War

B-1B Lancer bombers covering operations in Iraq and Syria against the Islamic State/ISIS are to return to the U.S. for scheduled cockpit upgrades, according to the USAF Central Command. Russia Today reports: With the B-1 taking a back seat, the campaign may lose a “little flexibility,” but the USAF has plenty of other aircraft to compensate for the deficit, Lt. Gen. Charles Q. Brown, who heads the command, told journalists from his HQ in Qatar. Brown said the bombers would return to Iraq and Syria, but didn’t provide any timetable.

The beating of a woman has led to an insurrection by Sunni tribesmen in the Iraqi city of Fallujah. Anti-ISIS fighters fought with militants after a local woman was targeted by the extremists for not wearing the right garb and showing some skin on her hands. NBC reports: “The clashes started when tens of Fallujah men stood against ISIS militants who started to beat a woman in a Fallujah market because she was not wearing gloves,” said Sabah Karhoot, the chairman of the governing council of Anbar province where the city is located.

As you might have noticed, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is about to lose his mind with the situation in Syria.

To be sure, the effort to usurp the Bashar al-Assad government wasn’t exactly going as planned in the first place. Regime change always takes time, but the conflict in Syria was dragging into its fifth year by the time the Russians got directly involved and although it did indeed look as though the SAA was on the verge of defeat, the future of the rebellion was far from certain.

In order to avoid an accidental conflict The Pentagon has revealed the location of its Special Forces in Syria to the Russian military. Sputnik reports: The disclosure was made beyond the scope of the existing memorandum of understanding (MOU) which was signed between the US and Russia in October 2015 in order to regulate safety protocols for their respective warplanes in the region. “We provided a geographical area that we asked them to stay out of it because of the risk to US forces,” Pentagon spokesman Peter Cook told journalists, according to Military Times.

The administration’s Syria policy has been a joke for years, and it’s getting even worse:

Officials with Syrian rebel battalions that receive covert backing from one arm of the U.S. government told BuzzFeed News that they recently began fighting rival rebels supported by another arm of the U.S. government.