Land Swap between Ankara and Damascus to Avoid Standoff over Manbij

The regions currently administered by the Kurds in Syria include the Kurdish-majority Qamishli and al-Hasakah in northeastern Syria, and the Arab-majority towns of Manbij to the west of the Euphrates River in northern Syria and Kobani to the east of the Euphrates River along the Turkish border.

The oil- and natural gas-rich Deir al-Zor governorate in eastern Syria has been contested between the Syrian government and the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces, and it also contains a few pockets of the remnants of the Islamic State militants alongside both eastern and western banks of the Euphrates River.

The Turkish “east of Euphrates” military doctrine basically means that the Turkish armed forces would not tolerate the presence of the Syrian PYD/YPG Kurds – which the Turks regard as “terrorists” allied to the PKK Kurdish separatist group in Turkey – in Manbij and Kobani, in line with the longstanding Turkish policy of denying the Kurds any Syrian territory to the west of the Euphrates River in northern Syria along Turkey’s southern border.

On Friday, the Syrian army said it entered Manbij for the first time in years, after the Syrian Kurds urged Damascus to protect the town from the threat of impending Turkish military offensive, though Turkish President Erdogan has termed the handover a “psyops” by the Kurds.

According to a report by RT: [1] “A high-ranking Turkish delegation arrived in Moscow on Saturday, only a day after international media broke news on Kurdish militias inviting Syrian forces to enter Manbij before the Turks do. Syria’s military proclaimed they ‘raised the flag’ over Manbij, but there have been no independent reports confirming the moving of troops into the city.”

The report notes: “The Saturday Moscow meeting was key to preventing all actors of the Syrian war from locking horns over the Kurdish enclave, Middle East experts believe.”

“Obviously, Turkey will insist that it is their forces that should enter Manbij, Russia will of course insist the city should be handed over to Assad’s forces,” Kirill Semenov, an Islamic studies expert with Russia’s Institute for Innovative Development, told RT.

The report further adds: “Realpolitik, of course, plays a role here as various locations across Syria might be used as a bargaining chip by all parties to the conflict. Semenov suggested the Turks may agree on Syrian forces taking some parts of Idlib province in exchange for Damascus’ consent for a Turkish offensive toward Manbij or Kobani.”

It becomes abundantly clear after reading the RT report that a land swap agreement between Ankara and Damascus under the auspices of Moscow is in the offing to avoid standoff over Manbij.

The agreement would likely stipulate that Damascus would give Ankara free hand to mount offensives in the Kurdish-occupied Manbij and Kobani in northern Syria in return for Ankara withdrawing its militant proxies from Maarat al-Numan, Khan Sheikhoun and Jisr al-Shughour, all of which are strategically located in the south of Idlib governorate.

Just as Ankara cannot tolerate the presence of the Kurds in northern Syria along Turkey’s southern border in line with its “east of Euphrates” military doctrine, similarly even Ankara would acknowledge the fact that Damascus cannot possibly conceive the long-term presence of Ankara’s jihadist proxies in the aforementioned strategic locations in the south of Idlib governorate threatening the Alawite heartland of coastal Latakia.

If such a land swap agreement is concluded between Ankara and Damascus, it would be a win-win for all parties to the Syrian conflict, excluding the Kurds, of course. But the response of Damascus and Moscow to the concerns of the Kurds has been tepid of late.

Not only have the Kurds committed the perfidy of acting as the proxies of Washington during the Syrian conflict which abandoned them after Trump’s announcement of withdrawal of American troops from Syria, but we must also recall another momentous event that took place in Deir al-Zor governorate in February.

On February 7, the US B-52 bombers and Apache helicopters struck a contingent of Syrian government troops and allied forces in Deir al-Zor that reportedly [2] killed and wounded scores of Russian military contractors working for the Russian private security firm, the Wagner group.

The survivors described the bombing as an absolute massacre, and Kremlin lost more Russian citizens in one day than it had lost throughout its more than three-year-long military campaign in support of the Syrian government since September 2015.

The reason why Washington struck Russian contractors working in Syria was that the US-backed and Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) – which is mainly comprised of Kurdish YPG militias – had reportedly handed over the control of some areas east of Euphrates River to Deir al-Zor Military Council (DMC), which is the Arab-led component of SDF, and had relocated several battalions of Kurdish YPG militias to Afrin and along Syria’s northern border with Turkey in order to defend the Kurdish-held areas against the onslaught of the Turkish armed forces and allied Syrian militant proxies during Ankara’s “Operation Olive Branch” in Syria’s northwest that lasted from January to March 2018.

Syrian forces with the backing of Russian contractors took advantage of the opportunity and crossed the Euphrates River to capture an oil refinery located to the east of Euphrates River in the Kurdish-held area of Deir al-Zor.

The US Air Force responded with full force, knowing well the ragtag Arab component of SDF – mainly comprised of local Arab tribesmen and mercenaries to make the Kurdish-led SDF appear more representative and inclusive – was simply not a match for the superior training and arms of Syrian troops and Russian military contractors, consequently causing a carnage in which scores of Russian citizens lost their lives. Clearly, Moscow and Damascus hold the Kurds responsible for the atrocity along with Washington.

Regarding the dominant group of Syrian militants in the Idlib governorate, according to a May 2017 report [3] by CBC Canada, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), which was formerly known as al-Nusra Front until July 2016 and then as Jabhat Fateh al-Sham (JFS) until January 2017, had been removed from the terror watch-list of the US after it merged with fighters from Zenki Brigade and hardline jihadists from Ahrar al-Sham and rebranded itself as Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) in January 2017.

The US State Department is hesitant to label Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) a terror group, despite the group’s links to al-Qaeda, as the US government had directly funded and armed the Zenki Brigade, one of the constituents of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), with sophisticated weaponry including the US-made antitank missiles.

The purpose behind the rebranding of al-Nusra Front, first as Jabhat Fateh al-Sham (JFS) and then as Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) and purported severing of ties with al-Qaeda, was to legitimize itself and to make it easier for its patrons to send money and arms.

Washington blacklisted al-Nusra Front in December 2012 and persuaded its regional allies Saudi Arabia and Turkey to ban it, too. Although al-Nusra Front’s name has been in the list of proscribed organizations of Saudi Arabia and Turkey since 2014, it kept receiving money and arms from its regional patrons.

Finally, regarding the deep ideological ties between the Islamic State and al-Nusra Front, although the current al-Nusra Front has been led by Abu Mohammad al-Jolani, he was appointed [4] as the emir of al-Nusra Front by Abu Bakr al Baghdadi, the leader of the Islamic State, in January 2012. In fact, al-Jolani’s Nusra Front is only a splinter group of the Islamic State, which split from its parent organization in April 2013 over a leadership dispute between the two organizations.

Will Kurds Keep American Weapons After Syria Withdrawal?

The US commanders planning for the withdrawal of the American troops from Syria are recommending that the Kurdish fighters battling the Islamic State be allowed to keep the US-supplied weapons, a move that would likely anger NATO-ally Turkey, according to an exclusive report [1] by Reuters.

The report adds: “The proposal to leave the US-supplied weapons with the Kurdish YPG militia, which could include anti-tank missiles, armored vehicles and mortars, would reassure Kurdish allies that they were not being abandoned.”

During the initial years of the Syrian conflict, although the US openly provided the American-made antitank (TOW) weapons to the Syrian militant groups, it strictly forbade its clients 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 the wrong hands, they could have become a long term security threat to the Israeli Air Force.

In the final years of the Syrian proxy war, some anti-aircraft weapons from Gaddafi’s looted arsenal in Libya made their way into the hands of the Syrian militants, but for the initial years of the conflict, there was an absolute prohibition on providing such weapons to the insurgents.

Last year, a report by the Conflict Armament Research (CAR) on the Islamic State’s weapons found in Iraq and Syria was prominently featured in the mainstream media. Before the story was picked up by the media, it was first published [2] in the Wired News in December 2017, which has a history of spreading dubious stories and working in close collaboration with the Pentagon and DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency).

The Britain-based Conflict Armament Research (CAR) is a relatively unknown company of less than 20 employees. Its one-man Iraq and Syria division was 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 had adapted the East European munitions to be used in the weapons available to the Islamic State. Spleeters had listed 1,832 weapons and 40,984 pieces of ammunition recovered in Iraq and Syria in the CAR’s database.

But Spleeters had 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 was 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) uncovered [3] the Pentagon’s $2.2 billion arms pipeline to the Syrian militants.

It bears mentioning that $2.2 billion were earmarked only by Washington for training and arming the Syrian militants, and tens of billions of dollars [4] that Saudi Arabia and the oil-rich Gulf states had pumped into Syria’s proxy war have not been documented by anybody so far.

More significantly, a Bulgarian investigative reporter, Dilyana Gaytandzhieva, authored a report [5] for Bulgaria’s national newspaper, Trud News, 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. Not surprisingly, 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, including the Islamic State, were no ordinary bands of ragtag jihadist outfits. They were 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 in 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 proxy war was such that had it not been for the Russian intervention in September 2015, the Syrian defenses would have collapsed.

The only feature that distinguished the Syrian militants from the rest of regional jihadist groups was 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 traditional allies in the Middle East.

Fact of the matter is that the distinction between Islamic jihadists and purported ‘moderate rebels’ in Syria was more illusory than real. Before it turned rogue and overran Mosul in Iraq in June 2014, Islamic State used to be an integral part of the Syrian opposition and enjoyed close ideological and operational ties with other militant groups in Syria.

It bears mentioning that although turf wars were common not just between the Islamic State and other militant groups operating in Syria but also among rebel groups themselves, the ultimate objective of the Islamic State and the rest of militant outfits operating in Syria was the same: to overthrow the government of Bashar al-Assad.

Regarding the Syrian opposition, a small fraction of it was comprised of defected Syrian soldiers who go by the name of Free Syria Army, but the vast majority was comprised of Islamic jihadists and armed tribesmen who were generously funded, trained, armed and internationally legitimized by their regional and global patrons.

Islamic State was nothing more than one of numerous Syrian militant outfits, others being: al-Nusra Front, Ahrar al-Sham, Jaysh al Islam etc. All the militant groups that were operating in Syria were just as fanatical and brutal as the Islamic State. The only feature that differentiated the Islamic State from the rest was that it was more ideological and independent-minded.

The reason why the US turned against the Islamic State was that all other Syrian militant outfits only had local ambitions that were limited to fighting the Syrian government, while the Islamic State established a global network of transnational terrorists that included hundreds of Western citizens who became a national security risk to the Western countries.

Notwithstanding, Damien Spleeters of the Conflict Armament Research (CAR) has authored another report [6] last month in which he has stated that South Sudan’s neighbors, Uganda in particular, have breached an arms embargo by funneling East European weapons to the South Sudan conflict.

South Sudan is the world’s youngest nation which gained independence from Sudan in 2011. The United States is often said to have midwifed South Sudan by leading the negotiations for its independence from Sudan, because it is an oil-rich country producing about half a million barrels crude oil per day.

But a civil war began in 2013 between Dinka tribal group of South Sudanese President Salva Kiir and Nuer rebels led by warlord Riek Machar, and has triggered one of the world’s largest humanitarian emergencies. Millions of South Sudanese have sought refuge in displacement camps in the country or in neighboring countries.

The Conflict Armament Research’s report on the weapons found in South Sudan notes: “One of the most astonishing findings is that 99 percent of the ammunition tracked by CAR is of Chinese origin. Some of it was legally transferred to South Sudan, but much of it was delivered secretly to the opposition via Sudan in 2015 and is still being used.”

Unsurprisingly, the Britain-based monitoring group has implicated China, East Europeans and South Sudan’s neighbors for defying the embargo and providing weapons to the belligerents, and has once again given a free pass to the Western powers in its supposedly ‘comprehensive and credible’ report.

Is Manbij Handover to Syrian Government a ‘Psyops’ by Kurds?

The Syrian army said it entered Manbij on Friday for the first time in years, after the Syrian Kurds urged Damascus to protect the town from the threat of impending Turkish military offensive, though Turkish President Erdogan has termed the handover a “psyops” by the Kurds.

If Turkey mounts an offensive in Manbij, it would be the third invasion by the Turkish armed forces and their Syrian militant proxies in the Kurdish-held areas in northern Syria. The first Operation Euphrates Shield in Jarabulus and Azaz in northern Syria lasted from August 2016 to March 2017, immediately after the foiled coup plot against the Erdogan administration in July 2016. And then, Turkey mounted Operation Olive Branch in the Kurdish enclave of Afrin in northwestern Syria that lasted from January to March 2018.

In order to simplify the Syrian theater of proxy wars for the readers, it can be divided into three separate and distinct zones of influence: the Syrian government-controlled areas, the regions administered by the Syrian Kurds and the areas occupied by the Syrian opposition.

Excluding Idlib in northwestern Syria, which has been occupied by the Syrian opposition, all the major population centers are controlled by the Syrian government: which include, Damascus, Homs, Hamah, Latakia and Aleppo, while the oil-rich Deir al-Zor has been contested between the Syrian government and the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces, and it also contains a few pockets of the remnants of the Islamic State militants alongside both eastern and western banks of the Euphrates River.

The regions administered by the Syrian Kurds include the Kurdish-majority Qamishli and al-Hasakah in northeastern Syria, and the Arab-majority towns of Manbij to the west of the Euphrates River in northern Syria and Kobani to the east of the Euphrates River along the Turkish border.

The Turkish “east of Euphrates” military doctrine basically means that the Turkish armed forces would not tolerate the presence of the Syrian PYD/YPG Kurds – which the Turks regard as “terrorists” allied to the PKK Kurdish separatist group in Turkey – in Manbij and Kobani, in line with the longstanding Turkish policy of denying the Kurds any Syrian territory to the west of the Euphrates River in northern Syria along Turkey’s southern border.

Excluding the western Mediterranean coast and the adjoining major urban centers controlled by the Syrian government and the Kurdish-administered areas in the northeastern Syria, the Syrian opposition-dominated areas can be further subdivided into three separate zones of influence.

Firstly, the northern and northwestern zone along the Syria-Turkey border, in and around Aleppo and Idlib, which has been under the influence of Turkey and Qatar. Both these countries share the ideology of Muslim Brotherhood and have provided money, training and arms to Sunni Arab militant organizations, such as al-Tawhid Brigade, Zenki Brigade and Ahrar al-Sham, in the training camps located in the border regions between Turkey and northern Syria.

Secondly, the southern zone of influence along the Syria-Jordan border, in Daraa and Quneitra and as far away as Homs and Damascus. It was controlled by the Salafist Saudi-Jordanian camp which provided money, weapons and training to the Salafist militant groups, such as al-Nusra Front and Jaysh al-Islam in the suburbs of Damascus, until those militant outfits were evicted from southern Syria by the offensives of Syrian armed forces and allied militias with the backing of Iran and Russia.

Here, let me clarify that this distinction is quite overlapping and heuristic at best, because al-Nusra’s jihadists have taken part in battles as far away as Idlib and Aleppo, and after its eviction from southern Syria, al-Nusra Front, which rebranded itself to Hayat Tahrir-al-Sham in January 2017, has found its new redoubt in Idlib in northwestern Syria alongside the Muslim Brotherhood-sponsored militant groups, though it belongs to the Wahhabi-Salafi denomination espoused by Saudi Arabia.

And thirdly, the eastern zone of influence along the Syria-Iraq border, in Raqqa and Deir al-Zor, which was held by a relatively maverick Iraq-based Salafist militant outfit, the Islamic State, until Deir al-Zor was recaptured by the Syrian government forces, and Raqqa and parts of Deir al-Zor governorate to the east of Euphrates River were cleared by the US-backed and Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces.

It’s worth noting that before the Russian intervention in September 2015, leaving the western Mediterranean coast and Syria’s border with Lebanon, the Baathist and Shi’a-led Syrian government was surrounded from all three sides by hostile Sunni forces: Turkey and Muslim Brotherhood in the north, Jordan and the Salafists of the Gulf Arab States in the south, and the Sunni Arab-majority regions of Mosul and Anbar in Iraq, which were then occupied by the Islamic State, in the east.

The ethnic and sectarian conflict in Syria and Iraq is actually a three-way conflict between the Sunni Arab militants, the Shi’a-led governments and the Kurds. Although after the declaration of a war against a faction of Sunni Arab militants, the Islamic State, Washington also lent its support to the Shi’a-led government in Iraq, the Shi’a Arabs of Iraq are not the trustworthy allies of the United States because they are under the influence of Iran.

Therefore, Washington was left with no other choice but to make the Kurds the centerpiece of its policy in Syria after a group of Sunni Arab jihadists overstepped their mandate in Syria and overran Mosul and Anbar in Iraq in early 2014, from where the United States had withdrawn its troops only a couple of years ago in December 2011.

The so-called “Syrian Democratic Forces” are nothing more than Kurdish militias with a symbolic presence of mercenary Arab tribesmen in order to make them appear more representative and inclusive in outlook.

Regarding the Kurdish factor in the Syrian civil war, it would be pertinent to mention here that unlike the pro-America Iraqi Kurds led by the Barzani clan, the Syrian PYD/YPG Kurds as well as the Syrian government have been ideologically aligned, because both are socialists and have traditionally been in the Russian sphere of influence.

Moreover, as I have already described that the Syrian civil war is a three-way conflict between the Sunni Arab militants, the Shi’a-led government and the Syrian Kurds, and the net beneficiaries of this conflict have been the Syrian Kurds who have expanded their areas of control by aligning themselves first with the Syrian government against the Sunni Arab militants since the beginning of the Syrian civil war in August 2011 to August 2014, when the US policy in Syria was “regime change” and the CIA was indiscriminately training and arming the Sunni Arab militants against the Shi’a-led government in the border regions of Turkey and Jordan with the help of Washington’s regional allies: Turkey, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states, all of which belong to the Sunni denomination.

In August 2014, however, the US declared a war against one faction of the Sunni Arab militants, the Islamic State, when the latter overran Mosul and Anbar in early 2014, and Washington made a volte-face on its previous “regime change” policy and started conducting air strikes against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, thus shifting the goalposts in Syria from the previous unrealistic objective of “regime change” to the achievable goal of defeating the Islamic State in order to save its credibility as a global power.

After this reversal of policy by Washington, the Syrian Kurds took advantage of the opportunity and struck an alliance with the US against the Islamic State at Masoud Barzani’s bidding, hence further buttressing their position against the Sunni Arab militants as well as the Syrian government.

More to the point, however, for the first three years of the Syrian civil war from August 2011 to August 2014, an informal pact existed between the Syrian government and the Syrian Kurds against the onslaught of the Sunni Arab militants, until the Kurds broke off that arrangement to become the centerpiece of Washington’s policy in the region.

In accordance with the aforementioned pact, the Syrian government informally acknowledged Kurdish autonomy; and in return, the Kurdish militias jointly defended the Kurdish-majority areas in northeastern Syria, specifically al-Hasakah, alongside the Syrian government troops against the advancing Sunni Arab militant groups, particularly the Islamic State.

Finally, everyone has their own axe to grind in Syria, as there are no permanent allies or foes in international politics, only interests are permanent. It’s all about maintaining the balance of power. But whenever the US throws its weight behind a faction, it invariably disrupts the delicate equilibrium.

The allies of Washington then tend to assume that they are negotiating from a position of strength with the weight of a global power behind them; and under the mistaken assumption, they overreach themselves and encroach upon the rights of their regional adversaries.

Afghanistan Drawdown: End of American Interventionism

After Donald Trump’s surprise announcement in a tweet on December 19 to withdraw 2,000 American troops from Syria after a telephonic conversation with the Turkish President Erdogan on December 14, the decision to scale back American presence in Afghanistan by 7000 troops has also reportedly been made and the announcement is imminent.

It would be pertinent to note here that after Donald Trump’s inauguration as the US president, he had delegated operational-level decisions in conflict zones such as Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria to the Pentagon.

Secretary of Defense James Mattis and the former National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster represented the institutional logic of the deep state in the Trump administration and were instrumental in advising Donald Trump to escalate the conflicts in Afghanistan and Syria.

They had advised President Trump to increase the number of American troops in Afghanistan from 8,400 to 14,000. And in Syria, they were in favor of the Pentagon’s policy of training and arming 30,000 Kurdish border guards to patrol Syria’s northern border with Turkey.

Both the decisions have spectacularly backfired on the Trump administration. The decision to train and arm 30,000 Kurdish border guards infuriated the Erdogan administration to the extent that Turkey mounted Operation Olive Branch in the Kurdish-held enclave of Afrin in northern Syria on January 20.

Remember that it was the second military operation by the Turkish armed forces and their Syrian militant proxies against the Kurdish-held areas in northern Syria. The first Operation Euphrates Shield in Jarabulus and Azaz lasted from August 2016 to March 2017.

Nevertheless, after capturing Afrin on March 18, the Turkish armed forces and their Syrian jihadist proxies have now set their sights further east on Manbij, where the US Special Forces were closely cooperating with the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces, in line with the long-held Turkish military doctrine of denying the Kurds any Syrian territory west of River Euphrates.

Thus, it doesn’t come as a surprise that President Trump replaced H.R. McMaster with John Bolton in April; and in a predictable development on Thursday, James Mattis offered his resignation over President Trump’s announcement of withdrawal of American troops from Syria, though he would continue as the Secretary of Defense until the end of February till a suitable replacement is found.

Regarding the conflict in Afghanistan, on November 9 Russia hosted talks between Afghanistan’s High Peace Council, the members of the Taliban from its Doha, Qatar office and representatives from eleven regional states, including China, India, Iran and Pakistan. The meeting showcased Russia’s re-emergence as a proactive global power and its regional clout.

At the same time when the conference was hosted in Moscow, however, the Taliban mounted concerted attacks in the northern Baghlan province, the Jaghori district in central Ghazni province and the western Farah province bordering Iran.

In fact, according to a recent report by the US Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR), the US-backed Afghan government only controls 55% of Afghanistan’s territory. It’s worth noting that SIGAR is a US-based governmental agency that often inflates figures.

Factually, the government’s writ does not extend beyond a third of Afghanistan. In many cases, the Afghan government controls district-centres of provinces and rural areas are either controlled by the Taliban or are contested.

If we take a cursory look at the insurgency in Afghanistan, the Bush administration toppled the Taliban regime with the help of the Northern Alliance in October 2001 in the aftermath of the 9/11 terror attack. Since the beginning, however, Afghanistan was an area of lesser priority for the Bush administration.

The number of US troops stationed in Afghanistan did not exceed beyond 30,000 during George Bush’s tenure as president, and soon after occupying Afghanistan, he invaded Iraq in March 2003 and American resources and focus shifted to Iraq.

It was the Obama administration that made Afghanistan the bedrock of its foreign policy in 2009 along with fulfilling then-President Obama’s electoral pledge of withdrawing the US troops from Iraq in December 2011. At the height of the surge of the US troops in Afghanistan in 2010, the American troops numbered around 140,000 but they still could not manage to have a lasting effect on the relentless Taliban insurgency.

The Taliban are known to be diehard fighters who are adept at hit-and-run guerrilla tactics and have a much better understanding of the Afghan territory compared to foreigners. Even by their standards, however, the Taliban insurgency seems to be on steroids during the last couple of years.

The Taliban have managed to overrun and hold vast swathes of territory not only in the traditional Pashtun heartland of southern Afghanistan, such as Helmand, but have also made inroads into the northern provinces of Afghanistan which are the traditional strongholds of the Northern Alliance comprising Tajiks and Uzbeks.

In October 2016, for instance, the Taliban mounted brazen attacks on the Gormach district of northwestern Faryab province, the Tirankot district of Uruzgan province and briefly captured [1] the district-centre of the northern Kunduz province, before they were repelled with the help of US air power.

This outreach of the Taliban into the traditional strongholds of the Tajiks and Uzbeks in northern Afghanistan bordering the Russian client states Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan has come as a surprise to perceptive observers of the militancy in Afghanistan.

It is commonly believed that the Taliban are the proxies of Pakistan’s military which uses them as “strategic assets” to offset the influence of India in Afghanistan. The hands of Pakistan’s military, however, have been full with a home-grown insurgency of the Pakistani Taliban (TTP) since 2009 when it began conducting military operations in Swat and Pakistan’s tribal areas bordering Afghanistan.

Although some remnants of the Taliban still find safe havens in the lawless tribal areas of Pakistan, the renewed vigour and brazen assaults of the Taliban, particularly in the Afghanistan’s northern provinces as I described earlier, cannot be explained by the support of Pakistan’s military to the Taliban.

In an August 2017 report [2] for the New York Times, Carlotta Gall described the killing of the former Taliban chief Mullah Akhtar Mansour in a US drone strike on a tip-off from Pakistan’s intelligence in Pakistan’s western Balochistan province in May 2016 when he was coming back from a secret meeting with the Russian and Iranian officials in Iran. According to the report, “Iran facilitated a meeting between Mullah Akhtar Mansour and Russian officials, Afghan officials said, securing funds and weapons from Moscow for the insurgents.”

It bears mentioning that the Russian support to the Taliban coincides with its intervention in Syria in September 2015, after the Ukrainian Crisis in November 2013 when Viktor Yanukovych suspended the preparations for the implementation of an association agreement with the European Union and tried to take Ukraine back into the fold of the Russian sphere of influence by accepting billions of dollars of loan package offered by Vladimir Putin to Ukraine, consequently causing a crisis in which Yanukovych was ousted from power and Russia annexed the Crimean peninsula.

Although the ostensible reason of Russia’s support – and by some accounts, Iran’s as well – to the Taliban is that it wants to contain the influence of the Islamic State’s Khorasan Province in Afghanistan because the Khorasan Province includes members of the now defunct Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU), which is Russia’s traditional foe, the real reason of Russia’s intervention in Syria and support to the Taliban in Afghanistan is that the Western powers are involved in both of these conflicts and since a new Cold War has started between Russia and the Western powers after the Ukrainian crisis, hence it suits Russia’s strategic interests to weaken the influence of the Western powers in the Middle East and Central Asian regions and project its own power. 

Finally, although the main reason of the surge in Taliban attacks during the last couple of years is the drawdown of American troops which now number only 14,000, and are likely to be scaled back to 7,000 in the coming months, the brazen Taliban offensives in northern and western provinces of Afghanistan, bordering Iran and Russian clients Central Asian States, lend credence to the reports that Russia and Iran are also arming the Taliban since 2015 in line with their “strategic interests” of containing Washington’s influence in the region.

Trump’s Midterm Electoral Defeat and Syria Withdrawal

Donald Trump’s abrupt decision to withdraw American troops from Syria was reportedly made during a telephonic conversation with the Turkish President Erdogan on December 14, before President Trump made the momentous announcement in a Tweet on Wednesday, December 19. The decision was so sudden that even the Turkish president was caught off-guard, according to a December 22 Associated Press report [1] by Matthew Lee and Susannah George.

Clearly, an understanding has been reached between Washington and Ankara. According to the terms of the agreement, the Erdogan administration released the US pastor Andrew Brunson on October 12, which had been a longstanding demand of the Trump administration, and has also decided not to make public the audio recordings of the murder of Jamal Khashoggi, which could have implicated another American-ally the Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman in the assassination.

And in return, the Trump administration has given a free hand to Ankara to mount an offensive in the Kurdish-held areas in northern Syria, though for the time being the Turkish president has delayed the offensive against the Kurds until the nitty-gritty of the deal is settled in a planned Trump-Erdogan meeting in Washington in January.

The reason why the Trump administration is bending over backwards to appease Ankara is that President Erdogan has been drifting away from Washington’s orbit into the Kremlin’s sphere of influence. Turkey, which has the second largest army in NATO, has been cooperating with Moscow in Syria against Washington’s interests since last year and has placed an order for the Russian-made S-400 missile system, though that deal, too, has been thrown into jeopardy after Washington’s recent announcement of selling $3.5 billion worth of Patriot missile systems to Ankara.

Regarding the murder of the Saudi dissident Jamal Khashoggi at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul on October 2, more than anything it was the timing of the assassination and the political mileage that could be gained from Khashoggi’s murder in the domestic politics of the United States that prompted the mainstream media to take advantage of the opportunity and mount a smear campaign against the Trump administration by publicizing the assassination.

Jamal Khashoggi was murdered on October 2, when the US midterm elections were only a few weeks away. Donald Trump and his son-in-law Jared Kushner in particular have known to have forged close business relations with the Saudi royal family. It doesn’t come as a surprise that Donald Trump chose Saudi Arabia and Israel for his maiden official overseas visit in May last year.

Thus, the corporate media’s campaign to seek justice for the murder of Jamal Khashoggi was actually a smear campaign against Donald Trump and his conservative political base, which is now obvious after the US midterm election results have been tallied. Even though the Republicans have retained their 51-seat majority in the Senate, the Democrats now control the House of Representatives by gaining 39 additional seats.

Clearly, two factors were mainly responsible for the surprising defeat of the Republicans in the US midterm elections. Firstly, the Khashoggi murder and the smear campaign unleashed by the neoliberal media, which Donald Trump often pejoratively mentions as “Fake News” on Twitter, against the Trump administration.

Secondly, and more importantly, the parcel bombs sent to the residences of George Soros, a dozen other Democratic Congressmen and The New York Times New York office by Cesar Sayoc on the eve of the elections. Although the suspect turned out to be a Trump supporter, he was likely instigated by shady hands in the US deep state, which is wary of the anti-establishment rhetoric and pro-Russia tendencies of the so-called “alt-right” administration.

Moreover, on November 29 President Donald Trump abruptly cancelled a planned G20 meeting in Buenos Aires with the Russian President Vladimir Putin. Although the ostensible reason for cancelling the meeting cited in Trump’s tweet was a recent naval standoff in which the Russian forces had seized three Ukrainian ships, the real reason was a report published in The Guardian two days before the event on November 27.

In the article titled “Manafort held secret talks with Assange in Ecuadorian embassy” [2], the author of the report Luke Harding alleged that Donald Trump’s former campaign manager Paul Manafort had held secret talks with Julian Assange inside the Ecuadorian embassy in London in 2013, 2015 and in March 2016, and several months later, WikiLeaks released a stash of Democratic emails allegedly stolen by Russian intelligence officers.

Although the report was dubiously sourced and its author lacks credibility, Paul Manafort had already accepted a plea deal. If he goes a step further and accepts the charges leveled against him by The Guardian – which is quite likely since Special Counsel Robert Mueller is already applying immense pressure on Manafort by alleging that he has violated the terms of his plea deal by lying – this scandal has the potential of stirring up a political storm which might eventually culminate in initiation of impeachment proceedings against Donald Trump for colluding with a foreign government to steal the 2016 US presidential elections.

This is the reason why President Trump was apparently advised by his close aides to keep maximum distance from the Russian President Putin until the dust settles down on the Manafort-Assange affair.

Notwithstanding, it would be pertinent to note here that regarding the Syria policy, there is a schism between the White House and the American deep state led by the Pentagon. After Donald Trump’s inauguration as the US president, he had delegated operational-level decisions in conflict zones such as Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria to the Pentagon.

The Secretary of Defense James Mattis and the former National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster represented the institutional logic of the deep state in the Trump administration and were instrumental in advising Donald Trump to escalate the conflicts in Afghanistan and Syria.

They had advised President Trump to increase the number of American troops in Afghanistan from 8,400 to 14,000. And in Syria, they were in favor of the Pentagon’s policy of training and arming 30,000 Kurdish border guards to patrol Syria’s northern border with Turkey.

Both the decisions spectacularly backfired on the Trump administration. The decision to train and arm 30,000 Kurdish border guards infuriated the Erdogan administration to the extent that Turkey mounted Operation Olive Branch in the Kurdish-held enclave of Afrin in northern Syria on January 20.

Remember that it was the second military operation by the Turkish armed forces and their Syrian militant proxies against the Kurdish-held areas in northern Syria. The first Operation Euphrates Shield in Jarabulus and Azaz lasted from August 2016 to March 2017.

Nevertheless, after capturing Afrin on March 18, the Turkish armed forces and their Free Syria Army proxies have now set their sights further east on Manbij, where the US Special Forces are closely cooperating with the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces, in line with the long-held Turkish military doctrine of denying the Kurds any Syrian territory west of River Euphrates.

Thus, it doesn’t come as a surprise that President Trump replaced H.R. McMaster with John Bolton in April; and in a predictable development on Thursday, James Mattis offered his resignation over President Trump’s announcement of withdrawal of American troops from Syria, though he would continue as the Secretary of Defense until the end of February till a suitable replacement is found.

It bears mentioning that unlike dyed-in-the-wool globalists and “liberal interventionist” hawks, like Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, who cannot look past beyond the tunnel vision of political establishments, it appears that the pacifist isolationist Donald Trump not only follows news from conservative mainstream outlets, like the Fox News, but he has also been familiar with alternative news perspectives, such as Breitbart’s, no matter how racist and xenophobic.

Thus, Donald Trump is fully aware that the conflict in Syria is a proxy war initiated by the Western political establishments and their regional Middle Eastern allies against the Syrian government. He is also mindful of the fact that militants were funded, trained and armed in the training camps located in Turkey’s border regions to the north of Syria and in Jordan’s border regions to the south of Syria.

Quoting the retired US Brigadier General Anthony Tata on Thursday, Donald Trump tweeted: “General Anthony Tata, author, ‘Dark Winter.’ ‘I think the President is making the exact right move in Syria. All the geniuses who are protesting the withdrawal of troops from Syria are the same geniuses who cooked the books on ISIS intelligence and gave rise to ISIS.’”

Under the previous Obama administration, the evident policy in Syria was “regime change.” The Trump administration, however, looks at the crisis in Syria from an entirely different perspective because Donald Trump regards Islamic jihadists as a much graver threat to the security of the United States than Barack Obama.

In order to allay the concerns of Washington’s traditional allies in the Middle East, Israel in particular, the Trump administration has conducted a few cruise missile strikes in Syria, but those isolated strikes were nothing more than a show of force to bring home the point that the newly elected President Donald Trump is an assertive and powerful president, but behind the scenes President Trump has been willing to cooperate with the Syrian government and its backer Russia in order to defeat the Islamic jihadists who were portrayed as “moderate rebels” by the mainstream media.

Finally, up until now Donald Trump was playing softball with the Pentagon and the foreign policy bureaucracy, but after the humiliating defeat in the US midterm elections and clear hand of the deep state and corporate media in it, Trump has apparently decided to play hardball. This is the reason why he has announced the withdrawal of 2000 American troops from Syria, and the decision to scale back American presence in Afghanistan by 7000 troops is reportedly also in the offing.

Syria Withdrawal: Rift between White House and Pentagon

In a predictable development on Thursday, James Mattis has offered his resignation over President Trump’s announcement of withdrawal of American troops from Syria, though he would continue as the Secretary of Defense until the end of February till a suitable replacement is found. Speculations about replacing him were rife for several months, therefore the news doesn’t come as a surprise.

It would be pertinent to note here that regarding the Syria policy, there is a schism between the White House and the American deep state led by the Pentagon. After Donald Trump’s inauguration as the US president, he had delegated operational-level decisions in conflict zones such as Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria to the Pentagon.

The Secretary of Defense James Mattis and the former National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster represented the institutional logic of the deep state in the Trump administration and were instrumental in advising Donald Trump to escalate the conflicts in Afghanistan and Syria.

They had advised President Trump to increase the number of American troops in Afghanistan from 8,400 to 14,000. And in Syria, they were in favor of the Pentagon’s policy of training and arming 30,000 Kurdish border guards to patrol Syria’s northern border with Turkey.

Both the decisions spectacularly backfired on the Trump administration. The decision to train and arm 30,000 Kurdish border guards infuriated the Erdogan administration to the extent that Turkey mounted Operation Olive Branch in the Kurdish-held enclave of Afrin in Syria’s northwest on January 20. Remember that it was the second military operation by the Turkish forces against the Kurdish-held areas in northern Syria. The first Operation Euphrates Shield in Jarabulus and Azaz lasted from August 2016 to March 2017.

Nevertheless, after capturing Afrin on March 18, the Turkish armed forces and their Free Syria Army proxies have now set their sights further east on Manbij, where the US Special Forces are closely cooperating with the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces, in line with the long-held Turkish military doctrine of denying the Kurds any Syrian territory west of River Euphrates.

After Donald Trump’s announcement of withdrawal of American troops from Syria on Wednesday, clearly an understanding has been reached between Washington and Ankara. According to the terms of the agreement, the Erdogan administration released the US pastor Andrew Brunson on October 12, which had been the longstanding demand of the Trump administration, and has also decided not to make public the audio recordings of the murder of Jamal Khashoggi, which could have implicated another US-ally the Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman in the assassination; and in return, the Trump administration has given a free hand to Ankara to mount an offensive in the Kurdish-held areas in northern Syria and has also decided to withdraw 2000 US troops from northern and eastern Syria.

Another reason why the Trump administration has given a free hand to the Erdogan administration to mount an offensive against the Kurdish-held areas in northern Syria is that Ankara has been drifting away from Washington’s orbit into the Kremlin’s sphere of influence.

Turkey, which has the second largest army in NATO, has been cooperating with Russia in Syria against Washington’s interests since last year and has placed an order for the Russian-made S-400 missile system, though that deal too has been thrown into doubt after Washington’s recent announcement of selling $3.5 billion worth of Patriot missile systems to Ankara.

Regarding the Kurdish factor in the Syrian civil war, it would be pertinent to mention that unlike the pro-America Iraqi Kurds led by the Barzani family, the Syrian PYD/YPG Kurds as well as the Syrian government have been ideologically aligned because both are socialists and have traditionally been in the Russian sphere of influence.

The Syrian civil war is a three-way conflict between the Sunni Arab militants, the Shi’a-led government and the Syrian Kurds, and the net beneficiaries of this conflict have been the Syrian Kurds who have expanded their areas of control by aligning themselves first with the Syrian government against the Sunni Arab militants since the beginning of the Syrian civil war in August 2011 to August 2014, when the US policy in Syria was “regime change” and the CIA was indiscriminately training and arming the Sunni Arab militants against the Shi’a-led government in the border regions of Turkey and Jordan with the help of Washington’s regional allies: Turkey, Jordan and the Gulf states, all of which belong to the Sunni denomination.

In August 2014, however, the US declared a war against one faction of the Sunni Arab militants, the Islamic State, when the latter overran Mosul and Anbar in early 2014, and Washington made a volte-face on its previous “regime change” policy and started conducting air strikes against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. Thus, shifting the goalposts in Syria from the impossible objective of “regime change” to the realizable goal of defeating the Islamic State.

After this reversal of policy by Washington, the Syrian Kurds took advantage of the opportunity and struck an alliance with the US against the Islamic State at Masoud Barzani’s bidding, thus further buttressing their position against the Sunni Arab militants as well as the Syrian government.

More to the point, for the first three years of the Syrian civil war from August 2011 to August 2014, an informal pact existed between the Syrian government and the Syrian Kurds against the onslaught of the Sunni Arab militants until the Kurds broke off that arrangement to become the centerpiece of Washington’s policy in the region.

In accordance with the aforementioned pact, the Syrian government informally acknowledged Kurdish autonomy; and in return, the Kurdish militias jointly defended the areas in northeastern Syria, specifically al-Hasakah, alongside the Syrian government troops against the advancing Sunni Arab militant groups, particularly the Islamic State.

Fact of the matter is that the distinction between Islamic jihadists and purported ‘moderate rebels’ in Syria is more illusory than real. Before it turned rogue and overran Mosul in Iraq in June 2014, Islamic State used to be an integral part of the Syrian opposition and it still enjoys close ideological and operational ties with other militant groups in Syria.

It’s worth noting that although turf wars are common not just between the Islamic State and other militant groups operating in Syria but also among rebel groups themselves, the ultimate objective of the Islamic State and the rest of militant outfits operating in Syria was the same: to overthrow the government of Bashar al-Assad.

Regarding the Syrian opposition, a small fraction of it is comprised of defected Syrian soldiers who go by the name of Free Syria Army, but the vast majority has been comprised of Islamic jihadists and armed tribesmen who have been generously funded, trained, armed and internationally legitimized by their regional and global patrons.

Islamic State is nothing more than one of numerous Syrian militant outfits, others being: al-Nusra Front, Ahrar al-Sham, Jaysh al Islam etc. All the militant groups that are operating in Syria are just as fanatical and brutal as the Islamic State. The only feature that differentiates the Islamic State from the rest is that it is more ideological and independent-minded.

The reason why the US turned against the Islamic State is that all other Syrian militant outfits only have local ambitions that are limited to fighting the Syrian government, while the Islamic State established a global network of transnational terrorists that includes hundreds of Western citizens who have become a national security risk to the Western countries.

Khashoggi’s Murder and Trump’s Syria Withdrawal

In a momentous policy decision on Wednesday, the Trump administration has decided to pull out the US troops from Syria. Although the current redeployment of American troops will be limited only to northern Syria to appease the US-ally Turkey where it has been a longstanding demand of the Turkish President Erdogan that Turkey will not tolerate the presence of the US-backed Kurdish forces west of the Euphrates River, according to the US officials, Washington will fully withdraw American forces from Syria within the next 60 to 100 days.

Clearly, an understanding has been reached between Washington and Ankara. According to the terms of the agreement, the Erdogan administration has released the US pastor Andrew Brunson on October 12, which has been the longstanding demand of the Trump administration, and has also decided not to make public the audio recordings of the murder of Jamal Khashoggi, which could have implicated another US-ally the Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman in the assassination; and in return, the Trump administration has given a free hand to Ankara to mount an offensive in the Kurdish-held areas in northern Syria and has also decided to withdraw 2000 US troops from Syria.

Regarding the murder of the Saudi dissident Jamal Khashoggi at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul on October 2, a question would naturally arise in the minds of astute readers of alternative media that why did the mainstream media, Washington Post and New York Times in particular, take the lead in publicizing the assassination?

One apparent reason could be that Khashoggi was an opinion columnist for The Washington Post, which is owned by Jeff Bezos, the owner of Amazon. The Washington Post has a history of working in close collaboration with the CIA because Bezos had won a $600 million contract [1] in 2013 to host the CIA’s database on the Amazon’s web-hosting service.

It bears mentioning that despite the Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman being primarily responsible for the war in Yemen that has claimed tens of thousands of lives and has created a famine in Yemen, the mainstream media hailed him as a “moderate reformer” who brought radical reforms in the conservative Saudi society by permitting women to drive and by allowing cinemas to screen the Hollywood movies.

So what prompted the sudden change of heart in the mainstream media that the purported “moderate reformer” was all of a sudden vilified as a brutal murderer? It could be the nature of the brutal assassination, as Khashoggi’s body was barbarically dismembered and dissolved in acid, according to the Turkish sources.

More significantly, however, it was the timing of the assassination and the political mileage that could be gained from Khashoggi’s murder in the domestic politics of the US. Khashoggi was murdered on October 2, when the US midterm elections were only a few weeks away.

Donald Trump and his son-in-law Jared Kushner in particular have known to have forged close business relations with the Saudi royal family. It doesn’t come as a surprise that Donald Trump chose Saudi Arabia and Israel for his first official overseas visit in May last year.

Thus, the mainstream media’s campaign to seek justice for the murder of Jamal Khashoggi was actually a smear campaign against Donald Trump and his conservative political base, which is now obvious after the US midterm election results have been tallied. Even though the Republicans have retained their 51-seat majority in the Senate, the Democrats now control the House of Representatives by gaining 39 additional seats.

Clearly, two factors were mainly responsible for the surprising defeat of the Republicans in the US midterm elections. Firstly, the Khashoggi murder and the smear campaign mounted by the neoliberal media, which Donald Trump often pejoratively mentions as “fake media” on Twitter, against the Trump administration.

Secondly, and more importantly, the parcel bombs sent to the residences of George Soros, a dozen other Democratic Congressmen and The New York Times New York office by Cesar Sayoc on the eve of the elections. Although the suspect turned out to be a Trump supporter, he was likely instigated by shady hands in the US deep state, which is wary of the anti-establishment rhetoric and pro-Russia tendencies of the so-called “alt-right” administration.

Another reason why the Trump administration has given a free hand to the Erdogan administration to mount an offensive against the Kurdish-held areas in northern Syria is that Ankara has been drifting away from Washington’s orbit into the Kremlin’s sphere of influence. Turkey, which has the second largest army in NATO, has been cooperating with Russia in Syria against Washington’s interests since last year and has placed an order for the Russian-made S-400 missile system.

In order to understand the significance of relationship between Washington and Ankara, it’s worth noting that the United States has been conducting air strikes against targets in Syria from the Incirlik airbase and around fifty American B-61 hydrogen bombs have also been deployed there, whose safety became a matter of real concern during the failed July 2016 coup plot against the Erdogan administration; when the commander of the Incirlik airbase, General Bekir Ercan Van, along with nine other officers were arrested for supporting the coup; movement in and out of the base was denied, power supply was cut off and the security threat level was raised to the highest state of alert, according to a report [2] by Eric Schlosser for the New Yorker.

Regarding the recent cooperation between Moscow and Ankara in the Syrian civil war, although the proximate cause of this détente seems to be the attempted coup plot against the Erdogan administration in July 2016 by the supporters of the US-based preacher, Fethullah Gulen, this surprising development also sheds light on the deeper divisions between the United States and Turkey over their respective Syria policy.

After the United States reversal of “regime change” policy in Syria in August 2014 when the Islamic State overran Mosul and Anbar in Iraq in early 2014 and threatened the capital of another steadfast American ally, Masoud Barzani’s Erbil in the oil-rich Iraqi Kurdistan, Washington made the Kurds the centerpiece of its policy in Syria and Iraq.

It’s worth noting that 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, Washington has also lent its support to the Shi’a-led government in Iraq, the Shi’a Arabs of Iraq are not the trustworthy allies of the United States because they are under the influence of Iran.

Therefore, Washington was left with no other choice than to make the Kurds the centerpiece of its policy in Syria and Iraq after a group of Sunni Arab jihadists, the Islamic State, transgressed its mandate in Syria and overran Mosul and Anbar in Iraq in early 2014 from where the United States had withdrawn its troops only a couple of years ago in December 2011.

The US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces are nothing more than the Kurdish militias with a symbolic presence 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, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and the rest of the Gulf Arab States might not have serious reservations against this 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 Shi’a Iranian threat.

Turkey, on the other hand, has been more wary of the separatist Kurdish tendencies in its southeast than the Iranian threat, as such. But after the recent concession by the Trump administration to let Ankara mount an offensive against the Kurds in northern Syria in order to deny them space west of the Euphrates River, the ball is now in Erdogan’s court whether he maintains a balance in relations between the Kremlin and Washington or once again takes Turkey back to the status of the client state of Washington.

Trump Signals Withdrawal of US Troops from Syria

In a succinct tweet on Wednesday, Donald Trump has announced a momentous policy decision that the Trump administration will soon be pulling out the US troops from Syria and Iraq. Although the current redeployment of American troops will only be limited to northern Syria to appease the US-ally Turkey where it has been a longstanding demand of President Erdogan that Turkey will not tolerate the presence of the US-backed Kurdish forces west of Euphrates River, it can be expected in the coming months that Washington will withdraw American forces from eastern Syria and Iraq as well.

President Trump said in the tweet, “We have defeated ISIS in Syria, my only reason for being there during the Trump Presidency.” Thus, Washington has finally acknowledged its humiliating defeat in a country it never formally invaded, but where it waged a devastating proxy war for the last seven years that gave birth to myriads of militant groups, including the Islamic State.

It is an irrefutable fact that the United States sponsors 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 former Soviet Union from 1979 to 1988, but after the signing of the Geneva Accords and consequent withdrawal of 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 proxy wars, but after achieving the policy objectives of toppling the Arab nationalist Gaddafi regime in Libya and weakening the anti-Israel Assad regime in Syria, the United States relinquished its blanket support to the militants and eventually declared a war against a faction of Sunni militants battling the Syrian government, the Islamic State, when the latter transgressed its mandate in Syria and dared to occupy Mosul and Anbar in Iraq in June 2014 from where the US had withdrawn its troops only a couple of years ago in December 2011.

The only difference between the Soviet-Afghan Jihad back in the 1980s that spawned Islamic jihadists such as the Taliban and Al-Qaeda for the first time in history and the Libyan and Syrian proxy wars 2011-onward is that the Afghan jihad was an overt jihad: back then, the Western political establishments and their mouthpiece, the mainstream media, used to openly brag that the CIA provides all those AK-47s, rocket-propelled grenades and stingers to Pakistan’s intelligence agencies, which then distributes those deadly weapons among the Afghan so-called “freedom fighters” to combat the Soviet troops in Afghanistan.

After the 9/11 tragedy, however, the Western political establishments and corporate media have become a lot more circumspect, therefore this time around they have waged covert jihads against the Arab-nationalist Gaddafi regime in Libya and the anti-Zionist Assad regime in Syria, in which Islamic jihadists (aka terrorists) have been sold as “moderate rebels” with secular and nationalist ambitions to the Western audience.

Since the regime change objective in those hapless countries went against the mainstream narrative of ostensibly fighting a war against terrorism, therefore the Western political establishments and the mainstream media are now trying to muddle the reality by offering color-coded schemes to identify myriads of militant and terrorist outfits operating in Syria: such as the red militants of the Islamic State and Al-Nusra Front, which the Western powers want to eliminate; the yellow Islamic jihadists, like Jaysh al-Islam and Ahrar al-Sham, with whom the Western powers can collaborate under desperate circumstances; and the green militants of the Free Syria Army (FSA) and a few other inconsequential outfits which together comprise the so-called “moderate” Syrian opposition.

It’s worth noting, moreover, that the Syrian militant groups are no ordinary bands of ragtag jihadist outfits. They were 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 along 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 proxy war was such that had it not been for the Russian intervention in September 2015, the Syrian defenses would have collapsed.

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 traditional allies in the Middle East.

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 the 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 their regional and global patrons.

If we were to draw parallels between the Soviet-Afghan jihad during the 1980s and the Syrian proxy war of today, the Western powers used the training camps located in the Af-Pak border regions to train and arm Afghan jihadists against the Soviet troops in Afghanistan.

Similarly, the training camps located in the border regions of Turkey and Jordan were used to provide training and weapons to Sunni Arab militants battling the Shi’a-led Syrian government with the collaboration of Turkish, Jordanian and Saudi intelligence agencies.

During the Afghan jihad, it is a known historical fact that the bulk of the so-called “freedom fighters” was comprised of Pashtun Islamic jihadists, such as the factions of Jalaluddin Haqqani, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, Abdul Rab Rasul Sayyaf and scores of other militant outfits, some of which later coalesced together to form the Taliban movement.

Similarly, in Syria the majority of the so-called “moderate rebels” were comprised of Sunni Arab jihadists, such as Jaysh al-Islam, Ahrar al-Sham, al-Nusra Front, the Islamic State and myriads of other militant groups, including a small portion of defected Syrian soldiers who go by the name of Free Syria Army (FSA).

Moreover, apart from Pashtun Islamic jihadists, various factions of the Northern Alliance of Tajiks and Uzbeks constituted the relatively “moderate” segment of the Afghan rebellion, though those “moderate” warlords, like Ahmad Shah Massoud and Abul Rashid Dostum, were more ethnic and tribal in character than secular or nationalist, as such. Similarly, the Kurds of the so-called “Syrian Democratic Forces” can be compared to the Northern Alliance of Afghanistan.

Recently, the Islamic State’s purported “terror franchises” in Afghanistan and Pakistan have claimed a spate of bombings against the Shi’a and Barelvi Muslims who are regarded as heretics by Takfiris. But to contend that the Islamic State is responsible for suicide blasts in Pakistan and Afghanistan is to declare that the Taliban are responsible for the sectarian war in Syria and Iraq.

Both are localized militant outfits and the Islamic State without its Baathist command structure and superior weaponry is just another ragtag regional militant outfit. The distinction between the Taliban and the Islamic State lies in the fact that the Taliban follow Deobandi sect of Sunni Islam which is an Islamic sect native to South Asia and the jihadists of the Islamic State mostly belong to the Wahhabi-Salafi denomination.

Secondly, and more importantly, the insurgency in the border regions of Afghanistan and Pakistan is a Pashtun uprising which is an ethnic group native to Afghanistan and northwestern Pakistan, while the bulk of the Islamic State’s jihadists is comprised of Arab militants of Syria and Iraq.

The so-called “Khorasan Province” of the Islamic State in the Af-Pak region is nothing more than a coalition of several breakaway factions of the Taliban and a few other inconsequential local militant outfits which have pledged allegiance to the Islamic State’s chief Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi in order to enhance their prestige, but which don’t have any organizational and operational association, whatsoever, with the Islamic State proper in Syria and Iraq.

Conflating the Islamic State either with Al-Qaeda, the Taliban or with myriads of ragtag local militant groups is a deliberate deception intended to mislead public opinion in order to exaggerate the threat posed by the Islamic State which serves the scaremongering agenda of Western and regional security establishments.

Is Strasbourg Attack a False Flag to Thwart Yellow Vests?

On Tuesday evening, a brazen terror attack occurred in the French city of Strasbourg, claiming three lives and injuring a dozen, six of whom are said to be in critical condition. The suspect was known to police as an Islamic extremist and has been identified as 29-year-old Cherif Chekatt.

The suspected shooter evaded capture from a police dragnet and is still on the run, prompting fears of a follow-up attack. The suspect was shot and injured by soldiers guarding the Christmas market in Strasbourg, but escaped in a hijacked taxi.

Cherif Chekatt is said to be on a watch-list of around 26,000 people, of whom 10,000 are believed to have been radicalized. He had previously served prison sentences in France and Germany for common law offences and fought twice with security forces.

It’s worth noting that although the Western powers are ostensibly fighting a war against terrorism, they had worked hand-in-glove with the Islamic jihadists from 2011 to 2014 to topple the hostile regimes of Qaddafi in Libya and Bashar al-Assad in Syria.

In line with their foreign policy, Britain, France and Germany gave a free hand to the Islamic jihadists and their patrons based in those countries to wage proxy wars against the governments in Libya and Syria. France was particularly vulnerable because it has a large Muslim diaspora from its former North African colonies.

The seven-year-long conflict in Syria that gave birth to scores of militant groups, including the Islamic State, and after the conflict spilled across the border into neighboring Iraq in early 2014 was directly responsible for the spate of Islamic State-inspired terror attacks in Europe from 2015 to 2017.

Since the beginning of the Syrian conflict in August 2011 to June 2014, when the Islamic State overran Mosul and Anbar in Iraq, an informal pact existed between the Western powers, their regional Sunni allies and jihadists of the Middle East against the Shi’a Iranian axis. In accordance with the pact, militants were trained and armed in the training camps located in the border regions of Turkey and Jordan to battle the Syrian government.

This arrangement of an informal pact between the Western powers and the jihadists of the Middle East against the Iranian axis worked well up to August 2014, when the Obama administration made a volte-face on its previous regime change policy in Syria and began conducting air strikes against one group of Sunni militants battling the Syrian government, the Islamic State, after the latter overstepped its mandate in Syria and overran Mosul and Anbar in Iraq from where the US had withdrawn its troops only a couple of years ago in December 2011.

After this reversal of policy in Syria by the Western powers and the subsequent Russian military intervention on the side of the Syrian government in September 2015, the momentum of jihadists’ expansion in Syria and Iraq stalled, and they felt that their Western patrons had committed a treachery against the Sunni jihadists’ cause, that’s why they were infuriated and rose up in arms to exact revenge for this betrayal.

If we look at the chain of events, the timing of the spate of terror attacks against the West was critical: the Islamic State overran Mosul in June 2014, the Western powers 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 occurred on the Western soil at the offices of Charlie Hebdo in January 2015, and then the Islamic State carried out the audacious November 2015 Paris attacks, the March 2016 Brussels bombings, the June 2016 truck-ramming incident in Nice, and three horrific terror attacks took place in the United Kingdom within a span of less than three months in 2017, and after that the Islamic State carried out the Barcelona attack in August 2017.

More to the point, the dilemma that the jihadists and their regional backers faced in Syria was quite unique: in the wake of the Ghouta chemical weapons attacks in Damascus in August 2013, the stage was all set for yet another no-fly zone and “humanitarian intervention” a la Qaddafi’s Libya; the war hounds were waiting for a finishing blow and then-Turkish foreign minister, Ahmet Davutoglu, and the former Saudi intelligence chief, Bandar bin Sultan, were shuttling between the Western capitals to lobby for the military intervention. Francois Hollande had already announced his intentions and David Cameron was also onboard.

Here it should be remembered that even during the Libyan intervention, the Obama administration’s policy was a bit ambivalent and France under the leadership of Sarkozy had taken the lead role. In Syria’s case, however, the British parliament forced Cameron to seek a vote for military intervention in the House of Commons before committing the British troops and air force to Syria.

Taking cue from the British parliament, the US Congress also compelled Obama to seek approval before another ill-conceived military intervention; and since both the administrations lacked the requisite majority in their respective parliaments and the public opinion was also fiercely against another Middle Eastern war, therefore Obama and Cameron dropped their plans of enforcing a no-fly zone over Syria.

In the end, France was left alone as the only Western power still in favor of intervention; at that point, however, the seasoned Russian foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, staged a diplomatic coup by announcing that the Syrian regime was willing to ship its chemical weapons stockpiles out of Syria and subsequently the issue was amicably resolved.

Turkey, Jordan and the Gulf Arab states, the main beneficiaries of the Sunni Jihad against the Shi’a-led government in Syria, however, had lost a golden opportunity to deal a fatal blow to their regional rivals.

To add insult to the injury, the Islamic State, one of the numerous Sunni Arab militant outfits fighting in Syria, overstepped its mandate in Syria and overran Mosul and Anbar in Iraq in 2014, from where the US troops had withdrawn only a couple of years ago in December 2011.

Additionally, when the graphic images and videos of Islamic State’s executions surfaced on the internet, the Western powers were left with no other choice but to adopt some countermeasures to show that they were still sincere in pursuing their dubious “war on terror” policy; at the same time, however, they assured their Turkish, Jordanian and Gulf Arab allies that despite fighting a war against the maverick jihadist outfit, the Islamic State, the Western policy of training and arming the so-called “moderate” Syrian militants will continue apace and that Bashar al-Assad’s days were numbered, one way or the other.

Moreover, declaring the war against the Islamic State in August 2014 served another purpose too: in order to commit the US Air Force to Syria and Iraq, the Obama administration needed the approval of the US Congress which was not available, as I have already mentioned, but by declaring a war against the Islamic State, which is a designated terrorist organization, the Obama administration availed itself of the war on terror provisions in the US laws and thus circumvented the US Congress.

But then Russia threw a spanner in the works of NATO and its Gulf Arab allies in September 2015 by its surreptitious military buildup in Latakia that was executed with an element of surprise unheard of since General Rommel, the Desert Fox. And now Turkey, Jordan, the Gulf Arab states and their jihadist proxies in Syria find themselves at the receiving end in the Syrian conflict.

Keeping this background of the quagmire created by the Western powers in Syria and Iraq to appease their regional allies, Israel and the Gulf states, in mind, it becomes amply clear that the Western powers are not sincere in pursuing their dubious war on terror policy as they have worked hand-in-glove with the Islamic jihadists in the Middle East.

Then how is it possible that a terror attack has occurred in Strasbourg when the Yellow Vests demonstrations have taken France by storm, which are demanding reduction in fuel tax, the reintroduction of wealth tax on large businesses, the raising of the minimum wage, and the resignation of the former investment banker and current President of France, Emmanuel Macron.

The only beneficiary of the Strasbourg shooting, it appears, is none other than the French government itself, because after the incident, the government would now put restrictions on freedom of assembly and all kinds of political demonstrations.

Thus it is quite likely that the French deep state might have instigated one of jihadists on its payroll to carry out the Strasbourg atrocity to break the momentum of the Yellow Vests protests, which have posed the single biggest threat to the elitist Macron administration since coming to power last year.