Global SITREP C4-15: Are We Witnessing the Final Days of the Ba'athist al-Assad Regime, and of Syria?

UPDATE 31 May 2015: It has been about a month since the last words were added here, so an update is definitely in order for SITREP C4-15. And in this interim period the answer to the question posed in the SITREP C4-15 title appears now to be a definitive "Yes!"  

The current status has the "Islamic State" and the other rebel forces continuing to hammer away at what's left of Al-Assad's military forces and defensible territory; Russia has apparently all but abandoned its military ally in Damascus, and Iran's Lebanese Hezbollah proxy is not militarily powerful enough to halt the Sunni jihadist onslaught which is coming very close to surrounding Al-Assad's capital city. Short of Iran airlifting entire combat divisions into Damascus International Airport, there is little or nothing left to rescue the Ba'athist-Alawite regime of Bashar al-Assad.

Jeremiah 49:23-27 and Isaiah 17 do appear to be that much closer to a literal fulfillment in the very near future.

4 May 2015: There is now significant military pressure being placed upon the faltering Syrian Ba'athist regime of Bashar al-Assad and the city of Damascus by an array of Sunni Jihadist militias. This kind of military pressure evokes images from the prophetic texts of Jeremiah 49:23-27 and the more well-known Isaiah 17. Accordingly, a military disaster of epic proportions appears to be in Damascus immediate future, a future vision Spiritually inspired and described by Jeremiah and Isaiah.

A thorough review of those texts is in order. As can be seen from the above image they were written by the two prophets with the Old City in mind, the Damascus they were familiar with. However, the modern-day Damascus we are familiar with over two dozen centuries later is five to six times as large. In the next day or so this will be the focus of eschatological study that will be posted here.

Jeremiah 49:23 "Concerning Damascus. Hamath is confounded, and Arpad: for they have heard evil tidings: they are fainthearted; there is sorrow on the sea; it cannot be quiet."  

This verse identifies the current battlegrounds in Syria, from the northwestern frontier with Turkey: Tell Erfad (Arpad) to Hama (Hamath) on the Orontes River, to Damascus, 132 miles to the south. As occurred in the ancient past, these cities are to fall to an enemy originating from the region of ancient Assur (Islamic State) before Damascus falls to this enemy. The "sorrow on the sea" appears to be a direct reference to the nations of the Mediterranean Sea; i.e., the West, who act as enablers of what is occurring. 

Therefore, verse 23 sets up the complete and totlal military disaster that follows in verses 24 through 27:

"Damascus is waxed feeble, and turneth herself to flee, and fear hath seized on her: anguish and sorrows have taken her, as a woman in travail. How is the city of praise not left, the city of my joy! Therefore her young men shall fall in her streets, and all the men of war shall be cut off in that day, saith the LORD of hosts. And I will kindle a fire in the wall of Damascus, and it shall consume the palaces of Benhadad."

In the concluding verse Ben-Hadad is a direct reference to a false god, and the consuming by fire of the palaces thereof, the walls of Damascus, and all the men of war being cut off in that day, speaks to great carnage and destruction as this war reaches it decisive conclusion. 

It is the burning and consuming by fire which I interpret to be a connecting dot to the same event that is presented in Isaiah 17, the utter destruction of the immense city that is Damascus as we know it today. The scope of the burning destruction and utter ruin into the heap of rubble as foretold by Isaiah should be measured against a recent image of Damascus presented below.

In my studies I have found there is nothing in these prophecies which suggests a peaceful end to the Ba'athist regime of Bashar al-Assad, and nothing good to come of the so-called peace talks. There is also the dire aspect of Isaiah's prophecy on what the Syrian war brings upon Israel and its population. 

There is simply no getting away from and no sugar-frosting of the soon to be established prophetic fact that not only is Damascus to be utterly destroyed, but the whole of what we know today as Syria is coming to an end. And the destruction does not end there, but continues well into the "cities of Aroer," which is northwestern Jordan, and the near total depopulation of that entire region, and into Israel as well in the central region known as Ephraim. 

I think we all need to understand exactly what these prophecies are telling us about what is now in the process of becoming a reality. We, in this present generation, have not seen and therefore do not properly comprehend and therefore are likely not mentally prepared for the unrestrained use of weapons of mass destruction. 

Hiroshima, Nagasaki and the carnage of World War Two are distant memories of a generation passing quickly from the present scene. We hear news reports of chlorine gas and "barrel bombs" being used in the Syrian war, but this is virtually as distant from affecting our lives as the dust on the moon; it is a perspective of real war we simply cannot relate to, but will have to come to grips with soon enough.

Yet through it all we know our God is in control; these things must take place as our Lord Jesus Christ made clear in the Olivet Discourse, they are the birthpangs of what is to come at the appointed time.

Global SITREP C7-15: The Islamic State - A Legacy of Saddam Hussein's Iraq

'Islamic State' growing with Iraq and Syria

UPDATE 26 May 2015: It is the opinion of the author of this Eschatology Today blog that SITREP C4-15 is directly tied to this C6-15 entry. This linkage comes directly from the manner in which the "Assur" of Psalm 83:8 has been interpreted by yours truly for several years now as the 'Sunni Triangle' of northern Iraq. This region is also the home of the late Ba'athist dictator Saddam Hussein and Sunni Muslim tribal region. This is an interpretation of a single word in the text of Psalm 83:8 that few of my peers have shown any willingness to join me in giving voice to, much less to even discuss in any meaningful way. So be it that I stand alone on this interpretive issue.

Above is a map of the growing Islamic state that I compiled on 22 May from multiple data points found in several recent open source reports. As recent as this image is "Islamic State' mechanized columns have in the past 72 hours pushed 50 to 75 kilometers beyond Palmyra on the main highways leading towards Damascus. Only Hezbollah, Iranian Shi'a proxy forces and the little that is left of Bashar al-Assad's own Syrian army stand between Damascus and the 'Islamic State.' In Iraq a furious effort is underway to defend Baghdad and the Shi'a holy city of Karbala. The coming battles in Syria and Iraq will have an unprecedented impact upon Sunni and Shi'a muslims throughout the Middle East and beyond. For its part the West continues to limit itself to dropping bombs on the IS formations. 'Islamic State' is simply ignoring the fact that Iran is nearing a battlefield nuclear capability.

It also appears to have escaped any mention by government spokespersons and the media that "Islamic State' is waging a successful campaign on two major fronts simultaneously. The success stems from the fact that on neither front does 'Islamic State' face opposing 'boots on the ground" capable of halting their advance. The 'perfect storm' continues to build in the Middle East with ongoing set of "free for all" wars from Libya to Syria to Yemen.

"Islamic State" with Ramadi spoils of war

19 May 2015: Is it making sense now, based upon the information contained below, how a Sunni "jihadist" army can suddenly emerge within a year of American combat troops departure from Iraq as demanded by the American Left and ordered by President Obama within months of his inauguration? The elite of the former army of Saddam Hussein, also known as the Republican Guard, several well-organized divisions of which simply melted away off the battlefield in Iraq twelve years ago, suddenly came roaring back wearing black pajamas and kaffiyeh and driving long convoys of Toyota Hilux pickup trucks out of the Syrian and Iraqi desert to overwhelm the Shi'a dominated New Iraqi Army. This "Islamic State" army knew exactly where to strike early on in order to acquire as war booty vast numbers of American-supplied up-armored humvees, M1A1 main battle tanks, infantry fighting vehicles, towed artillery and arsenals of weaponry and ordnance of every description.

Make no mistake, this is a victorious Islamic State that Obama built, and he snatched it from the jaws of Saddam's defeat. Everything that U.S. military forces achieved in Operation Iraqi Freedom between 2003 and 2011, especially the ground-pounding U.S. Marines and Army soldiers, was lost in this weekend's fall of Ramadi and thus the whole of Anbar Province to the "Islamic State."  Yet self-important current and former U.S. Government officials are singing a completely different tune from a completely different reality. It's an insane tune that is sung to Jerry Samuels' 1966 psychotic melody of "They're Coming To Take Me Away - Ha-Haa!"  It's a tune that ignores the fact that Saddam's WMD ever existed, or that much of it went to Syria where Islamic State now also controls vast regions of territory and the military installations where it was secreted away twelve years ago. And what do I hear from my fellow Americans? Nothing but the sound of Crickets.

 

 Col. S.A. Muhammed al-Khlifawi's (a/k/a Haji Bakr) Plan for the Islamic State

13 May 2015: Formerly secret files recently accessed and revealed by Germany's Der Spiegel Online International (a must read) media organization detail the plan for, the creation of the internal political structure for the "Islamic State" designed by an intelligence (al-Mukhabarat) colonel of Saddam Hussein's Ba'athist regime in Iraq. The 31 pages of meticulously drawn up and executed plans created by Colonel Samir al-Khlifawi, also known by his Islamic nom de guerre Haji Bakr, resulted in the emergence of what the world has known for the past two years as the "Islamic State." 

The "Islamic State" is also without question the direct result of the second gravest strategic error committed by the United States twelve years ago this month (May 2003) during Operation Iraqi Freedom. This error occurred when the Coalition's political overseer in Iraq, American State Department diplomat Paul Bremer, unilaterally disbanded the Iraqi Army against the agreed policy of President George W. Bush to leave it intact. The first gravest error was a political commitment to the American political left made by Barack Hussein Obama during the 2008 presidential campaign, and which resulted in the 2010-2011 military abandonment of Iraq. Both of these contributed to the rise of the Islamic State within a year of the final withdrawal of US combat troops from Iraq.

Paul Bremer's initial action of disbanding the Iraqi Army in May 2003 resulted in instantly placing a quarter-million highly trained Iraqi officers and troops out of a job and immediately ripe for vengeance. The alleged plan for Saddam's military forces to simply melt away off the battle field in the face of overwhelming US military supremacy was a neatly contrived media fallacy. These elite Iraqi troops retired into the desert north and west of Baghdad and aligned themselves with the Al-Qaeda aligned Sunni jihadists under the leadership of Jordanian national Abu Mus'ab al-Zarqawi and his Islamic State of Iraq (ISI).
 

US and Coalition combat pressure between 2004 and 2010 sent the bulk of the ISI retreating into eastern Syria, especially a Syrian town north of Aleppo known as Tal Rifaat. During all this time, according to the intelligence documents "Haji Bakr" was running the show in deep cover in creating this jihadist "caliphate" from his headquarters in Tal Rifaat while Jordanian Abu Mus'ab al-Zarqawi (hailing from Zarqa, Jordan) was the face of the jihad in Iraq's westernmost Anbar Province and in the Sunni heartland, the so-called "Sunni triangle" north of Baghdad. "Haji Bakr" was killed in a firefight with other jihadists in January 2014.

As discussed multiple times within Eschatology Today posts, the "Sunni Triangle" is the exact same territory as ancient Assur existed upon when the singing prophet Asaph was inspired to compose the Psalm 83 prophecy. This is the the bedrock eschatological reason that I believe it is important to understand the origin, current existence and future fate of the "Islamic State" and its role in the coming final actions of the Psalm 83 War, especially with respect to the passage of Psalm 83:8. And we can see the direct connection, the Sunni Islamic tribal connection, between "Assur" and the "children of Lot" is plainly evident for all to see. It is as prophetically unambiguous as prophetically unambiguous gets in my opinion.

At the present time a rather significant situation has developed. The Iraqi-Ba'athist creation of the "Islamic State" is potentially a leaderless entity with its architect "Haji Bakr" dead, and the reported severely injured Islamic State Caliph Ibrahim (Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi) has apparently also been taken him out of the picture. Caliph Ibrahim's second-in-command, Abu Ala al-Afri, was reported by the Iraqi Defense Ministry via Iraqi state TV today (Wed, 13 May 15) to have been killed in a Coalition air strike on the city of Tal Afar. Another former senior Iraqi officer, General Izzat Ibrahim al-Douri, was also recently reported to have been killed in combat against IRGC and Shi'a militias in the Sunni Triangle.  General Al-Douri's reported death may be an Iraqi government ruse or just plain Iranian disinformation. The thing is that at this time the real leadership of Islamic State is a virtual unknown, but it would not surprise me in the least if yet another Jordanian Sunni jihadist emerged with the reigns of power over the "Islamic State."

Global SITREP C6-15: Iran Threatens War Against US, Saudi Arabia and Egypt Over Yemen

UPDATE 22 May 2015: It took over a week to resolve this situation. In the interim since the last update a lot of hand-wringing and angst were to be found in numerous media reports... both those on the political right and the left.

In the end, in case none of those websites have informed you, it was the al-Mahdi-hastening terrorist Iranian regime which not only blinked, but shut both eyes and caved in completely to the non-negotiable demand of the Saudi-Egyptian and Western (US, UK and France) coalition of tier-one naval forces enforcing the blockade of Yemeni ports.

As of this morning the Iranian's heeded the demands of the Saudi-Egyptian-Western coalition and ordered their pawn, a/k/a the Merchant Vessel Iran Shahed, to sail into port Djibouti were all of the other nations merchant vessels bringing aid to the Yemeni people are making their port calls. The Iranian Revolutionary Guard Navy (IRGCN) also stood down as instructed and thus lived to sail these waters for another day.

The bottom line is that Iran (as usual) was engaged in the highest order of bluffing and in the end put its tail between its legs, whimpered and did exactly as it was told by the emergent and dominant military alliance of the Arabs and the West. Not many will make mention about this, but what occurred this morning was one military victory over Iranian aggression that occurred without a single shot being fired. Gunboat diplomacy still works.

Hopefully PM Netanyahu was paying close attention on how to press a military advantage and make a jihadist enemy sit down, do as it is told and shut up in the face of overwhelming military power. Same goes for IS.

14 May 2015: This is an update I received from the Lord early this morning when He suddenly put the fully formed thought into my mind. Perhaps He has given the same realization to you, which is as follows: The military coalition currently fighting Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, and the military coalition fighting to stop Iran in Yemen BOTH constitute allied Arab and Western military forces operating together, and are virtually identical the what the Lord prophesied to Ezekiel as "Sheba, Dedan, the merchants of Tarshish, and all their young lions..."  Prophecy teachers! Are you teaching this?

In the Persian Gulf one or more Iranian naval vessels are reported to have fired upon a Singapore-flagged merchant vessel which escaped into UAE territorial waters this morning.

On the Saudi-Yemeni border heavy artillery barrages, both rockets and conventional shelling, are reported between Houthi and Saudi forces with damage being done to towns on both sides of the border. Saudi tanks and mechanized infantry forces have been observed in recent hours moving south towards the Yemeni border. 

13 May 2015: The cargo ship Iran Shahed (image above) is currently enroute to Yemen, ostensibly to deliver humanitarian supplies. Current GPS location data places the Iran Shahed in the northern part of the Gulf of Oman sailing southwards at 8 knots and under escort by Iranian warships. Iran has threatened unrelenting war against any nation which interferes with the Iran Shahed's mission to deliver its cargo to the Yemen's Red Sea port at Al-Hudaydah.

The US, Saudi Arabia and Egypt all have warships maintaining a blockade to ensure no war materiel is delivered to the Houthi rebels in Yemen. The situation in Yemen continues to deteriorate, with the most recent reported military action being a Houthi invasion of the southern Saudi Arabia's southern Jizan Province on Saturday. The Houthi rebels moved several miles and through several towns before defeating local Saudi defenders and seizing control of the city Ahad al-Masarihah. More than 60 Saudi soldiers were reportedly  taken as prisoners of war by the Houthi rebels. An escalation of the fighting appears to be inevitable.

Global SITREP C5-15: North Korea Testing Submarine Launched Ballistic Missile

ex-Russian Golf II-Class Submarine

6 May 2015: Historians say that Roman Emperor Nero fiddled while Rome burned.  Present day American intelligence officials are saying that U.S. President Barack Obama is fiddling around while North Korea develops nuclear missiles and the submarine platform from which to launch them in order to make America burn.

The development of this technology was reported in yesterday's edition of Israel National News (INN) under the headline, "N. Korea Submarine Missile Allows Covert Nuclear Strike on US." The source article for the INN report was one I often cite here on matters of defense, intelligence and military matters of prophetic implications: Bill Gertz writing for the Washington Free Beacon. In fact, so profound are the implications of Bill Gertz' new article, which cites on-the-record albeit anonymous confirming statements by Pentagon and US intelligence officials, that the ink was barely dry and the digits white-hot off the computer when Israeli and other conservative media published their reports.

Missile Launch Tube on a Golf-II-class Submarine

The Bill Gertz article published in the Washington Free Beacon yesterday is titled "North Korea Conducts Ejection Test of New Submarine Missile" and contains the sub-text "Third sub-launched missile test by Pyongyang since November."  Of course, it should go almost without saying that Eschatology Today readers are very aware that the North Korean and Iranian nuclear weapons and missile delivery programs are Siamese twins joined at the hip; the technology developed between them is virtually identical in every way. 

So, the bottom line here is that the North Koreans are testing what US defense officials are calling the KN-11 submarine-launched nuclear-armed ballistic missile. They have Russian-made Golf-II-class nuclear missile firing submarines like the ones seen in the images above. This is the kind of nuclear weapon system that is designed for one mission and one mission only - to stealthily position itself off the enemy's coastline (America, no doubt) and fire a salvo of nuclear missiles at its great cities, or in nuclear airbursts at the well-calculated altitude to cause continent-spanning Electro-Magnetic Pulses (EMP) to bring our electronics-laden society to a screeching halt and defenseless against other incoming nuclear warheads. 

This is not science fiction, this is what our enemy's are preparing to do to us and have been very successfully testing in perfecting their weaponry for many months and even years now. What!? You haven't you heard President Obama warn us repeatedly about this existential threat to our well-being and what he is doing as our Commander-In-Chief to defend against it? Was this subject not one of the lead stories on last night's evening news covered by the major media? Not to worry, you didn't miss a thing because both Obama and his media have been as silent about this as the great marble statue found in the center of hundreds and thousands of American town squares from sea to shining sea. Not so much as a peep.

But honorable and loyal Americans are speaking up; they are talking within the limits of their oaths to protect classified information, and while they still can talk, to diligent reporters like Bill Gertz who publish what they have to say so you and I know what's really going on in imperial Washington, D.C.

Some examples excerpted from the cited report.

"Current and former national security officials criticized the Obama administration for not doing more to counter the North Korean nuclear threat to the United States. “This missile, along with the KN-08, happened on Obama’s watch and nothing has been done,” said a U.S. intelligence official critical of the Obama administration. “By utterly ignoring North Korea’s growing missile threats, Obama has allowed the threat of rogue state proliferators to fall out of the center of the national political debate,” said John Bolton, former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. “This is a potential tragedy for the country.”

Retired Air Force Lt. Gen. Thomas McInerney said North Korea’s development of the KN-08 and the emerging SLBM present “threats to the continental United States and have been developed under the Obama administration’s leadership.” “Leading from behind is a failed strategy as evidenced by this very dangerous strategic threat to the continental United States of nuclear attack by a very unstable North Korean government,” he said.

Allowing Iran to become a nuclear weapons power in 15 years under the Obama’s administration’s propose Iran nuclear deal “puts the United States in the most dangerous threat of nuclear attack since the height of the Cold War but from multiple threats—North Korea, China, Russia, and Iran,” McInerney said."

We now know the truth is that North Korea currently has an arsenal of 20 nuclear warheads. They have an ongoing and increasing enrichment technology that will provide them with another 20 warheads by next year. This is an existent North Korean nuclear arsenal that was supposed to have been prevented from existing by what diplomatic vehicles?  So-called "crippling economic sanctions" and multi-lateral negotiations, the so-called "Six-Party talks," between North Korea, China, Russia, the United States, South Korea and Japan, and with United Nations Security Council and IAEA over-watch, which lasted for four years, form 2003 to 2007. The years of negotiations were a complete and total failure, a charade of the highest order because North Korea detonated is first nuclear warhead in 2009. That was just six year ago, and Obama is doing the exact same thing with Iran today.

Does anyone think we need a modern-day prophet to tell us what is going to happen next? Is recent history our teacher? How about Jeremiah? Any questions?  And, yes, as always, our God is in control.

Global SITREP B9-15:Israel's Final Call

Update 1 May 2015:  When someone speaks the truth, it should be acknowledged. This is what VP Joe Biden did when he tactfully spoke the truth about PM Netanyahu's comment that the P5+1 framework would "pave Iran's way to the bomb."  Iran does not need to P5+1 to pave its way to a nuclear weapon; it has done that over the course of more than decade of indigenous technological development and assistance from other state and non-state proliferates of nuclear-related technologies. Bibi's statement was pure political theater in my opinion, too little and too late by at least a decade.

There is truth in one other thing VP Biden had to say last night at the annual dinner of the Washington Institute of Near East Policy. That truth is that Iran is just days away from construction of at least 8 nuclear weapons. That means Iran, given its Shi'a Twelver-driven agenda, does not need a final P5+1 final agreement to achieve its objective; that whole negotiation strategy was just a delaying tactic, a deliberate ruse, to keep Israel and the US from interfering by military means against its quest to manufacture weapons in its own nuclear laboratories. It has worked flawlessly as we can now all see.

So, with the P5+1 framework and June final agreement deadline having no real meaning for apocalyptic Iran, Israel's final warning has to translate into Israel's urgent action - unless it is also willing to accept a nuclear-armed Iran as the Obama Administration has clearly accepted it.

17 April 2015:  We should have seen this coming, and subconsciously I think we all did expect it to happen. Barack Hussein Obama is now saying he accepts the Senate Foreign Relations Committee vote as only regarding sanctions on Iran, but not having any effect on the P5+1 negotiation agreement itself.  So, the unconstitutional usurpation of power by this administration will continue until it is forced to leave office in January 2017 or the Congress grows a backbone and defends those powers our founding fathers saw fit to delegate to it. 

Imagine, a front-burner Constitutional crisis being deliberately created at this time with all the other emergent threats rising precipitously around the world.

15 April 2015: The Senate Foreign Relations Committee voted unanimously, 19 to 0, to approve Congressional oversight of the Obama Administration's efforts in the P5+1 Iran nuclear negotiations. The full Senate vote will be near unanimous. For once Obama caved-in to the good guys, and as a result Israeli PM Netanyahu won a political victory here in the US due to his speech before Congress in early March. 

Obama caved and will sign the Congressional oversight bill because his threatened veto against it would have been immediately shot down in flames by a near unanimous full Congressional vote to override. The 'lame duck' and roll-back season of the sun-setting Obama presidency has effectively just begun. 

However, this may all be just so much window dressing due to the impossibility of Barack Hussein Obama getting the Iranian Twelver Ayatollah to agree in a written and signed final agreement to allow unrestrained inspections of its nuclear sites under IRGC military control. That is the major show stopper in the final push of the P5+1 between now and June to ink a deal. This will also buy Israel a couple of extra weeks in holding off on a strike until the talks have fully collapsed over this issue.

7 April 2015: It would seem, if the current reading of the OSINT tea leaves floating out of Jerusalem is correct, that PM Netanyahu may have offered President Obama a willingness for Israel to accept the interim JCPOA in exchange for a legally binding Iranian pledge to accept Israel's right to exist. Not only did Iran immediately reject the Israeli offer, but so did President Obama reject it out of hand.

With that water now long gone from under the bridge of no return, the next and likely final benchmark will come a week from today when the Senate Foreign relations Committee will vote on whether the final P5+1 agreement with Iran due in mid-June must be confirmed by a vote of the U.S. Congress. Given the very recent admissions by both Obama and the Iranians that the P5+1 final agreement will result in Iranian possession of nuclear weapons a Congressional approval would appear to be dead on arrival, or made a moot point by an Israeli military preemption.

Both the U.S. Congress and the Israeli government could be declared certifiably suicidal to accept any agreement which grants the apocalyptic Twelvers of Iran possession of a nuclear weapon. Therefore, it would seem that Obama's attempt, despite all of his campaign pledges to the contrary, to kick the Iranian nuclear can down the road for another U.S. President and Prime Minister of Israel to deal with, is easily forecast as a world-class whiff.

3 April 2015: At this time it might be useful to review the history of the Iranian nuclear issue from 2003 to the present. 

In May 2003 the US was flush with having just vanquished the murderous Ba'athist regime of Saddam Hussein. It was in this same month that Iran, fully surrounded by US and NATO combat forces on its eastern and western borders and maintaining unprecedented and absolute military control of the Persian Gulf to Iran's south and the whole of the Middle East, began to send feelers out to the US about negotiations over its nuclear program. It was a ruse then just as it is a ruse now. President George W. Bush saw the ruse for what it was and rejected Iranian overtures because none of them addressed the issue of Iran's drive to obtain nuclear weaponry. 

The EU3 (France, the UK and Germany) began making their own proposals in 2004-05, and they were joined by the US, Russia and China in 2005 to create the P5+1 group that we have today. The UN Security Council (the IAEA) was also involved with Iran separately on nuclear issues, but also in concert with the P5+1 regarding sanctions and the demand which has never been met that Iran halt uranium enrichment and the reprocessing of spent fuel. 

In May of this year a full ten years of UN and P5+1 negotiations have yielded nothing in the way of an agreement by Iran to halt its drive for nuclear weaponry - the one thing the Shi'a Twelver regime in Tehran knows it needs to attack Israel and to create the chaos necessary to hasten an apocalypse for the sake of their nonexistent al-Mahdi figure. This has occurred despite severe economic sanctions and a total of six UN Security Council Resolutions.

What these past ten years have produced is a virtual library's worth of meaningless proposals and counter-proposals, all the while when Iranian nuclear weapons infrastructure continued to grow, and expand and, intermittently, some previously hidden and undeclared nuclear sites became exposed by Iranian opposition groups while negotiations continued, as did Western and Israeli covert actions such as Stuxnet, sabotage and assassinations of key Iranian nuclear scientists in order to harass Iran's progress towards an indigenous nuclear weapon. It is a war that will lead to bigger wars, and rumors of wars.

And we now know that Iran had a three-rail track to nuclear capability: it's indigenous overt nuclear sites, its indigenous covert nuclear sites and its covert sites in North Korea which have produced one or more working nuclear weapon designs which have been tested three times: October 2006, May 2009 and most recently in February 2013. And in all of this the issue of Iranian medium, intermediate and intercontinental ballistic advancement has never been addressed in parallel with the nuclear weapons issue.

And that brings me back to Jeremiah 49:34-39. Iran already has the arrows upon which to place their arrowheads, but it is the bow which fires the arrow that is the initial and critical subject matter of Jeremiah's five verse prophecy. I don't know with any specificity how it will happen, but God is going to break Iran's bow before it can fire an arrow. I believe that appointed time is upon us. That's all there is to it. 

And then, as a result a likely rapid-fire sequence of of other prophetic events will follow in Lebanon, Syria and Israel, and ultimately Psalm 83 and its parallel prophecies. This we know as the "flood" of prophetic fulfillment. Let us meet these events head-on in prayer to our Lord.


2 April 2015: The global corporate media has been awash today with beaming headlines and hundreds of words of text about what came out of Lausanne, Switzerland in the P5+1 negotiation with the Islamic Republic of Iran. What came out of the negotiations is known by the acronym JCPOA (Joint Comprehensive Plan Of Action). 

Yet in all of the hundreds of words of corporate media text applied to this so-called "framework" agreement, which is to pave the way to a final agreement in June we are assured, there is not one sentence pointing out a single article of negotiated agreement between the P5+1 and Iran. That means the key points within this "framework" are made of nothing more substantial than what any good diplomat would describe as a pasture fresh cow-pie, and that I will describe as a catalyst for biblical prophetic fulfillment.

However, there is one statement within the JCPOA which is quite revealing and might be cause for a show-stopper military preemption. That statement acknowledges that as of today Iran's timeline to breakout with enough fissile HEU for the production of their first home-made nuclear weapon is 2 to 3 months. Therefore, Iran could construct its first home-made nuclear weapon before the claimed final agreement is achieved in June. I have little doubt that Israel has been fully aware of this now publicly revealed fact for some time.


1 April 2015: Here below is the text of what I believe is PM Bibi Netanyahu's final call to the international community regarding the Iranian nuclear program. This call was an official statement made inside the Prime Minister's Office.

"Yesterday an Iranian general brazenly declared and I quote: ‘Israel’s destruction is non-negotiable’, but evidently giving Iran’s murderous regime a clear path to the bomb is negotiable. This is unconscionable. I agree with those who have said that Iran’s claim that its nuclear program is only for peaceful purposes doesn’t square with Iran’s insistence on keeping underground nuclear facilities, advanced centrifuges and a heavy water reactor. Nor does it square with Iran’s insistence on developing ICBMs and its refusal to come clean with the IAEA on its past weaponization efforts. At the same time, Iran is accelerating its campaign of terror, subjugation and conquest throughout the region, most recently in Yemen.

The concessions offered to Iran in Lausanne would ensure a bad deal that would endanger Israel, the Middle East and the peace of the world. Now is the time for the international community to insist on a better deal. A better deal would significantly roll back Iran’s nuclear infrastructure. A better deal would link the eventual lifting of the restrictions on Iran’s nuclear program to a change in Iran’s behavior. Iran must stop its aggression in the region, stop its terrorism throughout the world and stop its threats to annihilate Israel. That should be non-negotiable and that’s the deal that the world powers must insist upon. Thank you."

Now we will all wait for what I believe will be a relatively brief interval of time for the international community to act. Failing that, I believe the military option will be the next order of business because Israel's continued existence is non-negotiable.

Iran Hijacks by Armed Force Merchant Vessel Maersk Tigris

UPDATE 1 May 2015: U.S. National Military Command Authority has directed that all United States-flagged ships passing through the Strait of Hormuz will be escorted by elements of the U.S. 5th Fleet. This directive is immediate and of indefinite duration.  As of 06:30 Zulu (GMT) this morning the Maersk Tigris remains at anchor in the same position indicated on the map above. It's unlawful seizure on the high seas indicates an inherent weakness within the Iranian regime. 72 hours after the seizure of Maersk Tigris and the view appears to be that Iran has both overreached its military capabilities and bitten off more than it can chew. As a result Iran is strategically and literally situated between Iraq and a hard place.  It can either opt for open hostilities or remain pinned in its corner.

29 April 2015: I have created the above map from maritime tracking data which was current as of 5 hours ago (2:45 PM EDT). This track shows the Maersk Tigris was just emerging from the inbound shipping channel of the Strait of Hormuz, and was heading for its next port call at Jebel Ali, UAE when IRGC Naval forces intercepted, fired upon, hijacked on the high seas and then forced the ship's captain to take a northerly course out of Omani territorial waters and into Iranian territorial waters. This ship is now at anchor just off the eastern end of Qeshm Island, and due south of port Bandar Abbas. This action is nothing less than armed piracy on the high seas. 

28 April 2015: In the Persian Gulf Strait of Hormuz IRGC Navy forces have fired upon and attempted to seize the MV Maersk Tigris, a 52,000-ton merchant vessel operating under the Marshall Islands flag. Pentagon sources say there are no US citizens on board the vessel. IRGC Naval forces are reportedly attempting to take the merchant vessel into port Bandar Abbas, the home port of IRGC naval forces.

US aircraft and the guided missile destroyer USS Farragut (DDG-99) are in the process of responding the MV Maersk Tigris distress calls. As of 11:35 EDT (18 minutes) ago a maritime website reported that the Maersk Tigris had suddenly changed course in the direction of port Jebel Ali in the UAE. It is also reported that armed IRGC naval personnel might be onboard the Maersk Tigris.