By Theodore Shoebat

Syrian forces are vanquishing the rebels in Quneitra, with the help of the Russian air force, taking backing territory from the insurgents. According to a report from Al-Jazeera:

Troops loyal to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad widened their offensive in the country’s southwest to an adjacent province, days after reaching an evacuation agreement with rebels in southern Deraa province.

Pro-government troops, backed by Russian air support, bombed a rebel-held village in Quneitra – an area adjoining the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights – as they look to recapture a strip of land straddling Deraa and Quneitra provinces still in rebel hands.

The fighting was intense as one can see from recent footage from Darra:

According to rebel official Abu Shaima, he and five hundred other rebel fighters went on buses and evacuated the area of southern Deraa city. These rebels then began moving into opposition held territory in northern Syria. Turkish forces are heavily concentrated in northern Syria, as Turkish forces just recently did their 16th round of patrols against the YPG.

I would not doubt that these rebels are getting backed by Turkey, as the Turkish government collaborated with anti-Assad rebels in its conquest of Afrin in northern Syria. The Los Angeles Times reported that in Afrin there are “checkpoints run by Syrian rebels and Turkish soldiers and police”. This is not surprising given that from the beginning of the tensions in Syria, Turkey (and more especially the United States) was backing the rebels to topple the Assad government. As Newsweek writes: “The U.S. accused the Syrian government of killing innocent civilians and soon began actively arming, training and funding rebels, who also received backing from Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar.”

Turkish backed rebels recently broke into a Kurdish man’s home, murdering him before looting $2,000 worth of property. As one Kurdish report states on this very sad story:

A Kurdish man succumbed to his injuries on Tuesday after he was attacked by Turkish-backed rebels at his home in Afrin over the weekend, local sources from the region said.

Members of the armed group Ahrar al-Sham raided the home of Sami Haj Khalil on July 15, attacking him and his brother Ibrahim before looting $2,000 worth of property from the house.

Sources said Sami was tied to a tree outside his residence in the Haj Hasna village of Jindiris town located in northwestern Syria’s Afrin district.

The 40-year-old was discovered a day later beaten and tortured, and despite being taken to a hospital, he eventually died of his injuries due to a lack of medicine available.

Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, expressed outrage over Russia’s support for the Syrian military against rebels in Daraa. According to Haaretz:

Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan told Russian leader Vladimir Putin on Saturday an accord aimed at containing the Syrian conflict could be destroyed if Syrian government forces target the Idlib region, a Turkish presidential source said.

The two presidents spoke by telephone after the Syrian government raised the national flag on Thursday over areas of Daraa in the southwest that was in rebel hands for years.

Darra is adjacent to the Syrian side of the Golan Heights, which borders right with Israel.

Daraa on map of Syria

All of this is sparking more anti-Syrian responses in Israel, with Israeli officials expressing worry about Syrian forces — with Iranian and Hezbollah allies — being right across Israel. Israel, in other words, wants the rebels to prevail against the Syrian military. This is why Israel has been backing several rebel groups. Analyst Elizabeth Tsurkov, who has been studying and investigating the Syrian conflict for years, and has interviewed many rebel fighters, wrote on how Israel has been backing the rebels. As Haaretz reported early this year:

Dozens of rebels who spoke with Tsurkov described a significant change in the amount of aid they receive from Israel. Moreover, she said at least seven Sunni rebel organizations in the Syrian Golan are now getting arms and ammunition from Israel, along with money to buy additional armaments.

While Israel is worried about Syria, it was not worried about rebels on the Syrian Golan who she armed. That Israel has been backing the rebels is really of no surprise, given the fact that pro-Israel lobbyists who have the ears of the US government have been pushing for regime change in Syria for many years. In the spring of 2002, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee was pushing for Syria to be categorized as part of the “axis of evil”. John Bolton also called Syria a member of this “axis of evil”, and stated back in 2002:

The United States also knows that Syria has long had a chemical warfare program. It has a stockpile of the nerve agent sarin and is engaged in research and development of the more toxic and persistent nerve agent VX. …America is determined to prevent the next wave of terror. States that sponsor terror and pursue WMD must stop. States that renounce terror and abandon WMD can become part of our effort. But those that do not can expect to become our targets.”

John Bolton blabbers about Syria being in the “axis of evil,” all the while Bolton and his ilk will lobby for the MEK, that is, the Islamist Mujahideen-e Khalq, or the People’s Muhahideen of Iran, a terrorist group and cult which has done attacks that led to the deaths of both Iranians and American citizens. So while these lobbyists for destruction will sit there and talk about the dangers of Hezbollah and Iran, they will lobby not only for the Iranian mujahideen, but for the Syrian Muslim jihadists as well. This should lead us to question their motives. Are these lobbyists really against terrorism, or do they use the reality of terrorism to advocate for a pernicious agenda? The reality is the latter of the two.

Daniel Pipes has also lobbied for the MEK, stating that they are not terrorists and they can be useful to the US government. In a 2003 article, Daniel Pipes wrote:

Is the MeK a terrorist group? No. It used terrorism decades ago, when its members attacked Americans. For the last 15 years, however, the MeK has been organized as an army, and its only violent actions have been directed against the Iranian regime.”

So, according to Pipes, a terrorist is only defined as such when they only kill Americans or Israelis. To Pipes, a terrorist group that has killed Americans in the past is okay, just as long as it uses terrorism against the Iranian government. So all of this talk about Iran from these lobbyists is full of hypocrisy because these very people are backing the Iranian mujahideen. And now they are in favor for destroying a whole country (Syria) in the name of a hypocritical outcry against Iran. This goes back years in the activities of American lobbyists for war. In September of 2003, John Bolton appeared before Congress and declared that Syria was a growing threat to American interest in the Middle East. After Saddam was executed, lobbyists were stating that what happened to Saddam could happen to Assad next. In early April of 2003, WINEP (Washington Institute for Near East Policy), produced a report stating that Syria “should not miss the message that countries that pursue Saddam’s reckless, irresponsible and defiant behavior could end up sharing his fate.”

The Syrian government, while being berated as an evil regime, was at one point a major source of intelligence for the United Stated against Al-Qaeda. This continued until the second Iraq War (when neoconservative lobbyists began pushing for regime change in Syria). As Seymour Hersh wrote back in 2003:

 American intelligence and State Department officials have told me that by early 2002 Syria had emerged as one of the C.I.A.’s most effective intelligence allies in the fight against Al Qaeda, providing an outpouring of information that came to an end only with the invasion of Iraq. … [A]fter September 11th the Syrian leader, Bashar Assad, initiated the delivery of Syrian intelligence to the United States. The Syrians had compiled hundreds of files on Al Qaeda, including dossiers on the men who participated—and others who wanted to participate—in the September 11th attacks. Syria also penetrated Al Qaeda cells throughout the Middle East and in Arab exile communities throughout Europe. That data began flowing to C.I.A. and F.B.I. operatives.

Syria had accumulated much of its information because of Al Qaeda’s ties to the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood, Islamic terrorists who have been at war with the secular Syrian government for more than two decades.

Hersh also pointed to something quite fascinating: Mohammad Atta, one of the 9/11 hijackers, wrote an entire essay on Aleppo as part of his study on “urban planning”. He did such a study as part of the conspiracy of the Muslim Brotherhood to topple the Assad regime. As Hersh writes:

Aleppo was the subject of Mohammed Atta’s dissertation on urban planning, and he travelled there twice in the mid-nineties. “At every stage in Atta’s journey is the Muslim Brotherhood,” a former C.I.A. officer who served undercover in Damascus told me.

So, what we find here, is that the US’ plans for Syria, is no different from those of Al-Qaeda and Muhammad Atta himself. So now the US is doing what Muhammad Atta wanted.

In a CIA document written in 1985, entitled, Syria: Sunni Opposition to the Minority Alawite Regime, it talks about how the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood could destabilize Syria after the death of Hafez al-Assad:

“When Assad dies, concern among the Alawite elite about Sunni discontent probably will serve to dampen rivalries within the regime and contribute to an orderly succession. The longevity of such a successor regime, however, will depend in part on its ability to replicate Assad’s successful combination of repression and co-optation of the Sunni community. A broad-based popular movement or Islamic revolution appears unlikely, but in the context of a succession crises or in the early stages of a new regime, Sunni officers might seek to take advantage of regime weaknesses to attempt a coup. The Muslim Brotherhood almost certainly would attempt to instigate civil disorders to test the staying power of Assad’s successor as president.”

The US government knew very well that the Muslim Brotherhood wanted to topple the Syrian government, and this is why the CIA backed the Muslim Brotherhood to support the policy of destabilization in Syria. In the beginning of the Syrian civil war, the CIA was working in Turkey to use the Turkish government and the Muslim Brotherhood as a conduit to send weapons to the rebels. As the AP reported back in 2012:

The weapons, including automatic rifles, rocket-propelled grenades, ammunition and some anti-tank weapons, are being funneled mostly across the Turkish border by way of a shadowy network of intermediaries, including Syria’s Muslim Brotherhood, and paid for by Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar, the officials said.

So the US, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and the Muslim Brotherhood have been collaborating to commence a jihad against the Syrian government. What is disturbing is how Israel is siding with this Jihad. Many of our readers criticize us for exposing the US and Israel, urging us that we should only expose Islam. But they will ask us to refrain, when Israel and the US supports Islam. So I guess its okay for the US and Israel to support Islam?