U.S. politicians with a vested interest in supporting the ‘moderate’ Syrian opposition are increasingly being exposed as supporting a lie. The latest example comes from Lebanon, where a small village there is home to substantial collaboration between ISIS and FSA.
Free Syrian Army commanders around Arsal vehemently deny any involvement in recent clashes with the Lebanese security forces, but admit to cooperating with Islamist groups in military operations along the Syrian-Lebanese border.
Often at odds on the Syrian battlefields, the FSA, Nusra Front and ISIS have entered a tenuous allegiance of convenience to fight Assad-aligned forces in the badlands surrounding Arsal.
“We are collaborating with the Islamic State and the Nusra Front by attacking the Syrian Army’s gatherings in … Qalamoun,” said Bassel Idriss, the commander of an FSA-aligned rebel brigade.
“We have reached a point where we have to collaborate with anyone against unfairness and injustice,” confirmed Abu Khaled, another FSA commander who lives in Arsal.
The predictable response by said U.S. politicians will undoubtedly be that had the U.S. better supported the FSA that they wouldn’t have to align with ISIS. They’ll say that had we supported the FSA with more weapons, Bashar al-Assad would be gone and Syria would be in the hands of completely responsible people.
Uh, wasn’t that supposed to happen in Libya? In fact, the U.S. State Department relied on the same flawed model when it hired the February 17 Martyrs Brigade to provide security in Benghazi. Whistleblowers Eric Nordstrom and Gregory Hicks made this exact point during congressional testimony last year:
U.S. politicians who want to support the FSA are selling the American people a lie based on good cop / bad cop; they want the American people to support the good cop. In reality, there is no difference and if even if there were, ISIS would discard FSA the second the latter was no longer necessary just like the Muslim Brotherhood discarded those idealistic left-wing protesters in Egypt.
Just this week, a spokesman for the Steven Sotloff family said the beheaded American journalist was sold to ISIS by the FSA, even calling out the Obama administration for calling rebels who are in league with ISIS ‘moderate’. After the beheading of James Foley, it was learned that the FSA handed Foley over to ISIS as a goodwill gesture.
Once the case that FSA and ISIS are interchangeable is established, the American people need to start digging into why their leaders – Republicans and Democrats – have been feeding the lie. One place to start digging is a surprisingly explosive piece by the New York Times published this week. It’s about foreign countries buying influence with U.S. think tanks.
One of those think tanks is the Brookings Institute. This is where the digging starts as Shoebat.com reported. While NYT reported on Qatar’s collaboration with Brookings along with the millions of dollars it sends Brookings’ way, it’s the U.S.-Islamic World Forum (US-IWF) that explains quite a bit.
US-IWF is an annual forum co-sponsored by Qatar and Brookings. U.S. politicians like Senator John McCain, Hillary Clinton, and John Kerry have all attended this forum.