Syrian forces win new victories after West's failed attack

Syrian troops and allies have opened several new fronts and won a string of victories against terrorists despite Saturday's missile raid by the Western powers.

On Thursday night the Syrian Arab Army and allied Palestinian refugee militia launched an offensive against Islamic State (ISIS) and the al-Qaida affiliated Nusra Front in Yarmouk, a southern suburb of Damascus, Lebanon's Al Masdar News reported.

That was after the extremists rejected an offer of safe passage for them and their families to parts of the country still held by their fellows.

The official Syrian Arab News Agency (SANA) said only that air strikes had been launched against the two groups in al-Hajar al-Aswad, a neighbouring district to Yarmouk in the last terrorist-occupied area of the capital. But claimed video footage of the fighting emerged on social media.

Foreign-backed sectarians seized the heavily urbanised Palestinian refugee camp since soon after the attempted 2011 coup against the government of President Bashar al-Assad.

Dumayr liberated

The start of the offensive coincided with the raising of the Syrian flag over the town of Dumayr, northeast of the capital, for the first time in years. Two days earlier some 1,500 militants from the Saudi-backed Army of Islam agreed to surrender and board buses to Jarabulus on the northern border with Turkey, along with around 3,500 of their wives and children.

The same group finally gave up the northeastern Douma suburb of Damascus last week, despite claims by so-called White Helmets propaganda outfit of a chemical weapon attack there, since debunked by veteran news correspondent Robert Fisk.

Britain, France and the US responded with a barrage of 103 cruise missiles ― of which Syria's 30-year-old air defences shot down 71, according to Russia's Ministry of Defence.

Syria said Israel launched its missile raid on Dumayr air base, outside the town and firmly under government control, on Sunday and again on Tuesday, but all were shot down ― like the dozen fired at the base on Saturday.

Just north of Dumayr, the crack Tiger Forces brigade surrounded more sectarians in al-Ruhaybah on the western tip of the large, mountainous East Qalamoun pocket.

And in the Talbiseh pocket north of the central city of Homs, a ceasefire to allow surrender talks with Russian military representatives was announced on Wednesday after an army offensive there liberated a dozen settlements.

The mystery of the Guanches

The origins and language of the indigenous people of the Canary Islands remain a mystery, writes Dr Sabina Goralski Filonov Translation by James Tweedie The guanches, the aboriginals of the Canary Islands whose origin, lost in the mists of time, still arouses intense and passionate debate and great controversy about their origins and the how the seven Canary Islands were populated – which according to some studies occurred between 10,000 and 8,000 years BC. Literally, the word ‘Guan’ means man or person and ‘Chenech’ or ‘Chinet’ is applied to the island of Tenerife, thus meaning a man or inhabitant of Tenerife – although according to Núñez de la Peña, the Spanish named them the Guanchos during the conquest of the islands. But with the passage of time, experts in the subject are questioning whether the word Guanche was used to designate the primitive inhabitants of all the islands in the pre-Hispanic period. The term ‘Guanche’ has also ceased to be applied to the distin

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Sun-crossed haters endanger 220,000 lives

My stepmother Shanthie Naidoo and her sister Ramnie were on an overnight flight from Johannesburg to Heathrow for a speaking tour when Extinction Rebellion offshoot Heathrow Pause began wilfully endangering aircraft by flying drones over the airport this morning. Shanthie is an ANC struggle veteran who lived in exile in London from 1973 to 1993, apart from some time in the exile community in Mazimbu, Tanzania. She and all her immediate family were jailed by the Apartheid government for political reasons. Shanthie's late brother Indres did 10 years on Robben Island and later wrote the book 'Island in Chains'. Their grandfather Thembi Naidoo worked alongside Mohandas K Gandhi during the civil disobedience campaigns against the early form of Apartheid. Extinction Rebellion has chosen for its logo a variation on the 'sonnenkreuz', a symbol used by both proto-fascist neo-pagan organisations and modern neo-Nazis. Around 220,000 passengers fly in and out of Heathr

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