During the last week, a report by the Conflict Armament
Research (CAR) on the Islamic State’s weapons found in Iraq and Syria has been
doing the rounds on the media. Before the story was picked up by the mainstream
media, it was first
published [1] in the Wired news website on December 12, which has a history
of spreading dubious stories and working in close collaboration with the
Pentagon and DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) under its
erstwhile reporters Noah Shachtman and Spencer Ackerman, both of whom are now the
national security correspondents for the Daily Beast, though this particular
report has been written by Brian Castner, “a former US Air Force explosive
ordnance disposal officer and a veteran of the Iraq War.”
The Britain-based Conflict Armament Research (CAR) is a
relatively unknown company of less than 20 employees. Its Iraq and Syria division
is headed by a 31-year-old Belgian researcher, Damien Spleeters. The main theme
of Spleeters’ investigation was to discover the Islamic State’s homegrown
armaments industry and how the jihadist group’s technicians have adapted the
East European munitions to be used in the weapons available to the Islamic
State. He has listed 1,832 weapons and 40,984 pieces of ammunition recovered in
Iraq and Syria in the CAR’s database.
But Spleeters has only tangentially touched upon the subject
of the Islamic State’s weapons supply chain, documenting only a single PG-9
rocket found at Tal Afar in Iraq bearing a lot number of 9,252 rocket-propelled
grenades which were supplied by Romania to the US military, and mentioning only
a single shipment of 12 tons of munitions which was diverted from Saudi Arabia
to Jordan in his supposedly ‘comprehensive report.’ In fact, the CAR’s report
is so misleading that of thousands of pieces of munitions investigated by
Spleeters, less than 10% were found to be compatible with NATO’s weapons and
more than 90% were found to have originated from Russia, China and the East
European countries, Romania and Bulgaria in particular.
By comparison, a joint investigation by the Balkan Investigative
Reporting Network (BIRN) and the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting
Project (OCCRP) has
uncovered [2] the Pentagon’s $2.2 billion arms pipeline to the Syrian
militants. It bears mentioning, however, that $2.2 billion were earmarked only
by Washington for training and arming the Syrian rebels, and tens of billions
of dollars that Saudi Arabia and the oil-rich Gulf states have pumped into the
Syrian civil war have not been documented by anybody so far.
Moreover, a Bulgarian investigative reporter, Dilyana
Gaytandzhieva, authored a
report [3] for Bulgaria’s national newspaper, Trud, which found that an
Azerbaijan state airline company, Silk Way Airlines, was regularly transporting
weapons to Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates (UAE), and Turkey under
diplomatic cover as part of the CIA covert program to supply militant groups in
Syria. Gaytandzhieva documented 350 such ‘diplomatic flights’ and was subsequently
fired from her job for uncovering the story. Unsurprisingly, both these
well-researched and groundbreaking reports didn’t even merit a passing mention
in any mainstream news outlet.
It’s worth noting, moreover, that the Syrian militant groups
are no ordinary bands of ragtag jihadist outfits. They have been trained and
armed to the teeth by their patrons in the security agencies of Washington, Turkey,
Saudi Arabia and Jordan in the training camps located at Syria’s border regions
with Turkey and Jordan. Along with Saddam’s and Egypt’s armies, the Syrian
Baathist armed forces are one of the most capable fighting forces in the Arab
world. But the onslaught of militant groups during the first three years of the
civil war was such that had it not been for the Russian intervention in
September 2015, the Syrian defenses would have collapsed. And the only feature
that distinguishes the Syrian militants from the rest of regional jihadist
groups is not their ideology but their weapons arsenals that were bankrolled by
the Gulf’s petro-dollars and provided by the CIA in collaboration with regional
security agencies of Washington’s client states.
While we are on the subject of Islamic State’s weaponry, it
is generally claimed by the mainstream media that Islamic State came into
possession of state-of-the-art weapons when it overran Mosul in June 2014 and
seized huge caches of weapons that were provided to Iraq’s armed forces by
Washington. Is this argument not a bit paradoxical, however, that Islamic State
conquered large swathes of territory in Syria and Iraq before it overran Mosul
when it supposedly did not have those sophisticated weapons, and after
allegedly coming into possession of those weapons, it lost ground? The only
conclusion that can be drawn from this fact is that Islamic State had those
weapons, or equally deadly weapons, before it overran Mosul and that those
weapons were provided to all the militant groups operating in Syria, including
the Islamic State, by the intelligence agencies of none other than the Western
powers, Turkey, Jordan and the Gulf states.
In fact, Washington exercises such an absolute control over
the Syrian theater of proxy war that although it openly provided the US-made
antitank (TOW) weapons to the Syrian militants but it strictly forbade its
regional allies from providing anti-aircraft weapons (MANPADS) to the
militants, because Israel frequently flies surveillance aircrafts and drones
and occasionally carries out airstrikes in Syria, and had such weapons fallen
into wrong hands, they could have become a long-term threat to Israel’s air force.
Lately, some anti-aircraft weapons from Gaddafi’s looted arsenal in Libya have
made their way into the hands of Syrian militants, but for the initial years of
the proxy war, there was an absolute prohibition on providing MANPADS to the
insurgents.
No comments:
Post a Comment