Syrian Terrorist Wanted by NATO Terrorists ‘Reinvents’ Himself

Bassem Youssef on X: Al-Jolani reinvented

For more than 20 years, the US-NATO empire has been pretending to fight Al Qaeda (AQ) terror groups all over the Middle East. Having just installed a rebranded AQ outfit, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), in Syria, the CIA has had its cover story well and truly shot to pieces. It’s not that we didn’t know that Al Qaeda was Al CIA-da[i] a long time ago. It’s just that new depths have been plumbed. And that’s quite an achievement given how low they’d already sunk.

As unexpected as the fall of the Assad regime in Syria was, its driving force was rapidly discernible. The CIA, Mossad, Turkey and MI6 have finally accomplished their regime-change mission, which began in 2011. The fact that they used the rebranded AQ outfit HTS to do it is a minor detail. When the US-NATO empire uses its terror outfits to terrorise us, they are called terrorists. When the empire uses its terror outfits to smash its enemies, they are called rebels.

The US State Department still has a $10m bounty on the HTS leader’s head, Mohammad al-Jolani, who has been a designated terrorist for more than 10 years. The State Department’s charge sheet of al-Jolani’s misdemeanours reads:

“Al-Jawlani leads the al-Nusrah Front (ANF), al-Qa’ida’s (AQ) affiliate in Syria. In January 2017, ANF merged with several other hardline opposition groups to form Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS). While al-Jawlani is not the leader of HTS, he remains the leader of AQ-affiliated ANF, which is at the core of HTS. Under al-Jawlani’s leadership, ANF has carried out multiple terrorist attacks throughout Syria, often targeting civilians.”

Putting him to good use on CIA regime change operations is certainly one way of saving $10m on the CIA budget. One day you’re rampaging around Syria and Iraq supervising beheadings in your role as deputy to the founder of ISIS. The next day you’re in CIA-issue green fatigues being photographed by CNN looking wistfully into the distance, contemplating how to keep the US-NATO empire happy. In BBC speak, it’s called ‘reinventing’ yourself. If he plays his cards right, all will be forgiven.

And Al CIA-da in Syria have so far been playing their cards right by following the script handed to them. They’ve pledged undying love for Israel – they’re on record as saying they “love Israel” – and they “will go for full peace with Israel”. They even took time out of their busy schedule to be interviewed by The Times of Israel, requesting their Israeli paymasters to “plant a rose in the Syrian garden” and “support the Syrian people”. Reuters has confirmed that Syria’s new rulers are reading from the script handed to them by BlackRock and the World Economic Forum, proving (if proof were needed) that neo-liberal market economics is a highly versatile app compatible with any ideology, including the recently updated version of extremist Salafism 2.0.

While we’re on the subject of following the money, let’s not forget that Syria, up until now, was blocking a natural gas pipeline project between Qatar and Turkey. Qatar’s natural gas reserves, estimated at approximately 896 trillion cubic feet (14% of the world’s known reserves), are not reaching Western markets in the most cost-efficient way. That project is now back on the table.

And while we’re on the subject of Qatar, it’s not my intention to upset the Al CIA-da fans at the Qatari-funded Middle East Monitor, but I’m afraid there are some wrinkles in the fabric of the inorganic, in fact very genetically modified, ‘rebels’. It would be understating it to say they haven’t quite yet mastered pronoun culture. Syria’s new Minister of Justice plans to solve the pronoun dilemma by simply banning women judges, and ordering them to hand over their case load to the blokes who really know how to do law and justice. It remains to be seen how Clarissa Ward, head of CNN News’ Drama Production Unit, will paper over that little crack.

Still on the subject of Qatar, Jonathan Cook had this piece unceremoniously pulled from the Qatar-funded Middle East Eye. I’m guessing it had something to do with a reference to “the rich Gulf lapdogs” of the US-NATO empire.

What the Middle East Monitor’s celebratory opinion pieces don’t tell you is that, from its inception, the insurgency against the Assad regime was backed and funded by NATO allies and Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) states. HTS is mainly supported by Turkey, which supplies the training and equipment, while Qatar generously provides funding.

The Fall of Bashar – from a Syrian Army officer’s perspective is an interesting first-hand account from inside the Syrian army. If you trust it, and I think I do, the most important revelation for my money is this, in the words of a senior Syrian Army Officer:

5^th December:

“[timestamp 15:00] The problem we have is this unexplained withdrawal [of Syrian troops]. We had the upper hand in Homs. They [Syrian Army] left 70 operational tanks behind when we were ordered to withdraw from Homs. Those ordered to go are knocking their heads against the wall in frustration…Nobody knows if the orders being issued to the troops are coming from the president.” [emphasis added]

9^th December:

“We got betrayed by President Bashar al-Assad himself. I know this for a fact. The orders to withdraw from Homs were given just as he was about to board his flight for Moscow… The port of Latakia was bombed by Israel today. Erased, written off the map. It doesn’t exist anymore. But the Russian airbase remains untouched.” [emphasis added]

Russia’s military assets in Syria remain intact, and Moscow is in discussions with Al CIA-da in Syria to retain its two bases – a naval base in Tartous and the Khmeimim Air Base near the port city of Latakia. Middle East Eye (also Qatari-funded) reports this as a done deal.

My interpretation of this is that Russia has done a deal with NATO powers. It has traded Syria for a favourable settlement to the conflict in Ukraine, which may see Ukraine remaining a neutral country and Russia keeping the territories in the East that it has taken. The larger question behind this speculation is the extent to which deals made by all of these so-called sovereign powers are ultimately mediated by the true global hegemon – the Owners and Controllers of Global Financial Capital (OCGFC). The fall of Syria may have come as a surprise to us, but I doubt that it was a surprise to the global planners. It is part of an end game.

HTS is under Turkish and American intelligence control. As of 15^th December, Israel had carried out close to 800 airstrikes in Syria, comprehensively destroying all of its military capability, and paving the way for Israel’s further occupation of more Syrian land without any resistance. It has cut off the supply line between Iran and Hezbollah in Lebanon, which is a major blow to Palestinian anti-Zionist resistance, such as it was. Syrian airspace has effectively been converted to Israeli airspace, greatly increasing Israel’s strike potential against Iran.

The AQ coup in Syria is set to instigate a carve-up into separate enclaves governed by militias under the control of different factions of the US empire alliance. It looks as though Aleppo, Idlib and Homs will fall under Turkish supervision; Damascus and Daraa will be governed by a Saudi/UAE/Jordan coalition; Israel will control Suwayda in the South; and the Kurds will be under US supervision in the East.

Syria has been overtaken by AQ, which is a proxy of the Zionist US empire. To say that this is no improvement in either Syrian or Palestinian prospects is putting it mildly. One can both acknowledge the deep divisions within Syria caused by Assad’s rule and recognise that this latest development is a serious geopolitical downgrade from an anti-imperialist perspective. These are not mutually exclusive positions. Anyone who recognises this has been attacked by HTS sympathisers as a misguided grouping lazily labelled ‘the international left’. This label is actually code for anyone sensible who realises that the takeover in Syria by the NATO-backed HTS is a victory for Zionism, and the attack by HTS sympathisers is a thinly disguised distraction to hide the embarrassment of effectively siding with Israel instead of with Palestinians and against imperialism.

The analysis by a certain section, or should I say sect, of the independent media is decidedly off. These are outlets and influencers who, until now, appeared to have burnished their credentials as anti-Zionist. The revelation for me was that they seem to despise Shia Iran and the former Alawite regime in Syria more than they despise Zionism. The collateral damage in this tribal hate fest are the Palestinians. The celebratory, or at least unduly optimistic, posture adopted by the likes of Middle East Monitor on the takeover of Syria by Al CIA-da ‘rebels’ is music to Israel’s and the US-NATO empire’s ears.

Maajid Nawaz’s analysis ranks as one of the more curious propaganda pieces I’ve seen in the last week or so. His reference to the situation in Syria as a “People’s liberation” and a “genuinely popular uprising” is more risible than Clarissa Ward’s ridiculous amateur dramatics propagandising the ascent of NATO’s Salafist stooges [emphasis added]. Exactly which part of the Turkey-CIA-Mossad regime change operation was planned by the People? Which of the 800 Israeli airstrikes on Syrian military targets, gazed on lovingly by the ‘rebels’, had popular approval? When did the People agree to more of the Golan Heights being stolen from under their noses while the plucky ‘rebels’ stepped aside and gawped at Israeli chutzpah?

As Craig Murray succinctly observes:

“If Syria is so free, why are all the foreign powers that cooperated to install its new government meeting today in Jordan to determine its future?”

Nawaz speaks of a “grand regional settlement” on the horizon, but doesn’t define the outcome of this settlement. So, using the current geopolitical trajectory as a logical springboard, I’ll fill in the blanks for him:

· Israel resumes its brutality in Lebanon on the assumption of a weakened Hezbollah army.

· The US and Israel attack Iran to consolidate the US-NATO empire hold on the Middle East and advance the Greater Israel project.

· Israel finishes the filthy job it started but failed to complete in 1948 – ethnically cleansing or exterminating Palestinians from Gaza and the West Bank.

If this is Nawaz’s vision of “the wider grand peace settlement”, then he should be able to sleep more comfortably since 9^th December – the chances of it have greatly increased with the installation of Al Qaeda in Syria. Guess how many times the word “Palestinian” came up in Nawaz’s analysis of a grand peace settlement? Zero. That tells me all I need to know about Nawaz’s vision for the Middle East – for him, as for Israel, Palestinians are gone. They don’t even require a cursory mention.

As for Syrians themselves, the aim of these CIA/Mossad-led regime change operations in the Middle East is not stability and prosperity. It is chaos and instability. That is what Israel craves to justify its perpetual victimhood and provide further pretexts for aggression in the region. That is what the arms manufacturers need to steal more of our money. That is what the New World Order planners need to justify crises serving as pretexts for rule by state-of-emergency and more population control. The peace pipe Nawaz is smoking is not going to be passed around by Israel and NATO, and they, together with their reliable ally Turkey, are the ones driving this war machine. The GCC lapdogs are passengers going along for the ride.

I believe that a new geopolitical paradigm is required to understand the end game. Those with eyes to see accept that the entire West is a plutocracy in which the major political parties contesting national elections are controlled by powerful vested corporate interests. We also understand that global financial capital has subsumed national government power and that the covid-19 psychological operation was the first salvo in a global coup d'état by a financial technocracy. And yet many, if not most, find it difficult to embrace the possibility that global financial capital is also mediating conflict at the global level.

There are disagreements within the global financial oligarchic system, and those differences are varied and complex. But there is one thing that now unites our overlords more than ever – an understanding that the entire global population must be oppressed if they are to preserve their hold on concentrated wealth underpinned by a global power structure.

The so-called emerging multipolar world order is a Punch and Judy show put on by the OCGFC to install a world order controlled by financial capital. The savagery of war, with its needless indiscriminate killing, is the ultimate human crisis that the parasitic class has come to depend on to advance its agendas of concentrating wealth and imposing greater controls on the mass of humanity, which it fears and despises. To that end, a showdown with Iran is virtually inevitable. Perhaps the most galling aspect of it all is that the parasitic controllers are confident there is no risk to them, which is why they are hurtling down this path. They believe they will achieve their aims regardless of who emerges as the victor in any conflict.

If Iran is to prevail, it will likely have to rely on some level of support from Russia and China. In which case, the parasitic class will pull the financial levers of a BRICS-led world order. If Iran is destroyed, they believe they can rule over a Zionist world order – an even more Zionist order than the current one we’re living in, if you can imagine such a horror.

As with national elections, the Establishment has a preferred choice, and the criteria are actually quite similar to those used in the election fraud – which fork in the road will hoodwink the masses more effectively? But rest assured that either way, war is the ‘problem’ presented to the people, and the ‘solution’ remains the same – a global public-private partnership fronted by the UN, in which local freedom and autonomy are sacrificed at the altar of a carbon-rationed, global digital gulag. And all the global world powers, under the direction of the OCGFC, are firmly signed up to that dystopia. Every manufactured crisis, every war, is designed to lead us into that pen.

That is why the global Establishment always cooperate with each other at crucial moments. That is why none of them should be trusted or supported. That is why Syrian troops were betrayed and ordered to stand down in Homs.

If Biden’s, Putin’s, Trump’s, Starmer’s or Xi’s sons and daughters were sent to die in the battlefield, I might change my mind. We know that’s not going to happen.

---

[i] Thank you James Corbett