Washington is scrambling to apply a fig leaf to its program of covertly and overtly arming the armed rebels in Syria, trying to convince the increasingly skeptical that it can somehow thread the needle and ensure that sophisticated weapons and CIA training in Jordan will only benefit non-jihadist insurgents. Meanwhile, it has become painfully obvious that the Islamists are the only effective fighters in Syria, and most of them are not even Syrian but rather “have beard will travel” jihadis from such “Arab Spring” success stories as Tunisia.
Worse, the last real lie about Syria has also become unraveled: the endlessly repeated maxim that the bloody two year battle in Syria only became bloody after the government forces fired on peaceful protesters thus forcing them to take up arms.
As we see in this fascinating and critically important recent piece in the Daily Beast, this is the lie upon which the entire US support for the insurrection is based. But there was no “Arab Spring” in Syria. It had in fact been well planned in advance. The peaceful revolt turned violent may have been a tiny part of the story, but the real story was something completely different.
Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi, the head of al-Qaeda in Iraq, recently released a recording clarifying that al-Qaeda in Iraq is closely tied to the Syrian rebels, and specifically to the main jihadist group Jabhat al-Nusra. More importantly, he confirmed that the uprising in Syria falsely attributed to “Arab Spring” had in fact been long-planned as a violent revolt by highly trained terrorist cells burrowed into Syria. As the Daily Beast reports:
“According to the Al Qaeda leader, there were already jihadist cells in Syria before the conflict erupted. These cells were ‘awaiting the chance’ to expand their operations and when the civil war started Abu Muhammad Al-Julani was dispatched along with other Iraqi jihadists to establish al-Nusra and to set strategy. Al Qaeda in Iraq has been splitting its funds with al-Nusra, he says.”
Add to that the irrefutable evidence that the advanced weapons being shipped to Syria are most definitely falling into the hands of the most radical elements, and you have a Washington-led policy that is leading to unimaginable disaster.
