Sputnik - Last week the surreal nature of the Syrian war reached a new level of absurdity. Turkey lost soldiers in an air strike targeted at the terrorists in Idlib who were trying to recover the last stronghold of Daesh*.
Apparently 33 Turkish soldiers who happened to be there died. In response the spokesman of the ruling AKP party, Omer Celik, sought NATO support and protection and allegedly floated the idea of invoking Article 5 of the NATO Charter which classifies an attack on one NATO Member as an attack on all NATO Members.
Turning Syria Story on its Head
Scratch your head for a moment and consider such claptrap. Turkish soldiers invaded Northern Syria. Turkish soldiers were killed while being in Syria. Idlib is not under dispute. It is part of Syria. Turkey is the aggressor nation, not the victim. If we had a fair and balanced media we would all be informed of that salient fact, not set up to support further actions against Syria for the ‘crime’ of trying to repel invaders from its territory.
The classic George Orwell novel ‘1984’ was meant as a warning to society about the destructive and freedom sapping nature of oligarchs and tyrannical nation state, not a user manual for the powerful in the 21st century but recent events in Syria highlight yet again the incredible ability of the rulers of the world in the West to use their compliant and sycophant media to create narratives that belong in fairy tales, not news bulletins.
War is Peace. Freedom is Slavery. Ignorance is Strength. These are the three mottos inscribed on the Ministry of Truth building of the nation of Oceania in Orwell’s dystopian 1948 masterpiece which imagined a society of totalitarianism and perpetual war in 1984, thirty five years in the future as Orwell sat in a small farmhouse on the Scottish island of Jura to construct his warning to the world in the post WWII era. Totalitarianism may not be universal or at least recognised as such by all but perpetual war is certainly an underlying feature of the 21st century world. It used to be the case that arms companies were created to feed wars but nowadays wars are created to feed arms companies.
Manipulated Narratives to Justify Invasions Are Sadly Normal
Hard on the heels of the Afghanistan bombardment, Iraq invasion and Libya destruction with the US leading the charge under the guise of ‘freedom from tyranny’, ‘disarming weapons of mass destruction’ and ‘bringing democracy to the masses’ through millions of indiscriminate civilian deaths and obliteration of homes and essential infrastructure in the process, all the better to set up lucrative ‘reconstruction projects’ for US companies in the aftermath, we had the ‘rebel uprising’ in Syria with the declared aim of overthrowing the sitting President Assad. The fact the ‘rebels’ were receiving financial aid, arms and encouragement from the likes of Saudi Arabia, Turkey and the US was hidden from the news bulletins.
It was a familiar story. Just as Saddam in Iraq and Muammar Gaddafi in Libya had been former friends with the western powers and signed lucrative arms deals despite the on-going alleged suppression of human rights and democracy, such ‘crimes’ were perfectly acceptable while these regimes toed the Western party line. It should never be forgotten that the recorded use of chemical weapons by Saddam Hussain against Iran in 1988 was a war crime fully monitored by the US via the CIA with documents proving the West supplied the materials for chemical gas attacks and the US did nothing to intervene despite multiple prior warnings:
“It has been previously reported that the United States provided tactical intelligence to Iraq at the same time that officials suspected Hussein would use chemical weapons. But the CIA documents, which sat almost entirely unnoticed in a trove of declassified material at the National Archives in College Park, Md., combined with exclusive interviews with former intelligence officials, reveal new details about the depth of the United States’ knowledge of how and when Iraq employed the deadly agents. They show that senior U.S. officials were being regularly informed about the scale of the nerve gas attacks. They are tantamount to an official American admission of complicity in some of the most gruesome chemical weapons attacks ever launched”.
Removing Assad in Syria Was Supposed to Be Straightforward
President Assad was supposed to be removed from power and the US plan of accessing more cheap oil reserves and removing an Iran ally in the Middle East was straightforward in the war rooms and laptop presentations by the Pentagon. Unfortunately for the military strategists things have not been so simple, and consciously or stupidly the US support for the Syrian ‘rebels’ was actually support for the brutal Daesh terrorists intent on creating a grotesque state using methods wholly contrary to the Islamic religion they pretend to follow. Using money from Saudi Arabia and the cover of ‘fighting Assad for freedom’, the brutal Daesh terror groups captured large parts of Syria and murdered, raped and enslaved the Syrian civilians in the process. Assad was supposed to keel over but neither he nor his army surrendered.
Now over eight years into the Syrian war and with the backing of Russia and Iran, the Syrian army has re-taken most of the territory Daesh conquered and only the Northern Syria province of Idlib remains in terrorist hands. As the war has reached its latter stages in the past six months and the stamina of forces loyal to Assad became more recognised, the US decided to up sticks and withdraw most of its troops from Syria as the credibility of their claim to be there in the name of fighting Daesh became increasingly mocked. Trump in a moment of uncustomary honesty let the cat out the bag when he blurted out what every serious observer of the situation already knew – they were only there for the oil:
“We’re keeping the oil. We have the oil. The oil is secure. We left troops behind only for the oil”.
Douma Chemical Weapons Attack Was Manufactured Set-Up
Of course such biased reporting in relation to Syria is not new. Most of the world will remember attacks on Syria were justified in 2018 on the back of alleged chemical weapons attacks by the Assad regime in the Syrian city of Douma. The coverage was universal. The conclusion was clear to all. Assad was a war criminal using chemical weapons against civilians and had to be toppled by any means necessary. US missiles were launched against Assad, and infrastructure was destroyed and civilians killed. Yet how many across the world now know that both the engineering analysis of the alleged chlorine gas canisters and the detailed medical analysis of the alleged victims of this ‘horrific war crime’ prove conclusively that far from a chemical attack there has in fact been a carefully planned set up to con the world into believing such an attack took place and Assad was responsible?
The supposedly independent and credible international body established to monitor and investigate alleged chemical weapons use across the world, the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), was manipulated and coerced into releasing Reports which were not only misleading but downright fraudulent, for not only did they refute the use of chemical weapons - they covered up the fact the scenario most likely was created by ‘rebel’ forces on the ground and the lie of chemical weapons use was promoted deliberately and consciously.
Sovereign Nations Have Inalienable Right to Defend Their Territory
I’m no cheerleader for Assad in Syria but in my world when a sovereign nation is attacked and/or invaded they have an inalienable right to defend themselves and repel invaders. Isn’t it pathetic to witness the brutal suppression of thousands of firefighters and other public service workers by heavily armed police in France for the ‘crime’ of protesting against damaging pension changes reported as legitimate ‘public order’ and ‘crowd control measures’ but actions by the Syrian regime against terrorists and foreign army invaders as being aggressive and tyrannical? Our world is indeed more Orwellian by the day. In such an era of lies and distortions those who speak truth to power will be more brutally repressed. Witness the current treatment of Julian Assange. The solution to the Syrian war is for all the foreign invaders to withdraw. Turkey doesn’t merit NATO support for invading Syria - it deserves universal condemnation.
*Daesh (aka ISIS/Islamic state/IS) is a terrorist group banned in Russia