Attack On Yeshiva Students Goes Unreported
Two 18-year old American students narrowly escaped what could have been a lynching when they mistakenly entered a largely Palestinian Arab neighborhood in eastern Jerusalem, this reporter can exclusively divulge.
The students were attacked by a mob of at least six young Palestinian men, at least one of whom was armed with a knife.
One of the students ran away on foot while the other was stabbed and beaten for several minutes.
The event took place at about 3 a.m. local time on Saturday but until now has been unknown to the public because the yeshiva where the two are studying for the year took measures to ensure the story did not become public.
Insiders at the yeshiva said students were told to not discuss the matter or post anything about it on social media. The yeshiva is concerned American parents may pull their teenage kids out of the facility if the story is publicized.
The school is one of the many institutions here where Jewish American high school graduates study for a year and receive academic credit at affiliated U.S. colleges.
This reporter was granted an interview with one of the attacked students only after acquiescing to the yeshiva’s request not to publish the name of the student or the name of the yeshiva, which is located near Jerusalem’s Old City.
The 18-year old student described the early-morning onslaught, where he and the second student of the same age, both U.S. citizens, took a wrong turn and ended up in Shoafat, the Palestinian-majority section of eastern Jerusalem that has been the scene of intense clashes in recent days.
The student recounted: “We realized we were in the wrong neighborhood and went the wrong way. As we were leaving, two cars pulled up and about half a dozen guys jumped out and started chasing us so we started running.”
The student said at least one of the Palestinian assailants had a knife. They appeared to be in their late teens and early twenties.
“Someone threw a glass bottle at us,” the student continued, speaking from the yeshiva “They cursed at us. Someone said, ‘I’m going to kill you’”
“My friend ran faster than I did [and he escaped]. They caught up with me. While I was running one of them stabbed me in the [buttocks]. I didn’t feel it right away.”
The student said the other assailants, about five or six of them, then surrounded him, threw him on the pavement and “started kicking me and punching me on the head.”
The student said he took mixed martial arts classes while in high school where he learned the foundations of self-defense and how to strategize during an attack, tools that may have saved his life.
“As I was on the floor, instead of crawling into a ball, I sat up so that as they were kicking me they weren’t able to kick my head,” he said. “Only my side and my back got kicked. So as they were kicking me I didn’t lose consciousness.”
After a few minutes, the attackers “just jumped in their car and drove away,” the student related.
Asked why he thinks the assailants had stopped beating him, the student replied, “I don’t know why.”
“I guess they assumed my friend who got away had called the police and they didn’t want to be there when the police showed up.”
Jerusalem police spokesman Commander Assaf Aharoni told this column the police are investigating the incident.
Russia Helps Assad, Gets Petroleum Favors In Return
In exchange for Russia’s military intervention in Syria, embattled President Bashar al-Assad acquiesced to Moscow’s further exclusive exploration of gas fields off the Syrian coast, according to informed Middle Eastern defense sources speaking to KleinOnline.
The silent agreement, the sources say, extends beyond the multi-million-dollar deal Syria signed in 2013 with the Russian company Soyuzneftegaz for exclusive offshore drilling, development and production pertaining to a 2,190 square kilometer bloc of Syria’s territorial waters. The area stretches from the city of Tartus, where Russia has a naval fleet, to Banyas.
Agence France-Presse described the 2013 contract as “the first ever for oil and gas exploration in Syria’s waters.”
In 2010, a U.S. Geological Survey predicted as much as 1.7 billion barrels of oil and 122 trillion cubic feet of natural gas could be found in the northern part of the Levant Basin off the Syrian coast.
This is in addition to Syria’s strategic position on the Mediterranean to pipe Iranian and Kuwaiti gas to the European market, which Russia has long dominated.
Meanwhile, the defense officials said Russia is in Syria for the long haul. The sources, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said there is information that Moscow is in the midst of drawing up plans for military operations in Syria through at least the spring of 2016.
The officials confirmed U.S. accusations that Russia is not only targeting ISIS but carrying out strikes against U.S.-backed rebels fighting the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.
The officials said that in less than one week, Russia has done more to advance the international war against ISIS than the combined achievements of Western forces fighting in Syria during the last two years.
The information comes as NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg confirmed on Tuesday that Russian ground troops were stationed in Syria. Stoltenberg said Russia’s first incursion into Turkish airspace took place Saturday and the second was on Sunday.
On Tuesday, the British tabloid Mirror newspaper quoted sources saying Vladimir Putin’s hardcore Spetsnaz unit and a covert para battalion were on the ground assisting the Syrian ground campaign against the rebels.
One military source told the newspaper that Putin’s marines “are there to guard the airbases they are using against sabotage by rebels.”
Last week, this journalist reported that Russia’s first air strikes in Syria were followed immediately by a series of major Syrian army ground operations targeting rebel positions, including in some areas not controlled by ISIS. Two Lebanese sources further told Reuters that hundreds of Iranian troops have arrived in Syria to fight alongside Hizbullah and Syrian forces backed by Russian air strikes.