The truth is that it’s the lowest hanging fruit and there is almost no impetus either on the ground or from media bosses to check facts. But what will these journalists do when the truth gets out after the war ends in Ukraine, when they become the focus of opprobrium?

The biggest secret which no journalist ever wants to tell even his own mother is that war reporting is absurdly easy and can actually be carried out by the most stupid numpty in the office who struggles to even operate the photocopier. Sure, the psychological trauma weighs heavily, often after the event and it takes a certain amount of courage and selfishness to put yourself in a conflict zone (selfish if you have a family back home) but in terms of the actual mechanisms of the job, war reporting really is not at all challenging. The day to day events in a conflict are so horrific that really all the reporter needs to do is get to where the action is and take the shots, roll the camera or get the quotes. The stories practically write themselves for the simple reason that many of the normal requisites of reporting don’t apply in conflict zones. The consumer has an unlimited appetite for the same story over and over again. Blood and gore really does stun viewers, particularly in broadcast news, into a sense of shock and morbid curiosity which then metamorphosises into an addiction, an adrenalin rush which the reporters on the front line themselves also fall victim to.

But if you have the courage or are driven by your own sense of self-importance and can put out of your mind your loved ones, the a-b-c of reporting couldn’t be simpler or more rudimentary. The stories literally present themselves packaged and ready to go, with no annoying questions by editors who want to slow down the process by painful fact checking and due diligence.

You never forget the first time a gun is pointed at you. For me it was in the summer of 1992 in Mogadishu, Somalia where the country was being torn apart by a civil war and its capital resembled a hell which not even Ridley Scott could capture in Black Hawk Down. It was a security guard in a compound who wanted me to leave. I resisted and argued with him in Swahili until I heard the definitive click of the hammer on a Colt 45 1911 being pulled back and the muzzle pointed at me. “D’toka sai yee” (get out now) was all he had to say as my heart thumped so hard I was convinced it was jump completely out of its rib cage.

Getting the builders in

You also never forget the first time you hear the distinctive faint whistle noise of a 7.62mm round as it passes your ears. And you defiantly never forget the awkwardness of not knowing what to do when people are actually firing at you which also happened to me in Mogadishu a couple of days later where I was naively confused by parts of the wall next to me exploding. I stupidly thought that the summer heat was making the cement crack or that perhaps workman were drilling it from the other side. What an idiot. Well, I was in my mid 20s.

Somalia was my first conflict. Others followed in East Africa including Rwanda and Southern Sudan in ’94 and then later the former Yugoslavia in ’97 and ’98, Lebanon ’06, Afghanistan ’08. In all those times, I lost count of the whistling bullet noises of the number of times militias pointed guns in my face and how the sight of dead bodies shocks and yet intrigues at the same time. In 1994 in Southern Sudan I was specifically sent to a region which was being bombed by the Khartoum regime from Anthonovs which were barely visible at 18,000 feet. I was sent there to be bombed on and film it which I dutifully did for what is now APTN news in London. The idea today that AP, which is barely a shadow of itself compared to those days, would send a freelance journalist on such a suicide mission is unthinkable.

In all that time though I was aware how the strength of the story more or less dictates your role to document, film, replicate the events for history. What I was to imagine would be the diligence of journalism wasn’t required. There wasn’t really any fact checking as, on a practical level, it was more or less impossible. When you arrived at a site of a massacre, you’re more or less hostage to the anguish and horror and the people who are there to fill in the gaps and put the story together. It’s absurdly easy, a child could do it. One of the things I learnt in all of those places was that the victims, even though they didn’t need to lie, did just that. Even when a massacre happened and it was pretty obvious who did it, there were still plenty of people who survived who sexed up the story when it was so sexed up already that it hardly needed it. The temptation is too much for those who are the victims, but also for the governments, regular armies and aid organisations when a journalist is there on the scene and he has shown that speed is of the essence to get the story processed and sent back. I wonder whether the Marioupol theatre bombing is one of these stories as the facts as they are presented leave more questions than answers and residents claiming that they had been told days beforehand by right wing groups sympathetic to Zelensky that they were going to bomb it themselves as an amoral ruse to draw NATO into the war. We saw exactly this ploy by Muslim groups in Sarajevo in the Yugoslav war who figured that they could bomb their own civilians and western media would point the fingers at the demonized Serbs in the hills – which became the basis of NATO airstrikes against Milosevic.

In the nineties, we relied very heavily on our editors in London to provide a layer of fact checking as we weren’t hooked up to the internet (certainly not in my Africa and Yugoslavia period).

A generation who knew right from wrong

You chose a side. Usually the one which is first of all the more practical to get to; and secondly the one which is going to give you the instantly vivid and horrific pictures. And mostly journalists, certainly not today, ever cross the line between where they are to the group which was the aggressor. I tried to do this in ’92 in Somalia in its capital which was divided by a north-south line and very nearly got shot by Aideed’s thugs who chased after me in the south. I literally ran for my life carrying bulky video equipment which would be in a museum today, it was so heavy. My friend Dan Eldon was not so lucky. Later on in 1993 he rushed to a scene of an attack by a U.S. helicopter and was beaten to death by angry women who made the connection between his pale skin and western imperialism which robbed them of their children.

We were part of a generation of journalist who knew that it was not right just inserting yourself into the mayhem of war with civilians being bombed each day, without reaching out to the other side to at least offer a comment, a response to the news we were producing. But on the ground it often wasn’t possible; only when returning to your home country where calls can be made.

In those days there was more honour amongst all those practicing, whether they be journalists, government officials, defence ministries or even khat-chewing militias. It has taken the Yugoslavian war for all of these groups to wake up to taking advantage of the tricky position journalists find themselves in when covering war. They have seen that the speed to get the gory pictures and file the story with the ghastly details of death caused by modern warfare eclipses the need for due diligence. The ‘embedding’ of journalists, which really started in 1991 with the Gulf War, more or less creates a hostage situation between the powerful army and its facilities and the journalists who are happy to sign up the Stockholm Syndrome type reporting – which, in a nutshell, is a sort of stenography of what generals say at press conferences and a tacit agreement to report on the staged scenes which the army takes you to cover. And it’s the same with militias. Journalists who went to Norther Syria to cover the Syrian war soon found themselves embedded with ISIS and Al Qaeda affiliates who would protect them while taking them to scenes which they wanted covered. There is a certain amount of obligation from the journalist to not do their due diligence and reach out – via telephone and internet – to fact check what they’re being shown as tangible news material as such an act would be considered discourteous to the hosts. And so in this set up, fake news thrives as the incumbents who hold the journalists can barely resist the opportunity to spin stories. They have the journalists as a hostage and he/she is under pressure to write stories each day.

Staged chemical attacks in Syria

And so ‘embedding’ comes in many forms and it merely encourages the polarised set up which all wars now have, which we saw in Yugoslavia and other places. In Syria, we saw the same story where so many big title journalists even succumbed to writing reports based on finding sources on social media in places being bombed. The reporting became so jaded, the process so corrupted that it led, in many cases, false reporting on Assad using chemicals on his own people. In at least one case, there is overwhelming evidence now, for those who wish to examine in on line, to prove without any doubt that one such attack was staged entirely by Al Qaeda affiliates, with local Syrian actors being requested to stage a minor performance for the cameras – video footage shamefully used by the BBC to support a narrative which ticked a box for them and their journalists camped in Beirut.

Journalists these days in war zones don’t cross the line, even on a technical level with their smartphones such is the new ‘standard’ which all media giants are operating by – which has merely encouraged a new all time low of pseudo journalism from other journalists struggling to make their way up. It reminds me of a CNN producer who, so unable to cope with her assignment in Morocco, had decided on the beginning, middle and end of her report before she even got on the plane to carry out the ‘King clinging on to power’ story which was entirely wrong and planted in her head by her Emirati lover in Washington. The media giants who sent their big named journalists to Ukraine had already decided the story, the narrative that all must abide to which is that Zelensky is some sort of Ce Gevara figure and squeaky clean, that the war is not at all the west’s fault and so no responsibility shall be placed on its leaders since the early 90s and that all Ukrainians are angels and that we should all adopt one, like adorable Labradors. They’ve even invented the perfect explanation how they can carry out this extreme partisan news reporting, which is, conveniently that “Putin is mad”. Or perhaps intel agencies helped them out with this folly.

Journalists became the combatants

What iconic journalists from the UK who hail from a once esteemed investigative news outfit like BBC Panorama won’t be investigating is the worryingly high level of Ukrainians who supported far right fanatical groups there for decades which were funded by the CIA and the State department. The odious John Sweeny will not go against the grain of the newsroom indoctrination and present Zelensky as corrupt, if not more corrupt, than the leader he ousted in his anti corruption campaign which installed him as president. Sweeney, who claims to be an investigative journalist and who shouldn’t be judged on his mental meltdown while filming a doc about scientologists in the U.S. will no doubt do his reporting on the gore which is in front of his eyes but not look to hard for reasons behind it. A German journalist sent to Dresden during the second world war to film the antihalation of the RAF bombers on women and children might take a similar line by not blaming Hitler for invading Poland in 1939.

We should not expect much from Mr Sweeney or the BBC Panorama team who I have actually worked for briefly and know only too well how their own personal careers come before anything which remotely whiffs of raw, vociferous journalism. In 2017, I found Britain’s most wanted gangster who fled the UK in the 1990s after an FBI sting to net him failed. The individual, who was hiding in Greece, was prepared to tell Panorama the names and addresses of the top twenty heroine importers in the UK. I failed to convince the producer, who only wanted her idea of him spilling the beans on UK customs agents’ corruption, to repair a previous poor report she had made have more gravitas. Britain’s biggest ever double agent (heroine importer and paid super grass by the UK government who was protected by Jack Straw) was let go due to personal ambitions, office politics and rank stupidity. So much for BBC Panorama being an investigation team digging deep and finding great stories which set the media agenda. Just politics. People’s own greed and self fulfilment. Corruption.

I have stopped watching TV news from the Ukraine as I can see the A-B-C of how the sloppiest war reporting is carried out without the slightest effort for any western journalists to at least look beyond the bodies and twisted limbs for nuance, which has become the collateral damage of all journalism these days. Recently a number of western journalists have been killed in Ukraine which saddens me of course. But if you begin to understand how journalists have crossed a line and become combatants when they either embed themselves with the governments, armies or even the victims they are writing about, then it’s easier to understand why they have become targets themselves. I once used to feel guilty about not helping people who were suffering. The photo by the South African photojournalist Kevin Carter of the vulture looming over the almost dead infant left on the ground in Southern Sudan by a mother fleeing an attack in 1994 haunts me to this day, as I was there in the same year. But when time has passed and in years to come the truth comes out and we see a more complexed nuanced story about the Ukraine war, the big gun journalists today in Ukraine will feel a shame which will eclipse mine tenfold for being partisan to a over-simplified presentation of a story which will show we have much more blood on our hands in the west than most humble people realise. Western journalists in the Ukraine don’t understand the iconic photograph of the vulture and the dying child in Sudan which Carter took and which gave him nightmares all his life which finally led him to taking his own life in 1993. They wouldn’t miss a heartbeat to stop and help as they have already decided what the story is and their tawdry role in reporting it.

Londoner Robert Stuart has spent quite a few years documenting his Fabrication in BBC Panorama’s Saving Syria’s Children blog which details the alleged collusion of the BBC and rogue British Army elements in a false flag chemical attack in Syria perpetrated, he alleges, to get Britain to join the USA in bombing Damascus back to the Stone Age.

Though Stuart’s site is well worth exploring, it is important here because Stuart’s critics, the BBC included, have not been able to find even the smallest chink in his work. Until Stuart’s work is discredited, the man on the Clapham omnibus would have to conclude that the BBC, the British security services, the Muslim Brotherhood and their casts of crisis actors colluded to propel Britain into war against Syria and were, therefore, by definition, guilty of crimes against the peace, the very crimes Hitler’s top brass swung for at Nuremberg.

The issue of crisis actors not only in Syria but in Ukraine as well is worth more than a cursory glance. This is because, to take but one topical outrage, Russia alleged Ukraine’s Nazi battalions deployed crisis actors to pretend that casualties from Russia’s attack on Mariupol’s maternity hospital which, Russia alleges, the Nazis converted into a critical forward post, included many pregnant women and new-born babies.

Although the use of crisis actors on Ukraine’s front lines sounds implausible, Stuart’s work strongly suggests that such actors exist. And this site, one of very many, shows where and by whom they are hired and the various professional groups they can network through. Given CrisisCast’s strong military links, given Britain’s long track record in deceptive military techniques, given Britain’s military secrecy and given the expertise of Britain’s Brigade 77 and Israel’s Hasbara in such dark arts, one must, despite “conspiracy theory” (sic) scepticism, expect such wag the dog events as well as budgets to finance them on a scale we cannot begin to imagine.

If the Russians are wrong and crisis actors and meme producers are not employed, the Clapham bus commuter would consider Ukrainian outrages as horrific as Iraqi soldiers ripping babies out from incubators or, indeed, the Kaiser’s troops bayoneting Belgian babies to death in August 1914. But, how are we, who are denied credible, alternative news sources, supposed to divine between right and wrong, between truth and propaganda.

Well, one such way is to first use the 10-step cheat sheet of Belgian historian, Anne Morelli, which perfectly distils the essential propaganda techniques of Falsehood in War-time, Containing an Assortment of Lies Circulated Throughout the Nations During the Great War, Arthur Ponsonby’s timeless 1928 classic. Those steps are as follows:

1. We do not want war. NATO does not want war, even though NATO’s arms manufacturers benefit immensely from war and even though NATO’s main states have been almost continuously at war for hundreds of years.
2. The opposite party alone is guilty of war. Russia is now in the naughty corner for doing to Ukraine a fraction of what NATO’s various Coalitions of the Willing have “reluctantly” done to Yemen, Syria, Iraq and Libya, criminal wars we are now supposed to forget about, bar whatever Hollywood throws up on them.
3. The enemy is inherently evil and resembles the devil. The Daily Mail and its Irish imitations have the same low opinion of Russia’s president as they did of the leaders of those other countries, who have recently been in NATO’s crosshairs. Beelzebub personified.
4. We defend a noble cause, not our own interests. The millions who were murdered from NATO’s ordnance might disagree, as might Julian Assange, who is being extradited from one NATO country to another because he dared expose that mantra.
5. The enemy commits atrocities on purpose; our mishaps are involuntary. Not according to the evidence Wikileaks and others produced (but see point 10 below).
6. The enemy uses forbidden weapons. There is overwhelming evidence depleted uranium was used in Serbia, Iraq and Syria and let’s just skip those bio-warfare labs Russia captured on its Ukrainian border.
7. We suffer small losses, those of the enemy are enormous. And so it is with Ukraine where Russia has overwhelming military superiority but, by all our media accounts, are being slaughtered in Somme-like numbers to further the James Bond-villain aims of their leader. (see three above).
8. Recognised artists and intellectuals back our cause. Hurrah for Hollywood and Ireland’s virtue signallers. In the meantime, Dostoyevsky and Tchaikovsky are banned, presumably because they were neither artists nor intellectuals.
9. Our cause is sacred. Going abroad to slaughter innocents is as blasphemous now as it was when Britain’s Irish regiments slaughtered Boers by the tens of thousands in the 2^nd Boer war, whose sacred cause was about looting South African gold and nothing else.
10. All who doubt our propaganda are traitors. Herman Goering put it best at Nuremberg. “Why, of course, the people don’t want war,” he said. “Why would some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best that he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece. Naturally, the common people don’t want war; neither in Russia nor in England nor in America, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy or a fascist dictatorship or a Parliament or a Communist dictatorship. The people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country.”

It is certainly how it works in Ireland where war fever is at least as high as it was in the summer of 1914. Our political elite, their chums in charge of our defence forces, and the various foreign cartels they are beholden to, are the only “humans”, who will benefit from our increasing entanglement into NATO’s orbit. Their obsession with serving both King and Kaiser at the expense of Ireland not only spits in the face of generations of long-dead Irish patriots but does today’s Irish generation no favours at all, as it condemns almost all of them to little more than the role of hewers of wood and drawers of water Cromwell assigned for our ancestors.

There is, in economics, a basic trade-off between producing guns and producing butter which says that, with the limited resources Ireland has after our leaders skim off the top, you can produce either Kerrygold butter or you can buy NATO pop guns but you cannot do both in any appreciable numbers because you do not have the wherewithal to do so.

Our political elite are determined to take the pop gun option at the expense of the Kerrygold route as that will maximise their bribes. We have a mirror choice. We can rid ourselves of our entire political elite or we can expect our living standards to plummet. Though it is a simple choice, it is a necessarily hard one because nothing good comes easy.

By Kit KLARENBERG

This December, The Grayzone exposed how a shadowy communications firm, Valent Projects, enlisted a prominent YouTube influencer to front a covert state-sponsored influence operation designed to undermine critics of London’s pandemic policies. That company was founded by Amil Khan, a veteran of long-running and lavishly funded UK Foreign Office information warfare operations in Syria.

The overriding objective behind Khan’s involvement in the Syrian dirty war was destabilizing the government of Bashar Assad, while convincing Syrians and international bodies that the militant groups rampaging across the country were a “moderate” alternative. Media across the world was subsequently flooded with pro-opposition propaganda.

In fact, Khan ran communications for armed opposition gangs in the Syrian dirty war – the same militias that Amnesty had previously condemned for perpetrating egregious human rights abuses. He did so while maintaining a personal and professional connection with a top staffer at Amnesty International’s UK branch, Kristyan Benedict.

Amnesty had once covered the atrocities committed by those armed Syrian gangs, but as Khan entered its orbit by way of a UK government intelligence cutout, Amnesty became a dependable organ of regime change propaganda.

Though Amnesty recently infuriated the US Department of State and Israel lobby by accusing Israel of the crime of apartheid, The Grayzone can reveal that Amnesty International has been subverted and made a part of the malign effort to destabilize Syria – a key objective of NATO states and the government of Israel.

‘Shameful disregard for human life’

Though Amnesty International has become known for a steady supply of flashy, heavily promoted reports drumming up regime change narratives against Syria, it once highlighted atrocities committed by the violent gangs sponsored and armed by the West.

In May 2016 for instance, it published an excoriating report exposing how a number of terror groups had “repeatedly carried out indiscriminate attacks that have struck civilian homes, streets, markets and mosques, killing and injuring civilians and displaying a shameful disregard for human life” in militia-occupied Aleppo.

Between February and April, indiscriminate artillery shelling, rocket and mortar strikes targeting the Kurdish People’s Protection Unit (YPG) killed 83 civilians, including 30 children, and injured over 700 civilians in residential areas. On the “bloodiest day” ever witnessed by residents of the Sheikh Maqsoud suburb, one man alone lost seven members of their family, including his 18-month-old daughter, two sons aged 15 and 10, and eight-year-old nephew, when an improvised rocket struck his home.

Not long after, Amnesty followed up with another lengthy investigation documenting how armed groups – including terrorist factions such as al-Nusra – were responsible for widespread abductions, torture and summary killings throughout Aleppo. Ignored by mainstream media, these unprecedented exposés represented the first time a Western human rights source highlighted the daily misery and danger in which residents of the contested city had been forced to live for the past four years.

Rather than highlight how Aleppo was reduced to a hazardous wasteland overtaken by warring foreign-backed militias, major news outlets instead focused exclusively on attacks by government forces, while hailing the supposed heroism of opposition activists.

This warped portrayal of the reality on the ground was the result of a massive propaganda effort waged by a host of UK Foreign Office-sponsored intelligence cutouts, financed to the tune of millions.

A key component of this constellation was InCoStrat, a firm founded by ex-Foreign Office political officer Emma Winberg and UK military intelligence journeyman Paul Tilley. Winberg left in 2017 to join Mayday Rescue, the parent “charity” of the bogus humanitarian group known as the White Helmets. She later married Helmets’ founder James Le Mesurier, who died in mysterious circumstances two years later.

In leaked files reviewed by The Grayzone, InCoStrat boasted of training and maintaining an “extensive network” of citizen journalists and activists in Syria, totaling over 120 figures who provided the company  “distribution capabilities into the majority” of the country, producing documentaries, talk shows, movies, public service announcements, and radio serials which were “successfully placed” in Arabic-speaking media.

The firm also claimed its team was in “weekly contact with a network of over 1,600 journalists and people of influence related to Syria” internationally, outlining a wide range of on-and-offline methods it exploited to “to achieve influence in Syria and the region.” For instance, it spearheaded an “innovative” two-pronged “guerrilla campaign” and “guerrilla tactics” strategy, “[using] the media to create [an] event” and “[initiating] an event to create media effect.”

One notable example of this subterfuge was “[exploiting] the concentrated presence of journalists” during the Geneva II conference in January 2014 “to put pressure on the regime.” The company additionally produced “postcards, posters and reports” to “draw behavioural parallels” between the Assad government and ISIS, dishonestly furthering the baseless conspiracy theory that “a latent relationship exists between the two.”

According to internal Incostrat files, a “credible, Arabic-English speaking Syrian spokesperson” then toured major media outlets to spout talking points likening Assad to ISIS.

This particular psy-op was specifically intended to focus maintain media attention on alleged state atrocities, the firm stated, “at a crucial time when media attention has shifted almost exclusively towards ISIS and some influential voices are calling for co-operation with the Syrian regime.”

Khan “established relationships with, and embedded himself into terrorist organizations”

At precisely the same time Amnesty International was reporting on atrocities of armed opposition groups inside Damascus, InCoStrat was providing extensive “strategic communications support” to those same militias. Recipients of this support included armed gangs situated in “some of the most impenetrable areas in the country,” such as Syria’s “eastern front,” which at that time was predominantly occupied by ISIS.

Five “official spokesmen” for these groups were said in Incostrat documents to “appear several times a week on international and regional TV” thanks to the UK contractor. Incostrat also revealed its trained reporters “have had access to a variety of groups,” including Al Qaeda-affiliated Jabhat al-Nusra.

Further, the company claimed to have “strong relationships” with 54 brigade commanders in Syria’s southern front, “involving daily, direct engagement with the commanders and their officers,” regular contact with “defected officers in Irbid and Amman who coordinate with local military councils,” established ties with “FSA brigades in Aleppo, Idlib and parts of northern Latakia,” and even “indirect engagement with small FSA units inside regime-held Damascus.” This was said to produce “added value all round” for the Foreign Office.

“[We] developed, and currently project manage three Syrian media offices across Turkey and Jordan,” InCoStrat wrote. “Campaigns from this office not only target domestic and international audiences via traditional and social media to promote the moderate armed opposition, but also focus on the placing of products to influence pro-regime audiences internally.”

Valent Projects founder Amil Khan was central to efforts to cultivate fanatical, Al Qaeda-aligned armed gangsters as pro-Western information warriors.

In a document detailing InCoStrat’s ability to “[develop] contacts in Arabic-speaking conflict affected states,” the company specifically drew attention to how, “in his previous career as a journalist,” he had “established relationships with, and embedded himself into terrorist organizations in the UK and the Middle East,” gaining “unique insight into their narratives, communication methods, recruitment processes and management of networks.”

An official profile of Khan from a December 2015 event at the House of Lords hosted by the elite Franco-British Society, where he spoke beside former MI5 head Eliza Manningham-Buller, notes he was at that time “providing political and media support to opposition political and military groups fighting the regime.”

The disclosure of Khan’s role in managing brutal armed gangs makes his simultaneous work on Amnesty’s Syria initiatives a scandalous conflict of interest – and another blight on the internationally esteemed human rights group.

More shockingly still, in a file outlining InCoStrat’s “experience of managing communications influence campaigns,” developing Amnesty International’s “media and communication strategy for Syria” is cited prominently in a numbered list of “supporting evidence” for the company’s prowess in the field.

“Lots to plot” between regime change operative Khan and Amnesty’s Benedict

In August 2020, Amnesty’s official Twitter account promoted an Amazon Watch webinar featuring Roger Waters among others, intended to raise awareness both of Chevron’s pollution of an indigenous region of Ecuador, and the energy giant’s ruthless persecution of crusading environmental lawyer Steven Donzinger.

However, the endorsement was deleted within hours without warning or explanation, despite its sharing having been coordinated directly with Waters himself.

As The Grayzone’s Max Blumenthal revealed two months later, this retraction was orchestrated by Kristyan Benedict, Amnesty’s Syria campaign manager, due to the famed musician’s criticism of the White Helmets, and publicly declared skepticism over the alleged April 2018 Douma chemical weapons attack.

By that point, Benedict had established himself as a central figure among the online Syria regime change echo chamber, calling for sanctions to be imposed on Damascus – which came to pass in 2020, depriving citizens of food and crucial medical supplies in the process – and sponsoring a 2016 demonstration in London demanding NATO forces impose a ‘No Fly Zone’ over the country, a move which Hillary Clinton admitted would “kill a lot of Syrians.” It was not always this way though.

Back in August 2012, when Whitehall announced it was sending lethal aid to the opposition, Benedict demanded officials “be crystal clear with the commanders of Syria’s armed opposition that they have a duty to prevent war crimes.” He reiterated this point several times, telling The Daily Telegraph armed actors were subject to the Geneva Conventions and thus guilty of war crimes, while lashing out at the “gross hypocrisy” of those who cheered the FSA’s unconscionable violence despite claiming to support human rights.

All such concerns evaporated around May 2013, when the aggressive push for Western intervention against Damascus was beginning to escalate. That month, Benedict took to Twitter to denigrate former British lawmaker George Galloway as “cartoonish” for suggesting London was financing “cannibals” in Syria.

The insult arrived shortly after footage emerged of an FSA brigade commander cutting out and eating the heart of a government soldier. Coincidentally, Benedict tagged his pal, Amil Khan, in that post. It was the first public evidence of their connection.

In January 2015, Benedict shared a “thoughtful” article written by Khan in the wake of the Charlie Hebdo massacres in Paris, to which the latter responded that Al Qaeda strategy would be part of his “next training curriculum.” His interest clearly piqued, Benedict commented, “we should get on that” as he was “planning out 2015 training dates now,” inviting his pal to email him an outline so “we can take [this] forward.”

@KreaseChan #AlQaeda strategy is gonna be in my next training curriculum

— Amil Khan (@Londonstani) January 17, 2015

At this time, Douma was occupied by Jaish al-Islam, a Saudi Arabia-backed jihadist group responsible for multiple monstrous crimes against humanity, including kidnapping, imprisoning, torturing and executing innocent civilians – including children – for even mild infringements of strict Sharia code, attacking Kurdish enclaves with chemical weapons, and parading caged Alawite families in the streets of areas before placing them in public squares in a bid to deter airstrikes.

These heinous practices were criticized by some Western rights groups, including the pro-rebel Syrian Observatory for Human Rights – but Amnesty never once issued any condemnation. The organization’s silence is rendered all the more suspect given that throughout 2015, Benedict tweeted extensively about Douma, although his exclusive focus was on the impact of the Syrian government’s blockade of the city, rather than horrors inflicted on the local population by Jaish al-Islam.

In fact, in November 2015, Benedict slammed Syrian government forces for continuing to bomb the city, “despite the use of human shields,” seemingly justifying this barbaric strategy – or at least letting its perpetrators off the hook and then some. At this precise time too, InCoStrat was producing slick propaganda videos for Jaish al-Islam, designed to portray the brutal militia as a unified, well-equipped, fearsome professional fighting force.

It is unclear if Benedict was aware that his friend and colleague was concurrently engaged in such propaganda activities. In November 2015, however, the Amnesty staffer journeyed to Boston, Massachusetts to “[develop] strategies with Syrian nonviolence activists,” declaring it “an insult to say all those against Assad are ‘extremists’.” Khan was there as well – presumably training attendees in the art of communicating with the media.

Evidently, the information warrior’s expertise in the field is greatly valued by Benedict, and his employer. In September the next year, he again reached out to Khan, who’d briefly returned to London from the Middle East, suggesting they urgently “try and grab a coffee,” as there was “lots to plot for 2017.”

Ignore professionals, listen to spooks

On August 21st 2013, two opposition-controlled areas in Ghouta, the suburban area surrounding Damascus, were allegedly struck by rockets fired by government forces containing the chemical agent sarin. Estimates of the death toll vary wildly, from at least 281 to over 1,700 – and questions about whether the entire incident was a fabricated false flag, designed to precipitate Western military intervention, abound to this day.

Numerous Western intelligence officials openly acknowledged that the case against the Syrian government was far from a “slam dunk.” Communications intercepted by German spies suggested the Syrian president did not order or have any knowledge of the attack, while subsequent articles by investigative journalist Seymour Hersh framed the incident as a covert action carried out by al-Nusra, designed to push Washington “over the red line.”

However, Amnesty rejected any critical detachment and instantly amplified the narrative of regime change-hungry Western governments.

Within mere hours of the purported strike, Amnesty issued a strident press release demanding the UN be granted full access to the supposed crime scenes and its Security Council “refer the situation to the International Criminal Court.” It further declared the attacks to be war crimes if proven, and indicated it was “in contact with individuals and organizations in Syria to try and gather further information about the current medical condition of people in the area.”

It would be entirely unsurprising if Khan was involved in connecting Amnesty with those “individuals and organizations.”

A leaked file names him as one of the key managers of the media office of the Syrian National Coalition, a parallel puppet government controlled by London’s assorted intelligence cutouts, while another refers to the Coalition specifically receiving “media handling advice” around the Ghouta incident. Benedict has frequently shared statements issued by the body over the years, which his friend likely wrote.

Amil Khan went on to publicly admit to “working with the Syrian opposition” at the same time, as well as during the alleged April 2017 Khan Sheikhoun poison gas attack – another curious incident which bore clear hallmarks of staging and justified another US-led missile attack on Syria.

The latest chemical weapons drama prompted an even more robust response from Amnesty, with the group openly asserting that “evidence [points] to an air-launched chemical attack” by the Syrian government. Amnesty’s US director, Margaret Huang, went as far as writing an op-ed calling for “immediate action” against Damascus. Her piece was published in the esteemed foreign journal Teen Vogue.

Immediate action did swiftly arrive in the form of 59 cruise missiles launched by Washington at the country. Amnesty’s Secretary General criticized the move, although in the most mealy-mouthed language possible, declaring “it’s one thing to have some airstrikes by the US on a one-off basis, but it’s not going to address this problem.”

Fiery condemnation and widespread uncritical coverage of alleged Syrian government atrocities by ostensibly unimpeachable rights groups such as Amnesty has consistently been fundamental to directly and indirectly bolstering the West’s protracted dirty war against Damascus, framing the horrendous saga as a humanitarian effort. And shady deep state actors such as Khan have deliberately over many years exploited the organization for this precise purpose.

In the case of Ghouta, Khan’s then-employer ARK – yet another UK intelligence cutout – was clearly planning for all out war to erupt in the aftermath. A leaked document shows that the company “accelerated” its production of personal safety booklets to schoolchildren at that time, “to ensure that the message had been disseminated before any international intervention.”

Following the April 2018 Douma false flag, Amnesty published a blog on how the organization has increasingly relied on “open source information” such as “videos and photographs posted on the internet or shared on social messaging networks…to support our research and campaigning,” and was constantly “[working] as hard as we can” to get first-hand interviews from victims and eyewitnesses the ground.

Dependence on dubious anti-regime activists and Western-funded groups in official investigations is a growing trend across international institutions focused on conflict – including major intergovernmental bodies like the Organization for the Prevention of Chemical Weapons (OPCW).

None other than Amil Khan unwittingly exposed the ominous rationale for this push following Douma. Noting the OPCW would not assign responsibility for chemical weapons attacks to “a specific country,” those seeking a “better and quicker idea of who is to blame” should consult the work of the NATO-backed “open source” journalism cartel known as Bellingcat. In other words, the media should dismiss academics, experts, and official verification mechanisms, and instead rely on laptop jockeys fiddling with Google Earth images.

As a longtime Bellingcat advocate, Kristyan Benedict has repeatedly amplified character attacks on OPCW inspectors who have leaked internal documents and made public statements attesting to how the Douma incident was staged. In doing so, Benedict reinforced the disturbing narrative that credentialed professionals should be ignored if their findings and perspectives contradict official narratives, and that testimony and evidence supplied by anti-government elements trained and funded by Western intelligence should be accepted instead.

For its part, Amnesty International seems to have consolidated its support for Western-backed regime change operations. The website of Amil Khan’s Valent Projects reveals his company “trained activists facing brutal authoritarian regimes [to] be more effective on social media” on its behalf. There are, to say the least, no prizes for guessing where in the world these “activists” are situated.

It can only be considered an indictment of Amnesty’s integrity, objectivity and credibility that it maintained such a close relationship with Khan, a professional propagandist who contracted with the British state, while he whitewashed the image of armed actors guilty of the very crimes Amnesty was supposed to expose.

Amnesty and Amil Khan have refused to issue any comment on questions submitted by The Grayzone. Perhaps no amount of spin can explain away the scandalous conflict of interest in which they were engaged.

thegrayzone.com

By Giorgio CAFIERO

Marking a major boost to Sino-Syrian relations, on 12 January, Syria joined the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), China’s ambitious infrastructure development strategy stretching from East Asia to Europe.

For analysts with an eye on Syria, the development was expected. In November 2021, President Bashar al-Assad discussed his country gaining membership in the BRI with his counterpart in Beijing, Xi Jinping, following high-level meetings between officials of both states in previous months.

The move will likely help Syria deepen its cooperative and economic ties to other countries in the BRI, and enable it to circumvent the effects of harsh US sanctions on the country.

China clearly seeks to bolster the government in Damascus. Over the past decade, and for various reasons enumerated here on The Cradle, conflict-ridden Syria has been a country of increasing interest to Beijing.

Economy and the long game

China’s BRI agenda has been one main point of mutual interest: As Beijing sees it, Syria represents a corridor to the Mediterranean Sea which bypasses the Suez Canal and revives ancient trade routes connecting China to the African and European continents.

The incorporation of coastal Tartus and the capital city of Damascus into the BRI could boost Beijing’s economic footing in the Levant and Mediterranean.

Although nearly 11 years of warfare in Syria have prevented the Chinese from leveraging the Arab state’s geostrategic location to advance Beijing’s BRI, China’s leadership has carefully focused on playing the long game.

Now, in the post-conflict era, with Syria in need of massive reconstruction and infrastructure projects, China’s BRI has been brought into play.

Ancient links and modern opportunities

As a BRI member, Syria will look to further integrate itself economically into West Asia. In desperate need of foreign investment for the process of redevelopment, the Syrian leadership views China as a key investor and partner to rebuild the war-ravaged nation.

Importantly, during this period, China’s good will has grown among Syrians, in large part because of Beijing’s bold initiatives to thwart direct western military intervention at the UN Security Council and other institutions.

It is safe to assume that China will, at least eventually, be able to leverage its popularity among Syrians to take advantage of new economic opportunities in the country’s post-conflict future.

At the ceremony of Syria’s admission into the BRI, held this month in Damascus, Fadi Khalil, who heads Syria’s Planning and International Cooperation Commission, hailed the initiative. He invoked the historic roles of Aleppo and Palmyra in the ancient Silk Road and spoke about the potential for future Sino-Syrian relations within the framework of greater bilateral and multilateral cooperation.

Khalil and Feng Biao, Beijing’s ambassador to Syria, signed a Memorandum of Understanding on Syria’s admission into this Chinese initiative, which other Middle Eastern countries, including Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey, have previously joined at different levels of commitment.

Other recent developments underscore the extent to which Syria and China are deepening their ties. At the start of this year, Beijing aided Syria by sending over more than a million COVID-19 vaccine doses, according to Syrian state-owned media.

Despite the many ways in which Syria sees itself benefitting from membership in the BRI, the West Asian framework for this project will be no bed of roses.

A geographic wrench in the works

For Beijing, it is important that Iraq establish a long-term BRI corridor to both Syria and Jordan. While the BRI route between Iran and Syria – that traverses Iraq – has yet to be agreed upon with Baghdad, the Chinese must have many valid concerns about the security risks of doing business in Syria and Iraq.

China recognizes that “Iraq continues to top the list of high-risk investment destinations” in this grandiose project. Obviously, the same can be said about Syria where ISIS and other extremist militants continue to wage acts of terrorism, notably on the country’s borders with Iraq and Turkey.

With serious issues stemming from terrorism, social unrest, economic woes, and violent political instability, Iraq and Syria are two countries plagued by countless security uncertainties.

Although Chinese firms tend to accept higher levels of security risks than western companies, securing the BRI in Syria’s volatile neighborhood will prove no easy task for Beijing and its West Asian trade partners.

A far more stable and secure BRI economic corridor to Europe would be via northern Iran – a route already secured – then extending directly from Iran into Turkey. Yet the ice-cold state of Ankara-Damascus relations, China’s view of Turkey as an uneasy BRI partner, and NATO pressures on Ankara to avoid Beijing and Tehran, all contribute to practical challenges that will not be easy for the BRI’s financiers to quickly overcome.

But the Sino-Syrian deal this week shows that China is moving forward with its West Asian framework, despite these obstacles. One wonders whether Beijing has reason to believe Iraq’s acquiescence to the BRI is already in the bag. There is little point of developing the Syrian part of the project, without the Iraqi bridge necessary to secure Iran’s connectivity to Syria.

Washington’s reconstruction obstacle: The Caesar Act

On 17 July, 2020, the US began implementing the most sweeping sanctions which Washington has ever imposed on Syria.

Formally known as the Caesar Syria Civilian Protection Act of 2019 (or Caesar Act), the Biden administration continues to target Syria with Trump-era sanctions which pursue entities or individuals worldwide – including third-party actors – conducting business with government-dominated bodies of the Syrian economy, such as gas, oil, construction, engineering, and banking.

When China’s Foreign Minister Wang Yi visited Damascus in July 2021, he met with Assad and other high-ranking Syrian government figures.

That visit by Beijing’s top diplomat was an early indication of China’s seriousness about strengthening ties with Syria, despite Washington’s continued imposition of wide-ranging sanctions on the state.

During his visit to Syria, Wang emphasized his government’s staunch opposition to the foreign-backed ‘regime change’ agenda targeting the Assad government. Beijing frames its pro-Assad stance within the context of supporting Syria’s sovereignty as an independent nation-state.

Throughout the past 11 years of warfare in Syria, China has maintained four core beliefs on the conflict: First, that the Syrian people need to reach a political solution; second, that a political transition in Syria is necessary; third, that top priorities include nation-wide reconciliation and unity; and fourth, that the international community has an obligation to help Syria.

The BRI, while initiated and heavily financed by the Chinese, is ultimately a multinational project involving dozens of countries, many of them US-allied, and interconnected with Syria via history, religion, culture, and economy – past and present.

A project this global is unlikely to come to a grinding halt because of a domestic US government ruling on trade formulated thousands of miles away from the activity.

Fighting terrorism in Syria and China

Another issue that has driven the Beijing-Damascus joint agenda in recent years is China’s ‘securitization campaign’ or ‘pacification drive’ in Xinjiang.

Assad’s government has publically condemned western efforts to use the plight of Uighurs for the purpose of creating a wedge between China and Muslim-majority countries.

Syria, like most Arab-Islamic countries, has defended Beijing in the face of the US and other western governments which allege that Chinese authorities are guilty of waging ‘genocide’ in Xinjiang, where about 12 million Uighurs, mostly Muslim, reside.

Mindful of the fact that Uighur jihadists came from Xinjiang to Syria to fight the Syrian government in the ranks of Islamic State and other violent extremist groups, Damascus and Beijing see themselves as having common cause in a struggle against terrorism and extremism.

In 2017, Syria’s ambassador to Beijing said that roughly 5,000 terrorists from Xinjiang were transported, mostly via Turkey, to Syria during the conflict. Chinese authorities have voiced serious concerns about the now battle-hardened and indoctrinated extremists potentially returning to China to carry out acts of terrorism.

Likewise, Beijing rejects the view of western governments that Assad is guilty of serious crimes. China’s leadership believes that the Syrian government deserves praise for its fight against forces which sought to overthrow Assad and his government.

When Wang was in Syria last summer, he said that “the Syrian government’s leading role in fighting terrorism on its soil should be respected, schemes of provoking ethnic divisions under the pretense of countering terrorism should be opposed, and Syria’s sacrifice and contribution to the anti-terror fight should be acknowledged.”

The future of the Sino-Syrian relationship

Currently in the US there is strong support from both sides of Washington’s political aisle for stringent Trump-era US sanctions on Damascus. In fact, this year, Biden’s administration has come under bipartisan pressure to intensify the US government’s enforcement of the Caesar Act.

Given the existing polarization and hostility in West Asian geopolitics, it is difficult to imagine Washington lifting the Caesar Act in the foreseeable future. Ultimately, this means that the US will probably continue to target Syria’s economy with crippling sanctions.

Within this context, Damascus has all the reason in the world to pursue strategies that can help it minimize the harm caused by Washington’s financial warfare.

“China can play an important role in weakening the impact of the Caesar sanctions,” said Dr. Joshua Landis, head of the Middle East department at the University of Oklahoma, in an interview last year with The Cradle.

“In Iran, China has done this,” Landis explained. “Iran’s oil exports, which were devastated by sanctions, have begun to grow again, largely because China is purchasing Iranian oil again. China is the workshop of the world so it can supply most of the goods that Syria needs. China is also strong enough to thumb its nose at US sanctions. As the US increasingly forbids US companies from dealing with Chinese firms, China has greater incentive to punish the US by breaking sanctions on countries like Iran and Syria.”

Now that Syria has joined the BRI, it is safe to conclude that the Chinese will play an increasingly important role in terms of Syria’s strategies for withstanding sanctions imposed by the US.

The odds are good that, as time passes, China and Syria’s geopolitical and geo-economic value to each other will only expand.

thecradle.co

The United States is planning to redouble its weapons supply to Ukraine. What is shaping up is an intensified proxy war against Russia in which the Russophobic Kiev regime acts as Washington’s catspaw. The objective is to debilitate Russia in the same way the U.S. sapped the Soviet Union with a quagmire war in Afghanistan during the 1980s.

U.S. media reports cite Pentagon and Ukrainian officials saying that the Biden administration is considering a massive increase in armaments to the Kiev regime. This is on top of the $2.5 billion in military support that Washington has already given over the past eight years. The Biden administration has overseen $450 million in weaponry to Ukraine this year alone with a further $300 million budgeted for the coming 12 months. A separate proposal going through the Senate is seeking to boost military support for next year by another $450 million.

What gives added significance to this weapons pipeline is where they are being sourced. U.S. media reports say the arms are from inventories the Pentagon had allocated for the American-backed army in Afghanistan before it collapsed with the sudden Taliban victory in August. The weapons include Black Hawk helicopters and anti-armor munitions.

Other weapons under consideration for supply to Ukraine include more Javelin anti-tank missiles as well as Stinger anti-aircraft munitions.

In addition to the inventories previously allocated for Afghanistan, the U.S. is also planning weapons supplies from covert stockpiles overseen by the CIA in Romania and Bulgaria. This is the dark supply route that the U.S. and NATO allies used for arming terrorist proxies in a failed bid to overthrow the Syrian government. Russia’s military intervention in Syria in late 2015 defeated Washington’s regime-change objective in Damascus.

The year before, in 2014, the U.S. and its allies succeeded in their regime-change operation in Ukraine when an elected government friendly with Moscow was overthrown by a CIA-backed coup d’état. That coup brought to power a Neo-Nazi Russophobic regime that has been waging a civil war against the ethnic Russian population of southeast Ukraine. U.S. and NATO weapons supplies have motivated the Kiev regime to persist in hostilities despite a formal peace agreement known as the Minsk accord signed in 2015. France and Germany, supposed guarantors of the accord along with Russia, have both turned a blind eye to Kiev’s systematic violations.

Since the Biden administration took office 11 months ago, the Kiev regime has stepped up its provocations in southeast Ukraine. These provocations are ultimately aimed at destabilizing Russia. As well as weaponry, American and other NATO special forces are on the ground in Ukraine acting as “military advisors”. The accelerator for aggression has been stepped on in recent weeks.

The Kremlin has warned that the Ukrainian forces are ratcheting up hostilities towards the southeastern region that borders Russia. Russian President Vladimir Putin has recently said that the siege on the region also known as Donbass resembles a genocide.

The stark fact is that there is already a proxy war going on in Ukraine against Russia. Arguably, that has been the U.S. objective since the coup in Kiev in February 2014. The current escalation of violence by the Kiev regime with U.S. and NATO support means that there is a directive from Washington for widening the war.

Paradoxically, or perhaps more accurately, cynically, the U.S. and its NATO allies are boldly inverting reality with a torrent of claims that they are “defending” Ukraine from “Russian aggression”. Recent weeks have seen a full-court media propaganda campaign to shift the blame on an alleged Russian force build-up. Moscow has vehemently denied it has plans to invade Ukraine. It points out that satellite imagery cited by the U.S. and its allies for claiming a Russian build-up actually shows forces in established bases hundreds of kilometers from the border with Ukraine.

Taking stock of the situation: Ukrainian forces are stepping up aggression against the Russian-speaking population under siege for nearly eight years in the Donbass region. The U.S., NATO and European Union are complicit in this criminal aggression by weaponizing, training and apologizing for the Kiev regime with spurious allegations against Russia. Furthermore, there is an unprecedented build-up of U.S. and NATO forces in the Black Sea region conducting unscheduled war drills on Russia’s border. That is inescapably acting to embolden the unhinged Kiev regime, even more, to take the war to Russia.

Moscow is earnestly warning Washington and its NATO partners of red lines. Russia has called for a formal agreement to prohibit NATO expansion for Ukraine’s membership of the military bloc as well as installation of American weapons systems on Ukrainian territory.

Washington and its NATO partners appear complacent to a degree that suggests criminal complicity in fanning the tensions.

The Biden White House has already signaled that it will not reciprocate with Russia’s request for these security guarantees. Even if Washington somehow manages to muster the political will to appear to give Moscow some security reassurances, the fact remains that the U.S. and its NATO allies are already deeply involved in waging a proxy war in Ukraine against Russia.

Plans for redoubling weapons flow to Ukraine from inventories allocated for Afghanistan and from covert CIA-run networks in Eastern Europe indicate the proxy war is set for a deliberate escalation.

Senior U.S. lawmakers have intimated that the preferred scenario for Washington is to create a quagmire for Russia similar to the trap set for the Soviet Union in Afghanistan during the 1980s. That proxy war in which the U.S. armed Mujahideen militants with Stinger missiles greatly sapped the Soviet Union leading to its demise. Those militants later evolved into Al Qaeda networks that were used in the failed U.S.-backed regime-change operation in Syria over the past decade.

The Russophobic Kiev regime is being driven to escalate its terror war against the Russian people in Donbas. The objective is to draw Russia into that war to defend people with whom it is culturally connected. The moral imperative on Moscow to act would be huge. Washington is calculating that the move turns into a quagmire that will debilitate Russia and tarnish its international standing.

But this nefarious plan – an Afghanistan-Syria redux – could so easily slide over the abyss into a full war between the United States and Russia. Moscow seems to be more cognizant of that possible disaster than Washington which is afflicted with the insouciance of arrogance.

By Yeghia TASHJIAN

Under Russian President Vladimir Putin and Turkish President Recep Tayyib Erdogan, foreign policymaking in both countries has become a highly personalized and centralized affair.

Given the weakness of institutional agency in current Russian-Turkish relations, it is not clear in which direction these relations would veer in a post-Putin/Erdogan era. Although there are some strategic consistencies, this is still a relationship that is being shaped by events in the field.

The near-term goal for both leaders is a simple one: to uphold a manageable relationship despite many crises and challenges.

According to Arif Asalioglu, General Director of the International Institute of the Development of Science Cooperation (MIRNAS), Russia and Turkey have developed a ‘creative cooperation’ model, where they constructively compartmentalize their relations so as not to allow challenges to obstruct their mutual gains.

In other words, “things that go wrong in one region would not adversely affect good relationships in the other compartment where the relationships are successfully occurring,” explains Asalioglu. It’s a model that has worked, so far.

However, a major issue in this relationship is the thin line between its asymmetric and hierarchical nature, where for now, Ankara geopolitically and economically (mainly energy security) is dependent on Moscow.

At the moment, Russia and Turkey view one another as indispensable partners in managing conflicts in Eurasia. They are able to maximize shared interests while keeping conflicts in check. Despite the mutually beneficial nature of this relation, the future may bring disruptive change as any change of leadership in either country would bring a high degree of uncertainty into the bilateral relations.

To explain this ‘cooperative rivalry,’ one needs only to look at Libya, Syria, and Nagorno-Karabakh where the ‘frenemies’ have been able to manage their conflicts.

Libya: From conflict to ceasefire

Turkey and Russia supported opposite sides in the Libyan conflict. Ankara supported the Tripoli-based Government of National Accord (GNA), while Russia, alongside France, the UAE, and Egypt supported the Libyan National Army (LNA) led by Field Marshal Khalifa Haftar. Turkey viewed the Libyan conflict as part of a broader power play and geopolitical rivalry in the eastern Mediterranean.

In April 2019, Haftar launched an offensive to capture Tripoli and topple the GNA. Ankara, fearing it may lose Tripoli and its interests in the eastern Mediterranean, directly intervened in the conflict and deployed its Bayraktar TB2 drones against the Russian defense structures. As Turkey stepped in, the balance of power on the ground shifted in its favor. Moscow, fearing Haftar’s complete defeat, staged a diplomatic intervention with Turkey and agreed on a ceasefire agreement between the GNA and LNA, which has held to date.

However, the outcome of Libya’s 24 December presidential elections will determine the country’s direction and whether Turkey and Russia will continue cooperating or clashing in Libya.

Conflict management in Syria

Syria is central to the current shaping of Turkish-Russian relations. The Syrian case is unique as it is a model of partnership and conflict management in which the interests of both countries compete.

With the 2015 Russian direct military intervention in Syria on behalf of President Bashar al-Assad, the military tide on the ground changed in favor of the state. In December 2019, the Syrian army and its local, regional, and international allies launched the northwestern offensive to retake Idlib. This operation was only partially successful as the Turkish side once again deployed its Bayraktar TB2 drones.

In late February 2020, after intermittent deadly clashes between Turkish and Syrian forces, Ankara formally intervened in the offensive and announced the beginning of Operation Spring Shield, intended to push Syrian government forces back to pre-offensive frontlines.

To halt further Syrian losses and prevent Turkish advancement, on 6 March 2020, Moscow brokered a ceasefire with Ankara. The ceasefire called for joint Turkish–Russian patrols along the strategic Syrian M4 highway. However, this didn’t prevent the Russian side from bombing the pro-Turkey militias around the Turkish-occupied zones.

In time, the Syrian crisis became a model for the two states to both cooperate and confront their main opponents. For now, Turkey has attained some of its major goals, particularly vis-à-vis the Syrian Kurds, and Russia has emerged as the primary power broker in Syria.

This cooperative rivalry helped both sides to achieve some of their objectives. Viewed from Moscow, Turkey’s participation in the Russian-led diplomatic and military initiatives in Syria has lifted some of the diplomatic burdens and military costs of the Syrian war from Moscow’s shoulders. But the main question now is to what extent the status of Idlib will be frozen, while both Moscow and Ankara work to expel Americans from their occupation of northeastern Syria.

Nagorno-Karabakh: Provoking Russia in its backyard

While both countries ‘understand’ each other in Libya and Syria, Turkey’s aspiration to play a greater role in the South Caucasus has really put this relationship to test. With the outbreak of the Nagorno-Karabakh war, Turkey saw a historic opportunity to exert its influence in Russia’s backyard and recalibrate that relationship in Ankara’s favor. To challenge Russia, Turkey actively provided military and diplomatic support for Azerbaijan in its war against Armenians in Nagorno-Karabakh.

Turkey’s direct military support in the war caught many parties off guard. Not only did Ankara deploy its Bayraktar TB2 drones, but also its F-16 warplanes stationed in Ganja, while transferring hundreds of Syrian mercenaries to fight alongside the Azerbaijani army. These two factors were a threat to Russia’s national security in the region.

On a diplomatic level, Turkey tried to launch an ‘Astana-style’ diplomatic track to gain primacy over the OSCE Minsk Group whose aim was to encourage a peaceful, negotiated resolution to the conflict between Azerbaijan and Armenia. This process was welcomed by Ankara’s allies in Baku, who were dismayed by the failings of the traditional diplomatic track advanced by the OSCE.

Understandably, an ascendent Russia – well beyond its post-Soviet slump – was not interested in opening up a bilateral track giving Turkey equal status in managing a conflict in Russia’s own backyard. An Astana-style scenario would have legitimized Turkey’s intervention and presence in that geographic area. Instead, Moscow stepped into the fray as ‘big brother,’ and threw its weight into brokering a ceasefire on its own terms.

For Turkey, the outcome of the war was not satisfactory. Ankara had sought a complete Azerbaijani victory, pushing Russia out of the area by instigating enmity between Yerevan and Moscow – or at least deploying Turkish ‘peacekeepers’ in Nagorno-Karabakh alongside Russian forces.

Turkey did leave its mark, though. Despite Moscow’s annoyance with Turkish intervention in its traditional sphere of influence and the breach of some Russian ‘red lines,’ Moscow has had to recognize Turkey as a junior player in the region. This doesn’t mean, however, that it will easily share parity in the post-conflict regional order.

In short, the Russian-Turkish relationship in South Caucasus has been hierarchical. The one mutual gain was to sideline western influence, especially American and French (co-chairs of the OSCE Minsk Group alongside Russia) clout, from the region’s diplomatic process.

It is worth noting that the future of Turkish-Russian relations is impacted by Moscow’s relations with the west: the more tense those ties, the more Moscow will need Ankara to contain western influence. This dynamic may be boosting Turkey’s regional status, but it also increases its dependency on Russia.

Where lies the future?

Despite the growing areas of cooperation and conflict management between the Russians and Turks, whenever a disagreement has emerged, Moscow has been able to successfully secure its interests and roll back Turkey.

While many, particularly western, observers mistakenly highlight the two states’ increasing areas of cooperation and diplomacy as signs of a foreign policy realignment by Ankara, Russian-Turkish relations are actually more accurately characterized by mistrust and geopolitical rivalries.

What makes this relationship unique is that the two have tried to minimize western influence in their regions, and that Putin has found in Erdogan an opportunistic but pragmatic absolute authority who can quickly adapt to developments in the field.

For now, this asymmetrical relationship gives Russia a clear advantage, even in their commercial relations: While Turkey exports vegetables, textiles, and other replaceable goods to Russia, Moscow provides Ankara with natural gas, oil, nuclear reactors, military equipment, and millions of tourists. In the event of a breakdown in relations, Turkey is far more easily replaced by Russia than the other way around.

Moscow has used its energy policy to win leverage over Turkey. In December 2014, six months after the start of the war in eastern Ukraine, Russia announced its new Turkstream pipeline deal to deliver gas from Russia to the Balkans through Turkey, bypassing the pre-existing pipelines that flowed through Ukraine, Belarus, and Poland to Central Europe. The pipeline gave Turkey and Russia greater influence over Europe.

But Turkey then took steps to diversify its energy resources. During the first half of 2020, Turkey’s natural gas imports to Russia declined by 41.5 percent, compared to the same period in 2019. In contrast, Azerbaijan’s gas exports to Turkey increased by 23.4 percent during the same period. Azerbaijan now occupies the largest share of Turkey’s natural gas market.

This provides Turkey with a better negotiating position on gas pricing than before. It also means that Turkey’s reduction of dependency on Russia could have implications for the future of Russian-Turkish relations.

For this reason, Russia is trying its best to increase its influence on Turkey and bring Ankara closer into its orbit. Russia’s sale of the S-400 missile system and Russian talks with Turkey to design its fifth-generation fighter jets should be viewed within this context. From Moscow’s perspective, these arms sales would deepen splits between Turkey and its NATO allies and weaken the internal cohesion of the alliance. For Moscow, these trades increase Turkish dependency and provide Russia with additional leverage.

In sum, the Turkish-Russian relations, both economically and geopolitically are asymmetric in favor of Moscow. Conscious of this imbalance, Ankara is trying to reduce its dependency on Moscow and challenge it carefully where opportunities arise.

As Russia wants to maintain the political status quo in the region and prevent Ankara from taking any revisionist actions, the interest of both countries may clash again.

However, unlike in 2015 after a Turkish missile downed a Russian jet over Syrian skies, a future confrontation between both states may not take a direct form, but rather an indirect one and in the form of proxy wars, as both sides have ample experience in containing such conflicts.

thecradle.co

The New York Times has published a very solid investigative report on a US military coverup of a 2019 massacre in Baghuz, Syria which killed scores of civilians. This would be the second investigative report on civilian-slaughtering US airstrikes by The New York Times in a matter of weeks, and if I were a more conspiracy-minded person I’d say the paper of record appears to have been infiltrated by journalists.

The report contains many significant revelations, including that the US military has been grossly undercounting the numbers of civilians killed in its airstrikes and lying about it to Congress, that special ops forces in Syria have been consistently ordering airstrikes which kill noncombatants with no accountability by exploiting loopholes to get around rules meant to protect civilians, that units which call in such airstrikes are allowed to do their own assessments grading whether the strikes were justified, that the US war machine attempted to obstruct scrutiny of the massacre “at nearly every step” of the way, and that the Air Force’s Office of Special Investigations only investigates such incidents when there is “potential for high media attention, concern with outcry from local community/government, concern sensitive images may get out.”

“But at nearly every step, the military made moves that concealed the catastrophic strike,” The New York Times reports. “The death toll was downplayed. Reports were delayed, sanitized and classified. United States-led coalition forces bulldozed the blast site. And top leaders were not notified.”

Journalist Aaron Maté has called the incident “one of the US military’s worst massacres and cover-up scandals since My Lai in Vietnam.”

NYT revealed that the US bombed 70 Syrian civilians & covered it up. The Baghuz massacre likely only came to light because of whistleblowers, Pentagon investigator Gene Tate & Air Force lawyer Lt. Col. Dean Korsak, who challenged the cover-up from within. https://t.co/jKDOkOtXyR

— Aaron Maté (@aaronjmate) November 14, 2021

Asked by The Times for a statement, Central Command gave the laughable justification that maybe those dozens of women and children killed in repeated bomb blasts were actually armed enemy combatants:

“This week, after The New York Times sent its findings to U.S. Central Command, which oversaw the air war in Syria, the command acknowledged the strikes for the first time, saying 80 people were killed but the airstrikes were justified. It said the bombs killed 16 fighters and four civilians. As for the other 60 people killed, the statement said it was not clear that they were civilians, in part because women and children in the Islamic State sometimes took up arms.”

I mean, how do you even address a defense like that? How do you get around the “Maybe those babies were ISIS fighters” defense?

Reading the report it becomes apparent how much inertia was thrown on attempts to bring the massacre to light and how easy it would have been for those attempts to succumb to the pressure and just give up, which naturally leads one to wonder how many other such incidents never see the light of day because attempts to expose them are successfully ground to a halt. The Times says the Baghuz massacre “would rank third on the military’s worst civilian casualty events in Syria if 64 civilian deaths were acknowledged,” but it’s clear that that “acknowledged” bit is doing a lot of heavy lifting there.

And it really makes you appreciate how much work goes into getting information like this in front of the public eye, and how important it is to do so, and how tenuous the ability to do so currently is.

WTF????

“An American F-15E attack jet dropped a 500-pound bomb on the crowd [of women and children], swallowing it in a shuddering blast. Then a jet tracking them dropped one 2,000-pound bomb, then another, killing most of the survivors.”#WarCrimes https://t.co/2PLLkjvrFz

— Peter Daou (@peterdaou) November 14, 2021

Julian Assange currently sits in Belmarsh Prison waiting to find out if British judges will overturn a lower court’s ruling against his extradition to the United States to be prosecuted under the Espionage Act for journalistic activity which exposed US war crimes. War crimes not unlike those that were just exposed by The New York Times in its reporting on the Baghuz massacre.

The precedent the US government is trying to set with its persecution of Julian Assange will, if successful, cast a chilling effect over journalism which scrutinizes the US war machine, not just in the United States but around the world. If it can succeed in legally establishing that it can extradite an Australian journalist for publishing information in the public interest about US war crimes, it will have succeeded in legally establishing that it can do that to any journalist anywhere. And you can kiss investigative reporting like this goodbye.

This is what’s at stake in the Assange case. Our right to know what the most deadly elements of the most powerful government on our planet are doing. The fact that the drivers of empire think it is legitimate to deprive us of such information by threatening to imprison anyone who tries to show it to us makes them an enemy of all humanity.

caityjohnstone.medium.com

By Mnar ADLEY

Welcome to MintCast, the official MintPress News podcast featuring dissenting voices the establishment would rather silence. Today MintCast host Mnar Adley is joined by Vanessa Beeley, an independent investigative journalist and war correspondent based in Damascus, Syria.

While the U.S. military occupies a third of Syria — mostly in the northeast, controlling Syria’s vast oil reserves and water supplies — Syria continues to rebuild after nearly a decade of destabilization efforts by the U.S. and its proxies, who have armed rebel groups with the intention of stoking a civil war and toppling President Bashar al-Assad.

Today, the city of Daraa, which has been referred to as the cradle of the Syrian revolution, has been liberated by the Syrian Army. But, as MintPress reported nearly a decade ago, Daraa was the touchpaper lit by hardline Libyan mercenaries imported into Syria prior to 2011. These mercenaries were trained by the CIA and MI6, alongside Saudi intelligence, to hijack a small movement for economic reforms and turn it into an armed rebellion to fulfill foreign interests in the region.

In this segment of MintCast, Beeley joins us to help get us up to speed with the war that was once the focus of mainstream coverage pushing a humanitarian interventionist narrative.

mintpressnews.com

Aweek ago, US troops camped out in the small, dusty Syrian outpost of al-Tanf suddenly found themselves under a “deliberate and coordinated attack“, as multiple explosive-laden drones barreled toward their positions. According to US officials who spoke to the AP on background, Iran “resourced and encouraged” the latest drone attack targeting US forces. The five drones were also reportedly Iranian-manufactured, leading to speculation that Tehran is testing the Biden administration at a time when nuclear negotiations between the US and Iran remain in limbo.

Fortunately, US troops managed to defuse the drone attack without suffering any casualties. But the near-miss was still deeply troubling, for it again illustrated the extremely dangerous environment in which nearly 1,000 US forces in Syria are operating.

If the US desperately needed to put troops in harm’s way to protect itself and its core security interests in the Middle East, then perhaps the ongoing mission in Syria could be justified. Syria, however, can hardly be called a core US security interest — doubly so when the Islamic State, the terrorist group Washington sought to vanquish, is now stateless, weak and unable to hold ground anymore.

The October 21 drone attack on US positions in Syria certainly wasn’t the first of its kind — and if Washington insists on keeping troops there, it likely won’t be the last.

The number of rocket launches, drone swarms and miscalculations that have occurred in Syria over the past few years are too numerous to list here. Yet a few have been particularly noteworthy. On June 20, 2017, a US F-15 fighter plane shot down an Iranian-made drone as it approached the al-Tanf garrison located near the Syrian, Iraqi and Jordanian borders. Around two weeks earlier, an American aircraft blasted another drone from the sky after it released a munition near Syrian rebel fighters and their US trainers. In February 2018, in the most serious armed clash involving American troops in Syria to date, an outmanned group of US special operations forces based in Deir-ez-Zor was forced to call in airstrikes against hundreds of armed Russian contractors who were approaching the deconfliction zone (the attack was foiled, with about 300 Russians killed in an hours-long battle).

In August 2020, Russian vehicles patrolling an eastern section of the country sideswiped a lightly-armored US vehicle, injuring four Americans in the process. And this June, after President Biden ordered a limited air strike on Shia militia buildings near the Iraq-Syria border, those very same militias responded by launching more rockets at American facilities in East Syria. That US forces escaped all of these altercations with minimal damage is a miracle.

Foreign policy commentators will spend a significant portion of their time dissecting Iran’s motives. Others, like Senator Marco Rubio, will urge the Biden administration to penalize Tehran for unprovoked, heinous aggression against American servicemembers. As they have done in the past, the most diehard Iran hawks will likely try to exploit the assault in Syria to press for a termination of nuclear talks and a doubling down of maximum pressure — a strategy we can all thank for a more sophisticated Iranian nuclear program and a more bellicose Iranian foreign policy.

Instead of fixating about what Tehran may be up to, foreign policy analysts and opinion shapers should be asking an entirely different question: what on earth is the US still doing in Syria?

This is not a superficial or trick question. From the moment American warplanes struck its first targets in Syria, one goal has driven the entire US military campaign: eliminate ISIS’s so-called territorial caliphate. As President Obama told the American people in a nationally televised address on September 10, 2014, “Our objective is clear: we will degrade, and ultimately destroy, ISIL through a comprehensive and sustained counter-terrorism strategy.” Obama’s successor, Donald Trump, proceeded with the military campaign and in fact escalated it. By July 2017, the last ISIS holdout in the Iraqi city of Mosul was neutralized. Three months later, the group lost the Syrian city of Raqqa, the headquarters of its caliphate. In December 2018, ISIS saw the Euphrates River town of Haijin fall from its grasp. And in 2019, hundreds of ISIS fighters not only surrendered their last patch of territory, but saw their leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, killed in a US special forces raid.

ISIS used to rule a swath of territory as large as the United Kingdom. Today all of this territory is gone, its finances are depleted (although at $25-50 million, ISIS cash reserves are still sizable compared to other terrorist groups) and its freedom of movement is constricted by a litany of more powerful forces who don’t have an interest in letting the organization regenerate. Yes, ISIS continues to conduct terrorist attacks in Syria. But those attacks are largely confined to soft targets, static checkpoints and exposed convoys. Once one of the most predominate non-state actors in the Middle East, ISIS is now one among many.

In short, US troops did their job and fulfilled the mission they were ordered to execute. Which yet again begs the question: why is the US still in Syria? It’s time policymakers in Washington answer honestly and forthrightly rather than leaning on tired cliches about stability.

spectatorworld.com

Ten years after protesters in an obscure Syrian town demonstrated for change, a direct challenge to the rule of President Bashar al-Assad, half a million Syrians dead and a 100,000 missing, finally the West is accepting the legitimacy of the regime and its leader.

It started with the Gulf Arabs, who have decided that Assad is worth more as an ally – both as a useful expert on defying the odds and suppressing an entire uprising but also for his Midas touch with the Russians who GCC leaders might have to turn to one day, if a new Arab Spring sweeps across the Peninsular.

But then inevitably Joe Biden, whose approach to the Middle East is to have as little to do with it as possible in preference for a foreign policy agenda focussing on China, is following through with this initiative to bring Assad in from the cold once and for all. Intense lobbying in recent month by, in particular the UAE and Saudi Arabia in Washington have paid off and we are witnessing the first tentative steps towards a normalisation of relations with the Syrian leader.

You might have missed the signs as they were not seized upon by western media. The lifting of sanctions against a businessman associated with Assad, followed just recently by allowing Syria to facilitate a gas and electricity to Lebanon – from Egypt, via Jordan and Syria – in what has been called “energy diplomacy” – are clear indications that Biden is prepared to cut Assad some slack where there are obvious benefits to U.S. interests in the region.

It would be hard to imagine that two key decisions in the regime’s favour – Interpol allowing Syria arrest warrant rights and for the WHO to give Syria a seat on its executive board – were not given the tacit approval of the Biden administration. Given that Interpol now is obliged to arrest anyone of the thousands of Syrian dissidents living around the world, or that Assad’s Syria today is a country of people starving while billions of dollars of drugs are being manufactured there, the shift is significant.

Pragmatism seems to be kicking in. The West has lost its own proxy war against the Syrian dictator and there is a general feeling now of working more with Assad and cutting our losses. The war is over, except for Idlib province where Russia fights Turkey-backed extremists and perhaps ten years later the general public who vote in western leaders have educated themselves and learnt a few of the nuances of the ten year battle to overthrow Assad, dressed up as a war against terror; these days, there are pockets of online pundits in both America and the UK who understand that Assad’s forces were allies in fact with the West, in their war against Al Qaeda and its affiliates – a nuanced detail regularly over looked or not even understood by MSM in America.

But what could Biden gain by signalling this shift and stopping short of going the full nine yards himself and lifting all sanctions? Or rather, is it more what he won’t lose?

Lebanon’s meltdown, which saw just this week a total blackout of electricity, is part of it. As Iran wasted no time sending fuel to this tiny country which in recent months has undergone massive shortages and long lines at the pumps, Biden does not want to be the U.S. president whose tenure in office is tarnished by letting Lebanon fall into the abyss and become a full-on Iranian colony, to join Syria, Iraq and Yemen as a fully signed up member of the axis of resistance to U.S. hegemony.

Yet it was a perceived threat to America’s hegemony which assisted the Muslim Brotherhood attempted overthrow of Assad in the first place, which is where this all started. Assad himself must be delighted with how history has done a full circle on him. Despite a country with a destroyed economy and people on the brink of starvation, politically perhaps at his lowest point, he has to only look to the future to see where all this is heading. In recent days, King Abdullah of Jordan made some headlines for having a secret overseas stash of a mere hundred million dollars (small change compared to his Gulf neighbours). He also telephoned President Assad, a man who he had defamed quite spectacularly before and wooed him, talking of the “brotherly” countries and signalling to the Syrian leader that he was ready to welcome him back as a friend and a neighbour. And so, with Syria almost certainly destined to be reinstated at the mother of all talk-lunch-sleep shops, otherwise known as the Arab League, it is probably only a matter of time before Biden moves up a notch the sanctions relief, hoping that this new Syria strategy will give him leverage with the Iranians at the negotiating table in Vienna over the so-called Iran Deal. This is the real story, in reality. Biden badly needs to stop sinking in the Iranian quagmire and showing some peripheral support for Syria is expected to earn him some points. It’s as though we’ve gone back to 2007 with Nancy Pelosi and her “let’s use Assad to control people we don’t normally talk to” approach which almost got the Syrian president “buddy” status in Washington. Almost.