by Oui
Wed Jan 1st, 2025 at 03:11:25 PM EST
Creating an Islamist Terror State In the Levant
New Syria of Abu Mohammed al-Jolani Appoints Top Foreign Jihadists in Military Role
Syria: Ukraine Foreign Minister Lands In Damascus, Meets Rebel Leader Ahmed Al-Sharaa
450 Arab and foreign extremists from Idlib arrive in Ukraine | Al Mayadeen - 3 Mar 2022 |
Ukraine's foreign minister meets with Syrian leadership in Damascus
"This is the first visit of an official Ukrainian delegation to Syria in many years. It demonstrates our readiness to open a new chapter in bilateral relations with Syria," Sybiha said after the talks, according to a Foreign Ministry statement.
He outlined plans for potential cooperation, including joint ventures, the establishment of industrial and food production, technology exchanges, and collaboration in cybersecurity and information protection. "We also hope to see a greater share of Syrian goods in our imports," he added.
During his visit, Sybiha also met with Syrian Prime Minister Mohammad Al-Bashir and Foreign Minister Asaad Hasan Al-Sheybani. Sybiha delivered a personal message from President Volodymyr Zelensky, pledging Ukraine's support for Syria's stability and recovery.
'Foreign jihadists' made Syrian army officers, HTS military chief promoted to general | Arab Weekly |
A decree listed 49 people to be made officers, including former rebels and ex-army officers who deserted to join the opposition in the early days of Syria's civil war.
Two men have been given the rank of general, including Murhaf Abu Qasra, the military head of HTS, who had been expected to become defence minister in the transitional government.
Five others were made brigadier generals and around 40 were given the rank of colonel.
The Britain-based Observatory with a network of sources inside Syria has identified at least "six foreign jihadists" among those promoted, including an Albanian, a Jordanian, a Tajik, a Uyghur and a Turk from HTS.
The Uyghur is a member of the Turkistan Islamic Party, a jihadist group whose fighters mostly hail from China's Uyghur minority.
Aymenn al-Tamimi, an expert on jihadist groups and the Syrian conflict, meanwhile identified three foreigners on the list: a Uyghur, a Jordanian and the third, a Turk who "headed the block of Turkish fighters under HTS and is now a brigadier general".
Among the Uyghurs is Abdulaziz Dawood Khudaberdi, the commander of the Turkistan Islamic Party's (TIP) forces in Syria. The TIP's stated goal is to create an Islamic State in China's western Xinjiang region. Khudaberdi was named a brigadier general in the Syrian military, and two other Uyghur fighters were appointed colonels.
Among the Syrian officers, the majority comes from HTS, with the rest heralding from "allied factions" the Observatory said. HTS itself has jihadist roots in al-Qaeda and its former Syrian branch the Al-Nusra Front.
Erdogan rebuilding his version Ottoman Empire step-by-step ... the Uyghurs resistance operate across Khorasan Caliphate. See earlier diaries.
450 Arab and foreign extremists from Idlib arrive in Ukraine | Al Mayadeen - 3 Mar 2022 |
Hat tip to ATinNM: This is China's side of the story | 30 April 2021 |
Western corrupt media spreading disinformation about Xinjiang province and Uyghur separatism in China
As early as in the last century, the United States and other Western countries started to support separatist and terrorist activities in Xinjiang out of geopolitical purposes in order to destabilize China and contain its development.
During the Cold War, British scholar Bernard Lewis concocted the theory of "arc of crisis" aiming to fracture countries from the Middle East to India based on ethnic lines to divide the Soviet Union. Zbigniew Brzezinski, the National Security Adviser to President Carter, argued that the United States must prevent the realization of "the age-long dream of Moscow to have direct access to the Indian Ocean". The United States then launched Operation Cyclone, which lasted from 1979 to 1989 and cost up to US$630 million each year. Together with Saudi Arabia and Britain, the United States provided funding, equipment and training for Muslim guerrillas fighting against the Soviet Union.
Right after the Cold War ended, the United States and Britain started to use Xinjiang as a leverage to contain China, by supporting separatist and terrorist forces. The neoconservative forces in the US pivoted from the Soviet Union to containing China's influence in Central Asia. US and British intelligence agencies supported Pan-Turkism in order to weaken Russia and China and serve their agenda of maintaining a unipolar world. Over the years, there emerged a number of anti-China institutions and extremist groups seeking a state of "East Turkistan" or "independence" of Xinjiang, including the World Uyghur Congress and the East Turkistan Government-in-Exile.
Since 2004, the National Endowment for Democracy has funneled US$8.76 million to Uyghur diaspora groups campaigning against China's policies in Xinjiang. The above-mentioned factors have caused the rapid spread of radical ideas in Xinjiang. Terrorists entered Xinjiang from the battlefields in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Syria. Some violent terrorist organizations overtly clamored for targeting and attacking Chinese nationals. Between 1997 and 2014, the Eastern Turkistan Islamic Movement (ETIM) frequently plotted and carried out terrorist attacks, which claimed more than 1,000 civilian lives.
The CIA suggested in 2003 that should the US find itself in a crisis or confrontation with China in the future, the option of using the "Uyghur card" as a means of exerting pressure should not be taken off the table. Under this strategy, the United States, Britain and their allies, latching on to the Cold War mentality, have directed their intelligence establishments and anti-China scholars to mobilize Uyghur diaspora groups in spinning out misinformation about the so-called severe oppression of Uyghur Muslims in Xinjiang, which was spread by mainstream Western media in a coordinated manner.
The Black Hand -- ETIM and Terrorism in Xinjiang | CGTN documentary |
The United States repositioned the separatist terror group officially as "Freedom Fighters" for democracy, our moral values.
US Drops ETIM From Terror List, Weakening China's Pretext For Xinjiang Crackdown | Radio Free Asia Radio Liberty - 5 Nov 2020 | [after signing "peace" deal with the Afghan Taliban and retreat planned in early 2021]
Under the Biden administration to please the radical religious Netanyahu government ...
U.S. removes five groups from terrorist blacklist but keeps Al Qaeda
-- Kahane Chai, or Kach. The radical Orthodox Jewish group was founded by ultranationalist Israeli Rabbi Meir Kahane in 1971. He led the group until his assassination in 1990. Members of the group have killed, attacked or otherwise threatened or harassed Arabs, Palestinians and Israeli government officials, but the organization has been dormant since 2005. The group was first designated in 1997.
Foreign Fighters with Islamic State - An European Perspective | ICCT - Dec. 2015 | [cached file]
West European citizens and residents, often with a second generation immigration background, have, in the recent past, become foreign fighters (FFs) in at least nine countries -Bosnia and Herzegovina, in Chechnya, in Yemen, Somalia, Pakistan, Afghanistan and Mali and, since 2011, in Syria and Iraq. They are part of a stream of mainly Salafist jihadist foreign fighters that has grown since the early 1980s [See the Brzezinski Doctrine, Saudi funds, OBL and Soviet-Afghan War], with some of them moving from one jihad war theatre to the next.
Foreign fighters are not a new phenomenon. However, the present stream of foreign jihadist fighters to the Levant is unprecedented -unless one wants to go back to the crusades some 900 years ago. Up to at least August 2015, between 850 and 1,250 new jihadist volunteers have been travelling to Syria and Iraq from abroad month after month. In the twelve months up to late September 2015, the number of foreign fighters nearly doubled, according to the US Assistant Attorney General, John P. Carlin.
Before the Arab Spring erupted in 2011, some 30,000 Muslim foreign fighters had already taken part in eighteen different conflicts, ranging from Bosnia to Kashmir and the Philippines. Since 2011, more than 25,000 foreign recruits from more than one hundred countries (including, for instance, countries as far away as Argentina, Honduras, Cambodia and South Korea have been drawn into the conflict in Syria and Iraq alone, notwithstanding the absence of ethnic, cultural or language links with many of them.
Counterrevolution in Military Affairs Ambushes the U.S. Army | EIR - 17 Nov 2006 |
Military historian Dr. Williamson Murray, until recently associated with the U.S. Army's Strategic Studies Institute, wrote in his introduction to a recent volume of essays by students at the Army War College, that Huntington "captured the possibilities" that were already emerging in the early 1990s. "This author would and has argued that the future and its implications are even darker than what Professor Huntington suggested," Murray added. "The confluence between the world's greatest reserves of petroleum and the extraordinary difficulties that the Islamic world is having, and will continue to have, in confronting a civilization that has taken the West 900 years to develop will create challenges that strategists are only now beginning to grasp," challenges that the military, at all levels, must have the expertise to face, Murray argued.
Whether Murray realizes it or not, the Clash of Civilizations thesis is a British Arab Bureau creation. Long before Huntington's Foreign Affairs piece appeared, British Arab Bureau agent Bernard Lewis had crafted the "Arc of Crisis" policy for the Zbigniew Brzezinski-controlled Carter Administration for fostered Muslim Brotherhood-led insurrections along the southern periphery of the Soviet Union.
The 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran and the 1979-88 Soviet war in Afghanistan were two fruits of this policy. Lewis continued to agitate for a Clash of Civilizations policy, including joining with the likes of Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, Frank Gaffney, and others from the right wing, in a 1998 letter demanding that President Clinton carpet-bomb Iraq and overthrow Saddam Hussein. In the preface to his 1996 book The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, Huntington acknowledges the support of the right-wing John M. Olin, Bradley and Smith Richardson foundations for their financial support in making publication of the book possible (see Jeffrey Steinberg and Scott Thompson, "Bernard Lewis: British Svengali Behind the Clash of Civilizations," EIR, Nov. 30, 2001).
*) signatories under letter to President Bill Clinton were the future Middle East policy makers under GWB:
Elliott Abrams - Richard L. Armitage - William J. Bennett - Jeffrey Bergner - John Bolton - Paula Dobriansky - Francis Fukuyama - Robert Kagan - Zalmay Khalilzad - William Kristol - Richard Perle - Peter W. Rodman - Donald Rumsfeld - William Schneider, Jr. - Vin Weber - Paul Wolfowitz - R. James Woolsey - Robert B. Zoellick
New Bernard Lewis plan will carve up the Mideast | EIR - Oct. 1992 |
Professor Lewis first unveiled his project in the Bilderberg Meeting in Baden, Austria, on April 27-29, 1979
Many names seen in the Neocon plan to reshape the Middle East in favour of the Jewish State of Israel.
From an Ultra-Right extremist Robert Kagan, his premises have gone mainstream after 4 years Trump and by extension 4 years of Joe Biden ... MAGA and damn the rest.
Exceptionalism ... the Constitution was initiated by revolutionaries, white folks in the East, elites who did not accept serfdom under King George, but insisted African slavery was needed to build the New America. One Nation Under God.
Neocon Nation: Neoconservatism, c. 1776
"The Iraq War will always be linked with the term `neoconservative,'" George Packer wrote in his book on the war, and he is probably right. The conventional wisdom today, likely to be the approved version in the history books, is that a small group of neoconservatives seized the occasion of the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, to steer the nation into a war that would never have been fought had not this group of ideologues managed somehow to gain control of national policy.
This version of events implicitly rejects another and arguably simpler interpretation: that after September 11, 2001, American fears were elevated, America's tolerance for potential threats lowered, and Saddam Hussein naturally became a potential target, based on a long history of armed aggression, the production and use of chemical weapons, proven efforts to produce nuclear and biological weapons, and a murky relationship with terrorists. The United States had gone to war with him twice before, in 1991 and then again at the end of 1998, and the fate of Saddam Hussein had remained an unresolved question at the end of the Clinton administration. It was not so unusual for the United States to go to war a third time, therefore, and the Bush administration's decision can be understood without reference to a neoconservative doctrine. After September 11, the Bush administration weighed the risks of leaving Saddam Hussein in power against the risks of fighting a war to remove him and chose the latter, its calculus shaped by the terrorist attacks and by widely shared suppositions about Iraq's weapons programs that ultimately proved mistaken.
If one chose to believe this simpler version, then the decision to invade Iraq might have been correct or mistaken, but the lessons to be learned from the war would concern matters of judgment, tactics, and execution--don't go to war based on faulty intelligence; don't topple a foreign government without a plan to bring order and peace to the country afterwards; don't be so quick on the trigger; exhaust all possibilities before going to war; be more prudent. But they would not raise broader issues of foreign policy doctrine and grand strategy. After all, prudence is not a foreign policy. It is possible to be prudent or imprudent, capable or clumsy, wise or foolish, hurried or cautious in pursuit of any doctrine. The intervention in Vietnam was the direct product of the Cold War strategy of containment, but many people who think the Vietnam War was a mistake nevertheless do not condemn containment. They believe the war was the misapplication and poor execution of an otherwise sound strategy. One could argue the same was true of Iraq.
One could, but very few critics of the war do. The heated debate in the United States over the past few years has not been so much about bad intelligence, faulty execution, or imprudence in Iraq. In his book The Assassins' Gate, Packer claims that he is unable to explain why the United States went to war without recourse to the larger doctrine behind it. "The story of the Iraq war," he writes, "is a story of ideas about the role of the United States in the world." And the ideas he has in mind are "neoconservative" ideas. His premise, and that of most critics, is that neoconservatism was uniquely responsible for the United States going to war in Iraq and that, had it not been for the influence of neoconservative ideas, the war never would have occurred.
People need to accept sacrifices of a few genocides for the Good of the World ... do I hear Mark Rutte speaking?
EurTrib archive on Robert Kagan ... I am in illustre company 😊
Operation Enduring Wars ...
Al Qaeda reemerges in Afghanistan with training camps | 22 March 2016 |
Archive: references where Bernard Lewis has been named …
Pro-Israel Neocons Torpedo Juan Cole Appointment at Yale | Tikun Olam – 17 June 2006 |
Juan Cole to Jewish neocons:
‘J’Accuse!’ (photo: Harvard University Gazette)
M.J. Rosenberg just gave me a head’s up about Yale’s withdrawal of a faculty appointment to Juan Cole after a concerted campaign against him from Yale Jewish donors and other Jewish neocons. Both Jewish Week and The Nation report that Cole had been approved by several faculty committees before pro-Israel forces managed to muster a concerted effort to stop him.
So here you have the hardline pro-Israel Campus Watch, Scott Johnson, author of Powerline one of the most widely read right-wing blogs, a student of Alan Dershowitz and daughter of a Scott Johnson writing in the New York Sun, Joel Mowbray of the Washington Times, and Michael Rubin of the American Enterprise Institute orchestrating a right-wing pro-Israel campaign to deny Cole the job. And this is only what is publicly known because these people were the ones willing to use their names in voicing their opposition. Who knows whether groups like Charles Jacob’s DAVID Project or even AIPAC were involved more surreptitiously.
[…]
Zachary Lockman, an NYU Middle Eastern studies professor, says, “It’s fair to say he is probably among the leading historians of the modern Middle East in this country.” Joshua Landis, a professor at University of Oklahoma, describes Cole as “top notch.”
“He was the wunderkind of Middle East Studies in the 1980s and 1990s,” Landis says. “He can be strident on his blog, which is one reason it is the premier Middle East blog…. [But] Juan Cole has done something that no other Middle East academic has done since Bernard Lewis, who is 90 years old: He has become a household word. He has educated a nation. For the last thirty years every academic search for a professor of Middle East history at an Ivy League university has elicited the same complaint: ‘There are no longer any Bernard Lewises. Where do you find someone really big with expertise on many subjects who is at home in both the ivory tower and inside the Beltway?’”
Today, Juan Cole is that academic. Of course, Cole is on the left, while Lewis is a neoconservative.
From EuroTrib archive two diametrically opposite views of Bernard Lewis and the support for the illegal and inhumane Iraq War.
Iraq is what you get when you turn op-ed columns into foreign policy | by Jerome a Paris on Jan 15th, 2007 |
The amazing thing is not so much that editorialists tried to define policy - it's that they were listened to, seriously, by so many people - and that their damn ideas actually got implemented!
Neo-conservative columnists have tended to follow the trial lawyers' approach to expertise. First, decide what you want to argue then find an expert who agrees with you. Most academic specialists on the Middle East were adamantly opposed to the invasion of Iraq. But Bernard Lewis of Princeton University was in favour of toppling Saddam Hussein. So it was he who was routinely and reverentially cited by the neo-cons.
My theory, and it may not be too popular, is that they played on the basest instincts of a population traumatised (and, in the case of the ruling elites, humiliated) by 9/11, and they focused energy towards revenge rather than towards justice and towards self-righteous anger rather than understanding. Blind rage followed the sting, rather than healing.
This worked with Iraq, and it works with Iran because, despite the passing of time, that country is still associated with another trauma/humiliation: the embassy hostage crisis - and some people are still playing for revenge and self-righteous use of force rather than any peaceful closure.
And these people hog the headlines, make the headlines, and socialise with those that make the other headlines - and they grabbed that direct access to the public, and to those in power, to short circuit all decision processes.
For Israel, it's starting to feel like it's 1938 again ! by wchurchill on May 8th, 2006 |
The problem with Iran by Charles Krauthammer, a syndicated columnist based in Washington DC: Washington Post Writers Group, Published May 8, 2006 …. the article is a haunting one
[…]
It's easy to believe that if one were a Jew living in Israel, that one could see the following as a realistic appraisal of Iran's motives, and recent events.
