Syria’s War and ‘False Flag’ Attacks Are About Oil, Not Just Gas

Trans-Arabian pipeline (TAPLINE) map in 1951.

[su_dropcap style=”light” size=”4″]A[/su_dropcap]s Eastern Ghouta was being liberated from terrorists, or “falling to the Assad regime”, we are supposed to believe that the Syrian government for no strategic military purpose used chemical weapons for a third time in Douma. A third time, presumably out of pure sadism even as negotiations with the fighters of surrendering factions were taking place and the last town under rebel control was being captured. A third time, even after last year’s incident in Khan Sheikhoun was met with US retaliation in the form of tomahawk cruise missiles.

It was the first and most deadly attack in Ghouta in 2013, still unsolved, that spurred the international community’s direct involvement in Syria’s war which led to huge strategic losses for the government and prolonged the war unnecessarily. Russia, Iran, and Hezbollah’s assistance turned things around for the government against the “rebels” but also resulted in the defeat of ISIS in Syria, no thanks to the US and Israel. When the Khan Sheikhoun attack happened last April, a week later terrorists committed an attack in Aleppo where mostly Shia children were lured by suicide bombers distributing free potato chips before detonating themselves killing more than 80 of them. An opposition group capable of such savagery would not seem the more likely culprits to be staging these attacks to provoke U.S. military intervention?

In hindsight, the result of the so-called ‘Arab Spring’ across the Middle East is a measure to the resourcefulness of the U.S. that such events which initially threaten its regional domination can be used as a pretext to actually further its agenda in the long run. Not to say there weren’t any positive developments in the Arab Spring in the beginning, as tyrants long supported by the west such as Ben Ali in Tunisia and Mubarak in Egypt were toppled after their respective uprisings. However, it was through the process of doing so that an opportunity opened for the west to solidify the very systems it imposed under such leaders despite their removal. Egypt is now under the grip of a comparable puppet in Sisi after the U.S.-backed ousting of Mohammed Morsi. NATO was then able to ‘justify’ its intervention in Libya during its Arab Spring on the basis of defending ‘human rights and democracy’, when its support for Islamist rebels against Gaddafi transformed Libya into a lawless failed state with open slave markets currently trading black African migrants. Then came Syria.

Syria’s protests went from calls for democratic reform during its initial weeks to an armed conflict led by salafists within months. In a short time it became clear Syria’s so called uprising was not at all about democracy, but instead about reversing any progress the country had made backwards as far as the seventh century. Who are the other pillars of democracy backing the so-called ‘moderate rebels’ in Syria in addition to NATO? Not just the apartheid state of Israel that denies all basic human rights to Palestinians, but the petro monarchs of Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait and other Gulf States who rule by the divine right of kings and Sharia law. Nevermind that all of them in reality are oil companies disguised as nations in no position to criticize the legitimacy of the non-sectarian, secular Syrian government. In addition, each of those absolute monarchies had their own versions of the Arab Spring which were swiftly and brutally put down without a peep from western liberals or any calls for intervention. In Bahrain, doctors and medics that dared treat Shiite protesters brutalized by the police were targeted and subjected to torture by the dictatorship. When the Saudi military invaded Bahrain to help suppress its democratic movement, there was no international outcry. The same narrative supporting the rebels which claims that Assad is a dictator for the regime’s repressive treatment of journalists is aligned with Turkey’s Erdogan who routinely jails journalists for exposing his funding of ISIS against the Kurds and even for depicting him as Gollum from Lord of the Rings. The fact that the neo-Ottoman Erdogan and the ultra-sexist petrodollar kingdoms of the Gulf Cooperative Council are the parties backing the insurgency in Syria should have been enough to indicate its real nature as a manufactured mercenary army rather than the spontaneous ‘revolution’ and ‘civil war’ as it has been depicted.

It is true that the Assad government is unelected, if you are referring to that of the father, Hafez al-Assad. The legitimacy of the 2014 Syrian election is obviously disputed, but the fact is that it was open to international observers and that nearly 90% voted for Bashar al-Assad. The turnout was something near three quarters of the population which is difficult to factor considering the amount of refugees and casualties of the war, but nevertheless a very large turnout occurred even in the midst of much of the country being under the control and threat of terrorists. The government consisting of the Ba’athist party and progressive national front consisting of eight other parties are stable in popularity with the Syrian people, even despite the Arab Spring and seven years of brutal war. It is at least transitioning towards democracy despite its significant corruption, which certainly cannot be said at all for the Islamic dictatorships backing the rebels allied with the US. Despite all its authoritarian faults and distance from its socialist roots in the Ba’athist movement, the Syrian government still provides free education and medical care to its people. The west’s demonization of the republic has been part of a calculated plot to keep the middle east backward by simultaneously supporting the most medieval regimes in the region that surround Syria, making any of their criticism of the government’s many faults hypocritical and void.

The west also omits from its narrative that the majority of the dozen other rulers that preceded the Assads were also unelected. There were a few brief exceptions, however, starting with the end of World War I when the British and Arab forces captured Damascus in late 1918 from the Ottoman Empire and established a Greater Syria. The following year, elections were held for the Syrian National Congress, which proclaimed Faisal I the King of Greater Syria. (If it sounds familiar, Faisal I is the same Prince Faisal famously portrayed by Alec Guinness in Lawrence of Arabia.) For a mere four months, from March to July of 1920, the Arab Kingdom of Syria existed as a self-proclaimed state that went unrecognized but was the first modern Arab state established. Although hardly a real democracy, the seeds for emancipation from colonialism and Arab nationalism were planted in Syria by Faisal’s short lived kingdom. The people of Syria, a diverse group made up of mostly Sunnis but also Shia, Druze, Christians, Alawites, and other communities desired a unified country. This was to be short lived, as the French were quick to crush the Syrian nationalist independence movement as a secret agreement had been made with the British. Not long after the kingdom was proclaimed, the defeat of the Turks in World War I brought the San Remo Conference which partitioned the former Ottoman territories amongst the Allies. After the conference proposed that Syria be put under French rule, the French Mandate was not welcomed by the Syrian independence movement. The Franco-Syrian War broke out between the the Syrian nationalists and their occupiers, resulting in a French victory. Faisal I was promptly expelled where he later as a fugitive was installed as the King of Iraq by the British.

Faisal I with T.E. Lawrence (center-right) at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919.

Syria spent the next two decades under French colonial occupation. It finally gained independence in 1945 as a parliamentary republic after the UN was established replacing the League of Nations following World War II and Syria was made a founding member of the UN, legally ending the French mandate and expelling their Vichy rulers. The C.I.A.’s first foray into Syria came in 1949 when it orchestrated a bloodless coup ousting the country’s first democratically-elected President, Shukri al-Quwatli. Not coincidentally, Quwatli had decided to block the passage of the Trans-Arabian Pipe Line (TAPLINE) from Saudi Arabia to the Mediterranean through Syria crucial to U.S. oil interests in the region. The next two decades following the coup brought successive military coups and a long period of instability for Syria. It is critical to understand that when the west talks about bringing ‘democracy’ to Syria through regime change, its proponents make sure to omit the historical fact that the United States and the C.I.A. destroyed the very first democracy Syria ever had which derailed the country for decades, just as French colonialism had crushed the Syrian independence movement after World War I.

 

Quwatli was replaced in the 1949 coup by Husni al-Zi’am, who supported the U.S. and the Saudis oil agenda as well as the west’s position on the Arab-Israeli conflict. A truce was granted with Israel who had defeated Syria in the 1948 Arab-Israeli war and the pipeline went on constructed as planned with Quwatli and the prospect of democracy in Syria out of the way for U.S. interests to do as it pleased. Quwatli was re-elected again six years later, and the U.S. again began aiding the Muslim Brotherhood in an effort to turn the Sunni population vulnerable to Islamist incitement against him. This time the CIA coup was unsuccessful, but real democracy in Syria became more difficult as the government became increasingly authoritarian, otherwise risking sabotage and destabilization by more powerful outside actors.

Husni Zaim became President of Syria in 1949 after the CIA-backed coup

After more than a decade of repeated military coups, the Syrian Ba’athists took power in 1963. Like the Ba’athists in Iraq, their ideology was a brand of Arab nationalism, anti-colonialism and non-Marxist socialism. A gradual consolidation of power and purging of political opponents by then-defense minister Hafez al-Assad in 1971 led to his becoming the President of Syria. Assad and other Alawites, a Shia minority sect, had taken control of the military which gave them the upper hand on the Sunni Ba’athists who were the heads of government institutions. In power from 1971 to his death in 2000, apart from a few attempted Islamist rebellions, the Assad regime brought a long period of relative stability to Syria with their firm grip on power. The authoritarianism of the regime, however, must be understood in its context. With a majority Sunni population, the secular government ruled by the Alawites were regarded as heretics by a significant portion of Sunnis who leaned toward more radical Islam and the Muslim Brotherhood, thanks to the spread of Wahhabism throughout the region by the Saudis. Assad had ousted the more socialist wing of the Ba’athists when he took power and had tried a different strategy towards the Sunnis by opening a private sector economy and room for Islam in Syrian life in response to the Muslim Brotherhood’s protests and riots throughout the 1960s, but it proved ill fated.

[su_pullquote]It is critical to understand that when the west talks about bringing ‘democracy’ to Syria through regime change, its proponents make sure to omit the historical fact that the United States and the C.I.A. destroyed the very first democracy Syria ever had…[/su_pullquote]

Hafez al-Assad’s efforts of opening Islamic schools and relaxing the previous Ba’athist restrictions on religion only emboldened the Sunni opposition who by the early 1980s were waging a mujahideen guerilla war against the government. The Muslim Brotherhood’s real quarrel was with the secularism of the Ba’athist state and what they regarded as the privileging of the Alawite minority, as the constitution was Syria’s first to not require the President to be a Muslim and the Alawites were considered atheists and ‘enemies of Islam’ by Sunnis. In response, the 1982 Hama Islamic uprising was put down with sheer brutality by the government killing tens of thousands in the process. Throughout his reign, Assad built alliances with Shia Iran, Lebanon’s Hezbollah, and the Palestinian Sunnis in Hamas but the ruling Alawites remained resented by much of the Syrian population that were Islamists whom Syria’s economic rivals wished to exploit and strengthen. The Saudis undoubtedly planted the seeds of Wahhabism in Syria as they did throughtout the entire region and essential reading on the historical roots and context of the Islamist uprising is Charles Glass’s Syria Burning: A Short History of a Catastrophe. Declassified CIA documents also show that going back several decades the United States had long planned to foment sectarianism to destabilize Syria in an effort to force regime change, even ominously predicting the consequences that it could lead to the establishment of an Islamic state which was not an undesired outcome if it meant getting rid of Assad. When Bashar Al-Assad inherited power from his father, like Quwatli decades before him he rejected the proposed Qatar-Turkey gas pipeline citing Syria’s alliance with Russia whose economy survives on fossil fuel sales to Europe.

Proposed Qatar-Turkey pipeline through Syria to the EU rejected by Assad.

[dropcap]W[/dropcap]e are led to believe it was anti-Assad graffiti by teenagers in 2011 and the police’s brutal overreaction that sparked the conflict, when the Arab Spring demonstrations nearly from the beginning involved government buildings being set ablaze and police being killed. Why? Because amongst the sincere demonstrators calling for democratic reforms, an end to corruption and freedom of the press were also many Islamists demanding the release of terrorist prisoners from the Muslim Brotherhood and calling for the killing of Alawites for being heretics. A popular revolt does not almost immediately splinter into dozens of different armed groups because of endless religious sectarianism. The opposition collapsed into infighting when the struggle transformed into an armed conflict from its very inception, from groups like Jaysh Al-Sham to Ahrar Al-sham, Tahrir al-Sham/Al-Nusra Front (Al-Qaeda in Syria), Nour Al Din Al-Zenki and countless others. Then of course, came ISIS, which grew out out of western Iraq’s Sunni uprising spilling over into eastern Syria in 2013 and their Islamic caliphate being declared in Raqqa. Then Turkey’s conflict with the Kurds being used to expand its territory violating Syrian sovereignty, resulting in a endlessly complex war.

Even the supposedly most “moderate” faction in Syria, the Free Syrian Army, was composed of almost exclusively Sunnis and by 2015 had fragmented and collapsed from desertion to more radical groups. Millions of people also do not flee in terror in a popular uprising, which did not occur in Egypt which had its own brutal government crackdown in response to Arab Spring protests. Although the opposition was not created by the west, it was principally aided by NATO and the Gulf States while the sham ‘government in exile’ of the opposition, the Syrian National Council, is based in Turkey and dominated by Islamists. It is clear that the insurgency in Syria would not have lasted nor grown without aid from the NATO coalition, Turkey and the Gulf States who instantly seized upon the conflict to advance their own interests to make Syria’s battlefield a proxy war. The rebellion as a whole is not supported by the vast majority of Syrians, who consist of many minority groups including Christians, Alawites, Shias, Druze and others who are targeted by the Sunni extremists and would forcibly converted or slaughtered under any state established by them.

 

[dropcap]O[/dropcap]ne of the very few mainstream news outlets to present a fair and evenhanded look at the Syrian war and present the seldom heard perspective of the government’s supporters is PBS Frontline’s episode “Inside Assad’s Syria” by Martin L. Smith, an absolute must watch for anyone skeptical of the western narrative about the war. The documentary casts doubt on the dubious claims the initial protests were completely non-violent, and uncovers they contained provocateurs among the sincere protesters who provoked the predictable crackdown from the regime. It also shows how many of the fighters in the Free Syrian Army, which initially consisted of mostly Syrian army defectors, eventually defect back to the army as the character of the revolt is overrun by the Islamists. Any relatively “moderate” groups are dwarfed by the larger Islamist groups including al-Qaeda and ISIS, so any advancement made by them end up strengthening the larger extremists in their coalition. More importantly, it also clarifies the rationale behind the severity of the government’s brutal bombing campaign against the insurgency that has killed many innocent civilians caught up in the quagmire, a huge source of criticism leveled at the regime. One moment in particular is gripping when a pro-government militia commander rationalizes the need to recapture territory lost to the terrorists at all costs, something the west is apparently immune to when it did the same to recapture Raqqa from ISIS.

Important clip from PBS Frontline’s “Inside Assad’s Syria.”

The unprecedented propaganda campaign surrounding Syria has not only rebranded takfiri headchoppers as moderate rebels, but the same jihadists as crisis actors portraying humanitarian rescue workers funded with millions of dollars from USAID. The Syrian Civil Defense, AKA the White Helmets, are embedded with the al-Qaeda branch Jabhat Al-Nusra and have been the entire source of the footage of the chemical attacks. They were even the recipients of an Academy Award for the Netflix “documentary” made up of entirely footage they shot themselves and handed over for editing. Yes, that’s right, Al-Qaeda are the recipients of an Oscar. There are countless videos and photographs online clearing showing their members either facilitating or even participating in executions by militants. They exclusively operate in rebel territory which is also not coincidentally where every one of these attacks has occurred. They have been caught dumping the bodies of Syrian soldiers and testimonies of those liberated from rebel territory consistently explain they did little to nothing to help civilians, instead almost exclusively treating injured militants while preoccupied with shooting footage for their propaganda.

 

UN chief prosecutor Carla del Ponte determined that the rebels were responsible for the Ghouta attack in 2013 while the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons also found that the Syrian government has since destroyed all its chemical arsenal after it was accused of that attack. Meanwhile, James Mattis admitted there was no evidence Assad was behind the Khan Sheikhoun attack either prior to his sacking. Each time these chemical attacks have come when the Syrian army was on the offensive and having the upper hand on the Islamist insurgency. Trump just this past week came under fire for suggesting the US might be finally pulling out of Syria. Another coincidence this attack happens when the U.S. may be withdrawing troops? Since last April when he ordered the strike on the Shayrat airbase in what turned out to be a mere warning shot, the United States has increasingly appeared to be on the verge of full defeat in its regime change war in Syria. What is occurring today in Syria is part of a long history of western and gulf state interventionism in the country for their economic and geopolitical interests and the manipulation of oil prices to destabilize their rivals, principally Russia’s hold on Europe’s natural gas market. It is NOT a recent or isolated development. With John Bolton in his ear and the anti-Russia humanitarian interventionists in the “Resistance” egging him on, it seems likely Trump will wag the dog again.