The US foreign policy in the Middle East has given the opportunity for the extremist groups to advance through many parts of Iraq and Syria, as many political analyses say. But, President Obama was taking another viewpoint during an interview with “CBS This Morning” host Norah O’Donnell taped Friday, June 20.
At a previous date, President Obama said that he is thinking about arming and training “Syrian rebels”, what he called the ‘moderates,’ although in hindsight the label seems ill-picked. But as the PBS Frontline documentary exposed, the so-called “Syrian rebels” themselves (in fact, most of them aren’t even Syrians) said they were armed and trained by the US in the use of sophisticated weapons and fighting techniques. They were also told, as one rebel said, “how to finish off soldiers still alive after an ambush.”
“I think this notion that somehow there was this ready-made moderate Syrian force that was able to defeat Syrian President Bashar Assad is simply not true, and, you know, we have spent a lot of time trying to work with a moderate opposition in Syria,” president Obama said in his interview with “CBS This Morning” last Friday.
Deputy National Security Adviser Ben Rhodes announced last June that President Barack Obama had decided to aid the so-called “Supreme Military Council” that supposedly is the representative of the ‘Syrian revolution’. But, on Dec. 11, 2012, six months before the White House announced Obama would provide military support to the “Syrian Supreme Military Council” of the “rebels” (many of them radical Islamic terrorists), the State Department listed al Nusra Front (Jabhat al-Nusra) as an al-Qaeda-affiliated terrorist group.
Foreign-backed militants in Syria
ISIS is also an al-Qaeda-affiliated radical Islamist terrorist group. The shocking truth is that US was arming and training the al-Qaeda and ISIS terrorist groups, the very same ones who are working to usurp Syria and Iraq right now! Obama had already authorized clandestine operations, according to varied sources, and has provided at least $250 million in “aid” to the rebels in Syria.
This seems to run the risk of violating U.S. laws prohibiting material support of terrorists, although that wouldn’t be a first time (for example funding the Nicaraguan Contras) that has happened without real backlash.
The most shocking aspect is that US concurrently gave Iraq weapons to fight ISIS! And since Iraq is not able to face thousand of terrorists everywhere in his territory, it is now up to US drones to “fight” the same “rebels” that the US itself was collaborating with until a month or so ago!
Intelligence officials have claimed that a group linked to al-Qaeda in Syria has a wish to initiate an interior attack on the US, making the entire situation more complicated and seemingly absurd.
Foreign-backed militants in Syria
PBS’s Frontline documentary is considered as new evidence for US’s role in more than three years of the conflict in Syria. The United States has stepped up the provision of lethal aid to the rebels, as PBS notes “it appears the Obama administration is allowing select groups of rebels to receive US-made anti-tank missiles.”
Director of National Intelligence Clapper told the Senate Intelligence Committee that groups such as the al-Nusra Front in Syria have inaugurated training camps “to train people to go back to their countries,” the Associated Press quoted him as saying.
In fact, Obama’s support for the so-called ‘Syrian revolution’ is just the latest example in a long list of heavy-handed and misguided foreign policy backfiring in the face of the US, and benefiting only the weapons industry.