Washington-backed “rebels” surrender US arms to Al Qaeda in Syria

Bill Van Auken


A rebel fighter calls on his comrades during clashes with
regime forces in the northern Syrian city of Aleppo.

Washington’s strategy in its three-month-old war in Iraq and Syria appeared to suffer another humiliating blow over the weekend as one of the last remaining strongholds of US-backed “moderate rebels” in the northwestern Syrian province of Idlib fell to the Nusra Front, the Syrian affiliate of Al Qaeda.

The collapse of the US-backed force in Syria came amid reported plans for a major retraining of the Iraqi army in preparation for a US-orchestrated offensive against the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) in Iraq sometime next year.

Both developments underscore the unreliability of the proxy forces the Obama administration has indicated are to serve as the “boots on the ground” in the two countries and point to the inevitable expansion of the number and role of US troops deployed to prosecute the new Middle East war.

Washington Post correspondent Liz Sly, who has been one of the most enthusiastic media propagandists for the Free Syrian Army (FSA) and the so-called “moderate rebels,” questioned whether the FSA would “manage to survive the trouncing inflicted in recent days” by the Nusra Front. She described the events in Idlib as “throwing the rebels into disarray and upending the Obama administration’s hopes for a moderate alternative to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.”

The “trouncing” was accomplished without a shot being fired. Two US-backed groups, the Syrian Revolutionary Front and Harakat Hazm (Steadfastness Movement), surrendered without opposing the Al Qaeda-linked militia. It was reported that a large number of their members went over to the Nusra Front, while others fled.


US lawlessness fuels global insecurity

Finian Cunningham

In an insightful geopolitical speech this week, Russian President Vladimir Putin accused the US of instigating global instability and insecurity.

As if to underline Putin's point was the backdrop of major news stories during recent days: the national security alert that gripped Canada over the killing of two military personnel in Ottawa and Quebec; the near panic in New York City over an Ebola disease outbreak; and the Swedish hunt for a mystery submarine in its territorial waters.

To say that there was over-reaction in each instance is an understatement. But the disproportionate public response reflects the atmosphere of global insecurity that the US and other Western governments have engendered. The stoking of insecurity has partly been cynical as a way of manipulating the public into accepting greater state control measures or to promote a geopolitical agenda.

This was clearly the case in Canada, where the rightwing government of Prime Minister Stephen Harper framed the two deaths as a full-blown national terror alert, thus invoking more state powers over the public while at the same time justifying the recent deployment of Canadian military forces in the illegal US-led bombing campaign in Iraq and Syria.

When the public has been whipped up into a fervour of insecurity, all sorts of irrational reactions can then become possible, as in the widespread anxiety over the Ebola disease that has broken out in West Africa. One or two cases of infection in the US and Europe has created a stampede-like fear of a pandemic - despite the fact that patients, such as the Dallas nurse, can be successfully treated with adequate medical care.


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