{"id":65013,"date":"2015-10-12T12:00:31","date_gmt":"2015-10-12T11:00:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=65013"},"modified":"2015-10-12T11:06:24","modified_gmt":"2015-10-12T10:06:24","slug":"war-on-islamic-state-a-new-cold-war-fiction","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2015\/10\/war-on-islamic-state-a-new-cold-war-fiction\/","title":{"rendered":"War on Islamic State: A New Cold War Fiction"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Nafeez_Ahmed\"<\/a>The Islamic State group is little more than the proxy bastard child of a New Cold War that looks set to escalate.<\/p>\n

8 Oct 2015 – <\/em>Russia is bombing \u201cterrorists\u201d in Syria, and the US is understandably peeved.<\/p>\n

A day after the bombing began, Obama\u2019s Defence Secretary Ashton Carter complained that most Russian strikes \u201cwere in areas where there were probably not ISIL (IS) forces\u201d.<\/p>\n

Anonymously, US officials accused Russia of deliberately<\/a> targeting CIA-sponsored \u201cmoderate\u201d rebels to shore-up the regime of Bashir al-Assad.<\/p>\n

Only two of Russia\u2019s 57 airstrikes have hit ISIS, opined<\/a> Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu in similar fashion. The rest have hit \u201cthe moderate opposition, the only forces fighting ISIS in Syria,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Such claims have been dutifully parroted across the Western press with little scrutiny, bar the odd US media watchdog<\/a>.<\/p>\n

But who are these moderate rebels, really?<\/p>\n

\"A<\/a>

A Syrian woman reacts after her home were damaged by the Russian air strikes in Maasaran town, Idlib, Syria on 7 October, 2015<\/p><\/div>\n

Moderate al-Qaeda<\/strong><\/p>\n

The first<\/a> Russian airstrikes hit the rebel-held town of Talbisah north of Homs City, home to al-Qaeda\u2019s official Syrian arm, Jabhat al-Nusra, and the pro-al-Qaeda Ahrar al-Sham, among other local rebel groups. Both al-Nusra and the Islamic State have claimed responsibility for vehicle-borne IEDs (VBIEDs) in Homs City, which is 12 kilometers south of Talbisah.<\/p>\n

The Institute for the Study of War (ISW) reports that as part of \u201cUS and Turkish efforts to establish an ISIS \u2018free zone\u2019 in the northern Aleppo countryside,\u201d al-Nusra \u201cwithdrew from the border and reportedly reinforced positions in this rebel-held pocket north of Homs city\u201d.<\/p>\n

In other words, the US and Turkey are actively sponsoring<\/a> \u201cmoderate\u201d Syrian rebels in the form of al-Qaeda, which Washington DC-based risk analysis firm Valen Globals forecasts<\/a> will be \u201ca bigger threat to global security\u201d than IS in coming years.<\/p>\n

Last October, Vice President Joe Biden conceded<\/a> that there is \u201cno moderate middle\u201d among the Syrian opposition. Turkey and the Gulf powers armed and funded \u201canyone who would fight against Assad,\u201d including \u201cal-Nusra,\u201d \u201cal-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI)<\/a>,\u201d and the \u201cextremist elements of jihadis\u00a0who were coming from other parts of the world\u201d.<\/p>\n

This external funding enabled Islamist factions to systematically displace secular Free Syria Army (FSA) leaders, culminating in the rise of IS.<\/p>\n

In other words, the CIA-backed rebels targeted by Russia are not moderates. They represent the same melting pot of al-Qaeda affiliated networks that spawned the Islamic State in the first place.<\/p>\n

Our Islamists<\/strong><\/p>\n

And they rose to power in Syria not in spite, but because<\/em> of the US rubber-stamping the jihadist funnel through<\/a> the so-called \u201cvetting\u201d process. This summer, for instance, al-Qaeda led rebels received accelerated weapons shipments in a US-backed operation to retake Idlib province from Assad.<\/p>\n

Notice here that the US priority was to rollback Assad\u2019s forces from Idlib – not fight IS. Yet the brave Western press, so outspoken on Russian duplicity, somehow overlooked how this anti-ISIS coalition operation failed to target a single IS fighter.<\/p>\n

Since Russia\u2019s intervention, the press has been particularly coy about the fact that Washington\u2019s \u201cmoderate\u201d rebels include the likes of al-Nusra, Ahrar al-Sham and the Islamic Front.<\/p>\n

While al-Nusra, of course, is al-Qaeda\u2019s Syrian branch, Ahrar al-Sham openly \u201ccooperates with the Syrian affiliate of al-Qaeda and has welcomed former associates of Osama bin Laden\u201d according to<\/a> the New York Times. \u201cWhile its leaders say they seek to create a representative government, they avoid the word \u2018democracy\u2019 and say Islam must guide any eventual state.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Islamic Front, Syria\u2019s largest<\/a> opposition grouping consisting of tens of thousands of fighters, aims to establish an \u201cIslamic state\u201d in Syria, rejects democracy and secularism, and welcomes al-Qaeda foreign fighters as \u201cbrothers who came to help us\u201d.<\/p>\n

Islamic Front leader Zahran Alloush is on record as having praised Osama bin Laden, endorsed cooperation with al-Nusra, and repeatedly called for the total extermination of Shia and Alawite communities in the Levant.<\/p>\n

These are the \u201cmoderates\u201d the US has empowered in the name of fighting IS.<\/p>\n

How not to vet rebels and influence people<\/strong><\/p>\n

The US has evaded formal responsibility for doing so using the best covert operation traditions: plausible deniability by passing the buck.<\/p>\n

Since 2012, the CIA-run clandestine rebel-vetting programme has been conducted outside Syria, in partner countries like Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Jordan and Turkey. Although CIA and US military personnel oversee<\/a> the programme, they \u201cvet\u201d rebels largely through \u2018intelligence\u2019 provided by its own allies.<\/p>\n

The supposedly rigorous<\/a> vetting process includes \u201cpsychological exams,\u201d gathering of \u201cbiometric data,\u201d and running the names of candidates \u201cthrough US databases\u201d and \u201cwith regional allies for checks\u201d.<\/p>\n

Recruits already known to the US government are checked easily based on internal data. But for new recruits, the US depends on the \u201cexpertise\u201d of its coalition partners like Saudi Arabia and Turkey.<\/p>\n

Still, CIA personnel<\/a> were \u201chelping allies decide which Syrian opposition fighters\u201d would receive arms. But the relationship between the \u201cmoderate\u201d FSA and the jihadist factions, including IS, had grown increasingly porous.<\/p>\n

German journalist Jurgen Todenhofer, who spent 10 days inside the Islamic State, reported<\/a> last year that IS militants are being \u201cindirectly\u201d armed by the West: \u201cThey buy the weapons that we give to the Free Syrian Army, so they get Western weapons – they get French weapons\u2026 I saw German weapons, I saw American weapons.\u201d<\/p>\n

The CIA knew what was happening: classified intelligence\u00a0assessments year after year showed that most Saudi, Turkish and Qatari arms ended up with \u201chard-line Islamic jihadists, and not the more secular opposition groups\u201d.<\/p>\n

The CIA programme has not been shut down, although it has predictably failed to arm moderates despite seeding nearly 10,000 rebel fighters – many of whom have joined<\/a> the IS terrorists the West is supposed to be fighting.<\/p>\n

Instead, the Pentagon has been tasked to establish a \u201cnew,\u201d separate, \u201cmoderate\u201d rebel-training programme.<\/p>\n

Unsurprisingly, that programme has virtually collapsed, even as the CIA continues to arm the jihadists that pretend to hate IS while cooperating with IS to fight Assad.<\/p>\n

Just last month, in extraordinary testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee, General Lloyd Austin who leads the anti-ISIS strategy at US Central Command admitted that there are only \u201cfour or five\u201d US-trained \u201cmoderate\u201d rebels in Syria currently fighting IS.<\/p>\n

Who is fighting IS, really?<\/strong><\/p>\n

This doesn\u2019t mean questions about Russia\u2019s strategy are unjustified. Clearly, Vladimir Putin\u2019s self-serving intervention in Syria is about keeping the brutal Assad in power, by crushing the rebel forces seeking his removal.<\/p>\n

But Western journalists obediently mimicking the State Department line have universally failed to ask the sort of questions they rightly ask of Russia: namely, why is the US-led coalition refusing to bomb Islamic State extraction wells and oil truck convoys?<\/p>\n

A sobering Greenwich University study<\/a> published by Maritime Security Review in March on the Islamic State\u2019s illicit oil trafficking networks comes to some surprising conclusions on this issue.<\/p>\n

Authored by George Kiourktsoglou, lecturer in maritime security and former Royal Dutch Shell strategist, and Dr Alec Coutroubis, acting head at the Faculty of Engineering and Science, the study finds that US, Turkish and Gulf air raids on ISIS \u201coil manufacturing facilities\u201d have not gone far enough: \u201cExtraction wells in the area of bombardments have yet to be targeted by the US or the air-assets of its allies, a fact that can be readily attributed to the at times \u2018toxic\u2019 politics in the Middle East.\u201d<\/p>\n

The scholars, who have previously given evidence before the UK Parliamentary Foreign Affairs Select Committee, further report that despite large convoys transporting IS oil through Syria, Iraq and Turkey, \u201callied US air-raids do not target the truck lorries out of fear of provoking a backlash from locals\u201d (although killing up to a thousand<\/a> Syrian civilians is apparently fine). As a result, \u201cthe transport operations are being run efficiently, taking place most of times in broad daylight\u201d.<\/p>\n

So the US is not targeting the Islamic State\u2019s financial lifeline – its black market<\/a> oil infrastructure – but instead is teaming up with the same al-Qaeda affiliated groups that spawned IS in the first place, to undermine Assad. And Russia, for all its muscle-flexing rhetoric, sees its main priority as countering US-led efforts to topple Assad, by targeting his most immediate opponents.<\/p>\n

This is, in other words, a New Cold War between competing empires, the unending victims of which are the Syrian people. As for the Islamic State, it is little more than the proxy bastard child of a conflict that looks set to escalate.<\/p>\n

__________________________________<\/p>\n

Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed, Ph.D. is a member of the TRANSCEND Network for Peace, Development and Environment<\/a>. <\/em>He is an investigative journalist, bestselling author and international security scholar. A former Guardian writer, he writes the \u2018System Shift\u2019 column for VICE\u2019s Motherboard, and is also a columnist for Middle East Eye. He is the winner of a 2015 Project Censored Award, known as the \u2018Alternative Pulitzer Prize\u2019, for Outstanding Investigative Journalism for his Guardian work, and was selected in the Evening Standard\u2019s \u2018Power 1,000\u2019 most globally influential Londoners. Nafeez has also written for <\/em>TRANSCEND Media Service<\/a>, <\/em>The Independent, Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, The Scotsman, Foreign Policy, The Atlantic, Quartz, Prospect, New Statesman, Le Monde Diplomatique, New Internationalist, Counterpunch, Truthout, among others. He is a Visiting Research Fellow at the Faculty of Science and Technology at Anglia Ruskin University. He is the author of <\/em>A User\u2019s Guide to the Crisis of Civilization: And How to Save It<\/a> (2010), and the scifi thriller novel <\/em>Zero Point<\/a>, among other books. His work on the root causes and covert operations linked to international terrorism officially contributed to the 9\/11 Commission and the 7\/7 Coroner\u2019s Inquest.<\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 middleeasteye.net<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Islamic State group is little more than the proxy bastard child of a New Cold War that looks set to escalate.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[40],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-65013","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-transcend-members"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/65013","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=65013"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/65013\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=65013"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=65013"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=65013"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}