Global Research

Warns Syria about defending its own borders – brazen act of war, crime against world peace ignored by feckless United Nations. 

After losing a fighter jet earlier this month while conducting a high-speed, low altitude invasion of Syria’s airspace, Turkey has now pledged to treat any Syrian operation along its borders as a military threat.

“Turkey’s warning could tilt the dynamic along the border, which has become an incubator for Syrian antigovernment rebels who are seeking increased levels of international support. Turkey’s pledge to respond to aggression from Syrian forces could help the rebel Free Syrian Army by deterring Syrian forces from attacking—or else result in Turkish retaliation for cross-border attacks on rebels,” reported the Wall Street Journal in their article, “Turkey Warns of Retaliation Against Syria.” This encapsulates the brazen warping of logic applied by NATO aggressors as they seek to perpetuate the bloodbath and destabilization caused by their own proxy forces, primarily harbored, armed, and deployed from NATO member Turkey.

Syrian Rebels are Al Qaeda Terrorists

By US officials’ own admissions, since 2007 a combined US-Israeli-Saudi effort to assemble and deploy against Syria and Iran an army of sectarian extremists drawn from the ranks of Al Qaeda and its affiliates has been underway. In Seymour Hersh’s 2007 New Yorker article, “The Redirection,” he reported, “The U.S. has also taken part in clandestine operations aimed at Iran and its ally Syria. A by-product of these activities has been the bolstering of Sunni extremist groups that espouse a militant vision of Islam and are hostile to America and sympathetic to Al Qaeda.”

Within Hersh’s report, not only is this army of fanatical terrorists described as being fully backed by the West in order to create a sectarian bloodbath to be used to achieve Western foreign policy objectives, but it was fully anticipated that this army would commit abhorrent atrocities, particularly against ethnic and religious minorities throughout the region. In particular former CIA agent Robert Baer in Lebanon warned about the fate of Christians located in the region.

Today, Baer’s warning has manifested itself in a genocidal campaign against Syria’s Christians increasingly more difficult for the Western media to hide. This is confirmed by LA Times’ “Church fears ‘ethnic cleansing’ of Christians in Homs, Syria,” and more recently in USA Today’s distorted, but still telling, “Christians in Syria live in uneasy alliance with Assad, Alawites.”

Also mentioned was the Syrian chapter of the Muslim Brotherhood, who by 2007 was already receiving significant backing from the West and Israel to destabilize Syria – despite its feigned anti-Western, anti-Israeli rhetoric.  

As clandestine military operations became larger in scale and more difficult for the complicit Western media to obfuscate, it was announced that hundreds of fighters as well as torrents of weapons and cash began flowing into Syria from NATO-armed terrorists in Libya. The Al Qaeda affiliated Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG) (a US State Department listed terrorist organization – #28) led by Abdul Hakim Belhaj, spearheaded efforts to bolster what is essentially a foreign terrorist operation in Syria beginning as early as November 2011, according to the London Telegraph.

After Belhaj’s visit to the Turkish-Syrian border and his pledge to send cash, weapons, and fighters, up to 600 Libyan terrorists were reported to have made the journey to Syria to join the fighting. At least one ship flush with weapons from Libya was interdicted by Lebanon on its way to rebels’ hands in Syria.

In addition to LIFG terrorists admittedly entwined with the so-called “Free Syrian Army” (FSA), more recent reports indicate that Iraqi terrorists have also joined their ranks. Reuters in their article, “Outgunned Syria rebels make shift to bombs,” admit that not only is the FSA conducting a terrorist bombing campaign against the people of Syria, but that it is facilitated by rebels who “fought with Al Qaeda elements in Iraq” and learned their bombing skills while attacking both sectarian Iraqi targets as well as Western troops.

Ironic indeed, that the US in particular is backing entirely terrorist forces that thousands of Americans have shed their blood allegedly fighting in the “War on Terror.” It appears that Al Qaeda, admittedly a creation of the CIA in the 1980’s to draw in and fight Soviets in Afghanistan, is still patronized by the West and used as both a convenient casus belli as well as a terrorist proxy force against enemies of Western foreign policy.

Turkey is Helping

According to the New York Times, “a small number of C.I.A. officers are operating secretly in southern Turkey, helping allies decide which Syrian opposition fighters across the border will receive arms to fight the Syrian government, according to American officials and Arab intelligence officers.” While the Times article attempts but fails to allay fears that the FSA is in fact a terrorist front, the real significance of the article is that it confirms Turkey is serving as a willing conduit to harbor, arm, and deploy terrorist forces against neighboring Syria – a crime against world peace.

The Gulf States, which provided the bulk of the “hijackers” allegedly behind the September 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, are now the primary weapons and cash suppliers for the FSA, with Saudi Arabia leading the way – as Seymour Hersh reported they would be in 2007. These weapons, according to the UK Independent, are being transferred to terrorists via Turkey. It is also reported that the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood then distributes the weapons once they make their way into Syria – belying the narrative that the unrest is anything but an foreign-facilitated extremist terror campaign.

Perhaps most disturbing is a report published by Michael Weiss of the Neo-Con corporate-financier funded (beginning on page 18, .pdf) Henry Jackson Society, titled, “Syrian rebels say Turkey is arming and training them.” In the report, Weiss claims that, “rebel sources in Hatay told me last night that not only is Turkey supplying light arms to select battalion commanders, it is also training Syrians in Istanbul. Men from the unit I was embedded with were vetted and called up by Turkish intelligence in the last few days and large consignments of AK-47s are being delivered by the Turkish military to the Syrian-Turkish border.”

Weiss can hardly be considered a reliable source, and is just as likely fabricating his entire narrative for the purpose of psychologically targeting Syria. However, Turkey has made no attempts to refute such claims, made more frequently and by an increasing number of sources. Turkey is admittedly serving as a conduit for weapons, and is most likely participating in a more direct role to train, arm, fund, and support terrorists operating along the Turkish-Syrian border.

And despite all of this, the United Nations has remained mute over these transgressions, acts of war, and crimes against world peace. While it feigns outrage over the violence in Syria, it has failed categorically to identify the driving forces behind it – namely the unending torrent of weapons, cash, and foreign fighters flowing over Syria’s borders – supplied by NATO and its Gulf State partners.

Turkey Plays Pivotal Role in Psychologically Breaking Syria

Turkey is clearly harboring a terrorist front within its borders and facilitating their violent-subversive actives within Syrian borders. While the US and NATO hypocritically use a similar narrative to justify cross-border raids into Pakistan, it is attempting to tie Syria’s hands from even operating up to and along its own border to stem very real, admitted terrorist networks maintained by NATO and their Gulf State partners.

The goal of NATO is to create enough chaos in Syria, long enough, to shake the Syrian people’s faith in their government and their armed forces by dividing and destroying Syria’s national institutions. Just as in Libya, such divisions brought on by unwarranted panic will accelerate, not stem the violence. The stated goal by Western policy makers is to create divisions, doubt, and defections – and they are trying to achieve this through a combination of propaganda, economic sanctions, and overt Western-backed terrorism. They pursue this course of action because a full-scale military operation is untenable, as is the prospect of their terrorist proxies achieving any meaningful tactical victory. Syria, by remaining united and exhibiting perseverance will defeat NATO aggression.

Libya proves that capitulation is not an option, with sectarian genocide the result, subjecting capitulators, defectors, and even NATO’s hand-picked proxies to post-Qaddafi violence and mayhem. There is no option but to continue resisting.