated by Austria-Hungary and Serbia.

Then the larger countries joined the fight.
This.

On 28 June 1914, Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria, heir presumptive to the Austro-Hungarian throne, and his wife, Sophie, Duchess of Hohenberg, were shot dead in Sarajevo, by Gavrilo Princip, one of a group of six Bosnian Serb assassins coordinated by Danilo Ilić. The political objective of the assassination was to break off Austria-Hungary's south-Slav provinces so they could be combined into a Greater Serbia or a Yugoslavia. The assassins' motives were consistent with the movement that later became known as Young Bosnia. Serbian military officers stood behind the attack.

......................

Assignment of responsibility for the bombing and murders of 28 June is highly controversial because the attack led to the outbreak of World War I one month later.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_of_Franz_Ferdinand

Is Syria the powder keg of our time? Methinksnot.

The economies and power structures of modern countries have become too globalized and intertwined. Something very drastic (such as dante's scenario) would need to happen to start a world wide conflict.

Honestly though the end game of WW3 would be total global annihilation by way of nuclear weapons. No one wants that so I'm not too worried.
 
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Andyman_1970

Turbo Monkey
Apr 4, 2003
3,105
5
The Natural State
This.

Is Syria the powder keg of our time? Methinksnot.

The economies and power structures of modern countries have become too globalized and intertwined. Something very drastic (such as dante's scenario) would need to happen to start a world wide conflict.

Honestly though the end game of WW3 would be total global annihilation by way of nuclear weapons. No one wants that so I'm not too worried.
Ditto this and what Dante said. IMO our biggest threat is non-state actors using some sort of (I hate this acronym) WMD, be it chemical, bio or dirty. I think the threat of some nsa making a fission device is pretty low. State actors are Iran and N Korea in that order IMO. Iran seems pretty unhinged but N. Korea seems to be Chinas biotch so I'm not worried there.......
 

Pesqueeb

bicycle in airplane hangar
Feb 2, 2007
40,145
16,539
Riding the baggage carousel.

$tinkle

Expert on blowing
Feb 12, 2003
14,591
6
speaking of dr strangelove
Hagel told the panel in his opening remarks that he is “fully committed to the President's goal of preventing Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon,” and that “all options must be on the table to achieve that goal. My policy is one of prevention, and not one of containment and the President has made clear that is the policy of our government.”
 

Pesqueeb

bicycle in airplane hangar
Feb 2, 2007
40,145
16,539
Riding the baggage carousel.
Of course they are gonna talk tough and make a fuss. But at this point what retaliation do you think they can muster?
We're talking about a guy who is slaughtering his own people. While it's true most of his army is currently involved in domestic house keeping, let's not discount the fact that Assad clearly haz teh crazy.
 

Silver

find me a tampon
Jul 20, 2002
10,840
1
Orange County, CA
We're talking about a guy who is slaughtering his own people. While it's true most of his army is currently involved in domestic house keeping, let's not discount the fact that Assad clearly haz teh crazy.
Kind of makes me wish for those halcyon days when we just used Assad to torture people for us.