The war drums are getting louder in the aftermath of ISIS attacks in Paris, as Western countries gear up to launch further airstrikes in Syria. But obscured in the fine print of countless resolutions and media headlines is this: the West has no legal basis for military intervention. Their strikes are illegal.
“It is always preferable in these circumstances to have the full backing of the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) but I have to say what matters most of all is that any actions we would take would… be legal,” explained UK Prime Minister David Cameron to the House of Commons last Wednesday.
Legal? No, there’s not a scrap of evidence that UK airstrikes would be lawful in their current incarnation.
Then just two days later, on Friday, the UN Security Council unanimously adopted Resolution 2249, aimed at rallying the world behind the fairly obvious notion that ISIS is an “unprecedented threat to international peace and security.”
“It’s a call to action to member states that have the capacity to do so to take all necessary measures against (ISIS) and other terrorist groups,” British UN Ambassador Matthew Rycroft told reporters.
The phrase “all necessary measures” was broadly interpreted – if not explicitly sanctioning the “use of force” in Syria, then as a wink to it.
Let’s examine the pertinent language of UNSCR 2249:
The resolution “calls upon Member States that have the capacity to do so to take all necessary measures, in compliance with international law, in particular with the United Nations Charter…on the territory under the control of ISIL also known as Da’esh, in Syria and Iraq.”
Note that the resolution demands “compliance with international law, in particular with the UN Charter.” This is probably the most significant explainer to the “all necessary measures” phrase. Use of force is one of the most difficult things for the UNSC to sanction – it is a last resort measure, and a rare one. The lack of Chapter 7 language in the resolution pretty much means that ‘use of force’ is not on the menu unless states have other means to wrangle “compliance with international law.”
What you need to know about international law
It is important to understand that the United Nations was set up in the aftermath of World War 2 expressly to prevent war and to regulate and inhibit the use of force in settling disputes among its member states. This is the UN’s big function – to “maintain international peace and security,” as enshrined in the UN Charter’s very first article.
There are a lot of laws that seek to govern and prevent wars, but the Western nations looking to launch airstrikes in Syria have made things easy for us – they have cited the law that they believe justifies their military intervention: specifically, Article 51 of the UN Charter. It reads, in part:
“Nothing in the present Charter shall impair the inherent right of individual or collective self-defense if an armed attack occurs against a Member of the United Nations, until the Security Council has taken measures necessary to maintain international peace and security.”
So doesn’t France, for instance, enjoy the inherent right to bomb ISIS targets in Syria as an act of self-defense – in order to prevent further attacks?
And don’t members of the US-led coalition, who cite the “collective self-defense” of Iraq (the Iraqi government has formally made this request), have the right to prevent further ISIS attacks from Syrian territory into Iraqi areas?
Well, no. Article 51, as conceived in the UN Charter, refers to attacks between territorial states, not with non-state actors like ISIS or Al-Qaeda. Syria, after all, did not attack France or Iraq – or Turkey, Australia, Jordan or Saudi Arabia.
And here’s where it gets interesting.
Western leaders are employing two distinct strategies to obfuscate the lack of legal justification for intervention in Syria. The first is the use of propaganda to build narratives about Syria that support their legal argumentation. The second is a shrewd effort to cite legal “theory” as a means to ‘stretch’ existing law into a shape that supports their objectives.
The “Unwilling and Unable” Theory – the “Unable” argument
The unwilling and unable theory – as related to the Syria/ISIS situation – essentially argues that the Syrian state is both unwilling and unable to target the non-state actor based within its territory (ISIS, in this case) that poses a threat to another state.
Let’s break this down further.
Ostensibly, Syria is ‘unable’ to sufficiently degrade or destroy ISIS because, as we can clearly see, ISIS controls a significant amount of territory within Syria’s borders that its national army has not been able to reclaim.
This made some sense – until September 30 when Russia entered the Syrian military theater and began to launch widespread airstrikes against terrorist targets inside Syria.
As a major global military power, Russia is clearly ‘able’ to thwart ISIS –certainly just as well as most of the Western NATO states participating in airstrikes already. Moreover, as Russia is operating there due to a direct Syrian government appeal for assistance, the Russian military role in Syria is perfectly legal.
This development struck a blow at the US-led coalition’s legal justification for strikes in Syria. Not that the coalition’s actions were ever legal – “unwilling and unable” is merely a theory and has no basis in customary international law.
About this new Russian role, Major Patrick Walsh, associate professor in the International and Operational Law Department at the US Army’s Judge Advocate General’s Legal Center and School in Virginia, says:
“The United States and others who are acting in collective defense of Iraq and Turkey are in a precarious position. The international community is calling on Russia to stop attacking rebel groups and start attacking ISIS. But if Russia does, and if the Assad government commits to preventing ISIS from attacking Syria’s neighbors and delivers on that commitment, then the unwilling or unable theory for intervention in Syria would no longer apply. Nations would be unable to legally intervene inside Syria against ISIS without the Assad government’s consent.”
In recent weeks, the Russians have made ISIS the target of many of its airstrikes, and are day by day improving coordination efficiency with the ground troops and air force of the Syrian Arab Army (SAA) and its allies -Iran, Hezbollah and other foreign groups who are also in Syria legally, at the invitation of the Syrian state.
Certainly, the balance of power on the ground in Syria has started to shift away from militants and terrorist groups since Russia launched its campaign seven weeks ago – much more than we have seen in a year of coalition strikes.
The “Unwilling and Unable” Theory – the “Unwilling” argument
Now for the ‘unwilling’ part of the theory. And this is where the role of Western governments in seeding ‘propaganda’ comes into play.
The US and its allies have been arguing for the past few years that the Syrian government is either in cahoots with ISIS, benefits from ISIS’ existence, or is a major recruiting magnet for the terror group.
Western media, in particular, has made a point of underplaying the SAA’s military confrontations with ISIS, often suggesting that the government actively avoids ISIS-controlled areas.
The net result of this narrative has been to convey the message that the Syrian government has been ‘unwilling’ to diminish the terror group’s base within the country.
But is this true?
ISIS was born from the Islamic State of Iraq (ISI) in April, 2013 when the group’s leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi declared a short-lived union of ISI and Syria’s Al-Qaeda branch, Jabhat al-Nusra. Armed militants in Syria have switched around their militia allegiances many times throughout this conflict, so it would be disingenuous to suggest the Syrian army has not fought each and every one of these groups at some point since early 2011.
If ISIS was viewed as a ‘neglected’ target at any juncture, it has been mainly because the terror group was focused on land grabs for its “Caliphate” in the largely barren north-east areas of the country – away from the congested urban centers and infrastructure hubs that have defined the SAA’s military priorities.
But ISIS has always remained a fixture in the SAA’s sights. The Syrian army has fought or targeted ISIS, specifically, in dozens of battlefields since the organization’s inception, and continues to do so. In Deir Hafer Plains, Mennagh, Kuweires, Tal Arn, al-Safira, Tal Hasel and the Aleppo Industrial District. In the suburbs and countryside of Damascus – most famously in Yarmouk this year – where the SAA and its allies thwarted ISIS’ advance into the capital city. In the Qalamun mountains, in Christian Qara and Faleeta. In Deir Ezzor, where ISIS would join forces with the US-backed Free Syrian Army (FSA): al-Husseiniyeh, Hatla, Sakr Island, al-Hamadiyah, al-Rashidiyah, al-Jubeileh, Sheikh Yasseen, Mohassan, al-Kanamat, al-Sina’a, al-Amal, al-Haweeqa, al-Ayyash, the Ghassan Aboud neighborhood, al-Tayyim Oil Fields and the Deir ez-Zor military airport. In Hasakah Province – Hasakah city itself, al-Qamishli, Regiment 121 and its environs, the Kawkab and Abdel-Aziz Mountains. In Raqqa, the Islamic State’s capital in Syria, the SAA combatted ISIS in Division 17, Brigade 93 and Tabaqa Airbase. In Hama Province, the entire al-Salamiyah District – Ithriyah, Sheikh Hajar, Khanasser. In the province of Homs, the eastern countryside: Palmyra, Sukaneh, Quraytayn, Mahin, Sadad, Jubb al-Ahmar, the T-4 Airbase and the Iraqi border crossing. In Suweida, the northern countryside.
If anything, the Russian intervention has assisted the Syrian state in going on the offensive against ISIS and other like-minded terror groups. Before Russia moved in, the SAA was hunkering down in and around key strategic areas to protect these hubs. Today, Syria and its allies are hitting targets by land and air in the kinds of coordinated offensives we have not seen before.
Seeding ‘propaganda’
The role of propaganda and carefully manipulated narratives should not be underestimated in laying the groundwork for foreign military intervention in Syria.
From “the dictator is killing his own people” to the “regime is using chemical weapons” to the need to establish “No Fly Zones” to safeguard “refugees fleeing Assad”… propaganda has been liberally used to build the justification for foreign military intervention.
Article 2 of the UN Charter states, in part:
“All Members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state, or in any other manner inconsistent with the purposes of the United Nations.”
It’s hard to see how Syria’s sovereignty and territorial integrity has not been systematically violated throughout the nearly five years of this conflict, by the very states that make up the US-led coalition. The US, UK, France, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Qatar, the UAE and other nations have poured weapons, funds, troops and assistance into undermining a UN member state at every turn.
“Legitimacy” is the essential foundation upon which governance rests. Vilify a sitting government, shut down multiple embassies, isolate a regime in international forums, and you can destroy the fragile veneer of legitimacy of a king, president or prime minister.
But efforts to delegitimize the government of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad have also served to lay the groundwork for coalition airstrikes in Syria.
If Assad is viewed to lack “legitimacy,” the coalition creates the impression that there is no real government from which it can gain the necessary authority to launch its airstrikes.
This mere ‘impression’ provided the pretext for Washington to announce it was sending 50 Special Forces troops into Syria, as though the US wasn’t violating every tenet of international law in doing so. “It’s okay – there’s no real government there,” we are convinced.
Media reports repeatedly highlight the ‘percentages’ of territory outside the grasp of Syrian government forces – this too serves a purpose. One of the essentials of a state is that it consists of territory over which it governs.
If only 50 percent of Syria is under government control, the argument goes, “then surely we can just walk into the other ‘ungoverned’ parts” – as when US Ambassador to Syria Robert Ford and US Senator John McCain just strolled illegally across the border of the sovereign Syrian state.
Sweep aside these ‘impressions’ and bury them well. The Syrian government of Bashar al-Assad is viewed by the United Nations as the only legitimate government in Syria. Every official UN interaction with the state is directed at this government. The Syrian seat at the UN is occupied by Ambassador Bashar al-Jaafari, a representative of Assad’s government. It doesn’t matter how many Syrian embassies in how many capitals are shut down – or how many governments-in-exile are established. The UN only recognizes one.
As one UN official told me in private: “Control of surface territory doesn’t count. The government of Kuwait when its entire territory was occupied by Iraq – and it was in exile – was still the legitimate government of Kuwait. The Syrian government could have 10 percent of its surface left – the decision of the UN Security Council is all that matters from the perspective of international law, even if other governments recognize a new Syrian government.”
Countdown to more illegal airstrikes?
If there was any lingering doubt about the illegality of coalition activities in Syria, the Syrian government put these to rest in September, in two letters to the UNSC that denounced foreign airstrikes as unlawful:
“If any State invokes the excuse of counter-terrorism in order to be present on Syrian territory without the consent of the Syrian Government whether on the country’s land or in its airspace or territorial waters, its action shall be considered a violation of Syrian sovereignty.”
Yet still, upon the adoption of UNSC Resolution 2249 last Friday, US Deputy Representative to the United Nations Michele Sison insisted that “in accordance with the UN Charter and its recognition of the inherent right of individual and collective self-defense,” the US would use “necessary and proportionate military action” in Syria.
The website for the European Journal of International Law (EJIL) promptly pointed out the obvious:
“The resolution is worded so as to suggest there is Security Council support for the use of force against IS. However, though the resolution, and the unanimity with which it was adopted, might confer a degree of legitimacy on actions against IS, the resolution does not actually authorize any actions against IS, nor does it provide a legal basis for the use of force against IS either in Syria or in Iraq.”
On Thursday, UK Prime Minister David Cameron plans to unveil his new “comprehensive strategy” to tackle ISIS, which we are told will include launching airstrikes in Syria.
We already know the legal pretext he will spin – “unwilling and unable,” Article 51, UN Charter, individual and collective self-defense, and so forth.
But if Cameron’s September 7 comments at the House of Commons are any indication, he will use the following logic to argue that the UK has no other choice than to resort to ‘use of force’ in Syria. In response to questions about two illegal drone attacks targeting British nationals in Syria, the prime minister emphasized:
“These people were in a part of Syria where there was no government, no one to work with, and no other way of addressing this threat… When we are dealing with people in ISIL-dominated Syria—there is no government, there are no troops on the ground—there is no other way of dealing with them than the route that we took.”
But Cameron does have another route available to him – and it is the only ‘legal’ option for military involvement in Syria.
If the UK’s intention is solely to degrade and destroy ISIS, then it must request authorization from the Syrian government to participate in a coordinated military campaign that could help speed up the task.
If Western (and allied Arab) leaders can’t stomach dealing with the Assad government on this issue, then by all means work through an intermediary – like the Russians – who can coordinate and authorize military operations on behalf of their Syrian ally.
The Syrian government has said on multiple occasions that it welcomes sincere international efforts to fight terrorism inside its territory. But these efforts must come under the direction of a central legal authority that can lead a broad campaign on the ground and in the air.
The West argues that, unlike in Iraq, it seeks to maintain the institutions of the Syrian state if Assad were to step down. The SAA is one of these ‘institutions’ – why not coordinate with it now?
But after seven weeks of Russian airstrikes coordinated with extensive ground troops (which the coalition lacks), none of these scenarios may even be warranted. ISIS and other extremist groups have lost ground in recent weeks, and if this trend continues, coalition states should fall back and focus on other key ISIS-busting activities referenced in UNSCR 2249 – squeezing terror financing, locking down key borders, sharing intelligence…”all necessary measures” to destroy this group.
If the ‘international community’ wants to return ‘peace and stability’ to the Syrian state, it seems prudent to point out that its very first course of action should be to stop breaking international law in Syria.
Sharmine Narwani is a commentator and analyst of Middle East geopolitics. She is a former senior associate at St. Antony’s College, Oxford University and has a master’s degree in International Relations from Columbia University. Sharmine has written commentary for a wide array of publications, including Al Akhbar English, the New York Times, the Guardian, Asia Times Online, Salon.com, USA Today, the Huffington Post, Al Jazeera English, BRICS Post and others. You can follow her on Twitter at @snarwani
President Barack Obama – always sensitive to neocon criticism that he’s “weak” – continues to edge the world closer to a nuclear confrontation with Russia as he talks tough and tolerates more provocations against Moscow, now including Turkey’s intentional shoot-down of a Russian warplane along the Turkish-Syrian border.
Rather than rebuke Turkey, a NATO member, for its reckless behavior – or express sympathy to the Russians – Obama instead asserted that “Turkey, like every country, has a right to defend its territory and its airspace.”
It was another one of Obama’s breathtaking moments of hypocrisy, since he has repeatedly violated the territorial integrity of various countries, including in Syria where he has authorized bombing without the government’s permission and has armed rebels fighting to overthrow Syria’s secular regime.
Obama’s comment on Turkey’s right to shoot down planes — made during a joint press conference with French President Francois Hollande on Tuesday — was jarring, too, because there was no suggestion that even if the SU-24 jetfighter had strayed briefly into Turkish territory, which the Russians deny, that it was threatening Turkish targets.
Russian President Vladimir Putin angrily called the Turkish attack a “stab in the back delivered by the accomplices of terrorists.” He warned of “serious consequences for Russian-Turkish relations.”
Further provoking the Russians, Turkish-backed Syrian rebels then killed the Russian pilot riddling his body with bullets as he and the navigator parachuted from the doomed plane and were floating toward the ground. (Update: On Wednesday, the Russian defense minister said the navigator was alive and was rescued by Syrian and Russian special forces.)
Another Russian soldier was killed when a U.S.-supplied TOW missile brought down a Russian helicopter on a search-and-rescue mission, according to reports.
But Obama, during the news conference, seemed more interested in demonstrating his disdain for Putin, referring to him at one point by his last name only, without the usual use of a courtesy title, and demeaning the size of Putin’s coalition in helping Syria battle the jihadist rebels.
“We’ve got a coalition of 65 countries who have been active in pushing back against ISIL for quite some time,” Obama said, citing the involvement of countries around the world. “Russia right now is a coalition of two, Iran and Russia, supporting [Syrian President Bashar al-] Assad.”
However, there have been doubts about the seriousness of Obama’s coalition, which includes Sunni countries, such as Saudi Arabia and Turkey, which have been covertly supporting some of the jihadist elements, including Al Qaeda’s Nusra Front and its ally, Ahrar al-Sham.
Syrian rebels, including jihadists fighting with Ahrar al-Sham, have received hundreds of U.S. TOW anti-tank missiles, apparently through Sunni regional powers with what I’ve been told was Obama’s direct approval. The jihadists have celebrated their use of TOWs to kill tank crews of the Syrian army. Yet Obama talks about every country’s right to defend its territory.
Obama and the U.S. mainstream media also have pretended that the only terrorists that need to be fought in Syria are those belonging to the Islamic State (also known as ISIS, ISIL or Daesh), but Al Qaeda’s Nusra Front and its ally, Ahrar al-Sham, which was founded in part by Al Qaeda veterans, make up the bulk of the Turkish-and-Saudi-backed Army of Conquest which was gaining ground – with the help of those American TOW missiles – until Russia intervened with air power at the request of Syrian President Assad in late September.
The SU-24 Shoot-down
As for the circumstances surrounding the Turkish shoot-down of the Russian SU-24, Turkey claimed to have radioed ten warnings over five minutes to the Russian pilots but without getting a response. However, the New York Timesreported that a diplomat who attended a NATO meeting in which Turkey laid out its account said “the Russian SU-24 plane was over the Hatay region of Turkey for about 17 seconds when it was struck.”
How those two contradictory time frames matched up was not explained. However, if the 17-second time frame is correct, it appears that Turkey intended to shoot down a Russian plane – whether over its territory or not – to send a message that it would not permit Russia to continue attacking Turkish-backed rebels in Syria.
After shooting down the plane, Turkey sought an emergency NATO meeting to support its attack. Though some NATO members reportedly consider Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan a loose cannon, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg declared that the allies “stand in solidarity with Turkey.”
Further increasing the prospect of a dangerous escalation, NATO has been conducting large-scale military exercises near the Russian border in response to the Ukraine crisis.
Erdogan’s government also appears to have dabbled in dangerous provocations before, including the alleged role of Turkish intelligence in helping jihadist rebels stage a lethal sarin gas attack outside Damascus on Aug. 21, 2013, with the goal of blaming Assad’s military and tricking Obama into launching punitive airstrikes that would have helped clear the way for a jihadist victory.
Obama only pulled back at the last minute amid doubts among U.S. intelligence analysts about who was responsible for the sarin attack. Later evidence pointed to a jihadist provocation with possible Turkish assistance, but the Obama administration has never formally retracted its allegations blaming Assad’s forces.
One motive for Erdogan to go along with the sarin “false flag” attack in 2013 would have been that his two-year campaign to overthrow the Assad government was sputtering, a situation similar to today with the Russian military intervention hammering jihadist positions and putting the Syrian army back on the offensive.
By shooting down a Russian plane and then rushing to NATO with demands for retaliation against Russia, Erdogan is arguably playing a similar game, trying to push the United States and European countries into a direct confrontation with Russia while also sabotaging Syrian peace talks in Vienna – all the better to advance his goal of violently ousting Assad from power.
The Neocon Agenda
Escalating tensions with Russia also plays into the hands of America’s neoconservatives who have viewed past cooperation between Putin and Obama as a threat to the neocon agenda of “regime change,” which began in Iraq in 2003 and was supposed to continue into Syria and Iran with the goal of removing governments deemed hostile to Israel.
After the sarin gas attack in 2013, the prospect for the U.S. bombing Syria and paving the way for Assad’s military defeat looked bright, but Putin and Obama cooperated to defuse the sarin gas crisis. The two teamed up again to advance negotiations to constrain Iran’s nuclear program – an impediment to neocon hopes for bombing Iran, too.
However, in late 2013 and early 2014, that promising Putin-Obama collaboration was blasted apart in Ukraine with American neocons playing key roles, including National Endowment for Democracy president Carl Gershman, Sen. John McCain and Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs Victoria Nuland.
The neocons targeted the elected government of President Viktor Yanukovych, recognizing how sensitive Ukraine was to Russia. The Feb. 22, 2014 coup, which was spearheaded by neo-Nazis and other extreme Ukrainian nationalists, established a fiercely anti-Russian regime in Kiev and provoked what quickly took on the look of a new Cold War.
When the heavily ethnic Russian population of Crimea, which had voted overwhelmingly for Yanukovych, reacted to the coup by voting 96 percent to leave Ukraine and rejoin Russia, the neocon-dominated U.S. mainstream media pronounced the referendum a “sham” and the secession a Russian “invasion.” Cold War hysteria followed.
However, in the nearly two years since the Ukraine coup, it has become increasingly clear that the new regime in Kiev is not the shining light that the neocons and the mainstream media pretended it was. It appears to be as corrupt as the old one, if not more so. Plus, living standards of average Ukrainians have plunged.
The recent flooding of Europe with Syrian refugees over the summer and this month’s Paris terror attacks by Islamic State jihadists also have forced European officials to take events in Syria more seriously, prompting a growing interest in a renewed cooperation with Russia’s Putin.
That did not sit well with ultranationalist Ukrainians angered at the reduced interest in the Ukraine crisis. These activists have forced their dispute with Russia back into the newspapers by destroying power lines supplying electricity to Crimea, throwing much of the peninsula into darkness. Their goal seems to be to ratchet up tensions again between Russia and the West.
Now, Turkey’s shoot-down of the SU-24 and the deliberate murder of the two Russian pilots (Update: Russia says one airman saved.) have driven another wedge between NATO countries and Russia, especially if President Obama and other NATO leaders continue taking Turkey’s side in the incident.
But the larger question – indeed the existential question – is whether Obama will continue bowing to neocon demands for tough talk against Putin even if doing so risks pushing tensions to a level that could spill over into a nuclear confrontation.
Investigative reporter Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s. You can buy his latest book, America’s Stolen Narrative, either in print here or as an e-book (from Amazon and barnesandnoble.com).
The real frontline confronting ISIS is not US or French bombers (the latter currently targeting Raqqa, a city with 140,000 civilians, who are virtual prisoners of ISIS) but the Kurds of Iraq and northern Syria. Just over a week ago the combined Kurd forces, under the command of the Yezidis, liberated Sinjar from ISIS. For the Kurds, their war is not just about defeating ISIS, but about creating their own autonomous region – a region that would link all the Kurd cantons. This will not be easy, especially as the Iraq-based Kurds (Peshmerga) are allied with Iran and benefit from US support (nor are the Iraqi Kurds in any hurry to secede from Iraq). But the largest hurdle to an autonomous Kurdistan is Turkey, which not only has rekindled its war with the PKK (Kurdish Workers Party), but has done everything it can over the last 12 months or so to ensure Kurd victories against ISIS were minimised. So where is the evidence for this? It comes from a a range of sources, including the Institute for the Study of Human Rights (Columbia University) and leading commentators/analysts Nafeez Ahmed and David Graeber. See below…
A. Introduction
The Kurds of northern Syria, together with the Kurds of Turkey and Iraq, have been at war with ISIS since the latter rose up and declared their so-called caliphate. It was the Syrian Kurds and their Kurdish comrades in Turkey who helped rescue the Yezidis, after they had fled the ISIS onslaught to take refuge in the Sinjar mountains. It was the Syrian Kurds and their comrades in Turkey who liberated the city of Kobani from ISIS.
But the Kurds of northern Syria have not just been waging war. They have also been waging peace: creating new, democratic structures, declaring autonmous cantons; setting up schools, universities, hospitals. They have taken their inspiration from the Zapatistas of Mexico, who in their thousands retreated into the jungles of Chiapas and together with the Mayans created a new society, free from the oppression of the Mexican authorities.
In short, the northern Syrian Kurds have created and are living a social revolution. It is no wonder, therefore, that the authoritarian and neo-Islamist Erdogan Government of Turkey is doing everything it can to break the Kurds, including providing covert support to the Kurds’ main enemy, to ISIS.
In a recent article in the Guardian, Professor David Graeber of the London School of Economics stated how “Back in August, the YPG, fresh from their victories in Kobani and Gire Spi, were poised to seize Jarablus, the last Isis-held town on the Turkish border that the terror organisation had been using to resupply its capital in Raqqa with weapons, materials, and recruits – Isis supply lines pass directly through Turkey.” Graeber added: “Commentators predicted that with Jarablus gone, Raqqa would soon follow. Erdoğan reacted by declaring Jarablus a “red line”: if the Kurds attacked, his forces would intervene militarily – against the YPG. So Jarablus remains in terrorist hands to this day, under de facto Turkish military protection.”
B. Turkey’s support for ISIS
For well over a year the Turkish Government has been secretly supporting ISIS, but the US and NATO turn a blind eye to this because of Turkey’s geopolitical position. ISIS as an armed force – though not ISIS terrorists outside the Mid East region – would most likely have been defeated long ago had it not been for Turkey’s support.
According to journalist, Nafeez Ahmed: “Earlier this year, the Turkish daily Today’s Zamanreported that “more than 100,000 fake Turkish passports” had been given to ISIS. Erdogan’s government, the newspaper added, “has been accused of supporting the terrorist organization by turning a blind eye to its militants crossing the border and even buying its oil… Based on a 2014 report, Sezgin Tanrıkulu, deputy chairman of the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP) said that ISIS terrorists fighting in Syria claimed to have been treated in hospitals in Turkey.”
Dr Ahmed adds: “In January, authenticated official documents of the Turkish military were leaked online, showing that Turkey’s intelligence services (MIT) had been caught in Adana by military officers transporting missiles, mortars and anti-aircraft ammunition via truck “to the al-Qaeda terror organisation” in Syria. According to other ISIS suspects facing trial in Turkey, the Turkish national military intelligence organization (MIT) had begun smuggling arms, including NATO weapons to jihadist groups in Syria as early as 2011.” Also: “Turkey has also played a key role in facilitating the life-blood of ISIS’ expansion: black market oil sales. Senior political and intelligence sources in Turkey and Iraq confirm that Turkish authorities have actively facilitated ISIS oil sales through the country. Last summer, an opposition politician estimated the quantity of ISIS oil sales in Turkey at about $800 million — that was over a year ago.”
Finally, Dr. Ahmed shows how consistent transfers of CIA-Gulf-Turkish arms supplies to ISIS have been fully documented through analysis of weapons serial numbers by the UK-based Conflict Armament Research (CAR), whose database on the illicit weapons trade is funded by the EU and Swiss Federal Department of Foreign Affairs.
Latest – see link in tweet below – is an article that reports on a group “involved in making arms deals on behalf of the Islamic State leaders in Syria, including buying FN-6 portable air defence systems and other weaponry, which were shipped to ISIL in Syria through Turkey… transferring money to Turkish bank accounts…
Other allegations re Turkey’s support for ISIS:
[Note: the following is compiled from a Report by Columbia University’s Program on Peace-building and Rights, which assigned a team of researchers in the United States, Europe, and Turkey to examine Turkish and international media, assessing the credibility of allegations made against Turkey. This report draws on Turkish sources (CNN Turk, Hurriyet Daily News, Taraf, Cumhuriyet, and Radikal among others) as well as a variety of mainstream media – The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Guardian, The Daily Mail, BBC, Sky News, etc.]
1. Turkey Provides Military Equipment to ISIS
• An ISIS commander told The Washington Post on August 12, 2014: “Most of the fighters who joined us in the beginning of the war came via Turkey, and so did our equipment and supplies.”
• Kemal Kiliçdaroglu, head of the Republican People’s Party (CHP), produced a statement from the Adana Office of the Prosecutor on October 14, 2014 maintaining that Turkey supplied weapons to terror groups. He also produced interview transcripts from truck drivers who delivered weapons to the groups. According to Kiliçdaroglu, the Turkish government claims the trucks were for humanitarian aid to the Turkmen, but the Turkmen said no humanitarian aid was delivered.
• According to CHP Vice President Bulent Tezcan, three trucks were stopped in Adana for inspection on January 19, 2014. The trucks were loaded with weapons in Esenboga Airport in Ankara. The drivers drove the trucks to the border, where a MIT agent was supposed to take over and drive the trucks to Syria to deliver materials to ISIS and groups in Syria. This happened many times. When the trucks were stopped, MIT agents tried to keep the inspectors from looking inside the crates. The inspectors found rockets, arms, and ammunition.
• Cumhuriyetreports that Fuat Avni, a preeminent Twitter user who reported on the December 17th corruption probe, that audio tapes confirm that Turkey provided financial and military aid to terrorist groups associated with Al Qaeda on October 12, 2014. On the tapes, Erdogan pressured the Turkish Armed Forces to go to war with Syria. Erdogan demanded that Hakan Fidan, the head of Turkey’s National Intelligence Agency (MIT), come up with a justification for attacking Syria.
• Hakan Fidan told Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu, Yasar Guler, a senior defense official, and Feridun Sinirlioglu, a senior foreign affairs official: “If need be, I’ll send 4 men into Syria. I’ll formulate a reason to go to war by shooting 8 rockets into Turkey; I’ll have them attack the Tomb of Suleiman Shah.”
• Documents surfaced on September 19th, 2014 showing that the Saudi Emir Bender Bin Sultan financed the transportation of arms to ISIS through Turkey. A flight leaving Germany dropped off arms in the Etimesgut airport in Turkey, which was then split into three containers, two of which were given to ISIS and one to Gaza.
2. Turkey Provided Transport and Logistical Assistance to ISIS Fighters
• According toRadikal on June 13, 2014, Interior Minister Muammar Guler signed a directive: “According to our regional gains, we will help al-Nusra militants against the branch of PKK terrorist organization, the PYD, within our borders… Hatay is a strategic location for the mujahideen crossing from within our borders to Syria. Logistical support for Islamist groups will be increased, and their training, hospital care, and safe passage will mostly take place in Hatay… MIT and the Religious Affairs Directorate will coordinate the placement of fighters in public accommodations.”
• The Daily Mailreported on August 25, 2014 that many foreign militants joined ISIS in Syria and Iraq after traveling through Turkey, but Turkey did not try to stop them. This article describes how foreign militants, especially from the UK, go to Syria and Iraq through the Turkish border. They call the border the “Gateway to Jihad.” Turkish army soldiers either turn a blind eye and let them pass, or the jihadists pay the border guards as little as $10 to facilitate their crossing.
• Britain’s Sky News obtained documents showing that the Turkish government has stamped passports of foreign militants seeking to cross the Turkey border into Syria to join ISIS.
• The BBC interviewed villagers, who claim that buses travel at night, carrying jihadists to fight Kurdish forces in Syria and Iraq, not the Syrian Armed Forces.
• A senior Egyptian official indicated on October 9, 2014 that Turkish intelligence is passing satellite imagery and other data to ISIS.
3. Turkey Provided Training to ISIS Fighters
• CNN Turk reported on July 29, 2014 that in the heart of Istanbul, places like Duzce and Adapazari, have become gathering spots for terrorists. There are religious orders where ISIS militants are trained. Some of these training videos are posted on the Turkish ISIS propaganda website takvahaber.net. According to CNN Turk, Turkish security forces could have stopped these developments if they had wanted to.
• Turks who joined an affiliate of ISIS were recorded at a public gathering in Istanbul, which took place on July 28, 2014.
• A video shows an ISIS affiliate holding a prayer/gathering in Omerli, a district of Istanbul. In response to the video, CHP Vice President, MP Tanrikulu submitted parliamentary questions to the Minister of the Interior, Efkan Ala, asking questions such as, “Is it true that a camp or camps have been allocated to an affiliate of ISIS in Istanbul? What is this affiliate? Who is it made up of? Is the rumor true that the same area allocated for the camp is also used for military exercises?”
• Kemal Kiliçdaroglu warned the AKP government not to provide money and training to terror groups on October 14, 2014. He said, “It isn’t right for armed groups to be trained on Turkish soil. You bring foreign fighters to Turkey, put money in their pockets, guns in their hands, and you ask them to kill Muslims in Syria. We told them to stop helping ISIS. Ahmet Davutoglu asked us to show proof. Everyone knows that they’re helping ISIS.” (See HERE and HERE.)
• According to Jordanian intelligence, Turkey trained ISIS militants for special operations.
4. Turkey Offers Medical Care to ISIS Fighters
• An ISIS commander told the Washington Post on August 12, 2014, “We used to have some fighters — even high-level members of the Islamic State — getting treated in Turkish hospitals.”
• Taraf reported on October 12, 2014 that Dengir Mir Mehmet Fırat, a founder of the AKP, said that Turkey supported terrorist groups and still supports them and treats them in hospitals. “In order to weaken the developments in Rojova (Syrian Kurdistan), the government gave concessions and arms to extreme religious groups… the government was helping the wounded. The Minister of Health said something such as, it’s a human obligation to care for the ISIS wounded.”
• According to Taraf, Ahmet El H, one of the top commanders at ISIS and Al Baghdadi’s right hand man, was treated at a hospital in Sanliurfa, Turkey, along with other ISIS militants. The Turkish state paid for their treatment. According to Taraf’s sources, ISIS militants are being treated in hospitals all across southeastern Turkey. More and more militants have been coming in to be treated since the start of airstrikes in August. To be more specific, eight ISIS militants were transported through the Sanliurfa border crossing; these are their names: “Mustafa A., Yusuf El R., Mustafa H., Halil El M., Muhammet El H., Ahmet El S., Hasan H., [and] Salim El D.”
5. Turkey Supports ISIS Financially Through Purchase of Oil
• On September 13, 2014, The New York Timesreported on the Obama administration’s efforts to pressure Turkey to crack down on ISIS extensive sales network for oil. James Phillips, a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation, argues that Turkey has not fully cracked down on ISIS’s sales network because it benefits from a lower price for oil, and that there might even be Turks and government officials who benefit from the trade.
• Fehim Taştekin wrote in Radikal on September 13, 2014 about illegal pipelines transporting oil from Syria to nearby border towns in Turkey. The oil is sold for as little as 1.25 liras per liter. Taştekin indicated that many of these illegal pipelines were dismantled after operating for 3 years, once his article was published.
• According to Diken and OdaTV, David Cohen, a Justice Department official, says that there are Turkish individuals acting as middlemen to help sell ISIS’s oil through Turkey.
• On October 14, 2014, a German Parliamentarian from the Green Party accused Turkey of allowing the transportation of arms to ISIS over its territory, as well as the sale of oil.
6. Turkey Assists ISIS Recruitment
• Kerim Kiliçdaroğlu claimed on October 14, 2014 that ISIS offices in Istanbul and Gaziantep are used to recruit fighters. On October 10, 2014, the mufti of Konya said that 100 people from Konya joined ISIS 4 days ago. (See HERE and HERE.)
• OdaTV reports that Takva Haber serves as a propaganda outlet for ISIS to recruit Turkish-speaking individuals in Turkey and Germany. The address where this propaganda website is registered corresponds to the address of a school called Irfan Koleji, which was established by Ilim Yayma Vakfi, a foundation that was created by Erdogan and Davutoglu, among others. It is thus claimed that the propaganda site is operated from the school of the foundation started by AKP members.
• Minister of Sports, Suat Kilic, an AKP member, visited Salafi jihadists who are ISIS supporters in Germany. The group is known for reaching out to supporters via free Quran distributions and raising funds to sponsor suicide attacks in Syria and Iraq by raising money.
• OdaTV released a video allegedly showing ISIS militants riding a bus in Istanbul.
7. Turkish Forces Are Fighting Alongside ISIS
• On October 7, 2014, IBDA-C, a militant Islamic organization in Turkey, pledged support to ISIS. A Turkish friend who is a commander in ISIS suggests that Turkey is “involved in all of this” and that “10,000 ISIS members will come to Turkey.” A Huda-Par member at the meeting claims that officials criticize ISIS but in fact sympathize with the group (Huda-Par, the “Free Cause Party”, is a Kurdish Sunni fundamentalist political party). BBP member claims that National Action Party (MHP) officials are close to embracing ISIS. In the meeting, it is asserted that ISIS militants come to Turkey frequently to rest, as though they are taking a break from military service. They claim that Turkey will experience an Islamic revolution, and Turks should be ready for jihad. (See HERE and HERE.)
• Seymour Hersh maintains in the London Review of Books that ISIS conducted sarin attacks in Syria, and that Turkey was informed. “For months there had been acute concern among senior military leaders and the intelligence community about the role in the war of Syria’s neighbors, especially Turkey. Prime Minister Recep Erdogan was known to be supporting the al-Nusra Front, a jihadist faction among the rebel opposition, as well as other Islamist rebel groups. ‘We knew there were some in the Turkish government,’ a former senior US intelligence official, who has access to current intelligence, told me, ‘who believed they could get Assad’s nuts in a vice by dabbling with a sarin attack inside Syria – and forcing Obama to make good on his red line threat.”
• On September 20, 2014, Demir Celik, a Member of Parliament with the people’s democratic party (HDP) claimed that Turkish Special Forces fight with ISIS.
8. Turkey Helped ISIS in Battle for Kobani
• Anwar Moslem, Mayor of Kobani, said on September 19, 2014: “Based on the intelligence we got two days before the breakout of the current war, trains full of forces and ammunition, which were passing by north of Kobane, had an-hour-and-ten-to-twenty-minute-long stops in these villages: Salib Qaran, Gire Sor, Moshrefat Ezzo. There are evidences, witnesses, and videos about this. Why is ISIS strong only in Kobane’s east? Why is it not strong either in its south or west? Since these trains stopped in villages located in the east of Kobane, we guess they had brought ammunition and additional force for the ISIS.” In the second article on September 30, 2014, a CHP delegation visited Kobani, where locals claimed that everything from the clothes ISIS militants wear to their guns comes from Turkey. (See HERE and HERE.)
• Released by Nuhaber, a video shows Turkish military convoys carrying tanks and ammunition moving freely under ISIS flags in the Cerablus region and Karkamis border crossing (September 25, 2014). There are writings in Turkish on the trucks.
• Salih Muslim, PYD head, claims that 120 militants crossed into Syria from Turkey between October 20th and 24th, 2014.
• According to an op-ed written by a YPG commander in The New York Times on October 29, 2014, Turkey allows ISIS militants and their equipment to pass freely over the border.
• Diken reported, “ISIS fighters crossed the border from Turkey into Syria, over the Turkish train tracks that delineate the border, in full view of Turkish soldiers. They were met there by PYD fighters and stopped.”
• A Kurdish commander in Kobani claims that ISIS militants have Turkish entry stamps on their passports.
• Kurds trying to join the battle in Kobani are turned away by Turkish police at the Turkey-Syrian border.
• OdaTV released a photograph of a Turkish soldier befriending ISIS militants.
9. Turkey and ISIS Share a Worldview
• RT reports on Vice President Joe Biden’s remarks detailing Turkish support to ISIS.
• According to the Hurriyet Daily News on September 26, 2014, “The feelings of the AKP’s heavyweights are not limited to Ankara. I was shocked to hear words of admiration for ISIL from some high-level civil servants even in Şanliurfa. ‘They are like us, fighting against seven great powers in the War of Independence,’ one said.” “Rather than the [Kurdistan Workers’ Party] PKK on the other side, I would rather have ISIL as a neighbor,” said another.”
• Cengiz Candar, a well-respected Turkish journalist, maintained that MIT helped “midwife” the Islamic state in Iraq and Syria, as well as other Jihadi groups.
• An AKP council member posted on his Facebook page: “Thankfully ISIS exists… May you never run out of ammunition…”
• A Turkish Social Security Institution supervisor uses the ISIS logo in internal correspondences.
• Bilal Erdogan and Turkish officials meet alleged ISIS fighters.
(The above report is by David L. Phillips, Director of the Program on Peace-building and Rights at Columbia University’s Institute for the Study of Human Rights.)
Russia will be deploying S-400 missile defense systems to Syria, the Russian defense minister says.
“The S-400 anti-aircraft missile system will be deployed to the Hmeimim airbase,” Sergei Shoigu said on Wednesday, referring to the Russian airbase outside the port city of Latakia in western Syria.
The system is the most advanced one owned by Russia in the field of air defense. The missile system, an upgrade of the S-300 family, is capable of intercepting and destroying airborne targets such as aircraft and ballistic and cruise missiles at distances of up to 400 kilometers (250 miles).
The official’s remarks came a day after the Turkish Air Force shot down a Sukhoi Su-24M Fencer, which they had accused of having violated Turkish airspace. Russia denies the allegation.
Russian presidential press officer Dmitry Peskov also said Russian President Vladimir Putin had agreed with the proposal made by the Defense Ministry to transfer the missile systems to Hmeimim.
Also on Tuesday, Russian media reported that Russian missile cruiser Moskva equipped with the Fort air defense system, similar to S-300, will be stationed off the coast of Syria’s Latakia province.
Since September 30, Russia has been conducting aerial operations against Daesh, al-Nusra Front, and the other terrorist groups that have been sowing fear and destruction among the Syrian country’s civilian population.
Damascus has hailed the Russian military engagement, which came upon the Syrian government’s request saying that since the beginning of the campaign, terrorists had begun to retreat and flee in thousands.
The foreign-sponsored conflict in Syria has thus far claimed the lives of more than 250,000 people and left over one million injured, according to the United Nations.
A US-led coalition has also been pounding purported Daesh positions inside Syria without any authorization from Damascus or a United Nations mandate since last September. The mission has fallen severely short of dislodging the terrorists.
The navigator of the Russian Su-24 shot down by a Turkish fighter jet on Tuesday insists that his plane did not cross into Turkey’s airspace, and says he was given no visual or radio warning before being fired at.
“It’s impossible that we violated their airspace even for a second,” Konstantin Murakhtin told Russia’s Rossiya 1 channel. “We were flying at an altitude of 6,000 meters in completely clear weather, and I had total control of our flight path throughout.”
As well as denying Ankara’s assertions that the plane was in Turkey’s airspace, Murakhtin also refuted Turkish officials’ claims that the pilots were warned repeatedly.
“In actual fact there were no warnings at all. Neither through the radio, nor visually, so we did not at any point adjust our course. You need to understand the difference in speed between a tactical bomber like a Su-24, and that of the F16. If they wanted to warn us, they could have sat on our wing,” said Murakhtin, who is currently recuperating at Russia’s airbase in Latakia, northern Syria.
“As it was, the missile hit the back of our plane out of nowhere. We didn’t even have time to make an evasive maneuver.”
The downing of the Russian warplane, which aggressively violated Syria’s sovereignty, is proof to the world of Turkish support for terrorism. This has been going on for years, the Syrian foreign minister said.
“This incident has shown the world that [Turkish President Recep] Erdogan and his government are helping terrorists in Syria,” Walid Muallem said after meeting Speaker of the Russian Parliament Sergey Naryshkin.
Muallem expressed his condolences over the death of the Russian pilot and later a marine in the incident.
“We express our condolences over the actions of those terrorists, who Erdogan and his government support, who opened fire at the pilot as he was parachuting down. It was no less than a war crime,” he said.
“We are glad that the joint Russian-Syrian military operation resulted in a rescue of the second pilot,” he added.
Naryshkin said the attack on the Russian plane did not reflect what the Turkish people want from its leadership.
“We believe this act was treason by the Turkish leaders against their own people,” he said.
Turkey deliberately attacked the Russian warplane in revenge for the Russian antiterrorist campaign in Syria, according to the Syrian minister.
“The effort to destroy the forces of Islamic State [IS, formerly ISIS/ISIL] and other terrorist groups offended Turkey. That is why they aggressively violated Syria’s sovereignty and attacked the Su-24 in its airspace,” Muallem said.
He added that the results of the Russian campaign contrast the lack of progress demonstrated by the US-led coalition, including Turkey.
“In 18 months the US and its allies have conducted around 6,000 strikes against the terrorists, but they failed to undermine IS capabilities. On the contrary, they became stronger,” the Syrian diplomat said. “What the Russian [Air Force] do in Syria is a hundred times more than the actions of the US and its allies.”
Russia branded Turkey an accomplice of terrorism after the incident. Moscow believes Ankara wants to protect terrorist groups to continue the flow of cheap oil into the country, which profits some Turkish officials and the jihadists. While Moscow continues an effort to form a global coalition to fight against terrorism in the region, it believes the Turks won’t commit to it.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov has addressed journalists following the downing of the Russian Su-24 jet by an air-to-air missile launched from a Turkish F-16.
The Russian minister held a phone conversation with his Turkish counterpart Mevlut Cavusoglu earlier in the day.
“Moscow is not avoiding contacts with Ankara — my phone conversation with the Turkish FM is proof,” Lavrov said.
Turkey’s foreign minister expressed his sincere condolences to Sergei Lavrov, the Russian Foreign Minister said. But the Turkish minister tried to excuse the incident, Lavrov added.
The Turkish minister said that Turkey did not know it was a Russian jet.
“We have serious doubts it was an accident and prepared footage of the jet downing suggests it wasn’t,” Sergei Lavrov said. “It all looks like a planned provocation”.
The incident occurred following the airstrikes by Russian aviation on ISIL oil trucks.
At NATO’s meeting yesterday, strange words concerning Russia’s Su-24 jet tragedy were said. We received no condolences from NATO or the European Union, Sergei Lavrov said.
Let me remind you, Russian warplanes were in Syrian airspace. But even if a Russian jet crosses into Turkish airspace serious questions arise as to why Turkey did not use the emergency communication line with Russia before or after downing the Su-24 bomber jet, the Russian Foreign Minister added.
“I reminded him [Turkish foreign minister] that on Russia’s initiative a hotline between the Russian National Defense Control Center and the Turkish Defense Ministry was established. The line was established at the beginning of the Russian Aerospace Forces operation in Syria, and was used neither yesterday nor before that, which provokes serious questions,” Lavrov told the press.
Ankara has stated it was unaware that the aircraft belonged to Russia.Lavrov also said he recalled a 2012 statement by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan during the phone talk with Cavusoglu. The Turkish leader said back then that a short violation of airspace was not a pretext to use force.
“I reminded my Turkish colleague of this statement and he could not reply to this either, just repeating that they did not know what kind of aircraft this was,” the Russian minister said.
The minister also wondered if Turkey has coordinated its actions with the United States.
“I wonder whether Turkey consulted the US before downing any jet in the Syrian airspace,” he said.
Russia is still expecting apology from Turkey over the downing of the Russian Su-24 bomber jet over Syria.
“We’re not going to wage a war against Turkey,” Sergei Lavrov said answering a question from a journalist.
According to the Russian foreign minister, “the attitude toward Turkish people has not changed.”
“We have questions only to the current Turkish government,” Lavrov noted.
But Russia will seriously reassess all agreements with Turkey, he added. As for specific measures, we’ve recommended our citizens not to travel to Turkey, Lavrov said.
“In regard to the current level of our relations and agreements that we have concluded with the Turkish government currently in force in Ankara, as the [Russian] president has said, we will seriously reassess and review everything that is going on in our relations taking into count the attack that was delivered against our airplane,” Lavrov said at a press conference.
Too many indicators showing terrorist threats have appeared on Turkish soil, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said Wednesday.
“We cannot leave everything that has happened without a reaction not because we have to respond somehow, that’s not it. Actually there have been too many indicators on Turkish soil that show a direct terrorist threat to our citizens,” Lavrov said at a press conference.
Russia may raise the issue in the UN Security Council of developing an overall understanding on the fight against channels of equipping and financing militants in Syria, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said Wednesday.
“I think that now we will insist on not just a list of members of this group, but also agree on the overall understanding of the channels the terrorists use to get their feedlines and support,” Lavrov said during a press conference.
“We will somehow probably have to deal with certain countries so that this support ends,” Lavrov added.
Russia tried to persuade Turkey to take a more balanced position on the Syrian crisis, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said in an interview with Russian and foreign media.
According to Lavrov, Moscow “did not try to turn a blind eye” to the fact that Islamists are using Turkey as a platform to prepare terrorist acts in Syria and other countries.”We tried to take into account the interests of our Turkish neighbors and tried to explain our positions in a dialogue,” the Foreign Minister said.
“We tried to persuade them to conduct a more balanced policy not aimed only at getting rid of Assad at any cost and thus cooperating with all kinds of extremist groups,” the foreign minister stressed.
Moscow backs the proposal of French President Francois Hollande to close the Turkish-Syrian border, Sergei Lavrov said.
“I think this is the right decision. I hope President Hollande will tell us more about the issue tomorrow. We would be ready to consider all measures that needed for this [closing the border]. By closing the border we will basically thwart the terrorist threat in Syria,” the minister said.
Earlier Russia’s top diplomat cancelled his visit to Turkey after a Russian Su-24 jet was downed over Syria.
“The president clearly stated that this could not but affect Russian-Turkish relations. In this context, it was decided to cancel the meeting between Russia’s and Turkey’s ministers of foreign affairs, which was planned for tomorrow [November 25] in Istanbul,” Sergei Lavrov told journalists on Tuesday.
On Tuesday, a Russian Su-24 jet crashed in Syria. Russian President Vladimir Putin said that the plane was downed over Syrian territory by an air-to-air missile launched by a Turkish F-16 jet, and fell 4 kilometers (2.5 miles) from the Turkish border. Putin described the Turkish attack as a “stab in the back” carried out by “accomplices of terrorists.”
The Su-24 tragedy also claimed the life of a naval infantry soldier, who was killed in the rescue operation, according to the Russian General Staff.
Prime Minister David Cameron must examine financial links between UK-allied Gulf regimes and terror groups, or risk facing awkward questions about Conservative Party links to “rich Arab Gulf individuals,” says former Liberal Democrat leader Paddy Ashdown.
Speaking on ITV’s Lorraine program on Tuesday, Ashdown – who is also a former soldier and has served as an ambassador to Afghanistan and Bosnia – said he is deeply concerned about how terrorism and Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS/ISIL) are being funded, and the UK government’s response to this.
“Who is arming ISIS, who is providing safe havens for ISIS? To get there you have to ask questions about the arms everyone’s sold in the region, the role of Saudi Arabia in this. I think there are some very big questions and we have to be careful,” Ashdown said.
He said there had been a “failure to put pressure on the Gulf states, especially Saudi Arabia and Qatar, to stop funding the Salafists and Wahhabists,” and said he is worried “about the closeness of the Conservative Party and rich Arab Gulf individuals.”
He hinted the strategic priorities of the UK in Syria are the wrong way around. “I think we should be impatient about the removal of ISIL and I think we should be more patient about the removal of Assad.”
Ashdown’s calls for a proper investigation into terror funding by the West’s Arab allies echo, to some extent, those of Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn.
Speaking to the House of Commons last Wednesday, the Labour leader urged Parliament to take more action to clamp down on institutions which provide “vital infrastructure” to the terror group in Syria and Iraq.
Corbyn said one of the main ways to stop IS from functioning is to cut off its resources, suggesting the EU would also need to play a part in suffocating the organization.
“Surely a crucial way to help defeat ISIL is to cut off its funding, its supply of arms, and its trade,” Corbyn said during prime minister’s questions (PMQs).
“Can I press the prime minister to ensure that our allies in the region, indeed all countries in the region, are doing all they can to clamp down on individuals and institutions in their countries who are providing ISIL with vital infrastructure?”
Moscow plans to suspend military cooperation with Ankara after the downing of a Russian bomber by Turkish air forces, Russian General Staff representatives said on Tuesday. Further measures to beef up Russian air base security in Syria will also be taken.
Sergey Rudskoy, a top official with the Russian General Staff, condemned the attack on the Russian bomber in Syrian airspace by a Turkish fighter jet as “a severe violation of international law”. He stressed that the Su-24 was downed over the Syrian territory. The crash site was four kilometers away from the Turkish border, he said.
Rudskoy said the Russian warplane did not violate Turkish airspace. Additionally, according to the Hmeymim airfield radar, it was the Turkish fighter jet that actually entered Syrian airspace as it attacked the Russian bomber.
The Turkish fighter jet made no attempts to contact Russian pilots before attacking the bomber, Rudskoy added.
A Russian Mi-8 helicopter came under attack while conducting a search and rescue operation, searching for the crew of the downed Su-24 in Syria. One naval infantry soldier was reported killed, the helicopter destroyed by mortar fire.
The Russian General Staff said that two Mi-8s were involved in the operation to save the crew of the downed Su-24.
One helicopter has been shot down, its crew evacuated to the Russian base at Hmeymim.
“A search and rescue operation involving two Mi-8 helicopters was carried out, charged with evacuating the pilots from the landing site. During the operation, as a result of small-arms fire, one of the helicopters was damaged, and forced to make a landing on neutral territory. One naval infantry soldier was killed,” Lieutenant-General Sergei Rudskoi, the head of the Main Operations Directorate of the General Staff of the Russian Armed Forces, told reporters on Tuesday.
The officer noted that the “personnel from the search and rescue team and the helicopter’s crew have been evacuated and are now located at the Hmeymim air base. The downed helicopter was destroyed by mortar fire from territory controlled by armed gangs.”
“The search and rescue operation tasked with finding the crew of the downed Russian bomber continues,” Rudskoi added, emphasizing that the territories in which the operation was conducted is believed to be controlled by radical rebel groups.
A Russian Su-24 Fencer jet crashed in Syria earlier in the day with two people aboard. Ankara claims that its F-16s shot down the plane because it violated the country’s airspace. Russia has countered Turkey’s accusations, President Vladimir Putin saying that the aircraft was 0.6 miles away from the Turkish border when it was shot down.
According to the Russian leader, the crashed aircraft was not posing any threat to Turkey when it was struck by an air-to-air missile from the Turkish jet.
The Al-Nusra Front, Al-Qaeda’s affiliate in Syria, has released a grateful video, where they openly thank the Free Syrian Army (FSA), which the US has touted as a “moderate opposition group”, for supplying them with US-made anti-tank TOW missiles (“Tube-launched, Optically tracked, Wire-guided”).
A recently released video shows an Al-Nusra Front field commander thanking the FSA commanders for giving his forces TOW missiles, according to a report released by the Iranian news agency FARS.
The agency reminds readers that the two groups, the Al-Nusra and the FSA, formed an alliance in March, the Army of Conquest, or Jaish al-Fatah in Arabic, to fight against the forces of President Assad.
Since then, they have fought together “at almost every single battle in Aleppo, Lattakia, Hama, and Idlib Governorates of Syria.”
Through this alliance several militant groups like the Al-Nusra Front and the Ahrar al-Sham movement have been given access to FSA’s US-made heavy weaponry, which has been supplied to the militant group by the US, Saudi Arabia and Qatar.
According to the agency’s estimates, Saudi Arabia sent 500 TOW missiles to Al-Nusra directly last month.
The US, however, claims that it is just supplying aid and weapons to FSA or the so-called moderate militant groups in Syria.
The BGM-71 TOW is one of the most widely-used guided anti-tank missiles. The weapon is used in anti-armor, anti-bunker, anti-fortification and anti-amphibious landing roles.
TOW missiles are used by the armed forces of more than 40 countries and are integrated in over 15,000 ground, vehicle and helicopter platforms worldwide.
A week now after the attacks in Paris that news broadcasters keep telling us has “changed the world forever”, it looks less and less likely that this was a straightforward ISIL terrorist attack and more likely that something much more sinister may have gone on.
And not just a staged, false-flag operation, but a pre-fabricated, mass Psy-Op designed to bring about radical changes and to shape or re-configure public perception and psychology.
It has become evident to me *why* it was Paris and why it was Friday 13th; the answers are unsettling. I will get to the significant occult symbolism shortly.
But any time we’re told over and over again that something “has changed the world forever”, we’re best served to be suspicious. In regard to terror attacks, the only other time this mass psychological conditioning has occurred was with 9/11, which probably did change the world forever and which we were repeatedly *told* would change the world forever. Other terror attacks have simply been treated as precisely that: as terror attacks – 7/7, Boston, and others weren’t sold to us as ‘world changing’ or historic, but just as terrorism.
The 13/11 Paris attack seemed pre-packaged from the start as something much more important. This is mass psychological programming we’re witnessing right now; and everyone should pay attention so they can observe how it works.
The mainstream media all over the Western world was on virtual 24-hour Paris coverage for days. In the UK, BBC News 24 reported on virtually nothing else. On Sunday, I watched even the UK’s Channel 4 news do a one-hour news special from Paris, forsaking all other world news. It didn’t show or report on anything new that hadn’t already been reported on the Saturday, but seemed to exist purely to amplify the mass hysteria and sense of historic, world-changing drama.
This weekend, the English Premier League was to play the French anthem before all football matches.
Facebook asking all its billions of users whether they wanted to change their icon to incorporate the French flag?
On the one hand, it’s a nice sentiment to show solidarity with the Paris victims. On the other hand, where was this sentiment in previous tragedies or losses of life? The Houla massacre in Syria? The relentless Saudi-led decimation of Yemen? The downing of a Russian passenger plane in the Sina? Five years of civilian casualties in Syria? ISIL massacres in Iraq last year? Or even natural disasters like earthquakes or tsunamis? Why is it only for Paris that Facebook tries to guilt-trip its scores of users into showing solidarity? To be fair, I was surprised by how many people seemed to react badly to this and ask the same question; but maybe that’s just the circles I tend to roll in, because I did see lots of users changing their icons like they were told to. You Tube, Amazon and others got in on the symbolism too.
This psychological operation was best exemplified by the lighting-up of various landmarks across the world in French colors, again to show solidarity. This actually seemed to happen suspiciously quickly in some cases, particularly the World Trade Center site.
Again, this was never done for the quarter-of-a-million dead in Syria or for the children of Yemen, or for the thousands of Palestinians killed by Israel’s bombardment of the Gaza Strip last year, etc. And I don’t believe it’s just because ‘white lives matter’ or anything like that, but more specifically because we are all *meant* to have focused deeply on Paris and what we’re told was happening.
These aren’t just friendly gestures. These images and gestures are designed to imprint themselves onto our minds, to shape our psychology.
We’re supposed to believe and always remember that Friday 13th 2015 ‘changed the world forever’, just as 9/11 changed the world forever. And we’re supposed to understand that the whole civilised world (including Qatar, which hilariously also lit up a landmark in French colors, despite being a primary funder of ISIL and terrorism) has united against this terrible, demonic ‘threat’ to civilisation and that we’re all together in both accepting the official narrative of what happened and in regarding ourselves and our societies as somehow the great ‘victim’ of the entire narrative.
It’s this mass identification with victimhood that is the main part of the Psy-Op. Never mind the hundreds of thousands dead in Syria on account of Western-funded terrorism. Never mind the million-plus Iraqis dead from Western, US-led aggression or the permanent erasing of the nation of Libya from existence by a French-led, illegal military operation. And most of all, never mind the fact that ‘ISIS’ is largely our creation.
No, the West is the victim; wealthy and eternal Paris, just like wealthy, eternal New York, is the victim.
Everyone is told, both overtly and subliminally, ‘focus all of your grief and sympathy here’ in Paris or New York and not in Aleppo or Mosul, Tripoli or Gaza.
That’s the Psy-Op. People are so mass-media reliant that they’ll only mourn who they’re told to mourn, while they’ll vilify who they’re told to vilify, and they’ll come together in their masses to mark one tragedy, while entirely ignoring another tragedy going on elsewhere. Now this mass-media manipulation goes on all the time, of course, and not just in terms of the CIA’s famous ‘Operation Mockinbird’ program; but every now and then major events like Paris or 9/11 are created to more aggressively, more overtly, focus everyone’s attention and emotion, so that the great masses of people can all be hypnotically, subliminally and overtly conditioned by the same event and the same symbols and at the same moment in time.
That shared, collective trauma is a shared, collective psychological conditioning that can inform our world-view on an emotional and subliminal level, even if our *intellect* thinks there’s something not right about the narrative.
Wikepdia defines Psy-Ops as ‘planned operations to convey selected information and indicators to audiences to influence their emotions, motives, objective reasoning, and ultimately the behavior of governments, organizations, groups, and individuals’. That’s as good a description as you could get of what appears to have happened in Paris.
This has looked more and more like a planned psy-op, a scripted drama, a trauma-based collective hypnosis, as the days have passed; all perfectly designed to draw everyone in and create a permanently resonating ‘moment in time’ that everyone will look back to as a justification for whatever is going to happen now or later. 9/11 served the same purpose, so that no matter what happened in Iraq or in the War on Terror, people – especially Americans – could look back to 9/11 and their collective emotional trauma, with all its accompanying images, as justification for anything the American military-industrial complex and Neo-Con regime subsequently did. That’s partly why George W. Bush was able to win a second term (even though he hadn’t actually won his first term), and why the American State Department is able to continue peddling nonsensical, insane ideas and statements with a straight face and why mainstream media is able to play out ludicrously fake narratives. Because ‘Never Forget 9/11’.
It’s a way of shutting down debate by forcing everyone to focus on symbols, catchphrases and emotions (and permanent association of specific emotions with those symbols). ‘Pray For Paris’, ‘Je Suis Charlie’, ‘Never Forget’, etc, are all designed to be emotional triggers or ‘trigger-words’.
Hypnosis often works a similar way; by what are known as ‘key words’ or ‘triggers’. A simple trigger word or trigger phrase can be employed by a hypnotist to evoke specific associated feelings or perceptions in their subject.
All that’s necessary is for the trigger word, phrase or symbol to be firmly planted in the subject’s emotional memory and psychology first. Events like 9/11 and 13/11 can be therefore be seen in many ways as a mass hypnosis almost on a par with the Nuremberg Rallies.
Don’t misunderstand; I’m not comparing the modern French or American states with Nazism in any moral or ideological terms; I’m simply talking about the power of imagery and dramatic moments as psychological conditioning. The power of mass hypnosis centering around ideas or symbols was something masterfully used by the Nazis. At Hitler’s personal request, a 31-year-old actress and movie director named Leni Riefenstahl filmed an entire week-long rally, producing an extraordinary film record, utilising many unique camera angles and dramatic lighting effects. Riefenstahl’s finished masterpiece was called Triumph of the Will.
It was a similar business after the Charlie Hebdo attack, which involved mass gatherings, a popular catchphrase, and mass solidarity events in different parts of the world. I wrote back then that the ’emotionally-charged issue is serving to engulf the masses in the fog of a trauma-based emotional reaction (further amplified by the experience and imagery of the marches in Paris and elsewhere) and is preventing people from looking beyond that fog’.
That is even more the case now in the wake of this latest attack, where it isn’t only the large gatherings and vigils or the minute’s silence, but the evocative visual stimuli of world landmarks and the social conditioning of Facebook icons. The message all of this instills isn’t just about fearing terrorists, but it is designed to also instill the idea that Western societies – in this instance the great symbolic city of Paris – are the innocent victims in everything that’s happening in the world and that anything Western states do in response is merely justified retaliation. ‘Pray For Paris’, because Paris is the victim; don’t pray for Syrians, because that’s where the Bad Guys came from.
Even children who’ve been seeing all this coverage are going to be conditioned by it to view the world a certain way, just as lots of children on 9/11 were conditioned for life.
Another interesting thing about hypnosis is that it can be induced via crippling fear. In human terms, it’s a much more psychologically complex version of the trance-like state you can induce in certain animals, like a mouse, by startling it with sudden movement or noise. Fear and anxiety can also make people more docile, more susceptible to things they might otherwise not be. This is particularly relevant in France, a society that, in normal circumstances, cherishes liberty above all else.
Fear and trauma also don’t allow you to think straight or reason properly. Many of the people who were attacked in Paris on Friday 13th probably have even had their suspicions about the emerging narrative. But when you’re abruptly caught up in terrifying or horrific events like that and you’re shaken and traumatised, all you want is to be safe and to be assured of your safety. In all the confusion and panic of Friday 13th, it is impossible to tell how many people caught up in the events of that night were crisis actors and how many were complete innocents with no idea what was going on; certainly some of them, especially some of those we’ve seen on film, were actors (in the same vein as in the Boston Marathon bombing), but the majority probably had no idea what was happening and might not have thought they were under attack by ‘ISIS’ until they got home and turned on the TV and were told.
Had they not been told they’d been attacked by ISIL, they might’ve been telling a very different story about what happened. This is already evident in some of the eyewitness testimony we’ve had that contradicts the official narrative.
The celebrity involvement is also tediously employed to further glamorise the drama and make it all the more relatable for a dumbed-down, celebrity-obsessed TV audience, particularly in America. This is seen in scripted dramas like an American TV personality claiming his daughter was at the Stade de France and then later saying she was at the Bataclan. It all seems to be part of a real-world ‘movie’ production being played out. What I have observed, disturbingly (and reluctantly), in the past week is that masses of people, not just in France but everywhere, are being psychologically programmed.
You, your children, your grandmother, even your little kitty-kat, are all being majorly mind-fucked. I was too; but only for about an hour. As soon as it became obvious they had no footage whatsoever of any explosions at the Stade de France, I was thankfully snapped out of any mass-induced trance immediately.
Furthermore, ‘ISIS’ itself is a massive Psy-Op designed to create fear and anxiety in the West and exacerbate racial and cultural tension and mistrust, all the while being used to achieve Geo-political objectives in Libya (already accomplished), Syria (pending), and the rest of the Middle East (as per the Zionist/Yinon Plan and US/Neo-Con agenda). Lebanon will be next, but no one cares because we’re all too busy watching Paris.
‘ISIS’ is in fact the ultimate Psy-Op. Even the name ‘ISIS‘ was invented by Western media, probably following directions from intelligence agencies. The jihadists in Iraq and Syria call themselves ‘ISIL’, and the Arabs call them by the derogatory name ‘Daesh’; ‘ISIS’ is a Psy-Op name the media continues to use because it has occult connotations and ancient connotations of the Egyptian Goddess, and – I suspect – because it phonetically sounds very similar to ‘SS’ when you say it, bringing to mind associations with the Nazi Stormtroopers. Things like this work on a subliminal level, but help to convince the broader population that ‘ISIS’ is the new ‘SS’ and that a Third World War may be necessary, just as the Second World War was.
And the idea is frequently put across now that this is a grave threat to Western society on a par with the Nazis and that this attack in Paris was the worst since World War II.
‘ISIS’ also has its menacing black-flag symbol that terrifies peace-loving people in the West, just as the Nazi swatsika became a symbol of evil decades ago; even though the swastika itself, prior to the Nazis, wasn’t a negative symbol at all – just as the Koranic script on the ‘ISIS’ flag doesn’t represent anything remotely ‘evil’, but is made to seem so. It is intended to terrify and program people on multiple levels, some of it overt, some of it subliminal. Daily ‘ISIS’ stories in mainstream newspapers are part of the long-playing Psy-Op, designed to condition people to be afraid of this terrible, inhuman threat from the East.
And in actual fact, the emergence of ISIL in the Middle East in many ways was also a Psy-Op conducted against populations in parts of Iraq and Syria (and Libya subsequently), with populations being – certainly in the early stages – terrified by what they were seeing and the stories they were hearing. This was something I touched upon when writing about Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.
Last summer, when I first heard that a mysterious figure named ‘Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi’ was being declared “the leader of all Muslims everywhere” by ‘Islamic State’ propagandists, it was one of the most disturbing things I had heard in a while; but I also clearly recognised it as a major, major piece of psychological warfare being conducted against Muslims in part of Iraq, Syria and beyond, and that it was cleverly rooted in Islamic prophecy concerning the End of the World. It was all designed to confuse, terrify and even bewitch some people, particularly young men, in those places; because here comes an ultra-violent group, spouting prophecy, massively funded, armed with Western weapons and vehicles, clearly supported from the outside by powerful backers, and declaring a holy, puritan Caliphate – that in itself is a big-time Psy-Op. According to a Brigadier General Kevin Bergner, a chief American military spokesman of the Iraq campaign, Baghdadi never even existed and was actually a fictional character whose audio-taped declarations were provided by an elderly actor.
Even the name Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi is designed to be divisive and inflammatory; as the original ‘Abu Bakr’ was the first Caliph of the first Caliphate and is also seen as a symbol of the schism between Sunni and Shia Islam.
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So it can be seen that a major psychological conditioning has been going on right across the board, engulfing minds and collective mind-sets in different parts of the world, most of it regarded as ‘post-9/11’. But the Friday 13th attacks in Paris and the subsequent outpouring of emotion, fear and anxiety, coupled with the heavy symbolism and focus is all designed to be a massive hypnotic/brainwashing amplifier that works at different levels of consciousness, some subtle, some overt.
And some of it occult in nature; which is the level at which the symbolism speaks to those ‘in the know’, but is missed by the majority of us plebeians.
Some non-linear thinking exposes possibilities that might explain why Paris was the site of the attacks, why Friday 13th was the chosen date, what is invoked or signified in the locations chosen, and what it may all be about.
It may be worth noting, as some others have, that Friday 13th is a date of occult significance, partly because it was the date the Knights Templar were betrayed and massacred in Paris in 1307, from which point – according to the legends – the Order’s occult or secret knowledge went underground to be preserved only by secret societies. It is believed by some – and possibly incorrectly – that the Templars were Satanists. That may be more a case of politically-motivated demonisation from the era (the authorities wanted a reason to steal the Templars’ immense wealth), but what certainly is accepted is that they were an Order of great occult significance.
These curiosities are in addition to the broader fact that Paris itself is historically a city of great occult or esoteric significance, a capital city for secret societies, and, like Washington DC and the City of London, believed by many to be laid out according to esoteric symbolism. In fact, Washington DC’s unique design was the work of Frenchman Pierre Charles L’Enfant. The esoteric city-plan of Paris and its national monuments was the subject of a book by Robert Bauval and Graham Hancock called Talisman: Sacred Cities, Secret Faith.
Even aside from that, however, the Knights Templar are particularly significant because they were the first international banking elite/cartel and were a model not only for subsequent and current secret societies but also for subsequent banking elites. The Templars also financed European Crusades and wars of aggression in the Middle East and oversaw the theft of wealth from the Muslim world, so they have great significance right across the board. It is also thought by many that these Crusades, conducted by barbaric religious fanatics from Europe (the ‘Daesh’ of their day, if you like), were what provoked Islamic societies into becoming more aggressive. This was at a time when the Islamic world was still quite close in time to its ‘Golden Age’, in which science, philosophy, medicine and astronomy had flourished and cities like Damascus, Cairo and Baghdad were great seats of learning while most of Europe was still mired in religious intolerance and persecution, with brutal inquisitions going on and people being burnt or tortured left, right and centre.
The date Friday 13th – especially in regard to the city of Paris – is highly symbolically significant. But the Templars aren’t the only factor. The Church of Saint Peter of Montmartre (pictured above) is the oldest surviving church in Paris and was held to be the location at which the vows were taken that led to the founding of the Society of Jesus, better known as the Jesuit Order. Jesuit conspiracy theories, particularly the earliest ones, often focused on the personality of Adam Weishaupt, a Professor of Canon Law at a Jesuit school who went on to found the Bavarian Order of the Illuminati.
I’ve usually kept a distance from modern fascination with ‘the Illuminati’ or the occult in general; I don’t particularly regard ‘the occult’ with any kind of disapproval or see it through any religious lens, so conspiracy-lore ‘Illuminati’ obsession isn’t something that has particularly interested me. However, there are times – and this Paris business is one of those times – where the symbolism and connection is so obvious that it becomes difficult to ignore it, even for someone who prefers to steer clear of it.
Wikipedia further highlights that Weishaupt was accused of being ‘the secret leader of the New World Order, and even of being the Devil himself’.
Now, let me just state this: the issue is not whether people like you or I believe in these religious or even occult concepts or realities, but it’s about understanding that *other people* and organisations *do* believe in these things. And in their world, all these things are symbolically significant and have symbolic/esoteric power. It’s the same reason that it is significant that Princess Diana was killed close to the site of the ancient Temple of Diana in Paris. I don’t demonise the ‘occult’ any more than I would demonise Christianity or Islam; in all three cases, my problem is with what specific organisations, networks and people are doing, and not about what belief system or mythology they happen to be co-opting or abusing in order to do it.
What’s fascinating is that both the Knights Templar and the Jesuit Order are claimed by contrary theorists to be both the source of Freemasonry and of the modern banking elite; and in regard to the city of Paris, both the Templars and Jesuits are historically significant.
But get this: getting back to the Jesuit Order and the Church of Saint Peter of Montmartre; according to its traditional history, the church was founded by Saint Denis in the third century, and moreover, Théodore Vacquier, the first municipal archaeologist of Paris, identified remains on the site belonging to the ancient Temple of Mars, from which Montmartre took its name. Mars was of course the God of War; and if there was one immediate thing these Paris attacks brought about it was Francois Hollande’s declaration that this was “an act of war” and France now would wage war in Syria. Hollande is known to be a high-ranking Masonic figure, and indeed French politics and high office are known to be riddled with masons; and to such men, symbols, invocations and reenactments are hugely important.
In that context, we can also note that the band playing at the Bataclan theatre on Friday 13th – the Eagles of Death Metal – are led by a musician who calls himself ‘the Devil’ (and who, like a lot of famous musicians, has been seen in recent years making occult signals and symbols – it’s only certain musicians and celebrities who seem to do this, probably because they’re very low-level initiates or fodder in secret fraternities), and more remarkably that the song they were reported to have been playing at the moment the unknown gunmen came in and began the massacre was titled ‘Kiss the Devil’, which begins with the lyrics ‘Who’ll love the Devil/Who’ll sing his song?’
Both the date of the attack and the nature of the performers at the Bataclan have led some to suggest the massacre was an occult or Satanic ‘blood sacrifice’ carried out as a symbolic sacrifice by those ‘in the know’; this could’ve therefore been, in part, a sacrifice to Mars, the God of War – and moreover as the event with which to literally *declare war*, as Hollande of course immediately did.
If you think I’m going off on one here, please note that the illegal operation to invade Iraq (2003) and the illegal operation to destroy Gaddafi and Libya (2011) both occurred on March 19th, and March 19th is the traditional date that celebrates the Roman goddess of war, Minerva; and Minerva is thought by some to be a particularly revered mythical figure in Masonic societies. According to John Robison’s Proofs of a Conspiracy (published in 1798), the third degree of the Bavarian Illuminati was called ‘Minerval’ or ‘Brother of Minerva’, in honour of the goddess. Later, this title was also adopted as the first level of initiation for the world-famous, notorious occultist/Satanist Aleister Crowley’s OTO rituals.
Robison was a renowned and accomplished Scottish physicist and mathematician and professor of philosophy. Following the French Revolution, Robison was suspicious about what had really been behind it and he had become disenchanted with elements of the Enlightenment; his 1798 book accused Freemasonry of having been infiltrated by Weishaupt’s ‘Order of the Illuminati’.
The full, original title of his work was Proofs of a Conspiracy against all the Religions and Governments of Europe.
And further, ‘Saint Denis’ (which, as explained above, is symbolic of the Jesuit church in Paris) is where the Stade de France is located and was also the location the alleged ISIL terrorists were holed up in and the site of the subsequent deadly raid that saw the remaining ‘perpetrators’ killed a few days ago.
So, as I said, even when – like me – you’re someone who usually resists this kind of area of discussion, there comes a point where the symbolism is so pronounced that you can’t really ignore it anymore.
What’s even more fascinating than all of that, however, is the pre-existing connection between the city of Paris and the goddess Isis. Paris was thought to be a center for the worship of Isis and the location of a major Temple of Isis.
As early as the 15th century AD, Parisian historians believed that the city of Paris owed its very name to Isis.
In 1512, the French historian Lemaire de Belge reported that an idol of the goddess Isis had been worshipped in the Abbey of St. Germain-des-Pres in Paris. The same belief was reported by Gilles Corrozet, the first historian to produce a comprehensive guide of the city. In 1550 Corrozet wrote, ‘… coming to the imposition of the name (of Paris), it is said that there, where stands St. Germain-des-Pres was a temple of Isis of whom it is said was the wife of the great Osiris or Jupiter the Just. The statue (of Isis) having come in our times, of which we recall… This place is called the Temple of Isis and, for the nearby city, this was called Parisis… meaning near the Temple of Isis‘.
New York’s iconic Statue of Liberty, for that matter, is regarded a statue of Isis that was gifted by French Freemasons to the American Freemasons who were the Founding Fathers.
So the manufactured ‘ISIS‘ coming to literally the city of Isis (Paris) to allegedly carry out attacks is just ridiculously rich in occult symbolism. The goddess Isis is, by all accounts, a favorite of occult or Masonic societies (and remember the jihadists don’t call themselves ‘ISIS’, but ISIL, and before that they were called simply ‘Al-Qaeda in Iraq’). For the record, I’m not saying there’s anything inherently wrong with the worshipping of the Egyptian goddess; it would seem as valid a religious belief as any.
But with all of that as context, the Paris attacks of Friday 13th look very different to what they’re portrayed as.
Whether or not there were any actual ‘jihadists’ on the ground (and there may well have been), when one examines the symbolism and its historic context, what we are looking at might well have been a symbolic false-flag massacre designed not only to pave the way for war, but to signal and announce an occult-inspired push towards what John Robison cited centuries ago as Weishaupt’s and the Bavarian Illuminati’s ‘New World Order’ model. The attack invoked all the necessary symbolic markers – the Templars, the Jesuits, the Bavarian Illuminati and the ‘New World Order’ concept, the God of War, the literal ‘sacrifice’ to the symbolic ‘Devil’ at the Bataclan, and so on.
And that would be why all the deliberate symbolism was invoked – to deliberately signal that fact to all ‘those in the know’, while letting the rest of us think this was simply the work of those terrible, disaffected and stupid, radicalised teenagers.
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Before I sound like a clichéd conspiracy theorist, however, I’d like to clarify that I don’t necessarily view ‘Masons’ as inherently a negative force, nor do I think a demonisation of the original, eighteenth century Bavarian Illuminati is necessarily historically accurate. The original movement, which was quickly suppressed, seemed to be an intellectual movement to oppose state abuses of power and the excessive influence of religion on public life; and excessive demonisation of Adam Weishaupt may have simply been a case of religious extremists objecting to the Enlightenment and the growth of reason and intellect.
A society or fellowship being secretive isn’t a reason to demonise it; sometimes the secrecy and secret handshakes and signals are necessary for safety purposes; in pre-Enlightenment Europe the church and the enforcers of religious orthodoxy were entirely intolerant of intellectuals and free-thinkers and intelligent people were therefore forced to conduct their gatherings and pursuits in secrecy. It would be comparable to if a ‘guild of liberals’ or a ‘fellowship of reformists’ were to form in modern-day Saudi Arabia – they’d have to meet in secret and develop secret language and vetting procedures to avoid being arrested and even executed.
The question, however, in my view is whether later offshoots or societies simply adopted or co-opted the ‘Illuminati’ ideology (just like co-opting ancient esoteric imagery like Isis, Egyptian mysteries, Roman gods, etc) and developed it in a different, sinister direction. In essence, all ideals or movements, no matter how noble in the first instance, are eventually hijacked or subverted – that is simply the way of the world. This can be seen in all religions, in most political movements, and classically in numerous states or governments that have been based on a high ideal or system only to later become corrupt, oppressive institutions that no longer resemble their original purpose or character.
With that in mind, it seems reasonable to consider that although the original thinkers and individuals behind the early ‘Illuminati’ or secret societies may have been entirely of noble intent and looking to the good of all society, subsequent perversions or subversions of those societies may well be a more sinister force, with collegiate fraternities (Skull and Bones), gentlemen’s clubs (Bohemian Club), and think tanks (Council on Foreign Relations, Trilateral Commission), all being movements of darker intent in the typical conspiracy-lore sense and trying to bring about a ‘New World Order’ based not on the original ideas or ideals but on something altogether more corrupt and sinister; as I said, all movements are eventually corrupted or degraded from within and all high-minded principles co-opted by ambitious men.
I also, for the record, don’t wish to sound like an anti-occult, right-wing religious fundamentalist, as nothing could be further from the truth; I actually have great interest in the ‘occult’, as well as in old mythologies and mystery traditions, including the Isis mythology. And I have no religious or other type of bias and consider myself always a neutral, objective observer.
But in the context of all the symbolism highlighted above, it is more than interesting to note what has happened since last week’s attacks. Rarely has a move towards the classic ‘New World Order’ model seemed so blatant as it seems right now in France.
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Vanessa Beeley, on the Wall Will Fall, has just also put up a very good analysis, which also focuses on controversies over Facebook employing its ‘Safety Check App’ during the Paris operation and an explanation of why this probably wasn’t the friendly or sympathetic act that Facebook wants Parisians to think it was. She also makes the crucial point that ‘The 13/11 Paris attacks with all the accompanying media frenzy will surely lead us further down the path to the implementation of Patriot Act equivalents in Europe’.
In the United States, September 11th 2001 – the Neo-Cons’ predicted and desired “Pearl Harbour” – established a “permanent state of emergency” (the Patriot Act), allowing it to make radical changes domestically and also to launch several imperialist wars of aggression. France’s state of emergency could be paving the way for France and Europe to follow/adopt, or perhaps more accurately to come into line with, the American model.
Francois Hollande gave an historic speech at Versailles on Monday before the upper and lower houses of parliament – only the third time this has happened since 1848 – to declare “France is at war”. The bombing of Syria, on the surface of it, may be an assault on the ‘ISIL’ strongholds, but ultimately this renewed French military operation, in concert with American operations, is aimed at the removal of the Syrian state and the reconfiguration of the country.
France has not only sent out hundreds of its own troops again into the streets, but EU troops, we’re now told, could be sent to France. The EU has opened the door to even Britain sending troops or other specialists to France as part of this ‘state of emergency’. The French state has cited ‘Article 42’, which compels other EU states to send support, including military support.
All of this being to combat a rag-tag group of teenage terrorists that France, NATO, the United States and its allies created in the first place.
Meanwhile the deployment of army soldiers and possible Special Forces could also pave the way for more militarization to come, not limited to France. Earlier this year when the Charlie Hebdo attacks occurred, it wasn’t just France that deployed armed soldiers into the streets, but Belgium followed suit. If further terrorist attacks are to occur in Europe, this all may multiply and spread, drawing us towards the deployment of an ‘EU Army’. The elite Special Reconnaissance Regiment (SRR) are reported to be backing up undercover armed police officers to protect the UK in the wake of the Paris attacks. More than 60 soldiers, including SAS and SRR personnel were deployed after a high-level security meeting was held at MI5.
Moreover, Francois Holland has said the French constitution may need to be altered in order to deal with this terrorist threat, as the country is being prepared for potentially draconian policies, including the possibility of expelling foreigners considered a threat. With the state of emergency stated to extend over three months, the president seeks to expand his own powers and the powers of the state. This is comparable to what is happening in once-secular Turkey, where the ruling AKP government has stated intentions to alter Turkey’s secular constitution, partly in order to combat the very terrorist threat that the Turkish state itself has been enabling against Syria.
Some, even in France, see the dangers of this. “If you give the president powers that have been reserved practically for civil war, that is extremely serious,” said Adrienne Charmet, campaign director for a French digital-rights group, la Quadrature du Net.
These attacks have also occurred only a few months after legislators passed sweeping new surveillance laws affording the government expanded powers to closely monitor the mobile phone and Internet communications of its citizens, including monitoring phone calls and emails without the authorization of a judge. The same law requires Internet service providers to retain and provide mass data on the Web-browsing and general Internet habits of millions of people to intelligence agencies. All of this might be a very effective way of fighting terrorism and thwarting future attacks; but that’s assuming of course that there have been any genuine terrorist attacks.
France has essentially been maneuvering to go the US/NSA route and establish a surveillance super-state based on the American model; a route it can now follow with virtually unanimous public support thanks to the Friday 13th attacks. And where France leads, the EU might follow; and in that scenario, we’ll end up with a NSA-style surveillance super-state that spans the entire Western world, backed up on the ground by armed troops with expanded powers to arrest, confine or eliminate people.
In France, the talk is already of people being legally arrested without trial or charges and about law-enforcement agencies being allowed to break into people’s houses at any time of night and without any search or arrest warrants. This essentially turns parts of France into a situation comparable to occupation-era Iraq.
These are Orwellian ideas, to say the least – and in a society that is traditionally seen as the bastion of libertarian principles.
This isn’t a joke; these powers and the intention behind them allows the state to legally act as ‘thought police’ and to go after anyone it wants at any time it wants, without needing a justification. And the main vehicle for this expansion of control is the Internet. In his 1928 book, The Open Conspiracy, H. G. Wells offered blueprints for a world revolution and ‘world brain’ to establish a technocratic world state and planned economy.
Further to this, as France moves further towards inevitable thought-policing and curtailing of freedom of speech, Hollande has equated “conspiracy theories” to Nazism and is calling for government regulations to prevent the sharing or publishing of any views deemed as ‘dangerous thought’ by the state. Hollande isn’t alone in this implicated maneuver; British Prime Minster David Cameron has already publicly stated that so-called ‘conspiracy theories’ (for ‘conspiracy theories’, read anything that challenged the official narratives) should be deemed as “extremist” and equivalent to “terrorist” and should be stopped/policed on the basis of ‘national security’.
Thierry Meyssan covers that subject more fully on the Voltaire Network. But this is serious, serious territory we’re now in. The alternative media and independent journalism has been a major problem for geo-political and psy-op conspirators for some time, having played a substantial role in exposing the corporate-media misinformation and the various agendas, from the fraud of 9/11 to the false narratives of the War in Syria. Eliminating as much of this alternative media as possible is a major part of the agenda.
It seems therefore that every element of progression needed to move us into the ‘new world order’ paradigm has been serviced by the Friday 13th attacks in Paris.
And the idea that France, and Paris particularly, would be at the centre of this push is in keeping with all the symbolic significance I highlighted earlier, and also in keeping with the historical precedents in regard to the Templars, the Jesuits, the Masonic traditions, and the banking system. Again, for the record, I’m not saying the original Templars, Jesuits or Masons were dark conspirators, but that they are evoked by modern conspirators as powerful symbols and markers.
Also, further ‘terror attacks’, as we’re being constantly told, are imminent. There is almost certainly going to be a major attack in either the UK or the United States very soon, which will serve to reinforce everything evoked or accomplished in the Paris attacks and will therefore hasten any such agenda further.
Moreover, if we are now being pushed towards a changing world order, people in general are now so scared and unsettled that they’re more likely to embrace it than to resist it. As previously suggested, people are currently in the grip of a trauma-based collective conditioning that Friday 13th was probably designed to create and which the mass media has been excessively working to cement.
This entire paradigm was in fact very lucidly laid out by George Lucas in his Star Wars saga, which is easily viewed as a story about false-flag wars in which one source is controlling both sides of the conflict, the ultimate purpose being to end a democratic Republic and turn it into an imperial dictatorship. In the Star Wars saga, it is via a carefully arranged false-flag war that the republic is placed into a ‘state of emergency’ and the political conspirator is granted ’emergency powers’, setting him up as a dictator and paving the way for a totalitarian regime that lasts decades.
This is a particularly good video on Star Wars as a parable for false-flag terrorism and the New World Order, which is really worth a watch. And for anyone who’s never seen the Star Wars prequels, I’d highly recommend you look past the Jar Jar Binks problem and do so. George Lucas in fact clearly had a vision of Star Wars as not just a fantasy or even just a morality play, but as a warning. In fact even in his early notes for early drafts for the first movie in 1977, he wrote that the Empire was “America ten years from now”.
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The actual reality is that ‘ISIS’ *isn’t* any kind of existential threat to ‘the West’, to Europe, to France or to civilisation, certainly nothing like on the level of 1930s fascism or the dangers of the Cold War.
‘ISIS’ is in fact simply a manufactured bogeyman, its rank-and-file consisting mostly of teenagers or disenfranchised young men who’ve been overly influenced by a mixture of Salafist indoctrination, violent, war-based computer gaming and intelligence-agency manipulation.
‘ISIS’ could be completely eliminated with little more than a sustained police-style investigation to identify and arrest recruiters, identify and cut off the sources of financing, identify the people buying oil from them, and identify the source of the arms supplies and put a stop to it. The air-strikes wouldn’t even be necessary. Of course, there’s probably a reason such investigations aren’t conducted; because no government wants to conduct an investigation in which they’d have to implicate or prosecute elements of its own state or call into question the activities of many of its allies. And any genuine investigation of the ISIL nightmare would lead any genuine investigator ultimately not to simply Baghdad or Syria, but to Qatar, Riyadh, Washington, Brussels and other problematic sources.
‘ISIS’ is an existential threat only in one part of the world and that’s the Middle East. It is an existential threat to the people and the nation of Syria and to Iraq and to post-Gaddafi Libya, even to parts of Egypt and possibly Lebanon. In those places, it is a matter of life and death; and not the life and death of just people, but of entire nations, national identities and cultures. But of course ISIL wouldn’t *be* there at all but for the US-led invasion of Iraq, US-led covert ops in Syria and the French-led NATO decimation of Libya.
But in terms of Europe or Western civilisation, ISIL is only a ‘threat’ to whatever extent it is enabled or allowed to be by the real orchestrators of the entire conspiracy. What now appears to be being played out is a very bloody, very disgusting pantomime for various purposes; we may in fact be approaching a Rubicon from which it might be very difficult to turn back.
After a year and a half of seeking but not finding SARS-2 in any wildlife anywhere (apart from domesticated or zoo animals that appear to have caught it from humans) is it time to say, yes, it didn’t just escape from a lab. It was created, built, assembled in a lab. Or many labs
Coronavirus scientists have been constructing new viruses out of bits and pieces of other viruses for a long time.
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The word “alleged” is deemed to occur before the word “fraud.” Since the rule of law still applies. To peasants, at least.
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The Al-Nusra Front, Al-Qaeda’s affiliate in Syria, has released a grateful video, where they openly thank the Free Syrian Army (FSA), which the US has touted as a “moderate opposition group”, for supplying them with US-made anti-tank TOW missiles (“Tube-launched, Optically tracked, Wire-guided”).
Aletho News 