Sunday, June 18th., 2017
More Damning Evidence That the U.S. Is Directly Backing Al Qaeda-Linked Groups
Valuable:
Pablo Picasso's Women of Algiers (Version O) was sold for a
record-breaking $180million after a tense 11 minute auction at
world-famous Christies on Monday
"......"Billionaire
Hamad bin Jassim bin Jaber Al Thani is understood to have purchased
Women of Algiers (Version O) after outbidding rivals in a tense 11
minute auction at world-famous Christies.
But
the vibrant, multi-hued painting, which features a number of
bare-breasted women, will most likely be kept behind closed doors,
thanks to the Middle Eastern country's strict laws."...
J
Qatar’s former prime minister admitted in an interview that the
United States and its Gulf allies supported Islamist extremists in
Syria.
In CIA-run training sites located in Jordan and Turkey, Hamad bin
Jassim bin Jaber al-Thani explained, the U.S., Saudi Arabia and Qatar,
“all of us, we [were] supporting the same groups,” he said. Among them
were extremists, al-Thani noted.
This testimony adds to the growing body of evidence that the U.S.
government and its proxies backed hard-line Salafi-jihadists in order to
weaken the Syrian government and its allies Iran and Hezbollah.
Qatar has recently come under fire by the U.S. and Gulf allies Saudi
Arabia and the UAE, which have condemned the country for its support of
Islamist groups.
U.S. officials have internally acknowledged that both Saudi Arabia
and Qatar aided ISIS and al-Qaeda, but in a diplomatic fracas, Qatar has
become a scapegoat for the spread of violent extremism. Saudi Arabia
and the UAE have suspended political and economic ties with Qatar and
imposed a de facto blockade on the tiny country.
Hamad bin Jassim bin Jaber al-Thani, who served as Qatar’s prime
minister and foreign minister until 2013, sat down for a June 12 interview with Charlie Rose to discuss the crisis.
"What is the reason for this coming now?" Rose asked. “Questions have
been raised about how much funding Qatar has done to some of the Islamic
groups in Syria.” (The exchange begins at 7:30 in the video, which is
embedded below.)
“In Syria, everybody did mistakes, including your country,” al-Thani replied.
When the war began in Syria, he went on, “all of us worked through two operation rooms: one in Jordan and one in Turkey.”
In Jordan, al-Thani continued, “There was countries, some of the GCC
countries, among them the Saudis, the Emiratis, Qatar, United States,
and other allies. And they [were] working from there. And all of us, we
[were] supporting the same groups. In Turkey we did the same.”
The former Qatari prime minister was referring to the U.S. government’s Operation Timber Sycamore, a covert CIA program in which thousands of militants were trained to fight to try to topple the Syrian government.
At its peak, the CIA was spending $1 billion per year training
and arming what it claimed were “moderate” Syrian rebels — $1 of every
$15 in its entire budget, according to documents leaked by NSA
whistleblower Edward Snowden.
Eventually, al-Thani said in the interview, it became clear that some of
the armed groups “have other agenda, and we always eliminate them one
by one.”
The U.S. also "supported the wrong groups sometimes," he emphasized
to Rose. "It doesn’t mean that we did not do something wrong there.”
In one such example, Nour al-Din al-Zinki, a former “moderate” rebel
group vetted by the CIA and armed with U.S. anti-tank weapons, joined a rebranded Syrian al-Qaeda-led coalition.
Growing Body of Evidence
Hamad bin Jassim bin Jaber al-Thani’s comments are further substantiated by large amounts of evidence.
A 2014 email from former secretary of state Hillary Clinton, citing
U.S. government intelligence, states that American allies Saudi Arabia
and Qatar supported ISIS in Syria.
In a speech at Harvard University in 2014, former Vice President Joe Biden also admitted that close U.S. allies Saudi Arabia and Turkey had intentionally supported Islamist extremists in Syria.
“They were so determined to take down [Syrian President Bashar
al-]Assad and essentially have a proxy Sunni-Shia war. What did they
do?" he asked. “They poured hundreds of millions of dollars and tens of
thousands of tons of weapons into anyone who would fight against Assad,
except that the people who were being supplied were al-Nusra, and
al-Qaeda, and the extremist elements of jihadis coming from other parts
of the world."
Turkey played a double game with
ISIS, allowing thousands of Salafi-jihadists from around the world to
cross its border into Syria to join the genocidal militant group. Biden
added that his “old friend” Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan told
him, “You were right; we let too many people through. Now we are trying
to seal the border.”
In 2013, former CIA director Mike Morell admitted that
Syria's al-Qaeda affiliate Jabhat al-Nusra and the extremist group
Ahrar al-Sham were "the two most effective organizations on the
battlefield," and "moderate members of the opposition joined forces with
them to fight the Syrians.” Yet weapons and support continued flowing
in from the U.S. and its allies.
Moreover, a declassified 2012 document from the Defense Intelligence Agency shows that just
over one year into the conflict, the U.S. government knew "Salafi[s],
the Muslim Brotherhood, and AQI are the major forces driving the
insurgency in Syria.” The DIA report added that these rebel groups were
likely to create a "Salafist principality in eastern Syria,” in the area
ISIS eventually took over, “and this is exactly what the supporting
powers to the opposition want, in order to isolate the Syrian regime."
Despite this clear understanding, the U.S., Saudi Arabia, Qatar and
Turkey poured billions of dollars into the Syrian opposition, empowering
these Salafi-jihadist groups.
The Qatar Controversy
The U.S. government’s acknowledgement that Qatar has supported Islamist
extremist groups has not stopped the arms deals from continuing —
suggesting that the longtime U.S. policy of using Salafi-jihadist groups
to destabilize its enemies will continue.
On June 14, just days after Donald Trump castigated Qatar over its funding of extremist groups, the U.S. president signed a $12 billion deal to transfer F-15QA fighter jets to the country. This was part of a larger $21 billion U.S. arms package with Qatar.
The primary point of dispute in the conflict in the Gulf is over Qatar’s
support for the Muslim Brotherhood and the Palestinian militant group
Hamas. Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Egypt strongly oppose the Muslim
Brotherhood and consider it a terrorist organization.
Saudi Arabia and the UAE, which see Iran as their mortal enemy, have
also accused Qatar of being too close to Iran, but Hamad bin Jassim bin
Jaber al-Thani strongly rejected this claim.
"Qatar supporting Iran is a big joke," the former prime minister said in
the interview with Charlie Rose. If Qatar and Iran were supposedly
close allies, he added, “we would not fight with them in Syria.”
With Iran, Qatar has “a normal relation,” al-Thani stressed. He noted
that other Middle Eastern countries have even larger economic ties with
Iran than Qatar does.
Qatar is technically a constitutional monarchy, although there are few
checks and balances on the absolute authority of the royal family.
Hamad bin Jassim bin Jaber al-Thani is often referred to with the
abbreviation HBJ. He was made foreign minister in 1992, and prime
minister in 2007. A billionaire notorious for spending large amounts of money on luxury items like a $100 million New York City penthouse, he was one of the scores of politicians mentioned in the Panama Papers.
Though tiny, Qatar has enormous oil reserves, which have made it the
richest country in the world, per capita. As al-Thani explained, it has
used its vast wealth to punch above its weight on the international
stage, including by backing some of the Middle East’s more unsavory
actors.