THE ROVING
EYE Syria: A jihadi
paradise By Pepe Escobar
So Bashar al-Assad hath martially spoken -
for the first time in seven months - predictably
blaming the Syrian civil war on "terrorists" and
"Western puppets".
Turkish Foreign
Minister Ahmet Davutoglu, he of the former "zero
problems with our neighbors" policy, commented
that Assad only reads the reports of his secret
services. C'mon, Ahmet; Bashar may be no Stephen
Hawking, but he's certainly getting his black
holes right.
Assad, moreover, has a plan:
a national dialogue leading to a national charter
- to be submitted to a referendum - and then an
enlarged government and a general amnesty. The
problem is who is going to share all this bottled
happiness because Assad totally
dismisses the new Syria
opposition coalition as well as the Free Syrian
Army (FSA), describing them as foreign-recruited
gangs taking orders from foreign powers to
implement one supreme agenda: the partition of
Syria.
Still, Assad's got a plan. First
stage: all foreign powers financing the
"terrorists" - as in the North Atlantic Treaty
Organization-Gulf Cooperation Council compound -
must stop doing so. That's already a major no-no.
Only in a second stage would the Syrian Army cease
all its operations, but still reserve the right to
respond to any - inevitable - "provocation".
Assad's plan does not mention what happens
to Assad himself. The only thing the multiple
strands of the opposition agree on is that "the
dictator must go" before any negotiations take
place. Yet he wants to be a candidate to his own
succession in 2014.
As if this was not a
humongous "detail" torpedoing the whole construct
of current UN mediator Lakhdar Brahimi, there's
still the crucial nagging point of Brahimi
insisting on including the Muslim Brotherhood (MB)
in a Syrian transitional government. Brahimi
should know better. It's as if the UN was praying
for a Hail Mary pass - that is, Assad's voluntary
abdication.
This ain't Tora
Bora If you want to know what's really
going in Syria, look no further than Hezbollah
secretary-general Sheikh Nasrallah. He does tell
it like it is.
Then there's what Ammar
al-Musawi, Hezbollah's number 3 - as in their de
facto foreign minister - told my Italian
colleaguem Ugo Tramballi. The most probable
post-Assad scenario, if there is one, will be "not
a unitary state, but a series of emirates near the
Turkish border, and somebody proclaiming an
Islamic state". Hezbollah's intelligence - the
best available on Syria - is adamant: "one third
of the combatants in the opposition are religious
extremists, and two-thirds of the weapons are
under their control." The bottom line - this is a
Western proxy war, with the Gulf Cooperation
Council (GCC) acting as a "vanguard" for the North
Atlantic Treaty Organization.
Asia Times
Online readers have already known this for eons,
as much as they know about the
tectonic-plates-on-the-move fallacy of GCC
autocracies promoting "democracy" in Syria. While
the geologically blessed House of Saud has bribed
every grain of sand in sight to be immunized
against any whiff of Arab Spring, at least in
Kuwait the winds of change are forcing the
Al-Sabah family to accept a prime minister who is
not an emir's puppet. Yes, petromonarchs; sooner
or later you're all going down.
As for
those who ignore Musawi, they do it at their own
peril; blowback is and will remain inevitable,
"like in Afghanistan". Musawi adds, "Syria is not
Tora Bora; it's on the Mediterranean coast, close
to Europe". Syria in the 2010s is the 1980s Afghan
remix - with exponential inbuilt blowback.
And for those who blindly follow the blind
in repeating that Hezbollah is a "terrorist"
organization, Hezbollah is closely cooperating
with the UN - on the ground with over 10,000 blue
helmets, under the command of Italian General
Paolo Serra - to keep southern Lebanon free from
Syrian civil war contamination.
The
dictator has fallen - again Not
surprisingly, that motley crew branded as the
"Syrian opposition" rejected Assad en bloc. For
the Muslim Brotherhood - the self-styled power in
waiting - he is a "war criminal" who should go on
trial. For Georges Sabra, the vice-president of
that American-Qatari concoction, the National
Coalition, Assad's words were a "declaration of
war against the Syrian people".
Predictably, the US State Department - not
yet under John Kerry - said Assad was "detached
from reality". London said it was all hypocrisy
and immediately launched yet another "secret"
two-day conference this week at Wilton Park in
West Sussex mingling coalition members with the
usual gaggle of "experts", academics, GCC
officials and "multilateral agencies". The
spectacularly pathetic UK Foreign Secretary
William Hague twitted - for the umpteenth time -
that "Assad's departure from power is inevitable".
Facts on the ground though spell that
Assad is not going anywhere anytime soon.
As for British claims that "the
international community can provide support to a
future transitional authority", that doesn't cut
much slack among war-weary informed Syrians - who
know this civil war has been funded, supplied and
amply coordinated by the West, as in the NATO
component of the NATOGCC compound.
They
smell a - Western - rat in the obsessive
characterization of everything in Syria as a
sectarian war, as they see how loads of influent
Sunnis have remained loyal to the government.
They smell a - Western - rat when they
look back and see this whole thing started just as
the US$10 billion Iran-Iraq-Syria gas pipeline
(crucially bypassing NATO member Turkey) had a
chance to be implemented. This would represent a
major economic boost to an independent Syria, an
absolute no-no as far as Western interests are
concerned.
The Obama 2.0 administration -
and Israel - would be more than comfortable with
the MB in power in Syria, following the Egyptian
modus operandi. The Brotherhood promotes
the idea of a "civil state"; one just has to check
the few "liberated areas" across Syria to detect
rebel civility inbuilt in hardcore Sharia law and
assorted beheadings.
Yet what the NATOGCC
compound and Israel really want is a Yemeni model
for Syria; a military dictatorship without the
dictator. What they're getting instead, for the
foreseeable future, is Jihadi Paradise.
Off with their heads Almost a
year ago, al-Qaeda number one Ayman al-Zawahiri
called on every Sunni hardcore faithful from Iraq
and Jordan to Lebanon, Turkey and beyond to take a
trip to Syria and merrily crush Assad.
So
they've kept coming, including - just like in
Afghanistan - Chechens and Uyghurs and Southeast
Asians, joining everything from the FSA to Jabhat
al-Nusra, the number one killing militia, now with
over 5,000 jihadis.
A report published
this week by the London-based counterterrorism
outfit Quilliam Foundation confirms Al-Nusra's
role. The lead author of the report, Noman
Benotman, happens to be a former Libyan jihadi
very cosy with al-Zawahiri and the late
"Geronimo", aka Osama bin Laden.
Al-Nusra
is in fact the Syrian branch of al-Qaeda in Iraq
(AQI), the terrorist brand of late Abu Musab
al-Zarqawi, also known as Islamic State of Iraq
after Zarqawi was incinerated by a US missile in
2006. Even the State Department knows that AQI
emir Abu Du'a runs both AQI and al-Nusra, whose
own emir is Abu Muhammad al-Jawlani.
It's
AQI that facilitates the back-and-forth of Iraqi
commanders - with plenty of fighting experience on
the ground against the Americans - to sensitive
areas in Syria, while the Syrians, Iraqis and
Jordanians at al-Nusra also work the phones to
extract funding from Gulf sources. Al-Nusra wants
- what else - an Islamic State not only in Syria
but all over the Levant. Favorite tactic: car and
truck suicide bombings as well as
remote-controlled car bombs. For the moment, they
keep a tense collaboration/competition regime with
the FSA.
What happens next? The new Syrian
National Coalition is a joke. Those GCC bastions
of democracy are now totally spooked by the jihadi
tsunami. Russia drew the red line and NATO won't
dare to bomb; Russians and Americans are now
discussing details. And sooner or later Ankara
will see the writing on the wall - and revert to a
policy of at least minimizing trouble with the
neighbors. Assad saw The Big Picture -
clearly, thus his "confident" speech. It's now
Assad against the jihadis. Unless, or until, the
new CIA under Terminator John Brennan drones
itself into the (shadow war) picture with a
vengeance.
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