The “Sacred Union” Between the United States and al-Qaida

Though already inundated with an enormous number of terrorists, Syria can now count another international terrorist organization as an actor in its ongoing civil war. According to Turkish admiral Turker Erturk in his June resignation speech from the Turkish Military Academy, al-Qaida has already accomplished several major acts of terrorism in Syria and now counts the United States as one of its main supporters. Erturk added that multiple suicide bombings in Damascus show that the West and its Arab allies have decided to repeat the “Salvadoran script” by replacing the opposition with international terrorist groups. Moreover, the terrorist-aided destabilization of El Salvador was led by John Negroponte, who went on to be the American Ambassador to Iraq, and Robert Ford, who now serves as the United States Ambassador to Syria.

Peter Oborne, a columnist at the British newspaper The Daily Telegraph, confirms that the United States and Great Britain have secretly cooperated in recent months with al-Qaida in the joint effort against Syrian authorizes. In his Feb. 18 article, “Syria’s Crisis Is Leading Us to Unlikely Bedfellows,” Oborne observes that a series of terrorist attacks carried out in Damascus in late 2011 bear a strong resemblance to earlier al-Qaida attacks in Iraq. According to Oborne, al-Qaida militants travelled to Syria from Libya via the “Turkish corridor.” Oborne concluded that the triple alliance of “Washington, London and al-Qaida” posed the great risk and danger for the United Kingdom.

Islamist militant leader Omar Bakri Muhammad, who currently resides in Lebanon, admitted in an interview with The Daily Telegraph that members of al-Qaida, aided by former Lebanese Prime Minister Saad Hariri and his political movement Al Mustaqbal, have already entered Syria via Lebanon. In a press conference in Baghdad, Iraqi Foreign Minister Koshiar Zibari confirmed that al-Qaida militants seeking to transport weapons and carry out terrorist attacks are passing into Syria through the Iraqi border.

The British newspaper The Guardian published an article on July 3 entitled “Military Intervention in Syria Would Be Disastrous for Its People.” The author of the article, Sami Ramadani, also pointed to the newly forged alliance between the United States and al-Qaida. Ultimately, the United States and Turkey, seeking Qatar and Saudi Arabia’s petrodollars, actively work to destabilize the situation in Syria. While Hillary Clinton was still trying to convince the world of the necessity of military intervention in Syria, the CIA was already working to support and train militants. As we now know, the United States and its NATO allies won over terrorist leaders and common criminals from different countries, hired them as mercenaries and trained them in special camps in Turkey and Lebanon. Recently, an Iraqi Special Forces member serving as a delegate in Arab League Observer Mission to Syria said that he was shocked to find Pakistani, Iraqi and Afghan mercenaries during his stay in Homs and recognized some of them as terrorists known in Iraq. It is also worth noting that after the liberation of Homs, Syrian authorities captured more than 100 mercenaries from Arab countries and other states outside of the Middle East, including a large number of French legionnaires.

Correspondent for the British newspaper The Sunday Times Hala Jaber is convinced that the transportation of religious extremists and foreign mercenaries into Syria from neighboring countries has caused the violence to escalate, forcing international observers to suspend their work in the country. Jaber emphasized that at the beck and call of Saudi sheiks are dozens of fanatical Libyan, Tunisian, Algerian, Saudi Arabian, Lebanese, Egyptian, Jordanian and Kuwaiti citizens willing to cross into Syria and push for the creation of an international Islamic caliphate.

British newspaper The Times reported in January that Saudi Arabia and Qatar clandestinely agreed to finance the Syrian opposition by buying various weapons for the fight against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. The leaders of the Syrian opposition came to their tripartite agreement with Saudi Arabia and Qatar after a meeting of the foreign ministers of the Arab League in Cairo in January. During this meeting, “the Saudi representatives offered some help,” a member of the Syrian opposition commented to The Times, adding that the Saudis were planning to supply weapons to the insurgents through the Syrian-Turkish border.

“Many Turkish-made firearms are used in Syria,” Mehmet Ali Ediboglu, a deputy MP from the opposition in the Turkish Hatay province along the Syrian border, said in an interview with United Arab Emirates publication The National. Edigoblu, together with a delegation from the Republican Turkish Party, visited Syria in Sep. 2011. During the visit, Syrian officials showed the delegation trucks full of weapons that had been unloaded and deserted in the buffer zone between Turkish and Syrian-controlled checkpoints. “The Syrians said the arms ended up with the Muslim Brotherhood,” Ediboglu stated in the interview.

Debkafile, an Israeli internet news source and careful observer of the Israeli intelligence agency Mossad, reported that as of Aug. 2011, NATO was already supplying the Syrian opposition with missiles, anti-tank rocket launchers, mortars and heavy machine guns via Turkey. “The Syrian insurgents received military training in Turkey,” the Israeli publication reported. NATO and the United States have organized a campaign to recruit thousands of Muslim volunteers from different countries in order to strengthen the Syrian insurgency, and the Turkish army trains them and then assists them in safely crossing the Turkish-Syrian border.

According to The Guardian in their June 22 article “Saudi Arabia Plans to Fund Syria Rebel Army,” Saudi Arabia is ready to give full financial support to the Free Syrian Army “as a means of encouraging mass defections from the military and increasing pressure on the Assad regime.” Riyadh has already discussed far-reaching plans with Washington and other Arab countries. According to sources from three unnamed Arab states, The Guardian reported that the idea of financial support for the Syrian opposition — and the larger consequence of the total destruction of the Syrian state — initially came not from the Saudis, but rather from their Arab allies. Moreover, the encouragement of the Syrian military defections coincided with Saudi Arabia’s decision to supply weapons to Syria. According to The Guardian, discussions with officials from the three unnamed Arab states revealed that the supply of automatic rifles, grenade launchers, anti-tank missiles and other arms from Saudi Arabia and Qatar began to move into Syria during mid-May of this year. According to the newspaper’s anonymous sources, “the final agreement to move weapons from storage points inside Turkey into rebel hands was hard won, with Ankara first insisting on diplomatic cover from the Arab states and the U.S.” The authors of the article, Martin Chulov and Ewen MacAskill, stress that Turkey has been given permission to establish a command center in Istanbul that would coordinate weapons delivery and consult leaders of combat troops in Syria. At the beginning of this year, other British journalists personally witnessed a weapons transfer near the Turkish border.

The New York Times published an article on June 21 reporting that the CIA has already organized the supply of arms and equipment for the Syrian opposition. According to the article, “CIA Said to Aid in Steering Arms to Syrian Opposition,” a team of experienced CIA operatives is currently set up in southern Turkey to help transport military supplies across the Turkish-Syrian border. Eric Schmitt, the author of the article, writes that one of the channels of supply for the weapons is the Syrian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood. Machine guns, grenade launchers and anti-tank weapons were yet again supplied to the Syrian opposition by the governments of Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar. The CIA also helps some groups in the creation of intelligence and counterintelligence units in the fight against Bashar al-Assad. This information was corroborated by The Huffington Post’s Andrea Stone, who notes that CIA operatives have been in southern Turkey since March to consult the governments of Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates about cooperating with and supplying weapons to the Free Syrian Army. Moreover, the deputy secretary-general of Turkey’s Labor Party reported that the CIA recruited about 6,000 Arab, Afghan and Turkish mercenaries to carry out terrorist acts in Syria.

The union between the United States and al-Qaida does not seem to bother former CIA officer and Foundation for Defense of Democracies senior fellow Reuel Marc Gerecht, who writes a column for The Wall Street Journal. In his July 11 column “To Topple Assad, Unleash the CIA,” Gerecht wrote that a CIA major operation, if coordinated with forces from Turkey, Jordan and Iraqi Kurdistan, could destroy Assad. In his opinion, a small secret CIA operation against the Syrian president will not produce any results. Gerecht places special emphasis on the fact that Assad, “who depends upon his Shiite Alawite minority (roughly 10-15 percent of the population), does not have the manpower for a multiple-front counterinsurgency.” According to Gerecht, “a coordinated, CIA-led effort to pour anti-tank, anti-aircraft and anti-personnel weapons through gaping holes in the regime’s border security wouldn’t be hard. The regime’s lack of manpower and Syria’s geography — low-rising mountains, arid steppes and forbidding deserts — would likely make it vulnerable to the opposition, if the opposition had enough firepower.” Gerecht is convinced that an operation to overthrow Assad would require minimal effort on the part of the CIA. “This Syrian action would not be a massive undertaking. Even when the CIA ramped up its aid to Afghan anti-Soviet forces in 1986-87, the numbers involved (overseas and in Washington) were small, at roughly two dozen. An aggressive operation in Syria would probably require more CIA manpower than that, but likely still fewer than 50 U.S. officers working with allied services.”

Gerecht believes that the ultimate goal of Assad’s downfall is helped by the prime minister of Turkey’s recent break with Assad as well as the position of the United States’ greatest ally in the Middle East, Jordan, against Damascus. Furthermore, Gerecht suggests that the Kurdistan region of Iraq could provide the CIA with freedom of action, if they are willing to exchange American support for the Kurds in any disputes with Baghdad and Tehran.