Earlier this month, the Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said the United States has a double standard in respect to fighting terrorism in Syria.
Lavrov said “the West is ready to fight against Daesh, but still shields al-Nusra Front,” also known as Jabhat Fateh al-Sham.
In September, Lavrov said the US will use al-Nusra as part of its “Plan B” to overthrow Bashar al-Assad.
The United States “still, in spite of many repeated promises and commitments ... [is] not able or not willing to do this [target al-Nusra in Syria] and we have more and more reasons to believe that from the very beginning the plan was to spare al-Nusra and to keep it just in case for Plan B or stage two when it would be time to change the regime," Lavrov told the BBC.
“I asked Kerry if [the US] has some hidden plan to save Al-Nusra… so that at some point to make it a main force to overthrow Assad. He swore that this was untrue, and that they are really fighting Al-Nusra,” he said.
The Russian Foreign Ministry is not alone. In September, Jabhat al-Nusra unit commander Abu al-Ezz told the German daily Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger the US has supported and trained the group.
“Yes, the US supports the opposition [in Syria], but not directly. They support the countries that support us. But we are not yet satisfied with this support,” said al-Ezz.
He said US weapons have helped the ongoing effort to depose al-Assad and impose Sharia law under a caliphate or Islamic principality. In 2012 the Pentagon predicted a Wahhabi Salafist principality would emerge in the region.
“Due to these rockets [American-made TOW anti-tank missiles], we reached a balance with the regime. Our tanks came from Libya via Turkey, joined by the [BM-21] multiple rocket launchers,” the leader said.
Al-Ezz also said that Jabhat al-Nusra received funding from US allies Saudi Arabia and Israel. He said the group received $2.3 million from Saudi Arabia. The al-Nusra leader also said when his group came under attack, they “had officers from Turkey, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Israel and America here… Experts in the use of satellites, rockets, reconnaissance and thermal security cameras.”
Diplomats and geopolitical experts agree Qatar is a prime motivator of terrorism in Syria.
“Qatar has deliberately channeled guns and cash towards Islamist rebels, notably a group styling itself Ahrar al-Sham, or ‘Free Men of Syria.’ Only last week, Khalid al-Attiyah, the Qatari foreign minister, praised this movement as ‘purely’ Syrian,” The Telegraph reported in September, 2014.
Ahrar al-Sham received weapons from Turkey according to German intelligence. The terrorist group is notorious for killing Christians and kidnapping Shia Alawite Muslims. Bashar al-Assad is an Alawite Muslim.
Syria also claims the US is supporting al-Nusra. “The American administration is not genuine and not serious about combating al-Nusra Front terrorists, which is a terrorist entity according to the Security Council list,” said Bashar al-Ja’afari, the Syrian ambassador to the United Nations.
The US State Department denied it supports al-Nusra. It has not, however, addressed evidence TOW missiles and other arms were delivered to the jihadists by the so-called moderate Free Syrian Army (FSA).
On November 10, The Washington Post reported Obama has ordered the Pentagon to find and kill the leaders of al-Nusra that “the administration had largely ignored until now and that has been at the vanguard of the fight against the Syrian government.”
A CIA report reveals the US in fact armed al-Nusra. It sent weapons to the FSA at the same time record numbers of FSA members were defecting to al-Nusra.
“The report concludes that the FSA was quickly becoming a cover name for Nusra, a fact which apparently didn’t phase the CIA, which was just as eager to use this pretense, so long as they were arming a group that was fighting against the Syrian government,” Jason Ditz wrote in September.
“The joint US-NATO secret training camp in the US air force base in Incirlik, Turkey, began operations in April- May 2011 to organize and expand the dissident base in Syria,” Sibel Edmonds wrote in November, 2011, citing sources in the region and current and former government insiders.
“Since then, in addition to Col. Riad al-Assad, several other high-ranking Syrian military and intelligence officials have been added to operations’ headquarters in the US base. Weekly weapons smuggling operations have been carried out with full NATO-US participation since last May. The HQ also includes an information warfare division where US-NATO crafted communications are directed to dissidents in Syria via the core group of Syrian military and Intelligence defectors,” she writes.
Al-Nusra, recently rebranded as Jabhat Fateh al-Sham, has played an instrumental role in the effort to depose al-Assad and the Syrian government. It has led attacks “on key Syrian military installations; air-defense bases; coastal and major highway routes in attempts to block SAA supply lines; the vast majority of suicide attacks in civilian areas; and assassinations on key Government security officials,” notes Phil Greaves.
“These extremist groups have become the best equipped, most organized, consistently well-funded and importantly, the most successful on the ground. While the US and its Gulf allies claim to have only armed, trained and supported ‘vetted’ and ‘moderate’ rebels, the reality inside Syria bears absolutely no resemblance to these claims,” Greaves writes.
The effort to support Salafist terrorist groups in Syria was acknowledged by Hillary Clinton when she was secretary of state.
“We need to use our diplomatic and more traditional intelligence assets to bring pressure on the governments of Qatar and Saudi Arabia, which are providing clandestine financial and logistic support to ISIL and other radical Sunni groups in the region,” she wrote in 2014.
Another leaked email released by WikiLeaks from January 2016 includes an excerpt from a private October 2013 speech in which Clinton acknowledged that “the Saudis have exported more extreme ideology than any other place on earth over the course of the last 30 years.”
Remarks by Lavrov on US support for al-Nusra have received zero coverage by the corporate propaganda media in the United States. Russian media, including RT and Sputnik, continue to report what the US media refuses to cover.
Prior to the so-called “fake news” meme now used to attack alternative media, The New York Times accused Russia of spreading false stories. In August the newspaper reported “numerous analysts and experts in American and European intelligence point to Russia as the prime suspect” in disseminating what it calls misinformation.
On November 23, the German chancellor Angela Merkel said governments have to fight back against information that does not jive with the establishment’s narrative.
"Today we have fake sites, bots, trolls—things that regenerate themselves, reinforcing opinions with certain algorithms and we have to learn to deal with them,” Merkel told France 24.
Merkel said government “must confront this phenomenon and if necessary, regulate it."
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Kurt Nimmo, Newsbud Producer & Author, is a writer, editor, producer and researcher based in New Mexico. His research centers on international geopolitics and national politics in the United States. He is the former lead editor and writer for Infowars and now edits Another Day in The Empire. His most recent books are Donald Trump and the War on Islam and Another Day in the Empire: The Reign of George W. Bush and the Total War Neocons. Visit Kurt Nimmo’s website here