At a time when the international community is looking forward to the possibility of putting an end to the bloody conflict in Syria that has dragged on for years, while putting their hopes behind the agreement that was achieved between the US and Russia on February 22 regarding the cessation of all hostile activities in Syria, certain forces in the United States carry on banging the war drum.
As it has been pointed out by the The Wall Street Journal:
Defense Secretary Ash Carter; Marine Gen. Joseph Dunford, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; and Central Intelligence Agency Director John Brennan have voiced increasingly hawkish views toward Moscow in recent White House meetings, calling for new measures to “inflict real pain on the Russians,” a senior administration official said.
Moreover, those gentlemen are somehow convinced that Moscow will break the ceasefire, so they have formulated a “Plan B,” that will imply the strengthening of their support to extremists and the introduction of new sanctions against Russia.
Of course, one could only be amazed by such behavior from Washington’s “hawks” if one did not take into consideration the evidence exposing their direct involvement in the continuous aggravation of the situation in Syria, which makes them directly responsible for the deaths of thousands of civilians. Those actions would for sure present the perfect subject for a careful investigation of an international tribunal.
In particular, according to the facts presented by Daveed Gartenstein-Ross and Nathaniel Barr in the Daily Beast, the CIA is now assisting the terrorist organizations that the United States has been allegedly fighting for 15 years. This program was launched in 2013 to further aggravate the armed conflict in Syria. According to this publication, at least one of these CIA-backed groups severed its ties with the CIA and joined a listed terrroist-led coalition, Later, Associated Press reported that CIA-backed groups are gaining ground in Syria, “fighting alongside more extremist factions.”
The article concludes:
Analysis of the geography of “moderate” rebels’ gains during this period and reports from the battlefield demonstrate that CIA-backed groups collaborated with Jaysh al-Fateh, an Islamist coalition in which Jabhat al-Nusra—al Qaeda’s official Syrian affiliate—is a leading player…
and
At this point it is impossible to argue that U.S. officials involved in the CIA’s program cannot discern that Nusra and other extremists have benefited. And despite this, the CIA decided to drastically increase lethal support to vetted rebel factions following the Russian intervention into Syria in late September.
The authors are convinced that now it’s more important than ever to organize a public debate in the US about the role that the CIA played in the Syrian conflict and the considerable strengthening of radical groups.
It would be no less interesting to take a look at yet another investigation of the criminal role American intelligence agencies played in the inciting of the Syrian conflict that was published in The New York Times. The authors, Mark Mazzetti and Matt Apuzzo described in detail how the United States was using Saudi money to provide radical militants in Syria with lethal weapons. Yet, this is but an episode in the continuous and vicious cooperation between Saudi and American security agencies that lasted for decades. The alliance was in place during the Iran-Contra scandal, the hidden fight against Soviet troops in Afghanistan and countless proxy wars in Africa.
These forces are actively involved in the Ukrainian conflict, openly opposing any form of peaceful settlement, pushing all the blame on Russia while Turkey is pulling the strings behind the stage and sending radical mercenaries to Ukraine.
Therefore, one shouldn’t be surprised that this Plan B will be put into action regardless of the facts surrounding how the parties actually observe the agreements reached or even before it’s imposed. It would be safe to assume that the CIA will be put in charge of the operation, funded with the money provided by Saudi Arabia, therefore we can await provocations and misleading articles about how it is Russia who is continuing with provocations, not these forces hidden in plain view.
That is why today the international community is tasked with preventing the failure of the recent agreement between the leaders of the US and Russia by exposing those “hawks”, namely the CIA, the Pentagon, and Saudi intelligence services.
Martin Berger is a Czech-based freelance journalist and analyst, exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook.