By the INTERNATIONAL CRISIS GROUP Turkish officials say their fighter jets shot down a Russian warplane near the Syrian border on Tuesday 24 November after warning it ten times in the space of five minutes that it was violating Turkish airspace. Moscow said that a SU-24 was downed …

Prof Michel Chossudovsky The downing of a Russian jet fighter over Syria’s airspace was undertaken  by Turkey in consultation with Washington and Brussels. Turkey did not take this decision without getting the greenlight from the Pentagon. Is this an act of  revenge against Russia for bombing the US-sponsored …

Nikolas Gvosdev As we continue to gather more information on the shoot-down of a Russian aircraft by Turkish planes, the incident forces not only Russia and Turkey but all NATO countries (including the United States) as well as other regional players to reconsider their positions and assumptions. Over …

Robert Merry The United States suffers from a severe case of strategic confusion, manifest in the country seeing enemies where none exist and showing an inability to concentrate action where they do exist. Given the immensity of American power relative to the rest of the world, this malady …

It’s the right time for Obama to rethink the administration’s policy toward both Assad and his jihadist foes. In the wake of the ISIS terrorist attack on Paris, President Barack Obama declared that his administration has the right strategy on ISIS and will “see it through”. But the …

There are persisting reports from inside Syria pointing to differences between IRGC officers active in the civil war there and Russian Commanders. In two separate occasions, an IRGC General complained that his officers asked for Russian air forces to bomb specific sites to no vain. The whispers questioning …

Many questions are still unanswered at the time of writing this report on the potential consequences of downing the Russia jet by the Turks. The incident was doomed to happen at any time since the moment President Putin decided to go heavy handed to Syria in support of …

On November 13, 2015 a series of terrorist attacks across Paris left more than 150 people dead. The attacks included a shooting at a Cambodian restaurant in the 10th arrondissement, another shooting at the Bataclan concert hall in Paris’s 11th arrondissement, and explosions outside the Stade de France …

The pressure from Washington on Iraq’s Prime Minister Haider Al Abadi not to invite the Russians to participate in fighting ISIL may not hold for a long time. CENTCOM confirmed that Abadi did not issue an invitation to the Russians. This is indeed the case. But is it …