Obama’s Last Chance to Redeem Himself was Wasted on Russia
The rapid liberation of the Syrian city of Aleppo, against the background of a complete collapse of the actions Washington led coalition in Mosul has clearly driven the Obama administration mad.
It’s been reported that a total of three
thousand militants in Syria has voluntarily joined the cease-fire
agreement and handed over its weapons to the government forces. It took
52 buses to transport these militants together with their families from
the outskirts of Damascus suburb to the Syrian province of Idlib. The
militants have handed over 500 units of small arms, including sniper
rifles, and a couple dozens of 120-millimeter mortars. As for the
situation in Aleppo, the Syrian army has been applying so much pressure
on the Jabhat al-Nusra militants that they’re not just retreating from
the city, they flee in panic, leaving back documents, equipment and
weapons. It’s been reported that American-made missile systems were
found in the liberated areas of Aleppo.
It’s now a well-established fact that on
various levels the CIA and the Pentagon have been secretly supplying
the so-called “rebels” with TOWs and MANPADS, as it has previously been
reported by a number of European media sources. Thus, the German
magazine Focus, citing one
of the commanders of the terrorist organization Jabhat al-Nusra
reported that radical militants in Syria were receiving TOWs from the
United States directly.
Additionally, there’s been programs
aimed at arming the so-called “moderate” Syrian opposition indirectly,
by urging Saudi Arabia to hand them over BGM-71 TOW so they could fight
Syrian armoured vehicles more effectively. And each time, instead of
answering questions about US arms supplies to radical militants at the
US Congress hearings, the Obama administration officials were saying
that they were “unable to discuss such questions in public.”
At the same time ISIS was obtaining
weapons made in Eastern Europe. As it has been stated by the director of
Conflict Armament Research, James Bevan, last summer his company traced
a direct source of arms supplies to Islamic extremists from Europe.
Sometimes it took small arms mere weeks to reach Iraq and Syria, the
expert on illegal weapons tracking said.
Analysts of the British military journal Jane’s Defence Weekly have recently established that
the FBO has released two solicitations in recent months looking for
shipping companies to transport explosive material from Eastern Europe
to the Jordanian port of Aqaba on behalf of the US Navy’s Military
Sealift Command. The cargo listed in the document included AK-47 rifles,
PKM general-purpose machine guns, DShK heavy machine guns, RPG-7 rocket
launchers, and 9K111M Faktoria anti-tank guided weapon (ATGW) systems.
The Faktoria is an improved version of the 9K111 Fagot ATGW, the primary
difference being that its missile has a tandem warhead for defeating
explosive reactive armour (ERA) fitted to some tanks.
At the same a jihadist media source
known as the Sham Center has announced that in the province of Hama
radical militants launched three MANPADS rockets simultaneously,
damaging a SU-24 of the Syrian Air Force. This tactics seriously
increases one’s chances of bringing down a jet, but you need a lot of
MANPADS to employ it. Therefore, large amounts of those are being
shipped to the north of Syria, where the Syrian army troops supported by
Russian aircraft continue liberating the city of Aleppo.
There’s every reason to believe that
we’re witnessing a CIA operation of buying and delivering Soviet-made
MANPADS to the Middle East. The SA-18 Grouse and SA-24 Grinch are
capable of downing aircraft flying at 2000 miles at a distance of 4500
miles. Its capabilities are comparable to the famous US-made Stingers,
which the CIA was supplying to the Taliban back in 1980s to fight the
Soviet Air Force in Afghanistan.
However, if these deliveries were kept a
secret earlier, now Washington sees no reason to hide its wrongdoings,
as it is fully aware of the bitter failure of its policies in the Middle
East. Now the Obama has adopted a bill approving the procedure of
supplying the so-called Syrian “opposition” with MANPADS officially.
The loophole was left in the budget of
the US Ministry of Defense for 2017 and it was adopted by the House of
Representatives on Friday. Before that US lawmakers didn’t try not
regulate the shipments of MANPADS to Syria, but they didn’t introduce a
direct ban either.
Now we can witness radical militants in
Syria being armed with something way more serious than MANPADS, like
mobile anti-aircraft guns and sophisticated anti-tank weapons. Neither
ISIS, nor Jabhat al-Nusra is getting its combat aviation in the
foreseeable future. Clearly, since Washington is convinced that the
groups it has been supporting have passed the test on their
“moderateness”, so it can go along and hand them over any sort of
weapons out of the US military arsenal. And it’s clear that this step is
not aimed at the Syrian Air Force, but Russian military jets operating
in Syria instead.
Jean Périer is an independent researcher and analyst and a renowned expert on the Near and Middle East, exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”
http://journal-neo.org/2016/12/08/obama-s-last-chance-to-redeem-himself-was-wasted-on-russia/
http://journal-neo.org/2016/12/08/obama-s-last-chance-to-redeem-himself-was-wasted-on-russia/