Syrian ethnic, sectarian conflicts deepen as US plots to install client regime
international |
anti-war / imperialism |
other press 
Tuesday July 31, 2012 12:04
by pat c
Even US media groups like CNN are admitting that foreign jihadists, particularly Libyans, are flocking to Syria. Writing in the New York Times, Vali Nasr, Dean of the Johns Hopkins School of International Studies, warns that if Assad should fall from power, over 100 different opposition groups inside Syria would continue to fight for power with each other and with members of the Alawite, Shiite, Christian, and Druze religious minorities, threatening to turn Syria into “a larger version of Lebanon in the 1970s … There would be ethnic cleansing, refugee floods, humanitarian disasters and opportunities for Al Qaeda.” Full text at link.
The Gulf sheikhdoms, especially Saudi Arabia and Qatar, have supplied millions of dollars’ worth of weapons to the Syrian opposition and pledged to pay salaries to “rebel” fighters. While Washington has claimed that it is providing “non-lethal” supplies to the opposition, such as night vision glasses and communications equipment, teams of CIA operatives are acknowledged to be working inside Turkey to coordinate the distribution of money and arms to the various militant groups.
The United States and its allies are escalating their intervention in Syria despite growing concerns over the character of the Islamist forces they are supporting. Having stoked the conflict in Syria to the point of civil war, Washington now faces the prospect of an ethno-sectarian break-up of the country and the spread of fighting throughout the region.
Comments (7 of 7)
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Behind the scenes, the German government has long been active in the civil war in Syria and in preparations for military intervention.
Berlin is an important hub for the Western-backed Free Syrian Army (FSA) and the Syrian National Council (SNC), who discreetly work there on plans to topple Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. ...
Since the end of May, Germany has been part of the “Friends of the Syrian People” group comprising countries that support the FSA and work for the overthrow of Assad.
The group’s coordinating office, which maintains contact with the Syrian rebels, is based in Berlin and led by the former head of the Afghan offices of the Kreditanstalt für Wiederaufbau (KfW), Gunnar Wälzholz. It is financed with €600,000 from the foreign ministry.
In cooperation with the SNC, the group is supposed to organise the reconstruction of Syria after Assad’s fall. This means the privatization of state enterprises and the development of a free-market economy. ...
Why should Germany not prepare?
Are some people afraid of Germany?
..the Anglo-Saxon axis of transatlantic imperial virtue were certainly worried enough to expend considerable blood and treasure, twice last century, ensuring Deutsch hubris was humbled before they were invited to the global banquet of militarised corporate capital.
But once they know who is boss...and dont rock the Nato gunboat.
Plenty for all..if you're in the club.
...more detail of the convolutions
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=32134
as usual, bring your own grain of salt.
Full text at link.
Beginning his week-long Middle East tour in Tunis yesterday, US Defense Secretary Leon Panetta called for regime change in Syria and threatened Iran with sanctions and war.
Panetta will visit the Tunisian Islamist regime of Prime Minister Hamadi Jebali of the Ennadha Party, as well as Egypt’s Islamist President Mohammed Mursi and Field Marshal Mohamed Hussein Tantawi, the leader of the US-backed Egyptian military junta. Panetta will then continue on to visit Israel and King Abdullah in Jordan.
Panetta’s trip aims to deepen the US military’s ties to the Islamist regimes that have come to power after the mass working class uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt, while pursuing Washington’s deepening military intervention throughout the region.
In Tunis, the Tunisian capital, Panetta discussed closer collaboration between US and Tunisian counter-terrorism officials in tracking Al Qaeda-linked forces in Mali. Allied to Tuareg forces that fled from Libya to neighboring Mali after NATO overthrew Libyan Colonel Muammar Gaddafi last year, these groups now control much of northern Mali, which rebelled against the central government in Bamako.
Panetta threatened Iran, repeating the Obama administration’s usual threat that “all options,” including war, are “on the table.”
The Saudi Spymaster Prince Bandar Bush bin Sultan enters stage right. Was the bombing of Syrian National Security Bureau a CIA-Mossad joint operation? Full text at link
An enigmatic personality who has periodically vanished from the scene of politics in different junctures in time, Prince Bandar bin Sultan was appointed as the Director General of Saudi Arabia’s main intelligence agency on July 19, an appointment which took place at a critical time, namely when the unrest in Syria was growing gravely worrisome thanks to the influx of the Saudi-funded rebels infiltrating the Syrian soil.
Known as ‘Bandar Bush’ on account of his close ties with former US President George Bush, the prince-cum-spymaster is widely considered as a linchpin in CIA-Mossad dastardly subterfuges in Syria and Iran and his appointment to such a sensitive position is from an intelligence point of view regarded a strategic step to contribute to the materialization of these sinister plans.
On July 18, a blast rocked the headquarters of the National Security Bureau (NSB) in Damascus and killed President Bashar Assad's brother-in-law and Deputy Defense Minister Gen Assef Shawkat, Defense Minister Gen Daoud Rajiha, former Defense Minister Hassan Turkomani and NSB chief Hisham Ikhtiar.
The role of CIA and Mossad in Syria unrest is highlighted in an article dated July 18 by David Ignatius who is well-connected to intelligence sources, “The CIA has been working with the Syrian opposition for several weeks under a non-lethal directive that allows the United States to evaluate groups and assist them with command and control. Scores of Israeli intelligence officers are also operating along Syria’s border, though they are keeping a low profile.”
In view of the complicated nature of the terrorist attack, one cannot easily rule out the possibility of the CIA-Mossad joint operations.
A report (29th July) by Tarpley for Press TV gives a good analysis behind the recent attacks within Syria in the past few weeks. These attacks have come in the form of terrorists acts which have been sponsored by Western powers and the Gulf States.
Here is some extracts from that report:
Last week, the NATO powers launched their long-awaited summer offensive against Syria. This was a multi-pronged effort designed not just to overthrow the government of President Assad, but also to totally disintegrate the existing structures of the Syrian state, dissolving the entire country into chaos, confusion, secession, attempted coups d’état, and a likely massacre of Assad backers, Alawites, Christians, Kurds, and other minority groups.
This assault peaked between July 18 and July 21. Almost a week later, all indications suggest that Assad, the Baath party, and the Syrian state have proven to be much stronger than the NATO planners had imagined, and that the imperialist attack has been defeated for the time being.
The easiest way for NATO to destroy independent Syria would be to obtain a UN Security Council resolution authorizing a no-fly zone, a bombing campaign, and incursions by special forces, many of them sent by Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the other reactionary Gulf monarchies. But this path has been blocked by the courageous resistance of Russia and China....
... Therefore, NATO created a multi-layered strategy to subvert and destroy the Syrian state using covert action below the threshold of bombing and invasion, although including out special forces and espionage.
The signal to activate the assembled capabilities was given by US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on July 8, when she warned Damascus that little time remained to avoid a “catastrophic assault” capable of destroying the Syrian state. This is exactly what was attempted last week.
The article then goes on to describe the actions that were set in motion. ...
The most dramatic single episode of the assault was an apparent explosion on Wednesday, July 18 in one of the main Syrian government buildings which killed Defense Minister Rajha (the top Christian in the government), crisis management director Turkmani, and Assef Shawkat, a military intelligence expert and brother-in-law of President Assad. Interior Minister Shaar was reported wounded, and national security director Ikhtiyar succumbed later to injuries. Western media were quick to gloat,.....
And then it goes on to details about the fighters injected into the country:
So far, the NATO attack on Syria has depended mainly on Salvadoran-style death squads composed mainly of foreign fighters, including al-Qaeda and similar groups, some of which had originated as part of the US counterinsurgency effort in Iraq in 2005,......
....But, given the inability of the numerically weak death squads to capture and hold even a single town or village, to say nothing of a region of the country, it was decided to recruit and deploy an entirely new echelon of foreign fighters from all over North Africa and the Middle East. These were necessarily mercenaries, fanatics, convicts, and adventurers whose military training and weaponry would be inferior even to those of fighters deployed by NATO so far.
Their task was to implement a strategy of swarming. In military terms, swarming is the attempt to overwhelm an opponent by a rapid series of attacks from loosely coordinated autonomous groups. Quantity trumps quality. Many thousands of additional fighters were shipped in by NATO; Meyssan puts their numbers between 40,000 and 60,000, but this may be excessive. ....
.....The premise of this irregular assault had been the wishful notion that resistance by the Syrian army would collapse. But the Fourth Armored division, the Republican Guard, and other key units held fast. This left the foreign fighters as sitting ducks in vulnerable positions they could not hope to defend. As of this writing, the foreign fighters have been largely mopped up in Damascus, and another large concentration in Aleppo appears to be surrounded and destined for annihilation. NATO’s pool of cannon fodder has thus been sharply depleted.
To spread the idea that Syrian resistance had collapsed and that further resistance against NATO was futile, Ben Rhodes of the Obama White House, the US ambassador to Saudi Arabia, Saudi Prince Bandar, and other officials had also prepared a campaign of psychological media warfare and video fakery. Syrian state television, al Adounia, and other pro-Syrian broadcasters were to be denied access to Nilesat and Arabsat, and their signals replaced by fake programming generated by the CIA, including with movie sets and Potemkin villages in the Gulf monarchies. But this plan had been revealed many weeks in advance, notably by Meyssan. Accordingly, loyal Syrian broadcasters prepared their audience with public service announcements about what was coming, and how to receive genuine programming.
Programming on Nilesat and Arabsat was in fact repeatedly interrupted, while the widely hated al Jazeera of Qatar and Saudi al Arabiya reported that Assad had fled. But few were fooled by the crude NATO substitutes, so shock and awe fell flat. A NATO plan to organize a panic run on the Syrian currency, contributing a further dimension of economic and logistical chaos, also fell short.
And crucially the reason for the recent hype about the chemical weapons is put in context by all of this:
As it became clear that the anti-government forces trapped in Damascus were being decimated, King Abdullah of Jordan began harping on the danger that Syrian chemical weapons might be used or get out of control - an established meme of NATO propaganda. NATO was clearly still looking for a pretext to attack, but the eleven Russian warships assigned to Tartus and the eastern Mediterranean left that approach fraught with peril.
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