The influence of the Soviet by way of agitation, disinformation, political manipulation (through the KGB) and sponsorship of terrorism in relation to the middle east conflict cannot be underestimated. The post-WWII leveraging of Arab anti-Semitic sentiment — involving some with power, not everyone — succeeding in developing despotic regimes benefiting the Soviet as client states.
Soviet cartoons distributed in the Middle East to leverage “the masses” into the Soviet camp.
The Soviet dissolved in financial and moral bankruptcy about 25 years ago; however, in its place has developed a feudal state in the Russian historic tradition, and it continues to entertain PFLP and to interface with both Hezbollah and Hamas.
Who has been made to suffer as a consequence of Soviet / post-Soviet Russian influence and KGB-designed manipulation?
There are differences between the medieval world and the modern one, and the modern is a much, much better world in which to live.
These too are Palestinians:
Additional Reference
“Eshkol knew and feared the Russians,” noted Michael Oren. “War with Syria [and Egypt] was risky enough; with the USSR, it would be suicidal.” But Eskhol calculated that without U.S. support, the Soviets would find themselves compelled to get involved directly. Moscow had, after all, “invested massively in the Middle East, about $2 billion in military aid alone—1,700 tanks, 2,400 artillery pieces, 500 jets, and 1,400 advisers—since 1956, some 43 percent of it to Egypt.”
Sure enough, as the Israelis demolished the forces of the Arab coalition over the next three days and captured the Sinai, the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, and the Golan Heights, reunified the holy city of Jerusalem, and began an offensive against Damascus itself, Moscow saw itself staring into the face of a geopolitical disaster. Those were, after all, Soviet-trained soldiers being defeated. Those were Soviet-made arms being seized or destroyed. Those were billions of dollars in Soviet funding to their Arab client states being poured down the drain. And—it would later be learned by U.S. and Israeli intelligence—the Egyptian war plan itself (code-named, “Operation Conqueror”) had actually been written in 1966 by the Soviets. As a result, the Soviets feared their prestige was quickly unraveling.
Before hostilities were established back in 2011, Syria may have been washed, as it were, in two streams of political poison that would render it untouchable and toxic to the west and its interests. Both streams would be located in the medieval worldview of political power as legitimate when exercised as dictatorship. Soviet Era duality combining anti-Semitic expression, socialism, and pan-Arab nationalism would become part of today’s “lostness”; and then on the political track linked to religious belief, “Islamist” exceptionalism and hubris would mirror the nationalist dictat.
As regards speaking . . . reporting, seeing, and speaking have not been of issue.
As regards extremism + post-Soviet history, ah, there’s the issue that now has former Iraqi Baath Party officers fighting for ISIL against (some) Iraqi Shiite militia embedded with Iranian Revolutionary Guard officers.
Which is the war being fought?
Medieval v Modern; Sunni v Shiite; “Political Absolutism” v Democracy — and then the lesser politics: Iran v Iraq; Turkey v Russia; Turkey v the Kurdish Liberation community; and so on
???
I tend to focus on post-Soviet Moscow for answers as regards motivation and policy for shaping the conflict as it appears. However, one might also focus on multiple elements in the field and ask about illusive motivations. There seem to me multiple aspects of the conflict that can only be seen _by everyone_ — all involved or on the sidelines — as absurdly anachronistic, barbaric (especially in the cultivation and expression of cruelty) and surreal.
The poem that set off the response was lovely and correct in its complaint about silence and its query about the lack of human intervention in deposing Bashar al-Assad. However, great vision matters in Syria, and, in fact, it may now be all that matters in Syria, specifically the ability to observe from a distance in time and space that views the whole of it as contained in time.
Truly, the conflict began with a despot’s sadistic response to a peaceful challenge to his authority, and here five or six years later, thereabouts, those outside of Syria area overviewing a complete medieval theater of politics and war of which Putin, Assad, Khamenei, and Baghdadi — and similar others — are of a whole piece.
Different talks — same walk!
The leaders are not opponents: they have been cooperating perfectly in mutual destruction, disregard, and unspeakable sadism.
For starters, the Moscow-controlled Communist International, and its sidekick, the Communist Party of Germany, made Hitler’s rise to power possible, if not indeed inevitable, by tarring the German Social Democrats as “social fascists” who threatened to split the proletariat and were, thus, a greater evil than the Nazis. Had the German left remained united against the real threat—Nazism—Hitler might not have come to power. (Many leftists make a similar mistake today, preferring Vladimir Putin’s fascism to American capitalism and thereby promoting war in Europe.)
On August 24, Turkey invaded Jarabulus, a Syrian border town held by ISIS, with great fanfare: several hundred Turkish soldiers, twenty tanks, and 1,500 Free Syrian Army (FSA) fighters from Islamist militias. In reality, the whole battle was a fake. ISIS had quietly left town several days before, and the difference between this and their usual behavior convinced some observers, particularly the Kurds, that their exit was coordinated with Ankara.
Posted to YouTube by Muhammed Al Mousa on September 4, 2016
Homs represents a brutal depopulating. It brings to my mind the drought that impelled a combination of “Arab Spring” and economic protest in 2011 that would be met with a brutality and sadism far out of proportion to the regime’s political needs. In turn, that would make sense of Assad’s choosing to produce a general bloodbath in Syria out of which he could then play to his own family’s advantage as owners of a Russian client state, as an enemy of the west, and as a symbol of state order against “The Terrorists”, both anyone not with Assad as well as the al-Qaeda types incubated expressly to serve for blackmailing and goading the west and as a foil for the aligned powers, Moscow-Damascus-Tehran.
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”.
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.
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.”
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.
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!
>> 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.”
BackChannels 