Epstein Secrets

nterviews with Syrians I met in Jordan or who talked with me from inside Syria by phone. My Syrian contacts described a bitter stalemate: President Bashar al-Assad holds on to power, but he has lost control of major parts of the country. The rebels fight bravely, but they lack the organization and heavy weapon

al-Qaeda extremists fester in the shadows. The opposition remains so fragmented that some rebels frankly admit they aren't ready to govern, even if Assad should fall. EFTA00718098 "We still need to find a leader," conceded one rebel commander. "We are headless inside the country." Rebel fighters s

d selective violence in the proxy-proclaimed EFTA00718101 People's Republic of Donetsk, where Putin's "maskirovka" (disguised warfare) has turned Eastern Ukraine into a no-man's land where Kiev hardly dares tread. As for Obama's vaunted economic sanctions, when he finally got around to applying Round 2 on M

l settlement in Syria has vanished. The United States needs an alternate strategy for strengthening Syrian moderates who can resist both the brutal Bashar al-Assad regime and al- Qaeda extremists. A new Syrian opposition leader who may help get the balance right is Jamal Maarouf. He heads a group called the S

rategy that sounded more pragmatic than anything I've heard from the opposition in recent months. Maarouf says his forces must simultaneously fight Assad's army and the fighters from Jabhat al-Nusra and the Islami tat of Iraq and Syria, two jihadist groups with al-Qaeda roots. That's easier said tha

y encourage a new anti-Russian government in Kiev that ended up eliminating Russian as a second language and replacing pro-Russian governors in the Eastern Ukraine and Crimea? Could Obama, if less intent on dissing Putin, have engineered a compromise during that fateful weekend that would have prevented Russi

bout an Israeli raid in Syria on August 1, 2008. It revealed that in it a group of Israeli commandos killed General Suleiman, a top aide to President Assad who had been working with North Korea to build a nuclear facility in Syria. Israel had destroyed that facility in Operation Orchard nearly a year ear

eached Moscow. For example, there were indications that the NSA had lost part of its capabilities to follow Russian troop movements in the Crimea and Eastern Ukraine. U.S. intelligence officials even went so far as to suggest, according to a report in the Wall Street Journal that “ Russian planners might have gott