‘Israel’s’ support for Syrian opposition exposed
By Kit Klarenberg | Al Mayadeen | December 14, 2024
In the wake of ultra-extremist militants of Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham seizing Damascus, Zionist entity premier Benjamin Netanyahu gave a smug address from the Golan Heights, Syrian territory illegally occupied ever since 1967. Along the way, he took personal credit for the fall of Bashar al-Assad’s government and the Syrian Arab Army’s defeat, while pledging that the ground on which he stood would be part of “Israel “for eternity”. Ever since, Israeli occupation forces have pushed ever deeper into Golan, unimpeded and unopposed.
Tel Aviv’s criminal seizure of yet further territory from its neighbors was an absolutely inevitable upshot of Syria’s collapse. However, some Western journalists and politicians have expressed dismay – in many cases, the same figures were cheering al-Assad’s fall just 24 hours prior. Consternation has also widely abounded over the foreign-dominated and controlled opposition groups that overran Damascus, effusively praising the Zionist entity’s assistance in their offensive against the SAA.
Speaking to Israeli TV on December 2, one rebel fighter thanked Tel Aviv for striking Hezbollah and other Resistance groups, stating the opposition was “very satisfied” with the support. They added, “We love Israel and we were never its enemies… [Tel Aviv] isn’t hostile to those who are not hostile toward it. We don’t hate you, we love you very much.”
‘Striking deeper’
While never acknowledged in the mainstream, the Zionist entity’s sinister alliance with extremist opposition groups arrayed against Damascus has long laid in plain sight. A September 2018 investigation by the US empire house journal Foreign Policy spelled out in detail “Israel’s secret program to back Syrian rebels.” It documented how, since 2013, Tel Aviv “armed and funded at least 12 rebel groups” in the country. The ostensible purpose was to “prevent Iran-backed fighters and militants of the Islamic State from taking up positions near the Israeli border.”
The entity’s “military transfers” to anti-Assad opposition groups were vast. They “included assault rifles, machine guns, mortar launchers, and transport vehicles.” The material was funneled via the illegally occupied Golan Heights. “Israel” even “provided salaries to rebel fighters… and supplied additional money the groups used to buy arms on the Syrian black market.” Initially, arms transferred were “mostly US-manufactured,” but these were later “switched” to “non-American weapons… apparently to conceal the source of the assistance.”
Every step of the way, “Israel’s” backing of the Syrian opposition ratcheted. Foreign Policy attributes this ever-aggressive stance to Tel Aviv’s failed “appeals” to the US and Russia “to secure a deal that would ensure that Iranian-backed militias would be kept away from southern Syria.” This prompted the entity to “[begin] striking deeper inside Syrian territory, targeting not just individual weapons shipments from Iran to Hezbollah but also Iranian bases across the country.”
In providing this largesse, Tel Aviv “relied on relationships it developed with individual commanders” of extremist militias, sending “assistance directly to them.” Representatives of these factions “would communicate with Israeli officials by phone and occasionally meet them face to face” in the Golan Heights. “When commanders switched groups and locations, Israeli assistance followed them” – and the entity’s chosen proxies frequently served as distributors of Zionist-supplied weaponry “to other groups,” giving them “outsized influence” in the dirty war.
Foreign Policy records, “As a result of Israel’s humanitarian and military assistance, many residents of southern Syria came to perceive it as an ally.” An anonymous opposition fighter told the outlet, “Israel is the only one with interests in the region and a little bit of humanity and [provides] assistance to civilians.” However, “As troops loyal to Assad, aided by Russian and Iranian forces, reasserted control over more and more areas of Syria,” Tel Aviv cut a secret deal with Moscow, to the opposition’s detriment.
Under its auspices, SAA forces returned to “areas adjacent to the Golan Heights” while Russia promised “to keep Iran-backed militias 80 kilometers” from the area “and not to start hindering Israeli strikes on Iranian targets across Syria.” Despite this, Tel Aviv didn’t desert its murderous surrogates. As government forces closed in, “rebels reached out to their Israeli contacts and asked for asylum.” They and “their immediate family members” were duly permitted to flee to “Israel”, Jordan, and Turkey, with Tel Aviv’s assistance and protection.
With eerie foresight, Foreign Policy concluded that “Israel’s” policy of backing the rebels would contribute to significant and enduring unresolved security problems not only in Damascus but throughout West Asia more widely:
“[This] raises questions about the balance of power in Syria as the civil war there finally winds down. With the Iranian forces that helped Assad defeat the rebels showing no inclination to withdraw from Syria, the potential for the country to become a flash point between Israel and Iran looms large. Without deft diplomacy, confrontations in Syria, protests in Gaza, and tensions over the Iran nuclear deal could plunge the Middle East into chaos.”
‘Military capabilities’
Foreign Policy was at pains to portray “Israel’s” assistance to the Syrian opposition as being predominantly informed by a desire to crush ISIS. For example, the outlet claimed Tel Aviv “provided fire support to rebel factions” fighting an Islamic State affiliate near the Yarmouk River. This purportedly extended to drone strikes targeting ISIS commanders “and precision-missile strikes against the group’s personnel, fortifications, and vehicles during battles with the rebels.” Meanwhile, the Zionist entity “did not extend similar fire support for rebel assaults on regime forces.”
Yet, such an exculpatory narrative is at glaring odds with multiple public admissions by Israeli officials. For example, in April 2017, former entity Security Minister Moshe Ya’alon revealed that “recently”, ISIS had “apologized” after “[opening] fire” on Tel Aviv’s forces in the Golan Heights. This contrition was expressed by the terror group despite the IOF responding to this broadside by bombarding Islamic State fighters with airstrikes and tank fire, killing four of them.
One might reasonably ponder why, despite these casualties, ISIS felt the need to say sorry. An obvious explanation is the hyper-militant faction did not wish to offend Tel Aviv, lest the entity’s long-running operation to provide medical assistance to insurgents wounded in the Syrian dirty war in field hospitals dotted across Golan be terminated. From 2012 onward, UN peacekeeping forces consistently testified to witnessing injured Al Qaeda, al-Nusra, and ISIS fighters being treated by Israeli military doctors across the region.
Along the way, documentary filmmakers even captured video evidence of this practice. Once tended to, these belligerents were sent straight back into battle by their Zionist protectors to fight Hezbollah and the Syrian Arab Army. These astonishing scenes went largely unremarked upon in the Western media although in May 2016, ex-Mossad chief Efraim Halevy proudly boasted that Tel Aviv was committed to a strategy of “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” in its crusade to neutralize Assad:
“It’s always useful to deal with your enemies in a humane way. When you have people who are wounded, considerations of whether to take them in are not simply whether it’s politically useful… I didn’t say there was no tactical [consideration]. I don’t think there’s going to be blowback… Al Qaeda to the best of my recollection hasn’t specifically targeted Israel… As Hezbollah fighters are concerned, we have a different account.”
Fast forward to today, and ever since al-Assad’s fall, “Israel” has relentlessly blitzed SAA sites in Syria. Entity officials boast the “historic” campaign has “destroyed most of the former [Assad] regime’s strategic military capabilities,” decimating up to 80% of the fallen government’s “strategic weapons stockpiles.” Markedly, there has been no attempt whatsoever by HTS to deter or respond to this bombardment, despite Damascus now being completely defenseless against future incursions from its adversaries. Group spokespeople have moreover actively refused to denounce the attacks.
Nonetheless, longtime Syrian “revolution” activists have expressed shock at “Israel’s” onslaught against the “newly liberated” country and further illegal “annexation” of its territory, demanding Tel Aviv cease its inexorable assaults forthwith. One wonders whether such public reactions are truly borne of ignorance and naivety about “Israel’s” rapacious expansionism. The reality may be that the opposition knew all along precisely what would be unleashed following al-Assad’s ouster and still welcome it. After all, they were coordinating directly with the Zionist entity at every step of their struggle.
How ex-Daesh and al-Qaeda leader al-Jolani became West’s blue-eyed boy in Syria
By Alireza Akbari | Press TV | December 15, 2024
Only a day after West-backed militant groups led by Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) took control of Damascus, ending Bashar al-Assad’s long reign, HTS leader Abu Muhammad al-Jolani stood triumphantly on a hill overlooking the Syrian capital.
Wearing army fatigues, Ahmed al-Sharaa, popularly known as Jolani, looked on as plumes of smoke billowed into the sky—a grim spectacle of destruction wrought by Israeli bombings following the ouster of Assad’s democratically-elected government in Damascus.
The haunting scene evoked an eerie parallel to Emperor Nero, who infamously watched Rome burn while playing his lyre—portraying an image of power and apathy.
As the Israeli regime grabbed more Syrian land beyond the occupied Golan Heights and launched unprecedented airstrikes on Damascus, HTS militants gleefully roamed the streets, celebrating the “conquest,” and unleashed a brutal campaign of throat-slitting and terrorizing minorities.
The tumultuous events that eventually led to the overthrow of the Assad government began on November 27, when videos surfaced of militant groups in Aleppo making rapid advances.
These groups swiftly and dramatically escalated their advances, capturing strategic military bases in Idlib and Hama before marching toward the capital Damascus.
On December 8, they delivered a televised address from Damascus, declaring the end of Assad’s 24-year reign—a seismic shift in the region’s power dynamics with all eyes on Jolani as the leader.
Who is al-Jolani?
Abu Muhammad al-Jolani was born in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, in 1982 to a Syrian family originally from the occupied Golan Heights of Syria, which has been under Israeli occupation for years.
His family returned to Syria in 1989, settling in Damascus’s affluent Mezzeh district. Jolani pursued media studies in Damascus before relocating to Iraq in 2003, just prior to the US invasion.
In Iraq, he joined the al-Qaeda terrorist group and became a key figure in the group.
He was captured by American forces in 2006 and spent five years imprisoned at Camp Bucca before being released in 2011. After that, he moved back to Syria and gained prominence as a militant leader.
Jolani’s journey through the ranks of Takfiri terrorist groups was spectacular as he became a close aide to top al-Qaeda leaders including Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri.
After his release from Camp Bucca in 2011, where he forged connections with future Daesh leaders, Jolani emerged as a key figure in the global Takfiri terrorist movement.
He initially served as a Daesh commander in Iraq’s Nineveh and Mosul provinces before being handpicked by Daesh chief Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi in 2012 to establish a Syrian affiliate at the outset of the West-backed militancy against the Assad government in the Arab country.
Jolani founded the Nusra Front as Daesh’s Syrian offshoot, leveraging the chaos to advance his agenda. However, a power struggle with al-Baghdadi over control of the group led to a split in 2013.
Jolani severed ties with Daesh and fortified his influence in Syria’s Idlib governorate, aligning the Nusra Front with al-Qaeda to retain the loyalty of hardline elements within his ranks.
While the split signaled a shift in allegiance, according to experts, it was less about ideology and more a personal rift. Jolani continued to espouse the Salafi ideology but sought to differentiate himself through a political veneer, setting him apart from figures like al-Zarqawi and al-Baghdadi.
Terror designation
The US State Department designated Jolani as a Specially Designated Global Terrorist in May 2013. By 2017, he was among the most wanted terrorists globally, with a $10 million bounty by the US government for information leading to his capture.
In an audio statement on September 28, 2014, Jolani declared his intent to fight the United States and its allies, urging his forces to reject Western assistance in their battle against Daesh.
Yet, just two years later, in July 2016, Jolani broke his pledge of allegiance to al-Qaeda leader al-Zawahiri, aiming to rebrand his militant organization and broaden its alliances.
This strategic pivot marked a shift in Jolani’s focus—from global ambitions to governance in Syria.
Following the establishment of the HTS militant group in 2017, the group took control of large swathes of Idlib, where they established a rudimentary governing structure.
HTS began collecting taxes and issuing identity cards to locals. However, these efforts were marred by authoritarian practices, including the suppression of dissent and the arrest of political opponents.
Despite Jolani’s public commitment to protecting minorities, his group adopted high-handed measures against religious and ethnic minorities, especially those who spoke about discrimination.
While HTS made rapid strides in consolidating power in the region bordering Turkey, its track record of human rights abuses in Idlib continued to be an area of concern.
The group has been known for systematically silencing dissent, targeting rivals, and using disproportionate force against those who opposed his authoritarian practices.
Concerns have also grown over the presence of foreign mercenaries in HTS, particularly those in its elite Red Brigades, which include members from Central Asia, Chechnya, and France.
Bigger political aspirations
Despite his Takfiri-militant roots, Jolani’s bigger political aspirations kept him in the news for years, as he continued to harbor ambitions of capturing Damascus from his hideouts in Idlib, financially and militarily backed by the United States, the Israeli regime and some regional countries.
Now, with HTS and its allies controlling significant territory in Syria, questions loom over how they will govern the country. Around 100,000 Syrians have already gathered on the border to enter Lebanon, according to reports, desperate to leave their home country.
Fears persist about the treatment of minorities, dissidents, and women under their rule, as many Syrians and the international community remain wary of Jolani’s true intentions.
Despite growing concerns over HTS rule, fueled by viral videos showing the group’s violent tactics, both the UK and the US are reportedly reconsidering its designation as a terrorist organization.
The British government is actively weighing the removal of HTS from its list of designated terrorist groups, particularly in light of the group’s pivotal role in the fall of the Assad government.
UK government minister Pat McFadden has suggested that such a move could be “relatively swift,” given the rapidly changing dynamics in Syria.
Similarly, US officials are debating the merits of removing the $10 million bounty on Jolani.
After years of lobbying for delisting, HTS appears to have gained traction with Western powers, particularly following its instrumental role in Assad’s ousting, a goal it shared with Western powers.
For years, the US and its Western allies had tried to dislodge the Assad government, using transnational mercenary forces as well as terrorist groups without much luck.
al-Jolani finally accomplished what his Western backers couldn’t for years despite massive efforts.
In his first detailed interview on Saturday, he emphasized engagement with Western nations and confirmed that the channels of communication with Western embassies, including talks with the British government to restore its diplomatic representation in Damascus, are underway.
He once again asserted that his regime has no intention of engaging in a conflict with the Israeli regime, despite Benjamin Netanyahu decimating the Arab country’s military muscle in a few days.
Has Bibi Achieved His Dream of Obliterating the Arab World?
By Mike Whitney • Unz Review • December 14, 2024
Take a look at the map above. It explains everything.
This is roughly the situation on the ground today. The majority of Syria’s landmass is controlled by 5 groups: Al Qaida (HTS), the Kurds (SDF), the IDF (Israel), the Turks, and remnants of the Syrian Army (SAA). Of course, the situation is extremely fluid so some of the territory is likely to change hands in the near future as rival groups fight among themselves. But here’s what won’t change: A government will not emerge that is capable of stitching together a unified, contiguous, viable centrally-governed Syrian state. That’s not going to happen. The various armies are too powerful for any one group to crush the others and reestablish a government that rules all of Syria’s previously controlled territory.
Why does that matter?
Because we need to acknowledge that Israel has accomplished what it sought from the very beginning; they not only enlisted allies to help them topple Assad, but they also obliterated the Syrian state. Syria is gone; it no longer exists. And that has been Israel’s goal for more than 40 years.
So, we shouldn’t view the events of the last week as random or spontaneous, because they are neither. Everything that has taken place aligns closely with a strategic blueprint produced by a Zionist intellectual (Oded Yinon) more than four decades ago and which—according to biographer Israel Shahak—concocted “an accurate and detailed plan…. for the Middle East which is based on the division of the whole area into small states, and the dissolution of all the existing Arab states.” Full Stop.
This is where readers need to pause for a moment and honestly consider whether this accurately explains the endless fighting and turmoil we’ve seen in the Middle East for the last two decades?
The answer is: It does. Iraq, Libya, Lebanon, Syria etc. These are not just countries; they are agenda items on a Zionist checklist for regional domination. So, stop thinking that the wars have something to do with Assad or oil or pipelines or Hamas or even Israeli security. Because they don’t. These are wars aimed at establishing Israeli hegemony across the Middle East. Let’s look at the document itself which is titled A Strategy for Israel in the Nineteen Eighties by Oded Yinon:
The Moslem Arab World is built like a temporary house of cards put together by foreigners without the wishes and desires of the inhabitants having been taken into account. … every Arab Moslem state nowadays faces ethnic social destruction from within, and in some a civil war is already raging. All of the Arab states east of Israel are torn apart, broken up and riddled with conflict… This national ethnic minority picture extending from Morocco to India and from Somalia to Turkey points to the absence of stability and a rapid degeneration in the entire region. When this picture is added to the economic one, we see how the entire region is built like a house of cards, unable to withstand its severe problems… A Strategy for Israel in the Nineteen Eighties, Oded Yinon, voltairenet
So, in the opening paragraphs, the author identifies the vulnerabilities within the current societies that can be exploited for Israel’s strategic advantage. The focus, of course, is on “ethnic minorities” that can be incited to exacerbate existing divisions within the society in order to weaken the larger body politic leading to regime change. Here’s the kicker:
The Western front… is in fact less complicated than the Eastern front. Lebanon’s total dissolution into five provinces serves as a precendent for the entire Arab World… The dissolution of Syria and Iraq later on into ethnically or religiously unique areas such as Lebanon, is Israel’s primary target on the Eastern front in the long run, while the dissolution of the military power of those states serves as the primary short term target. Syria will fall apart in accordance with its ethnic and reliegious strtucture, into several states such as in present day Lebanon, so that there will be a Shi’ite Alawi state along its coast, a Sunni state in Damascus hostile to its northern neighbor, and the Druzes who will set up a state, maybe even in our Golan, and certainly in the Hauran and in northenr Jordan. This state of affairs will be the guarantee for peace and security in the area in the long run, and that aim is already within our reach today… A Strategy for Israel in the Nineteen Eighties, Oded Yinon, voltairenet
Repeat: “This state of affairs will be the guarantee for peace and security in the area in the long run.” In other words, inciting ethnic and religious violence against other groups within the society, is the operational strategy for achieving regional dominance. In order to establish Israeli security, Arabs must be encouraged to kill each other.
Are we clear about that?
Regarding the Palestinians, there’s this little nugget:
Genuine coexistence and peace will reign over the land only when the Arabs understand that without Jewish rule between the Jordan and the sea, they will have neither existence nor security. A nation of their own and security will be theirs only in Jordan. A Strategy for Israel in the Nineteen Eighties,
Keep in mind, this was written in 1982 which means—that among the politicos in Netanyahu’s party—there was never any intention of exchanging land for peace or fulfilling their obligations under US Resolution 242 to evacuate the occupied territories. It was always a ruse aimed at confusing credulous nitwits in the US.
Economist Jeffrey Sachs has confirmed much of what we’ve stated here. He has recently been quite outspoken in a number of interviews on YouTube where he has laid blame for all the recent wars in the Middle East on Benjamin Netanyahu. Here’s Sach’s in a recent piece at Consortium News:
The fall of Syria this week is the culmination of the Israel-U.S. campaign against Syria that goes back to 1996 with Netanyahu’s arrival in office as prime minister. The Israel-U.S. war on Syria escalated in 2011 and 2012, when former U.S. President Barack Obama covertly tasked the C.I.A. with the overthrow of the Syrian Government in Operation Timber Sycamore. ….
Syria’s fall came swiftly because of more than a decade of crushing economic sanctions, the burdens of war, the U.S. seizure of Syria’s oil….. and most immediately, Israel’s attacks on Hezbollah… Netanyahu’s ambition to transform the region through war, which dates back almost three decades, is playing out in front of our eyes…
The long history of Israel’s campaign to overthrow the Syrian government is not widely understood, yet the documentary record is clear…
Israel’s war on Syria began with U.S. and Israeli neoconservatives in 1996, who fashioned a “Clean Break” strategy for the Middle East for Netanyahu as he came to office… The core of the “clean break” strategy called for the Israel (and the U.S.) to reject “land for peace,” the idea that Israel would withdraw from the occupied Palestinian lands in return for peace…
... Netanyahu’s strategy was integrated into U.S. foreign policy. Taking out Syria was always a key part of the plan. This was confirmed by General Wesley Clark after 9/11. (The role of the Israel Lobby is spelled out in Ilan Pappé’s new book, Lobbying for Zionism on Both Sides of the Atlantic)…
The U.S. has by now led or sponsored wars against Iraq (invasion in 2003), Lebanon (U.S. funding and arming Israel), Libya (NATO bombing in 2011), Syria (C.I.A. operation during 2010s), Sudan (supporting rebels to break Sudan apart in 2011), and Somalia (backing Ethiopia’s invasion in 2006).
A prospective U.S. war with Iran, ardently sought by Israel, is still pending….. The U.S. and Israel are high-fiving that they have successfully wrecked yet another adversary of Israel and defender of the Palestinian cause, with Netanyahu claiming “credit for starting the historic process.”...
American interference, at the behest of Netanyahu’s Israel, has left the Middle East in ruins, with over a million dead and open wars raging in Libya, Sudan, Somalia, Lebanon, Syria, and Palestine, and with Iran on the brink of a nuclear arsenal, being pushed against its own inclinations to this eventuality. US & Israel Destroyed Syria & Called it Peace, Jeffrey Sachs, Consortium News
These are Israel’s wars, and they are prosecuted to pursue Israeli interests not American interests. The US military (and political class) has been hijacked by the maneuverings of strongarm lobbyists who know how to work the levers of power to achieve their own ends. Their rate of success speaks for itself. Much of the Middle East lies in ruins which was the plan from the get-go.
But now comes the hard part, because nothing has really been resolved in Syria. Yes, Assad is gone and, yes, the Syrian state has disintegrated. But how long will it take before Turkey is fighting the US-backed Kurds in the East, or before Israeli and Turkish interests clash in central or southern Syria or before HTS proves to be the unreliable terrorist organization it is known to be and refuses to follow its marching orders from Washington and Tel Aviv? So, yes, the invaders may be congratulating themselves this week “for a job well done”, but the Syrian conflagration is not over yet, not by a long-shot.
There was an important development that took place last week that provides a window into future goings-on in the battered country, although the statement was downplayed by most of the media. On Wednesday, officials of Hayat Tahrir-al Sham (HTS) announced that Mohammed al-Bashir had been appointed as Syria’s interim prime minister. Al-Bashir, who has been running the Idlib province, has been chosen to lead a small cabinet whose job will be to make sure the government agencies, banks and public services continue operate without interruption. More importantly, al-Bashir, who speaks English, is likely the designated technocrat chosen by Washington to jumpstart the sale of the country’s state-owned assets and businesses, its natural resources, and anything else of value. Judging from past experience, he will probably oversee a sharp reduction in government spending, as well as dramatic cutbacks in education, public safety and health care. He will also seek hefty loans from the IMF for reconstruction that will be diverted to foreign accounts for his family and cronies leaving ordinary Syrians with an ocean of red ink they can never hope to repay. Sound familiar?
Unfortunately, Bashir’s debut did not go as well as expected. Here’s the story from NBC News:
When Syria’s new interim prime minister, Mohammad al-Bashir, chaired a Cabinet meeting in Damascus on Tuesday, hanging behind him was the flag of the country’s suddenly victorious opposition. Next to it, however, was a second banner popular with the region’s Sunni Islamist fighters, featuring the large Arabic letters of the Shahada, an Islamic declaration of faith.
As a new Syria fast emerges from the ruins of the Assad regime, the world is watching for hints of what that might look like — and that second flag has concerned those hoping for a future of moderation and tolerance…
HTS is banned as a terrorist organization in the United States and elsewhere and grew out of a branch of Al Qaeda. Its leader, Abu Mohammad al-Jolani, said a decade ago that there would be no room for religious minorities in the Islamist Syria of which he dreamed about. He also suggested that he could bring terrorism to the West unless it withdrew from the Middle East’s wars.
More recently, however, Jolani, who now uses his real name, Ahmad al-Sharaa, has undergone something of a rebrand, trimming his beard, donning Westernized green fatigues and espousing tolerance for all of Syria’s myriad faiths. Nevertheless plenty of observers are reserving judgment until these words become actions…
Seeing Syria’s corridors of power welcome a flag “indicating Islamist-Salafist leanings” has “put people on alert,” Sukkar said. Although he does not think deploying the emblem was a “wise” move, he sees it as more reflective of the rebels’ origins in Idlib rather than anything else…
The classic worry among Western foreign policy watchers was that Assad might be toppled but replaced by something that is not much better: an extremist terror group…
Displaying the flag in an image meant to represent Syria’s new transition government shows how HTS and Jolani are still “deeply entrenched in their Salafist-Sunni ideology and worldview”…
With the group now making more moderate noises, and also in a position of considerable influence, the United States is exploring removing HTS’ terrorist designation, two current administration officials and a former senior U.S. official told NBC News. Although Washington will watch closely the militant group’s moves from its new political vantage point. Why a photo of Syria’s interim leader could hint at trouble ahead, NBC News
Mohammed al-Bashir before and after his Western Facelift
Let’s see if I got this right: The Biden administration replaces Assad with a terrorist organization but is suddenly surprised when it discovers the group is led by terrorists. Is that it?
Indeed, it is. As you can see, none of this resolves the basic crisis created by the removal of Assad. Instead, the main proponents of regime change—Turkey, the US and Israel—have merely transformed Syria into an even bigger battleground where their own competing interests will soon play out by way of mortal combat.
How long will it be before Turkey locks horns with Israel or the United States? How long before sectarian war engulfs the country?
Not long, I’d wager. And for the people who thought that toppling the “evil dictator” would bring peace and security. They’d better think again.
Israel Gives Biden His Marching Orders
Syrian land will be annexed into “Greater” Israel
By Philip Giraldi • Unz Review • December 13, 2024
My former CIA colleague Larry Johnson has a real ability to clarify the significance of the constantly growing deep dark hole that Joe “Mumbles” Biden, he of failing mental capacity, has hurled the American people into. Larry wrote on December 12th that “There is still plenty of time before Donald Trump is inaugurated for Joe Biden’s team of cretins to start World War III. I think the biggest risk is that Israel may be emboldened to attack Iran and try to destroy sites, and may be encouraged to do so by the Biden lackeys. In short, American interference, at the behest of Netanyahu’s Israel, has left the Middle East in ruins, with over a million dead and open wars raging in Libya, Sudan, Somalia, Lebanon, Syria, and Palestine, and with Iran on the brink of a nuclear arsenal, being pushed against its own inclinations to this eventuality. The collapse of the Assad regime has prompted a punishing military response from Israel, which has launched airstrikes at military targets across Syria and deployed ground troops both into and beyond a demilitarized buffer zone for the first time in 50 years.”
Given the destruction and partitioning of Syria, it has become impossible to consider United States foreign policy without some acceptance that it is driven and, in a sense, directed by Israel and Israel’s formidable domestic lobby in the US. “The Lobby,” as it is commonly referred to, controls both Congress and the White House on key issues and manages the media narrative in such a fashion as to make Israel the permanent victim, never the aggressor. Even though Israel is now marching in triumph across what remains of Syria and has indicated that it will be sticking around as an occupier, the move is being described as “temporary” and “defensive” by White House spokesmen. The Lobby’s success rests on the corruption that lots of money can buy, obvious to nearly everyone in politics, but a forbidden topic, sometimes referred to as an antisemitic “trope,” i.e. “Jews and money.” Israel’s role in managing the Joe Bidens and Donald Trumps is largely exercised in the broader Middle East but it also includes passionately supporting Volodymyr Zelensky’s Ukraine, a process derived in part from Jewish mythologizing and obtaining revenge for the alleged “pogroms” carried out in imperial Russia. Subsequent Jewish dominance of the Soviet intelligence and security services, which saw the killing of millions of Christians in Russia, Ukraine and Eastern Europe, are carefully excluded from the narrative.
In the latest bit of “mowing the grass” by the Israeli military, the country’s new Defense Minister Israel Katz told the press that the Israel Air Force (IAF) had carried out more than 480 strikes across Syria during the two days after the initial invasion, deliberately destroying most of Syria’s strategic weapon stockpiles. Meanwhile, the Israeli navy totally destroyed the Syrian fleet based at Latakia overnight. Katz hailed the operation as “a great success.” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, on the day before, had called the rapid defeat of Bashar al-Assad’s regime as “a new and dramatic chapter… The collapse of the Syrian regime is a direct result of the severe blows with which we have struck Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran… we are changing the face of the Middle East.”
When informed of the initial invasion of al-Assad’s Syria by Israeli, Turkish, insurgent and US forces, Donald Trump said that the conflict was none of our business and it would be best to keep out of it. Hopefully that will be the policy after January 20th’s inauguration, but one recalls that Trump’s record of pandering to Israel is almost as bad as Biden’s, and he was the one who decided (admittedly under pressure from the Pentagon) to continue in 2017 the military occupation of a third of Syria that included its oil resources and its best agricultural land. Add in the crippling US and European sanctions on Damascus and one might argue that since that time Syrians have been poor and starving, causing refugee flows and hostility towards the al-Assad government that contributed to the success of the recent uprising.
To be sure, many Syrians are celebrating the fall of an admittedly repressive, authoritarian, and corrupt Bashar al-Assad government. But other Syrians, particularly from hitherto protected minority groups like Christians, Alawites and Shiites, are now living in fear of or fleeing from the violent sectarian insurgents that have taken the place of President al-Assad. Christian Churches have already been looted and desecrated and warned not to hold Christmas services, not to sponsor Christmas parades, and not to display the image of St. Nicholas.
To be sure, fearing what is to come is legitimate as the “rebel” leader of the al-Qaeda derived Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) Terror group, Abu Mohammad al-Jolani, who now goes by his given name Ahmed al-Shara, is a founder of al-Qaeda in Syria, al-Nusra, and a former deputy to ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. The US State Department has listed him as a terrorist as well as HTS as a terrorist group, and has placed a $10 million bounty on al-Jolani’s head, which presumably will soon be removed by Joe Biden. There is plenty of blood on al-Jolani’s hands and little in the way of evidence that he will not opt to slaughter those who he sees as his enemies, much of the killing being guided by the extreme religious groups that make up his followers. Indeed, there are already reports of group killings, including numerous soldiers in the Syrian Arab Army who surrendered rather that fight the insurgents.
Al-Jolani now claims that his extremism was just a “phase” and he has several times confirmed that he wants good relations with Israel, clearly a condition imposed by the US to allow him to remain in power. He has even suggested that Israeli air support enabled his warriors to move quickly from their bases in the north to Damascus. But al-Jolani has never actually apologized for or disowned the atrocities committed on his watch in 2011-3 when he was actively killing fellow Syrians. This includes August 2013 massacres in some of the Alawite areas of Latakia, which included “the systematic killing of entire families,” an international investigation later determined. One observer also reported that the insurgents were devoted to “sectarian mass murder” This is the legacy of the new “inclusive” government in Syria. According to one other ominous report, it appears that Sharia law has already been announced by the newly installed justice minister, Shadi Alwaisi.
So, what is in it for the United States? Nothing but a curt thank you from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who clearly connived with Joe Biden’s Special Envoy Amos Hochstein, an Israeli by birth, to set the ball rolling towards Syria through adroit use of an attack on southern Lebanon to disarm Hezbollah followed by a phony ceasefire in Lebanon that gave Netanyahu a free hand and empowered Israel to invade and overthrow its neighbor Syria, parts of which will undoubtedly be annexed to help create Eretz or “Greater” Israel. It was and is all part of a plan by the US and Israel to reshape the Middle East to benefit the Jewish state and you can bet that Iran is the next target. And a delusional Joe Biden took credit for it all in his usual haphazard way, claiming after the regime change that Assad’s “main allies” — Iran, Hezbollah, and Russia — “are far weaker today than they were when I took office.” Their inability to save Assad was “a direct result of the blows that Ukraine, Israel have delivered upon their own self-defense, with unflagging support of the United States.”
Sure Joe, what bullshit. At the end of the day, to bring down Syria the US spent billions of dollars arming an insurgency that they knew was dominated by al-Qaeda in a government replacement scheme that benefited only Israel and Turkey and which targeted a country that in no way threatened the United States. It sure makes sense to me and I hope you will be comforted by it when you are hauled off to prison after you leave office and are prosecuted for exceeding your constitutional authority by involving the United States in two unnecessary wars. Some might call it treason!
Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation (Federal ID Number #52-1739023) that seeks a more interests-based U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Website is councilforthenationalinterest.org, address is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its email is inform@cnionline.org.
West shamelessly whitewashes barbarism in Syria
Strategic Culture Foundation | December 13, 2024
One week after the dramatic collapse of the Syrian government of President Bashar al-Assad, it is too early to give a precise prognostication of how the Arab country and the wider region will emerge politically.
But already, there are grim signs of the nation surging in bloody conflict and barbarism. Predictably, the West is covering up its guilt for creating another epic horror, with its news media shamelessly propagandizing and denying the reality of Syria’s new rulers as terrorist factions.
Syria is facing a fate similar to Libya in 2011. The North African country was turned into a killing field by a NATO regime-change aggression under the cynical guise of “liberation.” NATO-backed jihadists brutally murdered Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi, and the former oil-rich country has been wrecked as a failed state, riven by warlordism ever since without a functioning national government.
Syria’s former president Assad escaped to Moscow and has been granted asylum by his Russian ally. Apart from that difference, Syria’s future looks ominously like Libya’s. Cruelly, that is rather fitting. The overthrow of Libya in 2011 was used by the United States and its Western allies to mount the regime-change war on Syria that also began in 2011, as recounted in our SCF editorial last week.
Thirteen years on, the takeover of Damascus by the terror group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) is unleashing murderous reprisals, internecine warlordism, and sectarian hatred. The U.S. and its Western allies are strenuously covering up the huge imperial crime that has befallen Syria, as with Libya before.
In an audacious denial of reality, Washington and its European partners are talking up a “new beginning” for Syria. It’s a charade of optimism aimed at lulling the world into acceptance of heinous Western criminality.
This outpouring of Western optimism is while the Western-backed Israeli regime immediately launched a blitzkrieg on its northern neighbor, viewing the chaotic events in Syria as an opportunity to annex more land. The Israeli military extended its illegal occupation of the Golan Heights and carried out a massive bombing campaign across Syria.
U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken made a hurried tour of the region this week, no doubt to ensure an orderly carving up of Syrian territory and resources between Washington and its allies Turkey and Israel – all of whom have worked for years to pursue regime change in Damascus.
While Washington is urging the formation of a non-sectarian government in Syria that “respects religious minorities and women’s rights” – the cringemaking rhetoric of public relations – the reality on the ground told a different story.
The black flags of Wahhabi Islamism supported by HTS and its other al Qaeda-type associates were hoisted in Damascus and other cities. There are palpable fears among Syrian Shia and Alawite Muslims, as well as Christians, that they will be subjected to a reign of terror, as was seen during the years of U.S.-led proxy war from 2011 onwards with beheadings of infidels and apostates, among other atrocities.
Credible videos have shown HTS supporters executing unarmed captives and shouting obscenities about their victims’ perceived religious affiliation. There have been appalling scenes of barbarism where corpses are dragged through streets tied to trucks. Mothers holding the bodies of their slaughtered sons have been abused by jostling crowds in deranged bloodlust.
In an incredible wave of psyops, Western news media organizations have been whitewashing the events in Syria as a kind of “liberation from the tyranny of Assad rule.”
There have been multiple reports of crowds celebrating in the streets of Damascus and Aleppo, tearing down symbols of Bashar al-Assad and his father Hafez. However, the Western media have omitted or downplayed any reports that might indicate a descent into barbarism and sectarian killings.
If there was a prize for propaganda, the British state-owned BBC might have won it with this article headlined: “From Syrian jihadist leader to rebel politician. How Abu Mohammed al-Jolani reinvented himself.”
The truth is it is the Western media, like the BBC and CNN, that have “reinvented” al-Jolani.
The years of al-Jolani carrying out mass killings as a commander in Al Qaeda, Islamic State, Al Nusra as well as HTS have suddenly been shoved down the memory hole, and he is now presented as a statesman supposedly leading Syria to a brighter future.
His belated words about respecting religious minorities and pluralism are reported with cloying gullibility by the Western media. Washington and other Western governments are moving to recognize the new Syrian regime by delisting HTS as a terrorist group and indulging al-Jolani’s rhetoric about reconciliation and tolerance as somehow plausible.
Of course, Washington is euphoric about its apparent success in Syria. Damascus has long been a target for regime change, going back to the Eisenhower administration more than 70 years ago when the Arab state was perceived as being too independent.
More recently, as former U.S. Senator Richard Black explained in this 2016 article, Syria became a renewed target for Washington’s regime change in 2007 when then-President GW Bush’s administration decided Bashar al-Assad had to go. To achieve that illegal result, the U.S. and its regional allies deployed murderous proxies, one of which was Hayat Tahrir al-Sham – the new ruler in Damascus.
The covert proxy war continued under Obama, Trump, and Biden. Russia and Iran’s intervention to defend their Syrian ally managed to impede the regime-change objective, but, in the end, they did not succeed for various reasons, as adduced in a SCF commentary this week.
For over a decade, the Western media have systematically and blatantly lied about Syria to cover up for the U.S.-led imperial aggression against that country. They lied about Assad’s alleged despotism when, in reality, Syrians enjoyed religious and social freedoms. They lied about Assad using chemical weapons when it was the Western-backed jihadist terrorists who used them in false-flag provocations, as Seymour Hersh reported.
The overthrow of Assad appears to be a great victory for the Western imperialist agenda and a blow to Russia and Iran. Washington and its allies are in a celebratory mood over the spoils of victory.
But the signs of bloody disintegration are impossible to conceal even for the lying Western media. In the short term, the Western powers and their propaganda media are trying to present the new rulers of Syria as somehow reformed and benign. This is while Israel annexes territory and U.S. and Turkish-backed factions begin fighting over strongholds.
Syria’s descent into untold mayhem has begun, and in the usual Orwellian fashion, the Western culprits are trying to sell the infernal outcome as a liberation. This is typical of the whitewashing deception that comes as a matter of routine following every imperial regime-change operation. It never ends well.
The people of Syria and the region are facing more turmoil, chaos, conflict, and suffering. The criminal Western imperialist axis is emboldened, but lies are never a sound foundation for the future.
HTS officials order Palestinian resistance factions to disarm, close bases in Syria: Report
The Cradle | December 13, 2024
Representatives from Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), the new ruling extremist organization in Damascus, informed the representatives of the Palestinian factions in Syria they would no longer be allowed to possess any weapons, training camps, or military headquarters, Ibrahim Amin of Al-Akhbar reported on 13 December.
Amin further reports that the factions must dissolve their military formations as soon as possible in exchange for political and charitable work under the roof of the new Syrian state.
Palestinian factions, including Fatah, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command (PFLP-GC), the Saiqa, and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) Martyr Ali Aswad Brigad, have had a presence in Syria as guests of the government for decades.
A source in the PFLP-GC revealed to Erem News that the factions were informed of the decision in meeting headed by Ahmed al-Sharaa, also known as Abu Muhammad al-Julani, in the Yarmouk Palestinian refugee camp in the capital, Damascus.
Palestinians came to Syria as refugees during the 1948 Nakba. That year, pre-state Zionist militias ethnically cleansed some 750,000 Palestinians from the land that became the state of Israel, making them refugees in neighboring countries.
Many Palestinian refugees settled in Syria in the Yarmouk Camp on the southern outskirts of Damascus. The camp became the capital of the Palestinian diaspora.
The Palestinian factions formed armed resistance groups and provided manpower for the Palestinian Liberation Army (PLA), which served as an auxiliary to the Syrian Army.
Amin notes that the practical result of these steps taken by HTS, led by former Al-Qaeda leader Abu Mohammad al-Julani, who now goes by his real name Ahmad al-Sharaa, is that the Palestinians are prohibited from using Syria as a headquarters or passage for any activity against Israel.
In 2012, the predecessor to HTS, the Nusra Front, invaded and occupied Yarmouk, seeking to use it as the gateway to conquer Damascus. The camp was largely destroyed over the following years in the course of the fighting. ISIS also occupied the camp and fought against the Syrian army and Palestinian factions there.
Amin says that although the new Syrian government does not talk about establishing relations with Israel, its representatives talk about taking practical steps to prevent any existing or potential resistance against Israel from Syrian territory.
He writes that Israel may seek to force the Lebanese government to take similar actions against Palestinian factions in the refugee camps in Lebanon.
How the US and Israel Destroyed Syria and Called it Peace
By Jeffrey D. Sachs | Common Dreams | December 12, 2024
In the famous lines of Tacitus, Roman historian, “To ravage, to slaughter, to usurp under false titles, they call empire; and where they make a desert, they call it peace.”
In our age, it is Israel and the U.S. that make a desert and call it peace.
The story is simple. In stark violation of international law, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his ministers claim the right to rule over seven million Palestinian Arabs. When Israel’s occupation of Palestinian lands leads to militant resistance, Israel labels the resistance “terrorism” and calls on the U.S. to overthrow the Middle East governments that back the “terrorists.” The U.S., under the sway of the Israel Lobby, goes to war on Israel’s behalf.
The fall of Syria this week is the culmination of the Israel-U.S. campaign against Syria that goes back to 1996 with Netanyahu’s arrival to office as Prime Minister. The Israel-U.S. war on Syria escalated in 2011 and 2012, when Barack Obama covertly tasked the CIA with the overthrow of the Syrian Government in Operation Timber Sycamore. That effort finally came to “fruition” this week, after more than 300,000 deaths in the Syrian war since 2011.
Syria’s fall came swiftly because of more than a decade of crushing economic sanctions, the burdens of war, the U.S. seizure of Syria’s oil, Russia’s priorities regarding the conflict in Ukraine, and most immediately, Israel’s attacks on Hezbollah, which was the key military backstop to the Syrian Government. No doubt Assad often misplayed his own hand and faced severe internal discontent, but his regime was targeted for collapse for decades by the U.S. and Israel.
Before the U.S.-Israel campaign to overthrow Assad began in earnest in 2011, Syria was a functioning, growing middle-income country. In January 2009, the IMF Executive Board had this to say:
Executive Directors welcomed Syria’s strong macroeconomic performance in recent years, as manifested in the rapid non-oil GDP growth, comfortable level of foreign reserves, and low and declining government debt. This performance reflected both robust regional demand and the authorities’ reform efforts to shift toward a more market- based economy.
Since 2011, the Israel-U.S. perpetual war on Syria, including bombing, jihadists, economic sanctions, U.S. seizure of Syria’s oil fields, and more, has sunk the Syrian people into misery.
In the immediate two days following the collapse of the government, Israel conducted about 480 strikes across Syria, and completely destroyed the Syrian fleet in Latakia. Pursuing his expansionist agenda, Prime Minister Netanyahu illegally claimed control over the demilitarized buffer zone in the Golan Heights and declared that the Golan Heights will be a part of the State of Israel “for eternity.”
Netanyahu’s ambition to transform the region through war, which dates back almost three decades, is playing out in front of our eyes. In a press conference on December 9th, the Israeli prime minister boasted of an “absolute victory,” justifying the on-going genocide in Gaza and escalating violence throughout the region:
I ask you, just think, if we had acceded to those who told us time and again: “The war must be stopped”– we would not have entered Rafah, we would not have seized the Philadelphia Corridor, we would not have eliminated Sinwar, we would not have surprised our enemies in Lebanon and the entire world in a daring operation-stratagem, we would not have eliminated Nasrallah, we would not have destroyed Hezbollah’s underground network, and we would not have exposed Iran’s weakness. The operations that we have carried out since the beginning of the war are dismantling the axis brick by brick.
The long history of Israel’s campaign to overthrow the Syrian Government is not widely understood, yet the documentary record is clear. Israel’s war on Syria began with U.S. and Israeli neoconservatives in 1996, who fashioned a “Clean Break” strategy for the Middle East for Netanyahu as he came to office. The core of the “clean break” strategy called for Israel (and the US) to reject “land for peace,” the idea that Israel would withdraw from the occupied Palestinian lands in return for peace. Instead, Israel would retain the occupied Palestinian lands, rule over the Palestinian people in an Apartheid state, step-by-step ethnically cleanse the state, and enforce so-called “peace for peace” by overthrowing neighboring governments that resisted Israel’s land claims.
The Clean Break strategy asserts, “Our claim to the land—to which we have clung for hope for 2000 years—is legitimate and noble,” and goes on to state, “Syria challenges Israel on Lebanese soil. An effective approach, and one with which American can sympathize, would be if Israel seized the strategic initiative along its northern borders by engaging Hizballah, Syria, and Iran, as the principal agents of aggression in Lebanon…”
In his 1996 book Fighting Terrorism, Netanyahu set out the new strategy. Israel would not fight the terrorists; it would fight the states that support the terrorists. More accurately, it would get the US to do Israel’s fighting for it. As he elaborated in 2001:
The first and most crucial thing to understand is this: There is no international terrorism without the support of sovereign states… Take away all this state support, and the entire scaffolding of international terrorism will collapse into dust.
Netanyahu’s strategy was integrated into U.S. foreign policy. Taking out Syria was always a key part of the plan. This was confirmed to General Wesley Clark after 9/11. He was told, during a visit at the Pentagon, that “we’re going to attack and destroy the governments in seven countries in five years—we’re going to start with Iraq, and then we’re going to move to Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Iran.” Iraq would be first, then Syria, and the rest. (Netanyahu’s campaign for the Iraq War is spelled out in detail in Dennis Fritz’s new book, Deadly Betrayal. The role of the Israel Lobby is spelled out in Ilan Pappé’s new book, Lobbying for Zionism on Both Sides of the Atlantic). The insurgency that hit U.S. troops in Iraq set back the five-year timeline, but did not change the basic strategy.
The U.S. has by now led or sponsored wars against Iraq (invasion in 2003), Lebanon (U.S. funding and arming Israel), Libya (NATO bombing in 2011), Syria (CIA operation during 2010’s), Sudan (supporting rebels to break Sudan apart in 2011), and Somalia (backing Ethiopia’s invasion in 2006). A prospective U.S. war with Iran, ardently sought by Israel, is still pending.
Strange as it might seem, the CIA has repeatedly backed Islamist Jihadists to fight these wars, and jihadists have just toppled the Syrian regime. The CIA, after all, helped to create al-Qaeda in the first place by training, arming, and financing the Mujahideen in Afghanistan from the late 1970s onward. Yes, Osama bin Laden later turned on the U.S., but his movement was a U.S. creation all the same. Ironically, as Seymour Hersh confirms, it was Assad’s intelligence that “tipped off the U.S. to an impending Al Qaeda bombing attack on the headquarters of the U.S. Navy’s Fifth Fleet.”
Operation Timber Sycamore was a billion-dollar CIA covert program launched by Obama to overthrow Bashar al-Assad. The CIA funded, trained, and provided intelligence to radical and extreme Islamist groups. The CIA effort also involved a “rat line” to run weapons from Libya (attacked by NATO in 2011) to the jihadists in Syria. In 2014, Seymour Hersh described the operation in his piece “The Red Line and the Rat Line”:
“A highly classified annex to the report, not made public, described a secret agreement reached in early 2012 between the Obama and Erdoğan administrations. It pertained to the rat line. By the terms of the agreement, funding came from Turkey, as well as Saudi Arabia and Qatar; the CIA, with the support of MI6, was responsible for getting arms from Gaddafi’s arsenals into Syria.”
Soon after the launch of Timber Sycamore, in March 2013, at a joint conference by President Obama and Prime Minister Netanyahu at the White House, Obama said: “With respect to Syria, the United States continues to work with allies and friends and the Syrian opposition to hasten the end of Assad’s rule.”
To the U.S.-Israeli Zionist mentality, a call for negotiation by an adversary is taken as a sign of weakness of the adversary. Those who call for negotiations on the other side typically end up dead—murdered by Israel or U.S. assets. We’ve seen this play out recently in Lebanon. The Lebanese Foreign Minister confirmed that Hassan Nasrallah, Former Secretary-General of Hezbollah had agreed to a ceasefire with Israel days before his assassination. Hezbollah’s willingness to accept a peace agreement according to the Arab-Islamic world’s wishes of a two-state solution is long-standing. Similarly, instead of negotiating to end the war in Gaza, Israel assassinated Hamas’ political chief, Ismail Haniyeh, in Tehran.
Similarly in Syria, instead of allowing for a political solution to emerge, the U.S. opposed the peace process multiple times. In 2012, the UN had negotiated a peace agreement in Syria that was blocked by the Americans, who demanded that Assad must go on the first day of the peace agreement. The U.S. wanted regime change, not peace. In September 2024, Netanyahu addressed the General Assembly with a map of the Middle East divided between “Blessing” and “Curse,” with Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, and Iran as part of Netanyahu’s curse. The real curse is Israel’s path of mayhem and war, which has now engulfed Lebanon and Syria, with Netayahu’s fervent hope to draw the U.S. into war with Iran as well.
The U.S. and Israel are high-fiving that they have successfully wrecked yet another adversary of Israel and defender of the Palestinian cause, with Netanyahu claiming “credit for starting the historic process.” Most likely Syria will now succumb to continued war among the many armed protagonists, as has happened in the previous U.S.-Israeli regime-change operations.
In short, American interference, at the behest of Netanyahu’s Israel, has left the Middle East in ruins, with over a million dead and open wars raging in Libya, Sudan, Somalia, Lebanon, Syria, and Palestine, and with Iran on the brink of a nuclear arsenal, being pushed against its own inclinations to this eventuality.
All this is in the service of a profoundly unjust cause: to deny Palestinians their political rights in the service of Zionist extremism based on the 7th century BCE Book of Joshua. Remarkably, according to that text—one relied on by Israel’s own religious zealots—the Israelites were not even the original inhabitants of the land. Rather, according the text, God instructs Joshua and his warriors to commit multiple genocides to conquer the land.
Against this backdrop, the Arab-Islamic nations and indeed almost all of the world have repeatedly united in the call for a two-state solution and peace between Israel and Palestine.
Instead of the two-state solution, Israel and the U.S. have made a desert and called it peace.
Biden claims credit for toppling Syria’s Assad
RT | December 9, 2024
Outgoing US President Joe Biden has claimed credit for the fall of Damascus to a coalition of armed groups, including jihadists from Hayat Tahrir-al-Sham (HTS). Washington had weakened the supporters of former Syrian President Bashar Assad, the American leader has said.
The result of the lightning offensive of anti-government militants in the past two weeks was a “fundamental act of justice” and a “moment of historic opportunity for the long-suffering citizens of Syria,” Biden said in a video address from the White House on Sunday.
“For years, the main backers of Assad have been Iran, [the Lebanese-based militant movement] Hezbollah, and Russia. But over the last week, their support collapsed, all three of them. Because all three of them are far weaker today than they were when I took office,” Biden said.
Washington has been pushing for the ouster of Assad since 2011, when mass protests spiraled into a devastating civil war, in which foreign-armed Islamists emerged as dominant players among anti-government forces. HTS, one of the groups that took over Damascus on Sunday, was formerly known as Jabhat al-Nusra, a Syrian Al-Qaeda affiliate. The war was exacerbated further in 2014 when the terrorist group Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS) rose as a regional threat amid the collapse of security in Syria.
In his speech, Biden highlighted the sanctions on Syria, as well as the US military presence in the country and its support for Kurdish militias in the northeast, which denied Damascus access to fertile lands and oil fields under their control. The US has also supported Israel in its military campaigns in Gaza and Lebanon and its direct confrontation with Iran, Biden added.
“Our approach has shifted the balance of power in the Middle East,” Biden said, mirroring similar remarks by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
“Through this combination of support of our partners, sanctions, diplomacy, and targeted military force where necessary, we now see new opportunities opening up for the people of Syria and for the entire region.”
The US president claimed that Washington was clear-eyed about HTS and its “grim record of terrorism and human right abuses.” Washington will “assess not just their words, but their actions,” he stated. Biden’s national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, said on Sunday that HTS’ history of terrorism and atrocities is a concern for the US.
Abu Mohammed al-Julani, the current leader of HTS, has had a $10 million bounty posted on his head by the US since 2013. According to the US government, the fighters he led were responsible for kidnappings and massacres of civilians.
Biden’s Parting Shot at America
By Ron Paul | December 2, 2024
The interim between a US presidential election and the swearing in of a new Administration has for most of our history been a non-eventful period where the outgoing Administration winds down operations and the incoming Administration ramps up new personnel before the inauguration.
The 20th Amendment to our Constitution was enacted in 1933 to reduce the “lame duck” period between election and inauguration to January 20th instead of March 4th. Increasing ease in travel and communications made such a long interim unnecessary. However long the transition period, it has been understood that with the new election came a new mandate from the American people and the “lame duck” outgoing administration was meant to quietly quack out its last few days in office without incident.
Then came Biden. In the period since the American people rejected Biden’s neocon interventionists in favor of Donald Trump’s promises to end the wars, the “lame duck” has run roughshod over the will of the American people. Whoever is running Biden – and the answer is unclear – has decided to “Trump proof” foreign policy to bring us to the literal brink of WWIII with Russia. And to top it off, Biden’s people this past week have again unleashed al-Qaeda linked rebels to wreak havoc in Syria!
After solidly opposing the neocon demand that Ukraine be given permission to fire US weapons deep into Russia, President Biden in the waning days of his presidency suddenly reversed course and granted permission. From back in 2022, when Russia first went into Ukraine, Biden had argued against sending offensive weaponry and US troops to fight on Ukraine’s behalf. “Make no mistake,” he said in March of that year, “that’s called World War III.”
Something about losing the popular and electoral vote has led Biden’s people to disregard the threat of WWIII and give the green light for attacks with US missiles deep into Russian territory. Why is this so different than providing tanks or bullets? These missile systems are highly complex and classified and can only be operated by US or NATO personnel. That means that American military officers are shooting American missiles into Russia – something unimaginable even in the depths of the Cold War!
Then, just days ago, we saw the sudden re-emergence of the US former proxies in Syria – extremists whose ties go back to al-Qaeda – sweep halfway through the country in what appears to be a return of Obama’s disastrous “Assad must go” policy. For five years the conflict in Syria had been more or less “frozen,” but Biden’s people have turned it up to a boil.
Why has the Biden Administration suddenly given a green light to these terrorists and how deeply is the CIA involved in stirring up new trouble in Syria? Make no mistake: these US-backed “rebels” would never have made their move without the approval of the Biden Administration.
The American people did not vote for an expansion of war, either in eastern Europe or the Middle East. A recent CBE News/YouGov poll has shown that a majority of Americans favor an end to all US military aid to Ukraine.
Upending the card table just because you lose the game not only shows blatant disregard for the “democracy” his party constantly preached on the campaign trail, but by pouring gasoline on these two very dangerous conflicts as he heads for the door President Biden puts each and every one of us in grave danger.
Terrorist Offensive in Aleppo Reeks of US and Israeli Involvement – Marandi
Sputnik – 29.11.2024
The sudden escalation in Syria where anti-government groups launched a sudden offensive towards Aleppo betrays the involvement of several foreign powers, including Israel and the United States, says Seyed Mohammad Marandi, political analyst and professor at Tehran University.
“We see thousands of foreign fighters affiliated to al-Qaeda from across Central Asia,” Marandi tells Sputnik. “They’ve been mobilized and well trained to carry out this assault.”
The offensive, he points out, takes place “literally a day after Netanyahu said he needs the ceasefire in order to deal with the so-called Iranian threat,” and it appears that the goal of this offensive is “to cut off Syria from the Axis of Resistance in order to isolate Lebanon.”
“Obviously, this is being done in coordination with the United States. The whole dirty war in Syria since 2011 was led by the United States,” Marandi adds. “We know that Jake Sullivan back then, who is now the national security adviser of Biden, said in an email to Hillary Clinton on February 12th, 2012, that in Syria, al Qaeda is on our side.”
Given the long history of the US’ association with terrorist groups in the region and previous efforts by Washington to “create a Salafist entity between Syria and Iraq to isolate Syria,” there is no doubt that the United States and its allies “are a part of this conspiracy against Syria,” the analyst concludes.
That said, Marandi identifies the government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as the “number one beneficiary” of the current crisis in Aleppo.
“Netanyahu needs war, and he only accepted a ceasefire under a great deal of pressure. So no one has faith in the Israelis. The Israelis have always violated commitments,” Marandi says. “After all, it is carrying out a holocaust in Gaza, a regime that carries out the Holocaust and continues to do so in front of the eyes of the world after 14 months is not a regime that can be trusted for anything.”
Syrian military expert Mahmoud Abdel Salyam offers a similar take on the subject, blaming Israel for the current crisis and claiming that Tel Aviv’s plans threaten the security situation in the region.
“Israel essentially wants to solidify its position in the region after the ceasefire in Lebanon,” he says. “So Tel Aviv has no intention of stopping – it wants to sow discord among the other players in the region and to force them to react to such challenges.”
Salyam does note, however, that other global players who are interested in “changing the power balance in the Middle East” will undoubtedly capitalize on this situation.
“Some countries, for example, may use the weakening of the Arab republic to bolster their influence by supporting radical and extremist groups that Israel tries to use in Syria,” he says. “But such dangerous actions will lead to unpredictable consequences, for these countries and for their allies.”
Ukraine in league with Al-Qaeda – Syria
RT | November 12, 2024
Ukrainian agents have been working with Al-Qaeda in Syria, offering them drone warfare training and some of their US-supplied weapons in exchange for manpower, the government in Damascus has told RT.
The terrorist group Jabhat al-Nusra, since rebranded as Hayat Tahrir-al-Sham (HTS) has been reduced to parts of Idlib province in the northwest of the country, thanks in part to Russia helping the Syrian government defeat various rebel militants, including Islamic State (formerly ISIS).
RT’s Roman Kosarev has visited Syria and saw “undeniable evidence” that Kiev has made an alliance with HTS.
“We have real confirmation of the Ukrainian instructors’ presence in Syria,” a Russian soldier, identified only by the callsign ‘Gilza’, told RT. He said Kiev’s operatives have been teaching HTS militants how to fly suicide drones, as well as supplying them with such weapons.
Video footage filmed on a ship showed a US-made Switchblade 600 drone being delivered to the Syrian militants in crates labeled as humanitarian aid. Another video showed a man, wearing a black T-shirt with a Ukrainian trident symbol, chatting with a militant somewhere in Idlib.
Mohammed Hamra, a former government official who had to flee Idlib, has his own sources about what’s going on in the province. He told RT that around 250 Ukrainian instructors have been training HTS militants to kill Syrians and Russians.
Syrian intelligence has confirmed the presence of “several” Ukrainian operatives in Idlib. One of the Syrian officials, who sought anonymity, told Kosarev that Kiev’s instructors have been preparing HTS militants for attacks on government-controlled territory, in particular the Russian base at Khmeimim.
Kiev has delivered drones and even drugs – stimulants to keep militants alert – to HTS through Turkish territory, the Syrian said. In return for advice and technology, Kiev has asked HTS to release Chechen militants from their ranks so they could fight in Ukraine.
Moscow has “reliable information” that Islamic State militants and “similar groups” have been fighting in Ukraine under the guise of Chechen and Crimean Tatar units, according to Alexander Bortnikov, head of the Russian security service FSB.
Russia has accused Ukraine of “openly supporting terrorist groups in Africa,” pointing to an incident in Mali earlier this year involving Touareg militants. Ukraine’s HUR military intelligence agency has boasted about providing the Touaregs with information and drone warfare techniques to help them kill government soldiers and Russian security contractors.
Made in America: The ISIS conquest of Mosul
The Cradle | July 2, 2024
Ten years ago this month, the notorious terror group ISIS improbably conquered Mosul, Iraq’s second-largest city. In only two days of fighting, a few hundred ISIS militants captured the city, forcing thousands of Iraqi soldiers and police to flee in chaos and confusion.
The western media attributed the city’s fall to the sectarian policies of then-Iraqi prime minister Nouri al-Maliki, suggesting that local Sunnis welcomed the ISIS invasion. US officials claimed they were surprised by the rapid rise of the terror organization, prompting then-US president Barack Obama to vow to “degrade and ultimately destroy” the group.
However, a close review of events surrounding the fall of Mosul and discussions with residents during The Cradle’s recent visit to the city shows the opposite.
The US and its regional allies used ISIS as a proxy to orchestrate the fall of Mosul, thereby terrorizing its Sunni Muslim inhabitants to achieve specific foreign policy goals. Says one Mosul resident speaking with The Cradle:
There was a plan to let Daesh [ISIS] take Mosul, and the USA was behind it. Everyone here knows this, but no one can say it publicly. It was a war against Sunnis.
‘Salafist principality’
As the war in Syria raged in August 2012, the US Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) authored a now well-known memo providing the broad outlines of the plan that would lead to Mosul’s fall.
The memo stated that the insurgency backed by the US and its regional allies to topple Bashar al-Assad’s government in Damascus was not led by “moderate rebels” but by extremists, including Salafists, the Muslim Brotherhood, and Al-Qaeda in Iraq (Islamic State of Iraq).
The DIA memo stated further that the US and its allies, “the western powers,” welcomed the establishment of a “Salafist principality” by these extremist forces in the Sunni majority areas of eastern Syria and western Iraq. The US goal was to isolate Syria territorially from its main regional supporter, Iran.
Two years later, in June 2014, ISIS conquered Mosul, declaring it the capital of the so-called “Caliphate.”
Though the terror group was portrayed as indigenous to Iraq, ISIS only made the “Salafist principality” predicted in the DIA memo a reality with the help of weapons, training, and funding from the US and its close allies.
US and Saudi weapons
In January 2014, Reuters reported that the US Congress “secretly” approved new weapons flows to “moderate Syrian rebels” from the so-called Free Syrian Army (FSA).
In subsequent months, the US Army military and Saudi Ministry of Defense purchased large quantities of weapons from Eastern European countries, which were then flown to Amman, Jordan, for further distribution to the FSA.
After an exhaustive three-year investigation, EU-funded Conflict Armament Research (CAR) found that the weapons funneled to Syria by the US and Saudi Arabia in 2014 were quickly passed on to ISIS, at times within just “days or weeks” of their purchase.
“As far as our evidence shows, the diverters [Saudi and the US] knew what was going on in terms of the risk of supplying weapons to groups in the region,” Damien Spleeters of CAR explained.
The US-supplied weapons and equipment quickly reaching ISIS included the iconic Toyota Hilux pickup trucks, which became synonymous with the ISIS brand.
The Kurdish role
Another way US and Saudi-supplied weapons reached ISIS was through Washington’s main Kurdish ally in Iraq, Masoud Barzani. Discussing the secret funding for weapons approved by the US Congress in January 2014, Reuters noted that “Kurdish groups” had been providing weapons and other aid financed by donors in Qatar to “religious extremist rebel factions.”
In the following months, reports emerged that Kurdish officials from Barzani’s Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) were providing weapons to ISIS, including Kornet anti-tank missiles imported from Bulgaria.
Further evidence of Barzani’s support for ISIS comes from a lawsuit currently being litigated in the US District Court for the District of Columbia on behalf of the Kurdistan Victim’s Fund.
The expansive lawsuit, led by former US Assistant Attorney James R Tate, cites testimonies from sources with “direct clandestine access” to senior ranking officials in the KDP, alleging that Barzani’s agents “purposefully made US dollar payments to terrorist intermediaries and others that were wired through the United States,” including through banks in Washington, DC. These payments “enabled ISIS to carry out terrorist attacks that killed US citizens in Syria, Iraq, and Libya.”
Further, the agents made use of “email accounts serviced by US-based email service providers to coordinate and carry out elements of their partnership with ISIS.”
It is unthinkable that Barzani regularly arranged payments to ISIS from the heart of the US capital without the knowledge and consent of US intelligence.
An explicit agreement
In the spring of 2014, reports emerged of a deal between Barzani and ISIS to divide the territory in Iraq between them.
French academic and Iraq expert Pierre-Jean Luizard of the Paris-based National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) reported there was “an explicit agreement” between Barzani and ISIS, which “aims to share a number of territories.”
According to the agreement, ISIS would take Mosul, while Barzani’s security forces, the Peshmerga, would take oil-rich Kirkuk and other “disputed territories” he desired for a future independent Kurdish state.
According to Luizard, ISIS was given the role of “routing the Iraqi army, in exchange for which the Peshmerga would not prevent ISIS from entering Mosul or capturing Tikrit.”
In an unpublished interview with prominent Lebanese security journalist and The Cradle contributor Radwan Mortada, former Iraqi prime minister Nuri al-Maliki claimed that meetings were held to plan the Mosul operation in the Iraqi Kurdistan capital, Erbil, which were attended by US military officers.
When US officials denied any involvement, Maliki responded by telling them:
These are pictures of American officers sitting in this meeting … you are partners in this operation.
The UK pipeline
A resident from Mosul speaking with The Cradle states that many of the ISIS members he encountered during the group’s three-year occupation of the city were English-speaking foreigners, in particular the ISIS commanders.
But where did these English-speaking ISIS members come from?
In 2012, UK intelligence established a pipeline to send British and Belgian citizens to fight in Syria. Young men from London and Brussels were recruited by Salafist organizations, Shariah4UK and Shariah4Belgium, established by radical preacher and UK British intelligence asset Anjam Choudary.
These recruits were then sent to Syria, where they joined an armed group, Katibat al-Muhajireen, which enjoyed support from UK intelligence. These British and Belgian fighters then joined ISIS after its official establishment in Syria in April 2013.
Among these fighters was a Londoner named Mohammed Emwazi. Later known as the infamous Jihadi John, Emwazi kidnapped US journalist James Foley in October 2012 as a member of Katibat al-Muhajireen and allegedly executed him in August 2014 as a member of ISIS.
Made in America
The commander of Katibat al-Muhajireen, Abu Omar al-Shishani, also later joined ISIS and famously led the terror group’s assault on Mosul. Before fighting in Syria and Iraq, Shishani received US training as a member of the country of Georgia’s special forces.
In August 2014, the Washington Post reported that Libyan members of ISIS had received training from French, UK, and US military and intelligence personnel while fighting in the so-called “revolution” to topple the government of Muammar al-Qaddafi in 2011.
Many of these fighters were British but of Libyan origin and traveled to Libya with the encouragement of UK intelligence to topple Qaddafi. They then traveled to Syria and soon joined ISIS or the local Al-Qaeda affiliate, the Nusra Front.
“Sometimes I joke around and say that I am a fighter made by America,” one of the fighters told the Post.
There is no indication that the relationship between these fighters and US and UK intelligence ended once they joined ISIS.
‘Maliki must go’
US support for the ISIS invasion of Mosul is evident through the actions Washington refused to take. US planners monitored the ISIS convoys traveling across the open desert from Syria to assault Mosul in June 2014 but took no action to bomb them.
As former US secretary of defense Chuck Hagel acknowledged, “It wasn’t that we were blind in that area. We had drones, we had satellites, we had intelligence monitoring these groups.”
Even after Mosul fell, and as ISIS was threatening Baghdad, Washington planners refused to help unless Maliki stepped down as prime minister.
Maliki claimed in his interview with Mortada that US officials had demanded he impose a siege on Syria to assist in toppling Assad. When Maliki refused, they accused him of sabotaging the Syria regime change operation and sought to use ISIS to topple Iraq’s government.
American sources all but confirm Maliki’s claim. The US military-funded Rand Corporation noted that the US–Iraqi relationship at this time had become strained “because of the willingness of the Maliki government to facilitate Iranian support to the Assad regime despite significant American opposition.”
As Obama’s foreign policy advisor, Philip Gordon explained:
The president was clear he didn’t want to launch that campaign [against ISIS] until there was something to defend, and that wasn’t Maliki.
New York Times journalist Michael Gordon reported that Secretary of State John Kerry traveled to Baghdad two weeks after ISIS captured Mosul to meet with Maliki. Desperate for help, Maliki asked Kerry for airstrikes against ISIS to protect Baghdad, but the latter explained that the US would not help unless the former gave up power.
In July 2014, ISIS fighters were moving captured US artillery and armored vehicles back to Syria across the open desert. Gordon reports further that the ISIS convoys were “easy pickings for American airpower.”
However, when US Major General Dana Pittard requested authorization to conduct the airstrikes to destroy the convoys, the White House refused, saying the “political prerequisites” had not been met. In other words, Maliki was still prime minister.
Geopolitical gains
While claiming to be enemies of ISIS, the US planners and their allies deliberately facilitated the terror group’s rise, including its capture of Mosul.
ISIS relied on US and UK-trained fighters, US and Saudi-purchased weapons, and Kurdish-supplied US dollars – rather than popular support from the city’s Sunni residents – to conquer Mosul.
When self-proclaimed caliph and leader of ISIS, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, announced the establishment of the so-called Caliphate at the city’s historic Nuri Mosque, he set up the very Salafist principality outlined in the DIA document by US intelligence heads.
This orchestrated rise of ISIS not only destabilized the region but also served the geopolitical interests of those who claim to be combating terrorism.
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Truth, History and Integrity
By Gilad Atzmon | March 13, 2010
… As devastating as it may be, at a certain moment in time, a horrible chapter was given an exceptionally meta-historical status. Its ‘factuality’ was sealed by draconian laws and its reasoning was secured by social and political settings. The Holocaust became the new Western religion. Unfortunately, it is the most sinister religion known to man. It is a license to kill, to flatten, no nuke, to wipe, to rape, to loot and to ethnically cleanse. … Read full article
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