Global Research

On November 27, 2013, at a United Nations Security Council Stakeout, the Syrian Ambassador displayed a file of 258 letters addressed to the Security Council, documenting terrorist actions, terrorist groups and terrorist individuals currently operating in Syria, or arrested for such activities.  These letters urgently requested Security Council investigation into this situation and action to prevent the already exponentially increasing terrorist violence from culminating in an explosion that would ignite the entire region in uncontrollable conflict.  The Syrian Ambassador stated that all 258 letters have been ignored by the Security Council.

 On November 28, Security Council President Liu Jieyi of China read a Security Council Press Statement which included the following:

 “The members of the Security Council are outraged and strongly condemned the mortar shelling on November 28 against the Embassy of the Russian Federation in Damascus, Syria, which killed one and wounded nine people including among the Embassy security personnel.

 The members of the Security Council extended their condolences to the family of the victim and expressed their sympathy to all those injured in this heinous terrorist act.

 The members of the Security Council reaffirmed that terrorism in all its forms and manifestations constitutes one of the most serious threats to international peace and security, and that any acts of terrorism are criminal and unjustifiable, regardless of their motivation, wherever, whenever and  by whomsoever committed.”

The previous week, The New York Times described, in detail, the many millions of dollars sent by individually Kuwaitis, explicitly donated to known terrorist groups operating in Syria. 

“Mr. Ghanim al-Mteiri – one of dozens of Kuwaitis who openly raise money to arm the Syrian opposition, has helped turn this tiny, oil-rich Persian Gulf state into a virtual Western Union outlet for Syria’s rebels, with the bulk of the funds he collects going to a Syrian affiliate of Al-Qaeda.  ‘Once upon a time we cooperated with the Americans in Iraq,’ said Mr. Mteiri, a former soldier in the Kuwaiti army, recalling the American role in pushing Iraq out of Kuwait in 1991.  “Now we want to get Bashar out of Syria, so why not cooperate with Al Qaeda?’ 

“Fighters have flocked to Islamist militias, and in some cases rebranded themselves as jihadists because that is where the money is….With funds estimated to be in the tens of millions of dollars, Kuwaiti private donors have contributed to the effective partition of Syria, building up independent Islamist militias that control territory while espousing radical ideology, including the creation of an Islamic state.” “Prominent fund-raisers often boast of attacks by their preferred groups, which thank them with videos showing their new weapons.” 

“Mohammed al-Aymi said that their group funded operations rooms for military campaigns, and that the Nusra Front, a Syrian affiliate of Al Qaeda, is free to work with them.”  “David S. Cohen, the Treasury under-Secretary for terrorism and financial intelligence said that Kuwait posed the region’s biggest problem of funding linked to extremists in Syria.”  “Mr. Mteiri stated:  ‘We seek to end Alawite rule in Syria because we consider it a Sunni country and the capital of the Islamist world..’ lately his focus has shifted to arms.  He said he divided the money into smaller bundles to be taken by couriers to Turkey.  From there, he carries it across the border, where most of it goes to the Nusra Front which he called Syria’s most ‘effective and realistic’ rebel group.”

 On December 3, at a Security Council stakeout, the Syrian Ambassador, in reply to my reference to reports of Kuwaiti financial support for terrorist organizations in Syria, clarified that individuals from many countries are sending money to terrorist organizations in Syria, but the governments of Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkey are officially sending support to rebel organizations well known to be terrorist, such as Al Nusra and ISIS.

 Dozens of American citizens have travelled to Syria to join the terrorists. According the the New York Times, November 21, 2013,

“The Americans are a small subset of the mostly radicalized young Muslims with Western passports who are entering Syria from Europe, North America and Australia, a group that numbers roughly 600…that represents a fraction of the roughly 6,000 to 11,000 foreign fighters overall who have poured into Syria by way of the Middle East and North Africa…In Syria the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria has emerged as the leader in attracting foreign fighters, as it exploits the chaos of the civil war and tries to lay the groundwork for an Islamic State….Among the best known of these emerging groups is Jaish al-Muhajireen wal-Ansar, a group that actively recruits armed followers from Central Asia and Europe….While intelligence officials said there had not yet been any confirmed cases of foreign fighters carrying out attacks in their home countries upon their return – most of those suspected militants are still in Syria – it is the militants from groups like Jaish, they say, that pose the greatest threat when they come home.”

United Nations Security Council Resolution 2118 states: 

18.  “Reaffirms that all member states shall refrain from providing any form of support to non-state actors that attempt to develop, acquire, manufacture, possess, transport, transfer or use nuclear, chemical or biological weapons and their means of delivery, and calls upon all Member States, in particular Member States neighbouring the Syrian Arab Republic, to report any violations of this paragraph to the Security Council immediately.”

“21. Decides, in the event of non-compliance with this resolution, including unauthorized transfer of chemical weapons by anyone in the Syrian Arab Republic, to impose measures under Chapter VII of the United Nations Charter.”

 The impunity with which terrorist financing and support has been carried out was detailed as early as December 15, 2003 in an article by David Kaplan in U.S. New and World Report, in an article entitled: 

The Saudi Connection:  How billions in Oil Money Spawned a Global Terror Network.”  ‘Al Qaeda,’ said William Wechsler, the task force director of the CIA’s Illicit Transactions Group, was ‘a constant fundraising machine.”  And where did it raise most of those funds?  The evidence was indisputable:  Saudi Arabia.  

America’s longtime ally, and the world’s largest oil producer had somehow become, as a senior Treasury Department official put it, ‘the epicenter’ of terrorist financing…Starting in the 1980’s, Saudi Arabia’s quasi-official charities became the primary source of funds for the fast-growing jihad movement.  In some 20 countries, the money was used to run paramilitary training camps, purchase weapons and recruit new members.  The Charities were part of an extraordinary $70 billion dollar Saudi campaign to spread their fundamentalist Wahhabi sect worldwide…US intelligence officials knew about Saudi Arabia’s role in funding terrorism by 1996, yet for years Washington did almost nothing to stop it. 

Examining the Saudi role in terrorism, a senior intelligence analyst says was ‘virtually taboo.’  ‘Saudi largesse encouraged U.S. officials to look the other way, some veteran intelligence officers say.  Billions of dollars in contracts, grants and salaries have gone to a broad range of former U.S. officials who had dealt with the Saudis:  ambassadors, CIA station chiefs, even Cabinet Secretaries.  Washington’s unwillingness to confront the Saudis over terrorism was part of a broader strategic failure to sound the alarm on the rise of the global jihadist movement.  During the 1990’s the U.S. intelligence community issued a series of National Intelligence Estimates which report on America’s global challenges – on ballistic missile threats, migration, infectious diseases;  yet the government never issued a single NIE on the jihad movement or Al Qaeda.” 

“In Afghanistan, Riyadh and Washington together ponied up some 3.5 billion dollars to fund the mujahideen – the Afghan fighters who took on the Soviets.  At the same time, men like bin Laden served as fundraisers for the thousands of foreign jihadists streaming into Afghanistan….But by 1994 Riyadh was starting to get complaints from the French Interior Minister about Saudi funds reaching Algerian terrorists.  More concerns surfaced in the Philippines, where an investigation of an Al Qaeda plot to murder the Pope and bomb a dozen US airliners led to the local International Islamic Relief Organization (IIRO) office.  Its director was busily funnelling cash to the region’s top Islamic guerrilla group, Abu Sayyaf and the Moro Islamic Liberation Front.”

 “By the 1990’s the CIA found that the IIRO was funding six militant training camps in Afghanistan, where Riyadh was backing a then obscure sect called the Taliban…The head of a Muslim World League office in Pakistan was supplying League documents and arms to militants in Afghanistan and Tajikistan.  Another Saudi charity had begun funding rebels in Chechnya…Despite the mounting evidence, the issue of Saudi complicity with terrorists was effectively swept under the diplomatic rug.   Moreover, in many of the jihad struggles, Washington was neutral, as in Kashmir, or even supportive, as in Bosnia.  When Saudi money began financing jihadists headed to Chechnya, Washington responded with a ‘wink and a nod’ as one analyst put it…’It didn’t hurt that the Saudis had spread money around Washington by the millions – vast sums of Saudi contract have bought friends and influence here.  In his recent book, “Sleeping with the Devil:  How Washington Sold Our Soul for Saudi Crude,” former CIA operative Robert Baer calls it “Washington’s 401(K) Plan.” 

‘The Saudis put out the message,’ he wrote, ‘You play the game – keep your mouth shut about the kingdom – and we’ll take care of you.’”  “The list of beneficiaries includes CIA station chiefs, Washington lobbyists, PR firms, the high-flying Carlyle Group has made fortunes doing deals with the Saudis.  If that wasn’t enough, there was the staggering amount of Saudi investment in America – as much as $600 billion dollars in US banks and stock markets…..

In India, police detained Sayed Abu Nasir, a longtime IIRO staffer for plotting to bomb US consulates.  Nasir confessed that the organization was secretly supporting jihadist training camps in Pakistan and Afghanistan.  Equally striking was the Al Haramain Foundation, one of Saudi Arabia’s largest, which dispensed $50 million dollars a year through some 50 offices worldwide.  US officials would eventually conclude that its branches in at least 10 countries were providing arms or cash to terrorists, including those in Indonesia, Pakistan and Somalia.  In Southeast Asia, Al Haramain was acting as a key source of funds for Al Qaeda, in Chechnya.  Russian officials suspected it of giving $1 million dollars to the rebels and arranging the purchase of 500 heavy weapons from the Taliban.  There was more.  In the Middle East, the CIA learned, Saudi donations were funding as much as half of Hamas’ budget and paying off the families of suicide bombers.  In Pakistan, so much Saudi money poured in that a mid-level Pakistani jihadist could make seven times the country’s average wage.  Jihad had become a global industry, bankrolled by the Saudis.”

 David Kaplan’s report in US News and World Report is dated December 15, 2003.  Ten years later the Syrian ambassador provides evidence of Saudi funding to terrorists destroying his country, and responsible for many of the alleged 125,000 deaths in the last two years in Syria.  He requests the Security Council investigate and act on the 258 letters his government has sent to the Security Council.  He is met with silence.  No Security Council acton is taken to hold the Saudi, Qatari or Turkish governments accountable for funding terrorist threats to International Peace and Security.  While, on December 2, the UN High Commissioner of Human Rights, Navi Pillay has implied that the government of Syria should be held responsible for war crimes and crimes against humanity, at no point are the governments of Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkey held to account for funding and supporting terrorists responsible for a vast number of atrocities in Syria.  At no point are these governments held accountable for actions threatening the peace and security of the entire region, and beyond.

 Weapons of mass destruction are considered to include atomic weapons and chemical and biological weapons.  Only one country in world history has used the atomic bomb: (though many in the past 65 years have possessed that ‘ultimate’ weapon)

the United States dropped two atomic bombs on Japanese civilians in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  Contrary to the popular legend that this was done to end the war,  Nobel Laureate Joseph Rotblatt, the theoretical physicist who had worked on the Manhattan project at its inception resigned from the Manhattan Project when he learned that the purpose of Atomic weapons, which he had originally thought would be used to defend America from nazi Germany, was in reality intended to intimidate the Soviet Union, and its power was demonstrated by incinerating defenceless civilians in Japan.

Since August 6, 1945 many countries have become nuclear powers.  None has been so insane as to use that weapon, as the terrifying consequences of its use have inhibited all nuclear powers to this date from using these horrific weapons.  When Iraq used chemical weapons against Iran, it was with the tacit agreement by the US-NATO powers.  The actual perpetrators of the August 2013 chemical weapon attack in Syria have never been proved, and prompt action by the UN Security Council to prohibit further use of chemical weapons has been taken in Resolution 2118.

 The use of biological weapons was common in history:  the British sent blankets infested with smallpox to the Mapuche Indians in Chile in the nineteenth century, and the US sent smallpox contaminated blankets to wipe out large numbers of native Americans in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.  In 1952, Madame Sun Yat-sen headed the Chinese delegation to the Congress of Peoples for Peace held in Vienna, where she shared the podium with Berthold Brecht, Jean-Paul Sartre, Ilya Ehrenburg, and other world renowned human rights activists.  She denounced America’s use of germ warfare in Korea and North-East China.

 In the age of jet planes, the potential for global spread of contamination serves to inhibit the use of biological weapons.  And all those uses of traditional weapons of mass destruction by the UK, the US and their allies, and any other power, had the effect, though devastating, of unifying their victims, who were citizens of the nations against whom these heinous weapons were used.

 Jihad is another species of beast which attacks, ostensibly from within, like cancer, a fatal disease.  Though sponsored and instigated from without, Jihad stealthily infiltrates and corrodes the body politic of the targeted nations, and, ostensibly erupting indigenously, metastasizes, until the nation so infected collapses from internal chaos, infested with uncontrollable, combustible violence and the disintegration of viable state institutions.

 The failure of the United Nations Security Council to address the threat to global peace and security that jihad, the current weapon of mass destruction du jour presents, may prove, in the long run, to be the greatest failure of the organization.  Jihad, as a weapon of mass destruction has been threatening the survival or Russia since the collapse of the Soviet Union and the emergence of Islamic terrorist movements in the Caucasus.  On Octoer 22, 2013 a female suicide bomber, Naida Asiyatova, who had been married to a demolitions expert for a rebel group in Dagestan, blew herself up on a bus in Volgograd (formerly Stalingrad), killing six people and wounding 33.  In July, 2012, in a terrorist attack in Tartarstan, the moerate head of Islamic education for the region, Valiulla Yakupov was shot and killed outside his home in Kazan. 

Another terrorist attack led to the death of the driver of Ildus Faizov, the chief Mufti for the Tartarstan region.  Mr. Faizov was hospitalized with serious wounds. 

“The attack took place in the capital of the most prominent, prosperous and influential Muslim republic of the Russian Federation…What happened was in fact an assassination of the official leaders of moderate Islam in Russia –the country with the biggest Muslim population in Europe.  Jihad threatens the very integrity and survival of the Russian Federation.  Virulent Islamic separatist terrorist groups on the Volga could split European Russia from Siberia, reducing Russia to a country the size of France, from Ukraine to the Volga.

While US-NATO powers obsess about hypothetical nuclear weapons in Iran, or nuclear tests in North Korea, countries that sought nuclear weapons for defensive purposes, 258 letters documenting actual mass murders by terrorists in Syria, with the potential for global reach, are being ignored.  It is possible that the obsession with nuclear power in Iran and North Korea is serving as a diversion and distraction from the actual threat to global peace and security which Jihadist organizations and individuals now present. 

On December 4, The New York Times acknowledged:  “Intensifying sectarian and clan violence has presented new opportunities for jihad groups across the Middle East and raised concerns among American intelligence and counterterrorism officials that militants aligned with Al Qaeda could establish a base in Syria capable of threatening Israel and Europe.  The new signs of an energized but fragmented jihadist threat stretching from Mali and Libya in the west to Yemen in the east….have complicated the narrative of a weakened Al Qaeda that President Obama offered in May…Across the region, a rising tide of Islamist militancy has contributed to a recent wave of attacks, including deadly bombings in Lebanon and the Sinai Peninsula as well as the daily carnage in Syria and Iraq. 

Terrorism analysts say Southern Libya has become a safe haven for a range of jihadists.  ‘All our regional partners are very afraid of the instability they see emanating from southern Libya,’ said Major General Patrick J. Donahue II, the commander of American army forces assigned to Africa….Other extremist groups are redoubling their efforts across Africa.  Last month the State Department branded Boko Haram, the homegrown Islamist insurgent movement in Nigeria as a foreign terrorist group.  Its attacks have left thousands dead in a decade, and in October it ransomed four French hostages for a reported payment of over $27 million dollars.

 On October 28, 2013, suicide bombers killed five people and wounded 38 when their car burst into flames in an explosion at the very heart of China’s great historic monument, the Forbidden City.  Many believe that the suicide bombing was an attack on the symbolic heart of China, a warning of China’s vulnerability.  According to The New York Times, “If the Tiananmen Square episode proves to be the work of Uighur assailants, it will suggest that the region’s seething discontent can no longer be confined to China’s far-off frontier, a vast expanse rich in oil and gas that borders Pakistan, Afghanistan and several Central Asian countries.  Yang Shu, a professor who heads the Institute for Central Asian Studies at Lanzhou University said it is only a matter of time before the violence that plagued the region seeped into the Chinese heartland. “There is a spillover effect from these terrorist acts that extends beyond Xinjiang,’ he said. “This should be a warning for authorities that the sphere of their activities is expanding.

 Again, it may be no coincidence that violent Islamic separatist movements are erupting in China in an area “rich in oil and gas that borders Pakistan, Afghanistan and several Central Asian countries.”   Many people suspect that outside agitators are provoking Islamic violence in Xinjiang, which has been for many decades a moderate and peacefully integrated Islamic nationality within the People’s Republic of China.  There are 56 nationalities within the PRC, which have lived together since liberation in 1949.  Less than a decade ago, Rebiya Kadeer, who lives comfortably in Washington, DC, at the expense of United States taxpayers, has been agitating for the separation of the Uighur people from China, lobbying US congressmen and pretending to voice the sentiments of the Uighurs. 

The NED has been paying many of her expenses, and as a provocateur from abroad, she is stirring up the kind of destabilization in China that certain interests are seeking, similar to the disruptions recently occurring – or engineered – in the Russian Federation.  The long-term agenda of this kind of geopolitical engineering to destabilize Russia and China can only be described as diabolic, with an ultimately horrific cost in human lives, and the destruction of two of the great cultures in human history.  The easily purchased Ms. Kadeer, in an article in the Wall Street Journal made the ridiculous claim that “the Chinese Communist Party needs to foment ethnic hatred among Han Chinese against the Uighur minority.”  This grossly ignorant – or malicious allegation ignores the fact that there are 56 nationalities comprising the People’s Republic of China, a multitude of nationalities which have lived together peacefully, and the Chinese government’s paramount interest is to sustain this harmony as an essential core of national unity, crucial to the stability of China as a nation.  It is precisely to preserve this unity and prevent ethnic conflict that the Chinese government has implemented so many preferential policies to support the development of all autonomous regions.

 There is substantial evidence that these Uighur terrorists, who have emerged simultaneously with Ms. Kadeer’s provocations from her residence in Washington, D.C., were trained in Georgia, during the presidency of Mikhail Sakashvili, and in Kyrgistan, where the U.S. has leased a military base in recent years..

The implication of this terrorist action in the historic and political center of Beijing is terrifying.  It is the same diabolic use of jihad to destroy strong nations from within, paralyzing and terrifying citizens, psychologically disabling them, ultimately disrupting the effective functioning of the economy and the entire society.  This weapon of mass destruction works more effectively than an identifiably external attack would. And ultimately, like the typhoon or the tsunami, it destroys entire cities and the lives of entire nations. 

Syria’s disintegration is the current example of the effectiveness of Jihad as the  stealth weapon of mass destruction.  Whoever unleashed it, and is unleashing it at this time is obvious.