Posted to YouTube by Euronews, October 1, 2015.

As noted: http://www.newsweek.com/us-accuses-assad-aiding-islamic-state-through-airstrikes-338582 The bad guy catches a break, enough to put together an army. Assad’s priorities — always flanked by Putin and Khamenei — have shown up in the news over time.

http://www.cnn.com/2015/10/01/politics/john-mccain-cia-russia-airstrikes/ – 10/1/2015

http://freebeacon.com/national-security/russia-strikes-more-u-s-backed-rebels-in-syria/ – 10/21/2015

https://www.bellingcat.com/news/mena/2016/06/21/al-tanf-bombing-russia-assisted-isis-attacking-us-backed-fsa-group-cluster-bombs/ – 6/21/2016.

If you want to see what Assad had been fighting instead of western-back revolutionaries, have a look at the destruction of Homs (in the video at the bottom of this post).

BackChannels is not suggesting ISIL was never hit but rather that it has been groomed and shaped over the years for a role in  “Assad vs The Terrorists”.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Syrian_Civil_War_barrel_bomb_attacks

On this list, you will see that al-Nusra gets some early “licks” in in Damascus but, ISIL, which assembled into the “Islamic State” a couple of years into the war (around 2014), does not show up in association with Damascus until April of this year. Now there’s conspiracy-think: why not a 2014 or 2015 car bombing in Damascus credited to ISIL. And why this year? Perhaps they started taking hits from Russian jets. Finally.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_terrorist_incidents_in_Syria

Related on BackChannels: https://conflict-backchannels.com/2015/10/02/syria-assad-vs-the-terrorists-how-isis-defends-assad/

Addendum – October 13, 2016

WikiLeaks released an August 2014 e-mail from Hillary Clinton to John Podesta, who currently serves as her campaign chairman, stating that the governments of Saudi Arabia and Qatar have been “providing clandestine financial and logistic support to ISIL and other radical Sunni groups in the region.” Evidently President Obama has not heeded Hillary’s concern, or chose to ignore it. In December 2014, Obama praised Saudi Arabia’s significant role in helping to fight ISIL (also known as ISIS and the Islamic State) during a meeting in Washington with the Kingdom’s Minister of Interior Prince Mohammed Bin Naif Bin Abdulaziz. And at a meeting he hosted with Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al-Thani, the Emir of Qatar, at the White House in February 2015, Obama said, “Qatar is a strong partner in our coalition to degrade and ultimately defeat ISIL.”

Klein, Joseph.  “Saudi Arabia and Qatar Bankroll ISIS – And the Clinton Foundation.”  Frontpage, October 13, 2016.

BackChannels believes the post-Soviet Moscow axis — Moscow-Damascus-Tehran — chose, as it resisted the challenge to Assad’s authority, to emphasize fighting the west first by first combating the defecting officers who took up leadership of the Free Syrian Army while holding off, or shaping, the al-Qaeda-type organizations coming onto the field (reference, again, Lucy Westcott’s report in Newsweek, “U.S. Accuses Assad of aiding ISIS Through Airstrikes” (June 2, 2015) and compare that with more recent reports on Russia’s air campaigns both leading to the “Concert in Palmyra” (Russian jets appear to have bombed a refugee camp the next day) and the more recent barbarism, including the wanton destruction of hospitals taking place in Aleppo.

One might also have a glance a Michael Weiss’s “Russia’s Double Game with Islamic Terror” (The Daily Beast, August 23, 2015) —

Based on extensive fieldwork in one village in the North Caucasus, reporter Elena Milashina has concluded that the “Russian special services have controlled” the flow of jihadists into Syria, where they have lately joined up not only with ISIS but other radical Islamist factions. In other words, Russian officials are adding to the ranks of terrorists which the Russian government has deemed a collective threat to the security and longevity of its dictatorial ally on the Mediterranean, Bashar al-Assad.

Putin — and everyone else with a yard of the political science classroom — knows that every “Allahu Akbar Attack” induces some patriotic nationalist response, just as a bee sting causes the flesh to swell.  The same therefore becomes a tool of a greater political force: what if you could get the “worst of the worst” to now and then hit a western target?  Of course, each drama would amplify injured state’s existing political divisions by giving voice to the “defense leagues” and each state’s most conservative leaders while also reaching through the old comrade networks and combative Muslim defense circles in their hate-the-west-first presumptions.

It turns out the URL cited near the top of Klein’s piece says nothing about “. . . clandestine financial and logistic support to ISIL . . . .” from Saudi Arabia or Qatar!  

https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/3774

Here’s an excerpt from that source:

>> 2. It is important that once we engage ISIL, as we have now >> done in a limited manner, we and our allies should carry on until they are >> driven back suffering a tangible defeat. Anything short of this will be >> seen by other fighters in the region, Libya, Lebanon, and even Jordan, as >> an American defeat. However, if we provide advisors and planners, as well >> as increased close air support for the Peshmerga, these soldiers can defeat >> ISIL. They will give the new Iraqi Government a chance to organize itself, >> and restructure the Sunni resistance in Syria, moving the center of power >> toward moderate forces like the Free Syrian Army (FSA). In addition to air >> support, the Peshmerga also need artillery and armored vehicles to deal >> with the tanks and other heavy equipment captured from the Iraqi army by >> ISIL.

Unless “Leaks” changes — too late now! — the claim made about the URL doesn’t jive.

Addendum – November 5, 2016

His fellow prisoners were members of ISIS. “Abu Muhammad al-Joulani, (founder of the Jihadist group, Jabhat al-Jabhat al-Nusra) was rumored to be there. Mohammed Haydar Zammar, (one of the organisers of the 9/11 attacks) was there. This is where the Syrian part of ISIS was born,” he said.

Alghorani is convinced that members of ISIS were released strategically by Assad. “From the first days of the revolution (in March 2011), Assad denounced the organisation as being the work of radical Salafists, so he released the Salafists he had created in his prisons to justify the claim … If you do not have an enemy, you create an enemy.”

Cordall, Simon Speakman.  “How Syria’s Assad Helped Forge ISIS.”  Newsweek, June 21, 2014.

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