The NSA issued
three single source reports on March 14-18, 2013 based on PRISM Skype
collection which detailed directions from the Saudis to the Syrian opposition
to “light up Damascus” in attacks on the airport and other locations.
Graphic: NSA
In a television interview of former Prime Minister Hamad bin Jassim bin Jaber al-Thani of Qatar he confesses the truth behind the origins of the war
in Syria. The interview has gone viral across Arabic social media. during the same week a leaked top secret NSA
document was published which confirms that the arme haopposition
in Syria was under the direct command of foreign governments from the early
years of the conflict.
And according to a well-known Syria analyst and
economic adviser with close contacts in the Syrian government, the explosive
interview constitutes a high level "public admission to
collusion and coordination between four countries to destabilize an independent
state, [including]
possible support for Nusra/al-Qaeda." Importantly,
"this admission will help build case for what Damascus sees as an attack
on its security & sovereignty. It will form basis for
compensation claims."
As
the war in Syria continues slowly winding down, it seems new source material comes
out on an almost a weekly basis in the form of testimonials of top officials
involved in destabilizing Syria, and even occasional leaked emails and
documents which further detail covert regime change operations
against the Assad government. Though much of this content serves to confirm what has already long been known by those who have never accepted
the simplistic propaganda which has dominated mainstream media,
details continue to fall in place, providing future historians with
a clearer picture of the true nature of the war.
This process of clarity has been aided - as predicted -
by the continued infighting among Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) former allies
Saudi Arabia and Qatar, with each side accusing the other of funding Islamic
State and al-Qaeda terrorists (ironically, both true). Increasingly, the world
watches as more dirty laundry is aired and the GCC implodes after years of nearly all the
gulf monarchies funding jihadist movements in places like Syria, Iraq, and
Libya.
The top Qatari official is no less than former Prime Minister Hamad
bin Jassim bin Jaber al-Thani, who oversaw Syria operations on behalf of Qatar
until 2013 (also as foreign minister) Qatar's 2022 World Cup Committee donated $500,000 to
the Clinton Foundation in 2014).
In an interview with
Qatari TV Wednesday 25 October 2017, bin Jaber al-Thani revealed that his country,
alongside Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and the United States, began shipping weapons
to jihadists from the very moment events "first started" (in 2011).
Al-Thani even likened the
covert operation to "hunting prey" - the prey
being President Assad and his supporters - "prey" which he admits got
away (as Assad is still in power; he used a Gulf Arabic dialect word,
"al-sayda", which implies hunting animals or prey for sport). Though Thani denied credible allegations of support for ISIS, the former prime minister's words
implied direct Gulf and US support for al-Qaeda in Syria (al-Nusra Front)
from the earliest years of the war, and even said Qatar has "full documents" and records proving
that the war was planned to effect regime change.
al-Thani
said while acknowledging Gulf nations were arming jihadists in Syria with
the approval and support of US and Turkey: "I don't want to go into
details but we have full documents about
us taking charge [in Syria]." He claimed that both Saudi Arabia's King
Abdullah (who reigned until his death in 2015) and the United States placed
Qatar in a lead role concerning covert operations to execute the proxy war.
The former prime
minister's comments, while very revealing, were intended as a defense and excuse of Qatar's support for terrorism,
and as a critique of the US and Saudi Arabia for essentially leaving Qatar
"holding the bag" in terms of the war against Assad. Al-Thani
explained that Qatar continued its financing of armed insurgents in
Syria while other countries eventually wound down large-scale support,
which is why he lashed out at the US and the Saudis, who initially "were with us in the same trench."
In a previous US
television interview which was vastly underreported, al-Thani told Charlie Rose when asked about
allegations of Qatar's support for terrorism that, "in Syria, everybody
did mistakes, including your country." And said that when the war began in
Syria, "all of us worked through two operation rooms: one in Jordan and one
in Turkey."
Below is the key section of Wednesday's interview, translated and
subtitled by @Walid970721. The interview has reviewed and confirmed the Arabic to English translation, however, as the original translator has acknowledged, al-Thani doesn't say
"lady" but "prey" ["al-sayda"]- as in both Assad
and Syrians were being hunted by the outside countries.
The partial English transcript is as follows: The
partial English transcript is as follows:
"When
the events first started in Syria I
went to Saudi Arabia and met with King Abdullah. I did that on the instructions
of his highness the prince, my father. He [Abdullah] said we are behind
you. You go ahead with this plan and
we will coordinate but you should be in charge. I won’t get into details
but we have full documents and
anything that was sent [to Syria] would go to Turkey and was in coordination with the US forces and
everything was distributed via the Turks and the US forces. And us and everyone
else was involved, the military people. There may have been mistakes and
support was given to the wrong faction... Maybe there was a relationship with Nusra, its
possible but I myself don’t know about this… we
were fighting over the prey ["al-sayda"] and now the prey is gone and
we are still fighting... and now Bashar is still there. You [US and Saudi Arabia] were with us
in the same trench... I have no objection to one changing if he
finds that he was wrong, but at least inform your partner… for example leave
Bashar [al-Assad] or do this or that, but the situation that has been created
now will never allow any progress in the GCC [Gulf Cooperation Council], or any
progress on anything if we continue to openly fight.
As
is now well-known, the CIA was directly involved in leading regime change
efforts in Syria with allied gulf partners, as leaked and declassified US intelligence memos
confirm. The US government understood in real time that Gulf and
West-supplied advanced weaponry was going to al-Qaeda and ISIS, despite
official claims of arming so-called "moderate" rebels. For example, a
leaked 2014 intelligence memo
sent to Hillary Clinton acknowledged Qatari and Saudi support for
ISIS.
The email stated
in direct and unambiguous language that: "the governments of Qatar and Saudi
Arabia, which are providing clandestine financial and logistic support to ISIL and
other radical Sunni groups in the region."
Furthermore, one day before Prime Minister Thani's
interview, The Intercept released a
new top-secret NSA document unearthed
from leaked intelligence files provided by Edward Snowden which show in
stunning clarity that the
armed opposition in Syria was under the direct command of foreign governments
from the early years of the war which has now
claimed half a million lives. Julian Assange
continues to shine light in very dark places.
The
newly released NSA document confirms
that a 2013 insurgent attack with advanced surface-to-surface rockets upon
civilian areas of Damascus, including Damascus International
Airport, was directly supplied and commanded by Saudi Arabia with full prior
awareness of US intelligence. As the former
Qatari prime minister now also confirms, both the Saudis and US government
staffed "operations rooms" overseeing such heinous attacks during the
time period of the 2013 Damascus airport attack.
No doubt there
remains a massive trove of damning documentary evidence which will continue to
trickle out in the coming months and years. At the very
least, the continuing Qatari-Saudi diplomatic war will bear more fruit as each
side builds a case against the other with charges of supporting terrorism. And
as we can see from this latest Qatari TV interview, the United States itself
will not be spared in this new open season of airing dirty laundry as old allies
turn on each other.
A loosely knit collection of Syrian rebel fighters set up positions
on March 18, 2013, and fired several barrages of rockets at targets in the
heart of Damascus, Bashar al-Assad’s capital. The attack was a brazen show of
force by rebels under the banner of the Free Syrian Army, targeting the
presidential palace, Damascus International Airport, and a government security
compound. It sent a chilling message to the regime about its increasingly shaky
hold on the country, two years after an uprising against its rule began.
Behind the attacks, the influence of a
foreign power loomed. According to a top-secret
National Security Agency document provided by whistleblower
Edward Snowden, the March 2013 rocket attacks were directly ordered by a member
of the Saudi royal family, Prince Salman bin Sultan, pictured above, to help mark the second
anniversary of the Syrian revolution. Salman had
provided 120 tons of explosives and other weaponry to opposition forces, giving
them instructions to “light up Damascus” and “flatten” the airport, the
document, produced by U.S. government surveillance on Syrian opposition
factions, shows.
The
Saudis were long bent on unseating Assad. Salman was one of the key Saudi
officials responsible for prosecuting the war in Syria, serving as a
high-ranking intelligence official before being promoted to deputy minister of
defense later in 2013.
The
NSA document provides a glimpse into how the war had evolved from its early
stages of popular uprisings and repression. By the time of the March 2013
attack, arguably the most salient dynamic in the conflict was the foreign
powers on both sides fueling what appeared to be a bloody, entrenched
stalemate. The document points to how deeply these foreign powers would become
involved in parts of the armed uprising, even choosing specific operations for
their local allies to carry out.
“A revolution, a
proxy war, and a civil war are not necessarily mutually exclusive of each
other,” said Aron Lund,
an expert on Syria at The Century Foundation, a New York-based think tank. “All
these things can exist simultaneously in the same country, as seems to have
been the case in Syria.”
The uprising
against the Assad regime in 2011 was in line with a wave of civil revolutions
that broke out across the Middle East that year. Thousands of people living
under much-reviled dictatorships sought to overthrow their rulers, launching
mass demonstrations and sometimes engaging in armed attacks. Inspired by
initial successes in Tunisia and Egypt, Syrians took to the streets in huge
numbers. But their uprising would not be able to chart the same peaceful
trajectory. In response to the protests, the Assad regime and its security
forces waged an open war against their own people, refusing to countenance any
change in power.
The crackdown
shocked international observers. The then-largely civilian uprising, faced with
extermination or resistance, took up arms. Assad’s response, though, coupled
with the burgeoning revolution, also opened the door for the involvement of
unscrupulous foreign powers. Since the conflict began, both sides of Syria’s
civil war have received significant support from abroad. Opposition groups got
help from Turkey, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia, while the government has been
propped up by the efforts of Iran and Russia.
The March 2013
attacks in Damascus provide a concrete example of the role that foreign powers
played in the day-to-day reality of the conflict. A number of videos posted by
Syrian opposition media on the day of the attacks purport to show rebel
fighters firing
rockets at the same sites mentioned in the U.S. document. Local
media reports from
that day described an attack in which rockets struck within the areas of the
presidential palace, a local government security branch, and the airport. A
representative of the U.K.-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights quoted in
a story the next day reporting the attacks, stating that they were unable to
confirm whether they resulted in casualties.
The U.S. document,
based on surveillance of “opposition plans and operations,” did not indicate
whether the attacks deliberately targeted civilians or involved any extremist
groups — but it did show that American spies found out about the attacks
several days before they were launched.
Analyzing the
videos of the attacks posted online by opposition factions, Lund said, “There
appear to be several different groups involved, all identifying themselves as
different factions of the ‘Free Syrian Army,’ and all apparently linking back
to the same sponsor.”
Because of the
fragmentary nature of the Syrian opposition since the early days of the
conflict, it is difficult to know who else received arms or what strategy, if
any, was being employed by outside sponsors to try and place various factions
under central control. Over time, however, this chaotic strategic environment
aided the cause of terrorist groups in Syria, as well as the regime.
The NSA document speaks
to a defining question faced by the Syrian opposition — and any insurgent
group: Where to get weapons and supplies?
In Syria, the
uprising’s arms initially came from defecting army units that, outraged at the
regime’s crackdown, joined the opposition. Among those who turned against Assad
were high-ranking officials like Lt. Col. Hussein al-Harmoush, an army officer who had denounced the Syrian
dictator after a wave of massacres in 2011. (Harmoush was likely abducted in
Turkey and returned to
Syria. After giving a videotaped “confession” on Syrian state television after
his return, he has not been heard from since.)
“Refusenik”
officers like Harmoush helped found the original armed groups that coalesced
into the “Free Syrian Army,” a name that was more of a brand for the opposition
than a singular entity. Groups identifying themselves as Free Syrian Army
adopted Syria’s old independence flag and began conducting small operations
across the country to defend protesters and requisition arms. Over time, the
Free Syrian Army came to represent a diverse spectrum of nationalist
opposition, Muslim Brotherhood-aligned Islamists, and family and tribal
networks that took up arms to defend their villages and towns. (In contrast,
hardline Islamists like Al Qaeda-affiliated Jabhat al-Nusra and the Islamic
State did not take up the Free Syrian Army name or flag, due to their
ideological opposition to nationalism.)
As the ferocious
crackdown proceeded and refugees began to stream out of the country, the arms
afforded to rebels by defectors and raids on government facilities became
insufficient. The opposition started to open channels with outside powers eager
to see Assad fall. It would not be long before foreign states were providing
arms to groups fighting the regime. But the flow of foreign-sponsored arms was
a development that would contribute to the fracturing of the opposition.
“By 2013, there was
a great division opening up between the sources of support for fighters, due to
a growing rivalry between the Saudis and the Qataris,” said Lund, adding that
Turkey sided with Qatar. “And this rivalry helped undermine the insurgency.”
“Much of the
support seems to have run along personal lines, with support being provided by
people who had personal connections with Syrians on the ground,” he added, a
dynamic that impacted the
armed uprising from the beginning. “But there was an ideological dimension to
it as well.” Lund said that in general, Qatari- and Turkish-sponsored groups
tended more toward Islamist ideology, while those supported by the United Arab
Emirates and Saudi were either non-Islamist or adhered to a version of Islamism
that did not threaten them, reflecting those countries’ opposition to the
populism of the Muslim Brotherhood: “The Saudis and Emiratis were never really
comfortable with most Syrian Islamists, though they supported some hardline
groups at times.”
The Free Syrian
Army factions in the videos of the March 2013 attacks appear to have belonged
to Saudi- and Jordanian-supported Southern Front, as well as the Ahfad al-Rasul
(“Grandsons of the Prophet”) Brigades. The group’s name offers a poignant
example of the sort of confusion that reigned over rebel forces: The moniker
Ahfad al-Rasul appears to have been used by different groups, with different
ideological leanings, at different times in the conflict.
The Syrian conflict is
notable for the extent to which the rebel opposition was able to arm itself and
continue challenging the regime over years of grinding warfare, experts on the
internal dynamics of civil wars say. The 2013 assault on Damascus described in
the NSA document, along with an unknown number of other attacks, were only
possible thanks to the support of a powerful patron like Saudi Arabia. (The
Saudi Arabian embassy in Washington and the Syrian mission at the U.N. in New
York did not offer comment for this story.)
“Generally, a large
number of civil wars tend to start from the periphery, with a small group of
people who assemble in isolated areas of the country and take time to build up
a military structure. That is the general idea behind a guerilla war,” said
Stathis Kalyvas, a professor of political science at Yale University and author
of “The Logic of
Violence in Civil War.”
“The Syrian case is
striking for the extent and the speed with which the opposition was able to arm
itself,” Kalyvas said. “Despite the fact that there were many defections from
the military, we didn’t really observe the implosion of Syrian state. At the
same time, we saw this very decentralized but rapid emergence of a rebel army —
which, for me, is quite puzzling — and the most likely explanation is the
extent and ability of the opposition to gain external assistance.”
Unlike nationalist
and Muslim Brotherhood-aligned groups, it has never been firmly established
that terrorist organizations like ISIS benefitted from direct state
sponsorship. ISIS did, however, manage to get a hold of both private
funding and significant quantities of foreign armaments, including U.S. arms,
during the maelstrom of the wars in Syria and Iraq. While largely independent, in 2015, Jabhat
al-Nusra, Al Qaeda’s local affiliate, also benefitted from its participation in
an umbrella coalition of Saudi-, Turkish-, and Qatari-sponsored groups known a
Jaish al-Fatah, or the “Army of Conquest.” The relative
independence of the most extreme groups over the course of the war – granted by
the absence of state sponsorship – stood as a major advantage in the jockeying
between various rebel factions. The extremist jihadists had a free hand to set
their own agendas in everything from taking territory to running propaganda
campaigns aimed at recruitment.
Over the course of
the conflict, the most extreme groups, with the support of private donors and
foreign volunteers, were largely able to defeat their rivals in the opposition
that lined up under the Free Syrian Army umbrella. The Free Syrian Army-type
factions had to manage their operations and alliances in order to keep their
foreign backers on-side; some groups, for instance, were forced to turn against
erstwhile allies like the Syrian Kurds to
maintain their Turkish sponsorship. On the other hand, the extremists were able
to operate with astounding flexibility. And they benefitted from having a
coherent, if harsh, ideological doctrine to impose onto their cadres and areas
under their control — another advantage while operating among populations
desperate for any kind of order amid the terrifying insecurity of civil war.
“During the Cold
War, you had many conflicts in which the rebels were divided by nationalist and
communist factions. And very often, the communist factions were both more
radical and more ruthless,” said Kalyvas. “Radical parties are often much more
centralized and disciplined, making them better able to compete with
non-radical rebel groups. The way that they deal with local populations also
employs an effective mixture of propaganda — which they tend to be more skilled
at — and the brutal suppression of any dissent.”
“This strategy,”
Kalyvas added, “can often dominate a civil war and lead to the elimination of
any rebel competition.”
There are still
nationalist armed revolutionary factions operating in Syria, including the
Manbij Military Council, a faction of the U.S.-backed Syrian Democratic Forces,
as well as countless
civil society activists and groups working in areas liberated
from government control. But six years after the war began and four years since
the attacks described in the NSA document, the tide of the war has turned
dramatically. Caught between the hammer and anvil of extremist groups on one
side and the regime on the other, the nationalist Syrian opposition has been
largely defeated in its confrontation with the regime. Their slow – and,
seemingly, final — vanquish came thanks in no small part to foreign
intervention by Iran and Russia, but also, crucially, through the rebels’ own
internal divisions.
In one of the
videos purporting to show rockets being fired at Damascus International
Airport, a rebel commander identified as member of the Free Syrian Army tells
the camera that the attack was “in memory of the second anniversary of the
Syrian revolution” — just as the Saudi prince had declared.
Instead of
foreshadowing a campaign to take Damascus, the 2013 mortar attacks wound up
being just another episode in a long, grueling effort to unseat Assad by force.
The direct foreign involvement in the attack paints a more sharply outlined
picture of a war that had already begun to spin out of local control — with
foreign powers manipulating Syrians on both sides. While outsiders have written
checks, shipped arms, and fired missiles into Syria, it has been the Syrians
who have been killed, driven into exile, and seen their country carved into
pieces, in a conflict that, despite being more or less decided, continues to
rage to this today.
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