LAROUCHEPAC

After being caught completely flat-footed by Russian President Putin's strategic flanking operation in Syria, announced on Sept. 30, the British Empire and President Obama have launched an ongoing string of direct military attacks and provocations against Russia which are escalating by the day.
They have done this through wholly-owned subsidiaries such as ISIS (which looks more and more like a branch of London's Dope, Inc.), the Turkish government, Saudi Arabia, etc. Consider a brief chronology:

* Oct. 31: Russia's Metrojet was blown up over the Sinai by ISIS.

* Nov. 24: Turkey downed a Russian SU-24 inside Syria, with clear Obama approval and malice aforethought. President Putin today took receipt of the plane's black box, which Russian and Syrian forces managed to recover, announcing that it would only be opened in the presence of international experts, and that it would show that the plane had been struck in Syrian air space.

* Dec. 1: U.S. Defense Secretary Ash Carter announced the deployment of additional U.S. Special Forces in Iraq, over the vocal opposition of the Iraqi government.

* Dec. 3: Turkish troops invaded northern Iraq, over the strident protests of the Iraqi government, again with clear Obama backing. This escalated on Dec. 7 with reports of additional Turkish troops entering the area, now totalling 900, according to the governor of Nineveh province, Sputnik reported. Turkey has refused to withdraw its troops; its only "concession" has been to not yet send in an additional 350 troops that are poised at the border.

* Dec. 6: The U.S. bombed a Syrian army base in Syria, killing three soldiers; and a second U.S. bombing raid killed 32 civilians. The Defense Department has denied responsibility for the attack on the army base, countering that the Russians did it.

Finian Cunningham, the anti-British Irish analyst who is regularly published in the Russian media, summarized the situation in a Dec. 7 article in RT: "Despite the absurd denials, the grim conclusion is that NATO is at war in Syria...
By extension, that means NATO has also moved to a war footing against Russia, as an ally of the Syrian government of President Bashar al-Assad." Cunningham concluded: "It looks like Washington is prepared to start a world war."

And the Russian military expert Vladimir Bogatyrev gave an interview to Radio Sputnik Dec. 7 in which he said that the Turkish move into northern Iraq is a provocation coordinated with the US government. "We have entered an entirely new phase of the fight against Daesh [ISIS]... It is definitely a Turkish provocation. And, of course, it was coordinated with the United States."

But all of these British/Obama provocations are running up against Putin's steely resolve and his ongoing flanking of the provocations. Today, Putin and his Defense Minister Shoigu announced that Russia had launched cruise missiles against ISIS from a Russian submarine in the Mediterranean. Putin added that the missiles can be armed with either a conventional or a nuclear warhead, but that he hoped that nuclear warheads "will never be needed."

ISIS Is a Narco-terrorist Army Deployed by the Queen's Dope, Inc.

Dec. 8, 2015 (EIRNS)--ISIS is functioning like any other narco- terrorist tool in the British Empire's {Dope, Inc.} armamentarium, and is increasingly involved in the multi-billion-dollar Afghan heroin trade. This reality is being insistently pointed to by Russian officials and media outlets, for the world to better understand what the war against ISIS really involves.

The Dec. 7 RT quotes from a recent study by the IHS Conflict Monitor, which reports that ISIS's control over illegal oil shipments is {not} the major source of their financing. Some 43% of ISIS's income comes from oil, the prestigious British defense and security analysis firm reports, but 50% comes from "taxation of all business activities on the territories under their control [including] trafficking of antiques and drugs." The article reports that the Russian air strikes against the ISIS oil contraband from Iraq and Syria to Turkey, has really hurt ISIS, and that "for that purpose, ISIS also intends to take under full control heroin production and trafficking in Afghanistan. The terrorists are already making $1 billion a year from Afghan heroin."

That figure of $1 billion comes from Russia's Federal Drug Control Service, which was cited in an earlier Nov. 30 RT piece on ISIS and drugs, which also quoted Russian anti-drug czar Viktor Ivanov from earlier this year: "The transit of heroin from Afghanistan through the ISIS-controlled territory is huge financial sponsorship. This problem should be raised not only in Moscow, but also in the UN in general, because this is a threat not only to our country, but also European security." The UN currently estimates the value of Afghan heroin trade at $100 billion per year--something of an underestimate, according to EIR's estimates.

The Nov. 30 RT article also quotes Tom Keatinge of RUSI (Royal United Services Institute), in London, who concurs that "the terrorists are shifting attention to drug traffic following Russian airstrikes inflicting irreparable damage to oil infrastructure... If you look at the routes that opium takes from Afghanistan, there is a lot of territory controlled by ISIS and therefore they will be making money out of it. It is not clear that they are currently able to control production, but you see more and more reports that they are active in Afghanistan."

RT concludes by quoting Vladimir Markin, the spokesman for Russia's Investigative Committee (a powerful investigative agency within the executive branch of the Russian government): "Daesh [ISIS] and Al-Nusra Front are nothing but political cronies for massive trafficking of oil, currency, weapons, items of cultural value, transplant organ harvesting and slave trade.``

Russia, Iran Sound the Alarm on ISIS Role in Afghan Heroin Trafficking

Dec. 8, 2015 (EIRNS)-There is growing evidence that ISIS is in the process of seizing control of the enormous heroin trafficking that emanates from Afghanistan. Russian officials have been sounding the alarm about that for well over a year, and today Iranian Interior Minister Abdolreza Rahmani Fazli, according to a report that appeared in the Young Journalists Club website, said that ISIS is funded to a great extent from the smuggling of illegal drugs: "We are seeing that the benefit gained from the agriculture of narcotics in Afghanistan feeds many terrorist groups. Aid going to the ISIS also comes from the benefits gained from the smuggling of narcotics. The group are themselves smugglers of narcotics."

On Sept. 20 of this year, Carol Adl of YourNewsWire.com reported that Russia's UN envoy Vitaly Churkin told a UN Security Council session that there is increasing heroin trafficking activities by the ISIS terrorists.

"There is information that a group of militants from ISIS ... already control a part of the routes of illegal drug supply from the Badakhshan Province"
in northeastern Afghanistan. At that session, Adl said, Churkin had urged the UN body to closely monitor the situation of drugs in Afghanistan, given that it is one of the main routes of drug trafficking into Europe. Badakhshan Province, she noted, "is especially strategic since it extends into Afghanistan's neighbors Pakistan, Tajikistan and the Xinjiang Province in China, which could also become a militant corridor for the ISIS group."

On Oct. 8, the Russian news agency nakanune.ru reported that Gen. Valeri Gerasimov, chief of the Russian military's General Staff, announced an estimate that Afghan heroin production will have increased 20% this year over 2014. Gerasimov also said that the General Staff estimates that two to three thousand Islamic State guerrillas are currently in Afghanistan.

Almost a year earlier, in late November 2014, Russia's Federal Drug Control Service (FDCS) Director Victor Ivanov told the annual meeting in St. Petersburg of the Counternarcotics Group of the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO), that the enormous narcotics business in Afghanistan was a global threat to security and peace, citing the fast-developing role of the Islamic State terrorists and African coastal pirates as drug-runners. He said that ISIS was then handling the logistics for half of the heroin reaching Europe via Iraq and Africa, deriving steady financing from its drug-running. "Without the elimination of large-scale Afghan drug production," Ivanov said, "there will be no settlement of the conflicts in these regions."

Ivanov has also repeatedly noted the dependence of the world financial system on laundered drug money, and has presented programmatic proposals for the rapid industrial development of Afghanistan and the region as the antidote to the drug trade.

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LAROUCHEPAC