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CAMP MOREHEAD, Afghanistan Signaling that the U.S. military expects its mission to continue, the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan on Sunday hailed the launch of the Afghan Army's new special operations corps, declaring that "we are with you and we will stay with you."

Gen. John Nicholson's exhortation of continued support for the Afghans suggested the Pentagon may have won its argument that America's military must stay engaged in the conflict in order to insure terrorists don't once again threaten the U.S. from safe havens in Afghanistan.

The White House announced that President Donald Trump would address the nation's troops and the American people Monday night to update the path forward in Afghanistan and South Asia.

Nicholson, speaking prior to the White House announcement, said the commandos and a plan to double the size of the Afghan's special operations forces are critical to winning the war.

"I assure you we are with you in this fight. We are with you and we will stay with you," he said during a ceremony at Camp Morehead, a training base for Afghan commandos southeast of Kabul.

The Pentagon was awaiting a final announcement by Trump on a proposal to send nearly 4,000 more U.S. troops to Afghanistan. The added forces would increase training and advising of the Afghan forces and bolster counterterrorism operations against the Taliban and an Islamic State group affiliate trying to gain a foothold in the country.

The administration has been at odds for months over how to craft a new strategy for the war in Afghanistan amid frustrations that 16 years after 9/11 the conflict is stalemated.

The Afghan government only controls half of the country and is beset by endemic corruption and infighting. The Islamic State group has been hit hard but continues to attempt major attacks, insurgents still find safe harbor in Pakistan, and Russia, Iran and others are increasingly trying to shape the outcome. At this point, everything the U.S. military has proposed points to keeping the Afghan government in place and struggling to turn a dismal quagmire around.

U.S. Defense Secretary Jim Mattis said he is satisfied with how the administration formulated its new Afghanistan war strategy. But he refused to talk about the new policy until it was disclosed by Trump.

He said the deliberations, including talks at the Camp David presidential retreat on Friday, were done properly.

"I am very comfortable that the strategic process was sufficiently rigorous," Mattis said, speaking aboard a military aircraft on an overnight flight from Washington to Amman, Jordan.

Months ago, Trump gave Mattis authority to set U.S. troop levels in Afghanistan, but Mattis said he has not yet sent significant additional forces to the fight. He has said he would wait for Trump to set the strategic direction first.

Trump wrote on Twitter on Saturday that he had made decisions at Camp David, "including on Afghanistan," but he did not say more about it. The expectation had been that he would agree to a modest boost in the U.S. war effort, while also addressing broader political, economic and regional issues.

Mattis said Trump had been presented with multiple options. He did not name them, but others have said one option was to pull out of Afghanistan entirely. Another, which Mattis had mentioned recently in Washington, was to hire private contractors to perform some of the U.S. military's duties.

At Camp Morehead, lines of Afghan commandos stood at attention as Afghanistan President Ashraf Ghani and a host of proud dignitaries sat under flag-draped canopies and welcomed the advancement in their nation's long-struggling military.

In short remarks to the force, Nicholson said a defeat in Afghanistan would erode safety in the U.S. and "embolden jihadists around the world."

That's why, he said, the U.S. is helping to double the size of the Afghan commando force, adding that the ceremony "marks the beginning of the end of the Taliban."

Maj. Gen. James Linder, the head of U.S. and NATO special operations forces in Afghanistan, said the nearly 4,000 troops requested by the Pentagon for Afghanistan includes about 460 trainers for his staff to help increase the size of the special operations forces.

He said he'd be able expand training locations and insure they have advisers at all the right levels, including on the new Afghan special operations corps staff.

According to a senior U.S. military officer in Kabul, increasing the number of American troops would allow the military to quickly send additional advisers or airstrike support to two simultaneous operations. Right now, the official said, they can only do so for one.

The officer said it would allow the U.S. to send fighter aircraft, refueling aircraft and surveillance aircraft to multiple locations for missions.

The officer was not authorized to discuss the details publicly so spoke on condition of anonymity.

Afghan military commanders have been clear that they want and expect continued U.S. military help.

Pulling out American forces "would be a total failure," Col. Abdul Mahfuz, the Afghan intelligence agency chief for Qarahbagh, north of Kabul, said Saturday. And he said that substituting paid contractors for U.S. troops would be a formula for continuing the war, rather than completing it.

Mahfuz and other Afghan commanders spoke at a shura council meeting at Bagram air base attended also by U.S. military officers and Afghan intelligence officials.

Col. Abdul Mobin, who commands an Afghan mechanized battalion in the 111th Division, said any reduction in the U.S. military presence "leads to total failure."

Speaking through an interpreter, he added that operations by Afghan and U.S. special operations forces have been very effective, and that "the presence of U.S. military personnel is felt and considered a positive step for peace."

He said he'd like to see an additional 10,000 American troops in the country.

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Trump will address path forward on Afghanistan - 10TV

DESPITE MUCH heated rhetoric, the Trump administration is doing little to counter Iranian aggression. In Syria, its strategy of striking deals with Russia has opened the way for Tehrans forces to establish control over a corridor between Damascus and Baghdad. In Afghanistan, Iran is steadily building a strategic position even as President Trump balks at a plan to strengthen U.S. support for the Afghan government. In Yemen, the United States enables its Persian Gulf allies to pursue an unwinnable proxy war with Tehran whose main result has been the worlds worst humanitarian crisis.

In only one area has the Islamic Republics toxic ambition been relatively contained: the production of material for use in nuclear warheads. According to international inspectors and the U.S. intelligence community, Iran has largely abided by the terms of the 2015 nuclear deal, which greatly reduced its stockpile of enriched unranium and placed strict limits on its nuclear activities. If the regime continues complying, it could be a decade or more before Iran could again threaten to become a nuclear power. Yet perversely, Mr. Trump is matching his passivity toward Irans regional meddling with an apparent determination to torpedo the nuclear pact.

After grudgingly certifying in July that Iran was meeting the terms of the deal a test mandated by Congress every 90 days Mr. Trump told the Wall Street Journal that he planned to find the regime noncompliant when the next certification is due in October. How to reach such a finding if the intelligence community judges otherwise? According to Foreign Policy, Mr. Trump ordered a group of political aides, including now- fired strategist Stephen K. Bannon, to cook up a rationale something that presumably will be made easier by their lack of data or expertise.

The real experts puzzle over what Mr. Trump could hope to accomplish by announcing that Iran is noncompliant other than satisfying what appears to be his compulsive urge to spoil President Barack Obamas legacies. Without proof of Iranian noncompliance, U.S. partners in the nuclear deal, including the European Union, Russia and China, would surely refuse to support the nullification of the accord or the reimposition of sanctions. Iran might respond to decertification by resuming uranium enrichment, even if Mr. Trump did not reimpose U.S. sanctions. That would present the White House with the ugly old problem of how to stop Iranian progress toward a bomb. Could Mr. Trump credibly threaten Iran with military action even while using the threat of force against North Korea?

The principal weakness of the nuclear accord is its temporary nature. Most of its provisions will expire in eight to 13 years, leaving Iran free to stockpile an unlimited quantity of nuclear materials. It follows that the challenge for a rational U.S. administration would be not how to get out of the deal now, but how to extend its restrictions into the future. U.S. partners would likely be ready to cooperate in a strategy aimed at that goal and they ought to be pressed to do more to stop Irans non-nuclear misbehavior. But there is no reason to expect support for a foolish U.S. move that would rekindle a dormant Iranian threat while tolerating its truly dangerous behavior.

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Trump may be planning to make a very bad decision on the Iran deal - Washington Post

Since the real estate company owned by President Trump's son-in-law and senior adviser, Jared Kushner, started doing business in Maryland in 2013, it has been the state's most aggressive practitioner of a controversial debt-collection method called body attachment, where a landlord gets a judge to order the arrest of former tenants who fail to appear in court for allegations of unpaid rent, fines, and fees, The Baltimore Sun reports, citing court records. In all, 20 former tenants have been detained, and a dozen have filed for personal bankruptcy protection to avoid arrest.

Kushner Cos. owns 17 apartment complexes with nearly 9,000 units in Maryland, mostly in the Baltimore area, and pays other firms to manage them. The company earns at least $30 million in profit a year off $90 million in revenue from the properties, The Baltimore Sun reports, and the Kushner-controlled entities have managed to collect $1 million out of the $5.4 million in judge-approved judgments against 1,250 tenants since 2013, averaging $4,400 per judgment including original debt, court costs, lawyer fees, and interest.

Kushner Cos. "follows guidelines consistent with industry standards" and state law, and its management partner, Westminster Management, "only takes legal action against a tenant when absolutely necessary," company CFO Jennifer McLean said in a statement. And real estate interests say that body attachments for former tenants who miss two court appointments can be the only way to make delinquent tenants pay up. At least some tenants say they were never notified of the court dates, or dispute the money owed.

Not all collection agencies use body attachments, in part because "they don't want to risk the public relations issue," Amy Hennen at the Maryland Volunteer Lawyers Service tells the Sun. Garnishing wages, which can be ruinous for poor people barely scraping by, is "harsh" enough, she said. "But certainly the body attachment is probably the worst, because we're talking about what is effectively a debtors' prison, which is something out of Charles Dickens." You can read more at The Baltimore Sun. Peter Weber

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Assad credits Russia, Iran, and Hezbollah for his army's gains - The Week Magazine

Nintendos biggest competitors in the console market, Sony and Microsoft, both recognize a handful of Middle Eastern regions on their respective websites, including Saudi Arabia, The United Arab Eminence, and Israel. The full list from the official Xbox site even includes often overlooked countries like Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Azerbaijan.

But no Iran. The second largest population in the middle east, home to over 78 million residents, has no representation in the world of console gaming.

According to research -- from a 2015 Landscape Report provided by the Iran Computer and Video Game Foundation (IRCG) and the Digital Games Research Center (DIREC) -- there are roughly 23 million gamers in Iran. Its an absolutely enormous market, but ultimately ignored for a variety of reasons. Nintendos annual fiscal report for 2017 offers at least a surface-level explanation as to why the company (and many others) would avoid such a region.

The report states, Domestic and overseas business activities involve risks such as a) disadvantages from emergence of political or economic factors, b) disadvantages from inconsistency of multilateral taxation systems and diversity of tax law interpretation, c) difficulty in recruiting and securing human resources, and d) social disruption resulting from terror attacks, war and other catastrophic events.

But despite the lack of love from major gaming companies, Iranians continue to buy, sell, and play games through any means necessary. Its an odd market controlled by a sometimes unpredictable fluctuation of supply from outside sources and demand from Iranian players. This economic rollercoaster -- coupled with a rise of online-only titles and Irans less than stellar internet speeds -- can make the gaming climate in Iran seem unstable.

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A Hard Sell - Mashable

Iran's Judiciary Spokesman Gholam Hossein Mohseni-Ejei speaks during a press conference in Tehran.

The Iranian Judiciary has issued a ruling demanding that the US government pay around 245 million dollars in damage to a number of victims of chemical attacks carried out by Saddam Husseins troops during the 1980 to 1988 imposed war on Iran.

Gholam-Hossein Mohseni-Ejei, Iran's Judiciary spokesman, made the remarks on Sunday, while noting that the amount would be distributed among 18 victims of the attacks who had filed for the legal action.

Hundreds of thousands of Iranians were killed in the Iraqi-imposed war and many more were affected by the chemical weapons like mustard gas that were used by the regime of the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein. Many of those Iranians who were attacked by chemical weapons and are alive today continue to suffer the lingering aftereffects.

Iraq once possessed a huge arsenal of chemical weapons, the production of which was facilitated by exports of chemicals as well as financial and technological support from the United States and other Western countries.

Iraq is believed to acquire the technology and the materials to develop chemical weapons from the US and a number of Western countries. According to reports, US spy agency, CIA, had knew about Iraqs use of chemical weapons as early as 1983, but the US took no action against the violations of international law, and even failed to alert the UN.

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US must pay $245mn in damage to chemical victims of Iraq-Iran war: Judiciary - Press TV