“Saudi Arabia has created a Frankenstein’s monster over which it is rapidly losing control. The same is true of its allies such as Turkey which has been a vital back-base for Isis and Jabhat al-Nusra by keeping the 510-mile-long Turkish-Syrian border open. As Kurdish-held border crossings fall to Isis, Turkey will find it has a new neighbour of extraordinary violence, and one deeply ungrateful for past favours from the Turkish intelligence service.”
Article doesn’t provide much new reporting. It does, however, nicely tie Hillary Clinton, then Secretary of State, to Treason, covering up Saudi state support for Al Qaeda:
“Saudi sympathy for anti-Shia “militancy” is identified in leaked US official documents. The then US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton wrote in December 2009 in a cable released by Wikileaks that “Saudi Arabia remains a critical financial support base for al-Qa’ida, the Taliban, LeT [Lashkar-e-Taiba in Pakistan] and other terrorist groups.” She said that, in so far as Saudi Arabia did act against al-Qa’ida, it was as a domestic threat and not because of its activities abroad. This policy may now be changing with the dismissal of Prince Bandar as head of intelligence this year. But the change is very recent, still ambivalent and may be too late: it was only last week that a Saudi prince said he would no longer fund a satellite television station notorious for its anti-Shia bias based in Egypt.”
Prince Bandar is a central figure in this ISIS movement to wage a war of annihilation against the Shia and to create a caliphate across Asia. The US sees this as wonderful, as the main Shia stronghold is, of course, Iran.
More:
Turkey’s role has been different but no less significant than Saudi Arabia’s in aiding Isis and other jihadi groups. Its most important action has been to keep open its 510-mile border with Syria. This gave Isis, al-Nusra and other opposition groups a safe rear base from which to bring in men and weapons. The border crossing points have been the most contested places during the rebels’ ‘civil war within the civil war’. Most foreign jihadis have crossed Turkey on their way to Syria and Iraq. Precise figures are difficult to come by, but Morocco’s Interior Ministry said recently that 1122 Moroccan jihadists have entered Syria, including nine hundred who went in 2013, two hundred of whom were killed. Iraqi security suspects that Turkish military intelligence may have been heavily involved in aiding Isis when it was reconstituting itself in 2011. Reports from the Turkish border say Isis is no longer welcome, but with weapons taken from the Iraqi army and the seizure of Syrian oil and gasfields, it no longer needs so much outside help.
Of course I would disagree with the title of this article, by Patrick Cockburn:
Ultimate disaster for the US? Bullshit. This has been their outright strategy since 2006:
It’s a disaster for the little people who live there, not for the US or Britain who were kicked out of Iraq by the Iran-friendly Maliki regime. Now they are destroying Maliki, and the “Caliphate” seeks to destroy Iran and Shia generally. This sort of hyperbolic gibberish, from Patrick Cockburn, makes me doubt his sincerity sometimes.
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