It has been an alliance between the leaderships of U.S., Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and UAE; but, regardless of whether it’s called “the U.S. alliance” or “the Saudi alliance,” or even (possibly) “the Turkish alliance” (and it could be called by any of those three names), it’s the jihadist alliance, and it now seems to be near its final defeat, by, quite clearly, the Russian alliance: Russian air power has enabled the Syrian army (called the SAA or “Syrian Arab Army”) of Bashar al-Assad, plus Lebanon’s Shiite warriors (called “Hezbollah”), plus organization by Iran’s generals, to exterminate thousands of ISIS jihadists. The pro-Syrian alliance, under Russian air-power, are now making final preparations to finish the job, in the Syrian headquarters of ISIS — the city of Raqqa, where ISIS’s “Caliph” is, who could soon be meeting his end.

This major military victory, in Palmyra — the center of the Jihadist-controlled region of Syria (and located south of Raqqa, separated from it only by desert) — was announced on Easter Sunday, 27 March 2016, by the website Syrian Perspective (one of the world’s two great news-sites covering the Syrian war, the other being Al Masdar News), as they headlined, “Palmyra Liberated! General Ayyoob Reviews Troops in Aftermath of Enormous Victory; What’s Next?” Reporter Ziad Fadel opened:

HOMS: The rats inside were finally given the go-ahead to withdraw to Al-Sukhna, Al-Raqqa and Dayr El-Zor, but not by the rodent commanders in Al-Raqqa. This was a desperate order by Abu-Ihaab Al-‘Iraaqi, the local commander who, evidently, values his life on earth a lot more than what was promised to him by the shamans of ISIS This morning at 5:00 a.m., the SAA had confirmation from sources inside the city that the piece-meal escape was taking place. The Syrian high command ordered troops to stand down until the last rodent had left, after which time the SAAF and RuAF would take to the skies to see how many of the stragglers could be exterminated. It’s over. The Syrian and Russian Air Forces have been directed into the air to block any movement of terrorist ISIS rodents to any area considered a stronghold. This means that no deal was ever struck between the army and the murderers inside the city. Instead, what happened was the army was commanded to permit a withdrawal with the understanding that escaped rats would still be targets once the city was liberated. As I write, SAA engineers are everywhere inside the city removing IEDs, booby-traps and mines. It’s a thankless task replete with danger, but, it must be done in order to return the population to a safe city.

He went on to explain that the head of SAA’s Special Forces unit, called “Tiger Forces,” “is very keen on being the leader of the force which will liberate Al-Raqqa and his forces to the east of Aleppo are preparing for exactly that.”

The key question now is whether a deal can be reached with Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, ISIS’s leader or “Caliph,” in Raqqa — a deal which won’t require the entire population of Raqqa to be massacred, in order for the Russian alliance to eliminate all of ISIS’s leadership, and all of its jihadists there. Ideally, some way will be found to salvage at least some of the civilian population who are being held, essentially as slaves, by ISIS. However, Russia’s leader, Vladimir Putin, has stated, on several occasions, that what’s most essential is for the jihadists in Syria, and in Iraq, to be killed where they are — not allowed to escape to become terrorist cells in Russia or anywhere else (as has been happening, though not on the huge scale that would result if Baghdadi and his jihadists are allowed to escape.

In a related event that also signals the defeat of the terrorist alliance, Middle East Eye, yet another of the key independent reporting sites regarding the war in Syria — and specializing on the entire Middle Eastern region — headlined on Friday the 25th of March, “Jordan’s King Accuses Turkey of Sending Terrorists to Europe,” and David Hearst reported:

King Abdullah of Jordan accused Turkey of exporting terrorists to Europe at a top level meeting with senior US politicians in January, the MEE can reveal. The king said Europe’s biggest refugee crisis was not an accident, and neither was the presence of terrorists among them: “The fact that terrorists are going to Europe is part of Turkish policy and Turkey keeps on getting a slap on the hand, but they are let off the hook.” Asked by one of the congressmen present whether the Islamic State group was exporting oil to Turkey, Abdullah replied: ”Absolutely.”

In other words: the U.S. alliance is coming apart, at least at the edges, when the reality becomes revealed — despite the long hiding of this fact on the part of Western ‘news’ media — that the U.S.-Saudi-Qatari-Turkish-UAE-Israeli alliance has been supporting jihadist Sunni groups in order to weaken the only non-Sunni-run nations in the Middle East, Syria and Iran, both of which (and Syria’s government is more properly to be called non-sectarian than Shiite, because the Ba’athist Party, which has been leading Syria since the 1950s, is ideologically committed to secularism and against sectarianism of any type, neither Shiite nor Sunni nor any) have allied themselves with Russia, instead of with the U.S.

The origin of the CIA aspect of this operation was well covered in an extraordinary BBC documentary in 1992, and the broader aristocratic operation was reported in my article, “The Two Contending Visions of World Government.” During Obama’s Presidency, one of the major physical battlefields in this global war has been in Syria; another, in Ukraine, Obama’s coup there, was well covered here.

Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of They’re Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010, and of CHRIST’S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity.