By Robert Inlakesh
Ahmed al-Shara'a's transitional government. (Photo: Presidency of the Syrian Arab Republic, via Wikimedia Commons)
While several Syrian groups have reacted differently to the visit of Syrian leader to the UN General Assembly, right-wing, pro-war Zionist conservatives have seized the opportunity to weaponize Syrian sectarianism.
Amidst the visit of Syrian leader Ahmad al-Shara’a to the United Nations General Assembly in New York, right-wing conservatives have jumped on the opportunity to weaponize Syrian sectarianism for their own political agendas. Not only is this disingenuous, but they are also supporting a clear side in a conflict they do not understand.
When the Syrian delegation from Damascus arrived in New York, the first of its kind since 1967, the reactions were mixed. From the Arab perspective, some viewed the visit as a betrayal of Syria’s national values, as President al-Shara’a met with prominent American officials and sat down for a friendly conversation with former CIA director David Petraeus.
Others were opposed to the meeting from the get-go, citing the thousands of civilians murdered from Syria’s minority communities, with a total death toll in the country in less than a year now standing at around 11,000, according to conservative estimates.
Then there were the sectarian supporters of specific agendas who expressed their staunch support or opposition to the United Nations visit. Instantly, the likes of right-wing commentator Laura Loomer had jumped in to express her outrage at how a former leader of ISIS could be invited to the United Nations.
This then became a popular right-wing talking point surrounding al-Shara’a’s visit. While, on the opposite side of the spectrum, waiting to prove the conservatives correct in their ill-drawn conclusions, were the Syrian sectarian supporters of the new leadership in Damascus.
On Wednesday, as the new leader of Syria delivered his speech at the UN General Assembly, a protest group gathered outside, consisting of a contingent of Syrian Druze. In opposition to them were a group of Syrian regime supporters, who performed blatantly sectarian taunts and have now gone viral for their rather grotesque behavior. Yet, as is usually the case, the conservative commentators pushing the video are doing so with a hypocritical ulterior motive.
Right Wing Sectarian Glass Houses
While the sectarian bloodshed, which continues to divide and plague Syria, is a major issue and has had international implications, those weaponizing Ahmad al-Shara’a’s visit to score political points with their anti-Muslim base are actively playing on the ignorance of their audiences.
To begin with, Ahmad al-Shara’a, who formerly went by Abu Mohammad al-Jolani, was indeed a commander of ISIS. According to his own account, he decided to join al-Qaeda in Iraq, following the invasion of the country by the United States.
The image that is being spread around, offering a 10 million dollar reward for information about him, is also real and was issued by the US State Department. That bounty has since been dropped, however.
Yet, these conservative commentators, most of whom are pro-war Zionists, are deliberately misinforming their ill-educated audiences about the nature of what has just occurred. Instead, they depend on ignorance in order to score cheap points with the anti-immigrant crowd on the right.
Then they go a step further by using the video of regime supporters taunting Syrian-Druze to further argue that Islam is not compatible with what they call Western Civilization and that Muslims should be kicked out of the United States.
This is disingenuous for a range of reasons. The first being that Abu Mohammad al-Jolani would never have even existed as the man he is today if the US had never invaded Iraq in 2003. The same anti-Muslim voices and rhetoric we hear today joined a chorus that blamed former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein for the September 11 attacks and for collaborating with al-Qaeda.
The reality could not have been so starkly different. Saddam Hussein’s rule kept al-Qaeda out of Iraq, as he was a mortal enemy of the group. While there are many sectarian Sunni Muslims today who have adopted the Iraqi leader as some kind of Sunni ruler, al-Qaeda has ruled him a disbeliever. As anticipated by those with knowledge of the region at the time, al-Qaeda only managed to operate and grow in power inside Iraq after the fall of the Iraqi regime.
Abu Mohammad al-Jolani has been a long-time British MI6 affiliate. While the Palestine Chronicle had previously been informed of this by three separate sources, on September 19, the outgoing UK intelligence chief, Richard Moore, admitted it publicly. The MI6 chief claimed that this communication, with Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), which al-Jolani heads, started “a year or two” before the group took over Damascus late last year. However, anonymous sources claim that this is incorrect and that al-Jolani had been affiliated with the intelligence agency throughout the Syrian War.
Prior to rebranding as Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, al-Jolani’s group was called Jabhat al-Nusra and began as the Syrian branch of al-Qaeda. In 2013, the Israelis just so happened to begin backing at least a dozen Syrian opposition groups, most of them affiliated with al-Qaeda, including al-Nusra. At this stage of the war, al-Nusra was committing gruesome civilian massacres against minority groups and even allied directly with ISIS.
The US also ran what was known as Operation Timber Sycamore, which cost the CIA over a billion dollars and is noted as one of its most expensive operations ever conducted. American officials would later admit that the weapons they were sending to what was then called the Free Syria Army were falling into the hands of al-Qaeda linked groups and that even the Syrian militants they were training would later fight for such organizations.
All the way back in 2012, the former State Department official, Jake Sullivan, had even sent a private email to Hilary Clinton, informing her that “AQ (al-Qaeda) is on our side in Syria.”
This is all to say that the United States, Israel, and the UK have all been chief proponents of extremist ideology associated with al-Qaeda, inside of Syria and beyond. The US and UK are now openly championing the HTS government of Ahmad al-Shara’a, while the Israelis are openly holding direct meetings with Syrian officials.
Meanwhile, the Israelis have actively worked to back thousands of Syrian-Druze militants in the Sweida area and, earlier this year, had set up a joint communications room with these militias. They are actively fanning the flames of sectarian bloodshed. Around a decade ago, the Israelis were arming, funding, and treating al-Jolani’s al-Qaeda fighters; today, it is backing Druze Separatists under the command of Hikmat al-Hijri.
What has been the end result of all of this? It is simple – the interventions of the West and Israel inside Syria had actively led to the rise of countless al-Qaeda and ISIS affiliates, all of which used child soldiers, committed torture, and committed massacres against minority populations. By 2018, when the Syrian Arab Army (SAA), under the command of Bashar al-Assad, had halted its offensive, there were no powerful Syrian opposition groups that did not adhere to a hardline Salafist doctrine.
The civil war, fueled by the weapons and funding of the West, including their allies, led to millions of Syrians fleeing their country due to a civil war, which transformed into an international invasion. While Libya is not the focus of this article, it is yet another example of precisely the same strategy pursued by the West.
To get back to the point, if it were not for the West’s regime change wars across the region, not only would it have stopped Muslim migration in search of a safe and stable place to live, but the very extremism expressed by the supporters of al-Jolani who showed up in New York this week would not exist in the first place.
Even more frustrating is that al-Qaeda and Osama Bin Laden were direct results of the CIA/MI6 operations in Afghanistan, where they used Muslim fighters to defeat the Soviets and push them out of the country.
The very ideology itself that produces the kinds of sectarian extremism we see pointed to by racist right-wingers is the direct product of propaganda spread by Western allied Arab Gulf monarchies. The Arab regimes, installed in power by the British and now led by the United States, combine their efforts along with those of the collective West to ensure extremist groups win and hardline ideologies dominate.
This serves the Greater Israel Project perfectly and has worked wonders for them. The so-called Greater Israel Project was never supposed to be a plot to turn Syria into the West Bank and settle all of it; far from it. The idea was to divide up every surrounding Arab nations into mini sectarian and ethno-states, each driven by so much hate for their neighbors, but allied with the Israelis under an empire-type system. This was the original 1982 Oded Yinon plan, at least, and is also the common-sense way that Israel would achieve total regional domination.
Unfortunately, sectarianism rules as the Israelis and their Western allied governments look on laughing, implementing all of their desired agendas as they watch the Muslims and Arabs kill themselves. Then, these right-wing racists and Zionists complain about those refugees who escaped the hell which they created for them, pointing at their grotesque behavior as if it is the real problem.
– Robert Inlakesh is a journalist, writer, and documentary filmmaker. He focuses on the Middle East, specializing in Palestine. He contributed this article to The Palestine Chronicle.
No comments:
Post a Comment