By Wayne Sonter
Source: The Guardian – The Workers’ Weekly
The war on Syria is a covert CIA-managed war the USA and its allies have initiated to overthrow the Syrian government. The Syrian adventure was to be a relatively brief regime change exercise, camouflaged by the social unrest of the Arab Spring and a step in re-ordering the Middle East in the interest of the US and its allies.

This accorded with the US global strategic objective of remaining the world’s ‘first, last and only’ truly global empire, despite a declining economic base relative to rest of the world.

Five years later the US-led War on Syria is showing itself to be one more brutal, costly and disastrous venture into which the US state has dragged much of the world.

The plan was to trigger the collapse of the Syrian government, through inciting sectarian war, mainly used foreign gangs paid, armed, trained and logistically supported by US and its allies, as the CIA itself disclosed to a US congressional budget committee in 2015.

Not only did the CIA train and equip nearly 10,000 fighters out of its own budget in the previous few years, as part of a broader, multi-billion dollar effort involving Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkey, it also managed a sprawling logistics network to move fighters, ammunition and weapons into the country.

The process of grinding Syrian society into subjugation, at the cost of hundreds of thousands of Syrian lives, creation of millions of refugees and destruction of the country’s heritage and civil infrastructure, was suddenly interrupted by Russia’s intervention last October, at the invitation of Syria’s government.

Russia’s serious concern with jihadi terrorism and its joint efforts with the Syrian army have rapidly collapsed the anti-Syrian, fundamentalist militias. It has disrupted ISIS’s multi-million dollar oil trade with Turkey, previously untouched by the US-led “war on ISIS”. The joint forces are set to lift the siege on Aleppo, Syria’s largest city and cut the ISIS/Al-Qaeda supply lines between Syria and Turkey. They are preparing to take Raqqa, the ISIS “capital”.

At this rate peace could be restored in Syria within a few months and the Syrian people could start to rebuild their lives. The destruction of ISIS and Al-Qaeda related terrorist forces and the end of this cruel war should be welcome.

However, the US and its allies are portraying the Syrian and Russian gains as a disaster, a narrative a compliant media unrelentingly transmit to Western audiences.

The “disaster” is that those military assets the US-led coalition created to directly subjugate or dismember Syria are being destroyed “in the field” before they can be used to enforce a regime “transition” “at the table”.

Instead, the US is warning it will create a “quagmire” for Russia in Syria if it does not disengage, and Turkey and Saudi Arabia are openly preparing to invade Syria if Assad is not promptly despatched at peace talks.

Russia has warned that the US and its allies risk “a new world war” if they send troops into Syria. If the outside powers seeking regime change in Syria do not back off, but instead escalate the war, then Syria could suck the world’s two main nuclear powers into direct conflict.

At this stage it is only a matter of whether this is what the US wants – a war with Russia to permanently relegate it to economic colony status – or whether the US has already lost control of what it has set in train, and is being dragged towards disaster.

US society itself is under tremendous duress, and both Turkey and Saudi Arabia are riven by internal tensions. These are regimes whose policies are driven by desperation, as well as imperialist ambitions.

Ultimately the war on Syria will need a political solution – not the one of imposed regime change, but the one where the democratic and progressive forces within the countries aiding the US to prosecute this war demonstrate that they know what their governments are up to and act forcefully to rein them in.

This includes Australia – whose government has moved in lockstep with the US in all its imperialist ventures, obligingly breaking diplomatic relations with Syria, participating in a US-initiated sanctions regime against Syria and deploying military forces to the Middle East to participate in the US pseudo-war against ISIS.

By Tim Anderson
Source: Global Research
War propaganda often demands the abandoning of ordinary reason and principle, and the Dirty War on Syria demonstrates this in abundance. A steady stream of atrocity stories – ‘barrel bombs’, chemical weapons, ‘industrial scale’ killings, dead babies – permeate the western news on Syria. They all have two things in common: they paint the Syrian President and the Syrian Army as monsters slaughtering civilians, including children; yet, when tracked back, all the stories come from utterly partisan sources. We are being deceived.

Normal ethical notions of avoiding conflicts of interest, searching for independent evidence and disqualifying self-serving claims from belligerent parties have been ignored in much of the western debate. This toxic atmosphere invites further fabrications, repeated to credulous audiences, even when the lies used to justify previous invasions (of Iraq in 2003) and dirty wars (in Libya, 2011) are still relatively fresh in our minds. As in previous wars, the aim is to demonise the enemy, by use of repeated atrocity claims, and so mobilise popular support behind the war (Knightley 2001).

Yet in circumstances of war adherence to some key principles is necessary when reading contentious evidence; at least if we wish to understand the truth of the matter. A belligerent party always has a vital interest in discrediting and delegitimising its opponent. For that reason, we must always view belligerent party ‘evidence’ against an opponent with grave suspicion. It is not that a warring party is incapable of understanding its opponent, rather what they say will always be conditioned by their special interest. We must assume bias. If there is no way to check the origin of that evidence, and if it is partisan and ‘self-serving’, it should be rejected as forensically worthless. This exclusion of ‘self-serving’ evidence follows broad principles applied in civil and criminal law. Such evidence only has value when it goes against the interest of the warring party, as with admissions, or when it says something about the mentality of the party putting it forward.

These principles apply whether speaking of the nature of wartime violence, of public opinion or political allegiance. So, for example, when Islamist armed groups and their associates claim that their mortal enemy the Syrian Arab Army is slaughtering civilians (e.g. AP 2015), that claim by itself is next to meaningless. We expect armed opponents to attack each other, with words as well as weapons. False stories of Government atrocities were in play from the beginning of the conflict. The head of a monastery in Homs, Mother Agnes-Mariam, denounced ‘false flag’ crimes by ‘Free Syrian Army’ groups back in 2011, where the images of murder victims were recycled in media setups by sectarian Islamists (SANA 2011). Similarly, US journalist Nir Rosen wrote of ‘dead opposition fighters … described as innocent civilians killed by security forces’ (Rosen 2012). What is the lesson here? Beware of partisan atrocity stories. They might at best serve as a flag, an accusation which might set in train a search for independent evidence.

For the same reason, when the Qatari monarchy (which has invested billions of dollars in the armed attacks on Syria) presents an anonymous, paid witness ‘Caesar’, with photos of numerous dead and tortured bodies, blaming the Syrian Army for ‘industrial scale killing’ (O’Toole 2014; Jalabi 2015), it should be plain that that ‘evidence’ is partisan and unreliable (Smith-Spark 2014; MMM 2014). The fact that this story was presented by a belligerent party just before a Geneva peace conference should give further cause for suspicion. But without genuinely independent evidence to corroborate the witness we have no way of verifying in which year, circumstance or even which country the photos were taken. Those who finance and arm the sectarian groups have slaughtered hundreds of thousands in recent years, in the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria. There is no shortage of photos of dead bodies. The fact that western media sources run these accusations, using lawyers (also paid by Qatar) to provide ‘bootstrap’ support (Cartalucci 2014; Murphy 2014), merely shows their limited understanding of independent evidence.

Similar principles apply to claims over legitimacy. Assertions by US Government officials, openly (and contrary to international law) seeking ‘regime change’ in Syria, that President Assad has ‘lost all legitimacy’ (e.g. Hilary Clinton in Al Jazeera 2011) should be seen as simply self-serving, partisan propaganda. In the case of Washington’s claims about the August 2013 chemical weapons attack in East Ghouta, the US Government and some of its embedded agencies attempted to use telemetry and some other circumstantial evidence to implicate the Syrian Army (Gladstone and Chivers 2013; HRW 2013). However, after those claims were destroyed by a range of independent evidence (Lloyd and Postol 2014; Hersh 2014; Anderson 2015), Washington and its media periphery simply kept repeating the same discredited accusations. In the climate of war, few were bold enough to say that the emperor ‘had no clothes’.

We might pay a little more attention when evidence from belligerent parties goes against their own interest. For example, in 2012 western media interviewed three Free Syrian Army (FSA) commanders in Aleppo. They all admitted they were hated by the local people and that the Syrian President had the loyalty of most. One said President Assad had about ‘70 percent’ support (Bayoumy 2013) in that mainly Sunni Muslim city. A second said the local people, ‘all of them, are loyal to the criminal Bashar, they inform on us’ (Abouzeid 2012). A third said they are ‘all informers … they hate us. They blame us for the destruction’ (Abdul-Ahad 2012). Although this is simply anecdotal evidence, because it runs against the interests of its sources it has greater significance than self-serving claims. Similarly, while NATO heads of government were claiming President Assad had ‘lost all legitimacy’, an internal NATO report estimated that 70% of Syrians supported the President, 20% were neutral and 10% supported the ‘rebels’ (World Tribune 2013; BIN 2013). While there is no public detail of the method behind this estimate, it has some significance in that it also runs against self-interest. It also roughly matches the outcome of the June 2014 Presidential elections, where Bashar al Assad gained 65% support from all eligible voters, that is, 88.7% of the vote from a 73.4% participation rate (Idea International 2015).

Perhaps the most common and profound error of the western media, reporting on the Syrian crisis, has been the extraordinary reliance on a single person, a man based in Britain who calls himself the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR). Many of the stories about Syrian body counts, ‘regime’ atrocities and huge collateral damage come from this man. Yet Rami Abdul Rahman has always flown the flag of the Muslim Brotherhood led ‘Free Syrian Army’ on his website (SOHR 2015). He claims to collect information from a network of associates in and around Syria. It is logical to assume these would also be mostly anti-Government people. Media channels which choose to rely on such an openly partisan source undermine their own credibility. Perhaps they don’t care? The fact that western governments generally support the Muslim Brotherhood line on Syria (a sectarian narrative against the secular state) may make them less concerned. They regularly present the SOHR stories, often with impressive-sounding casualty numbers, as though they were fact (e.g. AP 2015; Pollard 2015). A ‘regime’ denial may be added at paragraph 7 or 8, to give the impression of balanced journalism. Abdul Rahman’s occasional criticism of rival Salafist groups (such as DAESH-ISIL) perhaps adds a semblance of credibility. In any case, the unthinking adoption of these partisan reports has been important in keeping alive the western myth that the Syrian Army does little more than target and kill civilians.

Much the same problem can be seen in the campaigns over 2014-2015 against ‘barrel bombs’, where it has been said that a particular type of Syrian Air Force bomb (which includes fuel and shrapnel) has been responsible for massive civilian casualties. Robert Parry (2015) makes the point that any sort of improvised bomb ‘dropped from helicopters’ would be far less devastating and indiscriminate than most missile attacks, not to speak of the depleted uranium, napalm, white phosphorous and cluster munitions used by Washington. However the point here is not to do with the technology, it is simply a new way to generate horror and backing for the war, by claiming that the Syrian Army only ever kills civilians. The supposedly ‘indiscriminate’ nature of this ‘new’ weapon is merely suggested by repetition of the slogan.

Yet the great majority of sites of these alleged ‘barrel bomb’ attacks, over 2014-2015, have been places occupied for years by sectarian Islamist gangs: north-eastern Aleppo, Douma in north-eastern Damascus and Raqqa in the eastern desert. The Washington-based Human Rights Watch (tightly linked to the US foreign policy body, the Council on Foreign Relations) published a map showing the sites of literally hundreds of these barrel bomb attacks in ‘opposition held’ north-east Aleppo (HRW 2014). The ‘opposition’ in these areas has been the official al Qaeda franchise in Syria, Jabhat al Nusra, allied with the Saudi-backed Islamic Front (a merger of former Free Syrian Army groups Harakat Ahrar as-Sham, Suqur as-Sham, Liwa at-Tawhid, Jaysh al-Islam, Jabhat al-Kurdiyya, Liwa al-Haqq and Ahrar as-Sham), then later the ‘Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant’ (ISIL), the Turkistan Islamic Party and the Army of Conquest. Virtually all of these groups are internationally proscribed terrorist organisations responsible for multiple atrocities in Syria. It is hardly surprising, then, that the Syrian Army regularly bombs the armed groups in these areas.

Contrary to the myth of the ‘moderate rebel’, the terrorist groups most often work together. For example, a top US-backed leader of the Free Syrian Army (FSA), Abdel Jabbar el-Okaidi, is quite open about the fact that he works closely with ISIL-Daesh (see Eretz Zen 2014). The FSA has worked closely with the other main al Qaeda group, Jabhat al Nusra, from the beginning.

The source of the ‘civilian’ death claims comes almost exclusively from the Islamist groups themselves, or ‘activists’ embedded with them. Those claims are then magnified by the western media and by some human rights NGOs which are effectively ‘embedded’ with western governments’ foreign policies. Casualty numbers are typically provided by the British-based ‘Syrian Observatory on Human Rights’ (SOHR 2015), the British-based Syrian Network for Human Rights (SN4HR 2015), or the Istanbul-based Violation Documentation Center in Syria (VDC 2015; Masi 2015). All these centres are allied to the Islamist gangs, but usually maintain some public distance from ISIL. The VDC has listed some ISIL causalities in Syria as ‘martyrs’ for the revolution (see Sterling 2015b.); but the key point is that they are all partisan voices, sectarian Islamists committed to overthrow of the Syrian state and thus highly motivated to vilify and lie about the Syrian Army.

Commander in Chief of the propaganda war, US President Obama, leads the way, claiming his Syrian counterpart ‘drops barrel bombs to massacre innocent children’ (Obama in Mosendz 2015). As there has never been any evidence that President Assad had any such intent, Parry (2015) is right to call this statement ‘crude and deceptive propaganda’. The White House is backed up by ‘embedded watchdog’ Human Rights Watch, whose boss Kenneth Roth obsessively repeats the words ‘barrel bombs’, and has even been exposed posting photos of devastated Gaza and Kobane, falsely claiming that both showed Aleppo after ‘Assad’s barrel bombing’ (MOA 2015; Interventions Watch 2015). In fact those photos showed the results of Israeli, US and ISIL bombing. The recycling of war dead photos seems to have become routine. Yet the foundation of western war propaganda is the consistent reliance on partisan sources. The ‘barrel bomb’ campaign is clearly designed to delegitimise the Syrian Government and the Syrian Army, and also perhaps to deter or slow the attacks on Islamist groups. However the Syrian Army does not apologise to anyone for bombing terrorist held areas.

Most civilians in the areas said to have been ‘barrel bombed’ left a very long time ago. In January 2015 Reuters (2015a) showed video of some of the last large evacuations of Douma by the Syrian Army. Several months later the same agency decried a massacre of ‘civilians’ in Douma, using the ‘activists’ of the SOHR as their source (Reuters 2015b). Repetition of these fake claims by the Islamists, their associated ‘activists’ and their western backers (for information on Avaaz, The White Helmets and the Syrian Campaign, see Sterling 2015a and Mint Press 2015) has led to headlines like: ‘The Syrian Regime’s Barrel Bombs Kill More Civilians than ISIS and Al Qaeda Combined’ (Masi 2015). Such stories suggest the need for more war on Syria. The photos of dead and injured women and children in the ghost towns inhabited by the armed groups are simply borrowed from other contexts. Amnesty International (USA) largely adopted the barrel bomb story, along with the invented ‘civilian’ casualty numbers. Yet Amnesty shares that same weakness in method: relying on partisan sources like the VDC, the SN4HR and the SOHR. Amnesty’s pro-western bias has led it into repeating NATO-contrived falsehoods in other conflicts, such as those in Kuwait and Libya (see Sterling 2015b).

None of this is to say that the Syrian Army has not killed civilians, particularly those embedded with the terrorist groups. However many Syrians, whose families have been directly affected by the terrorist attacks, question why the Government has not carpet-bombed areas like Douma, north-east Aleppo and Raqqa. They say the only civilians remaining there are those that support the throat-cutting gangs. The US certainly did not hesitate to carpet bomb the Iraqi resistance in Fallujah (Iraq), back in 2004 (Democracy Now (2005). Yet in Syria, as one former Russian-Syrian member of the Government militia said, things have been different:

‘Islamists [do] hide behind civilians. But if we really killed everyone who supported the enemy, the Douma district would have been destroyed long ago – simply leveled with tanks in a single day, like some [Syrian] hotheads have been [demanding] for a long time already. But Assad doesn’t want that … our task is to reunite the country. Therefore, before each mission, we were told that we should not shoot at civilians under any circumstances. If a civilian dies, there is always an investigation and, if necessary, a court-martial’ (Mizah 2015).

Such concerns are simply ignored in the self-obsessed and reckless western debate.

Great care is also needed with the claims of outsiders who run opinion polls in war-turn Syria. For example, although the British-based ORB International is not a government agency, it is financed within a hostile state and engages with debates of concern to the belligerent parties. Case in point: its mid-2014 poll suggested that ‘Three in Five Syrians Support International Military Involvement’ (ORB 2014: Table 1). This proposal is an issue that only really preoccupies western governments and the figure is implausible. First of all, those Syrians who support the government (by most accounts a strong majority of the population) have always opposed foreign intervention.

Second, most of the Syrian Opposition also opposes foreign intervention. The most comprehensive Syrian opposition document, the Damascus Declaration (2005), opposed both armed attacks on the government and foreign intervention. Only the Muslim Brotherhood, some exile figures and some of the Kurdish groups later split from this position. The suggestion that, after three years of war and tremendous suffering, which has already involved high levels of NATO and Gulf Monarchy intervention, 60% of Syrians want more of that sort of foreign intervention just does sit with the known facts. It does fit with an unrepresentative poll which elevates the voices of those backing the armed groups. We need to look at the way ORB collects information.

Their methods are rather opaque. The British group carries out polls in Syria by employing small numbers of Syrians with whom they communicate by phone and internet. These local agents are then trained to select and interview small groups of people across Syria. ORB provides little information on how they select their agents or on how those people, in turn, select their interviewees.

They simply assert that their poll was representative. The mid-2014 poll claimed to have that found that 4% of Syrians said the [Saudi Arabia-backed Islamist group] ISIS/Daesh ‘best represented the interests and aspirations of the Syrian people’ (ORB 2014). ISIL was, by then, the most prominent armed anti-Government group. That result (4% support) does seemed plausible, and not inconsistent with other information. But its reliability is undermined by the implausibly high level of support for foreign military intervention. A further anomaly is that the ORB poll of July 2015 showed ISIL to be viewed positively by 21% of Syrians (ORB 2015: Table 3). Although this was not exactly the same question, the difference between these figures (4% and 21%) is huge and hardly explicable by anything that had occurred between 2014 and 2015. No-one else has suggested that the fanatics of ISIL-Daesh are anything close to that popular. The 35% ‘net positive view’ of the terrorist group Jabhat al Nusra (ORB 2015), notorious for its suicide truck bombings and beheadings is also implausible. Indeed, how could one third of any society view ‘positively’ these terrorist organisations, best known for their atrocities? Something is very wrong here.

The only reasonable explanation is that serious bias affects the ‘representativeness’ of the ORB surveys. ORB was previously criticised by an academic paper for its opaque and ‘incomplete disclosure’ of method and ‘important irregularities’ in their estimates of deaths from the war in Iraq (Spagat and Dougherty 2010). That unreliability is present in their Syrian data. Despite what seems like highly inflated support for the al Qaeda groups, the 2015 poll still shows President Assad as the most positively viewed force in the country, although at only 47% (ORB 2015: Table 3), a figure much lower than that of any other poll (Syrian or non-Syrian) during the crisis. Interestingly, the ORB 2015 poll says 82% of Syrians believe ISIL was created by the US (ORB 2015: Table 20). However given the other anomalies of the survey it is not possible to place any reliance on this figure. It seems plain that the ORB polls, through their mostly undisclosed selection processes, have given an enhanced voice to anti-government people. That is perhaps not surprising, for a British company, and it may help reinforce popular discussion in western countries. However it does not help foreign understandings of Syria.

While it is important to recognise the sources of bias, the repetition of anti-Syrian stories based on partisan sources cannot be a matter of simple bias. We know from independent evidence that earlier claims of massacres were fabricated by the sectarian groups, then backed by Washington. This has been documented with respect to mass killings at Houla, Aqrab, Daraya, and East Ghouta (see Anderson 2015a and 2015b). After these exposures, there were no apologies or admissions either from the White House or the western media channels which ran the initial stories. This pattern means that other fabrications are likely. So while genuine students of the crisis must revert to principled study of claims and counter-claims, we should also recognise this industrial scale propaganda machine, which is likely to maintain its production into the foreseeable future.

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O’Toole, Gavin (2014) ‘Syria regime’s ‘industrial scale killing’, Al Jazeera, 22 January, online; http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2014/01/syria-regime-industrial-scale-killing-2014122102439158738.html

Parry, Robert (2015) ‘Obama’s ludicrous ‘barrel bomb’ theme’, Consortium News, 30 September, online: https://consortiumnews.com/2015/09/30/obamas-ludicrous-barrel-bomb-theme/

Pollard, Ruth (2015) ‘Assad regime’s barrel bomb attacks caused many civilian deaths in Syria: UN Envoy’, Sydney Morning Herald, 23 July, [the headline suggests the UN envoy is the source of the ‘barrel bomb’ kills civilians story, in fact the SOHR is the source] online: http://www.smh.com.au/world/assad-regimes-barrel-bomb-attacks-caused-many-civilian-deaths-in-syria-un-envoy-20150722-giihvw.html

Reuters (2015) ‘Over 1,000 Syrian civilians evacuated from near Damascus’, Youtube, 17 January, online: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H-DstETWlTY

Reuters (2015b) ‘Air strikes near Damascus kill at least 80 people: activists’, 16 August, online: http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/08/16/us-mideast-crisis-syria-idUSKCN0QL0E320150816

Rosen, Nir (2012) ‘Q&A: Nir Rosen on Syria’s armed opposition’, Al Jazeera, 13 Feb, online: http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2012/02/201221315020166516.html

SANA (2011) ‘Mother Agnes Merriam al-Saleeb: Nameless Gunmen Possessing Advanced Firearms Terrorize Citizens and Security in Syria’, Syrian Free Press Network, 19 November, online: http://syrianfreepress.wordpress.com/2011/11/19/mother-agnes-merriam-al-saleeb-nameless-gunmen-possessing-advanced-firearms-terrorize-citizens-and-security-in-syria/

Smith-Spark, Laura (2014) ‘Syria: Photos charging mass torture by regime ‘fake’’, CNN, 23 January, online: http://edition.cnn.com/2014/01/22/world/meast/syria-torture-photos/

SN4HR (2015) Syrian Network for Human Rights, online: http://sn4hr.org/

Sterling, Rick (2015a) ‘Humanitarians for war on Syria’, Counter Punch, 31 March, online: http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/03/31/humanitarians-for-war-on-syria/

Sterling, Rick (2015b) ‘Eight Problems with Amnesty’s Report on Aleppo Syria’, Dissident Voice, 14 May, online: http://dissidentvoice.org/2015/05/eight-problems-with-amnestys-report-on-aleppo-syria/

SOHR (2015) ‘Syrian Observatory for Human Rights’, online: http://www.syriahr.com/en/

Spagat, Michael and Josh Dougherty (2010) ‘Conflict Deaths in Iraq: A Methodological Critique of the ORB Survey Estimate’, Survey Research Methods, Vol 4 No 1, 3-15

VDC (2015) ‘Violation Documentation Center in Syria’, online: https://www.vdc-sy.info/index.php/en/

Copyright © Prof. Tim Anderson, Global Research, 2015

Source: Greanville Post
How speedily the lies of the “international community” in general and those of the US and UK in particular about the Syrian situation are unraveling since the participation of Russia.

Take UK Prime Minister David Cameron. On 24th September last year he addressed the United Nations, committing British aircraft to targeting IS/ISIL/ISIS in Iraq adding unequivocally that there would be no similar action in Syria and absolutely no “boots on the ground.”(1)

Referring to Iraq he added that the West should not be frozen by “past mistakes.” If Iraq is a “mistake” Heaven alone knows what a catastrophe would look like.

Cameron of course was being economical with the truth. In 2013 Parliament voted not to be involved in Syria, making Cameron the first Prime Minister in 200 years to lose a Parliamentary war vote. It would anyway have been another illegal action, since they had not been invited by the Syrian President or government and had no UN mandate. However, in July this year it transpired that pilots of Britain’s Air Force have been “embedded” with US and Canadian Air Squadrons and been involved in flying: “intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance and strike missions …” according to the Ministry of Defence. (2)

On 7th September Cameron also announced that a British drone strike in Syria had killed two UK citizens fighting with ISIS. What an irony, the UK has enjoined wiping out entire nations having accused their leaders of “killing their own people”, terrorists or not, now Cameron kills his “own people” in what Michael Clarke, Director General of London’s hawkish Royal United Services Institute has called a “targeted assassination.”

Those killed were : “… targeted in an area that the UK does not currently regard, legally, as an operational theatre of war for UK forces”, Clarke commented, adding: “The government insisted that, unlike CIA drones, they were never used for targeted assassinations in territories where we were not militarily engaged.” (3) Another government lie pinned.

As for “no boots on the ground”, another seemingly whopping untruth. As Stephen Lendman has written (4): “On 2nd August The Sunday Express revealed: ‘SAS dress as ISIS fighters in undercover war on jihadis’ side expanding that:

“ ‘More than 120 members belonging to the elite regiment are currently in the war-torn country’ covertly ‘dressed in black and flying ISIS flags’ engaged in what is called Operation Shader – attacking Syrian targets on the pretext of combatting ISIS.”

A mirror image of Basra, Iraq, exactly ten years ago, September 2005, when British Special Forces, dressed in Arab clothing, were arrested by Iraqi police in an explosive laden car. Had the car detonated, “Iraqi insurgents” would, of course, have been blamed. The British military demolished the police station in order to free the would-be bombers. (5) How many were not caught and “insurgency” for which Iraqis were blamed, killed, tortured, was actually “made in Britain” and the US, as Syria now?

In August it was reported that SAS troops in Syria “dressed in US uniforms, joined US special forces” in the assassination of alleged ISIS financier Abu Sayyaf and the kidnapping of his wife (Independent, 10th August.) It appears the British government only ever acts with, or at US behest, whilst sidelining it’s own Parliament.

Moreover: “Around 800 Royal Marines and 4,000 US counterparts were on standby to intervene on short notice if ordered”, wrote Lendman.

No wonder the Russians are being castigated for targeting the “wrong” kind of terrorists. In addition to being non-discriminatory and regarding a terrorist as simply that, they might also take the black flag waving SAS soldiers in fancy dress as terrorists. A “tangled web”, indeed.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov is anything but selective about the head chopping, culture erasing monsters besieging Syria – CIA trained or not – stating last week: “If it looks like a terrorist, if it acts like a terrorist, if it walks like a terrorist, if it fights like a terrorist, it’s a terrorist, right?” (6)

In a response which stunningly illuminated Washington’s selective stance towards terrorism US Secretary of State, John Kerry stated: “What is important is Russia has to not be engaged in any activities against anybody but ISIL”, he said: “That’s clear. We have made that very clear.” Breathtaking, it is for the Syrian government to specify the parameters.

The US and UK of course are both bombing and supporting insurgents entirely illegally in Syria, having no UN mandate and no request from the country’s governing body. Did Kerry even blush when Lavrov remarked – over the unspoken questions as to whether Russia would extend it’s air coverage to terrorist groups in Iraq – that they had no such plans: “We are polite people, we don’t come if not invited”, he said.

Vladimir Putin had said: “We have … an invitation and we intend to fight against terrorist organizations and them only”, possibly referring to allegations that the US has been targeting Syrian government sites and military personnel.

Russia’s diplomatic envoys were reasonably polite to the US too. Before embarking on air strikes, according to US State Department spokesman John Kirby: “A Russian official in Baghdad this morning informed US Embassy personnel that Russian military aircraft would begin flying anti-ISIL missions today over Syria.

“He further requested that US aircraft avoid Syrian airspace during these missions.” Russia had, in effect given the US one hour’s notice to leave Syria.

The US speedily responded with a report of Russian attacks causing civilian casualties. Sadly it transpired that at the time of the reported attacks, Russian ‘planes had not yet left the ground.

By 2nd October, it seems panic has set in amongst the “US led coalition” which: “ … released a joint statement calling on Moscow to immediately cease attacks on the Syrian opposition and to focus on fighting ISIS.” (Guardian 2nd October 2015.)

The statement was issued by France, Turkey, the United States, Germany, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and Britain.

However the US cat had already escaped from the Pentagon bag and made it’s way to no less than the Wall Street Journal which, the previous day had a header: “Russian Airstrike in Syria Targeted CIA-Backed Rebels, U.S. Officials Say.

“One area hit was location primarily held by rebels receiving funding, arms, training from CIA and allies.” Oooops.

Michel Chossudovsky has succinctly unraveled (7) the unholy morass of the various groups coupling his piece with the WSJ story:

“Affiliated to Al Qaeda, Al Nusra is a US sponsored ”jihadist” terrorist organization which has been responsible for countless atrocities. Since 2012, AQI and Al Nusra — both supported by US intelligence– have been working hand in glove in various terrorist undertakings within Syria.

“In recent developments, the Syrian government has identified its own priority areas for the Russian counter-terrorism air campaign, which consists essentially in targeting Al Nusra. Al Nusra is described as the terrorist arm of the Free Syrian Army (FSA).

“While Washington has categorized Al Nusra as a terrorist organization (early 2012), it nonetheless provides support to both Al Nusra and it’s so-called ‘moderate rebels’ in the form of weapons, training, logistical support, recruitment, etc. This support is channeled by America’s Persian Gulf allies, including Qatar and Saudi Arabia as well as through Turkey and Israel.

“Ironically, The UN Security Council in a May 2012 decision ‘blacklisted Syria’s al-Nusra Front as an alias of al-Qaeda in Iraq’, namely the ISIL …”

At the Russian intervention, US Ambassador to the UN, Samantha Power took to Twitter, stating: “We call on Russia to immediately cease attacks on Syrian opposition and civilians.” Such action, she warned: “will only fuel more extremism and radicalization.” Chutzpah outdone – until 2003 and the US-UK blitzkrieg there were no US sponsored organ eating, dismembering lunatics. Syria and Iraq were of the most secular countries in the region.

Syria, from lies, to heartbreak, to cultural destruction has become a microcosm of the demented, ridiculous “war on terror.” The lies and subterfuge to justify the horror have become more desperate but only the most obtuse can avoid noticing that terrorists R US.

NOTES

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/iraq-crisis-david-cameron-recalls-parliament-for-debate-on-airstrikes-on-isis-9754029.html
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-33562420
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/sep/07/drone-british-citizens-syria-uk-david-cameron
http://www.thepeoplesvoice.org/TPV3/Voices.php/2015/08/06/uk-special-forces-fighting-assad-in-syri
http://www.globalresearch.ca/british-undercover-soldiers-caught-driving-booby-trapped-car/972
http://www.mail.com/int/news/us/3858296-russia-defends-military-action-syria.html
http://www.globalresearch.ca/obama-accuses-russia-of-going-after-americas-good-guy-terrorists/5479099

Felicity Arbuthnot is an award-winning journalist specialising in social and environmental issues with special knowledge of Iraq, a country which she has visited thirty times since the 1991 Gulf war. Iraq, she describes as: ‘sliding from the impossible, to the apocalyptic.’

By Tony Cartalucci
Source: New Eastern Outlook
Since ancient times an army required significant logistical support to carry out any kind of sustained military campaign. In ancient Rome, an extensive network of roads was constructed to facilitate not only trade, but to allow Roman legions to move quickly to where they were needed, and for the supplies needed to sustain military operations to follow them in turn.

In the late 1700’s French general, expert strategist, and leader Napoleon Bonaparte would note that, “an army marches on its stomach,” referring to the extensive logistical network required to keep an army fed, and therefore able to maintain its fighting capacity. For the French, their inability to maintain a steady supply train to its forces fighting in Russia, and the Russians’ decision to burn their own land and infrastructure to deny it from the invading forces, ultimately defeated the French.

Nazi Germany would suffer a similar fate when it too overextended its logical capabilities during its invasion of Russia amid Operation Barbarossa. Once again, invading armies became stranded without limited resources before being either cut off and annihilated or forced to retreat.

And in modern times during the Gulf War in the 1990’s an extended supply line trailing invading US forces coupled with an anticipated clash with the bulk of Saddam Hussein’s army halted what was otherwise a lighting advance many mistakenly believed could have reached Baghdad had there been the political will. The will to conquer was there, the logistics to implement it wasn’t.

The lessons of history however clear they may be, appear to be entirely lost on an either supremely ignorant or incredibly deceitful troupe of policymakers and news agencies across the West.

ISIS’ Supply Lines

The current conflict consuming the Middle East, particularly in Iraq and Syria where the so-called “Islamic State” (ISIS) is operating and simultaneously fighting and defeating the forces of Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, and Iran, we are told, is built upon a logistical network based on black market oil and ransom payments.

The fighting capacity of ISIS is that of a nation-state. It controls vast swaths of territory straddling both Syria and Iraq and not only is able to militarily defend and expand from this territory, but possesses the resources to occupy it, including the resources to administer the populations subjugated within it.

For military analysts, especially former members of Western armed forces, as well as members of the Western media who remember the convoys of trucks required for the invasions of Iraq in the 1990s and again in 2003, they surely must wonder where ISIS’ trucks are today. After all, if the resources to maintain the fighting capacity exhibited by ISIS were available within Syrian and Iraqi territory alone, then certainly Syrian and Iraqi forces would also posses an equal or greater fighting capacity but they simply do not.

And were ISIS’ supply lines solely confined within Syrian and Iraqi territory, then surely both Syrian and Iraqi forces would utilize their one advantage – air power – to cut front line ISIS fighters from the source of their supplies. But this is not happening and there is a good reason why.

Terrorists and weapons left over from NATO’s intervention in Libya in 2011 were promptly sent to Turkey and then onto Syria – coordinated by US State Department officials and intelligence agencies in Benghazi – a terrorist hotbed for decades.ISIS’ supply lines run precisely where Syrian and Iraqi air power cannot go. To the north and into NATO-member Turkey, and to the southwest into US allies Jordan and Saudi Arabia. Beyond these borders exists a logistical network that spans a region including both Eastern Europe and North Africa.

The London Telegraph would report in their 2013 article, “CIA ‘running arms smuggling team in Benghazi when consulate was attacked’,” that:

[CNN] said that a CIA team was working in an annex near the consulate on a project to supply missiles from Libyan armouries to Syrian rebels.

Weapons have also come from Eastern Europe, with the New York Times reporting in 2013 in their article, “Arms Airlift to Syria Rebels Expands, With Aid From C.I.A.,” that:

From offices at secret locations, American intelligence officers have helped the Arab governments shop for weapons, including a large procurement from Croatia, and have vetted rebel commanders and groups to determine who should receive the weapons as they arrive, according to American officials speaking on the condition of anonymity.

And while Western media sources continuously refer to ISIS and other factions operating under the banner of Al Qaeda as “rebels” or “moderates,” it is clear that if billions of dollars in weapons were truly going to “moderates,” they, not ISIS would be dominating the battlefield.

Recent revelations have revealed that as early as 2012 the United States Department of Defense not only anticipated the creation of a “Salafist Principality” straddling Syria and Iraq precisely where ISIS now exists, it welcomed it eagerly and contributed to the circumstances required to bring it about.

Just How Extensive Are ISIS’ Supply Lines?

While many across the West play willfully ignorant as to where ISIS truly gets their supplies from in order to maintain its impressive fighting capacity, some journalists have traveled to the region and have video taped and reported on the endless convoys of trucks supplying the terrorist army.

Were these trucks traveling to and from factories in seized ISIS territory deep within Syrian and Iraqi territory? No. They were traveling from deep within Turkey, crossing the Syrian border with absolute impunity, and headed on their way with the implicit protection of nearby Turkish military forces. Attempts by Syria to attack these convoys and the terrorists flowing in with them have been met by Turkish air defenses.

Germany’s international broadcaster Deutsche Welle (DW) published the first video report from a major Western media outlet illustrating that ISIS is supplied not by “black market oil” or “hostage ransoms” but billions of dollars worth of supplies carried into Syria across NATO member Turkey’s borders via hundreds of trucks a day.

The report titled, “‘IS’ supply channels through Turkey,” confirms what has been reported by geopolitical analysts since at least as early as 2011 – that ISIS subsides on immense, multi-national state sponsorship, including, obviously, Turkey itself.

Looking at maps of ISIS-held territory and reading action reports of its offensive maneuvers throughout the region and even beyond, one might imagine hundreds of trucks a day would be required to maintain this level of fighting capacity. One could imagine similar convoys crossing into Iraq from Jordan and Saudi Arabia. Similar convoys are likely passing into Syria from Jordan.

In all, considering the realities of logistics and their timeless importance to military campaigns throughout human history, there is no other plausible explanation to ISIS’s ability to wage war within Syria and Iraq besides immense resources being channeled to it from abroad.

If an army marches on its stomach, and ISIS’ stomachs are full of NATO and Persian Gulf State supplies, ISIS will continue to march long and hard. The key to breaking the back of ISIS, is breaking the back of its supply lines. To do that however, and precisely why the conflict has dragged on for so long, Syria, Iraq, Iran, and others would have to eventually secure the borders and force ISIS to fight within Turkish, Jordanian, and Saudi territory – a difficult scenario to implement as nations like Turkey have created defacto buffer zones within Syrian territory which would require a direct military confrontation with Turkey itself to eliminate.

With Iran joining the fray with an alleged deployment of thousands of troops to bolster Syrian military operations, overwhelming principles of deterrence may prevent Turkey enforcing its buffer zones.

What we are currently left with is NATO literally holding the region hostage with the prospect of a catastrophic regional war in a bid to defend and perpetuate the carnage perpetrated by ISIS within Syria, fully underwritten by an immense logistical network streaming out of NATO territory itself.

By Jerome Corsi
Source: Global Research
More than 100 pages of previously classified Department of Defense and Department of State documents implicate the Obama administration in a cover-up to obscure the role Hillary Clinton and the State Department played in the rise of ISIS.

The documents were obtained in a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed by the Washington watchdog Judicial Watch.

They confirm WND reporting over the past three years of evidence that U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens was involved in shipping weapons from Benghazi to support the al-Qaida-affiliated militias fighting the Bashar al-Assad regime in Syria, effectively arming the Sunni jihadists who morphed into ISIS.

The documents further confirm WND reporting that the goal of the terrorists behind the Benghazi attack that killed Stevens was to force the release of Omar Abdul Rahman, the “blind sheik” in U.S. prison serving a life sentence for his involvement in the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, and to avenge death of a prominent Libyan al-Qaida leader killed by a U.S. drone strike in Pakistan.

“These documents are jaw-dropping,” said Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton. “No wonder we had to file more FOIA lawsuits and wait over two years for them.”

Fitton referenced in particular a Defense Department document from the Defense Intelligence Agency, DIA, dated Sept. 12, 2012. It documents that the attack on the Benghazi compound had been carefully planned by the al-Qaida and Muslim Brotherhood-linked Brigades of the Captive Omar Abdul Rahman, BOCAR, which aimed “to kill as many Americans as possible.”

The document, dated the day after the Benghazi attack, was sent to then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, then-Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Obama White House National Security Council.

“If the American people had known the truth – that Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and other top administration officials knew that the Benghazi attack was an al-Qaida terrorist attack from the get-go – and yet lied and covered this fact up – Mitt Romney might very well be president,” Fitton observed.

“These documents also point to connection between the collapse in Libya and the ISIS war – and confirm that the U.S. knew remarkable details about the transfer of arms from Benghazi to Syrian jihadists,” Fitton stated.

He said the documents “show that the Benghazi cover-up has continued for years and is only unraveling through our independent lawsuits.”

“The Benghazi scandal just got a whole lot worse for Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton,” Fitton said.

Plan to release the blind sheik

The heavily redacted Defense Department “information report” provides additional evidence for a WND article Jan. 27 reporting that James “Ace” Lyons – a former four-star admiral who served as the commander in chief of the U.S. Pacific Fleet and a founding member of the Citizens’ Commission on Benghazi – proposed that the attack was an Obama administration-orchestrated kidnapping attempt that went “terribly wrong.”

Lyons speculated that the Obama administration wanted to give the al-Qaida-affiliated rebels operating in conjunction with the Libyan Muslim Brotherhood an opportunity to kidnap Stevens and exchange him for the blind Sheik. The purpose of the plan, Lyons says, may have been to furnish the Obama administration with a pretext to justify to the American public the release of the blind sheik to then-Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi, complying with a request Morsi made in his 2012 acceptance speech on becoming president of Egypt.

The Department of Defense documents released by Judicial Watch further reveals that a-Qaida chief Ayman al-Zawahiri sent BCOAR leader Abdul Baset, AZUZ, into Libya to seek revenge “for the U.S. killing of Aboyahiye (ALALIBY) in Pakistan.”

The documents provide additional evidence for a 2013 WND story reporting the Benghazi attack was in response to Zawahiri’s request to avenge the U.S. drone killing of Libyan al-Qaida leader Abu Yahya al-Libi in Pakistan’s Waziristan tribal area June 4, 2012.

CIA ‘not well organized’ narrative disputed

The newly released DOD and State Department documents also differ from the account of the Benghazi attack Michael Morell, the recently retired CIA deputy director, gives in his current book, “The Great War of Our Time.” On Page 206, he argues that viewing a CIA video of the Benghazi attack made in “real time” caused him to conclude that “with little or no advance planning, extremists in Benghazi made some phone calls, gathered a group of like-minded individuals to go to the TMF.”

In Morell’s narrative, the 9/11 Benghazi attack “was not well organized” but “seemed to be more of a mob that had come to the TMF with the intent of breaching the compound and seeing what damage they could do.”

“When you assess the information from the video, there are few signs of a well-thought-out plan, few signs of command and control, few signs of organization, few signs of even the most basic military tactics in the attack on the TMF,” Morrell said.

“Some of the attackers were armed with small arms; many were not armed at all. No heavy weapons were seen on the videotape,” Morell continued. “Many of the attackers, after entering through the front gate, ran past buildings to the other end of the compound, behaving as if they were thrilled just to have overrun the compound. They did not appear to be looking for Americans to harm. They appeared intent on looting and conducting vandalism.”

Morell stressed that the Obama administration, despite his objections to the contrary, has refused to make available for public viewing the yet classified CIA “real time” video of the Benghazi attack.

Weapons shipped to Syria

Judicial Watch also noted the DOD documents released this week contain the first official documentation that the Obama administration knew that weapons were being shipped from the Port of Benghazi to rebel troops in Syria.

An October 2012 DOD report confirmed:

Weapons from the former Libya military stockpiles were shipped from the port of Benghazi, Libya to the Port of Banias and the Port of Borj Islam, Syria. The weapons shipped during late-August 2012 were Sniper rifles, RPGs, and 125 mm and 155mm howitzers missiles.

During the immediate aftermath of, and following the uncertainty caused by, the downfall of the (Qaddafi) regime in October 2011 and up until early September of 2012, weapons from the former Libya military stockpiles located in Benghazi, Libya were shipped from the port of Benghazi, Libya to the ports of Banias and the Port of Borj Islam, Syria. The Syrian ports were chosen due to the small amount of cargo traffic transiting these two ports. The ships used to transport the weapons were medium-sized and able to hold 10 or less shipping containers of cargo.

A DIA document further detailed:

The weapons shipped from Syria during late-August 2012 were Sniper rifles, RPG’s and 125mm and 155mm howitzers missiles. The numbers for each weapon were estimated to be: 500 Sniper rifles, 100 RPG launchers with 300 total rounds, and approximately 400 howitzers missiles [200ea – 125mm and 200ea – 155 mm.]

The heavily redacted document does not disclose who was shipping the weapons.

Another Defense Intelligence Agency report, written in August 2012, the same time period the U.S. was monitoring weapons flows from Libya to Syria, said that the opposition in Syria was driven by al-Qaida and other extremist Muslim groups: “the Salafist, the Muslim Brotherhood, and AQI are the major forces driving the insurgency in Syria.”

Judicial Watch noted the sectarian direction of the war in Syria was predicted to have dire consequences for Iraq, which included the “grave danger” of the rise of ISIS.

The DIA document noted the following:

This creates the ideal atmosphere for AQI [al Qaeda Iraq] to return to its old pockets in Mosul and Ramadi, and will provide a renewed momentum under the presumption of unifying the jihad among Sunni Iraq and Syria, and the rest of the Sunnis in the Arab world against what it considers one enemy, the dissenters. ISI could also declare an Islamic state through its union with other terrorist organizations in Iraq and Syria, which will create grave danger in regards to unifying Iraq and the protection of its territory.

Judicial Watch commented that some of the “dire consequences” are blacked out but the DIA presciently warned one such consequence would be the “renewing facilitation of terrorist elements from all over the Arab world entering into Iraqi Arena.”

On Feb. 26, Judicial Watch has reported on State Department documents obtained by the Washington-based watchdog organization in a separate FOIA lawsuit that revealed aides for then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, including her then-chief of staff Cheryl Mills, knew from the outset that the Benghazi mission compound was under attack by armed assailants tied to a terrorist group.

By Thierry Meyssan
Source: Information Clearing House

Western governments no longer hide the fact that they’re using jihadists – NATO overthrew Mouamar el-Kadhafi by using al-Qaïda as its only ground forces; Israël displaced the UN Forces to Golan, and replaced them with al-Nosra; the international anti-Daesh Coalition allowed Palmyra to fall in order to cause more problems for Syria. But while we can understand Western interests, we fail to grasp why and how the jihadists can serve Uncle Sam in the name of the Coran.

We often ask ourselves how the Pentagon and the CIA manage to manipulate millions of Muslims and send them off to fight for Uncle Sam’s interests. Of course, it’s true that certain leaders are paid agents, but all jihadists believe that they’re fighting and dying in order to gain access to Paradise. The answer is childishly simple – using the rhetoric of the Muslim Brotherhood as a start, it’s possible to evade human reality and send them to kill anyone you like as long as you wave a red flag at them.

Officially, the Islamic Emirate no longer recognises the authority of Ayman al-Zawahiri, and has therefore left al-Qaïda. Nonetheless, in many places, like the Qalamun mountains, it is still impossible to distinguish between them, since the same jihadists claim allegiance to both flags at once.

Of course, one could argue that this is only a personal quarrel – Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi simply wants to replace the current leader. But while the two organisations have exactly the same practices, they develop very different dialogues.

They share the slogans of the Muslim Brotherhood – « The Coran is our Constitution », « Islam is the solution ». A life of holiness is therefore very simple. It doesn’t really matter if the Creator has made us all intelligent, we must, in all cases, apply the Word of God like a machine. And when the situation is not dealt with in the Book, we should just smash it to pieces. The result is obviously catastrophic, and nowhere have these organisations been able to set up even the beginnings of the perfect society that they hope for.

History demonstrates their differences. From 1979 to 1995, in other words, from the CIA operation in Afghanistan to the Popular Arab and Islamic Congress in Khartoum, Oussama Ben Laden’s mercenaries fought the Soviet Union with public aid from the United States. From 1995 to 2011, in other words, from the Congress in Khartoum to operation « Neptune’s Spear », al-Qaïda took position against « Jews and Crusaders » while continuing its struggle against Russia in Yugoslavia and Chechnya. And since 2011, in other words, since the « Arab Spring », it has supported NATO in Libya and Israël at the Golan frontier. Generally speaking, Western public opinion has not kept up with this evolution. It remains convinced of the danger of a mythical Russian expansionism, persists in blaming the jihadists for the attacks of September 11th, has not realised what happened in Libya and at the Israeli frontier, and maintains the false idea that al-Qaïda is an anti-imperialist terrorist organisation. As for the Arabs, they do not base themselves on facts, but choose, according to the situation, between reality and Western propaganda so as to invent a romantic narrative for themselves.

From its side, the Islamic Emirate is moving away from the Coran and closer to the neo-conservatives. It claims that the main enemies are other Muslims – the Chiites and their allies. It has clearly forgotten the Bosnian episode during which Ben Laden’s Arab Legion were supported both by the United States, Saudi Arabia and Iran. But who are the allies of the Chiites? The Syrian Arab Republic (secular) and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad (Sunnite). In other words, the Islamic Emirate is fighting in priority against the Axis of Resistance to imperialism. De facto, it confirms that it is an objective ally of the United States and Israël in the « Greater Middle East », even though, theoretically, they are the enemy.

The malleability of these two organisations resides in their basic ideology, that of the Muslim Brotherhood. It is therefore logical that almost all of the jihadist leaders, at one time or another, have been members of one branch or another of the Brotherhood. By the same token, it is logical that the CIA has not only supported the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, since their reception at the White House by President Eisenhower in 1955, but also all its foreign branches and all the dissident groups. Finally, the califat that Hassan el-Bana dreamed about and that Ayman al-Zawahiri and Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi pretended to want, is not the reproduction of the Golden Age of Islam, but the reign of obscurantism.

This was confirmed by Laurent Fabius in 2012, in other words, before the split between al-Qaïda and Daesh, when he declared: « On the ground, they’re doing a good job! »

Thierry Meyssan, French intellectual, founder and chairman of Voltaire Network and the Axis for Peace Conference. His columns specializing in international relations feature in daily newspapers and weekly magazines in Arabic, Spanish and Russian. His last two books published in English : 9/11 the Big Lie and Pentagate.