Since the times of the Soviet-Afghan jihad, during the
eighties, it has been the fail-safe game plan of the master strategists at NATO
to raise money from the oil-rich emirates of Saudi Arabia, Qatar, UAE and
Kuwait; then buy billions of dollars’ worth of weapons from the arms’ markets
of the Eastern Europe; and then provide those weapons and guerilla warfare
training to the disaffected population of the victim country by using the
intelligence agencies of the latter’s regional adversaries. Whether it’s
Afghanistan, Chechnya, Bosnia, Libya or Syria, the same playbook has been
executed to the letter.
More to the point, raising funds for proxy wars from the
Gulf Arab States allows the Western executives the freedom to evade
congressional scrutiny; the benefit of buying weapons from the unregulated
arms’ markets of the Eastern Europe is that such weapons cannot be traced back
to the Western capitals; and using jihadist proxies to achieve strategic
objectives has the advantage of taking the plea of plausible deniability if the
strategy backfires, which it often does. Remember that al-Qaeda and Taliban
were the by-products of the Soviet-Afghan jihad, and the Islamic State and its
global network of terrorists is the blowback of the proxy war in Syria.
Notwithstanding, the Western interest in the Syrian civil
war has mainly been to ensure Israel’s regional security. The Shi’a resistance
axis in the Middle East, which is comprised of Iran, the Syrian regime and
their Lebanon-based proxy Hezbollah, posed an existential threat to Israel; a
fact which the Israel’s defense community realized for the first time during
the 2006 Israel-Hezbollah war during the course of which Hezbollah fired hundreds
of rockets into northern Israel.
Those were only unguided rockets but it was a wakeup call
for Israel’s military strategists that what will happen if Iran passed the
guided missile technology to Hezbollah whose area of operations lies very close
to the northern borders of Israel?
Therefore, when the protests broke out against the Assad
regime in Syria, in early 2011 in the wake of the Arab Spring uprisings, under
pressure from the Zionist lobbies, the Western powers took advantage of the
opportunity and militarized those protests with the help of their regional
allies: Turkey, Jordan and the Gulf Arab States. All of the aforementioned
states belong to the Sunni denomination, which have been vying for influence in
the Middle East against the Shi’a Iranian axis.
Moreover, since the beginning of the Syrian civil war in
August 2011 to June 2014, when the Islamic State overran Mosul in Iraq, an
informal pact existed between the Western powers, their regional allies and the
Sunni Arab jihadists of the Middle East against the Shi’a resistance axis. In
accordance with the pact, the Sunni militants were trained and armed in the
training camps located in the border regions of Turkey and Jordan.
This arrangement of an informal pact between the Western
powers and the Sunni Arab jihadists of the Middle East against the Shi’a
Iranian axis worked well up to August 2014, when Obama Administration made a
volte-face on its previous regime change policy in Syria and started conducting
air strikes against one group of Sunni militants battling against the Syrian
regime, i.e. the Islamic State, after the latter transgressed its mandate in
Syria and overran Mosul and Anbar in Iraq and threatened the capital of another
steadfast American ally: Masoud Barzani’s Erbil in the oil-rich Iraqi
Kurdistan.
After the reversal of policy in Syria by the Western powers
and the subsequent Russian military intervention on the side of the Syrian
regime, the momentum of Sunni Arab jihadists’ expansion in Syria has stalled
and they now feel that their Western patrons have committed a treachery against
the Sunni jihadists’ cause; that’s why, they are infuriated and once again up
in arms to exact revenge for this betrayal.
If we look at the chain of events, the timing of the Paris
and Brussels attacks has been critical: the Islamic State overran Mosul in June
2014, the Obama Administration began conducting air strikes against the Islamic
State’s targets in Iraq and Syria in August 2014, and after a lull of almost a
decade since the Madrid and London bombings in 2004 and 2005, respectively, the
first such incident of terrorism took place on the Western soil at the offices
of the Charlie Hebdo in January 2015, and then the Islamic State carried out
the November 2015 Paris attacks and the March 2016 Brussels bombings.
Notwithstanding, it is an irrefutable fact that the United
States sponsors the militants, but only for a limited period of time in order
to achieve certain policy objectives. For instance: the United States nurtured
the Afghan jihadists during the Cold War against the erstwhile Soviet Union
from 1979 to 1988, but after the signing of the Geneva Accords and the
consequent withdrawal of the Soviet troops from Afghanistan, the United States
withdrew its support from the Afghan jihadists.
Similarly, the United States lent its support to the
militants during the Libyan and Syrian civil wars, but after achieving the
policy objectives of toppling the Qaddafi regime in Libya and weakening the
anti-Israel Assad regime in Syria, the United States relinquished its blanket
support from the militants and eventually declared a war against a faction of
Syrian militants, the Islamic State, when the latter transgressed its mandate
in Syria and dared to occupy Mosul and Anbar in Iraq in early 2014.
The United States’ regional allies in the Middle East,
however, are not as subtle and experienced in the Machiavellian geopolitics.
Under the misconception that the alliances in international politics are
permanent, the Middle Eastern autocrats keep pursuing the same untenable policy
indefinitely, which was laid down by the hawks in Washington for a brief period
of time in order to achieve certain strategic objectives.
For instance: the security establishment of Pakistan kept
pursuing the policy of training and arming the Afghan and Kashmiri jihadists
throughout the ’80 and ‘90s and right up to September 2001, even after the
United States withdrew its support from the jihadists’ cause in Afghanistan in
1988 after the signing of the Geneva Accords.
Similarly, the Muslim Brotherhood-led government of Turkey
has made the same mistake of lending indiscriminate support to the Syrian
militants even after the United States’ partial reversal of policy in Syria and
the declaration of war against the Islamic State in August 2014 in order to
placate the international public opinion when the graphic images and videos of
the Islamic State’s brutality surfaced on the internet.
Keeping up appearances in order to maintain the façade of
justice and morality is indispensable in international politics and the Western
powers strictly abide by this code of conduct. Their medieval client states in
the Middle East, however, are not as experienced and they often keep pursuing
the same unsustainable policies of training and arming the militants against
their regional rivals, which are untenable in the long run in a world where
pacifism is generally accepted as one of the fundamental axioms of the modern
worldview.
Notwithstanding, the conflict in Syria and Iraq is actually
a three-way conflict between the Sunni Arabs, the Shi’a Arabs and the Sunni
Kurds. Although after the declaration of war against a faction of Sunni Arab
militants, the Islamic State, the Obama Administration has also lent its support
to the Shi’a-led government in Iraq, but the Shi’a Arabs of Iraq are not the
trustworthy allies of the United States because they are under the influence of
Iran.
Therefore, the Obama Administration was left with no other
choice but to make the Kurds the centerpiece of its policy in Syria and Iraq
after a group of Sunni Arab jihadists transgressed its mandate in Syria and
overran Mosul and Anbar in Iraq from where the United States had withdrawn its
troops only in December 2011. The so-called Syrian Democratic Forces are
nothing more than Kurdish militias with a tinkering of mercenary Arab tribesmen
in order to make them appear more representative and inclusive in outlook.
As far as the regional parties to the Syrian civil war are
concerned, however, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and the Gulf Arab States might not
have serious reservations against the close cooperation between the United
States and the Kurds in Syria and Iraq, because the Gulf Arab States tend to
look at the regional conflicts from the lens of the Iranian Shi’a threat.
Turkey, on the other hand, has been wary of the separatist Kurdish tendencies
in its southeast more than the Iranian Shi’a threat.
The sudden thaw in Turkey’s relations with Russia and latent
hostility towards the West is partly due to the fact that Erdogan holds the
US-based preacher, Fethullah Gulen, responsible for the July coup plot and
suspects that the latter has received tacit support from certain quarters in
the United States’ intelligence community; but more importantly, Turkey also
feels betrayed by the duplicitous Western policy in Syria and Iraq, and that’s
why it is now seeking close cooperation with Russia in the region.
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