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Tehran-based Imam Hossein University, a school affiliated with The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), said it recently deployed military leadership students to fight in Syria as part of an educational program designed for future officers, according to state-run media.

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Tehran says its forces are in Syria to protect the Zeinab Shrine in Damascus, a Shiite holy site. But since 2011, Iran has been a major backer of the Syrian regime in its war with rebel groups across the country, at first sending advisers, then forces from the IRGC expanding far beyond the shrine area.

Morteza Saffari, a senior IRGC commander who heads the brass hat division at Imam Hossein University, said at least 100 students from the school have been dispatched to Syria for training in combat situations.

Some of the students sent for two-month training sessions got martyred (killed), many were injured and some have been deployed in Syria for a longer period, he told Irans Danshjoo news agency in a recent interview.

VOA news observes that Syria presents Iran with its first opportunity to give military officers front-line combat experience since the end of the Iran-Iraq war in the eighties. Revolutionary Guards Corps deputy commander Brig. General Hossein Salami boasted his forces have gained technical and tactical advancements, militarily and in terms of intelligence collection from their deployment to Syria. Extensive field testing of Iranian weapons was another benefit.

Syrian rebel commanders enter the VOA story to confirm that IRGC units have been involved in heavy Syrian combat, particularly around the long-besieged city of Aleppo. One rebel leader said Iran sent many reinforcements to Aleppo, mainly new officers and students from its military academy. A significant IRGC presence was also reported in Homs and in the suburbs of Damascus.

In an op-ed for McClatchy News on February 14, Andrew Malcolm argues that Russia is using the Syrian civil war as a live-fire boot camp to train Iranian troops as the regions dominant military force.

Irans concerted buildup, including sophisticated new Russian missile defenses, is expanding its armed influence toward tipping the Middle Easts balance of power adversely to American interests, Malcolm warns. He notes that both Russia and Iran have rapidly cycled troops through the Syrian theater, aiming to give as many soldiers and commanders a taste of live-fire military experience as possible.

Malcolm quotes work from the Institute for the Study of War that makes precisely the same point as Voice of Americas new coverage, arguing that experience in Syria is dramatically increasing Tehrans ability to plan and conduct complex conventional operations as Iranian officers learn by seeing and doing.

The Institute warns that Iranians are learning important Russian military concepts such as cauldron battles, multiple simultaneous and successive operations, and frontal aviation by working closely with Russian forces in Syria. This will help Iran become a formidable conventional military power in the Middle East in relatively short order, permanently changing the balance of power and the security environment in the region.

According to the Institutes analysis, Iran is on track to become one of the few nations in the world able to conduct quasi-conventional warfare hundreds of miles from its borders, an achievement that would disrupt the balance of power in the Middle East.

Iran will add these improved capabilities to a demonstrated aptitude for coordinating local allies and proxy forces, such as Hezbollah fighters and Shiite militias. Thats the kind of force coordination President Trumps new National Security Adviser, General H.R. McMaster, has recommended the United States develop in a different way with different choices for local allies.

If Iran is already skilled at force coordination and weaponized politics, which it tends to exert through terrorism and subversion, and its also gaining advanced military training, battlefield experience, and battle-tested weapons by cooperating with Russia in Syria, it will become a formidable adversary for the United States and its regional allies.

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Iran Uses Syrian Battlefields to Train Military Officers - Breitbart News

LONDON OPEC has so far surprised the market by showing record compliance with oil-output curbs and could do so further in coming months as the biggest laggards - the United Arab Emirates and Iraq - pledge to catch up quickly with their targets.

The Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries has pledged to curb its production by about 1.2 million barrels per day (bpd) from Jan. 1, the first cut in eight years, to boost prices and get rid of a supply glut.

Compliance with output restrictions has often been problematic in OPEC's history but this time the group has delivered reductions amounting to as much as 90 percent of the target in the first month alone.

That prompted the International Energy Agency (IEA) to call it one of the deepest cuts on record.

Iraq and the UAE have delivered smaller portions of their pledged reductions, based on their own figures and OPEC production estimates by government agencies, consultants and industry media.

Still, officials and industry sources say the UAE will try to move closer to its OPEC target in coming months, improving average compliance during the six-month duration of the supply cut rather than focusing on month-by-month performance.

"The UAE is fully committed to the OPEC cuts and is undertaking the necessary measures that will ensure it is fully compliant over the six-month period with the OPEC agreement," the UAE's OPEC governor, Ahmed Al Kaabi, told Reuters in a statement.

The UAE, among the core Gulf OPEC group that traditionally shows high compliance with output agreements, has focused on expanding its production capacity in the last few years, rather than on limiting output.

It doubled the capacity of its Ruwais refinery last year to more than 800,000 barrels per day to feed rising domestic demand.

Oilfield maintenance could also help to push compliance higher. Abu Dhabi National Oil Co has work planned at fields producing Murban and Das light crude in March and May, people familiar with the matter said.

OPEC's average compliance is put by the IEA at a record 90 percent in January, and based on a Reuters average of production surveys it stands at 88 percent.

Top exporter Saudi Arabia cut production by even more than called for in the OPEC deal, helping to push compliance higher, according to its own figures and those of independent analysts.

IRAQ 'RESPECTS' OPEC COMMITMENT

The UAE and Iraq's own figures suggest they have further to go than other big OPEC producers to reach targeted output.

According to data the countries reported to OPEC, while both cut production substantially in January, they did so from higher levels than the supply baselines used in the agreement, meaning that technically they are not complying at all.

Iraq had initially been reluctant to limit supply. In negotiations last year on the supply cut, Iraq argued that it should be exempt due to a need for cash to fight Islamic State militants.

Baghdad also pushed to be allowed to cut production from a higher level than estimated by the secondary sources OPEC uses to monitor its output. Eventually, to get a deal, it accepted a cut from a lower baseline.

Iraq's OPEC peers are privately urging Baghdad to make further reductions, sources say, and there are indications compliance may at least not worsen. Partial export figures for February suggest no increase in shipments, and March allocations were reduced sharply.

"Iraq's allocations in March are low due to OPEC cuts, mainly," a source familiar with the matter said. "Iraq respects its commitment."

The table below is based on OPEC production in January as estimated by OPEC secondary sources, OPEC members themselves, news agencies Reuters and Bloomberg and bank Goldman Sachs.

OPEC's six secondary sources are oil-pricing agencies Platts and Argus, the IEA, the U.S. Energy Information Administration, consultancy Cambridge Energy Research Associates and industry newsletter Petroleum Intelligence Weekly.

OPEC UAE Iraq

compliance compliance compliance

high low high low high low

94 82 100 negative 62 negative

(Editing by Dale Hudson)

NEW YORK/HOUSTON Traders are turning the spigots to drain the priciest storage tanks holding U.S. crude stockpiles as strengthening markets make it unprofitable to store for future sale and cuts in global production open export opportunities.

LONDON Oil prices fell one percent on Friday after U.S. crude inventories rose for a seventh week, showing that the market is still struggling to ease oversupply despite many producers' efforts to rein in production.

LONDON It's time to talk about the London Metal Exchange (LME).

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OPEC compliance seen growing as laggards Iraq and UAE pledge action - Reuters

Closely supported by the U.S.-led international coalition, Iraqi forces secured a series of cautious advances on Thursday, pushing into a sprawling military base outside of Mosul and onto the grounds of the city's airport, where they took control of the runway.

The three-pronged attack began just after sunrise, with three convoys of Iraqi forces snaking north across Nineveh's hilly desert on Mosul's southern approach. Iraq's special forces joined federal police and rapid response units in the push part of a major assault that started earlier this week to drive IS from the western half of Iraq's second-largest city. By afternoon they had entered the Ghazlani military base south of the city, as well as the airport.

Iraqi helicopters circled above Mosul firing down onto the city's southwestern edge. Coalition and Iraqi airstrikes that hit targets inside Mosul sent plumes of white smoke into the air on the horizon.

"We've broken the first line of IS defenses," said Iraqi special forces Lt. Yaser Mohsen, whose troops captured the key village of Tell al-Rayan, where Islamic State snipers had been slowing the government offensive. They then moved to the edge of Mosul's western Mamun neighborhood, where they were working to surround it before punching into the city.

Several armored coalition vehicles could be seen in the line of military vehicles, and security officials said coalition troops were embedded with the forward advancing forces, advising the Iraqi troops as they conducted the assault. The officials spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to talk to reporters.

The cautious advance stood in sharp contrast to the first days of Iraq's push into Mosul from the east, when Iraqi forces quickly advanced deep into the city's congested neighborhoods, where they were hit with heavy IS counterattacks, including dozens of car bombs that struck the slow-moving Iraqi convoys with deadly consequences.

Clashes at Mosul's airport continued for hours, with IS militants hunkered down inside several airport buildings. By early afternoon, federal police commander Maj. Gen. Raid Shakir Jawdat told Iraqi state TV that his troops had control of "more than half" of the airport complex. About 200 families were evacuated to safe areas in government-controlled areas, he said.

Separately, the spokesman of the Joint Military Operation Command, Brig. Gen. Yahya Rasool confirmed to the AP that Iraqi special forces entered the Ghazlani military base next to the airport on the southern edge of the city.

On Sunday, after weeks of preparations, Iraqi forces launched the operation to take Mosul's western half, with the Iraqi regular army and federal police forces taking part in the initial push. Since then, the military says they have retaken some 120 square kilometers (nearly 50 miles) south of the city.

Thursday marked the first time the Iraqi special forces, which played a key role in securing the eastern half of the city, joined the fight for western Mosul.

A special forces officer overseeing the operation said IS targeted the advancing troops with dozens of bombs dropped from drones. The officer, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to brief the media, said his troops sustained at least a dozen casualties, including some inflicted by a car bomb attack.

Making up for a lack of fighters, IS militants are increasingly relying on modified commercial drones to guide suicide car bombers to their targets and to launch small-scale airstrikes on Iraqi forces.

While some 750,000 civilians are estimated to be trapped in Mosul's western sector, only a few dozen could be seen fleeing the city on foot Thursday alongside convoys of Iraqi Humvees.

Hamad Khalaf fled the Mamun neighborhood in southern Mosul with his wife and four children. Covered in dust, he said IS fighters were targeting people as they tried to escape.

"There are many injured still inside," he said.

"We've been walking since the morning," said his wife, Badriya, cradling their 1 ?-year-old daughter in her arms. A few meters (yards) away a mortar fired from inside the city hit a nearby hill.

In January, Iraqi authorities declared the eastern half of Mosul "fully liberated" from IS. The battle for western Mosul, the extremist group's last major urban bastion in Iraq, is expected to be the most daunting yet.

The streets are older and narrower in the sector of the city that stretches west from the Tigris River that divides Mosul into its eastern and western halves. The dense urban environment will likely force Iraqi soldiers to leave the relative safety of their armored vehicles.

Mosul fell to IS in the summer of 2014, along with large swaths of northern and western Iraq. But the Sunni militant group has been steadily losing territory, as backing by the U.S.-led coalition proved critical for Iraqi government efforts clawing back territory lost to the extremists.

IS has suffered losses in Syria as well: Turkish troops and Syrian opposition forces seized the center of the Islamic State-held town of al-Bab on Thursday, breaking a weeks-long deadlock between the two sides at the periphery of the town, Turkey's state news agency and opposition activists said. The northern Syrian town in Aleppo province is one of the militants' last urban strongholds in Syria west of Raqqa, the Islamic State group's de facto capital.

The Iraqi special forces officer overseeing this week's operation said he expected heavier IS resistance once his forces punched inside the city, but he said Iraqi forces wouldn't make the same mistakes they made in the east: quickly punching into dense neighborhoods only to be hit with overnight IS counterattacks.

"It's not caution," he said, adding, "They've learned, they're smarter now."

Abdul-Zahra and Salaheddin reported from Baghdad. Zeina Karam in Beirut contributed to this report.

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Iraq retakes Mosul airport amid cautious advances against IS - ABC News

New York Times

ISIS Says British Militant Carried Out Suicide Attack in Iraq New York Times LONDON They called him Abu Zakariya al-Britani the surname means the Briton and they say he blew himself up on Monday in an attack at a village southwest of Mosul, Iraq. The claim, in a communiqu from the Islamic State, immediately revived ... Iraq suicide bomber was former detainee at Guantanamo BayUPI.com Isis bomber Jamal al-Harith: from Manchester to Iraq via GuantnamoThe Guardian British suicide bomber in Iraq had won compensation for Guantanamo stayReuters New York Post -KCRA Sacramento -The Times (subscription) all 364 news articles »

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ISIS Says British Militant Carried Out Suicide Attack in Iraq - New York Times

BAGHDAD Senior U.S. military officials want to elevate talks with Russia aboutair operations over Iraq and Syria, an effort that is meant to protect pilots from collisions but complicated by concerns at the Pentagonthat doing so will make itlook like Washington and Moscow have begun to collaborate on the battlefield.

The talks, known as deconfliction, began in 2015 after the Russian military deployed forces to Khmeimim Air Base, a military installation along Syrias Mediterranean coastline that has been used to launch airstrikes against opposition forces in Syria in support of PresidentBashar al-Assads regime. Russias arrival in Syria complicated U.S.-led operations against the Islamic State military group in Syria, which began a year earlier.

An agreement signed between Washington and Moscow in fall 2015 called for the use of specific communication frequencies and the establishment of a phone hotline in which a U.S. colonel in Qatar and a Russian counterpart in Syria deconflict operations regularly but do not share intelligence. When there are points of contention between the two militaries, though, the existing arrangement has not left many options for U.S. officers, said Lt. Gen. Jeffrey Harrigian, the top Air Force commander in the Middle East.

Our perspective has been that there needs to be another layer that allows us to have a more senior-level discussion, and weve got to work through where that layer is, Harrigian told reporters in Baghdad this week, suggesting that adding a U.S. general with somewhere between one and three stars and a Russian counterpart would be helpful.

[New anti-Islamic State plan could change U.S. strategy in Syria]

Harrigian said that U.S. aircraft on occasion get out of the way of Russian jets. This was especially true a few months ago when both countries werelaunching airstrikes regularly near the Syrian city of Palmyra, he said. Such decisions could be hampering the overall operation, however.

In essence, we had some conflicting operational desires that ultimately we ended up working our way through over time because we were never able to elevate this discussion, Harrigian said. Did we miss targets? I cant say that for sure, but I would tell you that optimally we would have gone after that in a different manner.

U.S. military officials also have advocated upgrading the technology used to communicate with the Russians, which up until now has consisted of little more than a commercial phone line, said Air Force Col. John Thomas, a spokesman for U.S. Central Command. Doing so, he said, would boost the safety of flight operations, and thats certainly a big reason for considering making the communication more robust.

The discussions are complicated by legislation passed in 2014 after Moscows military bloody intervention into Ukraine and annexation of the Crimean Peninsula. With few exceptions, the law banned military-to-military cooperation between the United States and Russia unless Russian forces withdraw from Ukraine. Defense Secretary Jim Mattis can make an exception on issues where he considers it in U.S. interests, but is not ready to do so anytime soon, according to two people familiar with his thinking who spoke on condition of anonymity due to the sensitivity of the issue.

During a Feb. 16 visit to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization in Brussels, Mattis said that the conditions are not right presently for the U.S. and Russian militaries to work together and that Moscow would have to prove itself first.

We are not in a position right now to collaborate on a military level, but our political leaders will engage and try to find common ground or a way forward so that Russia, living up to its commitment, can return to a partnership of sorts here with NATO, Mattis said.

Senior U.S. military officials and the Obama administration last year discussed establishing a new, higher-level channel for communicating with Russia about Syria that could have involved three-star generals, but Defense Secretary Ashton B. Carter opted not to make a change before leaving office, according to people who were aware of discussions at the time and spoke on the condition of anonymity in order to speak candidly.

The individuals said that one of the concerns was potentiallycreating the appearance that Russia and the United States were carving up sections of Syrian airspace for their differing missions, effectively collaborating. Another was that senior U.S. military officials already could consult senior civilian officials at the Pentagon in cases where they ran into any difficulty with the Russians.

Elissa Slotkin, one former senior defense official involved in the discussions at the time, said that until the Trump administration makes policy decisions about how it wants to interact with Russia in regard to Syria, it would be unwise to increase interaction between the U.S. and Russian militaries any more than needed to keep pilots safe. She said Defense Secretary Jim Mattis might address the issue in a plan hehas been directed to deliver to Trump by the end of the month on how to accelerate the war against the Islamic State, she said.

Concerns about a potential collision in the air have persisted as U.S., Russian, Syrian and Turkish aircraft increasingly converge on the same areas of Syria, like the city of al-Bab. Pilots who have recently flown combat sorties over Iraq and Syria said that existing ways of deconflicting dont always work well and Russian pilots sometimes do not respond to radio communications.

Air Force Brig. Gen. Charles Corcoran, commander of the 380th Air Expeditionary Wing that flies combat missions against the Islamic State, said that the military has opted to fly advanced F-22 Raptors above U.S. aircraft in a stack formation in part because their sensors can better keep track of other aircraft. At times, he said, information gathered in the F-22 has been used to shift other U.S. planes to make room for an incoming Russian aircraft.

In October, U.S. military officials were particularly alarmed by an incident over Syria in which a Russian jet passed within a half-mile of a coalition E-3 Sentry, better known as an Airborne Warning and Control System (AWACS) plane. The encounter was close enough to knock out the radar on the AWACS, Corcoran said.

Operations have improved since then, Corcoran said, but he said hed still welcome additional dialogue. Russian jets not only encounter American aircraft over Syria, he said, but over the Iraqi city of Mosul and surrounding areas, as Russian jets travel to Syria from southern Russia after crossing south down the Caspian Sea and west over Iran.

I think it would be helpful, Corcoran said of elevating talks. Its never a bad thing to have [military-to-military]ties. How many times during the Cold War did we say that having them stopped bad things from happening? We all have our objectives, but we have to talk.

Marine Gen. Joseph F. Dunford was open to elevating deconfliction talks to higher levels of the military, individuals familiar with previous discussions said. He met Feb. 16 with his Russian counterpart, Gen. Valeriy Gerasimov, in Baku, Azerbaijan, marking their first face-to-face meeting since Russias intervention in Ukraine in 2014.

A spokesman for Dunford, Navy Capt. Greg Hicks, said that the U.S. military continues to ensure the safety of flights over Syria and concerns are met through existing communication channels but declined to characterize Dunfords talks with the Russian general.

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US generals want elevated talks with Russia about Iraq and Syria operations because of aerial collision fears - Washington Post