A US-backed Islamist militia in southern Syria has been armed with
portable surface-to-air missiles, so-called manpads. These weapons are
capable of shooting down Syrian government aircraft as well as Russian
warplanes, which have played a prominent role in providing air support
to the Syrian army against the Al Qaeda-linked “rebels.”
The group, the Ansar al-Islam Front, exhibited the weapons, SA-7
Strela-2 missiles, in a video it posted on Sunday, claiming that it had
“a good number” of them in its possession. The video, produced by a
Dubai-based Syrian opposition propaganda network, shows the Islamists
un-crating, assembling and testing the manpads.
“We, in Ansar al-Islam Front, have distributed several points of air
defense to counter any attempt by the Syrian warplanes or helicopters,
which bomb points in Quneitra Province. We have a good number of these
missiles,” one of the Islamists states in the video, according to a
translation posted by the web site Middle East Eye.
A second individual, identifying himself as Abu Bilal, tells an
interviewer: “We, in Ansar al-Islam Front and factions of the FSA, are
distributing equipment and soldiers toward Tal al-Hara, Mashara,
Sandaniya and Jabata. And in the coming days you will hear good news
from Quneitra and its surroundings.”
The shipping of these portable anti-aircraft missiles to Syria marks a
major escalation of the US-backed war for regime-change that has
devastated the country for the past five years, leading to the deaths of
some 300,000 Syrians.
In September, US officials told the Reuters news agency that, after
the breakdown of a brief US-Russian-brokered cessation of hostilities
and amid renewed fighting around the northern Syrian city of Aleppo,
Washington might resort to a “Plan B,” giving the green light to Saudi
Arabia and Qatar to funnel the portable anti-aircraft missiles to the
Syrian Islamists. At the time, however, State Department and
administration official spokesmen denied the report.
Whether the delivery of the manpads has been ordered by the Obama
White House, the CIA, the Pentagon or some faction within the vast US
military and intelligence apparatus it is impossible to say. What is
clear, however, is that they are intended to establish new “facts on the
ground” in Syria before a Trump administration takes office in January.
Pressure for a US escalation in Syria has mounted since Trump gave an interview to the Wall Street Journal
on November 11 in which the president-elect called into question the
CIA and Pentagon operations for arming so-called “moderate rebels” in
Syria, saying “we have no idea who these people are.”
In a rambling and incoherent statement to the Journal, Trump
said he had “an opposite view of many people regarding Syria,” adding,
“My attitude was you’re fighting Syria, Syria is fighting ISIS, and you
have to get rid of ISIS. Russia is now totally aligned with Syria, and
now you have Iran, which is becoming powerful, because of us, is aligned
with Syria.”
The statement set off alarm bells within the US political
establishment, whose predominant layers are committed to a strategy of
escalating confrontation with Russia as part of drive to militarily
assert US hegemony over the Middle East and, more broadly, the landmass
of Eurasia.
The New York Times responded with an editorial “The Danger
of Going Soft on Russia,” in which it accused Trump of acting as
“Putin’s apologist” and insisted, “Since Mr. Trump has refused to
criticize the Kremlin, it’s important that Mr. Obama figure out, before
he leaves office, how to punish Russia...”
It would appear that shipping surface-to-air missiles to Syria,
raising the prospect of US-backed forces shooting down Russian aircraft
and triggering a far wider and more dangerous conflict, is part of this
“punishment.”
As yet, Trump has enunciated no clear policy in relation to the
conflict in Syria, outside of vows on the campaign trail to “bomb the
shit out of ISIS.” At the same time, however, many of those surrounding
him, including his vice president-elect Mike Pence and his nominee for
CIA director Mike Pompeo, have strongly advocated direct US military
intervention against the Syrian government of Bashar al-Assad.
The group which received the anti-aircraft weapons, Ansar al-Islam,
while apparently counted by Washington as part of the “moderate”
opposition in Syria, was previously designated as a terrorist
organization by the US and the United Nations, as well as a number of
other countries, because of its affiliations with the Al Qaeda network.
It first emerged as an armed group in the wake of the US invasion of
Iraq in 2003, fighting against US occupation troops and later the forces
of the US-imposed regime in Baghdad. With the fomenting of the war for
regime-change in Syria, it sent its members into that country to fight
against the Assad government, thereby winning US backing.
Two years ago, the majority of the group’s leadership announced that
it was joining the Islamic State (also known as ISIS), which is
supposedly the main target of Washington’s ongoing military intervention
in Iraq and Syria. Some elements, apparently including those who have
now been armed with manpads, rejected the merger, despite their shared
ideology and objectives.
Previously, US officials had warned against supplying such weapons to
Syrian “rebels” for fear that they would end up in the hands of Al
Qaeda-affiliated fighters and could be turned against not only Syrian
and Russian warplanes, but also Western civilian passenger jets. In the
past, weapons funneled to so-called CIA-vetted “moderates” have quickly
fallen into the hands of the Al Nusra Front, Syria’s Al Qaeda affiliate.
Now it appears that such concerns have been cast aside and the missiles
have been supplied directly to forces tied to Al Qaeda.
The introduction of these weapons into the conflict in Syria in
flagrant violation of international law is indicative of the growing
desperation within US ruling circles over the debacle confronting its
regime-change operation. Syrian government forces have made increasing
inroads in the past few days in eastern Aleppo, the last stronghold of
the US-backed Islamists, taking back at least a third of the area
previously occupied by these forces.
The mounting hysteria found consummate expression in a speech
delivered Monday at the United Nations by US Ambassador to the UN
Samantha Power, the administration’s foremost standard-bearer of “human
rights” imperialism. Power read out the names of a dozen Syrian military
commanders alleged to have attacked civilians or overseen torture in
Syrian jails, warning, “Those behind such attacks must know that we in
the international community are watching their actions, documenting
their abuses and one day they will be held accountable.”
Power made no mention of war crimes committed by the US-backed
“rebels,” which are also under investigation by the International
Criminal Court, nor of the recent report that the global court is
investigating over a decade of torture carried out by the US military
and the CIA in Afghanistan and at so-called “black sites” around the
world. One could easily come up with a list of a dozen US commanders who
carried out attacks leading to the mass murder of civilians, from the
brutal sieges of the Iraqi city of Fallujah in 2004 through to the
assault on the Doctors Without Borders hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan
just a year ago.
Even as Power was speaking, a report filtered out of Syria that US
warplanes struck a cotton mill in the village of Salhiyeh in the
northeastern part of the country, killing 10 civilians, including
children. Among the dead were three workers at the mill, a family of six
who had taken shelter there after fleeing from a US-backed offensive in
the area, and a bystander. Independent estimates place the number of
civilians killed by US air strikes in the country at well over 1,000.
Source: WSWS
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