The alleged fleeing of General Selim Idriss of the so-called “Free Syrian Army” (FSA), was more symbolic than anything else.
Image: U.S. Marine Helicopter (Wikimedia Commons).
Whether or not he really fled, and whether he is in Turkey or Qatar
is of little consequence. The so-called “moderates” he commanded were
nothing more than a smokescreen, a cheap veneer applied to the hardcore
Wahabist extremists of Al Qaeda’s Al Nusra franchise and similar fronts
that have formed the core of foreign-backed militancy turned against the
Syrian people from the very beginning of the conflict.
It was as early as 2007 when it was revealed that the US, Israel,
and Saudi Arabia were planning on building up extremists within and
around Syria for the purpose of eventually overthrowing the
government. Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Seymour Hersh warned about
this in his extensive report titled, ”The Redirection: Is the Administration’s new policy benefiting our enemies in the war on terrorism?” which prophetically stated (emphasis added):
“To undermine Iran, which is predominantly Shiite, the
Bush Administration has decided, in effect, to reconfigure its
priorities in the Middle East. In Lebanon, the Administration has
coöperated with Saudi Arabia’s government, which is Sunni, in
clandestine operations that are intended to weaken Hezbollah, the Shiite
organization that is backed by Iran. The U.S. has also taken part in
clandestine operations aimed at Iran and its ally Syria. A by-product
of these activities has been the bolstering of Sunni extremist groups
that espouse a militant vision of Islam and are hostile to America and
sympathetic to Al Qaeda.”
While the initial conflict was disingenuously portrayed as the
spontaneous militarization of unarmed protesters fighting against a
“brutal regime,” in reality Al Nusra was already inside the country and
operating on a national scale. The US State Department itself would
reveal this in its December 2012 “
Terrorist Designations of the al-Nusrah Front as an Alias for al-Qa’ida in Iraq,” which stated:
Since November 2011, al-Nusrah Front has claimed nearly
600 attacks – ranging from more than 40 suicide attacks to small arms
and improvised explosive device operations – in major city centers
including Damascus, Aleppo, Hamah, Dara, Homs, Idlib, and Dayr al-Zawr.
During these attacks numerous innocent Syrians have been killed.
And while the West has attempted to portray these extremist groups as
entities entirely separate from the “moderates” they have claimed to be
openly training, funding, arming, and equipping to the tune of billions
of dollars, there is no other logical explanation for Al Nusra’s
ability to rise above these Western-backed “moderates,” unless of course
they never existed and the West was, as was planned in 2007,
simply arming Al Qaeda all along.
In Hersh’s 2007 report, it was noted that the West could not directly
arm or fund the militant groups and that the US and Israel would have
to funnel weapons and cash through nations like Saudi Arabia and Lebanon
instead. Since 2011 when these plans went fully operational, Qatar and
Turkey have also entered the fray. When questions are raised about Al
Nusra’s rising prominence in the conflict, the West has been
increasingly unsuccessful in convincing the world of its own plausible
deniability.
As the Syrian government began early this year to decisively turn the
tide against the West’s proxy invasion, and after several abortive
attempts to directly intervene militarily, the West appears to have
resigned the myth of “moderates” and as of this week,
symbolically ended its so-called “non-lethal aid”
to terrorists operating in Syria. In fact, the myth of “moderates” was
perpetuated solely to justify intervening directly on their behalf. With
direct intervention taken off the table, it appears a new phase in the
war has begun.
Indeed, the West has claimed it has stopped the flow of aid to its
“moderate” proxies, however, in practice, billions of dollars of
equipment, weapons, and other forms of support will continue to flow so
long as there are forces of any kind fighting inside of Syria against
the government and its people.
Geopolitical maneuvering reveals the framework for this next phase.
During the West’s
disingenuous nuclear negotiations with Iran, a feigned rift was opened between the US and Saudi Arabia. In Reuters’ report titled, “
Saudi Arabia warns of shift away from U.S. over Syria, Iran,” it stated:
Upset at President Barack Obama’s policies on Iran and
Syria, members of Saudi Arabia’s ruling family are threatening a rift
with the United States that could take the alliance between Washington
and the kingdom to its lowest point in years.
Of course, Saudi Arabia owes its entire existence to the United
States – from its oil infrastructure, its military, and even its brutal
internal security forces – any real rift between the US and the Saudis
would be a gust of wind upon a shaky house of cards.
In reality, the rift is nothing more than political cover for the
West as Saudi Arabia plans a more open and aggressive proxy campaign
against Syria. As it directly arms and builds up legions of Al Qaeda,
this rift will afford the United States who will in fact still be
assisting Saudi Arabia in its proxy war, a degree of plausible
deniability.
In Foreign Policy’s article, “
Why Is Saudi Arabia Buying 15,000 U.S. Anti-Tank Missiles for a War It Will Never Fight? Hint: Syria,” it states:
No one is expecting a tank invasion of Saudi Arabia
anytime soon, but the kingdom just put in a huge order for U.S.-made
anti-tank missiles that has Saudi-watchers scratching their heads and
wondering whether the deal is related to Riyadh’s support for the Syrian
rebels.
The proposed weapons deal, which the Pentagon notified
Congress of in early December, would provide Riyadh with more than
15,000 Raytheon anti-tank missiles at a cost of over $1 billion.
Foreign Policy would go on to explain how the scheme would work, with
the US replacing Saudi Arabia’s current arsenal while Saudi Arabia
unloaded its older weapons onto terrorist armies invading Syria. FP
reports:
But while the latest American anti-tank weapons might not
be showing up in Aleppo anytime soon, that doesn’t mean the deal is
totally disconnected from Saudi efforts to arm the Syrian rebels. What
may be happening, analysts say, is that the Saudis are sending their
stockpiles of anti-tank weapons bought from elsewhere to Syria and are
purchasing U.S. missiles to replenish their own stockpiles. “I would
speculate that with an order of this size, the Saudis were flushing
their current stocks in the direction of the opposition and replacing
them with new munitions,” said Charles Freeman, a former U.S. ambassador
to Saudi Arabia.
Saudis’ Terror Legions Not Enough to Win War – West Has Another Plan
Of course, with Syria’s army already decisively on the
offensive, restoring order to large swaths of Syrian territory and with
the West’s terrorist proxies in many cases surrounded and cut off
completely by Syrian forces, simply increasing arms shipments will not
make much of a difference – it will only prolong the inevitable and
leave a lower intensity terror campaign like that seen currently in
Iraq.
With the West dumping the “moderate” narrative and acknowledging that
Al Qaeda is all that is left fighting in Syria, it is preparing to
leverage that terror threat and the possibility of its ally Saudi Arabia
enhancing that threat as leverage with the Russians to cut ties and
support for the Syrian government and bring the conflict to an end
favorable to the West which
started it in the first place.
This was revealed in Foreign Policy’s article, “
Obama Advisor: ‘Extremism’ Could Be Key to Ending Syrian Civil War,” which stated (emphasis added):
For the past two and a half years, as the civil war in
Syria has descended into brutal bloodletting and spilled over its
borders, Obama administration officials have consistently decried the
growing presence of Islamist extremists in the conflict. But on
Wednesday, Deputy National Security Advisor Antony Blinken turned that
logic on its head: The growing role of extremist groups may actually be a good thing for bringing the conflict to a close, he said.
Speaking at Transformational Trends, a conference
co-hosted by Foreign Policy and the Policy Planning Staff of the U.S.
State Department, Blinken said that the radicalization of the
conflict may create a shared interest among world powers to bring the
war to an end. The growing prominence of radical groups has “begun to
concentrate the minds of critical actors outside of Syria” and may strip
the Bashar al-Assad regime of the key international backing that has so
far helped to keep him in power.
If anything, however, such a move should be perceived by the world as
the West conceding defeat and the resignation of its “global order”
that once constituted hegemonic superiority. Syria’s allies should take
this new designation of the conflict in Syria as a “terror threat” as an
opportunity to expand open support for the Syrian government to carry
out sweeping anti-terror operations. Russia, China, Iran, and all other
nations of good will should go to the UN seeking binding resolutions to
help the Syrian government fight what is admitted now even by the West
as a “war on terror.”
The arrogance of the West may have just dealt the final blow to their
global power and influence through this last attempt to leverage their
own terror-front to end the conflict in their favor. Syria and its
allies should take this opportunity to both expose the West and its
regional axis of terror, and stop the war in Syria not with conditions
favorable for the West and their regional ambitions, but with conditions
favorable for the Syrian people.
