Egyptian President Abdel-Fatteh El-Sisi's secret decision to intervene militarily in the Syrian war on the side of the Syrian President Bashar Assad is revealed here by DEBKA's military and intelligence sources. The precise details of that intervention vary from source to source. According to one version, a group of Egyptian helicopter pilots landed secretly a few days ago at the Syrian Air Force base in Hama and were pressed at once into service for strikes against Syrian rebel forces. Some sources describe the Egyptian flight crews as taking over the cockpits of Russian attack/reconnaissance Kamov Ka-52 helicopters, with which they were familiar, having trained on them since the end of 2015. Others say that the Egyptian airmen flew those helicopters from Egypt to Syria over the eastern Mediterranean. There is also a claim that their arrival was preceded by a preliminary inspection of the Syrian front lines by two major generals from the Egyptian general staff operations division, who later submitted their recommendations to the Egyptian president. Others say the Egyptian generals headed a military delegation, which has set up a permanent mission in Damascus. But every one of those sources agrees that, one way or another, Egypt has secretly entered the Syrian war in support of the Bashar regime ; a development which has raised a firestorm in Arab capitals.

Fidel Castro is dead. He sent Cuban troops to fight Israel on Golan front

Fidel Castro, the controversial revolutionary leader who ruled Cuba for 49 years, has died at the age of 90, Cuban state television announced. He rose to power in 1959 after a coup d'etat and transformed Cuba into the first communist country in the Western Hemisphere, only handing over to his brother Raul in 2008. An iconic bearded figure holding a cigar, Castro promised the masses democracy and social justice, but lost traction when his regime proved repressive and dictatorial. While acclaimed for inspiring the anti-imperialism and anti-colonial movements that swept the world in the latter half of the 20th century, and later leading the Non-Aligned Group, at home, he threw thousands of political dissidents into jail and forced a million people to flee Cuba. In the 1960s, he allowed Nikita Krushchev to deploy Soviet nuclear missiles pointing at the United States on the island, saying the Cuban people were willing to sacrifice themselves for the sake of destroying imperialism. For two weeks, in 1962, the world veered closer to nuclear war than ever before or since. But then, John Kennedy forced the Soviet leader to back down and remove the missiles. Castro's sympathy for the Arab world's war on Israel in the last decades of the past century has never made waves. In fact, he sent Cuban troops to fight with the Syrian army against Israel on the Golan front in 1973 shortly after the Yom Kippur war. The Russians airlifted a Cuban brigade from Angola to southern Syria to take part in the Syrian war of attrition against Israel. The Cubans were there for three months