Insider confirms US worked with Al Qaeda to fight the Syrian government

New insider claims revive long-standing questions about whether US policy in Syria involved working with extremist groups – and what that means for how the war is understood.

Over the years, in writing columns for Pearls and Irritations, the Canberra Times and Sydney Morning Herald, I’ve occasionally stuck my neck out and said things that were at odds with conventional wisdom.

I know such columns can be easily dismissed, but what’s the point of being an independent columnist if you don’t set out your conclusions based on the facts and figures before you?

One such case was my suspicion, from about 10 years ago, that despite all the terrorist attacks by ISIS and al Qaeda, the Americans were not fully committed to challenging them and were in fact playing a duplicitous game.

In the Sydney Morning Herald of 10 October 2015 I pointed out that the Americans were two-faced. Their public position was that they were against Islamic State.

“But here’s where the difficulty arises – the Americans support forces that devote much of their time to attacking the Syrian government, rather than Islamic State. Tajamu Ala’Azza and Liwa Suqor al-Jebel, for example, have received CIA training and been supplied with anti-tank rockets which they have used to attack Syrian government armour over the past year.

“On top of that, according to reports in Washington Post, the US Central Command has confirmed that in late September American-trained Syrian fighters in the New Syrian Force gave at least a quarter of their US-provided equipment to al-Qaeda affiliate Jabhat al-Nusra.

“From a Syrian government point of view the US backed “moderates” are in alliance with the extremists and as much the enemy as Islamic State itself.”

In April 15 2016, in another article I asked: “Does one arm of the US government know what the other is doing? You have to ask this when you see the administration claiming it supports the ceasefire in Syria while it is also shipping tons of weapons to fuel the conflict.”

I then went on to quote reliable reports that the Americans were helping ship weapons to rebel groups seeking to overthrow the Syrian Government which was fighting ISIS and Al Qaeda.

A key player during the time of the Syrian civil war was Hillary Clinton, who was US Secretary of State from 2009 to 2013 and then became the leading Democratic Party’s candidate for president in 2016. She was as much opposed to the Syrian Government of Bashar al-Assad as to the terrorist organisations of Al Qaeda and Islamic State.

Now Ahmed Hussein al-Sharaa, who previously went by the name, Abu Mohammad al-Julani and led Al Qaeda and Islamic State forces in Syria, is President of Syria.

According to British journalists Cathy Scott-Clark and Adrian Levy, in their book, The Exile, in his first few months as the leader of Jabhat Al-Nusra, commonly called the Nusra Front, Julani led his foot-soldiers in the merciless killing of hundreds of innocent civilians. He later changed his strategy to promoting individualised terrorism, or lone wolf attacks.

With his record, one would think that this might cause some concern in the west, where both IS and Al Qaeda were supposedly pariah organisations.

But not so. His government has been recognised and Sharaa/Julani has been embraced.

But now we have insider confirmation that the US did work with Julani’s Al Qaeda/Islamic State offshoot organisation, Nusra Front, to topple Bashar al-Assad’s Syrian government.

For years, there were hints of this.

Back in October 2012 the New York Times reported: “Most of the arms shipped at the behest of Saudi Arabia and Qatar… ..are going to hardline Islamic jihadists” and in November 2012 David Ignatius reported in the Washington Post that Free Syrian Army (FSA) representatives had told the State Department that, “most of the injured and dead FSA are Jabhat al-Nusra.”

The inside confirmation now comes from none other than President Trump’s former counterterrorism chief, Joe Kent, who resigned as head of the US National Counterterrorism Centre in protest against the US-Israeli war on Iran.

It’s worth quoting in detail what Kent told MintPress News in an interview on Friday 27 March.

He said the current Iran conflict was the third in a series of wars waged by the US on behalf of Israel. The first was the Iraq war, and the second the Syrian civil war.

The United States decided that it was going to work with the Israelis, but also decided that it was going to have to work heavily with the Sunni population on the ground in Syria to create an uprising.

“And that’s where ISIS came from,” he said. “We worked directly with Al-Qaeda.”

“Hillary Clinton’s emails confirm this. The operations that we were doing to support the so-called Free Syrian Army – and there were some moderates there – but the most effective guys initially were Al-Qaeda and then eventually ISIS.

“Now obviously ISIS got out of control, and they started plotting attacks in Europe, they started plotting attacks in America. They took over large swathes of Iraq.

“So, we then had to go back and put out once again the brush fire that we had started and go after ISIS and that’s where I lost my late wife.

“But Israel was the driving factor in that. We took down Saddam who was the strong man against Israel. We then had to go in and take out Assad who was the strong man against Israel as well.

“And now this is the third phase. We’re going into Iran to take out that strong government for Israel.”

Asked about Julani, the man installed in place of Assad, Kent said the US had “screwed the whole thing up.”  He recalled that Julani was in ISIS initially and was in Al Qaeda in Iraq fighting against the US.

“We had him in jail; [he] joined ISIS, broke off from ISIS,[was] hand-selected by Bin Laden’s right-hand man, Ayman Zawahiri to lead Nusra, and then they rebranded [him].”

Kent said the number one way for a jihadist to fool Americans was to put on a suit and get a good PR company “and then apparently we’ll believe anything you say.”

Kent agreed that Julani had been photographed holding heads and concluded “He’s a thug.”

White Helmets

In recalling the Syrian civil war and the other Middle East wars that have followed, it’s worth remembering the White Helmets, an organisation that fed the western media videos of its workers conducting humanitarian work from regions controlled by Al Qaeda/IS/Nusra Front forces.

Few viewers would have been aware that the White Helmets were formed in Turkey by a former British army officer, James Le Mesurier, and largely funded by western governments, including those of the US and UK. This raised the question of why these governments chose this organisation rather than the internationally recognised non-partisan Red Cross/Red Crescent. And it also raised the suspicion that the White Helmets – which had a state-of-the-art communications centre in Turkey and received $100 million in grants from the UK Foreign Office, Japan and USAID – was primarily a propaganda front organisation. This is now given credence by the fact that today it is nowhere to be seen in the wars that rage in Gaza, Lebanon or Iran.