In dit artikel van Whitney Webb o.a. aandacht voor het enorme aantal wapens, inclusief chemische wapens (als Sarin gas), dat de VS in Syrië leverde aan de door haar gesteunde terreurgroepen (in het westen aangeduid als 'gematigde rebellen)...... Daarnaast stopte de VS honderden miljoenen dollars in deze terreurgroepen........ Militaire training was eveneens een manier van hulpverlening aan psychopathische moordenaars en verkrachters................
Lees hoe de VS willens en wetens enorme terreur tegen het Syrische volk heeft gesteund, zelf heeft uitgeoefend en uitoefent op dit volk, zogenaamd in het belang van de strijd tegen terreur.......
Ook vind je hier een uitleg over de terreurgroepen in Syrië en hoe die in feite allen gelieerd zijn aan Al Qaida Syrië of ook wel al-Nusra genaamd....... Jammer dat Webb geen kritiek levert op het Syrian Observatory of Human Rights (SOHR), een propagandaorgaan van de zogenaamde gematigde rebellen, dat ook door de reguliere afhankelijke (massa-) media wordt geciteerd......
How Al-Qaeda Became an American Ally in the ‘War on Terror’
July
3, 2017 at 9:30 am
Written
by Whitney
Webb
Nearly
16 years since the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the United States is
inexplicably finding itself in bed with al-Qaeda, its alleged sworn
enemy. The group’s efforts to terrorize the population of Syria
have been rewarded with U.S. arms, training and other military aid.
(MPN) — Despite
ostensibly being the United States’ “Public Enemy No. 1”
following the 9/11 attacks, the international terror group al-Qaeda
has instead been a beneficiary of U.S. military aid in the post-9/11
world, particularly in Syria. With the Syrian conflict well into its
sixth year, al-Qaeda’s active branch in that war, widely known as
Jabhat al-Nusra or the al-Nusra Front, has continually received arms
and military protection from the United States, an outcome that is
clearly counterproductive to the U.S.’ global “War on Terror.”
Yet,
while the arming and propping up of al-Qaeda in Syria may not serve
the U.S.' fundamental goal of eradicating terrorism, it certainly
has helped the U.S. political establishment pursue a decades-old goal
of regime change in regionally strategic Syria.
Gareth
Porter, an award-winning independent investigative journalist, and
historian told MintPress News that such tactics are part of the U.S.
government’s long-standing “bureaucratic habit of mind that
really privileges short-term advantages against state adversaries
over the long term, fundamental interests of the American people.”
In
this case, U.S. counter-terrorism efforts have been usurped by the
government’s broader geopolitical interests in reshaping the Middle
East. While Washington politicians and bureaucrats may be content
with having helped extend Syria’s “civil war” to their benefit
and the benefit of their allies, this reality has had the ugly
consequence of the U.S. willfully sponsoring
terrorists who torture civilians to death,
regularly conduct mass executions, kidnap children and mutilate the
bodies of their victims.
U.S. funneled Libyan arms, chemical weapons to “rebels”
The
U.S.’ arming of al-Nusra began when the conflict in Syria was in
its infancy. In September 2011, the Obama administration began
providing logistical assistance to anti-Assad forces – namely the
Free Syrian Army, Syrian Revolutionaries Front, the Democratic Forces
of Syria and related groups – who were then supported by U.S.
allies Qatar, Saudi Arabia and Turkey. These groups received an
estimated $1 billion from
the CIA every year from 2012 until the program was scaled back in
2015. In addition, the U.S. government gave
another $500 million to
the “rebels” in 2014 which was intended to train thousands of
opposition fighters – an operation that turned out to be remarkably
ineffective.
A
year later, the CIA initiated weapon shipments to these
foreign-funded “rebels” by
funneling weapons that
once belonged to the fallen Gaddafi regime in Libya to
anti-government militias in Syria.
As
Gareth Porter details in his recent piece “How
America Armed Terrorists in Syria,”
the CIA continued to connect U.S. regional allies directly arming the
opposition with weapons from Libya and former Soviet bloc countries,
resulting in an estimated 8,000 tons of weapons being poured into
Syria in less than four months, from December 2012 to mid-March 2013.
The quantity of weapons that flooded into Syria from 2011 until that
time undoubtedly dwarfs this figure.
In
addition, the U.S. secured more than just conventional arms being
shipped to Syria. For instance, Pulitzer Prize-winning
journalist Seymour
Hersh exposed how
the Gaddafi regime’s chemical weapon stores were also sent to
foreign-backed opposition forces in Syria, including sarin gas. Hersh
has suggested that former Secretary of State Hillary
Clinton approved the chemical weapon transfers.
While
the U.S. was not directly arming al-Nusra specifically at this time,
the terror group’s effectiveness at combating the Syrian
government, along with their ruthlessness, quickly made them the
darlings of Saudi Arabia and Qatar, who were funding the “rebels”
with their own money and with U.S. assistance.
By
late 2012, the U.S. was well-aware that most of the arms it was
sending into the country were going to Syria’s al-Qaeda offshoot.
As the New
York Times reported in
October 2012, U.S. officials acknowledged off the record that “most”
of the arms shipped to Syrian “rebels” with U.S. support had
ended up in the hands of “hardline Islamic jihadists.”
However,
internal government communications reveal that the government knew
that such “jihadists” were al-Nusra. A now-declassified
U.S. government internal report from
2012 stated that the “the Salafists, the Muslim Brotherhood and AQI
[al-Qaeda in Iraq] are the major forces driving the insurgency in
Syria.” However, no efforts were taken to halt the U.S.-supported
flow of arms to such groups, which continued years after this
surprisingly frank admission.
Other
evidence from that same year has suggested that this “oversight”
was intentional. For instance, a
2012 email written
by Jacob Sullivan and sent to then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton
stated that “AQ [al-Qaeda] is on our side in Syria,” implying a
tacit alliance of sorts between the U.S. government and known
terrorist elements that dominated the Syrian armed opposition.
PDF
embed
Despite
the true nature of the foreign-funded opposition being well-known to
U.S. officials, the arming of these so-called “rebel” groups only
became more rampant in the years that followed, with the
U.S. supplying
them with
heavy weaponry, such as anti-tank
missiles and anti-aircraft
weapons,
while also providing themwith
training.
The
advantage of such substantial support from the U.S. and its regional
allies has only led to the rapid growth and strengthening of
al-Nusra, enabling them to out-compete and eventually absorb nearly
all groups belonging to the U.S.-backed “moderate rebels” active
within Syria.
As
al-Nusra’s influence grew, many “moderate” groups who shared
similar ideas began to work alongside the terror group and eventually
became part of it or directly allied with it. Among the first to do
so were U.S.-supported groups such as Ahrar al-Sham and Jaysh
al-Islam, whose cooperation and close relationship with al-Nusra has
been documented by
the pro-opposition Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR).
But
the U.S. had no complaints when Jaysh al-Islam led
the Syrian opposition at
peace talks in Geneva in 2016. In addition, the U.S. has
consistently refused to
add al-Nusra collaborators to the UN terrorist list, prompting some
journalists to call such
a refusal an “unwitting U.S. admission” regarding who really
leads the “rebellion” in Syria.
According
to the
Russian Defense Ministry,
the vast majority of Syrian opposition groups supported by the U.S.
form “an integral part” of al-Nusra front. Even the mainstream
press in the United States has admitted that most “rebel” groups
have been overtaken by al-Nusra. For instance, in
February, the Washington
Postquoted an
official with the U.S.-backed Fastaqim rebel group as saying
“Al-Qaeda is eating us” and that al-Qaeda’s influence and power
led his group chose to join the al-Nusra affiliated group Ahrar
al-Sham.
As
University of Oklahoma Center for Middle East Studies Director Joshua
Landis told
Sputnik last year:
“The
United States has placed itself in a very difficult situation because
many of the rebel groups that it wants to become principal holders of
state power in Syria work hand and glove with Al-Qaeda.”
Supporting al-Qaeda from the shadows
While
the arming of Syrian “rebels” that are either members of or
affiliated with al-Nusra should be controversial enough, the U.S.
government has also managed to aid the terror group in other ways,
offering them protection and covert tools to bolster their ranks.
The
U.S. State Department and the U.S. military have
long justified the
presence of U.S. military personnel and assets within Syria as being
directly aimed at fighting terrorists within that nation, namely
Daesh (ISIS). However, on repeated occasions, the U.S. has worked to
protect al-Nusra by
asking the Russian military and
Syrian government to avoid targeting the terror group.
Such
requests have led Russia to call the U.S.’ commitment to fighting
al-Nusra into question, with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey
Lavrov stating
in October last
year that the Russian government “doesn’t see any facts that the
U.S. is seriously battling al-Nusra.”
However,
the words of al-Nusra members themselves paint an even more
disturbing picture of direct U.S. involvement in aiding the group. In
an interview with
German newspaper Koelner
Stadt-Anzeiger,
an al-Nusra unit commander named Abu Al Ezz stated that when al-Nusra
was under siege from the Syrian and Russian governments that “we
had officers from Turkey, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Israel and America
here…Experts in the use of satellites, rockets, reconnaissance, and
thermal security cameras.”
When
asked to confirm the presence of U.S. instructors within its ranks,
Al Ezz replied “the Americans are on our side,” echoing a 2012
email exchange between Hillary Clinton and her advisor Jacob Sullivan
regarding al-Qaeda in Syria.
Perhaps
this explains why the “Stop Arming Terrorists Act” introduced by
Hawaiian Democratic Senator Tulsi Gabbard, which would bar federal
agencies from using taxpayer-backed funds to provide weapons,
training or any other type of support to terrorist cells such as
al-Qaeda, Daesh or any other group associated with them,was
only supported by 2 percent of
U.S. congressmen.
U.S.’ history of flirting with terrorist groups for geopolitical gain
While
the strategy of arming al-Qaeda affiliated terrorists and extremists
in Syria may seem bizarre, it is actually part of a long-standing
U.S. government practice that led to the terror group’s founding in
the first place. Indeed, al-Qaeda is the textbook example of the U.S.
creating and arming a terror group for political purposes.
Under
the presidency of Ronald Reagan, the U.S. government sent
billions of dollars in military aid to
the mujahideen in Afghanistan as part of a U.S.-supported “jihad”
against the Soviet Union. These extremist fighters, led by Osama bin
Laden, would soon become known as al-Qaeda. Gareth Porter told
MintPress that the creation of al-Qaeda under the Reagan
administration “set the precedent for the U.S. to support jihadi
forces where and when it is deemed to serve broader U.S. political
and diplomatic aims.”
Years
later, al-Qaeda’s relationship with the U.S. is best described as a
love-hate affair. As Garikai
Chengu wrote in Counterpunch in
2014: “Depending on whether a particular al-Qaeda terrorist group
in a given region furthers American interests or not, the U.S. State
Department either funds or aggressively targets that terrorist group.
Even as American foreign policy makers claim to oppose Muslim
extremism, they knowingly foment it as a weapon of foreign policy.”
However,
al-Qaeda is just one example of the U.S.’ aiding and abetting of
terror groups in order to realize broader geopolitical aims targeting
“enemies” of the U.S. political establishment. Latin America, for
instance, is rife with examples of how the U.S. trained and funded
terror groups to destabilize or topple leftist governments,
particularly in Nicaragua and El
Salvador in
the 1970s and 1980s.
Colombia
is another example that bares an uncanny resemblance to the U.S.’
policy in the Syrian conflict. Colombia, the U.S.’ closest ally in
South America, has
received over $4 billion in
U.S. military assistance since 2000. Much of that assistance has gone
to elements of the military – including right-wing paramilitary
groups – that the U.S. State Department had “vetted” and
“determined had complied with human rights requirements.”
While
that vetting was taking place, Colombia reported a surge in the
Colombian military murdering civilians in cold blood, resulting in
329 civilians killed in 2007. The Los
Angeles Times reported that
47 percent of those murders had been conducted by the very army units
previously “vetted” by the State Department.
Iraq
is another example where, for civilians, the line between “rebel”
terrorist and “army” terrorist is becoming increasingly thin.
There, the U.S. recently doubled down, promising to continue sending
aid to elements of the Iraqi Security Forces that have documented
carrying out human rights violations and war crimes. Many of the more
notorious units within the Iraqi Security Forces were
trained by former
U.S. special forces operative James Steele, who first made a name for
himself training U.S.-backed paramilitary forces that terrorized El
Salvador in the 1980s.
The
U.S.’ well-documented history of supporting and using terror groups
to fulfill geopolitical goals is so convincing that even Lt. General
William Odom, director of the National Security Agency under Ronald
Reagan, has
noted that “By
any measure, the U.S. has long used terrorism. In ‘78-79 the Senate
was trying to pass a law against international terrorism – in every
version they produced, the lawyers said the U.S. would be in
violation.”
Today,
little has changed, especially given the true nature of U.S.
involvement with the “moderate” opposition in Syria. Now, the
Trump administration has taken to inventing chemical attacks to blame
on the Syrian government before
they even happen,
again hoping to justify Western intervention in Syria.
The
timing couldn’t be better, as only Western
intervention is
guaranteed to save Syria’s struggling al-Qaeda “rebels” and
create the next failed state in the Middle East.
By Whitney
Webb /
Republished with permission / MintPress
News / Report
a typo
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Toevoeging op 16 december 2017: intussen heeft de VS 'Al Qaida Syrië' van de zwarte lijst met terreurorganisaties gehaald!!
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