The dissolution of the Hazm Movement, one of the last US-armed “moderate” rebel factions in northern Syria, has created a paucity of factions for the US to throw weapons at, at a time when the Pentagon is talking up the creation of a huge moderate force.
Enter al-Qaeda? It’s hard to imagine, but Director of National Intelligence (DNI) James Clapper is insisting now that moderates are “anyone who is not affiliated with ISIS,” and that the only obstacle to arming such groups are the international rules of law.
There are ways around that too though. Al-Qaeda’s Syria faction, Jabhat al-Nusra, is being courted by Qatar to publicly distance itself from al-Qaeda’s parent leadership as a way to get around international bans on funding al-Qaeda.
Ideologically, Nusra is a preposterously non-moderate faction, but the US has managed to keep from publicly going after the group, claiming airstrikes which were on Nusra members were really aimed at a faction called Khorasan, a term the US invented themselves.
This set Nusra against US-aligned rebel factions, wiping many of them out. This may come full circle, with Nusra having killed so many “moderates” that the US decides it’s just simpler to arm them directly, and so long as Nusra can keep a nominal distance from al-Qaeda’s parent leadership, the whole “arming al-Qaeda” thing can be downplayed, at least a bit.
A match made in hell–US and AQ working together in harmony…to achieve israel's goal of overthrowing Assad.
More wishful thinking from those who now ¨forge new realities¨, each one more bizarre than the former. Are there no really intelligent people in the US government who can see through all this crap? It is true that when History repeats itself, it is as parody. Tragic, in this case.
al Nusra is actually linked to ISIS, according to the USG and ISIS itself. al Nusra is likely the group that carried out the sarin attack against Ghoutta, and is working to expand its chemical warfare abilities. It is closely linked to al Qaeda.
Documentation: http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2015/03/us-conside…
Given the heritage of al-Qaeda, from the arming of the mujahideen by the CIA against the Russians in Afghanistan to the OBL-stated reasons for 9/11 it should be no surprise that the US is attempting to align themselves with their own offspring.
It doesn't change the facts that they (al-Qaeda or Jabhat al-Nusra, if you prefer) are still terrorists but it does clearly tag the USG as terrorist sympathizers, eh? Birds of a feather and all that…
Terrorists who kill for us — No longer terrorists?
Of course, for if the Islamic State had joined the Iraq government to fight against Kurds and others who have taken up arms against such a US backed terrorist state, then surely ISIS would no longer be terrorists.
Problem is, every fighter in the Iraq Civil War is a terrorist, from the Kurds, Islamic State and Iraq government — all civilian slaughtering terrorists, all doing ethnic cleansing to gain permanent rule over their share of the land.
And this intellectual stupidity of rebranding terrorists, exactly why will our intellectual upper half of society eat up such propaganda? For the same reason that they have voted for every war our Empire has ever fought, they get to own ever dollar plundered in time of war — every penny of the grand spoils of war.