No safe havens for terrorists. Period.

It's not difficult to figure out which nations promote and harbour terrorism. The can of worms opened up with the patronisation of ISIS. See below comments from conscientious readers...

‘No safe havens’: Terrorism should be countered through teamwork, ambitions set aside – Lavrov
RT, 28 Feb, 2016

There can be no safe havens from terrorism and the global terror threat should be confronted by a team effort, while double standards, selfish ambitions, and disputes need to be set aside, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov told Algerian media.

In an interview with Algerian newspaper L’Expression, Lavrov said that progress in the fight against terrorism can only be made through the joint efforts of the international community coordinated by the United Nations.

“Fighting terrorism can be efficient only if we work together, based on the solid ground of international law, with the UN in the role of central coordinator, and by putting aside double standards,” he told the newspaper.

“Today it is necessary to put aside disagreements, ambitions, and pre-conditions,” for the sake of defeating Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS, ISIL) and other extremist groups that “have challenged human civilization,” he said.

Commenting on various issues concerning Russian-Algerian relations, Lavrov said that both countries are working together for a common cause.

The foreign services of the two countries have set up an ad hoc committee that holds regular meetings to discuss how to counter the threat, the minister said, adding that Algeria and Russia are quite experienced in dealing with “terrorist aggression.”

“A series of deadly terrorist attacks has not only shown the barbaric nature of IS ideology and its practices, but has also shown that, in the contemporary interdependent world, the wish to create individual ‘safe havens’ to isolate oneself from your neighbors is impossible,” he said.

A series of IS terrorist attacks hit Paris last year, with the Charlie Hebdo and kosher market shootings in January, and the terror assaults in Paris that killed 130 people in November.

Lavrov also brought attention to the close ties enjoyed between Russia and Algeria in the interview, welcoming the countries’ collaboration in the military and energy sectors, as well as others. “Traditionally, Algeria is among Russia’s top trading partners,” Lavrov noted.

“It’s important – and our Algerian partners agree with us – not to be satisfied with what has been achieved, and look for new potential areas to work on,” he added.

Notable Readers' Comments:

# The US and their allies should not be in Syria, period. They are in Syria illegally and people need to stop acting as if they have a right to be there in any capacity when they don't.

# US and CIA created ISIS in Iraqi camps, all the Paris terror shootings and US terror shootings is CIA and Mossads doing. What a circus. Unfortunately we the common people are being killed left and right in this Bilderberg Banker Billionaire hunt for power circus..

# There should be no safe havens for terrorists but first things first, there should be no nations (US, UK, 'Israel', Turkey, Saudi Arabia, NATO) which create terrorist groups to use as their proxies to advance their geopolitical agenda or to use as their pretext for nations to illegally invade other nations. Address the root cause of the problem which is the foreign policies of western nations (the usual criminal offenders) where the primary objective is to control and rule sovereign nations by putting in western puppets.

# Syrians can have safe haven. The US is asking for safe haven for non-Syrians i.e. terrorists.

# Without terrorism the US is nothing.

# Amnesty international are the biggest lying UK-UN-biased left-wing cooperation..who are a bunch of marxist, liberal criminals, misfits & junkies with no credibility.

# Lavrov should remind his equine US counterpart that in order for the ceasefire to work the US has to stop supporting terrorists first.

# Terror&Murder Inc. in Washington DC just approved $90 million of bunker buster bombs for Erdog. Soon ISIS will be blowing up entire blocks at once.

# Terrorists already have a safe zone. It's called the Pentagon; it has a branch in London, Brussels and Tel Aviv.

# The USA have the CIA and other arms to say one thing do another and then write something completely different to the media, doing so many things it amazing they don't confuse themselves.

Poll Shows Americans Prefer Terrorist Nations

There's nothing to be surprised of ...

Iran vs. Saudi Arabia: Gallup Poll Shows Americans Prefer Terrorist Nations Over Iran. Why?
By Eric Zuesse
Global Research, February 24, 2016
Strategic Culture Foundation 21 February 2016

A February 17th Gallup Poll showed that Americans prefer the chief nation that sponsors international terrorism, when given a choice between that terrorist-sponsoring nation and Iran. The disapproval shown of Iran is 79%; the approval is 14%. Back in 2014, the disapproval / approval were 84%/12%. At that time, Saudi Arabia had figures of 57%/35%. Iran was seen by Americans as being even more hostile toward Americans than Saudi Arabia.

Americans are profoundly misinformed about international relations – and there’s a reason for this: the deep corruption within the American Establishment (the people who shape American political opinions).

Here are the facts: 92% of Saudi Arabians approve of ISIS. That country’s leadership – both the Saud family who own the country, and their clerics – teach them this way.

Fifteen of the nineteen 9/11 hijackers came from Saudi Arabia, and the bookkeeper/bagman who had collected, in cash, every one of the million-dollar-plus donations to al-Qaeda up till 9/11, said under oath, in US court-testimony which Western news-media have hidden from the public: virtually all of the Saudi Princes, and many of their close friends (each of which individuals he identified by name) were $1M+ donors to the al-Qaeda organization; and, without those funds, any attacks such as 9/11 would have been simply impossible for them to do.

The bag-man and bookkeeper for Osama bin Laden was captured by the United States and was sent to a maximum-security US prison where he is unable to speak to anyone, but before that, he named many of the leading Saudi Princes and their closest friends as having been the people who had provided the funds. And he said: «Without the money of the – of the Saudi, you will have nothing» of al-Qaeda.

Here’s one exchange:

    Q: To clarify, you’re saying that the al-Qaeda members received salaries?
    A: They do, absolutely.

The royals’ ‘charity’ that pays not only al-Qaeda but ISIS and other such organizations, is from the donors, to their warriors; the warriors are being paid by those ‘charitable donations’. That’s what pays their salaries. Jihadist organizations are religious charities – whose aim is to spread the Islamic faith (which is why the mullahs or ‘holy men’, who are also being paid by that same Saud family, approve of the Sauds to be the rulers).

Here’s another exchange:

    Q: What – what was bin Laden’s attitude towards the Saudi ulema [the religious scholars, the clerics]?
    A: It was of complete reverence and obedience. [It was like a Roman Catholic’s attitude] toward the Pope.

Among the mega-donors that he could remember off the top of his head were Prince Waleed bin Talal al-Saud, Prince Turki al-Faisal al-Saud, Prince Bandar bin Sultan al-Saud (affectionately known in the US as «Bandar Bush» (he was Saudi Arabia’s US Ambassador at the time of 9/11; he later became Chief of Saudi intelligence).

The bagman explained:

    The Saudi government is – they have two heads of the snake, they have the Saudi, like Al Saud, and the Wahhabi [clerics] were in charge of the Islamic Code of the Islam [the lawmakers and judges] – or Islamic power in Saudi Arabia, okay, and that’s why they have the name ‘Wahhabi’, okay, okay. So the Saudi [the Saud royal family] cannot keep [the Executive or ruling] power in Saudi Arabia without having the agreement, okay, of the Wahhab, the Wahhabi, the scholar [the clerics, who interpret the Quran, the nation’s real Constitution], okay.

One might reasonably wonder, then: why do Americans hate and fear Iran, over and above even the nation – the royal family and their clerics – that were actually behind 9/11? Might it be, perhaps, because the Shia clerics of Iran are as fundamentalist as the Sunni ones in Saudi Arabia? Not at all; but, yet, Americans seem to assume that that’s the case.

The American public are duped by lying ‘news’ media, which don’t let them know the reality – the American people are kept in the dark.

The Sauds, the one family who owns Saudi Arabia, hate the Iranian public, just as much as they hate the American public; and they do so because they (the Saud family) intend ultimately (their descendants) to conquer and rule over both, and over the entire world. But first, they need to kill all Shiites (and Iran is ruled by Shiites), because otherwise even the Islamic world itself won’t be united. Without a united Islam, how could they have a chance ultimately to conquer the non-Islamic world? It wouldn’t even be possible – and they know this. In fact, their nation was created in 1744 by a mutual oath between Muhammad ibn Saud and Muhammad ibn Wahhab that embodied it.

The US aristocracy has been allied with the Saudi royal family for decades. When John Foster Dulles and Allen Dulles had Kim Roosevelt – Teddy Roosevelt’s  grandson – organize the 1953 CIA overthrow of the progressive democratic secular freely elected Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh, and install there the barbaric Shah and his torture-chambers, it sparked the Iranian public to hate Americans, who had brought this hell to them.

Then, in 1979, came the Iranian revolution installing not a Mosaddegh-type secular democracy such as America overthrew, but instead a Shiite clerical dictatorship, to replace the American fascist one, which had been entirely alien to Iran (though this alien regime used a local dictator, the Shah, as its figurehead, who answered to Washington). In succession now, Mosaddegh’s two enemies – first the US aristocracy, and now the Shiite clergy – have replaced an alien, US, dictatorship by a native one. But that native one (after 1979, the Shia clergy) has no international-jihadist ideology. Though Shia clerics hate the apartheid Israeli regime and fund Hezbollah to fight it, there is otherwise nothing that’s even remotely comparable to jihadism, in the Shia branch of Islam. Jihad (global conquest) is strictly a Sunni phenomenon, and it centers around the Saudi government, which is owned by the Saud family, and whose laws are made by the Wahhabist (the Sauds’ extremely fundamentalist Islamic) clergy, which is financed by the Sauds and by the subjects that the royal family own – the ‘citizens’ of Saudi Arabia. This is why 92% of the Saudi public think that ISIS is good. (By contrast, in the multicultural nation of Syria, which is allied with Iran and Russia and is ruled by a decidedly non-sectarian and secular government that’s composed mainly of Shia, and which has been invaded by Wahhabist-Salafist foreign fighters who are financed by America’s jihadist allies, 78% of the population disapprove of ISIS, and 82% blame the US as being the chief power behind ISIS.)

The original sin that has shaped America’s role in the Mideast (other than our siding with the apartheid nation of Israel and so being widely despised around the world by Muslims) occurred when America’s aristocracy took over Iran in 1953, for their oil companies. But Americans hate Iranians as a result of that original sin, which was done by the Dulleses to Iranians on behalf of US oil-company friends, which include the Sauds. The American people are getting the blowback from the American aristocracy’s international crimes abroad.

And, now, as Gallup is consistently finding, Americans hate the Iranians. That’s because the Iranians have called America «the great Satan» because that’s what America (our aristocracy and its agents) had actually been to them – to the Iranian people. Iran’s public are right, even though the clergy that rule over them are wrong – but Americans don’t know that distinction, and condemn the Iranian nation.

Meanwhile, the Sauds, from whom the American public have suffered 9/11 and so much else, are ‘American allies’ according to the duplicitous US press. They are not allies actually of the American public, but of the American aristocracy, which the American press don’t even expose to the public: this country, after all, is (not) a ‘democracy’.

And our government won’t prosecute, nor attempt to prosecute, the people who actually fund terrorism – not even the terrorism that hits here, never mind in Europe etc. That refusal to prosecute the people who were behind the 9/11 attacks is also what the expurgated 28 pages in the US Senate’s 9/11 report are all about.

Instead, our lying politicians, who are empowered (in both Parties) by money from the same people, constantly call Iran the major backer of international terrorism, though they know that the allegation is rabidly false. Hillary Clinton says, «We have a lot of other business to get done with Iran. Yes, they have to stop being the main state sponsor of terrorism». But actually, she and the other agents of America’s aristocracy are the ones who have to stop their constant lying, because there are plenty of American suckers who believe their lies – and it ends up showing in the Gallup and other opinion-polls, and ultimately in the people that the thus-deluded American public vote for to serve in Congress and the Presidency. Americans are deluded by their aristocracy’s constant lies.

After all, it’s not hard for any authentic news-reporter to prove that Hillary herself is aware that what she said there was false – that her remark was a lie, not merely a slip-up. When she was the US Secretary of State, one of the first things she did (after assisting the fascist junta that had taken over in Honduras on 28 June 2009 to stay in power) was to send a cable to the US Ambassadors in all of the capitals where the donations to al-Qaeda, ISIS, and other terrorist groups, were coming from, requiring those Ambassadors to the local aristocracy to tell them to stop doing that; these were the Ambassadors only in fundamentalist-Sunni-run countries: Saudi Arabia (the center of it all), Qatar, UAE, Kuwait, and Pakistan. In that private cable, she even said things like:

    «Donors in Saudi Arabia constitute the most significant source of funding to Sunni terrorist groups worldwide».

     «Qatar’s overall level of CT [Counter Terrorist] cooperation with the US is considered the worst in the region».

    «Kuwait … has been less inclined to take action against Kuwait-based financiers and facilitators plotting attacks outside of Kuwait. Al-Qa’ida and other groups continue to exploit Kuwait both as a source of funds and as a key transit point».

    «UAE-based donors have provided financial support to a variety of terrorist groups, including al-Qa’ida, the Taliban, LeT and other terrorist groups, including Hamas».

Those are our ‘allies’? She knows that al-Qaeda and ISIS received no money from Shia. She knows that al-Qaeda and ISIS are Sunni-only groups, which hate all Shia – they want to defeat Iran, they don’t represent Iran.

Garbage like what Hillary said there against Iran makes it into Presidential candidates’ debates; and none of the ‘press’ says the person was either lying or else incredibly ignorant for saying such a thing. A statement like that poisons the well of US-Iranian relations, even more than a half-century after it had already been poisoned big-time, back in 1953. Why is this poisoning so persistent?

This lie that Hillary Clinton and so many other American politicians spout, is one of many lies that our ‘news’ media can’t expose, because to do that would also expose themselves – that the media themselves have deceived the American public by not pointing out that the politicians are lying about these major, determinative, issues. In this regard, it’s similar to the lie that Bush didn’t lie but merely had been mistaken about «Saddam’s WMD»: how could the press now acknowledge that Bush had lied, when they refused to even examine his lies while they were being made, which is when it counts? And that’s why politicians such as Clinton can get away with their lies about Iran.

America is now piling up with lies, which the nation’s ‘news’ media can’t expose without exposing themselves as being part of the deception of the American public. (After they had stenographically reported George W Bush’s lies about ‘Saddam’s WMD’, they could never admit how rotten the US press were – and still are. They have to hide that, too.) This piling-on of lies is now becoming extremely dangerous, even to the very possibility of restoring democracy to America. Without an honest press, democracy is impossible. Without an honest press, democracy won’t be restored in America.

There is nothing that the US press is as dishonest about as Russia and its traditional allies, such as Ukraine, Syria, and Libya. And this nest of subjects includes the entire topic of jihadism, which America’s aristocracy secretly back (and use as a tactic against Russia and its allies) but which Russia’s aristocracy and public both oppose, consistently – and not only by tokens such as killing al-Qaeda’s leaders, but by getting done the entire ugly job that needs to be done (which was described there with a remarkable lack of bias, in a recent issue of the New Yorker magazine, by Joshua Yaffa, headlining «Putin’s Dragon»). There is no way to defeat jihadism without destroying the jihadist culture itself. Instead, the US has been and is allied to it. Not just in Saudi Arabia, but also in the other Arabic Sunni oil-kingdoms: Qatar, Kuwait, and UAE – and, more recently, also in the resurgently-Sunni NATO ‘ally’: Turkey. So, our ‘press’ must lie big-time, and with only very few exceptions of honesty, about these matters.

That’s what is merely being reflected in Gallup’s latest, and prior, polls about the opinions that Americans have regarding Iran. It is a severe, worsening, and dangerous, sickness of the American ‘press’. And nobody seems to have any solution for it. How can the people of a nation boycott its corrupt press? How can they even know that they should? How can they ever know that they are «being had» – that they are being governed by lies?

The original source of this article is Strategic Culture Foundation.
Copyright © Eric Zuesse, Strategic Culture Foundation, 2016

Middle Eastern Wars Have ALWAYS Been about Oil

A must read article ...

Middle Eastern Wars Have ALWAYS Been about Oil

By Washington's Blog

Global Research, February 27, 2016

Washington's Blog 26 February 2016

Robert Kennedy Jr. notes:
For Americans to really understand what’s going on, it’s important to review some details about this sordid but little-remembered history. During the 1950s, President Eisenhower and the Dulles brothers — CIA Director Allen Dulles and Secretary of State John Foster Dulles — rebuffed Soviet treaty proposals to leave the Middle East a neutral zone in the Cold War and let Arabs rule Arabia. Instead, they mounted a clandestine war against Arab nationalism — which Allen Dulles equated with communism — particularly when Arab self-rule threatened oil concessions. They pumped secret American military aid to tyrants in Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Iraq and Lebanon favoring puppets with conservative Jihadist ideologies that they regarded as a reliable antidote to Soviet Marxism [and those that possess a lot of oil]. At a White House meeting between the CIA’s director of plans, Frank Wisner, and John Foster Dulles, in September 1957, Eisenhower advised the agency, “We should do everything possible to stress the ‘holy war’ aspect,” according to a memo recorded by his staff secretary, Gen. Andrew J. Goodpaster.

Let’s look at specific countries …

Iraq

Between 1932 and 1948, the roots for the current wars in Iraq were planted.  As Wikipedia explains:

The Mosul–Haifa oil pipeline (also known as Mediterranean pipeline) was a crude oil pipeline from the oil fields in Kirkuk, located in north Iraq, through Jordan to Haifa (now on the territory of Israel). The pipeline was operational in 1935–1948. Its length was about 942 kilometres (585 mi), with a diameter of 12 inches (300 mm) (reducing to 10 and 8 inches (250 and 200 mm) in parts), and it took about 10 days for crude oil to travel the full length of the line. The oil arriving in Haifa was distilled in the Haifa refineries, stored in tanks, and then put in tankers for shipment to Europe.
The pipeline was built by the Iraq Petroleum Company between 1932 and 1935, during which period most of the area through which the pipeline passed was under a British mandate approved by the League of Nations. The pipeline was one of two pipelines carrying oil from the Kirkuk oilfield to the Mediterranean coast. The main pipeline split at Haditha with a second line carrying oil to Tripoli, Lebanon, which was then under a French mandate. This line was built primarily to satisfy the demands of the French partner in IPC, Compagnie Française des Pétroles, for a separate line to be built across French mandated territory.
The pipeline and the Haifa refineries were considered strategically important by the British Government, and indeed provided much of the fuel needs of the British and American forces in the Mediterranean during the Second World War.
The pipeline was a target of attacks by Arab gangs during the Great Arab Revolt, and as a result one of the main objectives of a joint British-Jewish Special Night Squads commanded by Captain Orde Wingate was to protect the pipeline against such attacks. Later on, the pipeline was the target of attacks by the Irgun. [Background.]
In 1948, with the outbreak of the 1948 Arab–Israeli War, the official operation of the pipeline ended when the Iraqi Government refused to pump any more oil through it.

Why is this relevant today?   Haaretz reported soon after the Iraq war started in 2003:

The United States has asked Israel to check the possibility of pumping oil from Iraq to the oil refineries in Haifa. The request came in a telegram last week from a senior Pentagon official to a top Foreign Ministry official in Jerusalem.
The Prime Minister’s Office, which views the pipeline to Haifa as a “bonus” the U.S. could give to Israel in return for its unequivocal support for the American-led campaign in Iraq, had asked the Americans for the official telegram.
The new pipeline would take oil from the Kirkuk area, where some 40 percent of Iraqi oil is produced, and transport it via Mosul, and then across Jordan to Israel. The U.S. telegram included a request for a cost estimate for repairing the Mosul-Haifa pipeline that was in use prior to 1948.  During the War of Independence [what Jews call the 1948 war to form the state of Israel], the Iraqis stopped the flow of oil to Haifa and the pipeline fell into disrepair over the years.
***
National Infrastructure Minister Yosef Paritzky said yesterday that the port of Haifa is an attractive destination for Iraqi oil and that he plans to discuss this matter with the U.S. secretary of energy during his planned visit to Washington next month.
***
In response to rumors about the possible Kirkuk-Mosul-Haifa pipeline, Turkey has warned Israel that it would regard this development as a serious blow to Turkish-Israeli relations.

So the fighting over Iraq can be traced back to events occurring in 1948 and before.
But let’s fast-forward to subsequent little-known events in Iraq.
The CIA plotted to poison the Iraqi leader in 1960.
In 1963, the U.S. backed the coup which succeeded in killing the head of Iraq.
And everyone knows that the U.S. also toppled Saddam Hussein during the Iraq war.  But most don’t know that neoconservatives planned regime change in Iraq once again in 1991.
4-Star General Wesley Clark – former Supreme Allied Commander of NATO – said:

It came back to me … a 1991 meeting I had with Paul Wolfowitz.
***
In 1991, he was the Undersecretary of Defense for Policy – the number 3 position at the Pentagon. And I had gone to see him when I was a 1-Star General commanding the National Training Center.
***
And I said, “Mr. Secretary, you must be pretty happy with the performance of the troops in Desert Storm.” And he said: “Yeah, but not really, because the truth is we should have gotten rid of Saddam Hussein, and we didn’t … But one thing we did learn [from the Persian Gulf War] is that we can use our military in the region – in the Middle East – and the Soviets won’t stop us. And we’ve got about 5 or 10 years to clean up those old Soviet client regimes – Syria, Iran, IRAQ – before the next great superpower comes on to challenge us.”

And many people don’t know that the architects of the Iraq War themselves admitted the war was about oil. For example, former U.S. Secretary of Defense – and former 12-year Republican Senator – Chuck Hagel said of the Iraq war in 2007:

People say we’re not fighting for oil. Of course we are. They talk about America’s national interest. What the hell do you think they’re talking about? We’re not there for figs.

4 Star General John Abizaid – the former commander of CENTCOM with responsibility for Iraq – said:

Of course it’s about oil, it’s very much about oil, and we can’t really deny that.

Former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan said in 2007:

I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil

President George W. Bush said in 2005 that keeping Iraqi oil away from the bad guys was a key motivefor the Iraq war:

‘If Zarqawi and [Osama] bin Laden gain control of Iraq, they would create a new training ground for future terrorist attacks,” Bush said. ”They’d seize oil fields to fund their ambitions.”

John McCain said in 2008:

My friends, I will have an energy policy that we will be talking about, which will eliminate our dependence on oil from the Middle East that will — that will then prevent us — that will prevent us from having ever to send our young men and women into conflict again in the Middle East.

Sarah Palin said in 2008:

Better to start that drilling [for oil within the U.S.] today than wait and continue relying on foreign sources of energy. We are a nation at war and in many [ways] the reasons for war are fights over energy sources, which is nonsensical when you consider that domestically we have the supplies ready to go.

Former Bush speechwriter David Frum – author of the infamous “Axis of Evil” claim in Bush’s 2002 State of the Union address – writes in Newsweek this week:

In 2002, Chalabi [the Iraqi politician and oil minister who the Bush Administration favored to lead Iraq after the war] joined the annual summer retreat of the American Enterprise Institute near Vail, Colorado. He and Cheney spent long hours together, contemplating the possibilities of a Western-oriented Iraq: an additional source of oil, an alternative to U.S. dependency on an unstable-looking Saudi Arabia.

Key war architect – and Under Secretary of State – John Bolton said:

The critical oil and natural gas producing region that we fought so many wars to try and protectour economy from the adverse impact of losing that supply or having it available only at very high prices.

A high-level National Security Council officer strongly implied that Cheney and the U.S. oil chiefs planned the Iraq war before 9/11 in order to get control of its oil.

The Sunday Herald reported:

It is a document that fundamentally questions the motives behind the Bush administration’s desire to take out Saddam Hussein and go to war with Iraq.
Strategic Energy Policy Challenges For The 21st Century describes how America is facing the biggest energy crisis in its history. It targets Saddam as a threat to American interests because of his control of Iraqi oilfields and recommends the use of ‘military intervention’ as a means to fix the US energy crisis.
The report is linked to a veritable who’s who of US hawks, oilmen and corporate bigwigs. It was commissioned by James Baker, the former US Secretary of State under George Bush Snr, and submitted to Vice-President Dick Cheney in April 2001 — a full five months before September 11. Yet it advocates a policy of using military force against an enemy such as Iraq to secure US access to, and control of, Middle Eastern oil fields.
One of the most telling passages in the document reads: ‘Iraq remains a destabilising influence to … the flow of oil to international markets from the Middle East. Saddam Hussein has also demonstrated a willingness to threaten to use the oil weapon and to use his own export programme to manipulate oil markets.
This would display his personal power, enhance his image as a pan-Arab leader … and pressure others for a lifting of economic sanctions against his regime. The United States should conduct an immediate policy review toward Iraq including military, energy, economic and political/diplomatic assessments.
***
‘Military intervention’ is supported …
***
The document also points out that ‘the United States remains a prisoner of its energy dilemma’, and that one of the ‘consequences’ of this is a ‘need for military intervention’.
At the heart of the decision to target Iraq over oil lies dire mismanagement of the US energy policy over decades by consecutive administrations. The report refers to the huge power cuts that have affected California in recent years and warns of ‘more Californias’ ahead.
It says the ‘central dilemma’ for the US administration is that ‘the American people continue to demand plentiful and cheap energy without sacrifice or inconvenience’. With the ‘energy sector in critical condition, a crisis could erupt at any time [which] could have potentially enormous impact on the US … and would affect US national security and foreign policy in dramatic ways.”
***
The response is to put oil at the heart of the administration — ‘a reassessment of the role of energy in American foreign policy’.
***
Iraq is described as the world’s ‘key swing producer … turning its taps on and off when it has felt such action was in its strategic interest”. The report also says there is a ‘possibility that Saddam may remove Iraqi oil from the market for an extended period of time’, creating a volatile market.
***
Halliburton is one of the firms thought by analysts to be in line to make a killing in any clean-up operation after another US-led war on Iraq.
All five permanent members of the UN Security Council — the UK, France, China, Russia and the US — have international oil companies that would benefit from huge windfalls in the event of regime change in Baghdad. The best chance for US firms to make billions would come if Bush installed a pro-US Iraqi opposition member as the head of a new government.
Representatives of foreign oil firms have already met with leaders of the Iraqi opposition. Ahmed Chalabi, the London-based leader of the Iraqi National Congress, said: ‘American companies will have a big shot at Iraqi oil.’

The Independent reported in 2011:

Plans to exploit Iraq’s oil reserves were discussed by government ministers and the world’s largest oil companies the year before Britain took a leading role in invading Iraq, government documents show.
***
The minutes of a series of meetings between ministers and senior oil executives are at odds with the public denials of self-interest from oil companies and Western governments at the time.
***
Minutes of a meeting with BP, Shell and BG (formerly British Gas) on 31 October 2002 read: “Baroness Symons agreed that it would be difficult to justify British companies losing out in Iraq in that way if the UK had itself been a conspicuous supporter of the US government throughout the crisis.”
The minister then promised to “report back to the companies before Christmas” on her lobbying efforts.
The Foreign Office invited BP in on 6 November 2002 to talk about opportunities in Iraq “post regime change”. Its minutes state: “Iraq is the big oil prospect. BP is desperate to get in there and anxious that political deals should not deny them the opportunity.”
After another meeting, this one in October 2002, the Foreign Office’s Middle East director at the time, Edward Chaplin, noted: “Shell and BP could not afford not to have a stake in [Iraq] for the sake of their long-term future… We were determined to get a fair slice of the action for UK companies in a post-Saddam Iraq.”
Whereas BP was insisting in public that it had “no strategic interest” in Iraq, in private it told the Foreign Office that Iraq was “more important than anything we’ve seen for a long time”.
BP was concerned that if Washington allowed TotalFinaElf’s existing contact with Saddam Hussein to stand after the invasion it would make the French conglomerate the world’s leading oil company. BP told the Government it was willing to take “big risks” to get a share of the Iraqi reserves, the second largest in the world.
Over 1,000 documents were obtained under Freedom of Information over five years by the oil campaigner Greg Muttitt. They reveal that at least five meetings were held between civil servants, ministers and BP and Shell in late 2002.
The 20-year contracts signed in the wake of the invasion were the largest in the history of the oil industry. They covered half of Iraq’s reserves – 60 billion barrels of oil …

[Note:  The 1990 Gulf war – while not a regime change – was also about oil.   Specifically, Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait caused oil prices to skyrocket. The U.S. invaded Iraq in order to calm oil markets. In its August 20, 1990 issue, Time Magazine quoted an anonymous U.S. Official as saying:

Even a dolt understands the principle.  We need the oil. It’s nice to talk about standing up for freedom, but Kuwait and Saudi Arabia are not exactly democracies, and if their principal export were oranges, a mid-level State Department official would have issued a statement and we would have closed Washington down for August.]

Syria

The history of western intervention in Syria is similar to our meddling in Iraq.
The CIA backed a right-wing coup in Syria in 1949. Douglas Little, Professor, Department of Clark University History professor Douglas Little notes:

As early as 1949, this newly independent Arab republic was an important staging ground for the CIA’s earliest experiments in covert action. The CIA secretly encouraged a right-wing military coup in 1949.

The reason the U.S. initiated the coup?  Little explains:

In late 1945, the Arabian American Oil Company (ARAMCO) announced plans to construct the Trans-Arabian Pipe Line (TAPLINE) from Saudi Arabia to the Mediterra- nean. With U.S. help, ARAMCO secured rights-of-way from Lebanon, Jordan and Saudi Arabia.  The Syrian right-of-way was stalled in parliament.

In other words, Syria was the sole holdout for the lucrative oil pipeline.
Robert Kennedy Jr. notes:

The CIA began its active meddling in Syria in 1949 — barely a year after the agency’s creation. Syrian patriots had declared war on the Nazis, expelled their Vichy French colonial rulers and crafted a fragile secularist democracy based on the American model. But in March 1949, Syria’s democratically elected president, Shukri-al-Quwatli, hesitated to approve the Trans-Arabian Pipeline, an American project intended to connect the oil fields of Saudi Arabia to the ports of Lebanon via Syria. In his book, Legacy of Ashes, CIA historian Tim Weiner recounts that in retaliation for Al-Quwatli’s lack of enthusiasm for the U.S. pipeline, the CIA engineered a coup replacing al-Quwatli with the CIA’s handpicked dictator, a convicted swindler named Husni al-Za’im. Al-Za’im barely had time to dissolve parliament and approve the American pipeline before his countrymen deposed him, four and a half months into his regime.

The BBC reports that –  in 1957 – the British and American leaders seriously considered attacking the Syrian government using Muslim extremists in Syria as a form of “false flag” attack:

In 1957 Harold Macmillan [then Prime Minister of the United Kingdom] and President Dwight Eisenhower approved a CIA-MI6 plan to stage fake border incidents as an excuse for an invasion by Syria’s pro-western neighbours, and then to “eliminate” the most influential triumvirate in Damascus…. More importantly, Syria also had control of one of the main oil arteries of the Middle East, the pipeline which connected pro-western Iraq’s oilfields to Turkey.
***
The report said that once the necessary degree of fear had been created, frontier incidents and border clashes would be staged to provide a pretext for Iraqi and Jordanian military intervention. Syria had to be “made to appear as the sponsor of plots, sabotage and violence directed against neighbouring governments,” the report says. “CIA and SIS should use their capabilities in both the psychological and action fields to augment tension.” That meant operations in Jordan, Iraq, and Lebanon, taking the form of “sabotage, national conspiracies and various strong-arm activities” to be blamed on Damascus. The plan called for funding of a “Free Syria Committee” [hmmm … soundsvaguely familiar], and the arming of “political factions with paramilitary or other actionist capabilities” within Syria. The CIA and MI6 would instigate internal uprisings, for instance by the Druze [a Shia Muslim sect] in the south, help to free political prisoners held in the Mezze prison, and stir up the Muslim Brotherhood in Damascus.

Neoconservatives planned regime change in Syria once again in 1991 (as noted above in the quote from 4-Star General Wesley Clark).
And as the Guardian reported in 2013:

According to former French foreign minister Roland Dumas, Britain had planned covert action in Syria as early as 2009:
“I was in England two years before the violence in Syria on other business,” he told French television: “I met with top British officials, who confessed to me that they were preparing something in Syria. This was in Britain not in America. Britain was preparing gunmen to invade Syria.”
***
Leaked emails from the private intelligence firm Stratfor, including notes from a meeting with Pentagon officials, confirmed that as of 2011, US and UK special forces training of Syrian opposition forces was well underway. The goal was to elicit the “collapse” of Assad’s regime “from within.”
***
In 2009 – the same year former French foreign minister Dumas alleges the British began planning operations in Syria – Assad refused to sign a proposed agreement with Qatar that would run a pipeline from the latter’s North field, contiguous with Iran’s South Pars field, through Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Syria and on to Turkey, with a view to supply European markets – albeit crucially bypassing Russia. Assad’s rationale was “to protect the interests of [his] Russian ally, which is Europe’s top supplier of natural gas.”
Instead, the following year, Assad pursued negotiations for an alternative $10 billion pipeline plan with Iran, across Iraq to Syria, that would also potentially allow Iran to supply gas to Europe from its South Pars field shared with Qatar. The Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) for the project was signed in July 2012 – just as Syria’s civil war was spreading to Damascus and Aleppo – and earlier this year Iraq signed a framework agreement for construction of the gas pipelines.
The Iran-Iraq-Syria pipeline plan was a “direct slap in the face” to Qatar’s plans. No wonder Saudi Prince Bandar bin Sultan, in a failed attempt to bribe Russia to switch sides, told President Vladmir Putin that “whatever regime comes after” Assad, it will be“completely” in Saudi Arabia’s hands and will “not sign any agreement allowing any Gulf country to transport its gas across Syria to Europe and compete with Russian gas exports”, according to diplomatic sources. When Putin refused, the Prince vowed military action.
It would seem that contradictory self-serving Saudi and Qatari oil interests are pulling the strings of an equally self-serving oil-focused US policy in Syria, if not the wider region. It is this – the problem of establishing a pliable opposition which the US and its oil allies feel confident will play ball, pipeline-style, in a post-Assad Syria – that will determine the nature of any prospective intervention: not concern for Syrian life.

[Footnote: The U.S. and its allies have toppled many other governments, as well.]
The war in Syria – like Iraq – is largely about oil and gas.   International Business Times noted in 2013:

[Syria] controls one of the largest conventional hydrocarbon resources in the eastern Mediterranean.
Syria possessed 2.5 billion barrels of crude oil as of January 2013, which makes it the largest proved reserve of crude oil in the eastern Mediterranean according to the Oil & Gas Journal estimate.
***
Syria also has oil shale resources with estimated reserves that range as high as 50 billion tons, according to a Syrian government source in 2010.

Moreover, Syria is a key chess piece in the pipeline wars.  Syria is an integral part of the proposed 1,200km Arab Gas Pipeline:Here are some additional graphics courtesy of Adam Curry:

Syria’s central role in the Arab gas pipeline is also a key to why it is now being targeted.

Just as the Taliban was scheduled for removal after they demanded too much in return for the Unocal pipeline, Syria’s Assad is being targeted because he is not a reliable “player”.
Specifically, Turkey, Israel and their ally the U.S. want an assured flow of gas through Syria, and don’t want a Syrian regime which is not unquestionably loyal to those 3 countries to stand in the way of the pipeline … or which demands too big a cut of the profits.
A deal has also been inked to run a natural gas pipeline from Iran’s giant South Pars field through Iraq and Syria (with a possible extension to Lebanon). And a deal to run petroleum from Iraq’s Kirkuk oil field to the Syrian port of Banias has also been approved:

Turkey and Israel would be cut out of these competing pipelines.
Gail Tverberg- an expert on financial aspects of the oil industry – writes:

One of the limits in ramping up Iraqi oil extraction is the limited amount of infrastructure available for exporting oil from Iraq. If pipelines through Syria could be added, this might alleviate part of the problem in getting oil to international markets.

Iran

The U.S. carried out regime change in Iran in 1953 … which led to radicalization of the country in the first place.
Specifically, the CIA admits that the U.S. overthrew the moderate, suit-and-tie-wearing, Democratically-elected prime minister of Iran in 1953. (He was overthrown because he had nationalized Iran’s oil, which had previously been controlled by BP and other Western oil companies). As part of that action, the CIAadmits that it hired Iranians to pose as Communists and stage bombings in Iran in order to turn the country against its prime minister.
If the U.S. hadn’t overthrown the moderate Iranian government, the fundamentalist Mullahs would havenever taken over. Iran has been known for thousands of years for tolerating Christians and other religious minorities.
Hawks in the U.S. government been pushing for another round of regime change in Iran for decades.

Libya

Not only did the U.S. engage in direct military intervention against Gadafi, but also – as confirmed by a group of CIA officers – armed Al Qaeda so that they would help topple Gaddafi.
Emails from Hillary Clinton’s email server hint that regime change in Libya was about oil.

Turkey

The CIA has acknowledged that it was behind the 1980 coup in Turkey.

The original source of this article is Washington's Blog

Copyright © Washington's Blog, Washington's Blog, 2016

Al Qaeda in Yemen gets a boost from its patron

Partners in crime hang around together ...

How US Helps Al Qaeda in Yemen

February 25, 2016

Exclusive: The Obama administration, eager to assuage Saudi Arabia’s anger over the Iran nuclear deal and the failure to achieve “regime change” in Syria, has turned a blind eye to Riyadh’s savaging of Yemen, even though that is helping Al Qaeda militants expand their territory, writes Jonathan Marshall.


For nearly a year, the Obama administration has turned a blind eye to the humanitarian catastrophe in Yemen since Saudi Arabia invaded in March 2015 to crush an Iranian-supported insurgency and restore a discredited former president to power. But Washington cannot so easily ignore the rapid resurgence of a dangerous branch of Al Qaeda that is thriving on the chaos to take control of much of southern Yemen.
The war between indigenous Houthi rebels and Saudi-backed supporters of former President Abd Rabbuh Mansur Hadi has cost more than 6,000 lives and caused more than 35,000 casualties.
What a United Nations report called “widespread and systematic” attacks against civilians by Saudi and Gulf emirate pilots, armed with U.S.-made aircraft and cluster bombs that are banned by international treaty, account for the bulk of civilian deaths and for the wholesale destruction of ancient cities and cultural centers.

In addition, a Saudi-imposed blockade on Yemen, supported by Washington, has allowed only a trickle of relief supplies to reach the country, putting millions of people at risk of starvation.
In the midst of this Hobbesian nightmare, militant followers of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) militants are making a rapid comeback after being crippled in 2012.
Recently seizing numerous towns, including two provincial capitals, AQAP now dominates much of three provinces. And a new report suggests that AQAP insurgents are fighting alongside pro-Saudi forces in a savage battle for control of the large city of Taiz, northwest of the port of Aden.
As Jane’s Intelligence Weekly reported to its clients recently, “Exploiting a persistent security vacuum and the absence of effective state institutions, AQAP is in the process of asserting itself as the dominant actor across much of southern Yemen. The territory currently controlled by AQAP is larger than the area it held in 2011, when the group’s area of control reached its peak” during a popular rising against former President Ali Abdullah Saleh.
A merger of Al Qaeda groups in Yemen and Saudi Arabia formed AQAP in January 2009. AQAP’s predecessors in Yemen had bombed the USS Cole in 2000, killing 17 U.S. seamen. Its Saudi members killed nearly two dozen oil field workers during the infamous Khobar massacre in 2004.

Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton formally designated AQAP as a terrorist organization in December 2009 — 11 days before a supporter of the group tried to blow up a U.S. passenger jet headed for Detroit on Christmas Day, with a bomb sewn into his underwear.
The following year, CIA officials concluded that AQAP was the single most urgent threat to U.S. security, surpassing all other Al Qaeda branches, owing to its ongoing determination to hit American targets. The group has vowed to damage the U.S. economy and “bring down America” by mounting small-scale attacks to capitalize on the U.S. “security phobia.” It also took credit for the January 2015 terrorist attack on the French newspaper Charlie Hebdo, which killed a dozen people.
Within Yemen, AQAP has also proved formidable. In May 2012, a single suicide bomber killed more than 120 people and wounded 200 during a military parade. A month later, it killed 73 civilians with newly planted land mines. An attack on the country’s defense ministry in December 2013 left at least 56 dead.
The movement was severely weakened by a Yemeni government offensive in 2012 and an intense campaign of drone strikes ordered by the White House. Among the controversial targets were several U.S. citizens, including the prominent imam Anwar al-Awlaki, who reportedly inspired not only the Christmas 2009 “underwear bomber” and Charlie Hebdo terrorists but the Fort Hood shooter and even the Boston Marathon bombers. (Two weeks later, another strike killed Awlaki’s son, also a U.S. citizen, though the U.S. government said he was not the target.) In April 2014, two days of “massive and unprecedented” air strikes in southern Yemen reportedly killed dozens more militants — along with at least several civilians.

But taking advantage of the chaos caused by Saudi Arabia’s invasion in March 2015, AQAP mobilized quickly to strike back. That April it conquered the southern port town of Al Mukalla, which allowed jihadists to loot the central bank branch of more than $120 million, seize an oil terminal and major weapons depot, and free hundreds of inmates from the city’s prison. Through clever coalition building, AQAP members allied with local Sunni tribal leaders to provide security and essential services, winning support from residents.
Last December, AQAP seized the capital of Abyan province near the main port city of Aden. Soon its militants staged a blitzkrieg that seized five towns in a mere two weeks. In the process AQAP managed to link up its forces across much of southern Yemen from Lahij near the Red Sea east to Al Mukalla.
Like followers of Islamic State, AQAP jihadists are now pressing their attacks against government forces in Aden, where they recently killed a general who commanded regional operations.
“The group may well be reconstructing the quasi-state it ruled at the height of its power in 2011 and 2012,” commented Katherine Zimmerman of the Critical Threats Project at the American Enterprise Institute. “AQAP is becoming an ever-more serious threat to American national security, and no one is doing much about it.”

Even allowing for the usual threat inflation from this prominent neoconservative sanctuary, the fact remains that AQAP is successfully exploiting the turmoil of civil war to make significant territorial gains. It has proven adept at governing and is often welcomed by a population that deeply resents the violence brought to Yemen by Houthi insurgents and their Saudi-backed enemies.
Meanwhile, U.S. air strikes against AQAP have accomplished little or nothing. As The Long War Journal observed recently, “Although AQAP has lost several key leaders in American drone strikes since early 2015, this has not slowed al Qaeda’s guerrilla war. . . . Not only has AQAP continued to gain ground, it also quickly introduced new leaders to serve as public faces for the organization.”
Events in Yemen are reaffirming a lesson that should have been learned in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria: Civil wars breed vicious killers who thrive on conflict and jump from battlefield to battlefield with the help of modern technology and zealous supporters. American intervention in those civil wars invariably blows back against us.
By contributing to Yemen’s failure as a state, Washington is creating fertile ground for the renewed growth of anti-American terrorism there. The White House may not care much about the overall havoc wreaked by the Yemen war — as evidenced by its extensive support for Saudi Arabia’s war crimes — but it should be under no illusion that Fox News and Republican members of Congress will go easy when the next terrorist attack by AQAP kills Americans at home or abroad.

Jonathan Marshall is author or co-author of five books on international affairs, including The Lebanese Connection: Corruption, Civil War and the International Drug Traffic (Stanford University Press, 2012). Some of his previous articles for Consortiumnews were “Risky Blowback from Russian Sanctions”; “Neocons Want Regime Change in Iran”; “Saudi Cash Wins France’s Favor”; “The Saudis’ Hurt Feelings”; “Saudi Arabia’s Nuclear Bluster”; “The US Hand in the Syrian Mess”; and “Hidden Origins of Syria’s Civil War.” ]

Drop Cold War hostility & work with Russia. Period.

There are few people with some level of sanity in their heads in the USA...

On Syria: Thank you, Russia!

By Stephen Kinzer

Global Research, February 24, 2016

The Boston Globe (Opinion) 13 February 2016

Once again, Moscow has shown itself better able to make strategic choices than we are. Russia is not an ideal partner for the United States, but sometimes its interests align with ours. In those cases, we should drop our Cold War hostility and work with Russia. The best place to start is Syria.

American policy toward Syria was misbegotten from the start of the current conflict five years ago. By immediately adopting the hardest possible line—“Assad must go”—we removed any incentive for opposition groups to negotiate for peaceful change. That helped propel Syria into its bloody nightmare.

Russia, which has suffered repeated terror attacks from Islamic fanatics, is threatened by the chaos and ungoverned space that now defines Syria. So are we. Russia’s policy should be ours: prevent the fall of Bashar al-Assad’s government, craft a new regime that would include Assad or his supporters, and then work for a cease-fire.

The fall of Assad would create a catastrophic power vacuum like those that have turned Iraq and Libya into terrorist havens. This would be bad for the United States, and even worse for Russia and Iran. We should recognize this common interest, and work with countries that want what we want.

This may seem eminently logical, but the very suggestion is hateful in Washington. It violates a central precept of the liberal/conservative, Republican-Democrat foreign policy consensus: Russia is our eternal enemy, so anything that promotes Russia’s interests automatically undermines ours — and that goes double for Iran. Instead of clinging to this dangerously outdated with-us-or-against-us mantra, we should realize that countries with which we differ in some areas can be our partner in others. Russia is an ideal example.

We would have been more secure as a nation, and might have contributed to a more stable world, if we had followed Russia’s foreign policy lead in the past. The government Moscow supported in Afghanistan, run by Mohammad Najibullah from 1987-92, was more honest and progressive than any that has ruled Afghanistan since American-backed forces deposed Najibullah. Later, Russia urged the United States not to invade Iraq and overthrow Saddam Hussein. They were right both times, and we were wrong. In Syria, Russia is right for a third time. Keeping the odious Assad in power, at least for the moment, best serves American interests. The alternative could be an ISIS “caliphate” stretching from the Mediterranean to the Tigris River.

No military solution is possible in Syria. Continued fighting only adds to the toll of death and horror. Russia wants a negotiated settlement. We are reluctant, because our so-called friends in the region want to keep fighting. They calculate continuing war to be in their interest. It may be — but it is not in the interest of the United States.

Opposition groups in Syria that we have half-heartedly supported refuse to negotiate until a cease-fire is in place. By accepting that formula, the United States guarantees continued war. Instead, negotiations should be aimed at creating a new regime that both Russia and the United States could support. From there, peace can grow.

How long Assad remains in power is not crucial to the United States. Weakening ISIS and al Qaeda is. Fighting those forces is the policy of Russia and Iran. We should recognize this confluence of interests, and work with every country or faction that shares our goals in Syria.

Our reflexive rejection of all cooperation with Russia is a throwback to a vanished era. It prevents us from taking decisive steps to ease the crisis in Syria. Its effects are also being felt in Europe. The Obama administration recently announced a four-fold increase in spending for troop deployments near Russia. Russia responded with military maneuvers near its border with Ukraine. This spiral of tension ignores the reality that Europe can never be truly secure without Russian cooperation.

Refusing to work with Russia hurts us more than it hurts Russia. Seeking avenues of cooperation would benefit both, and contribute to global security. Syria is the best place to start. Russia’s strategy — fight ISIS and al Qaeda, defend Assad, and seek a cease-fire that preserves his regime in some form — is the least bad option. Until we accept it, Syrian blood will continue to flow.

Stephen Kinzer is a senior fellow at the Watson Institute for International Studies at Brown University. Follow him on Twitter @stephenkinzer.

The original source of this article is The Boston Globe (Opinion)

Copyright © Stephen Kinzer, The Boston Globe (Opinion), 2016

America creates frankensteins in Syria to fight off each other ?!

It would be interesting to find out who has the last laugh but definitely not the Muslims... Stay tuned...

America Is In A Proxy War With Itself In Syria

Confusion in the Obama administration’s Syria policy is playing out on the ground as U.S.-backed groups begin battling each other.

By Mike Giglio

Global Research, February 24, 2016

Buzzfeed 20 February 2016

American proxies are now at war with each other in Syria.

Officials with Syrian rebel battalions that receive covert backing from one arm of the U.S. government told BuzzFeed News that they recently began fighting rival rebels supported by another arm of the U.S. government.

The infighting between American proxies is the latest setback for the Obama administration’s Syria policy and lays bare its contradictions as violence in the country gets worse.

The confusion is playing out on the battlefield — with the U.S. effectively engaged in a proxy war with itself. “It’s very strange, and I cannot understand it,” said Ahmed Othman, the commander of the U.S.-backed rebel battalion Furqa al-Sultan Murad, who said he had come under attack from U.S.-backed Kurdish militants in Aleppo this week.

Furqa al-Sultan Murad receives weapons from the U.S. and its allies as part of a covert program, overseen by the CIA, that aids rebel groups struggling to overthrow the government of Syrian president Bashar al-Assad, according to rebel officials and analysts tracking the conflict.

The Kurdish militants, on the other hand, receive weapons and support from the Pentagon as part of U.S. efforts to fight ISIS. Known as the People’s Protection Units, or YPG, they are the centerpiece of the Obama administration’s strategy against the extremists in Syria and coordinate regularly with U.S. airstrikes.

Yet as Assad and his Russian allies have routed rebels around Aleppo in recent weeks — rolling back Islamist factions and moderate U.S. allies alike, as aid groups warn of a humanitarian catastrophe — the YPG has seized the opportunity to take ground from these groups, too.

In the face of public objections from U.S. officials and reportedly backed by Russian airstrikes, the YPG has overrun key villages in the northern provinces of Aleppo and Idlib. It now threatens the town of Azaz, on the border with Turkey, through which rebel groups have long received crucial supplies. Over the weekend, Turkey began shelling YPG positions around Azaz in response, raising another difficult scenario for the U.S. in which its proxy is under assault from its NATO ally.

Yet as America has looked on while Russia and Syria target its moderate rebel partners, it has failed to stop the YPG from attacking them too. “That is a major problem,” said Andrew Tabler, a Syria specialist at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. “It’s not just that it’s a nonsense policy. It’s that we’re losing influence so rapidly to the Russians that people just aren’t listening to us anymore.”

Othman, the Furqa al-Sultan Murad commander, said the YPG tried to seize two areas of Aleppo under his control, resulting in firefights that left casualties on both sides. He had captured seven YPG fighters and was holding them prisoner, he added.

Othman’s group receives weapons from the U.S. and its allies, including TOW anti-tank missiles, he said, and fights Assad as well as ISIS. The aid is part of a long-running CIA effort approved by Congress and coordinated from an operations room in Turkey with participation from international allies of the rebellion such as Saudi Arabia. Othman said he was in regular contact with his American handlers about the problems on the ground. “The Americans must stop [the YPG] — they must tell them you are attacking groups that we support just like we support you,” he said. “But they are just watching. I don’t understand U.S. politics.”

Officials with three other groups — the Northern Division, Jaysh al-Mujahideen and a coalition called Jabhat al-Shamiya — that have received support from the operations room also said they were now battling the YPG in northern Syria. “There are many groups supported by [the operations room] that are fighting the YPG right now,” said the Northern Division’s Col. Ahmed Hamada, who added that some of his fighters had received U.S. training in the past.

An official with the Turkish government criticized the U.S. for what he described as a Syria policy gone awry. “The YPG is taking land and villages from groups that are getting American aid,” he said, speaking on condition of anonymity due to the sensitive nature of the subject. “These are groups that are not only getting American aid. Some of them also got training from the Americans.”

The official added that U.S.-backed Arab rebel groups had seen their support dwindle of late, while the YPG was benefiting from a surge of interest from both Washington and Moscow. “The Americans are not giving the moderate rebels enough material. They are not providing any political support,” he said. “And they did not stop the YPG from attacking them.”

“They said we are not in control of the YPG in [those areas],” he added. “That’s the official answer. It doesn’t make any sense to us. What can I say?”

In an emailed statement, Col. Patrick J. Ryder, a spokesman for the U.S. Central Command, which oversees support for the YPG, said he had no information to provide “regarding potential friction between various opposition groups.”

“Syria continues to be a very complex and challenging environment,” he said. “I can tell you that we remain focused on supporting indigenous anti-[ISIS] ground forces in their fight against [ISIS].”

A State Department official acknowledged the increasingly problematic situation. “We’ve expressed to all parties that recent provocative moves in northern Syria, which have only served to heighten tensions and lessen the focus on [ISIS], are counterproductive and undermine our collective, cooperative efforts in northern Syria to degrade and defeat [ISIS],” he told BuzzFeed News, likewise speaking on condition of anonymity.

A spokesman for the YPG declined to comment. Yet the group appears to be battling Islamists and U.S.-backed moderates alike, said Faysal Itani, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council. “The YPG has also been physically capturing territory [around] Azaz, amid Russian bombing and regime progress further south in Aleppo province,” he said. “I see these moves as opportunistic, capitalizing on the insurgent losses in the province to increase YPG territory.”

The YPG is the Syrian branch of the Kurdistan Worker’s Party, or PKK, the insurgent force warring with the Turkish government in the country’s restive southeast. Both Washington and Ankara list the PKK as a terror group. Yet to Turkey’s increasing anger, the U.S. has sought to differentiate between the PKK and the YPG, promoting the latter as a key partner. In late January, Brett McGurk, President Obama’s special envoy to the anti-ISIS coalition, paid a visit to the YPG in the Syrian town of Kobane, which U.S. airstrikes had helped the group defend from ISIS last year.

The YPG fits well with the Obama administration’s growing hesitance to confront Assad: it has long maintained a détente with the Syrian government, focusing instead on pushing back ISIS and other extremists from Kurdish land.

As part of its embrace of the YPG, the Pentagon has propped up a new YPG-dominated military coalition called the Syrian Democratic Front (SDF) and encouraged smaller Arab battalions to join. In October, the U.S. government air-dropped a crate of weapons to the SDF in Syria, and it has also embedded special forces advisors with the group. This is both a bid to give U.S. support to the YPG some political cover and a nod to the reality that driving ISIS from its Sunni Arab strongholds will require significant help from Sunni Arab fighters.

A Department of Defense official sought to distance U.S. efforts from recent YPG offensives around Aleppo. He said the U.S. was supporting the group east of the Euphrates River, in its fight against ISIS, but not in its new campaign against rebel groups to the west. “Some of the Kurdish groups west of the Euphrates” have been “engaging with some Syrian opposition groups,” he said, speaking on condition of anonymity.

“What’s important here is that we are not providing any direct support to these groups,” he added. “Our operations have been focused on the SDF east of the Euphrates as they fight ISIS.”

The battle between America’s two proxies reflects the competing impulses of the Obama administration’s Syria policy. “The SDF model is meant to replace the failed [operations room] model,” said Nicholas Heras, an analyst at the Center for a New American Security.

Yet he noted that groups like Furqa al-Sultan Murad are battling ISIS as well as Assad — and still considered a bulwark against the extremists by the U.S. “It is a front-line combatant against ISIS,” he said of the battalion.

The recent clashes could make it difficult for the U.S. to build the crucial Arab component of its ISIS fight, the Washington Institute’s Tabler said. “If this continues, the U.S. is only going to have one option it can work with, which is the YPG. It’s not going to have the Arab option,” he said. “Which would be fine if the Kurds were the majority of the Syrian population, but they’re not. We need Sunni Arabs to defeat ISIS.”

Mike Giglio is a correspondent for BuzzFeed News based in Istanbul. He has reported on the wars in Syria and Ukraine and unrest around the Middle East. 

Contact Mike Giglio at mike.giglio@buzzfeed.com.

The original source of this article is Buzzfeed

Copyright © Mike Giglio, Buzzfeed, 2016