[Centraal] Crisis in Syri� #267 Hezbollah ruimt Al Qaida op in Qalamou

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Op vrijdag 29 mei 2015 16:42 schreef YazooW het volgende:

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markito0171 twitterde op vrijdag 29-05-2015 om 15:56:35 #Syria'n StateTV describe the big defeat of #Assad-forces in #Ariha/#Idlib as "tactical victory with a successful withdrawal" reageer retweet

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Op vrijdag 29 mei 2015 17:43 schreef Irakees het volgende:

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AJENews twitterde op vrijdag 29-05-2015 om 17:31:35 Assad's government only controls an estimated 20-30% of Syrian territory http://t.co/9AaU0VpTDN http://t.co/diqmCXzgy1 reageer retweet

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Op vrijdag 29 mei 2015 23:56 schreef Specularium het volgende:
Dit is dus geen slowchat.

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The leader of al-Qaeda's Syria wing said his group was focused on capturing Damascus and warned members of the country's minority Alawite sect to renounce President Bashar al-Assad and change their beliefs in order to be safe.

The Nusra Front has made gains in northwestern Syria alongside other insurgent groups in recent weeks, seizing the city of Idlib, the town of Jisr al-Shughour and bringing them closer to government-held coastal areas north of the capital.

“We will continue our focus on Damascus and on toppling this regime,” Nusra's Abu Mohamad al-Golani told news channel Al Jazeera in a rare interview aired on Wednesday. “I assure you, Assad's fall won't take a long time.”

His warning to Alawite villages and uncompromising language will do little to dispel Western fears about the growing influence of hard-line insurgents in Syria and Nusra's loyalty to al-Qaeda. The Alawite community, of which Assad is a member, is an offshoot of Shiite Islam.

The Sunni Muslim Nusra Front is the most powerful faction in Syria opposing both Assad and the ISIL.

It was not clear where the interview took place and Golani's face was not shown. He sat on an ornate chair opposite the interviewer with his back to the camera.

Addressing the Alawite community, he said: “If they drop weapons, disavow Assad, do not send their men to fight for him and return to Islam, then they are our brothers,” he said.

Golani said the Alawites were part of a sect that had “moved outside the religion of God and of Islam.”

He also said Nusra Front were not at war with Christians and that his group received no foreign state funding.

A black flag used by the group was placed on the table between him and the interviewer from the Qatar-based channel, which did not ask about reports that Nusra might distance itself from al-Qaeda.

Earlier this year, sources told Reuters that Nusra Front's leaders had considered cutting ties with al-Qaeda to form a new entity backed by some Gulf Arab states trying to topple Assad.

Sources within and close to Nusra said that Qatar was encouraging it to go ahead with the move, which would result in more support from Gulf states hostile to both Assad and ISIL.

Golani also condemned the Lebanese Shiite group Hezbollah, which backs Assad, saying Hezbollah knew its fate was linked to the Syrian leader and its efforts to save him were in vain.

Nusra Front is listed as a terrorist organization by the United States and has been sanctioned by the UN Security Council, but it is more powerful than the mainstream groups favored by Washington and its Arab allies in the fight against both ISIL and Assad's government.

US-led forces have carried out air strikes that have hit Nusra Front targets, saying they were targeting a specific al-Qaeda-linked faction called “Khorasan Group.”

Golani said there was no such thing as Khorasan Group in Syria. “We only heard about this name when the Americans said it,” he said.

He said Nusra Front's fight was with Assad and Hezbollah, not the West. But when pressed, said that all options were open if US-led forces continued to target it.

Apart from its recent battlefield gains in the northwest, Nusra Front is a major force in fighting against government forces and allied militia around the northern city of Aleppo. It is also fighting in southern Syria and its fighters have frequently clashed with ISIL in a number of locations.

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A newly declassified Pentagon report provides startling high-level confirmation that the US-led strategy in Syria contributed directly to the rise of the Islamic State (IS).

The secret US Defence Intelligence Agency (DIA) document, obtained by Washington DC law firm Judicial Watch, reveals that the emergence of an “Islamic State” across Iraq and Syria was foreseen by the Pentagon, as early as three years ago.

According to the internal report, which was distributed throughout the US intelligence community, this was seen as a likely consequence of the West’s efforts to destabilise Bashir al-Assad’s regime in Syria.

Despite that, Western governments continued to coordinate financial, military and logistical support to largely Islamist militant rebel groups in Syria, through allies Saudi Arabia, Qatar, UAE, Jordan and Turkey, among others.
A sectarian insurgency

Dated August 2012, the report states that the “major forces driving the insurgency in Syria” comprise “the Salafist, the Muslim Brotherhood, and AQI [al-Qaeda in Iraq].”

Immediately after, the document states that these forces are being supported by a Western-led coalition: “The West, Gulf countries and Turkey support the opposition.”

Throughout, the document does not suggest a distinction between "moderate" Free Syrian Army (FSA) rebels and Islamist militant groups, nor between the insurgency and the opposition.

Rather, the document shows that opposition forces engaged in fighting the Assad regime consisted of a combination of overlapping Islamist forces. Singling out al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI), the document says the terror group “supported the Syrian opposition from the beginning” due to its belief that Assad was “targeting Sunnis”.

The report further describes the insurgency as a “sectarian uprising,” whose increasingly sectarian character attracts “volunteers” from across the region to “support the Sunnis in Syria”.

In the same month the DIA report was written, the BBC, Associated Press and other news outlets reported increasing incidents of sectarian atrocities against Shia civilians by FSA rebels, demonstrating the FSA’s growing penetration by sectarian Islamist groups.

In his recent blog post, however, Middle East expert Professor Juan Cole denies that the document says the US “created” sectarian groups in Syria. This is beside the point – the document affirms that despite awareness of the increasingly “sectarian direction” of an insurgency driven significantly by al-Qaeda, the US and its allies still supported it.
Western backing for al-Qaeda

Earlier the same year, CIA officials were in southern Turkey overseeing the supply of Turkish, Saudi and Qatari-financed weapons to purportedly "moderate" rebels. The CIA was “helping allies decide which Syrian opposition fighters” would receive arms.

By the following year, defence consultancy IHS Jane concluded based on Western intelligence estimates that nearly half of all Syrian rebels were Islamist jihadists, who shared al-Qaeda’s outlook except for being focused on the Syrian conflict.

Cole scoffs at the idea that the US would “support al-Qaeda linked groups” – and that the DIA document might internally acknowledge the same.

Yet that is exactly what the West’s allies – the Gulf states and Turkey – were doing, under the close supervision of the CIA and MI6.

In 2014, a senior Qatari official revealed that Qatar and Saudi Arabia had for years provided economic and military assistance primarily to al-Qaeda’s Syrian arm, Jabhat al-Nusra, and to the IS precursor, the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS).

Prosecutor and witness testimony in court documents showed that in the same period, Turkey’s state intelligence agency (MIT) was supplying weapons by truck to al-Qaeda and ISIS-controlled rebel areas in Syria.

Such Saudi, Qatari and Turkish support for al-Qaeda and ISIS was not news to US intelligence. Back in late 2012, classified US intelligence assessments made available to President Obama and senior policymakers showed that most Saudi and Qatari arms went to “hard-line Islamic jihadists, and not the more secular opposition groups”.

And despite official declarations of being able to certify support to "moderates" as opposed to extremists, last year the State Department was unable to identify a single "moderate" rebel group in receipt of Western support.

The failure of secular rebel groups “to secure regular arms supplies,” reported the New York Times, “has allowed Islamists to fill the void and win supporters”. Consequently, rebel-held areas across Syria were “dotted with Islamic courts staffed by lawyers and clerics,” who want to “infuse Islamic law into a future Syrian government”.

The strategy allowed Islamist militants to hijack the grassroots Syrian revolution and crushed all prospects of an inclusive, democratically elected government.
Who wanted a ‘Salafist Principality’ ?

By early 2013, al-Qaeda had taken control of Syrian government oil fields in Hasaka and Deir Ezzor, today the de facto IS capital.

The August 2012 DIA document reveals that the Pentagon anticipated this outcome, and spurred it forward. Noting that “the opposition forces are trying to control the eastern areas (Hasaka and Deir Ezzor),” the document observed how “Western countries, the Gulf states and Turkey are supporting these efforts”.

The report warned explicitly that a rebel conquest of Hasaka and Deir Ezzor would likely spawn a militant Islamist political entity in eastern Syria:

“If the situation unravels there is the possibility of establishing a declared or undeclared Salafist Principality in eastern Syria (Hasak and Der Zor), and this is exactly what the supporting powers want, in order to isolate the Syrian regime, which is considered the strategic depth of the Shia expansion (Iraq and Iran).”

This extraordinary passage confirms that at least three years ago, the Pentagon anticipated the rise of a “Salafist Principality” as a direct consequence of its Syria strategy – and that the “supporting powers” behind the rebels “wanted” this outcome “to isolate the Syrian regime,” and weaken Shiite influence via Iraq and Iran.

Who were the “supporting powers?” According to Juan Cole, this refers to “those powers (e.g. Turkey and the Gulf monarchies) supporting the opposition.” He adds: “It doesn’t say the US or ‘the West’ wanted to see such a thing.”

This is a selective, and false, reading. Cole ignores that the sentences of the report mentioning Turkey and the Gulf States as “supporting powers,” all begin with “the West”:

“The West, the Gulf countries, and Turkey support the opposition.”

And three paragraphs before the mention of a “Salafist Principality”: “Western countries, the Gulf states and Turkey are supporting these efforts.”

The clear import of this precise language in the DIA report is that the “West, the Gulf countries, and Turkey” were not acting in isolation, but as a single coalition under Western leadership.

Similarly, Robert Barsocchini speculates that “supporting powers” might refer to al-Qaeda in Iraq. However, the US intelligence community does not classify AQI or any other non-state terrorist network as a “power”.

The use of the plural, “supporting powers,” clarifies that the reference is to a group of powers supporting the rebels, not just one entity like AQI.

Barsocchini, like Cole, also suggests that Western governments would not admit to wanting a "Salafist Principality," even privately. This is incorrect. Declassified files since World War II prove that Western governments frequently and privately admit to cultivating Islamist extremism for geopolitical reasons.

In summary, the Pentagon report is absolutely clear that the West, the Gulf states and Turkey were supporting the Syrian opposition to attain a common goal: the emergence of a “Salafist” political entity in eastern Syria that would help “isolate” Assad.
Anticipating ISIS

The Pentagon document cautioned that if such an Islamist entity did appear in eastern Syria, it could have “dire consequences” for Iraq, providing “the ideal atmosphere for AQI to return to its old pockets in Mosul and Ramadi,” and a “renewed momentum” for a unified jihad “among Sunni Iraq and Syria”.

Most strikingly, the report warned:

“ISI could also declare an Islamic State through its union with other terrorist organisations in Iraq and Syria, which will create grave danger in regards to unifying Iraq and the protection of its territory.”

So in 2012, the US intelligence community knew that an al-Qaeda victory over Hasaka and Deir al-Zour would likely facilitate the installation of an Islamist-Salafist entity, that its own allies - at least - wanted exactly that outcome, and that this outcome would create “the ideal atmosphere” for “AQI” and “ISI” to expand and even “declare an Islamic State” in Iraq and Syria, that could fracture Iraq.
Subsidising ISIS

So what did the Pentagon do in response to this information?

It escalated the strategy.

Even assuming the validity of Cole’s unilateral redaction of “the West” from the “supporting powers” behind the rebels, the implication is unchanged: in 2012, the Pentagon knew that its own allies, who were supplying arms to the rebels with CIA approval, wanted to see the emergence of an Islamist-Salafist political structure in eastern Syria.

Despite this, and despite ongoing intelligence updates proving that their allies were not funding "moderates" – instead supporting their favoured Islamist terrorists – US and European intelligence advisers on the ground simply continued on the same course.

No sooner had al-Qaeda and ISIS rebels conquered the eastern Syrian oil fields in Hasaka and Deir Ezzor in April 2013, they received direct Western financial support: the European Union voted to ease an embargo on Syria to allow the oil to be sold on international markets to European companies, with transactions approved by the FSA’s political overseers, the Syrian National Coalition.

“The logical conclusion from this craziness is that Europe will be funding al-Qaeda,” said Joshua Landis, a Syria expert at the University of Oklahoma.

Unsurprisingly, these al-Qaeda and ISIS inspired rebels supported by the Western-led coalition had an authoritarian theocratic agenda, distinct from the “many civilian activists, protesters and aid workers who had hoped the uprising would create a civil, democratic Syria.”

By September 2014, the EU’s ambassador to Iraq, Jana Hybaskova, complained to the Foreign Affairs Committee that “several EU member states have bought oil from the Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS) terrorist organisation that has been brutally conquering large portions of Iraq and Syria”.

So from early 2013 to late 2014, the West was bankrolling the jihadist-run "Salafist Principality" in eastern Syria through oil imports, fully cognisant that this entity posed a “grave danger” of galvanising the rise of an Islamic State across Iraq and Syria.

The Pentagon cannot pretend it didn’t know the consequence of its strategy. Indeed, it doesn’t.

When asked repeatedly by journalist and ex-US marine Brad Hoff to dispel claims that the West aligned itself with IS or ISIS at some point in Syria, the DIA’s official response was telling: “No comment.”

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Op zaterdag 30 mei 2015 00:45 schreef Montana_ir het volgende:

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Hij krijgt net als zijn vader een grote mausoleum.

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Op zaterdag 30 mei 2015 01:27 schreef Slayage het volgende:

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vat em niet

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Op zaterdag 30 mei 2015 01:39 schreef WammesWaggel het volgende:

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http://www.telegraph.co.u(...)il-to-the-death.html

Het is nu wachten op de cast van Iron Man om dit conflict te beslechten