While the US claims it has “accidentally” allowed weapons to fall into the hands of ISIS terrorists, in reality, the US has been arming, funding, and aiding ISIS and its terrorist affiliates either directly or through Saudi, Qatari, Jordanian, or Turkish proxies since at least 2011.
Far from springing from the dunes of northern Iraq or eastern Syria, the rise of ISIS is the verbatim fulfillment of long-established documented US conspiracy. It is perhaps best summarized by the prophetic 2007 report ”The Redirection: Is the Administration’s new policy benefiting our enemies in the war on terrorism?“ written by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Seymour Hersh and published in the New Yorker.
The new American policy, in its broad outlines, has been discussed publicly. In testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in January, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said that there is “a new strategic alignment in the Middle East,” separating “reformers” and “extremists”; she pointed to the Sunni states as centers of moderation, and said that Iran, Syria, and Hezbollah were “on the other side of that divide.” (Syria’s Sunni majority is dominated by the Alawi sect.) Iran and Syria, she said, “have made their choice and their choice is to destabilize.”
This time, the U.S. government consultant told me, Bandar and other Saudis have assured the White House that “they will keep a very close eye on the religious fundamentalists. Their message to us was ‘We’ve created this movement, and we can control it.’ It’s not that we don’t want the Salafis to throw bombs; it’s who they throw them at—Hezbollah, Moqtada al-Sadr, Iran, and at the Syrians, if they continue to work with Hezbollah and Iran.”
To undermine Iran, which is predominantly Shiite, the Bush Administration has decided, in effect, to reconfigure its priorities in the Middle East. In Lebanon, the Administration has coöperated with Saudi Arabia’s government, which is Sunni, in clandestine operations that are intended to weaken Hezbollah, the Shiite organization that is backed by Iran.
The U.S. has also taken part in clandestine operations aimed at Iran and its ally Syria. A by-product of these activities has been the bolstering of Sunni extremist groups that espouse a militant vision of Islam and are hostile to America and sympathetic to Al Qaeda.
What is ISIS if not an “extremist group” that espouses a “militant vision of Islam” and is “sympathetic to Al Qaeda?” And surely ISIS is undermining both Iran and Syria, and for that matter Hezbollah in Lebanon and Iran’s allies in Iraq as well.
The rise of extremist groups in the wake of the US-engineered “Arab Spring” is the story of how these clandestine operations reported on by Hersh reached their pinnacle in the creation of ISIS.
Syria’s foreign minister Walid al -Moualem has accused the United States and its allies of supporting terrorism in his country. Moualem told the UN general assembly that his country has been fighting “organized terrorsim” for over a year. The US and France have called for a regime change in Syria, while Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey are widely believed to be the ones arming the rebels.
Ulson Gunnar, a New York-based geopolitical analyst and writer especially for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”: “ISIS could not be a more effective part of America’s plans to overthrow the Syrian government and destroy the Syrian state if it had an office at the Pentagon.”
In August of 2013, even as the words came out of US President Barack Obama’s mouth regarding an “impending” US military strike against the Syrian state, the impotence of American foreign policy loomed over him and those who wrote his speech for him like an insurmountable wall.
So absurd was America’s attempt to once again use the canard of “weapons of mass destruction” to justify yet another military intervention, that many believed America’s proxy war in Syria had finally reached its end.
The counterstroke by Russia included Syria’s immediate and unconditional surrendering of its chemical weapons arsenal, and with that, so evaporated America’s casus belli.
Just as the “Islamic State” in Iraq was exposed as a fictional cover for what was also essentially Al Qaeda (as reported by the NYT in their article, “Leader of Al Qaeda group in Iraq was fictional, U.S. military says“), ISIS too is just the latest and greatest re-visioning yet.
Turkey and the United States signed an agreement Thursday to train and arm Syrian rebels fighting the Islamic State group, said the U.S. Embassy in Ankara. The two countries have been in talks about such a pact for several months. The deal was signed Thursday evening by U.S Ambassador John Bass and Turkish Foreign Ministry undersecretary Feridun Sinirlioglu, said Embassy spokesman Joe Wierichs. He gave no further details.
The Muslim Brotherhood and ISIS both want the same thing – an Islamic Caliphate. In fact it has been revealed that members of ISIS are actually beginning to support the return of the Ottoman Empire. This reality puts ISIS and the Muslim Brotherhood on the exact same page. Despite this, the U.S. is moving ahead with a plan to arm and train rebel fighters in Syria.
Whether the fighters are ISIS or Muslim Brotherhood-backed rebels, all want the same thing – a Caliphate. As the U.S. claims the agreement is intended to fight ISIS, Turkey is claiming Bashar al-Assad is the target. In reality, ISIS is not really a target of Turkey at all.
The campaign of Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) against Iraq’s Yazidi minority may be attempted genocide according to U.N. Assistant Secretary-General for Human Rights Ivan Simonovic.
The events are part of a historic attack on Christians in the Middle East — “a very silent genocide,” said Habib Ephrem, head of the Syriac League of Lebanon, a non-governmental group that supports the Syrian people in Lebanon.
Archbishop Athanasius Toma Dawod of the Syriac Orthodox church said that Isis’s capture of Qaraqosh, Iraq’s largest Christian city, had marked a turning point for Christians in the country.
“Now we consider it genocide – ethnic cleansing,” he said. “They are killing our people in the name of Allah and telling people that anyone who kills a Christian will go straight to heaven: that is their message. They have burned churches; they have burned very old books. They have damaged our crosses and statues of the Virgin Mary. They are occupying our churches and converting them into mosques.”
Indeed, a consistent slogan adopted by the opposition almost from the beginning of protests against Assad was “Christians to Beirut, Alawites to the coffins”, which naturally reinforces the Alawites’ worst fears of what their futures might hold in a post-Assad Syria.
Perhaps while the opposition still primarily consisted of more moderate elements such as the FSA, some type of outreach or reassurance to the Alawite population could have been possible. But given the current Islamist/Jhadist make-up of the Sunni-dominated rebels, the reconciliation train may have already left the station. Sadly, this is all just one more reason why the Syrian civil war seems set to drag on indefinitely.
Syria-based jihadi groups are gearing up for a major offensive deep into Lebanese territory along the eastern border with Syria to achieve two main goals: securing new supply routes and establishing a foothold as a prelude to setting up an Islamic emirate in Lebanon, analysts and military experts said.
According to retired Lebanese Army generals, ISISand the Nusra Front, entrenched on the outskirts of the northeastern town of Arsal, have long been preparing for such an attack, but have been hampered by bad weather conditions, particularly the severe blizzards that hit Lebanon in recent months.
‘Christians to Beirut, Alawites to Coffins’
How the US Supports the Islamic State (ISIS)
U.S. Embassy: Turkey, U.S. sign deal to train and arm Syrian rebels
ISIS, Nusra Front gearing up for major Lebanon push
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