This New Reality

"This new reality requires the region's countries and the allies in specific to hasten in forming a regional alliance to face the Russian-Iranian alliance that occupies Syria."
"The Russian military aggression on Syria is considered a blatant occupation of the country even if some claim it was done with the official request of the Assad regime. Those who lost legitimacy can't offer it."
"All Syrian armed revolutionary factions must realize we are in a war to push an aggressor, a war that makes unifying ranks and word a duty on all brothers."
Unified statement of the 41 factions in Syria opposing the Alawite-Shia presidency of Bashar al-Assad

"This is not an accident, this is a serious violation [by Russian warplanes inside Turkish airspace]."
"The violation lasted for a long time compared to previous violations of airspace we have seen elsewhere in Europe."
NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg

The Turkish military said on Monday that two Turkish F-16 jets were harassed by an unidentified MIG-29 aircraft on the Syrian border on Sunday.

Vladimir Putin, never one to shrink from dangerous impudence, appearing to enjoy tweaking the ears of those he considers opponents, must surely understand that the simmering anger he has raised within NATO over past encounters with its members following the Russian intervention in Ukraine, can only now consolidate the determination of the West to further isolate and condemn his adventurous spirit.

In choosing to champion a Shiite leader whose deadly internal exploits rival and surpass Putin's own in deadly slaughter, the much larger Sunni Islam majority now stands four-square against Moscow.

Add to those burning with anger against a man whose rules are all his own and who mocks international standards of behaviour while asserting that those who condemn his tactics have no right to interfere in the Russian Federation's relations with its former Soviet satellites, bearing witness to the sanctimony of the very same source repeating his adventure, this time in Syria, daring the world to condemn him as he courageously takes on the dread Islamic State terrorists.

Even while the terrorist regime of Bashar al-Assad has wrought atrocities equal in barbarity to ISIS.

Grandiloquent words of intent to rid the world of the Islamist blight of ISIL, not happening to match the reality in the air as Russian bombers target not ISIL necessarily, but President Assad's more pressing concerns with Syrian rebels and those aligned with them, gives the lie to Putin's assertions, even as his pilots indulge in their usual gratuitous challenges to the national airspace of Sunni Turkey whose own Islamist administration champions the downfall of Assad.

Russian parliament gave President Putin permission to launch air strikes (Photo: Reuters)

The Kremlin has decided to give their president full reign in racking up enemies, from the assorted rebel and Islamist Sunni groups to NATO's members and the United States administration which was once again taken in by the canny ability of the Russian president to lead his American counterpart around by the nose-ring of faux conciliation and the promise of diplomacy's superiority over military aggression.

This time perhaps Russia's president has allowed his egotistical arrogance to step a little too far toward the precipice of a reckoning. With the coalition representing all the rebel and Islamist Sunni groups now calling upon their Sunni-nation-supporting states to respond to the deadly incursion of a European interloper and even the Muslim Brotherhood declaring jihad against the "sheer Russian occupation of Syria" as a 'duty' for all Sunni Muslims capable of using weapons, a die is cast.