Did Assad Deliberately Release Islamist Prisoners to Militarize and Radicalize the Syrian Uprising?

"Are we supporting al Qaeda in Syria?"

The idea that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad deliberately militarized the Syrian uprising and sought to support extremist rebel groups, including ISIS, has been repeated often in the Western press. As proof of such claims, critics of the Syrian government suggest that Assad deliberately released Islamists from Syrian jails; that the Syrian army has not fought ISIS, and that Assad sought to support ISIS by purchasing oil from the terror group. It is argued that Assad took these measures to sabotage the peaceful, democratic uprising he allegedly faced, and in order to convince the West that he was fighting terrorists rather than peaceful pro-democracy protesters. It is presumed that if Assad could be successful in this, the United States would have no choice but to embrace the Syrian government as a partner in the so-called War on Terror against ISIS and other extremist groups, considering Assad the lesser evil. Articles to this effect have appeared in Newsweek, The Daily Beast, Independent (UK), the Wall Street Journal, and Der Spiegel, among others.

In fact the Syrian army has fought ISIS throughout the conflict, as detailed by Syria analyst Aymenn al-Tamimi. The Syrian government has purchased oil from ISIS, but out of necessity, as have US-backed rebel groups and even Western-funded NGOs, as I have detailed here.

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In Shocking, Viral Interview, Qatar Confesses Secrets Behind Syrian War

A television interview of a top Qatari official confessing the truth behind the origins of the war in Syria is going viral across Arabic social media during the same week a leaked top secret NSA document was published which confirms that the armed opposition in Syria was under the direct command of foreign governments from the early years of the conflict.

And according to a well-known Syria analyst and economic adviser with close contacts in the Syrian government, the explosive interview constitutes a high level "public admission to collusion and coordination between four countries to destabilize an independent state, [including] possible support for Nusra/al-Qaeda." Importantly, "this admission will help build case for what Damascus sees as an attack on its security & sovereignty. It will form basis for compensation claims."

A 2013 London press conference: Qatari Prime Minister Sheikh Hamad bin Jassim bin Jabr Al Thani with U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry. A 2014 Hillary Clinton email confirmed Qatar as a state-sponsor of ISIS during that same time period.  

As the war in Syria continues slowly winding down, it seems new source material comes out on an almost a weekly basis in the form of testimonials of top officials involved in destabilizing Syria, and even occasional leaked emails and documents which further detail covert regime change operations against the Assad government. Though much of this content serves to confirm what has already long been known by those who have never accepted the simplistic propaganda which has dominated mainstream media, details continue to fall in place, providing future historians with a clearer picture of the true nature of the war.

This process of clarity has been aided - as predicted - by the continued infighting among Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) former allies Saudi Arabia and Qatar, with each side accusing the other of funding Islamic State and al-Qaeda terrorists (ironically, both true). Increasingly, the world watches as more dirty laundry is aired and the GCC implodes after years of nearly all the gulf monarchies funding jihadist movements in places like Syria, Iraq, and Libya.

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New Mexico: Muslim 'Refugee' with Gas Pipeline Plans Arrested in Border County

But remember: building a wall is racist.

Judicial Watch reported Wednesday that police in a New Mexico border town arrested a woman they described as an “Islamic refugee” who was “in possession of the region’s gas pipeline plans.” This was, it said, the latest in “a number of stories in the last few years about Mexican drug traffickers smuggling Islamic terrorists into the United States through the porous southern border…. A few months ago Judicial Watch reported that members of a cell of Islamic terrorists stationed in Mexico cross into the U.S. to explore targets for future attacks with the help of Mexican drug traffickers.” But building a wall? That’s racist.

It gets worse. Judicial Watch adds:

Among the jihadists that travel back and forth through the porous southern border is a Kuwaiti named Shaykh Mahmood Omar Khabir, an ISIS operative who lives in the Mexican state of Chihuahua not far from El Paso, Texas. Khabir trained hundreds of Al Qaeda fighters in Pakistan, Afghanistan and Yemen and has lived in Mexico for more than a year, according to Judicial Watch’s high-level Homeland Security sources. Now Khabir trains thousands of men—mostly Syrians and Yemenis—to fight in an ISIS base situated in the Mexico-U.S. border region near Ciudad Juárez. Khabir actually brags in a European newspaper article about how easy it is to stake out American targets because the border region is wide open.

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Turkey-ISIS Link Admitted as Supply Route Cut

A major Washington DC think tank has become the first establishment institution to publicly admit that Turkey is the main source of supplies to the ISIS stronghold of Aleppo in Syria.

In a paper produced by the Atlantic Council’s Rafik Hariri Center for the Middle East, the think tank says that the Syrian army has now “severed the main insurgent supply line from Turkey to long-contested Aleppo, Syria’s second city.”

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To Cross the Rubicon

By Victor Sharpe

There is a time in a nation’s history when a decision of immense and fundamental importance must be made.  Such a decision means embarking on a new direction that alters everything that has gone before.  It is a veritable crossing of the Rubicon.  That decision now confronts embattled Israel.

A great alliance exists between two peoples who share principles of democracy, the rule of law, freedom of religion and speech, and human rights.  That alliance and friendship between the American and Israeli people largely remains, exemplified by the support of Congress, despite the policies of the current administration.

Like the United States, Israel respects the rights of minorities.  It has an independent judicial system, which protects the rights of individuals and operates under the principle of “innocent until proven guilty."  Israel, like America, features regularly scheduled elections that are free and fair and open to all its citizens, regardless of religion, race, or sex.  What a contrast exists between it and the grim horrors and butchery endemic among the failed Islamic states that surround it.

Read more at: American Thinker

Non-Black America Experiences a Paradigm Shift

By John Ross

There is a sea change occurring in America fifty years after MLK Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech. This paradigm shift is spreading with the growing realization among our citizens that Black America (including our president) seems to hate Non-Black America. Temper this sweeping statement with the fact that blacks in America may genuinely like non-black individuals, just as whites in 1850 who believed blacks were a lower form of life still knew individual black men they respected for their particular talents and/or character. However, if we take specific individual knowledge out of the equation, on the whole, being black trumps everything else for blacks in America today. This is not true of any other ethnic or racial group.

I first became aware of this fact on October 3, 1995, almost eighteen years ago. That was the day the jury returned a verdict of Not Guilty in the O.J. Simpson murder trial. I personally thought the verdict was the correct one, since the prosecution botched their case, but it was also pretty obvious that Simpson, and no one else, had wielded the knife.
 
What stunned me then was the absolutely breathtaking reaction of America's black population when the verdict was announced. Across the country, Black America was positively jubilant. Yes, long ago, all-white juries sometimes ignored the evidence of white violence against blacks, but White America as a whole has never, in my 50-year memory, collectively cheered such events.

Read more at: American Thinker

Quick Note on Syrian WMDs and Iraq

Tuesday, August 27, 2013

On the overall Syria situation, I have made clear my strong view that the Obama misadministration is leading us into a disaster--almost regardless of the end result of the intervention, our national interests lose. In addition, we are apparently going to intervene in a half-baked manner that would not have been necessary had we maintained a base in Iraq. That base would have given us an ability to come at the Syrians from two sides. A robust US military presence in Iraq also would have helped curb what is growing Iranian influence in Iraq, and hampered Iran's ability to intervene in Syria and Lebanon. Such, however, is the quality of our "leadership" that we are operating with self-imposed and severe handicaps, at the same time that we adopt grandiloquent objectives.

I notice some renewed speculation about the origin of Syria's stockpile of chemical WMDs. That reminds me of a little event in which I participated. The day, April 9, 2003, the day Saddam's statue was pulled down in Firdos Square in Baghdad. I was sitting in my office at a US Embassy in Asia. As were millions of others people around the world, I watched the destruction of Saddam's monument on TV. My phone rang; my office manager said that the Ambassador wanted me to take a call from Iraq's Embassy. I first thought it a joke, but, no, Iraqi Charge Abbas was indeed calling. I picked up the phone, and, in very good English, he immediately said, "I am calling from the Embassy of Liberated Iraq. I have told your Ambassador, you have done a good thing. You have given us freedom!" I was a bit surprised. This man had a reputation as one of the most loyal Saddamers around; just a few days prior he had been agitating for protests at the US Embassy. I had gone into the host nation Foreign Ministry to lodge my own protest over his activities. He previously had been, apparently, a senior official in the Iraqi Finance Ministry, and was very close to Foreign Minister Tariq Aziz. He now wanted to talk, and was willing to come to our Embassy, but I was curious about the Iraqi Embassy and wanted to go there. We agreed to meet there in a couple of days if State approved.

Read more at:   The DiploMad 2.0

I Will Not Be Intimidated

January 8, 2013

By Steve McCann

As a young boy I was shot by a man whose clear intent was to kill me as I had deliberately, by throwing broken bricks at him, interrupted his attempt to rape a young teen-aged girl, allowing her to escape. To this day I can still see the evil in his face and the sun glistening off the barrel of the pistol he aimed in my direction. As I turned and began to run away he fired hitting me in back. The bullet entering my chest felt as if someone had hit me with baseball bat followed immediately by an excruciating burning sensation as I fell to the ground from the impact. Perhaps it was the adrenaline, but I was able scramble to my feet and run as far as I could until finally passing out from the shock and loss of blood. Fortunately, someone came to my rescue and took me to a military hospital and the first step on my journey to the United States.

According to the current incarnation of the American left, who traffic constantly in victimhood and noble intentions, I should be in the vanguard of the mandatory gun control and confiscation movement. That somehow it was the inanimate object this soldier was holding and not him that was responsible for the attempt on my life or to ignore the fact that his mindset was such he would have used any weapon at hand to accomplish the same goal. 
 
On the contrary, I own a handgun today because of the experience of coming face to face with the evil that permeates some men's souls. I and the girl I rescued were defenseless. There were no police or armed citizens around and the death of another homeless and unknown boy and girl, buried in an unmarked mass grave, would have been just another easily ignored casualty of the post-War period. I was determined that I would never again face a similar circumstance. I have had in my possession firearms for virtually my entire life, as I have been fortunate to live in the one nation on earth that has embedded in its founding document the right to bear arms.

Read more at: American Thinker

A Middle East Policy for President Romney

By Barry Rubin

There was virtually no discussion of foreign policy at the Republican National Convention. This was entirely appropriate given the crisis and priority of domestic issues. Yet I haven’t even seen a single article discussing this issue at all, and it is going to be important.

Here is the key factor: Mitt Romney, the Romney-Ryan ticket, and Republican congressional candidates have a variety of choices on foreign policy. Some of them can be bad and because there are different and complex issues the line taken will not—and arguably should not—be consistent.

Of course, there are the general principles: make America strong and respected again; support the soldiers; help friends and make enemies sorry that they are enemies. There must be an end to apologies and the defense of legitimate U.S. interests. Popularity is okay but respect and trust are far more important. Avoid either isolationism or excessive interventionism and get over the democracy-solves-all naivete. Don't be chomping at the bit to go to war with Iran as a supposed panacea.

 

Read more at: The Rubin Report

"If I weren't clueless"

LATMA: "featuring President Obama's Advisor for Reality Perception Affairs John Zelokoreli (It's not happening to me) singing a psychedelic ode to what US foreign policy would look like if the administration had a clue about the world."

The question is: Is Obama really clueless? So far he has taken the side of the Palestinians against Israel. Maybe getting rid of Mubarak and letting the more fundamentalist (and more anti-Israel) forces in Egypt, including the Muslim Brotherhood of all things, take over suits him just fine...

Update: Listen also to Mark Levin interviewing Caroline Glick of the Jerusalem Post.

Our 1979

June 3rd, 2010 8:43 am

The Year That Was

It has been sort of a topos to evoke the specter of 1979. I’ve done it repeatedly, as have other observers.

Aside from the growing stagflation in the U.S. (I remember farming that year at the ending of an inflation-driven boom), that was the year that China invaded Vietnam. Muslims assassinated the U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan. Russia later invaded Afghanistan. The world seemed to have become unhinged. And there was more still.

The shah was abandoned and soon fell, amid American proclamations of support for him on Monday, and then denunciation of his dynasty by Tuesday, and yet more leaked reports on Wednesday of reaching out to Khomeini in Paris. Soon in his death throes he would jet the globe looking for a home and a doctor, as the U.S. let the phone ring when he called.

Soon Ayatollah Khomeini arrived in Teheran from Paris and proclaimed an Islamic revolution. Iranian students (Ahmadinejad probably among them) stormed our embassy and took hostages. In no time Ramsey Clark was denouncing America on Iran’s behalf, and rumors abounded of Carter’s backdoor deal-making to get them home at any cost before the 1980 election. (In 1980 a humiliating and disastrous rescue mission would see imams desecrating American dead on worldwide television. I recall an odious Ayatollah Sadegh Khalkhal, the hanging judge who sent thousands to the gallows, zipping open the body-bags to poke and probe the charred American corpses.)

The Sandinistas also took over Nicaragua. Radical Islamists torched the U.S. embassy in Pakistan. I could go on, but you get the picture. In all these cases, a baffled Mr. Carter sermonized a lot, blamed a lot — and in the end retired to the Rose Garden or fought rabbits from a canoe. He seemed petulant that he had come into the world in divine fashion to save us, and we flawed mortals were unwilling to be saved by him. The so-called “malaise speech” summed up his disappointment in the rest of us.

And after such a wonderful beginning…

Works and Days: Victor Davis Hansen

The Fruits of Weakness

By Charles Krauthammer

WASHINGTON -- It is perfectly obvious that Iran's latest uranium maneuver, brokered by Brazil and Turkey, is a ruse. Iran retains more than enough enriched uranium to make a bomb. And it continues enriching at an accelerated pace and to a greater purity (20 percent). Which is why the French foreign ministry immediately declared that the trumpeted temporary shipping of some Iranian uranium to Turkey will do nothing to halt Iran's nuclear program.

It will, however, make meaningful sanctions more difficult. America's proposed Security Council resolution is already laughably weak -- no blacklisting of Iran's central bank, no sanctions against Iran's oil and gas industry, no nonconsensual inspections on the high seas. Yet Turkey and Brazil -- both current members of the Security Council -- are so opposed to sanctions that they will not even discuss the resolution. And China will now have a new excuse to weaken it further.

RealClearPolitics

The Systematic Dismantling of a Secure America

April 15, 2010

By Janet Levy

The emotionally charged toppling of Saddam Hussein's statue in Baghdad's Firdos Square on April 9, 2003 was an ephemeral moment of unity for Americans applauding the defeat of a tyrannical regime and an enemy of the free world. The rapid victory over Saddam by U.S. forces reinforced, for Americans and the world, America's military supremacy as a force for good against evil. At that time, our nation appeared to uphold Woodrow Wilson's pre-World War I proclamation to "make the world safe for democracy."

Fast-forward to April 6, 2010, when Barack Obama informed the world that the United States would no longer function as a global superpower buttressed by nuclear weapons as a deterrence to war. With one unanticipated public statement from the putative leader of the free world, the security held by the doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction vanished from the American arsenal, and confidence in America's ability to defend its citizens vaporized. Obama's proclamation of unilateral nuclear disarmament nullified America's willingness and ability to defend itself and its allies at a critical juncture in history when worldwide nuclear proliferation abounds.

American Thinker

Obama's image: What a difference a year makes

December 28, 2009

By Ed Lasky

Almost a year has passed since January 20, 2009 -- when the waters of the ocean no longer rose and America began to heal from the depredations of Republicans. Barack Obama has been our president for that long, and the people have started to wise up.

The light that has shined on Barack Obama as president has reflected back an image that bears very little similarity to the iconic visage that floated above us all during 2008. Why has Barack Obama betrayed so many allies, broken so many promises, thrown so many pledges and people under the bus?

One simple aphorism (paraphrasing Winston Churchill) can explain it all. Barack Obama is no longer a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma. Much about his past remains murky, but faced with the need to govern, he has given the American people plenty of evidence of his nature, if only they will look.

American Thinker

Obama is a cynic, wrapped in hypocrisy, inside a bully.

We’re All Fascists Now II: American Tyranny

Most Americans no longer read Alexis de Tocqueville’s masterpiece, Democracy in America, about which I wrote a book (Tocqueville on American Character; from which most of the following is taken) a few years ago. What a pity! No one understood us so well, no one described our current crisis with such brutal accuracy, as Tocqueville.

The economics of the current expansion of state power in America are, as I said, “fascist,” but the politics are not. We are not witnessing “American Fascism on the march.” Fascism was a war ideology and grew out of the terrible slaughter of the First World War. Fascism hailed the men who fought and prevailed on the battlefield, and wrapped itself in the well-established rhetoric of European nationalism, which does not exist in America and never has. Our liberties are indeed threatened, but by a tyranny of a very different sort.

We’re All Fascists Now II: American Tyranny