By Dr. M. Koohzad:
FSA ‘Good Guys’ … Really?
There is no such mortal as a moderate Muslim militant in the Mideast.
They all are Islamist-Jihadist-Terrorists, SOBs.
We love them if they are our IJTs SOBs.
Introduction
All of the issues of political economy in the Mideast are related to the imperial arrangements of the Western powers. They imposed all of the political boundaries on the region. For decades they have been exploiting the region for its location and rich mineral resources including the largest amount of proven oil reserves in the world. They blessed the creation of Islamist terrorist groups such as the Taliban, al-Qaeda, FSA, ISIS, and many more in between. Now, the masters have decided to ideologically describe, evaluate, and define who is what in the world of terrorism. The case in point is that they are trying to make the world believe that some of the Islamist terrorists are moderate and thus are the right rebels to be paid by the US to fight against the government of Syria.
In the summer of 2014, the world was marred by the pandemic outbreaks of the worst kind of Sunni jihadist terrorism and the Ebola sickness. The virus that causes Ebola has evolved into one of the fastest killers and was brought into cities from the West African countryside. A symptom of the disease is that instead of tears, blood comes out of the eyes of the victim and in many cases similar to Hollywood’s special effects, the body disintegrates, often within a single day. Terrorism has also evolved from the hijacking of planes and suicide bombing to beheading, targeting minorities, and taking women into slavery.
Originally created by the American CIA, the British MI6, the Israeli MOSAD, and the Turkish MIT, with petro-dollars from Saudi Arabia and Qatar, the so-called ISIS is apparently more dangerous than Ebola. The US has more boots on the ground combating Ebola in West Africa than it has invested in the fight against ISIS in the Mideast. It is fighting from the air half-heartedly against ISIS. To avoid having more boots on the ground and thereby save American lives, the CIA has been trying, albeit uselessly, to recruit 5,000 moderate Muslim militants and the right rebels to fight against the ISIS terrorist group with over 30,000 members and the Assad regime’s army.
The purpose of this paper is to illustrate the fact that moderate Muslim militants, 3Ms, cannot be found among the network of proxy foreign mercenaries or local Islamist Jihadists. American lawmakers are badly mistaken if they think they can find them in Syria or anywhere in the Mideast. Throwing American taxpayers’ money at the so-called moderate Muslim militants in Syria does not solve any problem. Actually, it is like adding more fuel to the fire. The Obama administration and American lawmakers have already put aside $500,000,000.00 to find, train, and equip moderate Muslim militants in Syria. The whole world should unite in removing the plague of ISIS from the region.
In the first part of this paper, an attempt will be made to define the word “moderate” only in countries with secular governments and where moderates are seen as patient, compromising and humanist individuals, and where gods have not yet entered the arena of politics. As soon as the setting is changed to a less democratic region like the Mideast and something else is added to the mix, such as “Islamist”, the word moderate is rendered useless. With this new connotation, we have no way of knowing that an “Islamist moderate” individual has ever existed here. Thus, if the American political leaders are tempted by Ankara in search of finding a few thousand “moderate Muslim militants”, 3Ms, in Syria, they are wasting their time and American taxpayers’ money.
This section will be followed by a discussion of Senator John McCain’s search for the right rebels in Syria. It is believed that President Obama borrowed the phrase “moderate militants” from the Senator, who learned it from the Turkish Lobby in Washington. The next section will look at the so-called moderate rebels, especially the Free Syrian Army, to see how different they are from extremist Jihadists such as Al-Qaeda and ISIS. In conclusion, it is believed that none of the Syrian opposite opposition groups is “moderate.” An Islamist Jihadist in a non-secular setting cannot be moderate.
Moderate Muslim Militants
The concept of moderate, without adding any other dimensions such as religious fanaticism, is always described positively. Moderates keep within reasonable or proper limits. They are not extreme, excessive, or intense. They are balanced, fair, calm or mild. Mainly in politics or religion, they are opposed to extreme views and actions. They would like to reduce the extreme agenda and make less violent, severe, intense, or rigorous inflexible decisions. A moderate is reasonable, temperate, judicious, just, cool, steady, calm and avoids emotional, physical, intellectual, or other excesses. A moderate usually stresses the idea of caution, control, or self-restraint. A moderate offers a surprisingly temperate response to an angry challenge. A reasonable moderate suggests the imposition or adoption of limits derived from the application of reason or good sense.
The Urban Dictionary defines a moderate as a sane, well-balanced and rational person. He/she is someone with a political belief that sits between the two extremes of liberalism and conservatism, usually combining aspects of both. He may be liberal on social subjects yet conservative on economic issues. A moderate person is someone who seeks compromise on political issues and as such gets insulted or even abused by both extremes and ignored by the media that pursues extreme right or left perspectives because they make for better soundbites. By nature and definition, moderates do not exist in the Mideast. If we catch a few Muslim militants and force them to believe that they are moderates, they will not fight for us. They take the cold cash and run.
To start with, it is almost impossible to identify moderate Muslim militants anywhere in the Mideast. The keyword is moderate and it cannot be embodied in fundamentalist Muslim societies. The question is not about finding, recruiting, training, and equipping moderate opposition rebels to combat against our enemies and competitors in Syria. The problem is how to define moderate Muslim militants, acceptable Islamist-Jihadists or good terrorists to fight against the Syrian regime and ISIS, simultaneously. Since 2013, the US has sought the right rebels or moderate Muslim mercenaries, without any luck. Those who showed up were pure terrorists. Only a few of them showed up clean and shaved. It is only too obvious that nowhere in the Middle East have purely moderate Muslim militants ever existed. As stated earlier, those in charge of recruiting the right rebels are wasting time and American taxpayers’ money.
Generally speaking, in religion and politics, a moderate is an individual who is not extreme, partisan, or radical-minded. It is one of those buzzwords that cannot be clearly measured. The existence of the ideal moderate is disputed because of a lack of a moderate political ideology. Actually, it is common to describe what a moderate person is not, rather than defining exactly who that person is in regards to today’s political spectrum. Apparently, a moderate is lost between two radical mindsets and is unable to decide where to stand and at what distance he should place himself from either of the two extremes. As soon as religious fanaticism takes over a society, moderates will disappear. With both factions in the Mideast now calling for Jihad, there is a bloody race going on between the radical Sunnis and extreme Shia sects of Islam.
In religion, one is either a true believer or not. There is nothing in between. The three Middle Eastern monotheistic religions come in whole packages. The real believers are not allowed to choose some tenets vs. others. There is no democracy within each of these religions. The true believers must do what they are told. There is no room for bargaining or any compromise about the amount of religious tax, gender treatment, the number of daily prayers, or any other issue. Terrorism has been upgraded and has evolved into something that even its creators are unable to control.
The so-called Muslim moderates are not in any way, shape, or form secular, leaving Allah out of politics. They are unlike “centrist” parties in MDCs that are more civilized in Western democracies! Those that are fighting against the Syrian regime are foreign Muslim mercenaries and most of the local rebels are extremist Sunni Jihadists. Even national political movements and the revolution of the lower classes, the proletarian poor, have been Islamized. If there were any non-religious moderates they are totally gone.
The Mideast today is not Aristotle’s democratic society of old Greece that favored conciliatory politics dominated by moderates rather than the extremes of great wealth and poverty or the special interests of oligarchs and dictators. The special interest groups are associated with extremist Sunni and Shia sects of Islam. The “moderate Muslim militant” is an odd combination of words. As soon as an armed true believer comes in, a moderate one has no choice but to change color and creed. Moderate politicians must be patient and compromise with opponents on both sides. In the word combination, “moderate Islamist”, the second word negates the first one. Islam is unable to tolerate moderate politicians. The two are not and have never been compatible.
In Washington, there is a set of positive values associated with moderates. Although none of the Middle Eastern armed Islamist groups can be defined as moderate, still this hopeful feeling about locating moderates is not rare in the West, but from the Alawites, to Al-Qaeda, Fundamentalists Islamists, Hamas, Hezbollah, Jihadists, Salafis, Shias, Sunnis, Wahhabis, to Zionists, no group so far has called itself moderate! This wishful thinking and emphasizing positive aspects of moderate Muslims may be traced to Ankara. The West believes that the Turkish Islamist regime is a moderate model. The Islamist regime in Turkey has already begun implementing the Sharia laws. The Turkish leadership may shave but abuse their female relatives! The Turkish tyranny’s lack of tolerance shows up when Ankara bombs its own Kurdish population while a peace proposal rests on the table.
At home the term moderate is seen as positive and peaceful by the political leadership in the US. Even Aristotle saw moderates as the best fit for his republic. To him the moderates were valuable individuals compared with extremists on the right or the left. But, when he wrote about moderates, the deities, gods, and goddesses were not created as of yet or stayed out of politics. In the US, in the 2014 midterm election, 40% of those polled believed that they were moderates. From abroad, mainly in the Mideast, the country of Turkey can be identified as a false source of the positive view of moderate Islamists; false, because these two terms should not be located next to each other. The West has recognized the Salafi Islamist Turkish regime as being a more moderate government than Afghanistan’s Taliban. If both apply the Sharia laws of Islam, being more or less moderate means nothing.
At no time and in no place has Islam ever been moderate. Since its inception, the republic of Turkey has fared well on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean. After compromising with the West, during the signing of the 1923 Lausanne Treaty, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk and his Kemalism programs were recognized in the West. Until recently, he was known as a reformist national leader. The West forgave and reconstituted Ataturk, a fascist-bloody-murderer general. More importantly, his acts of genocide against non-Turks, mainly Armenians and Kurds, were ignored. Ataturk even became the hero of our former Defense Secretary, Chuck Hagel. In all of this, the Turkish Lobby in Washington had a major role.
By the early years of the new century, Ataturk’s star was falling fast. The new Islamist gang with all of the features of the original Egyptian Muslim brotherhood and Afghanistan’s Taliban came to power in Ankara. Under PM Erdogan, now a new President, and the Justice and Development Party, AKP, Islam was brought to the forefront. Turkey became a Sunni Islamic Republic patterned after its neighboring country, the Shia Islamic Republic of Iran. The only difference is that in Turkey political leaders shave and wear neckties. But, both abuse their women and ethnic minorities. The Turkish Lobby made Washington see Ataturk as a nice reformist leader and the Islamist government since 2002 as a moderate Muslim model.
Hassan Al-Banna established the Muslim Brotherhood, MB, in 1928. It is believed to be the first Islamic terrorist organization. It provided the foundation of radical Islam for the Mullahs in Iran and the Al-Qaeda terrorist group. Al-Qaeda’s current leader, Ayman al-Zawahiri, and his father both were very active members of the MB in Egypt. Today, few Arab-Muslim nations, including Saudi Arabia, consider the MB to be a terrorist organization. The Free Syrian Army, mostly followers of Sunni Islam, openly displayed their association with the MB. Similar to the Holy Roman Empire that was neither Holy, nor Roman, nor an Empire, the FSA is neither Free, nor Syrian, nor an Army. It is a hodgepodge of international, regional, local, and tribal Muslim terrorist groups. The leadership of these proxy Muslim terrorist groups is primarily in the hands of Turkish officers of the MIT, the Turkish National Intelligence Agency. In Syria or Iraq they are a network of proxies. Often the Turks are in the positions of leadership. Over 2,000 Turkish MIT officers, mainly extremist Sunni militants, are fighting in Syria.
In late 2010, the Arab Spring arrived in Tunisia and diffused to its neighboring countries in North Africa and Southwest Asia, the Middle East! Shortly thereafter, by 2011, the Muslim Brotherhood supporters dominated the show of force in Tahrir Square, in Cairo, Egypt. The Arab Spring movement penetrated into the Sinai Peninsula and Palestine welcomed it. Next, Jordan and Syria saw waves of Arab Spring demonstrations. But, the uprising changed form and became a civil war in the latter country. The West and Syria’s neighboring countries that wished for a regime change in Syria trained and paid Sunni Muslim militants, including the Free Syrian Army affiliated with the MB and the future ISIS terrorist group, to continue to fight against the Assad regime. While the Shia Islamic Republic of Iran had the full support of the Shia regime in Damascus, Sunni nations such as Turkey and the medieval monarchies of Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Bahrain, the UAE, and Jordan, plus the US, the EU, and NATO directly intervened in the Syrian civil war and have continued to be involved for the past three years.
Unless the FSA has pledged, in writing, that it would establish a secular and civil society in Syria, giving more money to these so-called moderates is like adding fuel to the fire. Their future agenda for democracy cannot change because of their original Islamist belief systems associated with Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood. Furthermore, in an evolutionary process, many of the MB members of the FSA have become official Al-Qaeda or ISIS associates.
The great majorities of the FSA members are fully associated with the MB and strictly follow Islamic tenets and the Sharia laws, every word of Islam’s Holy book, the Quran. While in the battlefield, even for propaganda, they take time out to pray to Allah five times a day. They yell “Allah-u Akbar” when they commit murder. More importantly, their bandana has the same color and inscription of ISIS’s flag of the Prophet Muhammad. It is almost impossible to distinguish between the FSA, Al-Nusrah Front, the Khorasan Group, Ahrar-Al-Sham, Salafis, Jihadists, and many other Al-Qaeda affiliates both in action and morality. They are uniform in appearance as well: dirty, smelly, in ragtag clothing, and very hairy.
Similar to many other Islamist-Jihadist terrorists, the FSA is marred by ill-discipline, in-group fighting, extremism, recruiting of child-soldiers, torture, and many war crimes. Some of the captured soldiers were forced to dig their own graves. Mock executions have not been uncommon. Prisoners of war were put behind the wheels of a truck loaded with explosives to hit selected government targets. Syria is a battlefield that only the most brutal groups survive. The FSA has committed war crimes of every sort, including severing body parts and limbs, beheadings, and burning prisoners. The moderate Muslim rebels have been involved in the kidnapping of foreign journalists and selling them to ISIS to be beheaded. The Islamist militants, moderate or not, are especially merciless towards women. None of these groups, unlike the Kurds, have any respect for their own women. Even worse, the FSA and the ISIS terrorist groups capture, take into slavery, sell and rape females of other ethnic groups.
McCain’s Muslim Moderates
Shortly after the capture of Iraq’s second largest city, Mosul, by ISIS on June 10, 2014, the world’s richest and most powerful Jihadist-terrorist organization posted their PR photos of a few of their members with Arizona’s Senator John McCain. The photos were taken in the May of 2013. With his Turkish MIT bodyguards, the Senator sneaked into Syria from Turkey to meet with his so-called moderate terrorists and promised that, if they would fight against the Assad regime, the US would train and pay them with American cold cash. Mr. McCain later said he did not know the ISIS members posing in the picture with him:
Senator McCain and his so-called Moderate Muslim Militant Terrorists
The Senator from Arizona was promoting and endorsing aid to his so-called moderates, even as they were carrying out cruel attacks against ethnic minorities such as Christians, Shia Muslims, Kurds, especially the Yazidi Kurds, and even taking their women as slaves. In the picture, to the right side of Mr. McCain, General Salim Idris, the head of the Free Syria Army, is standing. But General Idris was kicked out of his position for being “more-moderate”. To the far left, we also see Khalid Al-Hamad, the notorious “Heart-eater” who appeared in a viral video in which he cut out and ate the heart of a Shia victim in Syria. Some journalists have indicated that the man behind Al-Hamad is none other than the infamous Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi, the undisputed leader of ISIS, the now “Caliph Ibrahim.” To be included among McCain’s moderates, the Heart-eater and the Caliph Ibrahim must have been identified as “less-moderates.”
As early as June of 2013, Josh Rogin wrote, “Both in Syria and Turkey, McCain and Idris met with assembled leaders of Free Syrian Army units that traveled from around the country to see the U.S. senator. Inside those meetings, rebel leaders called on the United States to step up its support to the Syrian armed opposition and provide them with heavy weapons, a no-fly zone, and airstrikes on the Syrian regime and the forces of Hezbollah, which is increasingly active in Syria.”
On September 11, 2014, Rick Gladstone of the New York Times, quoting the representative of VoteVets, wrote that Mr. McCain “took photos with representatives of forces that he supported, many of which later became ISIS. It’s frightening to think what ISIS would be today, if John McCain had his way, and if we had sent even more weaponry their way.” Thus, it is believed that since McCain’s plan did not materialize, perhaps because enough moderate fighters were not found, the plan became a piece of history. Only ISIS generated some publicity about their association with an American Senator. Still, President Obama picked up the idea.
Obama’s Good Islamist-Terrorists
Evidently, this was not the end of the story. American taxpayers, who paid for Mr. McCain’s round trip to Syria, must learn that the idea of recruiting, training and helping Syrian opposition fighters was embraced by President Obama on the eve of the 13th anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. As is published on the White House’s site, Mr. Obama said, “Across the border, in Syria, we have ramped up our military assistance to the Syrian opposition. Tonight, I call on Congress again to give us additional authorities and resources to train and equip these fighters.” Mr. Obama’s statement is much more general than that of Senator McCain. The President’s statement could contain all of the Syrian opposition groups including ISIS itself.
Later, he had the audacity to seek $500 million to recruit, arm, and train moderate Syrian opposition forces. It was suggested that 5,000 of them should be found and trained in Jordan and Saudi Arabia by the CIA and the MIT. Thus, the American taxpayer would pay $100,000.00 per militant for this illegal regime change and for training less-radical Muslim militants. We pay them to become less-Islamist-jihadist-terrorists, to become our “Good Guys” or our “Moderate Terrorists.” But, the question is: how do we teach ex-terrorists to be moderate and simultaneously to fight against the Syrian army and ISIS? Speaking of the Syrian opposition groups that have been fighting the brutal regime, how moderate is moderate?
Based on the sources available, only two US lawmakers questioned McCain-Obama’s proposal. The day after Obama’s press conference, on September 12, when giving a keynote speech at the New Hampshire GOP Unity Breakfast, Senator Rand Paul, R-Kentucky, said that he was against arming moderate Syrian rebels. According to Jake Miller of CBS News, Senator Paul said in reference to McCain’s picture with the Syrian rebels “if a U.S. senator can’t differentiate between ISIS and moderate groups in the region, he asked, why should the rest of America have any confidence that the arms will be used as intended?” Mr. Paul, during a Senate hearing, tried to get our Secretary of State, John Kerry, to explain this “moderates for the win!” strategy in Syria. Apparently, dodging the question is easier than to give a foolish reply.
In addition, Senator Ted Cruz also criticized the president’s plan to arm Syrian rebels. He said, “The administration has presented no coherent plan for distinguishing the good guys from the bad guys.” Actually, to emphasize the fact, he repeated himself by saying, “Every time I have pressed the administration in both open hearings and classified hearings, as to how they would distinguish the good guys from the bad guys, the administration has failed to have an answer that makes any sense.”
Mr. Obama wants money to train and equip this many moderate Syrian rebels. But, the interesting question would be how such a small force is going to fight the national Syrian army and at the same time roll back a terrorist force like ISIS. Thanks to online sources, everybody knows that Obama actually has already covertly funded and equipped ISIS. With friends like Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar, ISIS has no need for training or equipment. In the case of war, the CIA and the MIT have given them the information to fight on more than one front. ISIS is currently an oil exporter and Turkey is their largest trade partner. Their wounded warriors are treated in the best Turkish hospitals.
For telling some basic truths in regards to the formation of the latest Sunni extremist terrorist group in the region, the American Vice President, Joe Biden, was pushed to apologize to the Turkish government and some of the medieval monarchies in the Middle East that were involved in state terrorism. President Obama, however, must apologize to the Kurds for not telling the truth about his deal with the Turkish tyrants in Ankara. Since day one of his presidency, Mr. Obama has been brainwashed by the Turkish Lobby in Washington D. C. to believe that the Kurds, living in Turkey are terrorists. From the revolution of the Young Turks to the campaigns of today’s Turkish Muslim Brotherhood, many non-Turks, including the Armenians and the Kurds, have been targets of genocide in Turkey. Washington must not listen to Ankara. The Kurds are America’s best friends.
Discussion
Five years before Senator McCain began searching uselessly for moderate mercenaries in Syria, Peter Hitchens (2008) wrote about what the West “did with the PLO and the IRA, whose grisly killers suddenly became moderates through a mystical process.” As long as they are being paid, they willingly change color and title. Nile Bowie’s (September 2, 2014) article title says it all. He described “the CIA’s plan to pay Islamist fighters to overthrow the regime in Syria as fueling radicalism, though Washington publically claims to only support so-called ‘moderates’, many of whom have now joined the ranks of the Islamic State…”
Sterling (September 5, 2014) reported that the two American journalists, Foley and Sotloff, were beheaded for documenting the “reality of Free Syrian Army.” Both journalists declared “the US should stop its proxy wars on Syria.” Although they were both embedded with Syrian moderate rebels, they documented some of the reality, not myths, about the Syrian “revolution”. Steven Sotloff reported that the CIA imported many of the Jihadist fighters and their weapons to Syria from Libya. It will be a mockery, Sterling wrote, “if the US government manipulates the tragic deaths of James Foley and Steven Sotloff to increase funding of moderate rebels who Foley described as ‘deeply infiltrated by foreign fighters and terrorist groups.’”
On this year’s anniversary of September 11, Hannah Allam wrote a piece on the fact that the US attempts to find the right allies, moderate ones, would be a tough job. Actually, she reported on a color-codified classification of the opposition forces in Syria. She stated that “In an effort to map out the ideological spectrum of Syria’s various rebel groups, Turkish and American officials used a color-coded scheme: Green for trusted friends, Red for clear-cut enemies and Yellow for those in the middle.” It is interesting that Ankara, Riyadh, and Washington were unable to come up with a comprehensive definition for the moderate Muslims in Syria. Turkey even nominated a few Al-Qaeda affiliated terrorist groups. The US was interested in working with “the nonviolent, political Syrian opposition.” But, the rebels proved to be distressingly disorganized and lacked credibility with common Syrian people.
The title of Sullum’s (September 12, 2014) article is the most descriptive of the attempts carried out by the US and its allies to find 3Ms. Allam (September 11, 2014) also wrote that it is a “tough” job, and Sullum wrote that it is “tricky” to find the right rebels to arm in Syria. Referring to Senator Rand Paul’s statements, Sullum wrote that the US has “been arming the Islamic rebels. Who do the Islamic rebels want to kill? Christians and other minorities…We say we only gave [weapons] to the nice ones, the ones that say, “Please, Sir… the ones that were nice, we called them moderates…”
Levine (September 19, 2014) believed that Iran and Syria, past and present enemies, are becoming de facto allies of the US. He continued that “those Syrian moderates, who haven’t exactly panned out in past iterations of American meddling, are now, again, their great Islamic hope. Saudi Arabia, America’s favorite country in the Middle East – except, of course, for Israel — is the beheading capital of the world. Levine wrote that according to the New York Times, “the moderate Free Syrian Army, the announced beneficiary of Obama’s largesse, recently undertook some beheadings of its own.”
Within two days, Cockburn, the most prolific and knowledgeable Western journalist, wrote two reports about the serious issues in the Mideast. One September 22, he stated the fact that the US policy in Syria was preposterous. He believed that “Neither the Syrian army nor the moderate Syrian rebels are strong enough to stop IS…” Cockburn alleged that Mr. Obama’s plan was to train and equip moderate rebels in Syria who supposedly going to fight both Assad and ISIS. “This is essentially a PR operation…” In another article, on the following day, Cockburn wrote that the release of 49 Turkish diplomats was a mystery. He asked if Turkey was “colluding” with ISIS? Apparently Ankara was plotting against the Kurds. He further wrote that the opponents of ISIS in Syria are divided and “the US is backing a group of moderates who barely exist and wants to weaken the Assad government.”
On September 22, 2014, Tim Lister wrote that it was a “tough” job to find the “right rebels” in Syria. He wrote “The United States has promised to supply weapons, communications equipment and training to rebels in Syria so they can help battle the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS.) Now comes the hard part: identifying ‘acceptable’ groups able and willing to take the fight to ISIS. The security landscape in Syria changes daily.” Not surprisingly, alliances, priorities, and evolution of politics are fluid and change extremely fast in the region. Actually, since the 1979 Iranian Revolution the political evolution has not been moving towards the center but in the direction of religious radicalism. According to Lister, “Corruption and incompetence permeates most of the Syrian rebel factions designated as moderates, and some have even been involved outright in serious war crimes.”
Kampmark (September 23, 2014) was more concerned about Turkey’s shaky “double game.” He wrote that Turkey’s own position in Syria is one of attempting to farm out anti-Assad moderates, though the distinction is often manufactured rather than genuine. He explained “It does, however, have a sophistication beyond the school grade distinctions made by Washington. For one thing, the Turkish distinction on the al-Nusra front [an Al-Qaeda affiliate terrorist group] is at odds with those of its Western allies. As al-Nusra has been fighting, at stages at least, with “moderate” elements, abandoning them would potentially drive them into the IS orbit.”
Andre Vetches (September 26, 2014) alleged that “The West is striking again; it is stabbing the very center, the heart of the Arab World. This time it is targeting the group – ISIS – which it created itself, and which it had been arming, feeding and pampering until just very recently.” He was told in Istanbul that the ‘Syrian opposition’ groups were “not really ‘Syrian opposition’. They are modern-day legionnaires collected from various Arab countries, including Qatar and Saudi Arabia, paid by western imperialist powers. Some are members of Al-Qaeda and other terrorist organizations. Most are militant Sunni Muslims. One could describe them as rogue elements hired to fight the Assad government.”
Ben Schreiner (September 30, 2014) has produced a short “dictionary reference to the war on ISIS.” To him, the term Bad Guys imply, “Whoever it is that is currently being bombed and shot at by the U.S. and its ‘partners.’” The phrase Good Guys refers to “The ‘moderates’ receiving U.S. arms and cash in order to sell American journalists to those beheading ‘bad guys.’” And, Moderates are “The ‘good guys’ eating the hearts of ‘violent extremists.’” Two more of his entries are: Middle East being “A vast depository holding America’s ‘oil’ and Saudi Arabia defined as “A state governed by a benignly beheading clan of democrats kindly overseeing to the well-being of America’s ‘oil.’” In a way, Schreiner is sarcastically talking about American hegemonic foreign policies to control natural Middle Eastern fossil fuels.
Peter Certo (October 2, 2014) informed us that “Despite Congress’ approval of $500 million in new funds to train and arm other Syrian rebels, the CIA—which has already been conducting a smaller-scale program in Jordan to do just that—is reportedly deeply skeptical about the plausibility of this plan, with one member of Congress reporting that CIA sources had described it as a “fool’s errand.” He quoted the University of Michigan’s Juan Cole as saying that “even moderate groups forge tactical battlefield alliances with groups like IS and Nusra when the need arises, leading to a virtual certainty that arms supplied by the United States could be traded to or seized by IS. This happened even with the Iraqi Army, so it’s a good bet that it would happen with Syrian rebel groups too (and indeed, some reports suggest it already has.)”
Barak Barfi (October 8, 2014) similarly argued that “Equipping the Free Syrian Army got off to a rocky start. Sources in Turkey told me this summer that one brigade tried selling American-supplied TOW anti-tank missiles to Jabhat al-Nusra for $25,000 this year. Throwing money, arms and training at Free Syrian Army units will not defeat ISIS. Instead, it will require a fundamental shift in the Free Syrian Army’s thinking. In contrast, Free Syrian Army brigades often battle for material gain and social status. In combat, their forces frequently disintegrate, no longer acting as a team.
Pepe Escobar (October 17, 2014) believed that the leader of ISIS, Caliph Ibrahim, the self-appointed and titled, could count on indirect assistance from Turkey. The Turkish President that Escobar called Sultan Erdogan is allowing the Kurds to die instead of repulsing the Caliph of the ISIS. He wrote that those who wanted to recruit the right Syrian rebels “have no clue who the hell qualifies as a moderate rebel. The rabble must be “vetted” – and then sent to, of all places, Saudi Arabia for training…. Even under the most optimistic scenario, the Pentagon won’t have its proxy moderate rebel army on the ground in Syria before the summer of 2015.” But, under such a title, it will never ever be on the ground.
William Blum (October 17, 2014) was concerned about the fact that nothing about ISIS is believable. He stated, “You can’t believe a word the United States [Western powers] or its mainstream media say about the current conflict involving the Islamic State. You can’t believe a word Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait, Jordan, or the United Arab Emirates say about ISIS… Why has NATO-member Turkey allowed so many Islamic extremists to cross into Syria? Is Turkey more concerned with wiping out the Islamic State or the Kurds under siege by ISIS? He correctly affirmed that one “can’t believe the so-called moderate Syrian rebels. You can’t even believe that they are moderate. They have their hands in everything, and everyone has their hands in them.”
Peter Van Buren (October 30, 2014) compared the nonexistence of moderates to the fantasy of unicorns. Around the world, many children’s books are written about such animals. We even have seen their pictures and cartoons of them running around. He wrote, “Syria today is a country in ruins. But somewhere loose in that land are unicorns — creatures often spoken of but never seen — the Obama administration’s much publicized, “moderate Syrian rebels.” Who are they? The working definition seems to be something like: people who oppose Assad, won’t fight him for now, but may in the meantime fight the Islamic State, and aren’t too “fundamentalist.” The US plans to throw arms and training at them as soon as it can find some of them, vet them, and transport them to Saudi Arabia.”
Conclusion
The continuation of civil war in Syria and the birth of the world’s worst Islamist-Jihadist terrorist group, ISIS, together mark the failure of the political projects of the Western colonial powers including the US, the EU, and NATO, and their regional partners, to have a regime change in Syria. The West and their local puppet governments of Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Jordan, the UAE, and Bahrain created the ISIS, trained, and armed them. The Western colonial powers want to divide and control the Mideast and thus continue with their perpetual war. Special interest groups including high-tech and expensive military hard and soft wares, big oil companies, and banks influence them. Their newest trick, however, is to recycle some of the old Cold War issues such as the communism scare. Now, however, the colonial West and their regional partners replace communism with terrorism. No wonder, then, that Ankara still foolishly calls the Kurds both communists and terrorists.
The purpose of this paper was to prove that today “Islamist moderates” do not exist in the Mideast. Together Democrats and Republicans are mistaken if they believe that they can spend half a billion dollars and train a few thousand Syrian moderate Muslim militants to fight the regime and ISIS. The two American political parties have usually been in full agreement in regards to the matters of foreign affairs, particularly in the Mideast. They have always wanted to fight communism, which is now being replaced by terrorism, they have concerned themselves with the security of Israel, and always have the largest oil reserves in the Mideast on their mind. Senator McCain and President Obama and the two political parties they represent should stop recruiting any kind of rebels in Syria. Actually, the right rebels are the wrong ones.
Sources:
Allam, Hannah. “For US, finding right allies in Syria will be tough.” McClatchy Washington Bureau, September 11, 2014. http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2014/09/11/ 239590/turkish-aid-to-al-qaida-linked.html
Barfi, Barak. “The group that could help defeat the ISIS behemoth.” cnn.com, updated 9:27 PM EDT, Wed October 8, 2014. http://www.cnn.com/2014/10/07/opinion/ barfi-kurdsisis/?cid=ob_articlesidebarall&iref=obnetwork
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Dr. Koohzad is the author of a forthcoming book entitled: Kurdistan: World’s Largest International Colony, Reflections on Its Political Economy.