Source: The American Conservative
Article dated 22 June 2017 – reposted 4 August 2019
Three-term Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii, a member of both the Armed Services and Foreign Affairs committees, has proposed legislation that would prohibit any U.S. assistance to terrorist organizations in Syria as well as to any organization working directly with them. Equally important, it would prohibit U.S. military sales and other forms of military cooperation with other countries that provide arms or financing to those terrorists and their collaborators.

Gabbard’s “Stop Arming Terrorists Act” challenges for the first time in Congress a U.S. policy toward the conflict in the Syrian civil war that should have set off alarm bells long ago: in 2012-13 the Obama administration helped its Sunni allies Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar provide arms to Syrian and non-Syrian armed groups to force President Bashar al-Assad out of power. And in 2013 the administration began to provide arms to what the CIA judged to be “relatively moderate” anti-Assad groups—meaning they incorporated various degrees of Islamic extremism.

That policy, ostensibly aimed at helping replace the Assad regime with a more democratic alternative, has actually helped build up al Qaeda’s Syrian franchise al Nusra Front into the dominant threat to Assad.

The supporters of this arms-supply policy believe it is necessary as pushback against Iranian influence in Syria. But that argument skirts the real issue raised by the policy’s history. The Obama administration’s Syria policy effectively sold out the U.S. interest that was supposed to be the touchstone of the “Global War on Terrorism”—the eradication of al Qaeda and its terrorist affiliates. The United States has instead subordinated that U.S. interest in counter-terrorism to the interests of its Sunni allies. In doing so it has helped create a new terrorist threat in the heart of the Middle East.

The policy of arming military groups committed to overthrowing the government of President Bashar al-Assad began in September 2011, when President Barack Obama was pressed by his Sunni allies—Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar—to supply heavy weapons to a military opposition to Assad they were determined to establish. Turkey and the Gulf regimes wanted the United States to provide anti-tank and anti-aircraft weapons to the rebels, according to a former Obama Administration official involved in Middle East issues.

Obama refused to provide arms to the opposition, but he agreed to provide covert U.S. logistical help in carrying out a campaign of military assistance to arm opposition groups. CIA involvement in the arming of anti-Assad forces began with arranging for the shipment of weapons from the stocks of the Gaddafi regime that had been stored in Benghazi. CIA-controlled firms shipped the weapons from the military port of Benghazi to two small ports in Syria using former U.S. military personnel to manage the logistics, as investigative reporter Sy Hersh detailed in 2014. The funding for the program came mainly from the Saudis.

A declassified October 2012 Defense Intelligence Agency report revealed that the shipment in late August 2012 had included 500 sniper rifles, 100 RPG (rocket propelled grenade launchers) along with 300 RPG rounds and 400 howitzers. Each arms shipment encompassed as many as ten shipping containers, it reported, each of which held about 48,000 pounds of cargo. That suggests a total payload of up to 250 tons of weapons per shipment. Even if the CIA had organized only one shipment per month, the arms shipments would have totaled 2,750 tons of arms bound ultimately for Syria from October 2011 through August 2012. More likely it was a multiple of that figure.

The CIA’s covert arms shipments from Libya came to an abrupt halt in September 2012 when Libyan militants attacked and burned the embassy annex in Benghazi that had been used to support the operation. By then, however, a much larger channel for arming anti-government forces was opening up. The CIA put the Saudis in touch with a senior Croatian official who had offered to sell large quantities of arms left over from the Balkan Wars of the 1990s. And the CIA helped them shop for weapons from arms dealers and governments in several other former Soviet bloc countries.

Flush with weapons acquired from both the CIA Libya program and from the Croatians, the Saudis and Qataris dramatically increased the number of flights by military cargo planes to Turkey in December 2012 and continued that intensive pace for the next two and a half months. The New York Times reported a total 160 such flights through mid-March 2013. The most common cargo plane in use in the Gulf, the Ilyushin IL-76, can carry roughly 50 tons of cargo on a flight, which would indicate that as much as 8,000 tons of weapons poured across the Turkish border into Syria just in late 2012 and in 2013.

One U.S. official called the new level of arms deliveries to Syrian rebels a “cataract of weaponry.” And a year-long investigation by the Balkan Investigative Reporting Network and the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project revealed that the Saudis were intent on building up a powerful conventional army in Syria. The “end-use certificate” for weapons purchased from an arms company in Belgrade, Serbia, in May 2013 includes 500 Soviet-designed PG-7VR rocket launchers that can penetrate even heavily-armored tanks, along with two million rounds; 50 Konkurs anti-tank missile launchers and 500 missiles, 50 anti-aircraft guns mounted on armored vehicles, 10,000 fragmentation rounds for OG-7 rocket launchers capable of piercing heavy body armor; four truck-mounted BM-21 GRAD multiple rocket launchers, each of which fires 40 rockets at a time with a range of 12 to 19 miles, along with 20,000 GRAD rockets.

The end user document for another Saudi order from the same Serbian company listed 300 tanks, 2,000 RPG launchers, and 16,500 other rocket launchers, one million rounds for ZU-23-2 anti-aircraft guns, and 315 million cartridges for various other guns.

Those two purchases were only a fraction of the totality of the arms obtained by the Saudis over the next few years from eight Balkan nations. Investigators found that the Saudis made their biggest arms deals with former Soviet bloc states in 2015, and that the weapons included many that had just come off factory production lines. Nearly 40 percent of the arms the Saudis purchased from those countries, moreover, still had not been delivered by early 2017. So the Saudis had already contracted for enough weaponry to keep a large-scale conventional war in Syria going for several more years.

By far the most consequential single Saudi arms purchase was not from the Balkans, however, but from the United States. It was the December 2013 U.S. sale of 15,000 TOW anti-tank missiles to the Saudis at a cost of about $1 billion—the result of Obama’s decision earlier that year to reverse his ban on lethal assistance to anti-Assad armed groups. The Saudis had agreed, moreover, that those anti-tank missiles would be doled out to Syrian groups only at U.S. discretion. The TOW missiles began to arrive in Syria in 2014 and soon had a major impact on the military balance.

This flood of weapons into Syria, along with the entry of 20,000 foreign fighters into the country—primarily through Turkey—largely defined the nature of the conflict. These armaments helped make al Qaeda’s Syrian franchise, al Nusra Front (now renamed Tahrir al-Sham or Levant Liberation Organization) and its close allies by far the most powerful anti-Assad forces in Syria—and gave rise to the Islamic State.

By late 2012, it became clear to U.S. officials that the largest share of the arms that began flowing into Syria early in the year were going to the rapidly growing al Qaeda presence in the country. In October 2012, U.S. officials acknowledged off the record for the first time to the New York Times that “most” of the arms that had been shipped to armed opposition groups in Syria with U.S. logistical assistance during the previous year had gone to “hardline Islamic jihadists”— obviously meaning al Qaeda’s Syrian franchise, al Nusra.

Al Nusra Front and its allies became the main recipients of the weapons because the Saudis, Turks, and Qataris wanted the arms to go to the military units that were most successful in attacking government targets. And by the summer of 2012, al Nusra Front, buttressed by the thousands of foreign jihadists pouring into the country across the Turkish border, was already taking the lead in attacks on the Syrian government in coordination with “Free Syrian Army” brigades.

In November and December 2012, al Nusra Front began establishing formal “joint operations rooms” with those calling themselves “Free Syrian Army” on several battlefronts, as Charles Lister chronicles in his book The Syrian Jihad. One such commander favored by Washington was Col. Abdul Jabbar al-Oqaidi, a former Syrian army officer who headed something called the Aleppo Revolutionary Military Council. Ambassador Robert Ford, who continued to hold that position even after he had been withdrawn from Syria, publicly visited Oqaidi in May 2013 to express U.S. support for him and the FSA.

But Oqaidi and his troops were junior partners in a coalition in Aleppo in which al Nusra was by far the strongest element. That reality is clearly reflected in a video in which Oqaidi describes his good relations with officials of the “Islamic State” and is shown joining the main jihadist commander in the Aleppo region celebrating the capture of the Syrian government’s Menagh Air Base in September 2013.

By early 2013, in fact, the “Free Syrian Army,” which had never actually been a military organization with any troops, had ceased to have any real significance in the Syria conflict. New anti-Assad armed groups had stopped using the name even as a “brand” to identify themselves, as a leading specialist on the conflict observed.

So, when weapons from Turkey arrived at the various battlefronts, it was understood by all the non-jihadist groups that they would be shared with al Nusra Front and its close allies. A report by McClatchy in early 2013, on a town in north central Syria, showed how the military arrangements between al Nusra and those brigades calling themselves “Free Syrian Army” governed the distribution of weapons. One of those units, the Victory Brigade, had participated in a “joint operations room” with al Qaeda’s most important military ally, Ahrar al Sham, in a successful attack on a strategic town a few weeks earlier. A visiting reporter watched that brigade and Ahrar al Sham show off new sophisticated weapons that included Russian-made RPG27 shoulder-fired rocket-propelled anti-tank grenades and RG6 grenade launchers.

When asked if the Victory Brigade had shared its new weapons with Ahrar al Sham, the latter’s spokesman responded, “Of course they share their weapons with us. We fight together.”

Turkey and Qatar consciously chose al Qaeda and its closest ally, Ahrar al Sham, as the recipients of weapons systems. In late 2013 and early 2014, several truckloads of arms bound for the province of Hatay, just south of the Turkish border, were intercepted by Turkish police. They had Turkish intelligence personnel on board, according to later Turkish police court testimony. The province was controlled by Ahrar al Sham. In fact Turkey soon began to treat Ahrar al Sham as its primary client in Syria, according to Faysal Itani, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Rafik Hariri Center for the Middle East.

A Qatari intelligence operative who had been involved in shipping arms to extremist groups in Libya was a key figure in directing the flow of arms from Turkey into Syria. An Arab intelligence source familiar with the discussions among the external suppliers near the Syrian border in Turkey during those years told the Washington Post’s David Ignatius that when one of the participants warned that the outside powers were building up the jihadists while the non-Islamist groups were withering away, the Qatari operative responded, “I will send weapons to al Qaeda if it will help.”

The Qataris did funnel arms to both al Nusra Front and Ahrar al Sham, according to a Middle Eastern diplomatic source. The Obama administration’s National Security Council staff proposed in 2013 that the United States signal U.S. displeasure with Qatar over its arming of extremists in both Syria and Libya by withdrawing a squadron of fighter planes from the U.S. airbase at al-Udeid, Qatar. The Pentagon vetoed that mild form of pressure, however, to protect its access to its base in Qatar.

President Obama himself confronted Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan over his government’s support for the jihadists at a private White House dinner in May 2013, as recounted by Hersh. “We know what you’re doing with the radicals in Syria,” he quotes Obama as saying to Erdogan.

The administration addressed Turkey’s cooperation with the al Nusra publicly, however, only fleetingly in late 2014. Shortly after leaving Ankara, Francis Ricciardone, the U.S. ambassador to Turkey from 2011 through mid-2014, told The Daily Telegraph of London that Turkey had “worked with groups, frankly, for a period, including al Nusra.”

The closest Washington came to a public reprimand of its allies over the arming of terrorists in Syria was when Vice President Joe Biden criticized their role in October 2014. In impromptu remarks at Harvard University’s Kennedy School, Biden complained that “our biggest problem is our allies.” The forces they had supplied with arms, he said, were “al Nusra and al Qaeda and the extremist elements of jihadis coming from other parts of the world.”

Biden quickly apologized for the remarks, explaining that he didn’t mean that U.S. allies had deliberately helped the jihadists. But Ambassador Ford confirmed his complaint, telling BBC, “What Biden said about the allies aggravating the problem of extremism is true.”

In June 2013 Obama approved the first direct U.S. lethal military aid to rebel brigades that had been vetted by the CIA. By spring 2014, the U.S.-made BGM-71E anti-tank missiles from the 15,000 transferred to the Saudis began to appear in the hands of selected anti-Assad groups. But the CIA imposed the condition that the group receiving them would not cooperate with the al Nusra Front or its allies.

That condition implied that Washington was supplying military groups that were strong enough to maintain their independence from al Nusra Front. But the groups on the CIA’s list of vetted “relatively moderate” armed groups were all highly vulnerable to takeover by the al Qaeda affiliate. In November 2014, al Nusra Front troops struck the two strongest CIA-supported armed groups, Harakat Hazm and the Syrian Revolutionary Front on successive days and seized their heavy weapons, including both TOW anti-tank missiles and GRAD rockets.

In early March 2015, the Harakat Hazm Aleppo branch dissolved itself, and al Nusra Front promptly showed off photos of the TOW missiles and other equipment they had captured from it. And in March 2016, al Nusra Front troops attacked the headquarters of the 13th Division in northwestern Idlib province and seized all of its TOW missiles. Later that month, al Nusra Front released a video of its troops using the TOW missiles it had captured.

But that wasn’t the only way for al Nusra Front to benefit from the CIA’s largesse. Along with its close ally Ahrar al Sham, the terrorist organization began planning for a campaign to take complete control of Idlib province in the winter of 2014-15. Abandoning any pretense of distance from al Qaeda, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar worked with al Nusra on the creation of a new military formation for Idlib called the “Army of Conquest,” consisting of the al Qaeda affiliate and its closest allies. Saudi Arabia and Qatar provided more weapons for the campaign, while Turkey facilitated their passage. On March 28, just four days after launching the campaign, the Army of Conquest successfully gained control of Idlib City.

The non-jihadist armed groups getting advanced weapons from the CIA assistance were not part of the initial assault on Idlib City. After the capture of Idlib the U.S.-led operations room for Syria in southern Turkey signaled to the CIA-supported groups in Idlib that they could now participate in the campaign to consolidate control over the rest of the province. According to Lister, the British researcher on jihadists in Syria who maintains contacts with both jihadist and other armed groups, recipients of CIA weapons, such as the Fursan al haq brigade and Division 13, did join the Idlib campaign alongside al Nusra Front without any move by the CIA to cut them off.

As the Idlib offensive began, the CIA-supported groups were getting TOW missiles in larger numbers, and they now used them with great effectiveness against the Syrian army tanks. That was the beginning of a new phase of the war, in which U.S. policy was to support an alliance between “relatively moderate” groups and the al Nusra Front.

The new alliance was carried over to Aleppo, where jihadist groups close to Nusra Front formed a new command called Fateh Halab (“Aleppo Conquest”) with nine armed groups in Aleppo province which were getting CIA assistance. The CIA-supported groups could claim that they weren’t cooperating with al Nusra Front because the al Qaeda franchise was not officially on the list of participants in the command. But as the report on the new command clearly implied, this was merely a way of allowing the CIA to continue providing weapons to its clients, despite their de facto alliance with al Qaeda.

The significance of all this is clear: by helping its Sunni allies provide weapons to al Nusra Front and its allies and by funneling into the war zone sophisticated weapons that were bound to fall into al Nusra hands or strengthen their overall military position, U.S. policy has been largely responsible for having extended al Qaeda’s power across a significant part of Syrian territory. The CIA and the Pentagon appear to be ready to tolerate such a betrayal of America’s stated counter-terrorism mission. Unless either Congress or the White House confronts that betrayal explicitly, as Tulsi Gabbard’s legislation would force them to do, U.S. policy will continue to be complicit in the consolidation of power by al Qaeda in Syria, even if the Islamic State is defeated there.

Gareth Porter is an independent journalist and winner of the 2012 Gellhorn Prize for journalism. He is the author of numerous books, including Manufactured Crisis: The Untold Story of the Iran Nuclear Scare (Just World Books, 2014).

Source: Fars News
Political analyst Mark Taliano says that there is no evidence of a chemical attack in Douma and the alleged gas attack was only a false flag operation by the White Helmets.

Speaking in an exclusive interview with FNA, Taliano said that there was no justification for the US and its allies to bomb Syria after the theatrical incident in Syria’s Douma.

Commenting on the so-called White Helmets and their operations in Syria, the analyst told FNA that the members of the group are “al Qaeda auxiliaries” who support the terrorist groups and carry out false flag operations in Syria.

Mark Taliano is an author and political analyst who has recently visited Syria. In his new book titled “Voices from Syria”, he combines years of research with on-the-ground observations to present an informed and well-documented analysis that refutes mainstream media narratives about the war on Syria.

FNA has conducted an interview with Mark Taliano about the war on Syria and the most recent developments surrounding the issue.

Below you will find the full text of the interview.

Q: Multiple places in Syria came under attack by the United States and its allies, namely Britain and France, several months ago based on a video footage of an alleged gas attack in Syria’s Douma released by the White Helmets. Who are the White Helmets? How can their unverified video be presented as justification for a large scale attack on Syria?

A: The White Helmets are a Western propaganda construct. They are not the legitimate Syrian Civil Defence, nor are they affiliated with the International Civil Defence Organization.

They are essentially al Qaeda auxiliaries. They support the terrorists in Syria, and their membership is largely comprised of terrorists.

One of their important roles is to set up and conduct false flag terrorism operations in which crimes are falsely attributed to the legitimate Syrian government with a view to engineering consent for the West to commit Supreme International Crimes against Syria, an independent, sovereign state, and a founding member of the United Nations.

The so-called chemical weapons attack at Douma was one such false flag operation. No chemical weapon attack occurred, and yet the Syrian government was blamed for the theatrical incident, yet again, with no evidence.

Even if there was such an incident (and neither the Syrian government nor the Syrian army would in any way benefit from such an attack), it would not justify the commission of the Supreme International Crimes which France, the UK and the US committed in response to the (theatrical) event, by bombing Syria.

Unfortunately, the West has been committing war crimes against Syria for seven years now, all beneath an umbrella of false pretexts and big lies.

Q: We have seen the Israeli regime and the so-called US-led coalition targeting the Syrian Arab Army (SAA) and its allied forces many times. What do you think is the reason for such moves?

A: Apartheid Israel and its allies, including NATO, Wahhabi Saudi Arabia, and Qatar, commit war crimes as policy against Syria. US-led NATO seeks to destroy non-compliant nations, including Syria, with a view to expanding its control, and its operations of looting and plundering prey nations. Apartheid Israel’s goals fit nicely into the West’s neo-con, criminal megalomania. Israel seeks to expand its territories and to demolish any opposition to its Oded Yinon-inspired plans. Needless to say, the sectarian, misogynist, anti-Christian, anti-democratic terrorists, including al Qaeda and ISIS, serve as excellent proxies for both Israel and the US Empire.

Q: Since the beginning of the crisis in Syria, Saudi Arabia has been actively supporting terrorists in the country. These terrorists are now losing ground every day. What do you think would be the implications of such failure for the Saudi foreign policy?

A: Terrorists are proxies for all of the countries invading Syria, including Saudi Arabia. Fortunately, Syria and it allies are defeating these terrorists. Remaining terrorists are being relocated and/or rebranded. It is the same game that has been repeated throughout the war. Moderate rebels never existed. Saudi Arabia and its allies will redirect funds towards alternate terrorist mercenaries with a view to supporting the illegal US occupation of Syria’s rich oil fields. The failure will be disguised as a victory.

Q: The so-called Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) have received tremendous amount of arms and support from the United States, initially with the stated aim to fight Daesh (ISIL or ISIS). But apparently, the US is now preparing the ground to establish an independent Kurdish state in Syria. What do you think the US is seeking to achieve by disintegrating Syria?

A: The anti-democratic, ethnic-cleansing SDF are simply more of the same – rebranded mercenary terrorists. The establishment of a so-called “Kurdish state” will serve Empire’s goal of partitioning and destroying Syria, but it will not serve Kurdish interests at all. Empire’s proxies, including ISIS, are expendable. As I explain in “Voices from Syria”, Empire uses its proxies as “place-setters” to hold territory, to conquer territory, and to create false perceptions that conquerors are “liberators”. The whole process serves Empire’s goals of destroying and looting Syria, but the proxies are expendable.

Q: The US announcement of its plans to recognize a Kurdish state in Syria has seemingly provoked Turkish invasion on the Kurdish areas. What are Turkey’s objectives in its military intervention and how do you think this recent development would affect the process of reaching peace in Syria?

A: I believe the US gave NATO member Turkey the green light to invade. Turkey seeks to expand and to eradicate terrorist threats at its borders, while at the same time, all of the fighting creates chaos and destabilization, which is what the US seeks. The US and its allies do not want peace. The only solution to the externally orchestrated and perpetrated disaster in Syria is for Syria to regain its sovereignty and territorial integrity as per international law. The terrorist threat, which is an imperial threat, will only be eradicated when the imperialists are gone.

By Jay Tharappel

This article was originally published on Al Masdar in September 2016, it has been reposted here in light of the severity of the economic pressures placed on Syria, and the urgency to call upon external powers to stop punishing the Syrian people for refusing the imposition of a political order by external powers. 

This article was written at a time when Syrian religious leaders representing the republic’s three largest churches (Greek Orthodox, Melkite Catholic, and Syrian Orthodox) issued a statement calling for an end to the economic sanctions on Syria, which they blamed for impoverishing the Syrian people.

That the west predictably ignored these calls is symptomatic of their abject refusal to address the most important truth about the war, which is that the militias waging war on the Syrian state are infinitely more dependent on an external predatory alliance of nations for constant flows of foreign mercenaries, funding, weapons, training, and even direct assistance on the battlefield than they are on any internal discontent with the Syrian government.

Those predatory nations include NATO states such as the United States, Britain, France and Turkey, and their regional allies, including Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Jordan and Israel, as well as other governments that fall in the ‘western sphere’ such as Canada and Australia, both of whom have co-signed the objectives of the proxy-war on Syria.

Those who live in these predatory nations, especially so-called ‘westerners’, are ironically encouraged to imagine themselves as the probable saviours of those living under siege IN Syria while being mostly oblivious to the fact that their governments have imposed an economic siege ON Syria.

Lifting the economic siege ON Syria would be a lot easier, but it would require westerners to come to terms with the reality that their governments are the problem, not the solution.

Targeted sanctions?

The notion that the sanctions on Syria are ‘targeted’ in the sense that they only affect ‘regime officials’ is the oldest lie used to justify economic aggression – this same lie was used to justify the sanctions on Iraq after the first gulf war.

When Madeleine Albright (then US Ambassador to the UN) was asked whether she believed the colossal death-toll of Iraqi children caused by these sanctions was worth it, she famously replied in the affirmative, saying ‘we think the price is worth it’.

In terms of achieving US foreign policy objectives she was correct since healthy children are potential Iraqi soldiers capable of defending their country against US aggression, so it’s much more effective to bring the country to its knees first, even if it means killing children.

Today Syria is being ‘softened up’ by sanctions that are just as ‘comprehensive’ as those imposed on Iraq.

Visa, Mastercard and Paypal all suspended services to Syria in August 2011 after the announcement of Executive Order 13582 by the US Treasury, prohibiting US persons (corporate entities included) from providing any services to Syria, which is a severe blow given that global financial transactions are dominated not just by these corporations but by corporations based in countries that impose financial sanctions on Syria in general.

This means that even people living in countries that never went along with the sanctions are unable to send money to Syria using these three services on the grounds that these three corporations are technically US persons and thus subject to US laws.

It also blocks the ability of many among the Syrian diaspora to send remittances back to their families, which is particularly cruel given that remittances are one source of revenue that would logically increase during a war, due to greater efforts made by the diaspora to support their relatives back home, and also because of the money that Syrians made refugees by the war would wish to send back, assuming they find sources of income abroad.

Of the $1.6b (current USD) that Syria earned in remittances in 2010 (which is the last year for which accurate World Bank figures are publicly available), 75% came from countries that now impose financial sanctions on Syria (see Figure 1).

In the case of the GCC states, which contributed 37% of Syria’s pre-war remittance revenues, the move to block remittances was a defensive move by Damascus itself because of the colossal financial support that Saudi Arabia and Qatar in particular have offered the Islamist proxies. As for the other 38% (which in addition to the previous 37% equals the 75% figure quoted earlier), this is made up of Jordan (16%), Turkey (14%), the EU (5%) and the Anglosphere bloc of the US, Canada, Australia and the UK (3%), all of which impose financial sanctions to varying degrees.

While it’s unclear what Syria’s remittance earnings actually are at present (especially given the cash-in-hand transfers that go unaccounted for and other informal methods) there’s no doubt that Germany in particular will host a sizable Syrian diaspora community in the near future and therefore may feel compelled to accommodate growing demands for financial sanctions to be lifted.

The exhaustive nature of the sanctions helps explain the pattern of corporations ‘over-complying’, that is refusing to do business with Syrian persons or entities altogether to avoid heavy penalties.

In March 2015 Paypal was ordered to pay $7.7m to the US Treasury for facilitating transactions worth a measly $44,000 between Cuba, Sudan and Iran that were in violations of US sanctions – that’s a $7.7m penalty for transferring up to $44,000, of which Paypal would have early taken only a small fraction in operating revenues.

With penalties that are orders of magnitude higher than the amounts violating the sanctions, why wouldn’t Paypal (and others) ‘over-comply’ with the sanctions just to play it safe?

Sanctions on Syrian oil exports

A currency depreciates when a country imports more than it exports, which is why the rising demand for heating fuels to keep Syrians warm in the coming winter months predictably led to Syria’s Central Bank announcing a 6% devaluation of the Syrian pound, which now officially trades at 517.4 against the US dollar.

Although Syria was an importer of petroleum products even prior to the conflict, this import bill was at least offset by export earnings from the sale of crude oil.

In the eleven years prior to the conflict (from 2000 to 2010 inclusively) 53.1% of Syria’s total export earnings of $81.9b (current USD) came from the sale of crude oil, however this percentage fell dramatically to around the 6.5% mark from 2012 onwards (see Figure 2).

The reason? In September 2011 the EU imposed sanctions which banned the importation of Syrian oil – a major blow given that in 2010 (the year prior to the conflict) the EU bloc was Syria’s single largest export-destination, earning 41.4% of total export revenues (exports in 2010 were $12.2b in current USD.

These sanctions were later lifted in May 2013, but only after the al Qaeda affiliate Jabhat al Nusra (now known as Jabhat Fateh al Sham) had seized control of Syria’s oil fields in the north-east of the country.

A month earlier in April 2013 a split within the ranks of al Nusra produced ISIS (which was defeated in September 2017) which has been selling stolen Syrian ever since, largely thanks to the EU’s willingness to be their customers.

At the time, the EU’s decision (to begin funding al Qaeda via the theft of Syria’s natural resources) was promoted by the Guardian as a way ‘to help the moderate opposition’ despite their report also acknowledging that ‘al-Qaida and other extreme Islamist groups control the majority of the oil wells in Deir Ezzor province’.

To the extent that ISIS has developed a Frankenstein-like independence from its original backers, it’s because they can sell this stolen oil, meaning that they don’t rely on their sponsors as much as their so-called ‘moderate’ rivals.

Should oil prices rise again to above $100/barrel thereby making it viable for Syria to resume oil exports (that is if Saudi Arabia stops driving down prices) Europe will have to make a choice – either lift the sanctions and buy from the government, or continue funding ISIS.

Sanctions are destroying Syria’s healthcare system

The sanctions, by helping to demolish the value of the Syrian pound by a factor of twelve (it’s pre-war value was 45 pounds per USD in 2010), has raised the price of imports by roughly the same factor, meaning that sanctions needn’t even formally prohibit the sale of medicines to Syria to make them unaffordable and scarce.

Maintaining the perception in the west that President Assad is almost solely to blame for the deterioration in public health is perhaps why the perspectives of Syrian doctors, who are in the best position to comment on the relationship between sanctions and healthcare, are routinely ignored.

Dr. Nabil Antaki, a medical practitioner who works in the government-held western Aleppo, had this to say about the sanctions, “we are disgusted by these sanctions because these sanctions and these embargoes have not been implemented against the Syrian government but against the Syrian people, all the Syrian people”.

Just as the sanctions on Iraq resulted in the deterioration of the water treatment systems by blocking the importation of the spare parts needed to fix them, Syria’s medical staff are experiencing similar difficulties when it comes to fixing their equipment.

Describing the bureaucratic hurdles in sourcing parts, “I wanted to replace one part of a piece of medical equipment. Normally this would take one week, it took a year and a half to get hold of the part because we couldn’t import it from Japan as it was a multi-national company”, Dr Antaki said.

Another doctor from Aleppo Dr. Tony Sayegh also blames sanctions, “something that makes life even more tough are the economic sanctions that the US and EU have imposed on Syria. The sanctions do not hit the government but the people”.

When I visited Syria in July 2015 as part of a delegation we met with Syria’s Health Minister Dr. Nizar Yazigi who pointed out that of the 70 pharmaceutical factories Syria once had, now only 20 remain.

These factories are what enabled Syria to achieve remarkable levels of self-sufficiency in the production of medicines prior to the war. According to the Syrian Economic Forum (which is critical of the government), 91% of the medicines consumed in Syria a year prior to the war (2010) were produced domestically.

The decimation of Syrian industrial capacity is not just a symptom of the generally destructive nature of war, but also because proxy-armies have looted industrial areas.

This is why after Sheikh Najjar’s industrial complex was taken back by the Syrian government in July 2014 (from Al Nusra, Ahrar al Sham and other smaller FSA militias) Aleppo’s industrialists, represented by the ‘Aleppo Chamber of Industry and Commerce’, began proceedings to take the Turkish government to The Hague (International Court of Justice) for their complicity in the plundering of ‘more than 300 factories’ including those used to produce medicines.

The combined strategy of plundering Syria’s productive capacity and then imposing sanctions on Syria to hinder the process of reconstruction looks like an attempt to shift the dependence of the Syrian public away from the government and towards to the forces seeking to topple the government.

This would also explain why the emphasis in the west is on directing charity towards organisations based outside Syria’s borders mainly in neighbouring countries, like Turkey, Lebanon or Jordan, on the pretext that it’s needed to help Syrian refugees, who, ironically, left Syria due to the policies of these countries (except Lebanon) in the first place.

By contrast, charities that operate in government-held Syria (where the vast majority of Syrians live), such as the Syrian Trust for Development, are often starved of donations from wealthier nations because those same nations either enforce the sanctions, or have online payment systems that are dominated by corporations that enforce the sanctions.

Other ‘charities’ however, like the Islamic Humanitarian Relief Foundation based in Turkey and the Qatari Red Crescent, that have been caught smuggling weapons to the proxy-armies inside Syria, experience no such online blockades.

If the key concern was Syrian welfare then it would be far more effective to stop strangling the healthcare system that already exist, which Syrians spent decades building, and which serves the vast majority of the Syrian public.

Decades of progress in human development, wiped out

To those unfamiliar with the region, Syria today epitomises nothing but war, which is why it may surprise them to know that prior to the conflict, Syria was actually something of a post-colonial success story, a feat largely achieved by a decades-long legacy of free healthcare, free education and a strong public sector.

Crunching the numbers (available from the World Bank and IMF databanks) gives one the impression that Syria ‘punched above its weight’ in terms of human development.

In the year prior to the war (2010), countries that were wealthier than Syria did only marginally better in terms of life expectancy on average, while countries with lower life expectancies than Syria did so on much higher incomes on average (weighted by population).

If China is excluded from the sample of nations wealthier than Syria, and if Peru is included to keep the sample at twenty nations, then Syria does better on life expectancy by 2.3 years than the revised sample average of 70 (see Figure 3).

As for the sample of nations with lower life expectancies than Syria (again, a sample of twenty nations) their average income works out at $11,385 (current international dollars) which is $5,010 higher than Syria – in other words, Syria did more for its people relative to its income than nations in the same proverbial ballpark (see Figure 4).

Punching above its weight, Syria’s achievements on the eve of the war are only diminished by the inclusion of China – nothing to be ashamed of given China’s remarkable achievements in human development.

End the sanctions

To those living in the so-called ‘west’, regardless of what you may think of the manner in which the Syrian government conducts itself militarily, this is not something you have much control over, however you do have some agency in opposing your own government’s policies that are fuelling this war.

Whether those policies include arming the death-squads that the Syrian government is predictably resisting, or imposing the cruel sanctions that are killing Syrians quietly, either through artificially inflated food prices and medicine shortages or by preventing them from receiving remittances from abroad, these are the actions you have some agency to oppose.

Westerners, if you want to ‘break the sieges’ (a reference to the PR slogan promoted by the ‘moderate’ mercenaries who for years have demanded NATO intervention on their behalf) you should start with the economic sieges imposed by YOUR governments against Syria.

Source: Fars
Local sources reported a series of blasts at the positions of Tahrir al-Sham Hay’at (the Levant Liberation Board) and Ahrar al-Sham in Idlib’s countryside, adding that the explosions escalated tensions and insecurity across the region.

The sources said that 15 people were killed and several more were wounded in an explosion caused by a bomb-laden car in the Central part of the town of al-Dana.

In the meantime, a bomb-laden vehicle was detonated near al-Dana chechpoint, killing and wounding several people.

Also, another bomb went off at a bazaar in al-Dana.

The sources went on to say that another bomb blast rocked the al-Zabit neighborhood West of Idlib city, while a fifth explosion caused by an explosive-laden motorbike hit the Northern countryside of Idlib.

Another road-side bomb was blown up on the main road to the town of Kafroumeh West of Ma’arat al-Nu’aman, while, another bomb blast killed a number of people in the township of Tal Hadeh in Northern countryside of Idlib.

News websites affiliated to terrorists confirmed the blasts, saying that the targeted regions are now in a state of chaos.

Terrorist groups are accusing each others starting a fresh round of blasts and insecurity.

Reports said on Tuesday that the terrorist groups intensified assassination operations in Idlib after Doha and Riyadh displayed their differences and darkened relations.

After differences between Saudi Arabia and Qatar surfaced, Abdullah Muhammad al-Muhaysini, the commander and Mufti (religious leader) of Tahrir al-Sham Hay’at (the Levant Liberation Board), called on other terrorist groups to merge with al-Nusra Front (also known as Fatah al-Sham Front or the Levant Liberation Board) under this pretext that Riyadh wants to withdraw support for the militants and will surrender all of them to the US at the end.

He also asked Yasser Abdolrahim, one of the Free Syrian Army (FSA) commanders, to join al-Nusra but he didn’t comply with the demand.

Abdolrahim escaped an assassination attempt after rejecting al-Muhaysini’s proposal and threatened him of revenge.
Field sources also underlined that the terrorist groups in Idlib are facing a deplorable situation as assassinations have increased, adding that al-Nusra is using the darkened ties between Doha and Riyadh and wants to persuade other terrorist groups, including the FSA, to merge with al-Nusra by annihilation of opposition groups.

According to reports, Muhaysini has himself escaped death in two attempted assassinations in recent days, as the assassination operations against terrorist commanders has intensified in Idlib.
News websites affiliated to the opposition groups reported earlier this month that the car carrying al-Muhaysini came under attack near Ma’arat al-Nu’aman in Idlib on June 7 and he received a bullet in his foot.

Ten days later, al-Muhaysini narrowly escaped death in an assassination attempt which resulted in death of one of his bodyguards.

In an attempt to assassinate al-Muhaysini, a suicide bomber blew up himself beside his car near Abuzar Qaffari Mosque in Idlib city center, but the mufti of Tahrir al-Sham Hay’at escaped death while his bodyguard was killed.

Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Egypt cut off diplomatic ties with Qatar, and suspended air and sea communication one week after the Arab Islamic American Summit in Riyadh, accusing Doha of supporting terrorist organizations and destabilizing the situation in the Middle East.
Later, Libya, Maldives, Mauritius and Mauritania joined that list of nation to break off diplomatic relations with Doha.

Jordan and Djibouti have also announced that Amman and Djibouti decided to reduce their diplomatic status after studying reasons behind the tension between Cairo, Riyadh, Abu Dhabi and Manama with Qatar.

Source: RT
Hawaii Rep. Tulsi Gabbard has called on the US to put an end to the “illegal war” she believes it wages in Syria after visiting Damascus and Aleppo. During her trip, she spoke with civilians, religious leaders, opposition leaders, and President Assad.

Gabbard described her privately-funded seven-day trip to Lebanon and Syria as a “fact-finding mission” to learn the truth about the war by speaking directly to the Syrian people. The itinerary was kept secret until Gabbard’s return to the US for security reasons.

Gabbard travelled to Beirut, and then to Damascus and Aleppo, where she spoke with Syrian students, entrepreneurs, academics, and aid workers. She also received firsthand accounts of the conflict from refugees displaced by the war.

She met with a number of religious leaders, including The Grand Mufti of Syria Ahmad Badreddin Hassoun and Archbishop Denys Antoine Chahda, who heads the Syrian Catholic Church of Aleppo.

Gabbard also met with several leaders of the Syrian opposition who spearheaded anti-government protests in 2011. She says some of them believe that the originally peaceful uprising was hijacked by jihadists “funded and supported by Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Qatar, the United States.”

Contrary to the official US narrative that terrorist groups such as Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS, ISIL) and Al-Nusra Front could be “separated” from the moderate opposition which fights by their side, Gabbard said that the Syrian people she talked with do not distinguish between the various militant groups.

“Their message to the American people was powerful and consistent: There is no difference between ‘moderate’ rebels and al-Qaeda (al-Nusra) or ISIS — they are all the same,” Gabbard said, describing the essence of the Syrian conflict as “a war between terrorists under the command of groups like ISIS and al-Qaeda and the Syrian government.”

Gabbard confessed she lacked any plausible explanations to offer the Syrian people about the role of the US in the lingering conflict, as she was asked questions like: “Why is the United States and its allies helping al-Qaeda and other terrorist groups try to take over Syria? Syria did not attack the United States. Al-Qaeda did.”

The Syrian people caught in this war “cry out for the U.S. and other countries to stop supporting those who are destroying Syria and her people,” Gabbard wrote in a blog post, adding that it is the message they asked her to convey to the world, as it has been constantly muted by “one-sided biased reports pushing a narrative that supports this regime change war at the expense of Syrian lives.”

The Congresswoman revealed upon her return that she had also met with Syrian President Bashar Assad, noting that she was not originally planning to meet him, but could not pass up the opportunity in hopes of making a difference. She did not elaborate on the details of the meeting.

“If we profess to truly care about the Syrian people, about their suffering, then we’ve got to be able to meet with anyone that we need to if there is a possibility that we can achieve peace,” Gabbard told CNN’s Jake Tapper.

Brushing off criticism over the perceived ethical issues that might arise from the meeting, Gabbard said that dialogue is an indispensable prerequisite on the road to any peaceful settlement.

“Whatever you think about President Assad, the fact is that he is the president of Syria,” Gabbard said, stressing that “in order for any possibility of a viable peace agreement to occur there has to be a conversation with him.”

An Iraq War veteran and member of the House Armed Services and Foreign Affairs Committees, Gabbard is known for her sharp criticism of former US President Barack Obama’s interventionist policy in the Middle East.

Her Syria trip became a talking point within the US establishment immediately after it was announced, with some pundits alleging she intends to cozy up to the Syrian government.

In December, Gabbard introduced the Stop Arming Terrorists Act, designed to prevent the US government from providing direct assistance to terrorist groups and to “prohibit the Federal government from funding assistance to countries that are directly or indirectly supporting those terrorist groups.

“We must stop directly and indirectly supporting terrorists—directly by providing weapons, training and logistical support to rebel groups affiliated with al-Qaeda and ISIS; and indirectly through Saudi Arabia, the Gulf States, and Turkey, who, in turn, support these terrorist groups”, Gabbard wrote.

Gabbard believes Washington should shift its approach from attempting to overthrow the Syrian government to actually combating terrorist groups. She says the US has been repeating the same foreign policy pattern “from Iraq to Libya and now in Syria,” with its pursuit of regime change which, she argues, has only brought about “unimaginable suffering, devastating loss of life” and contributed to “the strengthening of groups like al-Qaeda and ISIS.”

“I return to Washington, DC with even greater resolve to end our illegal war to overthrow the Syrian government,” Gabbard wrote in her blog post.

By Tim Anderson
In late 2016, at the cost of many young lives, Syrian forces took back the eastern part of the city of Aleppo, occupied by NATO and Saudi backed terrorists for more than four years.

The liberation of Aleppo, Syria’s second city and an ancient marvel, represents the most serious setback for the 15-year long Washington-led aggression on the entire region. An effective recolonisation of the region has stretched from Afghanistan to Libya, under a range of false pretexts. Invasions and proxy wars have been backed by economic sanctions and wild propaganda.

But this great war of aggression – called the creation of ‘New Middle East’ by former US President George W. Bush – has hit a rock in Syria. The massive proxy armies bought and equipped by Washington and its regional allies the Saudis, Turkey, Qatar and Israel, have been beaten back by a powerful regional alliance which supports the Syrian nation.

The endgame in Aleppo involves a handful of foreign agents – US, Saudi, Israeli and others – said to remain with the last al Qaeda groups in a tiny part of what was once their stronghold. The US in particular is keen to secure their release, because their presence is further evidence of the foreign command of what was claimed to be a ‘civil war’.

After a storm of western government and media misinformation (claims of massacres, mass executions and ‘civilians targeted’) over the evacuation of around 100,000 civilians and many thousands of terrorists, the UN Security Council authorised some ‘independent observers’ to monitor the process. However most of that evacuation is now over. Resettlement and reconstruction is already underway, and army reserves have been called up to defend the city.

Syrian, Iranian, Russian and independent reporters (including Maytham al Ashkar, Shadi Halwi, Asser Khatab, Khaled Alkhateb, Ali Musawi, Lizzie Phelan, Murad Gazdiev, Vanessa Beeley, Eva Bartlett and the late Mohsen Khazaei) have already told us quite a lot. What they said bore little resemblance to the western apocalyptic stories. For example, outgoing UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon, a close ally of Washington, claimed in his last press conference that ‘Aleppo is now a synonym for hell’. Those claims were based on stories from NATO’s desperate jihadists.

Reporters on the ground told a different story. As Syrian forces smashed the al Qaeda lines, the trapped civilians streamed out. They published video of long lines of people leaving east Aleppo and finding relief, food and shelter with the Syrian Arab Army. Tired and relieved, they told their stories to anyone who cared to listen. Russia and Iran gave many tonnes of food, clothing, blanket and shelter aid. By contrast, western countries generally gave nothing and the terror groups rejected all aid from the Syrian alliance.

Civilians were prohibited from leaving the al Qaeda enclave, many were shot dead when they tried to do so. The armed gangs had food reserves but kept it for their fighters. Arms factories including toxic chemicals were found and were being made safe. Some of the armed men were taken into custody, but most were shipped out to Idlib, where Damascus has been concentrating the foreign-backed fighters.

When the hell canons fell silent, and no more home-made gas cylinder mortars landed in the heart of the city, there was elation and dancing in the streets, shown widely on social media. The US State Department spokesman claimed he had not seen this.

Al Qaeda in Aleppo was crushed. All the anti-Syrian government armed groups in Aleppo were either the ‘official’ al Qaeda in Syria (Jabhat al Nusra aka Jaysh Fateh al Sham) or deeply embedded associates. When the US pretended to suppress Jabhat al Nusra in 2012 and 2016, all the ‘Free Syrian Army’ groups protested, saying ‘we are all Jabhat al Nusra’. One might have thought that the US Government – which once claimed to be engaged in a global war against terrorism, in the name of 3,000 people murdered in New York back in September 2001 – would be as elated as those on the streets of Aleppo. They were not.

Much of the western media, reflecting their governments, solemnly reported on ‘the fall of Aleppo’. The Syrian victory over the al Qaeda groups was a great tragedy, they said. On the other hand, the near simultaneous recapture of Syria’s ancient city of Palmyra, by the eastern al Qaeda group ISIS, was reported differently. That city was said to have been ‘retaken’.

All this underlines what should have been an obvious point, admitted by many US officials, that every single armed group in Syria (whether ‘moderate’ or ‘extremist’) has been armed and financed by the US and its allies, in an attempt to overthrow the Syrian Government. All the talk about ‘moderate rebels’, a ‘brutal regime’ and a ‘civil war’ just tries to hide this.

The final evacuations of Aleppo – which included an exchange of civilians besieged for 20 months in the Idlib towns of Faoua and Kafraya for remaining NATO-jihadists in eastern Aleppo – were organised between Russia and Turkey. There was some serious sabotage of these agreements, but the understandings have so far stayed on track. Now Iran is engaged with Russia and Turkey, in three way talks. Practical matters are being discussed.

It is notable that the Obama administration is playing no direct constructive role in the endgame over Aleppo. Its ‘regime change’ proxy war on Syria is failing and, in its place, the incoming Washington regime promises a new approach. More importantly, a new regional alliance has formed to reject any new aggression from the colonial powers.

Many things have changed during the war on Syria. The Syrian alliance has beaten back powerful NATO-GCC forces. The Muslim Brotherhood and its patrons in Egypt, Qatar and Turkey have received another beating. Egypt and Iraq now support Syria. The Saudis have joined with Israel against Iran and Syria. Russia has built stronger bonds with Syria and Iran. The Arab League, having backed the destruction of two Arab states, seems all but dead. Will the new, enhanced ‘Axis of Resistance’ take its place?