ISIS Falls: Today's News for October 17th

Independent:

Isis completely driven out of Syria 'capital' by US-backed forces

US-backed militias have completely taken Isis' de facto capital, Raqqa, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said on Tuesday, in a major symbolic blow to the jihadist group.

The fall of Raqqa, where Isis staged euphoric parades after its string of lightning victories in 2014, is a potent symbol of the movement's collapsing fortunes. The city was used as a base for the group to plan attacks abroad.

The Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), an alliance of Kurdish and Arab militias backed by a US-led international alliance, has been fighting Isis inside Raqqa since June.

It is rare that simply backing militias works this well. This speaks volumes to the SDF's determination and organization.

As for ISIS, the rest is just clean-up duty.

In other news...

The Guardian:

Madrid jails Catalan separatist leaders pending investigation

Spain has signalled a hardening line over Catalonia by jailing the leaders of two of the largest separatist organisations in a move seen as taking Madrid closer to imposing central rule over Catalonia.

In the first imprisonment of senior secessionist figures since Catalonia’s 1 October independence referendum, the court ordered the heads of the Catalan National Assembly (ANC) and independence group Omnium to be held without bail pending an investigation for alleged sedition.

Prosecutors said that the ANC’s Jordi Sànchez and Omnium’s Jordi Cuixart played central roles in orchestrating pro-independence protests that last month trapped national police inside a Barcelona building and destroyed their vehicles.

Around 200 people flocked to the Catalan government’s headquarters in Barcelona on Monday in a peaceful show of support for both men, with some chanting “Freedom” and waving “Democracy” banners.

The ANC, which has organised protests of hundreds of thousands of secessionists in the past, called for further peaceful demonstrations around Catalonia on Tuesday.

The Catalan regional president, Carles Puigdemont, commented on Twitter: “Spain jails Catalonia’s civil society leaders for organising peaceful demonstrations. Sadly, we have political prisoners again” – an allusion to Spain’s military dictatorship under Francisco Franco.

You are no longer a democracy or a republic when your central government behaves this way.

The sad part about this is that this conflict could be neutralized with a simple good faith effort by the Spanish government. Instead, this is likely to escalate into bloodshed.

Finally, in the fake news story of the day...

Business Insider:

New memo suggests Russian lawyer at Trump Tower meeting 

was acting 'as an agent' of the Kremlin

The Russian lawyer who met with President Donald Trump's son, son-in-law, and campaign chairman last June at Trump Tower brought a memo with her to that meeting that contained many of the same talking points as one written by the Russian prosecutor's office two months earlier.

The memo Natalia Veselnitskaya provided to the Trump campaign last year focused on banker-turned-human rights activist Bill Browder, whose reputation has become inextricably linked to the global human-rights campaign he launched in 2009 after tax lawyer Sergei Magnitsky died in a Russian prison.

...Browder told Business Insider on Monday that "the Veselnitskaya memo has exactly the same talking points as the Russian government's position on the Magnitsky case."

"That is the strongest indication to date that Veselnitskaya is an agent of the Russian government and not some independent operator as she claims," he said. 

"Agent" is a very loaded word. The definition that applies here is "one who is authorized to act for or in the place of another". It is not "one engaged in undercover activities (such as espionage)". But in this whole Russiagate silliness, that is likely the takeaway by most Leftist readers.

The problem with the "spy" definition is that Veselnitskaya was never covert about her intent to try and sell Trump's representatives about the need to get rid of the Magnitsky Act, except possibly in her reasons given for the meeting, being some kind of info about potentially illegal contributions being given to the Clinton campaign, which the idiot son Donald Trump Jr. fell for completely.

The more proper definition of what Veselnitskaya was doing was acting as a lobbyist for the Russian government. But "agent" does work, as long as you remove the James Bond aspects from it.

But there is nothing illegal about giving a false reason for a meeting, or even having a meeting. Since nothing ever came from the meeting, this investigation is a dead end. Someone needs to tell Business Insider this horse is dead.