American Herald Tribune | DAVID MACILWAIN: At 5pm on Friday, the last working day before Christmas, the Australian government announced that it will be pulling its fighter planes out of Iraq and Syria. Defence Minister Marise Payne said that “following discussions with the Iraqi Government and members of the international Coalition”, and after Iraqi PM Haidar al Abadi declared victory over the ISIS, Australian forces “would not be conducting any further airstrikes in Iraq or Syria.”

The exquisite timing of this “mission accomplished” announcement seemed to suggest that the Government had something to conceal, or at least that it sought to avoid any serious discussion of what exactly that “mission” might have been. But it needn’t have worried; Australia’s true agenda in joining the US war on Syria has been so well concealed that even parliamentarians seem to unaware of it. If any of them welcomed the end of Australia’s illegal intervention in Syria they weren’t very vocal about it. “This will be great news for their families for Christmas” was the comment from Opposition Labor party spokesperson Tanya Plibersek.

More realistic – and scathing – was a tweet from Tim Anderson, who knows a thing or two about the “Dirty War on Syria” to which Australia was fully committed. Unlike ALL the members of Australia’s parliament, and almost all journalists and correspondents in the mainstream media, who have not set foot in Syria since 2011, Prof Anderson has been there numbers of times and most recently this last October. Such is the general ignorance and misdirection about Syria’s war however, that his contact with Syrians in the Arab Army and in the Government – and even with Bashar al Assad himself – disqualifies him from comment in the eyes of the mainstream.

So without pushing the point too far, we should still question the intent of Australian government, both in “bringing the troops home for Christmas” (the “troops” won’t actually be coming home till the New Year), and in apparently trying not to draw attention to it.
In fact, the Australian government’s “drawdown” is only token. Not only will the surveillance and refuelling planes remain in the region – presumably at the Al Minhad base in the UAE (whose warplanes they will now be assisting we can only speculate on – Saudi and Israeli jets may be amongst them) – but 200 Special Forces and “trainers” will remain in Baghdad. Excusing this ongoing presence, the Australian government expresses concern that “Da’esh may return”, but without explaining why the Iraqi army wouldn’t be able to deal with such an insurgency on its own.
Given the evident role of the US coalition over the last three months in redeploying ISIS fighters towards the Syrian-Iraqi border, we might imagine that Iraq would much prefer no more such “assistance”! And it’s when we look at this in more detail that the true nature of Australia’s “mission” in Syria becomes clearer. Thanks to an almost complete lack of transparency from the government, either on what Australia’s mission in Syria is, or on what our forces have actually been doing there for the last two years, some speculation is necessary – though combined withinvaluable insights from the likes of Tim Anderson.

When Australia committed its military to the US coalition project in Syria in September 2015, it was justified with an obscure rationale of dubious legality. Our forces had been in Iraq for a year, notionally to train and assist the Iraqi Army in combatting ISIS, and the extension of air raids over the border into Syria was “to prevent Da’esh launching cross-border attacks”. Violating Syrian sovereign airspace was rationalised by foreign minister Julie Bishop on the basis that the Syrian government had lost control of its borders in the East, while at the same time suggesting that those borders were ill defined; a ludicrous idea, given Australia’s own problem in controlling its borders despite it being an island!

Some authorities consider that Australia’s deployment in Iraq as well as in Syria is illegal, as the pretention of “collective self-defence” on behalf of another state is false. And while the evidence for direct Australian involvement in proven war crimes in Syria is thin, one particular case stands out – our involvement in the strike on the SAA base in Deir al Zour on September 17th 2016.

In a report on SBS TV news reviewing Australia’s operations in Iraq and Syria following Friday’s announcement, this attack that killed at least 80 Syrian soldiers was acknowledged as a “botched strike”, and presented as one failure in an otherwise successful campaign to defeat the ISIS. It’s hard to understate the degree of cognitive dissociation, self-delusion, or pure mendacity that can allow such a dastardly attack to pass into history as mere incompetence or failure.

In the undoubted view of those who conspired to destroy this outpost of the Syrian army and facilitate the IS assault that followed, the hour-long operation was a great success. It was a year before Russian and Syrian forces and their allies finally managed to force ISIS out of Deir al Zour and liberate its besieged citizens – in a long campaign in which many soldiers were martyred at the hands of the terrorist thugs with their US-supplied weapons. When Tim Anderson visited Syria in October, he travelled to the recently liberated Deir al Zour, and met soldiers who had witnessed the US coalition attack on their base in Jebel al Tharba.

Their testimony, which was well broadcast at the time on Syrian TV, left absolutely no doubt about the intentions of the strike, and that this evidently set the stage for the US coalition’s subsequent campaign to occupy the area of Syria defined by the “caliphate” was also made clear (for instance by the destruction of seven bridges over the Euphrates). Prof Anderson describes the incriminating details of the 2016 attack in forensic detail, as well as the evidence in multiple instances where US forces have colluded with Da’esh and other forces fighting the Syrian army, in what finally became a desperate bid to prevent Iraqi and Syrian armies from taking control of the crucial border crossing at Al Bukamal.

But that bid was finally unsuccessful, thanks to incredible support from Russia as well as effective collaboration between Syrian and Iraqi armies. Whatever spin Australia might like to put on the defeat of the ISIS insurgency despite the efforts of the US coalition to keep it alive, no moral or legal justification can now be found for continuing Australian presence in Syria or Iraq. Russia and Iran have finally lost patience with US dissembling and pretentions of some “need” to remain in Syria; their presence is now clearly illegitimate and malevolent and Russia has said so.

So perhaps the Australian government has finally got the message, as well as fearing the political consequences if its planes were targeted by Syria’s rapidly improving missile defence systems. The actual reason for our “intervention” in Iraq and Syria was only ever about one thing in the end – regime change in Damascus – by whatever means necessary.

Now that project has failed it’s time to pull out the troops, and hope no-one notices.