Five years following a potentially catastrophic incident that could’ve inundated Islamic State’s former capital Raqqa and many towns downstream Euphrates River in eastern Syria and caused more deaths than the deployment of any weapon of mass destruction, the New York Times has finally mustered enough courage to report [1] that at the height of US-led international coalition’s war against Islamic State in Syria and Iraq, US B-52 bombers struck Tabqa Dam with 2,000-pound bombs, including at least one bunker-busting bomb that fortunately didn’t explode.
In March 2017, alternative media was abuzz with reports that
the dam was about to collapse and entire civilian population downstream
Euphrates River needs to be urgently evacuated to prevent the inevitable
catastrophe. But the US national security establishment had issued a gag order
to mainstream media “not to sensationalize the issue.” The Times deserves a pat
on the back for bringing the facts to the light, albeit five years too late.
The bombshell report notes that the dam was contested
between US-backed and Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces and the Islamic
State. A firefight broke out in which SDF incurred heavy casualties. It was
then that a top secret US special operations unit called Task Force 9 called
for airstrikes on the dam.
“The explosions on March 26, 2017, knocked dam workers to
the ground. A fire spread and crucial equipment failed. The flow of the
Euphrates River suddenly had no way through, the reservoir began to rise and
authorities used loudspeakers to warn people downstream to flee.
“The Islamic State group, the Syrian government and Russia
blamed the United States, but the dam was on the US military’s ‘no-strike list’
of protected civilian sites, and the commander of the US offensive at the time,
then-Lt. Gen. Stephen J. Townsend, said allegations of US involvement were
based on ‘crazy reporting.’”
It’s worth noting that it was the same rogue Pentagon
General Stephen J. Townsend, currently the commander of US AFRICOM and then the
commander of Combined Joint Task Force (CJTF) – Operation Inherent Resolve (OIR)
responsible for leading the war against the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq, who
was responsible for another reckless confrontation an year later that brought
two global powers engaged in the Syrian conflict almost to the brink of
full-scale war.
On February 7, 2018, US B-52 bombers and Apache helicopters
struck a contingent of Syrian government troops and allied forces in Deir
al-Zor province of eastern Syria 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 Moscow lost more Russian nationals in one day than it had lost during its
entire military campaign in support of the Syrian government since September
2015.
Washington’s objective in striking Russian contractors 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 the Euphrates River to Deir al-Zor Military
Council (DMC), which was 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 the 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 in outlook – was simply not a match for the superior training and
arms of the Syrian troops and Russian military contractors, consequently
causing a carnage in which scores of Russian nationals lost their lives.
A month after the massacre of Russian military contractors
in Syria, on March 4, 2018, Sergei Skripal, a Russian double agent working for
the British foreign intelligence service, and his daughter Yulia were found
unconscious on a public bench outside a shopping center in Salisbury. A few
months later, in July 2018, a British woman, Dawn Sturgess, died after touching
the container of the nerve agent that allegedly poisoned the Skripals.
In the case of the Skripals, Theresa May, then the prime
minister of the United Kingdom, promptly accused Russia of attempted
assassinations and the British government concluded that Skripal and his
daughter were poisoned with a Moscow-made, military-grade nerve agent,
novichok.
Sergei Skripal was recruited by the British MI6 in 1995, and
before his arrest in Russia in December 2004, he was alleged to have blown the
cover of scores of Russian secret agents. He was released in a spy swap deal in
2010 and was allowed to settle in Salisbury. Both Sergei Skripal and his
daughter have since recovered and were discharged from hospital in May 2018.
In the aftermath of the Salisbury poisonings in March 2018,
the US, UK and several European nations expelled scores of Russian diplomats
and the Trump administration ordered the closure of the Russian consulate in
Seattle.
In a retaliatory move, Russia also expelled a similar number
of American, British and European diplomats, and ordered the closure of
American consulate in Saint Petersburg. The number of American diplomatic
personnel stationed in Russia drastically dropped from 1,200 before the
escalation to 120 now, and the relations between Moscow and Western powers
reached their lowest ebb since the break-up of the former Soviet Union and the
end of the Cold War in December 1991.
A month after the Salisbury poisonings in March 2018, an
alleged chemical weapons attack took place in Douma, Syria, on April 7, 2018,
and Donald Trump ordered a cruise missile strike in Syria on April 14, 2018, in
collaboration with the Theresa May government in the UK and the Emmanuel Macron
administration in France.
The strike took place little over a year after a similar
cruise missile strike at al-Shayrat airfield on April 6, 2017, after an alleged
chemical weapons attack in Khan Sheikhoun, though both the cruise missile
strikes were nothing more than a show of force, and the alleged chemical weapons
attacks were at best dubious, as subsequently reported by credible sources.
But the fact that out of 105 total cruise missiles deployed
in the April 14, 2018, strike against a military research facility in the
Barzeh district of Damascus and two alleged chemical weapons storage facilities
in Homs, 85 were launched by the US, 12 by the French and 8 by the UK aircrafts
demonstrated the unified resolve of the Western regimes against Russia that
could’ve escalated into Third World War between two global powers, a doomsday
scenario far more frightening than the collapse of Tabqa Dam on Euphrates
River.
Citations:
[1] A dam in Syria was on a ‘no-strike’ list. The US bombed
it anyway:
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/20/us/airstrike-us-isis-dam.html
[2] Russian toll in Syria battle was 300 killed and wounded:
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