It seems every news outlet is suddenly confirming what the Syrian president Assad has claimed months ago. To a quite large part the insurgency in Syria consists of foreign Salafi fighters.
- AFP via Al Arabia: Foreigners join fight against ‘apostate’ Syria regime
- Spiegel: Christians Flee from Radical Rebels in Syria
- Time: Meet the Islamist Militants Fighting Alongside Syria’s Rebels
- NYT: Al Qaeda Taking Deadly New Role in Syria’s Conflict
As usual the NYT is propaganda and wrong in its headline and the piece. The Salafis do not have a "new role" but a quite established one.
From the TIME piece:
In another town in northern Idlib, another jihadist — belonging to a different group — also shared Ibrahim’s goal of an Islamic state. “Abu Zayd,” is a 25-year-old Sharia graduate who heads one of the founding brigades of Ahrar al-Sham, a group that adheres to the conservative Salafi interpretation of Sunni Islam.
…
The Ahrar started working on forming brigades “after the Egyptian revolution,” Abu Zayd said, well before March 15, 2011 when the Syrian revolution kicked off with protests in the southern agricultural city of Dara’a. The group announced its presence about six months ago, he said. Abu Zayd denied the presence of foreigners even though TIME saw a man in the group’s compound who possessed strong Central Asian features.
…
One prominent Syrian smuggler in a border town near Turkey said that he ferried 17 Tunisians across the night before. […] “Before that, every day there were new people, from Morocco, Libya, and elsewhere,” he said. (In the course of several hours of waiting to cross back into Turkey, I saw at least a dozen Arabs who were clearly not Syrian, and identified as foreigners by the smuggler.)
Bashar Assad was right. These guerrilla groups formed BEFORE the start of demonstrations in Syria and many of them are foreigners. This confirms that there was indeed, as Seymour Hersh reported in 2007, a larger well prepared plan behind this whole war. The ground was obviously already prepared before the conflict was started with provocateurs enticing bloody conflicts between local demonstration and police forces by firing at both sides.
That everyone now comes out with these Al Qaeda stories might be signal that the propaganda that covered up the real conflict with blabber of "peaceful protests" and "freedom" is no longer needed. It also might have a much more sinister purpose.
Following the headlines above, some parts of the FSA are now complaining about the existance of these Salafi groups. But here the hyping of their existence and the alleged threat of them taking over is used as a justification for intervention by foreign troops:
Those pushing Western governments to play a greater role in Syria often contend that failing to do so invites extremist groups to fill the void. “Extremist groups, al Qaeda-plus and all, are definitely in Syria,” says James Prince, founder and president of the Democracy Council. “We need to learn from similar lessons in Iraq, Afghanistan and Egypt and not leave democracy activists fighting for their own freedoms swinging in the wind.”
[FSA General] Sheikh sought to strike a similar note in his comments today, using the specter of armed extremists to call on Western governments to act. “Leaving Syria like this is very dangerous. It may become another Afghanistan or Iraq,” he said. “The international community must do something and move quickly.”
James Prince and his Democracy Council is the official conduit, according to Wikileaks documents, the U.S. government used since 2006 to funnel money to the Syrian opposition:
Several U.S. diplomatic cables from the embassy in Damascus reveal that the Syrian exiles received money from a State Department program called the Middle East Partnership Initiative. According to the cables, the State Department funneled money to the exile group via the Democracy Council, a Los Angeles-based nonprofit.
James Prince is paid tool of the CIA and the State Department. When he raises the specter of an Al Qaida takeover as justification for intervention, i.e. outright war, we can be sure that he is introduces a new official propaganda line. That also explains how all these semi-official media are somewhat synchronized in now coming out with the same Al Qaeda in Syria headlines. Who briefed them?
But even without the intervention the propaganda is pressing for the conflict in Syria is threatening to become more internationalized. The Turkish premier Erdogan wants to eliminate terrorists on the Syrian side of the border. But that of course does not mean he wants to kill the foreign Salafists of the Free Syrian Army. He will continue to support those with weapons and whatever they need. Erdogan wants to go after the Syrian Kurds who, after a deal with the Syrian government, have taken control over their cities and villages. Turkey is moving additional troops to the eastern Kurdish part of its border with Syria. Erdogan claims a "natural right" for Turkey to fight "terrorists" outside of its borders. One wonders how he will feel about that "natural right" when the Syrian government claims and acts upon it.
In another development the U.S. and its allies have shunned the disunited and ineffective National Syrian Council and are trying a different exile "government in a box" game. They now want to put the former general Manaf Tlass into the key role of their new Syrian puppet dictator:
The officials said Gen. Tlass is one of the few figures in opposition to the regime who could potentially help restore order in Damascus and secure Syria's vast chemical-weapons stockpile.
But Manaf is a rather mediocre guy who no one in the Syrian opposition wants to see in any leading role. That he is a tool of the Saudis, announcing his role in Saudi Arabia and giving his first interview there, may gain him Saudi and U.S. backing but will turn off most Syrians.
Meanwhile the build up of the Schwerpunkt battle in Aleppo continues. The Syrian government seems to assemble a serious force around the three suburbs the FSA has taken control of. Before hitting them the Syrian army is likely to give a high priority to first surrounding the insurgents and to let them no way to escape.