Syria

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Re: Syria

Post by blindpig » Fri Sep 10, 2021 2:32 pm

US plays dangerous game in Syria
China Daily Global | Updated: 2021-09-10 09:31


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US soldiers patrol in the northeastern Syrian village of Jawadiyah in Hasakeh Province, near the border with Turkey, on Aug 30. [DELIL SOULEIMAN/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE]

DAMASCUS, Syria-The presence of United States forces in Syria since 2014 has done nothing to help end a civil war and only increased instability in the country, political experts said.

The US intervention-without Syria's consent-was begun on the pretext of fighting radical groups such as the Islamic State, which was created in the wake of the US invasion of Iraq in 2003.

The experts pointed out that ever since the US launched an international war on terrorism following the Sept 11 attacks, its policy has been defined mainly by military interventions to reshape the Middle East in accordance with its own vision and agenda, not for the benefit of the people in these countries.

Muhammad Omari, a Syrian political expert, said terrorist threats still exist in Syria and that the groups behind them are covered by foreign powers, which provide them with arms and other military equipment to prolong their existence and further destabilize the country.

It's no secret that the US supports the Kurdish fighters in northeast Syria and encourages the rebels to create a form of regional autonomy in the area.

Imad Salem, another political expert, said the US military presence has impeded any progress that the Syrian army could make in areas east of the Euphrates region, which is controlled by the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces, or SDF.

The US doesn't really want to fight terrorism and its existence in the region has only brought "destruction and catastrophes", Salem said, adding that Washington not only supports the SDF but also emboldens the sleeper cells of the Islamic State to "carry out operations targeting the Syrian army, especially in the Syrian desert".

The analysts also believe that the US is conniving in the terrorist groups' theft of oil and other natural resources in Syria, worsening the tough economic situation of the Syrian people.

"Today there are sanctions and economic terrorism imposed on Syria amid a lack of capacity by the Syrian state to provide basic needs of the Syrian people" due to economic pressure, Omari said.

These actions are conducive to "creating a climate for growing terrorist organizations in the country", Omari said.

The political expert said the rates of terrorist and extremist incidents in Syria were much lower before the US forces entered the country.

"I believe that the military occupation and the devastation, destruction, economic and social effects it leaves behind, ... create a suitable environment for terrorist organizations to exist and grow in these countries," Omari said.

Lack of necessities

The experts said that the US has taken control of key gas and oil fields in eastern Syria while imposing suffocating economic sanctions to throttle the economy in government-controlled areas. These actions have worsened a shortage of basic necessities amid skyrocketing prices.

The dire situation in Syria has spillover effects. A direct result of the economic situation is the refugee exodus to Europe, and new flows add to the refugee crisis there, the experts said.

They believe that the real intention of the US is to weaken Syria and force the government into succumbing to the US policy in the region and accepting Washington's dictates.

With time, the example of Syria will make it clear that the US strategy only serves to destabilize the Middle East while doing little to keep terrorist organizations at bay.

A sure conclusion, Salem said, is that the staggering costs of the "war on terror" and its impact on the Middle East have created instability, chaos, destruction, and insecurity.

Xinhua

http://global.chinadaily.com.cn/a/20210 ... 6e921.html

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Re: Syria

Post by blindpig » Wed Sep 29, 2021 1:36 pm

IRAN’S ACTION IS PUSHING SYRIA TO BE EMBRACED BY THE ARAB AND INTERNATIONAL COMMUNITY
Posted on 27/09/2021 by Elijah J Magnier

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By Elijah J. Magnier:

The ripple effect of the Iranian oil tankers taking oil to Lebanon via Syria affected and generously amplified the influence of Hezbollah in Lebanon and reached the US, Russia, and several Arab states. The consequences have hastened important regional and international issues, putting these forcefully on the discussion table and imposing a review of US policy in West Asia, particularly Syria. The western countries, including the US, began to rethink and contemplate the current reservations about the relationship with Syria and its return to the Arab League and the international community. The goal – or perhaps the wish – is to offer President Bashar al-Assad the opportunity to rethink his global and regional relations and remove Iran and Russia’s exclusive roles in the Levant.

Many events have taken place in West Asia and New York in recent months. The undeclared meetings in Baghdad between Saudi Arabia and Iran, Jordan and Iran, and Egypt with Iran helped break the ice among these regional countries and discuss important affairs of great concern. Moreover, the Iraqi summit enabled Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Iran, Kuwait, Egypt, Jordan, and France to meet and warm up their relationship, creating more rapprochement between regional states. Iraq is playing a positive but important role where all countries can convene and discuss their differences. Also, there were important meetings between the Jordanian King Abdullah with President Joe Biden in Washington and President Vladimir Putin in Moscow, and the meeting of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s with President Putin to talk about the unity of the Syrian territory. Lastly, the expected visit of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan to Moscow and New York. These meetings open the door to the next stage, which paves the way for Syria’s return to the regional and international sphere.

Indeed, the most prominent development was the Jordanian king’s declaration from Washington that “President Bashar al-Assad is staying in power and a way must be found to regain the dialogue with him.” This does not mean that Jordan ceased its relationship with Syria in the last decade. The Jordanian embassy has never closed its doors in Damascus or the Syrian embassy in Amman despite Jordan hosting the Military Operation Command (MOC) room. The MOC hosted Arab and western military commanders, including the US, to lead sabotage and attack operations inside Syria, aiming to end the rule of the Syrian President and create a failed state in Syria. It has supported and trained militants and jihadists in Jordan, including Al-Qaeda organisations, to the knowledge of the US’s trainees and administration.

Throughout the decades of war in Syria, contacts between Amman and Damascus at security and political levels did not stop, although they varied in intensity. The last significant official communications were twofold.

The first was a call between the Jordanian Interior Minister Mazen al-Faraya with his Syrian counterpart, Muhammad al-Rahmoun. The two Ministers said they have agreed to coordinate the transit of trucks between the two countries, which means that the US has to exclude Jordan and Syria from the sanctions imposed through the “Caesar Civilian Protection Act“. Syrian trucks will be able to cross the borders without discharging their load into other trucks on the Jordanian side of the borders. That will significantly reduce the Syrian cost, open the road of Syrian merchandise to many countries, and bring in much-needed foreign currency.

The second high official contact was the visit of the Syrian Minister of Defence and Deputy Prime Minister Ali Ayoub to Amman and the meeting with the Jordanian Chief of Staff, Major General Yousef Al-Hunaiti, the first official meeting at this level after ten years of war in Syria.

There is little doubt that the US opened the door for Syria’s return to Lebanon when it agreed to revive the gas line carrying Egyptian gas via Jordan to Lebanon. This gas line was offered as an alternative in a desperate attempt to limit Iranian diesel and gasoline flowing to Lebanon via Hezbollah. The US Ambassador to Lebanon, Dorothy Shea, announced the gas supply decision in reaction to the announcement by the Secretary-General of Hezbollah Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah. Sayyed Nasrallah promised to supply the country with Iranian oil through Syria to break the US-unannounced blockade and meet the Lebanese people’s needs. Lebanon, thirsty for oil supplies (whose loss has paralysed the cycle of life in the country, which is suffering an unprecedented economic crisis), blessed the Iranian oil as it fell like manna on the Lebanese population. The popularity of Iran and Hezbollah boomed and was hailed by allies, friends and (many) enemies alike.

However, Iranian oil is not the only problem that the US and the Arab countries have to face. They are highly concerned that Syria will remain within the Iranian sphere of influence. Iran gained unprecedented popularity in Syria because of Washington’s policy, which wanted to create a failed state in Syria and remove President Assad from power. Moreover, Iran gathered more kudos when the US was unable to destabilise Syria, Iraq and Lebanon. The US administration thought that by imposing harsh sanctions on Syria and preventing any rapprochement between Damascus and other regional and western capitals, it could leverage President Assad and force his hand to dictate its conditions.

It seems that Joe Biden’s administration is beginning to evaluate matters more realistically, as expressed by the Jordanian king after he met with Biden. It is not by coincidence that King Abdullah says from Washington that there is a necessity for Syria’s return and dealings with Assad, a taboo topic to previous US administrations. It is indeed a small but significant step, even if it does not mean that the US will soon warm its relationship with Syria. Instead, the return of the Arab and Western countries relationship with Assad is a preparation for public opinion to acknowledge that the Syrian President is the elected leader of his country, which the countries involved in the last decade of war can no longer ignore.

The Syrian President said to his many official regional and western visitors that “the US has never severed its security relationship with Syria. However, we in Syria reject any political dialogue unless the US-occupied forces withdraw from the north-east active region.”

The US and many European states have maintained a security and counter-terrorism relationship with Syria (France, Italy, Germany, and others). However, Syria has stipulated that all the European delegations should reopen the doors of their embassies before engaging in political relations. Damascus’s government is stronger today than ever, notably when the south has fully returned to the Syrian army control.

Indeed, in recent weeks, Syria liberated Daraa and Tafas, securing more than 328 kilometres starting from the Badia to As-Suwayda and Daraa. A few days ago, all cities in the Huran area fell under the Syrian army’s control. A large part of the south of Syria was under rebels who coexisted with the Syrian military, following a deal stipulated by Russia in 2018. These militants created a “buffer zone”, controlling the border crossing with Jordan and protecting the Israelis who occupy the Syrian Golan Heights and Israel’s borders. The Israelis repeatedly said they feared the presence of Hezbollah and Iran on the Syrian borders and failed to impose a zone free of the Iranian presence wherever the Syrian leadership wished it to be.

However, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said, “Russia will not accept that Syria is used as a platform for operations against Israel.” Thus, Russia is sending the message to the US and Israel that the Syrian forces on the Syrian borders are a guarantor of Israel’s protection and an indication to Iran that Moscow wishes for the occupied Golan Heights front to remain cold.

The Russian Minister Lavrov is undoubtedly expressing Russia’s concern over Israel’s safety and security and is offering Moscow’s guarantee to prevent attacks against the occupied Golan Heights. Nevertheless, Russia did not stop Israel from violating Syrian sovereignty and territory. Indeed, Israel carried out over a thousand attacks, violating Syrian sovereignty, killing many civilians, and destroying many positions and warehouses belonging to the Syrian state. Moscow offered the Syrian army surface-to-air missiles to intercept the Israeli aggressive and repetitive attacks but failed to stop these attacks even when Israel was responsible for downing the Il-20 aircraft and killing 15 Russian service members.

Russia has been present in the south since 2018, following a deal between local militants and the Syrian government. This deal is no longer necessary because the forces of Damascus took complete control of the south of Syria. Moreover, Russia can’t prevent Syria from liberating its territory (the Golan Heights) when the central government decides to do so at any time in the future.

Undoubtedly, the Iranian influence and military presence in Syria were consequences of the global war against Syria and its request to Iran for support. Even if the US is preventing Middle Eastern countries from re-establishing ties with Syria, Damascus shows a willingness to open a new page with Western and Arab countries. Therefore, the US is the main contributor to the increasing Iranian influence in the Levant when the “Islamic Republic” is Syria’s leading supporter and supplier of first necessities.

The US may be trying to compensate by reviewing its position on Syria and its self-violation of “Caesar’s Law” to create new balances in the region and allow the Arab League to include Damascus again. During the recent summit in Baghdad, the French President Emmanuel Macron promised the Iraqi Prime Minister Mustafa Al-Kadhemi to look into the EU relationship with Assad. Al-Kadhemi briefed President al-Assad in a twenty-minute private telephone conversation immediately after the conference ended.

The return of the official Jordanian-Syrian relationship is related to border security, preventing old-new smuggling roads between the two countries, and combating terrorism. Jordan is taking the lead as a pioneer in opening the door for other Middle Eastern countries to go through it and allow the US administration to prepare its future policy to enable Syria to return to the regional and international platforms and no longer be isolated. This is not going to happen very soon. However, it is the beginning of a fundamental position shift toward Syria.

The international community will have no choice but to embrace Syria, the sooner the better, before the nuclear deal with Iran is implemented and when all sanctions are lifted. When this happens in the coming months, Iran is expected to become much stronger financially and enjoy unprecedented economic and financial power. Its support to Syria will be much more significant, rendering the US-EU embargo useless and ineffective.

The Iranian oil tanker docked in Syria, and the gas oil was transported to Lebanon, just as Hezbollah’s balance-breaking weapons supply is. The Iranian presence in Quneitra also worries Israel and the US and challenges the Israeli occupation of the Syrian Golan. In addition, the Syrian war is coming to an end with the liberation of the territories occupied by the US-Turkish in the north. The US forces will leave sooner or later, causing severe concern to the Kurdish forces in that northeast part of the country.

Indeed, the representative of the “Syrian Democratic Council” (the force that protects the US occupation forces) in the United States, Bassam Saqr, said that “America should warn the Syrian Kurds if the decision to withdraw all forces is taken. The withdrawal, whenever it will happen, must be gradual, step by step.”

A shift in the US policy and its review of the future of its forces occupying the northeast of Syria is to be expected. What raised severe alarms in the US and other Gulf countries is the strength Iran has reached and the power it is enjoying as an unintended consequence of the Syrian war in 2011. It is high time to admit the failure of the US objectives and allow the Syrian economy and its relationship with the rest of the world to blossom. The Syrian-Iranian relationship is strategic and their strong bond is robust enough not to be out at risk notwithstanding the future development in Syria.

Proofread by: Maurice Brasher

https://ejmagnier.com/2021/09/27/irans- ... community/
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: Syria

Post by blindpig » Mon Oct 11, 2021 1:47 pm

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Lebanon and Syria under Siege
October 10, 2021
By Tim Anderson – Oct 5, 2021

While the peoples of both countries have common origins, a key problem is, as many politically conscious Lebanese say: in Syria, there is a state, while in Lebanon there is a sectarian cartel of clans ruled by a handful of families.

How is it that, after ten years of war, the streets of Damascus are clean, basic food and services are available while Beirut remains a stinking metropolis of billionaires and beggars?

Separated by colonial design, neighbors Syria and Lebanon have evolved very different characters as nation-states and – more recently – have responded in distinct ways to Washington’s hybrid warfare, which aimed to extinguish independent political will in the region.

While the peoples of both countries have common origins, a key problem is, as many politically conscious Lebanese say: in Syria, there is a state, while in Lebanon there is a sectarian cartel of clans ruled by a handful of families.

How did this happen? Just as the British divided peoples in the former Ottoman territories it seized, by installing monarchies and the European Zionist colony, so the French carved out what they hoped might remain a loyal Maronite-Christian dominated coastal enclave.

The various Syrian communities, on the other hand, united in an anti-colonial struggle, to expel the French and reforge their nation. That led to a fairly strong state with some socialist features in a mixed economy.

In Lebanon, the Maronite majority has long gone, but the sectarian system remains, modified only slightly after a terrible civil war, and leaving a highly privatized system with little political will and few national institutions.

The result is that the two nations are dealing with the US-American siege of the region (wrongly called ‘sanctions’) in quite different ways. In Lebanon, there is even a minority that refuses to accept that the country is actually under siege.

However, Washington has spread the series of coercive measures imposed on Hezbollah (a leading member of the ruling coalition) to its domestic allies and the third party measures imposed on Syria and Iran also constrain Lebanon. The US is trying, without much success, to remove from government those who have resisted the Israelis most effectively.

Regional siege measures are a major factor in financial collapse, with Syria’s currency devaluing to a sixth of its value in the last 2 years, while Lebanon’s currency devalued to less than a tenth. Lebanon has relied much more on the cash economy and imports, a liability in a crash.

Enormous – often kilometer-long – queues for fuel are seen in Lebanon, while in Syria there is a better-organized ration system, providing 25 liters each per week, with text messages sent to advise when to collect.

And even with large parts of Syria’s own oil supply blocked and stolen by US occupation forces and their SDF proxies, Syria has been able to help Lebanon, in coordination with Lebanon’s Hezbollah, by rehabilitating and using its Baniyas port and refinery to channel Iranian fuel into Lebanon. After stern warnings from Hassan Nasrallah, and despite Israel’s sabotage war against Iranian ships, the Israelis and the U.S. were reluctant to sabotage this particular operation.

Still, Lebanon’s new ‘government’, led by billionaire Najib Mikati, has invited IMF overseers, who will make sure that Lebanon imposes no new subsidies to help the Lebanese people. The IMF-led destruction of food subsidies has been linked to starvation and food riots in many countries. Perhaps Lebanon has few subsidies left to destroy? By contrast, the bulk of poverty-stricken Syrians at least enjoy some relief through state subsidies on basic items such as bread, rice, and sugar.

Syria also maintains a mostly free public health system, despite great damage from the long war and siege, while Lebanon’s health services are highly privatized and mostly under ‘user pays’ regimes. Only in respect of pandemic measures is Lebanon ahead, due to higher levels of testing and vaccination. Both countries have much the same policies but Syria lacks test kits and vaccines.

There are still many Syrian war refugees in Lebanon, but here there is a reciprocal history. In the small Christian town of Maaloula, two years back, a local priest proudly showed me a letter from Hassan Nasrallah, thanking the town for taking in refugees from Lebanon’s south, during the Israeli invasion of 2006 which displaced tens of thousands. At the same time, the priest acknowledged that, when the town was threatened by the NATO-backed terrorists in 2014, it was young Muslim men from Lebanon (i.e. Hezbollah) who defended the town, often at the price of their young lives.

It is this broader Levantine cooperation that is bringing the two countries together again, under common siege. The Biden administration had to waive its own third party “sanctions” on Syria, to allow “the first official visit” of a Lebanese government delegation to Syria in ten years, i.e. during the long war on Syria. And that was because the only energy alternative to Iranian fuel that Washington could think of was to port Egyptian or Jordanian gas through Syria to Lebanon. In the event, the cheap Iranian fuel (to be paid for in the Lebanese currency) came through while the Egyptian-Jordanian gas idea is still a ‘pie in the sky’. But part of the blockade of both countries was lifted.

In the longer term, both countries need each other. Lebanon has been the highly commercialized coastal hub and Syria the stronger, productive hinterland. The key obstacle to deeper cooperation is Lebanon’s sectarian, privatized system. That prevents the little country from asserting itself either at home or abroad, just how the US, French and British want it to remain. The little ‘confessional’ state needs a new constitution.

https://orinocotribune.com/lebanon-and- ... der-siege/

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Bellingcat funded by U.S. and UK intelligence contractors that aided extremists in Syria
Originally published: The Grayzone by Kit Klarenberg (October 9, 2021 ) | - Posted Oct 11, 2021

Since its launch in July 2014, the self-styled open-source investigations website Bellingcat has cemented itself as a darling of mainstream Western media, with its dives into alleged Syrian government chemical weapon attacks and Russian intelligence operations showered with praise, puff pieces, and glitzy awards.

While vehemently insisting that it is independent of government influence, Bellingcat is funded by both the U.S. government’s National Endowment for Democracy and the European Union. CIA officials have declared their “love” for Bellingcat, and there are unambiguous signs that the outlet has partnered closely with London and Washington to further the pair’s imperial objectives.

Now that the media consortium has obtained access to high-tech satellites capable of capturing 50cm resolution imagery of any place on Earth, it is time to place these connections under the microscope.

To explore the relationship between Bellingcat and centers of imperial power, look no further than its officially published financial accounts from 2019 to 2020. According to these records, Bellingcat has accepted enormous sums from Western intelligence contractors.

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From Bellingcat’s public financial accounts

These war-profiteering firms have in turn provided direct support to Al Qaeda-allied jihadist groups in Syria–the same elements that have provided Bellingcat with “evidence” to convict Damascus in absentia on all manner of dubious charges.

Bellingcat’s cast of Western intelligence-connected funders is just the latest indication that its founder Eliot Higgins receives privileged, slanted information from extremist sources within Syria, and that his organization’s media operations have been conducted in concert with these elements.

Higgins’ recent history of promoting ISIS’ top Twitter propagandist raises further serious questions about Bellingcat’s reliance on Salafi-jihadist elements in Syria.

Funding from shady U.S. and UK firms

Journalist and academic Alan MacLeod has exposed in detail Bellingcat’s deep and cohering ties to the Western national security state. The supposedly open-source operation has employed a staggering number of former military and intelligence operatives, deploying them to reinforce imperial narratives while reaping sponsorship from an array of governments and quasi-governmental bodies.

Nonetheless, mainstream reporters have continued to peddle the fiction that Bellingcat is “independent,” and not in receipt of funding from any state. The Times of London, for example, has falsely asserted the organization “wisely refuses money from governments.”

For its part, Bellingcat’s website states it doesn’t “solicit or accept funding directly [emphasis added] from any national government,” but “can solicit or accept contributions from international or intergovernmental institutions” and “funding that is distributed by a private foundation that accepts government funds.”

Given this duplicitous sleight of hand, Bellingcat’s most recent accounts make for fascinating reading.

The records indicate that Higgins and company raked in €100,000 from Zandstorm BV, a Dutch shell company established by Joseph Peeraer, the energy mogul who chairs Bellingcat’s supervisory board. Ironically, Peeraer’s Twitter biography describes him as “founder of a few failed ventures.”

Further, Bellingcat has received financial backing from several organizations heavily bankrolled by Western governments, and which serve as effective fronts for them, supporting Higgins’ activities on their financiers’ behalf.

In 2019 to 2020, Bellingcat received just over €5,000 from Washington-based contractor Chemonics. As The Grayzone has documented, this company conducts U.S. government-funded intelligence and destabilization operations the world over.

In 1993, Chemonics’ founder openly admitted that he created the firm to “have [his] own CIA.” The contractor was the conduit through which U.S. funds and equipment reached bogus humanitarian group Syria Civil Defense, providing it with the now famous–or infamous–white helmets that earned them their nickname, along with much more expensive communications and video gear.

More substantially, Bellingcat was allocated €160,000 by Zinc Network, a shadowy intelligence cutout that conducts information warfare operations on behalf of numerous UK government ministries, the U.S. State Department, and USAID, a U.S. intelligence front. It appears this cash injection was related to the Open Information Partnership, a Foreign Office-financed “troll factory” led by Zinc and dedicated to “weakening the Russian state’s influence” in Central and Eastern Europe.

As The Grayzone editor Max Blumenthal has revealed, Bellingcat was dispatched under the Open Information Partnership’s auspices to North Macedonia, at the UK Foreign Office’s express request, to “respond” to the country’s 2019 elections, which pitted a pro-NATO, pro-EU candidate against a pro-Russian one.

A local media organization was provided “cyber security training, mentoring on digital forensics, open-source investigation and media ethics” by Bellingcat, and the Atlantic Council’s DFR Lab, which Eliot Higgins helped create. The pro-NATO candidate comfortably prevailed in the second round, after the first produced a virtual tie, suggesting this state-directed meddling may have influenced the result.

Bellingcat also received just over $65,000 from Adam Smith International (ASI), which has reaped hundreds of millions from the UK government for conducting all manner of skulduggery overseas. It remains unclear what sort of activities were covered by this sum.

Bellingcat did not respond to a request for comment from this reporter. ASI, meanwhile, initially responded to a request for details on the payment to Bellingcat through its head of legal, ethics, and compliance, Nimisha Agarwal, who promised to “follow up internally” on the issue. Agarwal ultimately dropped off the radar, however, never following up or providing further information.

Given ASI’s sordid history, and direct connection to the proliferation of jihadism in Syria over the course of the country’s grisly, decade-long crisis, its financial relationship with Bellingcat further undercuts the media organization’s already risible claim to independence.

BBC documentary exposes massive ASI scandal in Syria

Adam Smith International brands itself as “a global advisory company that works locally to transform lives by making economies stronger, societies more stable, and governments more effective.”

In reality, ASI’s activities abroad have frequently placed it in extremely close collaboration with some of the most brutal human rights abusers on the planet, directly and indirectly resulting in death and destabilization on a massive scale.

ASI also has a deplorable track record of corruption and grift. In February 2017, the UK’s Department for International Development froze all future contracts with the company, after it was found to have committed numerous grave ethics breaches. For one, the firm hired a former department staffer who passed on sensitive internal government documents, which it then used to gain a competitive edge in contract bids.

ASI then sought to mislead a parliamentary inquiry investigating allegations it was engaged in “excessive profiteering,” by concocting bogus glowing testimonials from beneficiaries. A House of Commons international development committee report condemned the contractor’s “deplorable” and “entirely inappropriate” actions.

In response, four founding directors resigned without severance packages, and the contractor pledged to undertake internal reforms. Meanwhile, ASI continued to manage a large portfolio of projects for the Foreign Office. This included the NATO member state-backed Access to Justice and Community Security (AJACS) program, which funded, trained, and equipped the Free Syria Police (FSP), an unarmed civilian force set up in opposition-controlled areas of Syria such as Aleppo, Daraa, and Idlib.

ASI’s U.S. partner on the project was the CIA cutout Creative Associates, which has reaped billions from overseas meddling in the interests of Washington. As The Grayzone’s Ben Norton has documented, Creative Associates has been one of USAID’s go-to contractors for organizing a renewed attempt to orchestrate insurrection against Nicaragua’s Sandinista government. The firm has also played a direct role in U.S. intelligence efforts to foment destabilization in Cuba.

The Free Syrian Police project initially received fawning coverage in the Western media. A BBC article presented the group as a heroic band of volunteers committed to nonviolence, resolving local disputes through peaceful means, and working “closely” with the White Helmets in the aftermath of air raids to fight fires, rescue people from rubble, and provide them with medical assistance.

The British state broadcaster was nonetheless forced to acknowledge that the FSP’s ability to bring armed actors to justice was “limited.” The UK-backed police force was similarly unable to interfere in disputes involving extremist elements, although the media repeatedly emphasized that the force did not collaborate with jihadist groups.

In December 2017, the BBC’s own Panorama documentary, Jihadis You Pay For, blew that farcical notion out of the water. Relying on ASI whistleblowers as sources, it exposed how ASI had identified links between several FSP stations and Sharia courts run by Al-Nusra that carried out summary executions of citizens who violated its medieval legal codes. The intelligence contractor not only failed to cease funding these extremist elements; it allowed the Free Syrian Police to maintain the relationship.

In one instance, FSP officers in receipt of UK FCO funds delivered by ASI were present when women were stoned to death for violating Al-Nusra’s theocratic codes. They even closed the road to allow the brutal executions to take place. Al-Nusra was further reported to have handpicked FSP recruits at two stations in Idlib.

Internal ASI files featured in the documentary showed that officers in Aleppo had forked over cash to Nour al-Din al-Zinki, a CIA-backed militia linked to hideous atrocities, including the videotaped beheading of a Palestinian teenager in 2016. One document from July of that year warned that 20% of all police salaries were being handed over “to pay for the military and security support that Zinki provides to the five FSP stations located areas under its control,” with FSP operatives moreover working with a Zinki court, “writing up warrants, delivering notices, and turning criminals over.”

UK funding for the project was eventually suspended, yet it resumed less than a month later following a confidential internal government review which concluded there was a “mitigating context” to all Panorama’s disturbing revelations, and the program “did not provide any information that was not already known to [the justice and security scheme known as] AJACS.”

Aid experts were outraged by the resumption of the program. The BBC’s Panorama, meanwhile, claimed it was never contacted about the probe, and no source material it uncovered was inspected by officials.

ASI tolerated human rights abuses, Al Qaeda militants in Syria program

Leaked UK Foreign Office files related to the effort made it abundantly clear that the Access to Justice and Community Security program was well-aware such hazards were likely.

One document forecasted a “medium” risk of equipment and money being lost to armed actors, noting jihadist groups have done just that in the past, and the practice was “likely to reoccur.”

The Free Syrian Police collaborating with extremists or committing human rights abuses was considered a medium risk. Meanwhile, the likelihood of jihadist activity producing a “reduced operating space” for AJACS was considered “high,” as the project was “known to attract the attention of extremist groups,” including Al-Nusra and ISIS affiliates, which could “inhibit our work, challenge our agenda, and threaten our staff and partners via kidnap, assault and theft of equipment.”

Proposed methods of dealing with these dangers typically amounted to simply tolerating them. Adam Smith International justified the central role of jihadist groups in its policing project on the grounds that they “don’t have the means or levers” to prevent their participation, and that such an effort would not have been “cost-effective.”

The project could only be “terminated,” according to ASI, if it was not possible to displace responsibility for any dangers or abuses to “a party that does have the means to treat it.” That appears to have been a reference to the Foreign Office, which was ultimately responsible for deciding whether a risk should be tolerated or terminated.

Moreover, ASI outright pledged to, “where feasible,” “present a challenge” to extremist groups for “control of a community,” and “not give ground” to these elements “unless forced to,” advocating the acceptance of a higher level of risk in order to “contest the influence and legitimacy” of armed actors. As such, the UK Foreign Office needed to accept “the potential for equipment losses to a reasonable degree.”

Clearly, loss of weapons, money and life was hardwired into the DNA of AJACS. And given the many millions invested by the British government into the project, the official appetite for accepting these calamities was as high as possible. Indeed, London was willing to pump public funds into the dangerous project because it formed just one strand of a wider attempt to create a series of “moderate,” Western-controlled quasi-states across Syria.

This objective is referenced in another leaked file in which ASI promised to “step up” the coordination of AJACS with other “stabilization and transition” programs in Syria. This included Tamkeen–a UK and EU financed project to “build the governance capacities of local communities”–and White Helmets parent company Mayday Rescue. If successful, ASI noted, the effort could lead to “expansion into newly liberated territory.”

This investment also ensured a steady stream of mawkish human-interest stories and atrocity propaganda, produced by and featuring the Free Syria Police, White Helmets, and other Western-created and funded opposition actors on the ground for the mainstream media to lap up.

Bellingcat has long-been a prominent purveyor and legitimizer of these groups. There are moreover clear indications Bellingcat founder Higgins is party to privileged information from local sources, and his organization’s media operations are conducted in concert with them.

For example, in the immediate aftermath of the notorious April 2018 Douma “gas attack” incident, which Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) whistleblowers suggest was staged, Higgins tweeted an exclusive photo of one of the cylinders purportedly used in the strike.

Higgins’ post was abruptly deleted though, perhaps because the White Helmets subsequently also shared a photo of the same site, in which the same cylinder was in a different position–proof positive that the scene had been manipulated by those staging it.

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ASI bids for shady UK contract to train Syrian extremists

One component of Whitehall’s effort to destabilize Syria was the training of opposition groups and fighters. In 2016, the Foreign Office issued a tender for a program dubbed MAO B-FOR (Moderate Armed Opposition Border Force), to provide “training, equipment, and other forms of support” to the Free Syrian Army’s Southern Front coalition, in order to “foster a negotiated political transition” and “support moderate structures and groups in opposition held areas of Syria.” Up to 600 fighters were to be trained every year for three years, at a cost of almost $21 million.

The UK would provide the successful bidder with “dedicated training site” in Jordan “at no cost” to providers. The 600-acre site, situated 45 minutes from Amman, comprised “accommodation, ablution, dining, classrooms, driving track, outside rural environment areas, and open space for equipment storage solutions.” Militants were to be trained in the effective use of AK-47s, machine guns, and pistols, with 175 able to be accommodated on-site at a time.

In response, the Bellingcat sponsor ASI submitted a pitch to the Foreign Office, pledging to lead a consortium of contractors, composed of GlenGulf, Kellogg Brown & Root (KBR, nicknamed “Kill, Burn & Loot”), Oakas, and Pilgrims Group.

As with AJACS, ASI privately forecast that it would be highly probable that Al-Nusra and ISIS would interfere in the program. “[D]ue to perceptions of an ‘international political agenda’,” ASI wrote, extremists “may seek to prevent trainees from joining or inhibit them from fulfilling their functions once trained via kidnap, assault and theft of equipment.”

It was considered of medium probability that fighters trained under the program would join other groups and/or collaborate with extremist actors, and end up committing human rights abuses.

ASI’s solution was simple: it would “transfer” responsibility for “owning and managing” problems that arose to the Foreign Office, and the loss of equipment was to be “tolerated” to “a reasonable degree.” Strikingly, ASI stated that its “experience and knowledge” of running AJACS would be “leveraged” to ensure optimal delivery of B-FOR.

In an emailed statement to this journalist, ASI alleged that the company didn’t implement B-FOR, and “had no involvement in it at any stage beyond the formal submission of a bid.” ASI added a veiled, empty threat of legal action if the company or its staff were associated publicly with the project, in order to maintain its “good public record and professional reputation.”

This warning confirms the documents’ authenticity, while seemingly breaching the company’s non-disclosure agreement with the Foreign Office, compelling ASI to adhere to the draconian confidentiality requirements of the Official Secrets Act.

If ASI’s bid was not accepted, another contractor’s almost certainly was. A UK- and U.S.-managed training site in Jordan is confirmed to have operated from the early days of the Syrian crisis. It remains unknown how many fighters were trained there over the years, how many went on to join jihadist groups, and how much equipment was “lost” and used to slaughter innocent civilians. The Foreign Office almost certainly has no idea either.

ASI has continued to conduct cloak-and-dagger work for Whitehall abroad ever since. In February 2018, the company was permitted to start applying again for Whitehall contracts. Its most recent accounts, for 2019, indicate turnover stood at £54.5 million. Over the first half of 2020, its Foreign Office receipts alone totaled £6 million.

Were the funds it provided to Bellingcat drawn from this sum?

‘Substantiated complaints’ about Bellingcat activities

An ever-growing number of rights groups and international bodies have “partnered” with Bellingcat. The organization’s website brags that its open-source investigations have informed the activities of the International Criminal Court’s Technology Advisory Board, as well as the UN’s newly-created International Independent and Impartial Mechanism on Syria.

Bellingcat has also listed the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) as a “partner,” before abruptly removing the disclosure. Higgins implausibly claimed this entry was just a mistake resulting from a careless copy and paste.

While the National Endowment for Democracy, a U.S. intelligence cut-out, has contributed extensively to Bellingcat, the extent to which the Foreign Office has partnered with the media organization cannot be ascertained.

A Freedom of Information request submitted to the department in January 2019 asked for all internal documents related to research on the Syrian crisis mentioning the organization, particularly those relating to the use of chemical weapons in the country, and “any documents that refer to the reliability of Bellingcat as a source when drafting research assessments.”

In response, the Foreign Office stated it could “neither confirm nor deny it holds information relevant to [the] request,” on the grounds of “safeguarding national security.”

Still, a leaked Foreign Office-commissioned appraisal of Bellingcat spells out in damning terms the department’s view of the organization’s “reliability.” Bellingcat was found to be “somewhat discredited, both by spreading disinformation itself, and by being willing to produce reports for anyone willing to pay.”

Given Bellingcat’s intimate relationship with such devious players in the dirty war on Syria, it can only be considered extremely concerning that it boasts similarly intimate ties with the same official bodies charged with investigating alleged government crimes committed therein.

There are however indications that the wheels are coming off the Bellingcat bus. On August 9, the European Press Prize announced that it was retracting the laureate status bestowed on now-former Bellingcat staffer Daniel Romein for his work geolocating images related to child abuse in Eastern Europe, due to numerous “substantiated complaints.”

Perhaps the day will come too when Eliot Higgins and company outlive their usefulness to Western intelligence agencies.

https://mronline.org/2021/10/11/belling ... -in-syria/
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Re: Syria

Post by blindpig » Sat Oct 30, 2021 2:20 pm

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75 years & counting: a history of Western regime change in Syria – Part I
Originally published: Orinoco Tribune by Vanessa Beeley (October 25, 2021 ) | - Posted Oct 30, 2021

Washington and London’s latest war against Syria was incubated in CIA and MI6 offices long before the manufactured “uprising” erupted in 2011.

This was not the first time that the U.S. neocolonialist alliance had attempted regime change in Syria. Historian Stephen Gowans writes about Washington’s Long War on Syria in his comprehensive book on the U.S.-led interference in Syrian state affairs for decades.

Gowans describes American opposition to the “fiercely independent” Arab nationalist movement that came to power in Syria in 1963. In 1971 Hafez Al Assad was elected President, the father of Bashar Al Assad both of whom uphold the principles of Arab unity and independence.

Washington sought to purge Arab nationalist influence from the Syrian state and the Arab world more broadly because it was a threat to its agenda of establishing global primacy and promoting business-friendly investment climates for U.S. banks, investors and corporations throughout the world.Arab nationalists aspired to unify the world’s 400 million Arabs into a single super-state capable of challenging United States hegemony in West Asia and North Africa and becoming a major player on the world stage free from the domination of the former colonial powers and the U.S.

Washington had waged long wars on the leaders of the Arab nationalist movement—Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser, Iraq’s Saddam, Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi, and Syria’s Assads, often allying with particularly violent forms of political Islam to undermine its Arab nationalist foes.

– from the introduction to Gowans’ book


By 2011, only one pan-Arabist state remained standing in the region–Syria–and it was targeted for subjugation to U.S. supremacy which led to the ten years of bloodshed and misery in a progressive, prosperous and stable sovereign nation.

The reformist President Assad was criminalised by colonial media outlets in the West and aligned Gulf State channels as consent was manufactured for yet another interventionist campaign by the UK and U.S. to bring Syria to heel.

Ten years later and Syria is bloody but unbowed and is emerging the military victor of the externally fomented conflict with the support of allies in Russia, Iran, Hezbollah, Iraqi resistance forces and diplomatic support from China.

However, despite this pyrrhic victory there remains a media complex, including so-called anti-imperialist outlets that are maintaining the various narratives that manufactured consent for the 2011 regime-change war in the first place.

These include narratives like “police state” “Assad the tyrant” and “authoritarian state” among others. It is rare that these claims are given any historical context or evidence that demonstrates in-depth research beyond the corporate media claims.

Peter Ford, former UK Ambassador to Syria, told me:

I always like to say that maybe Syria is a police state because in states which the West tries to subvert there is a lot of policing to be done!

What follows is a list of the CIA and MI6 interventions in Syrian affairs since the 1940s. It should clearly demonstrate why Syria has needed to shore up its security apparatus to protect itself from the U.S., Israel and UK-led black ops that have targeted the country for decades.

Part one of this series will go from 1946 to 2012 although the U.S., UK, EU interference in Syria began long before that. Part two will cover events from 2012 onwards demonstrating the manipulation of events and biased media coverage of the U.S. Coalition proxy war against Syria leading to a ten year war, barbaric economic sanctions and horrifying bloodshed to remove the Syrian government from power and to secure U.S./UK/Israeli/Turkish/Gulf State interests in the region.

Note: I have included declassified intelligence documents in the year they were published, not the year they were released.

1946
Syria is finally declared independent from the French mandate which was imposed upon the country by the 1916 Sykes-Picot agreement that ‘gave’ Syria to France.

France fought to prevent Syrian independence culminating in a direct attack against Damascus in 1945 killing an estimated 400 Syrian civilians and military in the process.

1947
The CIA was created as a rebrand of previous Intelligence agencies.

1949
The CIA coup of 1949 after Syria had declared war on the Nazis and ended the colonial Vichy French occupation ousted an elected, secular President Shukri Al Quwatli who supported the Palestinian cause, was anti-Zionist and did not recognise the (U.S. President) Truman-incubated state of Israel.

Al Quwatli rejected the Trans Arabian Pipeline (TAPLINE) a joint venture of Standard Oil of New Jersey (today ExxonMobil), Standard Oil of California and Texaco (now Chevron) because he believed it would afford the U.S. undue influence in Syria:

Syria’s democratically elected president, Shukri-al-Quwatli, hesitated to approve the Trans Arabian Pipeline, an American project intended to connect the oil fields of Saudi Arabia to the ports of Lebanon via Syria. (so)… the CIA engineered a coup, replacing al-Kuwaiti with the CIA’s handpicked dictator, a convicted swindler named Husni al-Za’im. Al-Za’im barely had time to dissolve parliament and approve the American pipeline before his countrymen deposed him, 14 weeks into his regime. Robert F Kennedy Jr

Dean Hinton, U.S. State Department official made a prescient statement in relation to the planned CIA coup against Syria in 1949 [emphasis added]:

I want to go on record as saying that this is the stupidest, most irresponsible action a diplomatic mission like ours could get itself involved in, and that we’ve started a series of these things that will never end.

The CIA man in Damascus who replaced Al-Quwatli turned out to be a murderous tyrant. The CIA had recruited General Husni al-Za’im, the Syrian army chief of staff, under direction of President Harry Truman–the advocate of the State of Israel and the 1948 Nakba, the ethnic cleansing of Palestine.

After only 5 months in power, Al-Za’im was also toppled in another coup.

1954
Fourth coup, CIA-supported Adib Shiskali overthrown.

1955
Syrian people re-elected Al Quwatli who pivoted towards the Soviet Union against U.S. interference and supremacy. The West perceived this policy as non-compliant with U.S./UK anti-communism.

CIA Director Dulles declared that “Syria is ripe for a coup” and sent his two coup wizards, Kim Roosevelt and Rocky Stone, to Damascus.”Robert F Kennedy Jr

1956
Operation Straggle–CIA plan to replace the recalcitrant Al-Quwatli Syrian government with an anti-communist regime.

National Security Council member Wilbur Crane Eveland, CIA official Archibald Roosevelt, and Michail Bey Ilyan, former Syrian minister, met in Damascus on 1 July 1956 to discuss a U.S.-backed ‘anti-communist’ takeover of the country. As William Blum wrote in his book ‘Killing Hope’, the plan was for the Syrian military to:

…take control of Damascus, Aleppo, Homs, and Hamah. The frontier posts with Jordan, Iraq, and Lebanon would also be captured in order to seal Syria’s borders until the radio stations announced that a new government had taken over under Colonel Kabbani, who would place armored units at key positions throughout Damascus.

The plan was postponed for five days, during which time the Suez Crisis happened. Ilyan told Eveland he could not succeed in overthrowing the Syrian government during a war of Israeli aggression. On 31 October, John Foster Dulles informed his brother Allen Dulles, the Director of the CIA:

Re Straggle our people feel that conditions are such that it would be a mistake to try to pull it off.

1957
Operation Wappen – Another CIA coup attempt to oust Quwatli. $3 million was invested in paying off of Syrian military officers to enable the coup.

The plan failed when some of the officers revealed the project to Syrian Intelligence agencies and turned in the CIA bribe money. This failed coup led to Syria being labelled a “Soviet satellite state”.

August 12th– Syrian Army surrounded U.S. Embassy in Damascus to avert a CIA plot to overthrow President Al Quwatli. Syrian Chief of Counter Intelligence Abdul Hamid Sarraj expelled three U.S. diplomats and jailed dozens of Syrian officers involved in the attempted coup.

U.S. President Eisenhower and UK Prime Minister Harold MacMillan conjured up a ‘Suez-in-reverse’’ plot that might have precipitated an all-out war between the Soviet Union and the U.S.

The U.S. deployed a fleet to the Mediterranean, armed several of Syria’s neighbors, and incited Turkey to deploy 50,000 troops to its border. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles suggested that the U.S. sought to invoke the “Eisenhower Doctrine” of retaliating against provocations, and this intention was later confirmed in a military report. No Arab state would describe Syria as a provocateur, and these military deployments were withdrawn.

The MacMillan involvement–Documents released in 2003 revealed that British Prime Minister, Harold MacMillan and U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower conspired to plunder Syria’s oil resources and to assassinate three Syrian influencers, to force a regime change–Abd al-Hamid Sarraj, head of Syrian military intelligence; Afif al-Bizri, chief of the Syrian general staff; and Khalid Bakdash, leader of the Syrian Communist party.

The Muslim Brotherhood was financed and weaponised to topple the secular Syrian government and to assassinate the key figures.

1960–1971
A series of coups and counter-coups. According to Laith Marouf, journalist and lifelong Palestinian cause activist, every single Syrian President post WW2 was overthrown by a U.S.-orchestrated coup d’etat.

1967
Israel illegally occupied the Golan Heights during the Six-Day War, a war that was much misrepresented in mainstream media, of course in favour of the Zionist aggressor.

A later 1986 declassified CIA document would outline the potential for military insurgence if Assad were to suffer a major defeat by Israel if an attempt were made to liberate the Golan territories.

Israel says 1967 land conquests weren’t planned. 2021 Declassified documents tell a more complicated story.

The documents describe detailed preparations that were made in the military in the years before 1967, with the intention of organizing in advance the control of territories that the defense establishment assessed–with high certainty–would be conquered in the next war.

A perusal of the information indicates that the takeover and retention of these areas–the West Bank from Jordan, the Sinai Peninsula and Gaza Strip from Egypt, and the Golan Heights from Syria–were not a by-product of the fighting, but the manifestation of a strategic approach and prior preparations.

– Adam Raz, Forward, June 4th 2021


1969
The failed CIA-manufactured coup d’etat (1949 in Syria)–BBC interview with CIA officer, Miles Copeland:



1971
Hafez Al Assad came to power. Author and historian Patrick Seale wrote this about the former President, father of President Bashar Al Assad:

A small country like Syria to stand up against the mighty U.S. and say: NO you will not prevail. This is Al-Assad’s historical legacy. He was the only Arab leader who refused to bend a knee for Washington and Israel and refused to accept dictates from them.

1973
“Yom Kippur War”–Syrian military campaign to liberate the Golan territories from illegal Zionist occupation.

According to the Vinogradov memo, Anwar al-Sadat, holder of the titles of President, Prime Minister, ASU Chairman, Chief Commander, Supreme Military Ruler, entered into conspiracy with the Israelis, betrayed his ally Syria, condemned the Syrian army to destruction and Damascus to bombardment, allowed General Sharon’s tanks to cross without hindrance to the western bank of the Suez Canal, and actually planned a defeat of the Egyptian troops in the October War […] in order to allow for the U.S. come-back to the Middle East.
– Israel Shamir, “What Really Happened in the “Yom Kippur” War?”, Counterpunch February 2012

1979
Syria further alienates itself from U.S. neocolonialist policy by supporting the Iranian Revolution. The revolution overthrew the CIA imposed Shah of Iran who had been CIA-assisted to topple the government of Mohammed Mosaddeq, a hardline nationalist who had campaigned against British oil companies in Iran, threatening to nationalise Iranian resources.

1980–1982
Brzezinski Cable–A cable from the National Security Council to Secretary of State Zbigniew Brzezinski sought collaboration between European and Gulf State monarchies to “identify possible alternative regimes” to the [Syrian] government led by Hafez Al Assad. (‘Syria July 16, 1980’, National Security Council, 4203XX, Memorandum for Zbigniew Brzezinski, declassified document)

The start of the U.S. coalition, Saudi Arabia, Saddam Hussein and Jordan-backed Muslim Brotherhood insurrection which led a series of savage attacks against Syrian civilians and military (Aleppo cadet massacre) until the CIA coup was crushed by Hafez Al Assad in Hama in 1982.

The Muslim Brotherhood U.S.-backed campaign of violence was hugely downplayed in Western media whose focus was on the “totalitarian regime” crack-down by Al Assad in order to support their regime change policy.

The CIA, at the time, observed that “Syrians are pragmatists who do not want a Muslim Brotherhood government”. (Defence Intelligence Agency (DIA)–Syria: Muslim Brotherhood Pressure Intensifies 1982)

1982
The Yinon Plan

Israel must become an imperial regional power, and must effect the division of the whole area into small states by the dissolution of all existing Arab states.

1984
Rifaat Al Assad failed in a suspected coup to overthrow his brother’s government (Hafez Al Assad).

Rifaat al-Assad, brother of Syrian President Hafez al-Assad, was reportedly in charge of an elite military force called Saraya al-Difaa’ (“al-difa”), or “Defense Companies,” until 1984 (al-Wasat 16 Feb. 1998).

The deployment of the Defense Companies in 1983 and 1984 while President Hafez al-Assad was seriously ill and unable to attend to government matters led some members of the Syrian government to fear that Rifaat was becoming too powerful at the expense of other potential successors to Hafez al-Assad.

– refworld report 1998

In addition, (in a 1986 document) the CIA notes the potential for in-fighting among the Alawi elite, particularly over Hafez al-Assad’s brother Rifaat–a controversial figure in Syrian politics.

– Whitney Webb


1986
CIA Report “Syria: Scenarios of Dramatic Political Change” written by the Foreign Subversion and Instability Center, a part of the CIA’s Mission Center for Global Issues:

This memorandum explores alternative scenarios that could lead to the ouster of President Hafez Al Assad. Specifically, it seeks to clarify the individuals and groups that might impel or impede takeover attempts…

The CIA favoured a (majority) Sunni Islam regime in Syria – “U.S. interests in Syria probably would be best served by a Sunni regime,”–particularly one led by Sunni “business-moderates” who would “see a strong need for Western aid and investment.”

The document states clearly that “a renewal of communal violence between Alawis and Sunnis could inspire Sunnis in the military to turn against the regime.”

It is noted that if the Syrian government cracks down hard on “minor outbreaks of Sunni dissidence”–the minor outbreaks being suicide bombings, assassinations, kidnappings,massacres of religious minority groups just as from 2011 onwards–large scale unrest would be triggered “setting the stage for civil war”. Remember this is in 1986.

1991
First Gulf War–Iraq’s ruler Saddam Hussein was recognised by Hafez Al Assad as a collaborator with the U.S. in the devastating and protracted war with Iran, using chemical weapons approved by the U.S., and as an opportunistic backer of the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood.

Hafez Al Assad supported the expulsion of Iraq from Kuwait, in line with International Law, in the First Gulf War but both Syria and Iran later opposed the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq even though it would effectively rid them of a mutual enemy, Saddam Hussein.

1996
“Clean Break Doctrine”–Israeli policy document proposed regime change in Iraq primarily as a “means” of “weakening, containing, and rolling back Syria.

As special consultant to U.S. Presidents Nixon, Ford and Reagan, Pat Buchanan, put it:

In the Perle-Feith-Wurmser strategy, Israel ’s enemy remains Syria , but the road to Damascus runs through Baghdad.

2000
President Hafez Al Assad died and he was succeeded by his son, Bashar Al Assad.

Qatar Pipeline proposal–Qatar proposes construction of a $10 billion, 1,500 kilometer pipeline through Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Syria and Turkey. Robert F Kennedy Jr wrote in his article ‘Why the Arabs don’t want us in Syria’:

Qatar shares with Iran the South Pars/North Dome gas field, the world’s richest natural gas repository. The international trade embargo until recently prohibited Iran from selling gas abroad.

Meanwhile, Qatar’s gas can reach European markets only if it is liquefied and shipped by sea, a route that restricts volume and dramatically raises costs. The proposed pipeline would have linked Qatar directly to European energy markets via distribution terminals in Turkey, which would pocket rich transit fees.

The Qatar/Turkey pipeline would give the Sunni kingdoms of the Persian Gulf decisive domination of world natural gas markets and strengthen Qatar, America’s closest ally in the Arab world. Qatar hosts two massive American military bases and the U.S. Central Command’s Mideast headquarters.


2001
9/11 triggers U.S. President Bush’s “war on terror”. An overall agenda for the Middle East was set in motion. Former U.S. General Wesley Clark said in his memoirs–two weeks after the World Trade Centre attacks, he was told by a senior Pentagon official that the 2003 invasion of Iraq had already been approved.

Six weeks later he says that same official told him, ‘It’s worse than that’, before indicating a memo ‘from the Office of the Secretary of Defence … [saying] we’re going to take out seven countries in five years’. Those countries were Iraq, Libya, Syria, Lebanon, Somalia, Sudan and finally Iran. [ Off-Guardian 9/11 archives here].

UK Prime Minister Tony Blair speaking in November 2011 2 months after 9/11 [emphasis added]

The events of September 11 have opened opportunities that must be grasped to forge better relations with countries such as Iran and Syria.

CIA Extraordinary Rendition program in Syria 2001–2003. The CIA used Syria as an illicit base of operations to torture so-called “ghost detainees“, as part of a program known as extraordinary rendition.

This program was established in the mid-1990s and expanded in the 2000s (Wikipedia). It is believed by some analysts that Syria went along with this program to try to soften U.S. sanctions and to create better relations with the West which was courting President Assad at this time for the “different relationship” which translates as compliant with U.S./UK neocolonialism and the ‘security’ of Israel.

2002

Smoking gun emails reveal [UK Prime Minister] Tony Blair’s ‘deal in blood’ with [U.S. President] George Bush over Iraq war was forged a YEAR before the invasion had even started.

– Daily Mail headline


President Bashar al Assad visited Britain, met the Queen, the Prince of Wales, and dined with Tony Blair at Downing Street. Blair recommended bestowing an honour on the President.

Blair went on to cheerlead the destruction of Syria in 2011, an act of supreme hypocrisy that was excused by a Blair mouthpiece:

Engagement with Syria and Assad in 2002 was absolutely right… Mr. Blair has said many times since that the situation has changed and Assad now has to go.

2003
Pre-planned invasion of Iraq on “war on terror” pretext and Israel launched the first missile attack on Syria for thirty years. President Bush immediately condoned the attack.

A memo from Blair to Bush discussed creating a ‘post-cold-war world order’. These memos were revealed by the Chilcot report into the WMD hoax that manufactured consent for the criminal invasion of Iraq in 2003.

Blair mentions Syria, Libya and Iran in the context of ‘anti-terrorism’ and Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD). These countries should be given a ‘choice’:

co-operate on WMD or face isolation and in time, worse.

2004
BBC Media Action launches project to identify opposition to Syrian government inside Syria:

We [BBC Media Action] worked in 2004 with individuals within the ministry who wanted change and tried to get them to be the drivers of that. All media development work that has been done in Syria has, in my opinion, been predicated upon this idea that there can be change from within–you have an authoritarian regime and you find who the reformers are within that (individuals) and you work with them.

– Juliette Harkin former BBC Media Action Project Manager


Syria is labelled an “unusual and extraordinary threat” by President Bush–Severe sanctions were imposed on Syria on the pretext that Damascus was ‘supporting terrorism’ which included the biggest perceived threat to Israel in the region, Hamas and Hezbollah.

In reality the sanctions were punishment for Syria’s opposition to Bush’s Iraq policy and to attempt to bring Assad to the table to discuss weakening his alliance with Iran and Hezbollah. Those sanctions did not include any restriction on future investments by U.S. energy companies.

2005
Christiane Armanpour of CNN interviews President Bashar Al Assad and informs him that the West is planning a regime change. (Note: CNN appear to have removed the video report).

In February of the same year, the Prime Minister of Lebanon, Rafiq Hariri was assassinated. Hezbollah and Syria would be held responsible for the murder while the covert operations of Israeli Intelligence were overlooked by the UN investigation. This report served only Israel’s interests. It was released 8 months before Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in July 2006.

2006
TIME Article–An article appears in TIME magazine headlined “Syria in Bush’s Crosshairs”. It claims, leading up to the 2007 Syrian elections:

The Bush Administration has been quietly nurturing individuals and parties opposed to the Syrian government in an effort to undermine the regime of President Bashar Assad.

U.S. State Department Cable–Wikileaks releases a 2006 State Department cable showing that destabilizing the Syrian government was a primary goal of U.S. policy in the Middle East. The ultimate intention was to topple Iran, one of Syria’s closest allies. The cable revealed that the U.S.’ goal at the time was to undermine the Syrian government by any means available.

The ‘New Middle East’ Project–The term “New Middle East” was introduced to the world in June 2006 in Tel Aviv by U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice in replacement of the older and more imposing term, the “Greater Middle East.”

The redrawing and partition of the Middle East from the Eastern Mediterranean shores of Lebanon and Syria to Anatolia (Asia Minor), Arabia, the Persian Gulf, and the Iranian Plateau responds to broad economic, strategic and military objectives, which are part of a longstanding Anglo-American and Israeli agenda in the region.

– Mahdi Darius Nazemroaya


Christian Zionist Pierre Gemayel assassinated in Beirut–Gemayel was gunned down in broad daylight in Jedideh, East Beirut on November 21st. He was a member of one of Lebanon’s most prominent Maronite dynasties.

Gemayel won a parliamentary seat in 2000 as representative for the Christian Phalange Party allied with Israel which led to Syria again being blamed for the attack and brought attention back to the Hariri assassination one year prior. President Bush endorsed the claim that Syria was responsible.

2007
Seymour Hersh reports U.S. is “bolstering” extremist groups “sympathetic to al Qaeda [emphasis added]:

A strategic shift–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.

– Seymour M Hirsh, “The Redirection” (New Yorker, Feb. 25 2007)


Cheney’s Middle-East advisor calls for regime change in Syria. David Wurmser, author of the “Clean Break” memo and Dick Cheney’s Middle East advisor, is quoted in a Telegraph article headlined “U.S. ‘must break Iran and Syria regimes’”:

We need to do everything possible to destabilise the Syrian regime and exploit every single moment they strategically overstep […] That would include the willingness to escalate as far as we need to go to topple the regime if necessary. […] an end to Baathist rule in Damascus could trigger a domino effect that would then bring down the Tehran regime.

2008
CIA paramilitary raids in Eastern Syria 2004–2008 In October 2008 the CIA conducted the ‘Abu Kamal’ paramilitary raid on the town of Sukkariyeh in Eastern Syria on the pretext of targeting an Iraqi who was supplying insurgents via the Syrian border.

Syria accused the U.S. of terrorist aggression and claimed that 8 civilians had died in the raid, not militants as reported by the U.S. Angry protests against America erupted in Damascus and the Syrian government deployed riot police to protect the U.S. embassy and buildings from the protestors.

The New York Times later revealed the existence of a secret 2004 military order authorising the CIA and Special Forces to conduct operations in 15-20 countries, including Syria. The order was approved by the Bush administration Defence Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld. U.S. officials acknowledged they had conducted other raids in Syria since 2004 but refused to provide details.

2009
Media industrial complex–U.S. and UK invest millions into Satellite TV Channel–Barada TV–to broadcast anti-Syrian Government propaganda throughout Syria before and after the orchestrated ‘uprising’ of 2011.

Wikileaks released cables showing that U.S. Embassy officials in Damascus were concerned that Syrian intelligence were questioning U.S. programs.

Saudi Arabia expresses an oblique desire to remove Assad–Wikileaks releases State Department email, “Saudi Intelligence Chief talks regional security with Brennan delegation (CIA)”, in which Iran was described as being “all over the place [..] the Shiite crescent is becoming a full moon” encompassing Syria, Iraq, Bahrain, Kuwait and Yemen.

U.S. embassy cables: Hillary Clinton says Saudi Arabia is a “critical source of terrorist funding”.

Evidence Britain making regime change plans two years before the ‘uprising’ – French Foreign Minister Roland Dumas was approached by British officials who informed him that plans to topple the Syrian government were already in place which included support for an armed ‘opposition’.

U.S. blocks Syrian efforts to join the World Trade Organization–A deliberate attempt to negatively impact further the Syrian economy combined with harsh sanctions.

French President Nicolas Sarkozy tries to orchestrate Israeli/Syrian meeting on French soil.–Sarkozy wanted to put France centre stage in a failed peace process between Israel and Syria so he attempted to bring the two leaders together in Paris but Assad refused to land in Paris until Netanyahu’s plane had departed.

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Bashar Al Assad and Nicolas Sarkozy in Paris 2009.

At this point EU and UK regimes were still in courting mode with Assad. Oil and energy interests were at the forefront of their negotiations.

Assad opposes the Qatar-Turkey oil pipeline–All the hard work of the EU, UK and U.S. to secure their oil interests in Syria were suddenly destroyed when President Assad declared that he would refuse to sign the agreement to allow the pipeline to run through Syria “to protect the interests of our Russian ally.”

Robert F Kennedy Jr described this blow to U.S. Coalition hegemony in his article ‘Why the Arabs don’t want us in Syria’:

Assad further enraged the Gulf’s Sunni monarchs by endorsing a Russian-approved “Islamic pipeline” running from Iran’s side of the gas field through Syria and to the ports of Lebanon. The Islamic pipeline would make Shiite Iran, not Sunni Qatar, the principal supplier to the European energy market and dramatically increase Tehran’s influence in the Middke East and the world.

Israel also was understandably determined to derail the Islamic pipeline, which would enrich Iran and Syria and presumably strengthen their proxies, Hezbollah and Hamas.

Secret cables and reports by the U.S., Saudi and Israeli intelligence agencies indicate that the moment Assad rejected the Qatari pipeline, military and intelligence planners quickly arrived at the consensus that fomenting a Sunni uprising in Syria to overthrow the uncooperative Bashar Assad was a feasible path to achieving the shared objective of completing the Qatar/Turkey gas link.

In 2009, according to WikiLeaks, soon after Bashar Assad rejected the Qatar pipeline, the CIA began funding opposition groups in Syria.

2011
The onslaught of terror attacks begin in the Jordan/Syria border town of Daraa.

U.S. Military Intelligence assessment on Bashar Al Assad’s chances of survival–The U.S. Marine Corps (USMC) Intelligence Department and Stratfor jointly produced this August 2011 report:

The Alawite-Baathist regime of Syria led by the al Assad clan will significantly weaken over the next three years. The potential for the regime to collapse cannot be ruled out, but the road to regime change will be a long and bloody one.

Fortunately for the regime, the opposition in Syria does not yet have the numbers, organization or capabilities overall to overwhelm the regime forces. Syria’s opposition is extremely fractured [..] The exiled opposition has been quite effecting in developing a narrative on the Syrian opposition to disseminate to major media agencies, but reports of protests are overblown [..]

Without foreign backing, the opposition movement is unlikely to acquire enough money or gain enough traction to acquire large quantities of weaponry, let alone achieve regime change.

– Stratfor


Special Ops from U.S./UK/Turkey were inside Syria, training the extremist armed groups. Wikileaks cable INSIGHT military intervention in Syria:

One Air Force intel guy (U.S.) said very carefully that there isn’t much of a Free Syrian Army to train right now anyway [..] I kept pressing on the question of what these SOF teams would be working toward, and whether this would lead to an eventual air campaign to give a Syrian rebel group cover.

They pretty quickly distanced themselves from that idea, saying that the idea ‘hypothetically’ is to commit guerrilla attacks, assassination campaigns, try to break the back of the Alawite forces, elicit collapse from within. There wouldn’t be a need for air cover, and they wouldn’t expect these Syrian rebels to be marching in columns anyway.

Weapons shipped from Libya to Syria after the murder of Muammar Gaddafi.

This week it was reported that weapons are flooding in to Syria from a Libya awash with weapons, “with spy chiefs saying” that the country has become a supermarket “of the world’s illegal arms trade.”

“Up to 3,000 surface-to-air missiles (SAMs) have gone missing since the conflict” with more than “one million tonnes of weapons belonging to Colonel Quaddaffi” looted after his terrible death at the hands of NATO’s “allies”.

Potentially that is enough SAMs to down 3,000 airliners. The Daily Mail understands that, “…there are now more weapons in Libya than in the entire arsenal of the British Army” according to MI6 estimates.”

– Felicity Arbuthnot, Dissident Voice


British survey firm YouGov published a poll in late 2011 showing support for Assad. The poll revealed that 55% of Syrians maintained support for President Assad.

Time’s correspondent Rania Abouzeid attributed the failure of the protest organizers to draw significant support to the fact that most Syrians were not opposed to their government.

– Stephen Gowans, October 2016


NATO and regional allies form the “Friends of Syria Coalition”. According to Robert F Kennedy Jr in his article “Why the Arabs don’t want us in Syria”:

In 2011, the U.S. joined France, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and the UK to form the Friends of Syria Coalition, which formally demanded the removal of Assad.

The CIA provided $6 million to Barada, a British TV channel, to produce pieces entreating Assad’s ouster.

Saudi intelligence documents, published by WikiLeaks, show that by 2012, Turkey, Qatar and Saudi Arabia were arming, training and funding radical jihadist Sunni fighters from Syria, Iraq and elsewhere to overthrow the Assad’s Shiite-allied regime.

Qatar, which had the most to gain, invested $3 billion in building the insurgency and invited the Pentagon to train insurgents at U.S. bases in Qatar. According to an April 2014 article by Seymour Hersh, the CIA weapons ratlines were financed by Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar.


2012
Al Jazeera foreign correspondent in Beirut Ali Hashem resigns–Hashem cited the channel bias against the Syrian government as the reason for his departure –

Television channels have turned into political parties, pushing the agenda for some outside forces

The Syrian Opposition: who’s doing the talking?–An excellent investigative report by journalist Charlie Skelton for The Guardian when decent and objective journalists were still on the payroll:

They’re selling the idea of military intervention and regime change, and the mainstream news is hungry to buy. Many of the “activists” and spokespeople representing the Syrian opposition are closely (and in many cases financially) interlinked with the U.S. and London–the very people who would be doing the intervening. Which means information and statistics from these sources isn’t necessarily pure news–it’s a sales pitch, a PR campaign.

But it’s never too late to ask questions, to scrutinise sources. Asking questions doesn’t make you a cheerleader for Assad–that’s a false argument. It just makes you less susceptible to spin. The good news is, there’s a sceptic born every minute.


Jonathan Steele in The Guardian–‘Most Syrians back President Assad, but you’d never know from western media’

As for foreign military intervention, it has already started. It is not following the Libyan pattern since Russia and China are furious at the west’s deception in the security council last year. They will not accept a new United Nations resolution that allows any use of force.

The model is an older one, going back to the era of the cold war, before “humanitarian intervention” and the “responsibility to protect” were developed and often misused. Remember Ronald Reagan’s support for the Contras, whom he armed and trained to try to topple Nicaragua’s Sandinistas from bases in Honduras? For Honduras read Turkey, the safe haven where the so-called Free Syrian Army has set up.

CIA spending $100,000 per ‘moderate rebel’–President Obama’s ‘train and equip’ program was effectively financing death squads in Syria.

It was calculated that it would cost $500 million to train 5,000 “moderates” for one year hence $100,000 per Muslim Brotherhood extremist thug allied with Al Qaeda and ISIS and supported on the ground by U.S. Ambassador to Syria, Robert Ford who was later expelled for his role in fomenting insurgence.

Hillary Clinton U.S. State Department email–From the Wikileaks archives of Hillary Clinton email [emphasis added]:

The best way to help Israel deal with Iran’s growing nuclear capability is to help the people of Syria overthrow the regime of Bashar Assad […] Speaking on CNN’s Amanpour show last week, Defense Minister Ehud Barak argued that the toppling down of Assad will be a major blow to the radical axis, major blow to Iran … It’s the only kind of outpost of the Iranian influence in the Arab world … and it will weaken dramatically both Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas and Islamic Jihad in Gaza.

Bringing down Assad would not only be a massive boon to Israel’s security, it would also ease Israel’s understandable fear of losing its nuclear monopoly. Washington should start by expressing its willingness to work with regional allies like Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar to organize, train and arm Syrian rebel forces.

The announcement of such a decision would, by itself, likely cause substantial defections from the Syrian military. Then, using territory in Turkey and possibly Jordan, U.S. diplomats and Pentagon officials can start strengthening the opposition.


Saudi Arabia demands that President Assad be overthrown using “all means available”–Wikileaks cable released in 2015:

The fact must be stressed that in the case where the Syrian regime is able to pass through its current crisis in any shape or form, the primary goal that it will pursue is taking revenge on the countries that stood against it, with the Kingdom and some of the countries of the Gulf coming at the top of the list.

If we take into account the extent of this regime’s brutality and viciousness and its lack of hesitancy to resort to any means to realize its aims, then the situation will reach a high degree of danger for the Kingdom, which must seek by all means available and all possible ways to overthrow the current regime in Syria.

As regards the international position, it is clear that there is a lack of “desire” and not a lack of “capability” on the part of Western countries, chief among them the United States, to take firm step…

Hillary Clinton receives an email stating “Al Qaeda is on our side [in Syria]”–Clinton received an email from Jake Sullivan, her deputy Chief of Staff (Sullivan is now National Security Advisor to the Joe Biden administration). Sullivan introduces the email with “see last item–AQ is on our side in Syria”

New York Times: “most U.S. weapons sent to Syria were ending up in hands of terrorist groups”. Rebel Arms Flow is Said to Benefit Jihadists in Syria:

American officials have been trying to understand why hard-line Islamists have received the lion’s share of the arms shipped to the Syrian opposition through the shadowy pipeline with roots in Qatar, and, to a lesser degree, Saudi Arabia.

Al Qaeda global leaders arrive in Syria to topple the Syrian government.

2011–2013 160 U.S. military cargo planes full of U.S. weapons sent to Syria–U.S. weapons sent from Saudi Arabia and Qatar to Turkey and then imported into Syria via the Turkey rat runs on Syria/Turkey borders enabled by the CIA.

Collaboration between “moderate rebels” aka the Free Syrian Army and Al Qaeda or ISIS–World Affairs blog has collated ten articles demonstrating that the ‘moderate rebel” concept was concocted in the CIA and MI6 intelligence rooms and never really existed from the beginning of the U.S.-dominated war against Syria.

French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius announces that “Al Qaeda are doing a good job” in Syria:

Relations of victims of jihadist groups in Syria took the French government to court in 2015, accusing Foreign Affairs Minister Laurent Fabius of encouraging violence in their country by praising the al-Qaida affiliate, the al-Nusra Front.

* * *

This list of CIA and MI6 meddling in Syrian affairs is not exhaustive but it is designed to enable readers to research historic events that are being deliberately obfuscated by the BBC, The Guardian, Channel 4, CNN etc in favour of distorted facts that will confuse voters and manufacture consent for perpetual British and U.S. criminal military adventurism.

Part Two will cover events from 2012 until the present day and will expose the major media fabrications, billionaire-funded NGO complex and intelligence agency involvement in the bloodshed, displacement and ethnic cleansing of Syrians by the various extremist Contra groups described by corporate media as “moderate rebels”.

https://mronline.org/2021/10/30/75-year ... ia-part-i/
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Re: Syria

Post by blindpig » Sun Nov 07, 2021 3:14 pm

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Israel Attacks Syria in Broad Daylight. We Shouldn’t Actively Ignore It
November 6, 2021
By Vanessa Beeley – Nov 5, 2021

Israel is on an attacking spree in Syria. Surface to surface missiles were launched from inside the Palestinian occupied territories twice in the space of four days. Israel is violating international law with criminal regularity.
On Saturday, October 30, Israel changed strategy and attacked Syria in broad daylight. The attacks usually come in the early hours of the morning under cover of darkness, but this time Israel launched at 11:15am. The target was the Syrian air defense base to the West of Damascus. The base is shared with a racehorse training facility and racetrack. If Israel had attacked an hour earlier, there would have been horses on the track with their jockeys, trainers watching from the side lines, and people in the seats having a traditional breakfast picnic. There would have been chaos and, possibly, carnage.

That morning there was a meeting of over one hundred civilians in the seating area next to the track. I was also in the area walking my dogs, never thinking that Israel would break its MO and attack at this time. It was a beautiful sunny autumn day. I heard what I thought were jets in the skies above but later I realised it was the sound of incoming winged missiles finding their target. Suddenly, about one hundred meters from me, the first missile hit. The sound was ear shattering. Plumes of smoke rose above the impact. Molten shrapnel was propelled into the air behind the gathering of civilians. They couldn’t see the explosion, but the sound must have been deafening.

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A photo taken by a local resident of an Israeli attack on Syrian Air Defense base west of Damascus city.

The missiles kept coming, maybe four or five hit the base, oblivious to the civilian presence or threat to their lives. Two Syrian Arab Army soldiers were injured in the attack. Syrians in Damascus are used to dealing with Israeli aggression and depend on the Syrian Air Defense Force to protect them, but this attack surprised everyone. My neighbor told me his son came running to him during the rainstorm that hit Damascus the day after. “Baba, is it Israel again?” the traumatised child asked his father.

Three days later Israel bombed Syria again. This time it returned to its normal tactics of an early morning strike. At 12:15am on November 3 an alleged military base, again on the outskirts of western Damascus, was targeted, causing material damage. Israel launched surface to surface missiles from the Palestinian occupied lands.

Where is the outcry in Western media, you might ask? When Russia bombs the headquarters or military centers of Al Qaeda affiliates in Idlib as part of the campaign to rid Syria of the infestation of armed extremist groups still embedded in the north-west—the corporate media in the west will scream “war crimes!” and the UN will rally around the US-led alliance, financing, arming and promoting the armed groups to condemn Syria and her allies.


When Israel bombs Syria indiscriminately without any concern for civilian casualties the same media complex will copy-paste Israeli justification for these attacks and claim Hezbollah or Iranian military were being eliminated to protect Israeli security in the region. These so-called “pre-emptive defensive” strikes are never exposed by the BBC or CNN for the monstrous, lawless aggression they really are.

The “Hezbollah, Iran” claims were made to provide the rationale behind the daytime bombing in western Damascus. I can safely confirm that there were no military personnel from any faction in the vicinity of where the missile landed. A source told me that a recent addition to the Syrian air defense equipment was the target and was badly damaged in the attack. If true, this raid had nothing to do with Israeli self-defense. It was an attempt by Israel to incapacitate the Syrian air defenses in order to allow Israel to attack Syria with impunity.

Media outlets funded by the EU and sympathetic to the terrorist groups supported by the West claimed that five “pro-Iranian” fighters were killed in the attack. Iranian experts have denied this and Lebanese journalist Marwa Osman told me that Hezbollah or Iranian martyrs are always publicly honored and mourned. The silence from Hezbollah and denials from Iran suggest that the Israel-linked claims are unsubstantiated.

After the full and final liberation in August of Daraa, the city and countryside south of Damascus, Syria enjoyed a month of silence from Israel. The successful re-integration of Daraa into Syria after peace negotiations between Damascus and the armed groups was a blow to Israel and the resource-plundering US Coalition. The essential pipeline that traversed Daraa countryside was back under Syrian control, which led to the US Ambassador in Beirut partially lifting economic sanctions on Syria to enable the transfer of oil and gas to energy-starved Lebanon from Egypt via Jordan and Syria.

Part of the original peace deal between Russia and the armed groups back in 2018 had included Russian reassurances to Israel that Hezbollah and Iranian troops would be withdrawn from proximity to the border with Israel. Now Russian influence in Daraa has ended, Israel knows that Damascus will not abide by this agreement.

The silence did not last. On October 8 Israeli fighter jets fired 12 guided missiles from Lebanese airspace. They targeted the Syrian T-4 airbase in Homs, north of the illegal US occupation base in Al Tanf, on the border with Jordan. Six Syrian soldiers were reported to be injured and material damage was caused.

On October 13, four Israeli F-16s entered Syrian airspace near the US Al Tanf base. Russia has claimed that these Israeli warplanes used civilian aircraft as cover to carry out a strike on a phosphate processing plant and communications tower near Palmyra. Syrian Air Defense was not activated because of the risk to civilian planes. Syrian forces suffered casualties in the attack. The fact that Israel launched from the Al Tanf zone also implicates Washington in the aggression as they have control over the region, having imposed a 55-kilometer protection zone around the illegal base. It is worth noting that this zone is used by the US-backed armed groups to carry out military exercises with US-supplied artillery and heavy weapons.

This is not the first time Israel has exploited civilian air traffic to prevent air defenses bringing down their missiles. In September 2018 a similar incident resulted in the deaths of 15 Russian personnel aboard a Russian Air Force Ilyushin II-20 when Israel used the aircraft as cover for an attack on the coastal city of Latakia.

On February 6 2020, Israel carried out an attack on the outskirts of Damascus with eight air-to-ground missiles without entering Syrian airspace. This time a Syrian-operated Airbus-320 passenger plane was about to land in Damascus travelling from Tehran with 172 passengers on board. The passengers narrowly escaped death thanks to the prompt action of Damascus air traffic control teams who diverted the plane to the Russian airfield at the Khmeimim airbase in Tartous.

In December 2020 Israel launched air to ground missiles from Lebanese airspace and failed to warn passenger airlines that the attack would take place. An Ethiopian Airlines plane flying to Beirut was put at grave risk. It was only the expertise of the Syrian Air Defense Force that prevented the plane being shot down in Syrian airspace. A horrific scenario that would have prompted an international outcry and played into Israel’s hands.

Israel is using civilian aircraft as human shields during these unlawful attacks on Syrian territory and it is putting the lives of civilians at risk every time these missiles are launched. This is not justified military engagement. Israel is not at war with Syria although every one of these attacks could be considered a declaration of war. These are the actions of a tyrannical military state determined to destroy Syria’s ability to defend itself should Israel decide to expand its aggression under any fabricated pretext.

The next few days and weeks in Syria will determine if Israel is preparing the ground for an escalation in the war against the Resistance axis but Israel should be aware it is facing a formidable enemy.





Featured image: Israeli soldiers take position near the border with Syria in the village of Majdal Shams in the Israel-occupied Syrian Golan Heights. Photo: Vanessa Beeley

(Russia Today)

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Re: Syria

Post by blindpig » Thu Nov 18, 2021 2:36 pm

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Syria’s My Lai? US Massacred 70 Civilians and Covered it up
November 16, 2021
By Aaron Maté – Nov 14, 2021

After killing dozens of Syrian civilians in a 2019 bombing, the US military exonerated itself and concealed evidence. It’s the latest scandal for a shadowy US war in Syria that has evaded oversight.

The New York Times has exposed one of the US military’s worst massacres and cover-up scandals since My Lai in Vietnam.

On March 18, 2019, amid a battle with Islamic State fighters, the US Air Force bombed a crowd of civilians taking shelter near the town of Baghuz, Syria, killing a reported 70 people. The attacks occurred within a 5-minute span: an initial strike, and then another with heavier bombs as survivors fled. The Times’ Dave Philipps and Eric Schmitt report:

Without warning, an American F-15E attack jet… dropped a 500-pound bomb on the crowd, swallowing it in a shuddering blast. As the smoke cleared, a few people stumbled away in search of cover. Then a jet tracking them dropped one 2,000-pound bomb, then another, killing most of the survivors.

US military personnel in Qatar watched the attack in real time via a surveillance drone at the scene. The high-definition footage showed that only two or three armed men were near the crowd, and were not engaging in any kind of combat activity that would have justified a defensive military strike.

“Who dropped that?” a confused analyst typed on a secure chat system being used by those monitoring the drone, two people who reviewed the chat log recalled. Another responded, “We just dropped on 50 women and children.” An initial battle damage assessment quickly found that the number of dead was actually about 70.

Instead of accountability, “at nearly every step, the military made moves that concealed the catastrophic strike,” Philipps and Schmitt write. The site of the bombing was bulldozed; the unit that conducted the strike vindicated itself; key evidence was buried; military logs were altered; and investigations were stalled and subverted. Although the Pentagon’s independent inspector general managed to launch a probe, “the report containing its findings was stalled and stripped of any mention of the strike.”

The bombing was called in by a classified special operations unit, Task Force 9, which led US ground operations in Syria. Two months after the March 2019 massacre, the task force completed a civilian casualty report on the strike that claimed that only four civilians were killed. It also determined that the strike was lawfully conducted in self-defense.

The Baghuz killings likely only came to light because of whistleblowers who challenged the cover-up from within. Lt. Col. Dean W. Korsak, an Air Force lawyer present at the Qatar air base when the massacre was observed, immediately ordered officials to preserve evidence, including video, and urged superiors to open a war crimes investigation. When they refused, Korsak alerted the Pentagon’s independent inspector general.

Earlier this year, after two years of inaction, Korsak shared details about the cover-up with the Senate Armed Services Committee.

“I’m putting myself at great risk of military retaliation for sending this,” he wrote. “Senior ranking U.S. military officials intentionally and systematically circumvented the deliberate strike process.”

…[Korsak] wrote that a unit had intentionally entered false strike log entries, “clearly seeking to cover up the incidents.” Calling the classified death toll “shockingly high,” he said the military did not follow its own requirements to report and investigate the strike. There was a good chance, he wrote, that “the highest levels of government remained unaware of what was happening on the ground.”

When Korsak alerted the Air Force’s Office of Special Investigations, an Air Force major replied that the office would likely only probe the massacre if there was a “potential for high media attention, concern with outcry from local community/government, concern sensitive images may get out.”

The Senate Armed Committee reached out to Korsack after being approached by another whistleblower, Gene Tate, an investigator at the Pentagon’s Inspector General office. Tate told the Times that he witnessed similar stonewalling and censorship.

“Leadership just seemed so set on burying this. No one wanted anything to do with it,” Tate said. “It makes you lose faith in the system when people are trying to do what’s right but no one in positions of leadership wants to hear it.”

After raising concerns at multiple levels, Tate says that in October 2020 “he was forced out of his position and escorted from the building by security.”

In response to the New York Times, Central Command acknowledged the Baghuz massacre for the first time. But it continues to deny the civilian toll, insisting that just four civilians were killed. According to the Times, a US military statement claimed that 60 of the dead may have not have been civilians, “in part because women and children in the Islamic State sometimes took up arms.”

The Times uncovered additional evidence that the cover-up is part of a broader pattern of US forces ignoring safeguards against attacking civilians in Syria, and hiding the death toll.

According to the Times, some officials believed that Task Force 9, the unit behind the strike, “was systematically circumventing the safeguards created to limit civilian deaths… by late 2018, about 80 percent of all airstrikes it was calling in claimed self-defense.”

Previous mass casualty causing military operations in Syria have also evaded scrutiny. As aNew Yorker report observed in 2020, US bombings in Syria have “reduced parts of the country to wasteland.” In Raqqa, US adopted “a strategy of physical annihilation applied against a city that still harbored a significant civilian population”, causing an “utter decimation” that “might be unique in this century.”

According to the Times’ exposé on Baghuz, US officials assessing civilian deaths in places like Raqqa “did not investigate on the ground and often based their findings on how many dead civilians they could definitively identify from aerial footage of the rubble.”

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Baghuz Cliff, Syria. (J. Steffen @ WikiMapia)

Parallels to My Lai massacre in Vietnam

News of the Baghuz massacre comes just days after the US military exonerated itself for the killing of 10 civilians, including seven children, in its August drone strike in Kabul.

The US military’s cover-up of the Baghuz massacre also parallels the My Lai massacre in Vietnam. A reported 504 Vietnamese civilians, including 182 women and 173 children, were slaughtered by US forces in My Lai and neighboring My Khe 4 on March 16, 1968. Just like in Baghuz, the US military unit involved in the My Lai massacre – the 11th Infantry Brigade — carried out an investigation and exonerated itself.

The atrocity was revealed in November 1969 by journalist Seymour Hersh, who interviewed two of the key perpetrators. Hersh’s report, published by the small anti-war outlet the Dispatch News Service, helped turn US public opinion against the Vietnam war.

The Baghuz massacre was kept hidden from the public for a year longer than My Lai was. Hersh’s story came out 18 months after the My Lai massacre; the Baghuz slaughter occurred on March 18, 2019, and was revealed by the New York Times on November 13, 2021 — more than two years later. Coincidentally, the Times’ story was published one day after the 52nd anniversary of Hersh’s report on My Lai: November 12, 1969.

US massacre in Baghuz follows decade-long dirty war in Syria with little oversight
The lack of accountability for US bombings that kill civilians is only one element of a years-long US warfare campaign in Syria given a blank check by Congress and kept largely from public view.

Against the will of the Syrian government — and with no authorization from the United Nations Security Council or the US Congress — the US military continues to occupy a large swath of northeast Syria with hundreds of troops. As I reported in September, the Biden administration has deceived the public about both the nature of the US mission in Syria and its motives.

Although the US claims that its “sole purpose” in Syria is fighting ISIS, the US military has in fact barely done any fighting over the last two years. In 2019, now-senior Biden official Dana Stroul admitted that the US military occupation in Syria in “not only about completing the anti-ISIS fight.” In reality, Stroul explained, occupying the “resource-rich”, “economic powerhouse” region in Syria’s northeast — which contains the country’s “hydrocarbons” and is its “agricultural powerhouse” — gives the U.S. government “broader leverage” to influence “a political outcome in Syria” in line with US dictates.


Underscoring the bipartisan mission, Stroul’s rationale was expressed more crudely by President Trump in January 2020, when he told Fox News that he had backed off a withdrawal from Syria in order to “to take the oil. I took the oil.”

The US Congress is so committed to deploying US troops to steal Syrian resources that it refuses to even debate it. In September, a proposed amendment from Rep. Jamal Bowman (D-NY) that would require Congressional authorization for the U.S. military force in Syria was defeated 141-286.

Although the U.S. military launched operations in Syria in 2014, this vote marked the first time that either chamber of Congress has taken a recorded floor vote on whether to authorize the deployment of hundreds of troops there.

The Congressional endorsement of continued military occupation in Syria pleased the Biden administration, which “doesn’t want a cap on military operations in Syria,” Politico reported. “The United States is in Syria for the sole purpose of enabling the campaign against ISIS, which is not yet over,” a National Security Council spokesperson claimed, omitting the hegemonic motives previously admitted by Stroul and Trump.

The Congressional abrogation of its oversight and war authority powers in Syria follows its decade-long rubber stamp on arguably the most catastrophic and deadly US operation of them all: Timber Sycamore, the multi-billion dollar CIA program that armed and trained insurgents seeking to overthrow Syria’s government.

Just like the cover-up over the Baghuz massacre, US officials concealed the costs and consequences of the massive covert CIA operation.

Timber Sycamore proved to be “one of the costliest covert action programs in the history of the C.I.A”, the New York Times reported in 2017, after Trump ordered its cancellation. With “a budget approaching $1 billion a year,” or “about $1 of every $15 in the CIA’s overall budget,” the CIA armed and trained nearly 10,000 insurgents, spending “roughly $100,000 per year for every anti-Assad rebel who has gone through the program,” the Washington Post revealed in 2015. Citing a “knowledgeable US official,” the Post’s David Ignatius reported in 2017, the “many dozens of militia groups” given “many hundreds of millions of dollars” by the CIA “may have killed or wounded 100,000 Syrian soldiers and their allies over the past four years.”

As David McCloskey, a former CIA analyst who worked on Syria during the program’s early years, told me in a recent interview for The Grayzone, the US continued this program despite the internal understanding that “al-Qaeda affiliated groups and Salafi jihadist groups were the primary engine of the insurgency.” The US government’s tacit alliance with Al Qaeda, McCloskey said, was “a tremendously problematic aspect of the conflict.”


US support for an Al Qaeda-dominated insurgency was privately acknowledged at the highest levels in the Syrian war’s early years. In February 2012, Jake Sullivan — now Biden’s National Security Advisor — wrote to Hillary Clinton: “AQ [Al Qaeda] is on our side in Syria.”


Although Sullivan made that admission in secret, the most publicly blunt acknowledgement of the US “side” in Syria came two years later from his current boss. In Syria, there was “no moderate middle,” then-Vice President Joe Biden told a Harvard audience in 2014. Instead, Biden said, US “allies” in Syria “poured hundreds of millions of dollars and thousands of tons of weapons into anyone who would fight against Assad. Except that the people who were being supplied were Al-Nusra, and Al-Qaeda and the extremist elements of jihadis coming from other parts of the world.”

Biden’s only error was omitting the extensive US role in concert with its “allies.”

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The CIA and its allies’ arming of a jihadi-dominated insurgency prolonged the Syrian war and led to untold atrocities. In the coastal Latakia region, a Human Rights Watch investigationfound that US-armed insurgents were responsible for “the systematic killing of entire families.” The US-backed insurgents there were bent on “sectarian mass murder”, Robert F. Worth of the New York Times found:

In Latakia, some people told me that their city might have been destroyed if not for the Russians. The city has long been one of Syria’s safe zones, well defended by the army and its militias; there are tent cities full of people who have fled other parts of the country, including thousands from Aleppo. But in the summer of 2015, the rebels were closing in on the Latakia city limits, and mortars were falling downtown. If the rebels had captured the area — where Alawites are the majority — a result would almost certainly have been sectarian mass murder. Many people in the region would have blamed the United States, which armed some of the rebels operating in the area.

Congress is mandated to oversee CIA programs like the covert dirty war in Syria. But instead, “there is no evidence that the intelligence committees ever used their powers to prevent, seriously modify, or terminate this fatally flawed operation,” former Congressional staffer Stephen Weissman wrote in Foreign Affairs last year. Even when the House Intelligence Committee voted in 2015 to cut the CIA program’s $1 billion budget by 20 percent, Weissman observes, “the actions of the committee’s Senate counterpart were never made public, so it’s possible that even that modest reduction never went into effect.”

Congress has also rejected oversight when it comes to the impact of its crippling sanctions on Syria. The Caesar Act, approved by voice vote in December 2019, aggressively seeks to prevent Syria’s reconstruction and has, in the unapologetic words of former Trump envoy James Jeffrey, “crushed the country’s economy.” In 2020, then-Rep. Tulsi Gabbard advanced a measure that would require regular reports on how sanctions impact civilians of targeted states like Syria. But the proposal was ultimately stripped by the Senate.


The prevailing rejection of accountability for US warfare in Syria is so extreme that not even high-level whistleblowers and explosive evidence can ensure public scrutiny. Whereas two brave US military officials managed to expose the massacre in Baghuz, the US media — including the New York Times — continues to ignore the OPCW scientists who challenged a US-backed cover-up at the world’s top chemical weapons watchdog.

The US, Britain and France bombed Syria in April 2018 after accusing it of committing a chemical weapons attack in Douma that same month. Leaked OPCW documents later revealed that the inspectors who investigated the scene in Douma found no evidence of chemical weapons use. Their findings instead suggest that the incident was staged by insurgents to frame the Syrian government. But the team’s original report was doctored, censored, and ultimately kept from the public. A US delegation was also brought in to meet with the inspectors and try to influence the probe in its favor. Although a series of explosive OPCW leaks have been released since May 2019, primarily at WikiLeaks and The Grayzone, Congress and US media outlets have refused to even acknowledge the scandal.

By revealing that the military murdered dozens of civilians and then concealed the crime, the New York Times’ Dave Philipps and Eric Schmitt have pierced the media and Congressional blockade surrounding US operations in Syria. After a decade of covert dirty warfare; devastating military strikes; and crippling sanctions on Syria, there are many more scandals to come to light.


Featured image: Combined Air Operations Center (CAOC) at Al Udeid Air Base, Qatar. US military officials watched the Baghuz massacre here via drone footage in real time. (US Air Force)

(Substack)

https://orinocotribune.com/syrias-my-la ... red-it-up/

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Syria increases efforts to ensure return of refugees

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The armed conflict of more than a decade in Syria has left about 13 million displaced. | Photo: acnur.org

Published November 17, 2021 (12 hours 46 minutes ago)

Syria and Russia implement mechanisms to ensure the dignified and progressive return of refugees to the entire national territory.

Syrian Foreign Minister Faisal al-Mekdad confirmed on Wednesday that the Government is increasing efforts to guarantee the return of refugees without any conditions other than a voluntary and safe return.

When referring to the impediments to achieve this objective, the head of diplomacy mentioned the unilateral coercive measures imposed on the Arab nation, in addition to the use of these by Western countries as a measure of political pressure on that country; "They are taking advantage of the pain of every Syrian refugee outside their country to serve their political purposes," he explained.

The head of diplomacy encouraged the rest of the Arab countries to continue the fight against terrorism and extremism, as part of the fulfillment of their duty with the search for Syrian and regional stability.


"We do not accept the imposition of another will on the Syrians, and we hope that the countries of the world will contribute to providing internal conditions such as ending terrorism and foreign occupation of some lands," he said so that each refugee can return safely. to his homeland.

He also mentioned the stance of obstruction taken by some countries that tried to boycott political and reconciliation advances by supporting and financing terrorist groups, and direct attacks such as those perpetrated by the US and Turkish occupations.

In this sense, he ignored the dialogues with the Syrian Democratic Forces and deepened that “we are in dialogue with all our people, and the evidence of this fact is the recent developments in Deraa, and the positive developments that took place in Deir Ezzor.


The Syrian Foreign Minister's statements take place in the context of the meeting of the Syrian and Russian coordination committees that takes place in Damascus (capital) and as part of which they agreed in a statement that the illegal military presence of foreign forces “is a important obstacle on the way to the rebirth of the country ”.

To which they added that in order to “overcome the obstacles that prevent the return of Syrian refugees to their homeland, as well as to restore a peaceful life on Syrian soil, we consider it necessary to involve the entire international community in solving the problems. to rebuild the country and provide support ”.

For his part, this Wednesday, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad received a Russian delegation headed by special envoy Alexander Lavrentiev, and both highlighted the progress derived from joint efforts to ensure conditions for the continuous return of refugees to their territories. natal; as well as strengthening the process of national reconciliations.

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Re: Syria

Post by blindpig » Fri Nov 26, 2021 3:07 pm

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Prestigious weaponry expert censored after demonstrating that a deadly poison gas attack—blamed on the Syrian government—was really a false-flag operation by U.S.-funded terrorists
Posted Nov 25, 2021 by Jeremy Kuzmarov

Originally published: CovertAction Magazine (November 22, 2021 ) |

Top MIT Scientist was subject to defamatory attacks and had article exposing truth about alleged Syrian chemical weapons attacks pulled by prestigious scientific journal.

Fearful editors and CIA-connected hacks ganged up to defame top MIT scientist who refused to echo government propaganda. Instead, he quit his 30-year job on principle.

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Theodore Postol lectures an audience in London on his findings that contradict the UN’s Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) report on chemical-weapon use in Syria. (Photo: rt.com)

Theodore Postol is one of the world’s leading authorities on warfare and weaponry. A physicist with a Ph.D. in nuclear engineering, he is Professor Emeritus of Science, Technology, and International Security at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and a former top policy adviser to the chief of naval operations.

During a career full of honors, he received the Leo Szilard Prize from the American Physical Society for “incisive technical analysis of national security issues vital for informing the public policy debate”; the Hilliard Roderick Prize from the American Association for the Advancement of Science; the Norbert Wiener Award from Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility for “uncovering numerous and important false claims about missile defenses”; and the Richard L. Garwin Award from the Federation of American Scientists “that recognizes an individual who, through exceptional achievement in science and technology, has made an outstanding contribution toward the benefit of mankind.”

Professor Postol was also a senior editorial board member of the Princeton-based Science & Global Security journal for more than 30 years—until he quit in protest over the journal’s refusal to publish an article he wrote that embarrassed the CIA and the U.S. government.

The article provided incontrovertible evidence that the murderous April 4, 2017, sarin gas attack on Syrian civilians was not the work of the Assad government but a false-flag operation by U.S.-funded jihadists designed to make it look like Assad was to blame.

As the professor said in his letter of resignation:
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To keep Postol’s article from being published, a campaign of character assassination was mounted against Professor Postol to destroy his credibility and smear his reputation. Pressure to refuse the article was exerted on the journal’s editors (many of whom Postol had mentored) by select members of the scientific and academic community—who had long suckled at the government teat, and therefore obediently ganged up on their former colleague with defamatory articles and scandalous letters circulated secretly behind his back.

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Postol featured in The Boston Globe with a replica of a Patriot missile. (Photo: archive.boston.com)

Bizarrely, in one of these cowardly letters, Gregory D. Koblentz, a Fellow of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), even compared Postol to a Holocaust denier.

But Professor Postol was no stranger to controversy, or to confronting and exposing U.S. government lies about its military “triumphs” and “successes.”

Following the 1991 First Persian Gulf War, Postol published an article in Science & Global Security debunking U.S. government claims about the efficacy of the Patriot missile defense system, which had reputedly shot down Scud missiles launched by Iraq over Israel.

The article prompted a congressional investigation and Postol became a minor scientific celebrity with a strong reputation for integrity.

Nearly 30 years later, Postol is still doing what he does best: debunking governmental narratives through cutting-edge scientific research and analysis.

However, the political landscape in America has changed—dramatically for the worse.

Not only can Postol no longer get his research published in leading scientific journals; he is now also forced to endure slanderous personal attacks in which he is labeled as a mental basket case, conspiracy theorist and crank.

In an interview with CAM, Postol said,

I could not do the stuff with the Patriot missiles I did today. Nobody has the courage to publish things anymore that go against conventional wisdom on certain key topics related to national security.

Postol added that,

universities and university journals are no longer a source of truth… There is a lack of independence of thought and ability to referee exposés of this nature carefully and a betrayal of the fundamental moral obligation of scientists and academics to society to investigate and then present the truth on important matters—even when it makes people in positions of power uncomfortable.

Report on Chemical Weapons Use in Khan Shaykhun, Syria

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(Source: bbc.com)

Postol made people in positions of power uncomfortable through his dissection of the official government narrative on chemical weapons attacks in Syria.

An article that he wrote with Goong Chen, a mathematician from Texas A&M University, and five other scientists, “ Computational Forensics for the Alleged Syrian Sarin Chemical Attack on April 4, 2017: What Actually Happened?” used forensic computer simulations and three-dimensional image analysis to model the crater that was identified as the source of sarin allegedly released at Khan Shaykhun, an al-Nusra front controlled town in the Idlib province.

The alleged attack served as a pretext for the Trump administration to launch 59 cruise missiles against the Syrian government’s airbase at Shayrat.

Postol and his co-authors determined that the crater and related fragments were almost certainly caused by a vehicle-launched improvised rocket-propelled artillery round with a high-explosive warhead—which the rebels could have possessed—and not an aerial bomb from a Syrian airplane.

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Site of the alleged chemical weapons attack. (Photo: theguardian.com)

No fragments characteristic of an aerial bomb such as tail fins were observed and the size of the crater was too small to be caused by a bomb.

This finding—which was confirmed by a senior intelligence official with experience assessing bomb damage—called into question the scenario of attack described by the U.S. intelligence community, and the UN’s Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) Joint Investigative Mechanism (JIM).

According to Postol’s team, there was extensive tampering with the crater and debris, which led to misreporting in the media.

A dead goat was found at the scene displaying symptoms of sarin inhalation; however, tracks were found indicating that the goat had been dragged to the scene along with a rope around its neck. Dead birds were also found that appeared to have been very recently released from a cage.

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(Photo: “Forensic Evidence Cited by the OPCW That Contradict Its Reported Analysis and Conclusions,” provided to the author by Theodore Postol)

Postol and his team determined that there was no physical evidence of any sarin-containing vessel at the scene.

A pipe was inaccurately identified by the OPCW as a container filled with sarin; in truth it was the casing of the rocket motor that propelled the warhead to the location of the explosion.

Chemical weapons generally do not make large craters in the ground and since no workers sent to clean up the scene were exposed to sarin or died—when any contact with the asphalt around the crater would have been highly lethal in the wake of an attack1—it is unlikely sarin was actually used.

According to journalist Seymour Hersh, the impression that sarin had been used was created by a toxic cloud that resulted from the bombing of an agricultural supply depot near the crater possessing fertilizers, disinfectants and other goods whose release caused neurotoxic effects similar to those of sarin.

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(Source: irishpublishers.com)

The Truth Is Suppressed

Postol, Chen et al.’s article “Computational Forensics for the Alleged Syrian Sarin Chemical Attack on April 4, 2017: What Actually Happened?” was published in the Global Journal of Forensic Science and Medicine in November 2020, and was featured by Tulsi Gabbard on her website when she was running for president.

However, the article was withdrawn from publication by the more prestigious journal Science & Global Security one year earlier after the article had initially been accepted and was circulated at the page proof stage.

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Two men collecting samples from scene of alleged chemical attack with almost no protection. (Photo: “Forensic Evidence Cited by the OPCW That Contradict Its Reported Analysis and Conclusions,” provided to the author by Theodore Postol)

Postol had served for more than 30 years on the editorial board of Science & Global Security and mentored the three main editors who ultimately blocked publication of his piece.

These editors were a) Pavel Podvig, an affiliate at the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University; b) Zia Mian, a senior research fellow and Co-Director of Princeton’s Program in Science and Global Security; and c) Alex Glaser, an associate professor in the School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton and in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering.

In a letter to Goong Chen obtained by CAM dated December 27, 2019, Podvig, Mian and Glaser said that they had decided to withdraw publication of his and Postol’s article because of their “identification of a number of concerns with the editorial process,” including “concerns about the competence of the reviews and editorial judgments being used as a substitute for a decision by the reviewers to determine if their concerns had been reasonably addressed.”

The editors went on to state that they “accepted responsibility for mishandling the process in this case,” noting that their “discovery of inadvertent mistakes [in the review process] should have come earlier…. Given these editorial mistakes, our decision was to return the manuscript to the authors without prejudice. At no point have we suggested that the manuscript has been rejected or retracted.”2

This explanation is hollow because if the editors—who admitted to poor judgment—screwed up the review process, they were obliged to find a fair-minded reviewer.

The insinuation that the article was never rejected is also false because it was returned to the authors and never published.

Crank Reviewer and Bellingcat Disinformation

According to Postol, the main peer reviewer selected by Science & Global Security’s editors was a “crank” and “clown.” He was either a member of Bellingcat or closely associated with the organization.

Dubbed “an intelligence agency for the people,” Bellingcat puts out reports that advance U.S. and UK government disinformation about countries targeted for regime change like Russia and Syria.

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Higgins, center, addressing press conference in May 2018. (Photo: spectrum.ieee.org)

Supported by the National Endowment for Democracy (NED)—a CIA offshoot—its staff includes former U.S. and UK military and intelligence officers.

Eliot Higgins, Bellingcat’s founder, attacked Postol in a September 13, 2019, blog entitled: “Simulations, Craters and Lies: Postol’s Latest Attempt to Undermine the Last Vestiges of his Reputation.”

Higgins is a college drop-out who never set foot in the Middle East and, according to Postol, “has no scientific training, knows no science, and is not interested in learning any science.”

Before the Arab Spring, Higgins admitted that he “knew no more about weapons than the average Xbox owners; any knowledge he had came from Arnold Schwarzenegger and Rambo.”3

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Eliot Higgins at home in England. Ironically, Higgins claimed to be an admirer of U.S. foreign policy critics Noam Chomsky and Naomi Klein—perhaps as part of a fake leftist veneer he has tried to cultivate. (Photo: newyorker.com)

In his blog, Higgins suggested that Postol was a Russian agent who had tried to pass the results of his research to the Russian delegation at the UN.

In fact, Postol and his team sent letters about their findings to all five permanent members of the UN Security Council—China, Russia, France, the United Kingdom and United States—and to the Acting President of the Security Council—Germany—because of their important implications.

According to Higgins, Postol’s study was flawed because the crater simulated in the computer models did not match the one in Khan Shaykhun or look like real-world craters formed by 122-mm artillery rockets.

However, Postol told CAM that the comparisons Higgins offered were flawed and he could not have replicated his team’s supercomputer calculation. The positions of the casings made clear the crater was caused by an artillery rocket, which was confirmed by military manuals.

Higgins’s blog was misleading, furthermore, because it analyzed photos that did not show the original crater and debris on the site at Khan Shaykhun, but ones that were taken after the scene had been tampered with. Also, it analyzed the wrong end of the rocket motor which had been turned upside down.

As such, Postol wrote that Higgins’s forensic analysis was “no more relevant to the truth than DNA evidence would be from the wrong blood samples at a murder trial.”4

Breach of Confidentiality and Conflict of Interest

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Ian Henderson (Photo: youtube.com)

According to Goong Chen, Science & Global Security’s editors were informed in October 2019 that the referee for Chen and Postol’s article had breached confidentiality by divulging the contents of his report to Higgins who told Postol about it during a public panel discussion in London.

Pavel Podvig’s own conflict of interest was apparent in his job as an adviser to the UN Secretary General.

Postol’s article provided science-based evidence that the OPCW has been falsifying reports to the UN Security Council related to chemical gas attacks in Syria—a charge corroborated by OPCW whistleblower Ian Henderson.

Slander by CFR Fellow

Gregory Koblentz, director of the biodefense graduate program at George Mason University’s Schor School of Public Policy and a CFR fellow, was one of the pseudo-experts quoted frequently in Bellingcat’s reports on Syria.

Koblentz obtained his Ph.D. in MIT’s security studies program in 2004 and took classes on nuclear weapons and missile defense from Postol and participated in WMD-related events that he organized.

Koblentz said that “the Ted Postol writing about Syria and chemical weapons is not the Ted Postol I knew back then [at MIT].”5

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Frank von Hippel (Photo: paw.princeton.edu)

In an attempt to block publication of Postol’s Khan Shaykhun article, Koblentz wrote confidential letters to members of the editorial board and editors of Science & Global Security— which became known when Frank von Hippel, who helped found the journal in 1989, shared his letter with Postol.

Koblentz in the letter—sent on September 27, 2019—never refuted the science in Postol’s article, but rather replicated Higgins’s efforts to smear him. He wrote that he had spent the last two weeks trying to “educate the editors” of Science & Global Security and its editorial board about Postol’s “conspiratorial views about chemical weapon use in Syria,” which in his view had been “debunked by the open-source investigative site Bellingcat.”

Koblentz charged that, if Science & Global Security went ahead and published Postol’s piece, the journal’s “prestige and connection to Princeton University would be used by conspiracy theorists, right-wing extremists, Russian disinformation peddlers, and Assad apologists to whitewash the regime’s most heinous war crimes.”

Koblentz said that Postol’s analysis of chemical-weapons use in Syria exhibited a “pattern of unfounded, unscientific, and illogical assumptions about the world,” a “classic sign of conspiracy theory.”

This conspiracy theory was “quite popular among CW truthers, which include those who deny the Holocaust occurred or that Al Qaeda was responsible for 9/11, as well as among individuals and organizations who support the Syrian and Russian narratives that Syria has not gassed its own people.”

According to Koblentz,

publishing Ted’s latest theory in Science & Global Security is akin to letting Andrew Wakefield publish an article about vaccines and autism in JAMA [Journal of the American Medical Association], Alex Jones to opine about media coverage of the mass shooting of Sandy Hook in the Columbia Journalism Review, or allowing a known climate change denialist to publish an article on global cooling in Science: these are all discredited conspiracy theorists who are best viewed as charlatans, despite any degrees they hold or honors they’ve received.6

Rejection and Dress-Down

After receiving Koblentz’s letter, he, Mian and Glaser consulted other scientists, like Princeton’s Robert H. Socolow, who encouraged them to withdraw Postol’s article from publication.

Mian and Glaser then met with Postol in a one-hour session in which Mian did all the talking. According to Postol, Mian was “very uppity in the meeting though showed signs he had not actually read his paper.” Postol said he felt at the meeting like he was “some South Asian servant being dressed down by a British imperialist in 1965.”

Resignation

Afterwards, Postol resigned from the editorial board of Science & Global Society, on which he had served for 30 years.

He stated that it was “anathema for him to be part of an organization that would intentionally or not seek to suppress or misrepresent valid scientific findings that have implications for international law and the future viability of the chemical weapons convention.”

In an exclusive interview with CAM, Postol said that the whole matter was very emotional for him because of his long friendship and association with the editors of Science & Global Security whom he mentored, helped get papers published and even helped get jobs. He feels that they betrayed him and the scientific community and made a grievous mistake by “failing to stand for their own scientific judgment.”

On October 25, 2019, Postol wrote to congratulate the three editors for allowing a “technically illiterate, third-class political scientist [Koblentz] to stop publication of a careful and comprehensively documented scientific analysis. Great job!”7

Academic Cowardice at George Mason University
In November 2019, Postol lodged a formal complaint of academic misconduct against Koblentz with Mark Rozell, Dean of the School of Government and Public Policy at George Mason University where Koblentz teaches.

Postol said that Professor Koblentz has been “misrepresenting himself as an expert on a matter where he demonstrably has no knowledge and he is using his false claims of knowledge to engage in slanderous allegations against me and my colleagues.”

In response to the letter, George Mason Provost S. David Wu (now president of Baruch College) carried out an investigation which determined that, while some of Koblentz’s statements were “undiplomatic,” he had not misrepresented his credentials and that accusations of slander should be handled in the courts.

The investigating committee concluded that “statements some may characterize as undiplomatic or disparaging nevertheless can be part of a discourse conducted within the bounds of academic freedom.”8

Postol responded by writing a letter to George Mason University Rector Tom Davis, a former Republican Congressman, in which he reiterated that Koblentz had no scientific expertise to challenge his findings and said that there was no discourse between him and Koblentz that could fall within the boundaries of academic freedom since the letters he sent were secret. Koblentz never sought to debate any questions about his work with him—rather, he posted information that was false to his colleagues without his knowledge.9

Postol further alleged that George Mason’s investigation was unprofessional and inadequate. Postol himself was never interviewed and never provided any information about who the panel members were and whether they possessed the requisite expertise to assess Postol’s research and whether it was professionally carried out.

Postol wrote:
I was excluded by a process that appears to have been designed from the beginning to exclude the addition of clarifying evidence or the raising of questions about the accuracy of statements that Koblentz may have made in his defense. In short, the procedure may or may not have been rigged, but they were certainly not constructed so as to get a balanced and comprehensive picture of the situation.10
Postol asked for Davis to rectify the problem, but he received no reply to his letter. When CAM tried to contact him, he was impossible to reach.

2013 Chemical Attacks in East Ghouta

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Secretary of State John Kerry gives dramatic performance at press conference on August 20, 2013, blaming Bashir al-Assad for sarin gas attacks in Eastern Ghouta seven days earlier. Kerry’s statements were false. (Photo: washingtonpost.com)

Postol wrote another important article debunking official government claims about alleged chemical-weapon attacks in Syria: in Eastern Ghouta, a suburb of Damascus, on August 13, 2013.

The latter attacks provided a pretext for threatened U.S. air strikes, which the Obama administration was poised to launch but held back on because of a lack of public support.

On August 20, 2013, Secretary of State John Kerry gave a dramatic press conference affirming the intelligence community’s conclusion that sarin chemical-weapon attacks had been carried out from “the heart of regime territory.”

Seymour Hersh quoted an intelligence officer at the time who suggested that the charade was a false-flag equivalent to the Gulf of Tonkin incident that resulted in the massive U.S. expansion of its war in South Vietnam.11

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(Source: newrepublic.com)

The Obama administration used the attacks to justify Operation Timber Sycamore, a $1 billion program supplying arms to jihadist rebels seeking to overthrow Assad, and to push for air strikes which were called off because congress and the public made clear they did not want them.12

Postol’s article is entitled “The 2013 Nerve Agent Attack in Damascus, Syria: A Potentially Disastrous National Intelligence Failure.” As of yet, it has not been published. In one journal to which Postol submitted it, the editor waited five months to give him the peer review after he had received it—an unheard of time-lag.

Postol’s paper demonstrated that the artillery rocket motors which delivered the sarin gas in Eastern Ghouta were sufficiently powerful to propel each heavy sarin-filled steel barrel to a range of 2 to 2.5 km (about 1.5 miles).

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Alleged rocket that delivered sarin gas. (Photo: blog.rootclaim.com)

Inspection of the map issued with the White House intelligence report showed that the attack could only have come from Syrian government-controlled areas if the rockets had a range of more than 10 km—which they did not.

Human Rights Watch, and The New York Times and other mainstream media outlets echoed the official U.S. government view that the attacks were carried out in Syrian government-controlled territory, which was impossible based on the laws of physics.

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(Photo courtesy of Theodore Postol)

After Postol’s article was written, a UN inspection team corroborated many of its findings. At a press conference on December 16, 2013, Åke Sellström, the Head of Mission of the UN Mission to Investigate Allegations of the Use of Chemical Weapons in the Syrian Arab Republic, said that a 2-km range for the rockets that delivered the nerve agent was a “fair guess.”

Sellström’s conclusion was omitted from the OPCW report and UN leadership never corrected U.S., British and French assertions about the attacks that were false.

James Clapper, the U.S. Director of National Intelligence, additionally never corrected the false intelligence report that was used by the Obama administration.

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(Source: blog.rootclaim.com)

New Evidence
After the attacks, a video surfaced which depicted fighters wearing gas masks—identified as members of the opposition faction Liwa Al Islam—launching sarin-filled Volcano rockets on August 21, the night of the attack.

The video was ignored in the media at the time, and dismissed as a fake, though a June 2021 study by Rootclaim—a website founded by tech entrepreneur Saar Wilf—pointed to several landmarks visible in the video that matched with footage from satellite photos.

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Targeted building with western wall destroyed. (Photo: blog.rootclaim.com)

The video combined with the satellite imagery helped the authors of the Rootclaim article, Michael Kobs and Adam Larson, to locate the launch site to a small field in rebel-held Qaboun with two rows of trees, low vegetation, and a paved platform.

Eliot Higgins suggested that the Syrian army launched the chemical rockets from an area of a military base south of the Air Force Intelligence Branch. However, the Rootclaim study shows it could not have been the source, as the angle was off and a rocket shot from there would have penetrated the northern wall of the target building, not the western wall, the actual one struck.

The authors also determined that the UN, The New York Times and Human Rights Watch, which all accused Assad of launching the strike, had calculated the wrong angle for the rocket.

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Launcher depicted near trees on left in insurgent video. (Photo: blog.rootclaim.com)

Three days after the Ghouta attack, as Syrian army forces entered the area, they were attacked by sarin, just 200 meters from the field where the Ghouta attack was thought to have been launched.

This attack was detailed in a UN report that Higgins, Koblentz and Bellingcat not surprisingly ignored.

Their agenda is clear in trying to poison the debate about Syria and defame dedicated scientists like Postol whose research casts important light on the deceptions underlying U.S. policy.

Notes:
1.↩ Residents who lived near the scene were also never exposed to the sarin gas when it would have been lethal.
2.↩ Letter to Goong Chen, Pavel Podvig, Zia Mian and Alex Glaser, December 27, 2019.
3.↩ Higgins’s employment history includes work as a data entry clerk at Barclays Bank, manager of invoices for a process management firm, helping asylum seekers find housing, and working on women’s undergarments.
4.↩ Theodore Postol, “Annotated and Highlighted Summary of Fraudulent Blog Referenced by Koblentz from George Mason University Hosted Web Site as Proof of Postol’s Incompetence and Dishonesty.” At a conference in London sponsored by the Center for Investigative Journalism, Postol debated Higgins who resorted to crude name-calling, smearing Postol as “an out of touch old man, an Assadist, and an apologist for mass murder.”
5.↩ Greg Koblentz to Frank N. von Hippel, “AAS—Scientists Clash Over Paper That Questions Syrian Government’s Role in Sarin Attack,” September 27, 2019, email copy of letter sent to the author by Theodore Postol.
6.↩ Greg Koblentz to Frank N. von Hippel, “AAS-Scientists Clash Over Paper That Questions Syrian Government’s Role in Sarin Attack,” September 27, 2019, email copy of letter sent to the author by Theodore Postol.
7.↩ Ted Postol to editors, October 15, 2019. Email supplied by Theodore Postol.
8.↩ S. David Wu, Provost and Executive Vice President to Theodore Postol, April 3, 2020.
9.↩ Theodore Postol, Letter to the Honorable Tom Davis, Rector, George Mason University, May 5, 2020. Letter provided to author by Theodore Postol.
10.↩ Ibid.
11.↩ In the Gulf of Tonkin incident, the Johnson administration lied about North Vietnam attacking two U.S. ships.
12.↩ See Jeremy Kuzmarov, Obama’s Unending Wars: Fronting the Foreign Policy of the Permanent Warfare State (Atlanta: Clarity Press, 2019), ch. 9.
13.↩ This was not the only instance of Clapper abetting misinformation or lying outright not only to the American public (as many politicians routinely do) but in testimony to Congress, which is a crime punishable by imprisonment.
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Re: Syria

Post by blindpig » Sat Dec 11, 2021 3:07 pm

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Assad, Syria and China’s new Silk Road
December 10, 2021
By Matthew Ehret – Dec, 07 2021

Count on Syria becoming an important West Asian hub in China’s Belt and Road Initiative

Ever since Russia and China began challenging the Anglo-American scorched Earth doctrine in 2011 with their first vetoes against US intervention into Syria, the Gordian knots that have tied up the Arab world in chaos, division and ignorance for decades have finally begun to unravel.

Where just one decade ago the unipolar vision of the ‘new American century’ reigned unchallenged, by 2013 the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) had sprung into life, and the largest purges of China’s deep state on record were launched under Xi Jinping’s watch. This latter crackdown even earned the ire of the American intelligence community, with war hawk John Bolton complainingthat Xi’s authoritarianism has made the CIA job of maintaining its spies inside China nearly impossible.

This new operating system, tied closely to Russia’s Eurasian Economic Union, has grown in leaps and bounds. Today, a new multipolar future has emerged; one which plans to actually deliver long-term development for all those who choose to play by its rules.

One of these adherents will be Syria, which is re-emerging onto the world’s stage after having miraculously defended itself from a ten-year military onslaught launched by the old unipolar players.

Of course, the pain and destruction of the war is still deeply felt; illegal US sanctions continue to plague the hungry masses, prevent the reconstruction of basic infrastructure and access to potable water, and cripple schools, hospitals, businesses, and livelihoods.

The BRI and Syria’s new future

On 5 November, China’s President Xi Jinping spoke with Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad, saying “we welcome the Syrian side’s participation in the
Belt and Road Initiative and Global Development Initiative” and calling for reconstruction, development, and the defense of Syria’s sovereignty and territorial integrity.

The discussion came in the wake of Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi’s whirlwind tour across West Asia and North Africa in July 2021, during which he met the Arab League’s chief to discuss Syria return to the fold.

By the end of this tour – which coincided with Assad’s re-election – China had signed a four-point proposal for solving Syria’s multifaceted crisis with a focus on large scale reconstruction, ending illegal sanctions and respecting Syria’s sovereignty.

Syria, in turn, re-affirmed its support for China’s territorial integrity in the face of western-sponsored separatist movements in Xinjiang, Tibet, Taiwan, and Hong Kong.

China’s interest in West Asian development was first made known in 2017 when Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Geng Shuang stated:

“Too many people in the Middle East are suffering at the brutal hands of terrorists. We support regional countries in forming synergy, consolidating the momentum of anti-terrorism and striving to restore regional stability and order. We support countries in the region in exploring a development path suited to their national conditions and are ready to share governance experience and jointly build the Belt and Road and promote peace and stability through common development.”

In 2018, China offered $28 billion in development aid to Syria while simultaneously coordinating the integration of Iraq into the BRI, made official in September 2019 when then-Prime Minister Adil Abdul Mahdi unveiled the China-Iraq oil-for-reconstruction program and Iraq’s broader integration into the BRI framework.

Events coordinated by foreign interests did not permit this momentum for long. Mass protests soon toppled Abdul Mahdi’s government and, with it, the oil-for-reconstruction initiative. While recent months have seen a revival of this initiative from Iraq in piecemeal form, progress has been slow.

Instead, the 25 year Comprehensive Strategic Partnership agreement struck between China and Iran in March 2021 has become the main gateway for extending Beijing’s infrastructure and connectivity projects into West Asia.

The construction of the Iran–Iraq Shalamcheh-Basra rail line is now underway, bringing the two neighboring states into an equal cooperative footing and opening prospects for greater rail and energy corridors extending from Iran through Iraq and into Syria, as a southern branch of the BRI.

In April 2019, Syria was invited to attend the first official BRI summit in Beijing, where President Assad stated:

“We have proposed around six projects to the Chinese government in line with the Belt and Road methodology and we are waiting to hear which project, or projects, will be in line with their thinking … I think when this infrastructure is developed, with time, the Silk Road (Belt and Road Initiative) passing through Syria becomes a foregone conclusion, because it is not a road you only draw on a map.”

So what, specifically, are those projects?

China and Syria are keeping their cards close to their chest when it comes to details for the moment. But it is not impossible to make some educated guesses about Assad’s wish-list by revisiting his earlier strategic vision for Syria.

Specifically, that would be the Five Seas Strategy that Assad had championed from 2004 to 2011, which disappeared from view once Syria was targeted for destruction.

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The Five Seas strategy, in brief

The Five Seas strategy involves the construction of rail, roads and energy grids connecting the water systems of the Mediterranean, Persian Gulf, Black Sea, Red Sea and Caspian Sea with Syria. The project serves as a logical node uniting the diverse nations of Mackinder’s world island behind a program of harmonization, integration and win-win industrial cooperation.

In a 2009 interview, President Assad described this project passionately:

“Once the economic space between Syria, Turkey, Iraq and Iran becomes integrated, we would link the Mediterranean, Caspian, Black Sea, and the [Persian] Gulf . . . we aren’t just important in the Middle East . . . Once we link these four seas, we become the unavoidable intersection of the whole world in investment, transport, and more.”

These weren’t empty words. By 2011, Assad had led delegations and signed agreements with Turkey, Romania, Ukraine, Azerbaijan, Iran, Iraq and Lebanon to begin the Five Seas projects. This was done at a time when Libya’s President Qaddafi was well underway in building the Great Man-Made River, the largest water project in history alongside a coalition of nations that included Sudan, Ethiopia and Egypt.

The true reasons for Qaddafi’s killing, the carving up of Sudan in 2009, and the current efforts at US-sponsored regime change in Ethiopia cannot be comprehended without an understanding of this potent, game-changing strategic paradigm that he and others were spearheading.

The need for secrecy
The secrecy of Chinese-West Asian diplomacy in the emerging post-regime-change world now emerging should therefore be understood as an obvious necessity.

For the past decade, every time a West Asian or African nation makes a public announcement of a BRI-compatible program, that same nation has been promptly dragged through different degrees of foreign sabotage. Neither Assad nor the Chinese have any intention to replay that trend at this pivotal moment.

Soon after the heads of Syrian and Turkish intelligence agencies met in Baghdad in early September, Assad reportedly told a Lebanese delegation that “many Arab and non-Arab states are communicating with us, but asking us to keep this a secret.”

The nature of this secret diplomacy soon became clear, when the Arab League made its 23 November announcement of Syria’s re-admission into the fold.

Former sworn enemies of Bashar Assad, such as the UAE and Saudi Arabia, have demonstrated their willingness to accept their humiliation, recognize Assad’s legitimacy and adapt to the new powers China and Russia. Unlike decades of Anglo-American promises which treat Arab participants like disposable temporary interests, the China-Russia alliance contains tangible, measurable benefits, like security and development for all participants.

Multipolarity vs the ‘rules-based international order’

While the US wasted the past decade imposing sanctions and punishments on nations, institutions and individuals unaccepting of its global hegemony, China was patiently recruiting West Asian and African states to the BRI: a whopping 17 Arab nations and 46 African nations are taking part today.

NATO-member Turkey has also been on the receiving end of Washington’s punishments, and has begun to view China as a potential means to a more independent future – one that comes with the financial resources to mitigate the country’s current economic woes and currency fluctuations.

Turkey, Qatar and Saudi Arabia had once provided vast support for ISIS and Al Qaeda operations across Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan, primarily through the purchase of ISIS-controlled oil and the supply of extremist fighters, clandestine funding and arms transfers. Such support has increasingly dried up, leaving ISIS with very little to work outside of what the CIA provides.

Despite US President Joe Biden re-affirming military support in October for the Kurdish-led Syrian Defense Forces (SDF) occupying north-east Syria, the Kurdish hand has also been overplayed. Many are finally recognizing that the Kurds have been duped into serving as a counter-gang to ISIS, and that promises for a Kurdish state have proved to be as illusory as the dream of Assad’s overthrow.

Erdogan may have tried to walk both worlds for some time, but it has increasingly become clear that Turkey’s only chance for survival rests with Russian military cooperation and China’s BRI (which crosses Turkey in the form of the Middle Corridor), both which demand a defense of Syria’s sovereignty.

As this new reality dawns on West Asia, and as the old unipolar order continues to veer towards a systemic collapse of historic proportions, there is good reason to believe that the region, or an important chunk of it, is already locked in and counting on the development and connectivity boom coming its way.



Featured image: Photo Credit: The Cradle

(The Cradle)

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Re: Syria

Post by blindpig » Tue Dec 28, 2021 2:54 pm

Israeli aggression targets container yard at Lattakia commercial port- video

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28 December، 2021

Lattakia, SANA- The Israeli occupation entity has launched a missile aggression targeting the container yard at Lattakia commercial port.

At about 03:21 a.m. on Tuesday, the Israeli enemy launched an aerial aggression with a wave of missiles from the depth of the Mediterranean Sea, west of Lattakia, targeting the container yard at the commercial port in Lattakia, a military source said in a statement to SANA.

The source added that the Israeli aggression caused the eruption of fires in the place and significant material damages, adding that work is underway to put out the fires and assess the results of the aggression.

Meanwhile, Major Mohanad Jaafar, Commander of Lattakia Fire Brigade, told SANA reporter that the firefighting teams are continuing to work to extinguish the fires in the container yard in the port, noting that the materials targeted in the containers are oils and spare parts for vehicles and cars.

In this context, SANA reporter in Lattakia indicated that the Israeli aggression also caused damages to al-Nada Hospital and some buildings and shops adjacent to the port.

On Dec. 7th, the Israeli enemy launched a missile aggression targeting the container yard at Lattakia commercial port.

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https://www.sana.sy/en/?p=259099

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Israel approves massive settlement expansion in occupied Syrian Golan Heights
The Israeli cabinet voted to approve the expansion of the Mevo Hama settlement in the occupied Syrian Golan Heights with the aim of doubling the Jewish population in the area in the next five years

December 27, 2021 by Peoples Dispatch

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(Photo: Tasnim News)

On Sunday, December 26, Israel announced approved plans for the massive expansion of an illegal Jewish settlement in the occupied Syrian Golan Heights, in a move to further cement its occupation of the territory in violation of international law. The proposed plan at an estimated cost of USD 317 million (one billion Israeli Shekels) aims to build 7,300 new settler homes in the illegal Mevo Hama settlement over the next five years.

The plan was first announced in October. It is reportedly designed to double the Israeli settler population by an additional 23,000 Jewish residents in order to drastically change the demographic balance of the area in Israel’s favor. Around 25,000 Israeli settlers currently live in the area, along with 23,000 Syrians from the Druze community in the last four remaining Syrian villages still under occupation.

The Israeli cabinet under prime minister Naftali Bennett on Sunday voted in favor of the plan at a meeting that took place in the Mevo Hama settlement. During the meeting, Bennett said, “this is our moment. This is the moment of the Golan Heights. After long and static years in terms of the scope of settlement, our goal today is to double settlement in the Golan Heights.” He also gave credit to former US president Donald Trump for opening the floodgates for further Israeli expansion in the occupied Golan Heights after he recognized Israel’s sovereignty over the territory in 2019 against international law and consensus which drew widespread criticism.

The silence of the current US government under president Joe Biden regarding the status of the territory has also contributed to the Israeli government’s current approval of the settlement expansion plan. Bennett also noted that the Biden administration has not made any clear indication of any policy change in regard to the Golan Heights. Notably, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken recently told US media outlets that the region is of “real importance to Israel’s security” and mentioned “threats” posed to Israel by “Iran-backed militant groups” in Syria.

Two new settlements are also in the pipeline, consisting of an additional 4,000 settler homes. According to reports, approximately 570 million Israeli Shekels would also be earmarked for other settlement-related infrastructure and renewable energy projects on more than six thousand acres of land.

Israel captured the Golan Heights, an area of 1,200 square kilometers (460 square miles), along with West Bank, Jerusalem and Gaza after defeating neighboring Arab countries in the 1967 six-day war. It formally annexed the Golan Heights in 1981, a move which was never recognized by the international community. In the decades since, Israel has expelled more than 131,000 Syrians from the cities of Quneitra and Fiq and from 137 villages and 112 farms, as per Syrian government figures. The 23,000 Syrian Druze who still live in the area continue to face threats of displacement and expulsion due to Israeli settlement construction and other energy-related projects that Israel intends to build in the region.

The occupied Palestinian territories of West Bank and East Jerusalem have also suffered from encroachment and illegal confiscation of land by Israel, as well as threats and attacks by Israeli settlers backed by the Israeli government and military. By building new settlement projects, Israel intends to displace the Palestinian residents and create an artificial Jewish majority in order to ultimately to annex the territories.

https://peoplesdispatch.org/2021/12/27/ ... n-heights/
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Re: Syria

Post by blindpig » Tue Jan 11, 2022 2:39 pm

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s Israel Plots Endgame in Occupied Golan, Bennett Must Remember Lessons of the Past
January 10, 2022
By Ramzy Baroud – Jan 5, 2022

With Syria still embroiled in its own war, Israel has been actively rewriting the rule book regarding its conduct in this Arab country. Gone are the days of a potential return of the illegally occupied Golan Heights to Syrian sovereignty in exchange for peace, per the language of yesteryears. Now, Israel is set to double its illegal Jewish settler population in the Golan, while Israeli bombs continue to drop with a much higher frequency on various Syrian targets.

Indeed, a one-sided war is underway, casually reported as if a routine, everyday event. In the last decade, many ‘mysterious’ attacks on Syria were attributed to Israel. The latter neither confirmed nor denied. With the blanket support given to Israel by the Donald Trump administration, which recognized Israel’s illegal annexation of the Syrian Golan Heights of 1981, Israeli reluctance to take credit for the frequent and increasingly destructive and bloody air raids has dissipated.

Briefly, some in the Israeli government were concerned by the possible repercussions of the advent of Joe Biden to the White House in January 2021. They worried that the new president might reverse some of the pro-Israel decisions enacted by his predecessor, including the recognition of the “Sovereignty over the Golan Heights,” due to the “strategic and security importance to the State of Israel”. Biden, a long-time supporter of Israel himself, did no such thing.

The initial concern about a shift in US policy turned into euphoria and, eventually, an opportunity, especially as Israel’s new Prime Minister, Naftali Bennett, is eager to break the Right’s historic dominance over the Jewish settlement movement in occupied Palestinian and Arab lands.

“This is our moment. This is the moment of the Golan Heights,” Bennett declared triumphantly at an Israeli government cabinet meeting held specially to officiate plans regarding the further colonization of the Golan on December 26.

The following statement by Bennett speaks volumes about the context of the Israeli decision, and its future intentions: “After long and static years in terms of the scope of settlement, our goal today is to double settlement in the Golan Heights.” The reference to ‘static years’ is an outright rejection of the occasional freezing of settlement construction that mostly took place during the so-called ‘peace process.’ Bennett – who, in June 2021, was embraced by Washington and its western allies as the political antithesis to the obstinate Benjamin Netanyahu – has effectively ended any possibility of a peaceful resolution to Israel’s illegal occupation of the Golan.

Aside from predictable and clichéd responses by Syria and the Arab League, Israel’s massive push to double its settlement activities in the Golan is going largely unnoticed. Not only Israel’s right-wing media, but the likes of Haaretz are also welcoming the government’s investment – estimated at nearly $320 million. The title of David Rosenberg’s article in Haaretz tells the whole story: “Picturesque but Poor, Israel’s Golan Needs a Government Boost to Thrive.” The article decries government ‘neglect’ of the Golan, speaks of employment opportunities and merely challenges Bennett’s government on whether it will “stay the course”. The fact that the occupation of the Golan, like that of Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza, is illegal under international law is absent from Israeli media coverage.

Namely, Israel’s main focus currently is to normalize its occupation of Arab land entirely. But if that mission has failed over the course of 54 years, can it succeed now?

For Israel, the illegal settlement enterprise, whether in the Syrian Golan or in occupied Palestine, is synonymous. It is inspired by deep-rooted ideological and religious beliefs, compelled by economic opportunities and political interests and assuaged by the lack of any meaningful international response.

In the case of the Golan, Israel’s intention was, from the onset, to expand on its agricultural space, as the capture of the fertile Syrian territory almost immediately attracted settlers, who set the stage for massive agricultural settlements. Although the home of merely 25,000 Jewish settlers, the Golan became a major source of Israeli apples, pears and wine grape production. Local tourism in the scenic Golan, dotted with numerous wineries, thrived, especially following the Israeli annexation of the territory in 1981.

The plight of the steadfast Golan Arab Druze population of nearly 23,000 is as irrelevant in the eyes of Israel as that of the millions of occupied Palestinians, whether under siege in Gaza or living under a perpetual occupation or apartheid in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. The Golan population is equally isolated and oppressed but, like the Palestinians, continues to resist despite the heavy price of their resistance. Their hardship, however, is likely to increase with the expected doubling of the Jewish settler population.

Israel is, of course, aware that popular uprisings will eventually be mounted in response to its latest colonial endeavors, but various factors must be giving Bennett the confidence to continue with his plans. A major source of reassurance is that it could take Syria years to achieve any degree of political stabilization before mounting any source of challenge to the Israeli occupation. Another is that the Palestinian leadership is in no mood for confrontation, especially that it is, once again, on good termswith Washington, which has resumed its funding of the PA soon after Biden’s inauguration.

Moreover, in Israel, the anti-settlement movement has long subsided, crystallized mostly into smaller political parties that are hardly critical in the formation or toppling of government coalitions.

More importantly, Washington has no interest to initiate any kind of diplomatic efforts to lay the ground for future talks involving Israel, the Palestinians and certainly not Syria. Any such attempt now, or even in coming years would represent a political gamble for Biden’s embattled administration.

Israel understands this absolutely and plans to take advantage of this opportunity, arguably unprecedented since the Madrid talks over thirty years ago. Yet, while Bennett is urging Israelis in their quest for settlement expansion with such battle cries as “this is our moment’, he must not underestimate that the occupied Palestinians and Syrians are also aware that their ‘moment’, too, is drawing near. In fact, all popular Palestinian uprisings of the past were initiated at times when Israel assumed that it had the upper hand, and that people’s resistance has been forever pacified.


Featured image: Israeli Government approves a plan to double the number of illegal Jewish settlers in the Golan Heights. (Photo: via Prime Minister of Israel Twitter page)

(ramzybaroud.net)

https://orinocotribune.com/as-israel-pl ... -the-past/

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Citizens of occupied Golan affirm their resilience to foil Israeli settlement schemes

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26 December، 2021

Occupied Syrian Golan, SANA –Citizens of occupied Syrian Golan renewed their condemnation of the Israeli settlement schemes in the Golan, stressing their resilience to foil those plans aimed at forcibly displacing its people, destroying villages and towns, and establishing settlements.

Meidian al-Damaqsi told SANA reporter that the Golan has been and still is Arab and Syrian land, and that the people who foiled the plots of the Israeli occupation over the past 54 years on its land, will also foil any new plan that affects his identity, Arabism.

For his part, Hayel Masoud said that the occupation authorities seek to Judaize the Golan and exploit its resources, condemning the announcement of the occupation government about a plan to increase the number of settlements on its land.

Syria reiterates that the occupied Golan is an integral part of its territory, and that it works to return every inch of its soil to the homeland, as it is an eternal right.

It also affirms its support for its people in their resistance to the Israeli occupation and their rejection of the policy of plundering lands and properties pursued by the occupation in the Golan, including the establishment of settlements on its lands with the aim of changing its demographic, geographical and legal nature.

MHD Ibrahim/Mazen Eyon

http://www.sana.sy/en/?p=258993
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