Washington raises specter of al Qaeda seizing Syrian chemical weapons
Having first issued threats against the Syrian regime of Bashar al-Assad over unspecified intelligence regarding its chemical weapons, the Obama administration is now warning that these arms may fall into the hands of the “rebels” which Washington itself has backed.
This is the significance of a front-page article published this week by the Washington Post, which reported that, “US officials are increasingly worried that Syria’s weapons of mass destruction could fall into the hands of Islamist extremists, rogue generals or other uncontrollable factions.”
According to the Post, citing unnamed US officials, members of the Islamist militia, al-Nusra, which Washington has formally designated as a “foreign terrorist organization” and charged is an offshoot of Al Qaeda, overran “the Sheik Suleiman military base near Aleppo, where research on chemical weapons had been conducted” and were “closing in on another base near Aleppo, known as Safirah, which has served as a major production center for such munitions.”
While a decade ago, Washington prepared its invasion of Iraq by propagating lies about the regime of Saddam Hussein collaborating with Al Qaeda and a supposed threat he would supply the terrorist organization with “weapons of mass destruction,” today the Obama administration is floating a new and perverse pretext for war. It is raising the specter that its war for regime change in Syria might place such weapons into the hands of the Al Qaeda-linked forces that the US itself has both armed and strengthened in the bid to oust Assad.