Israel denies backing Nusra after Golan lynching

CounterVortex

In a grisly incident on the Israeli-annexed Golan Heights last week, Druze villagers attacked an Israeli military ambulance, killing one of two Syrian casualties it was carrying. The attack was apparently retaliation for the Nusra Front massacre of Druze villagers in Syria a week earlier. Al-Monitor reports that the IDF has launched an aggressive "information campaign" to convince the Golan Druze that Israel is not backing the Nusra Front. Media reports (Reuters, Forward) have been vague on who the casualties in the ambulance actually were, but blogger Michael Karadjis identified the murdered patient as Munthir Khalil from the "Revolutionary Command Council in Quneitra and Golan," a wing of the Free Syrian Army's Southern Front. Karadjis emphasizes that the Southern Front months ago issued a declaration cutting off all cooperation with the Nusra Front, and offered refuge to fleeing villagers after the massacre. He calls the incident "deadly consequences" of the "fairy tale" that Israel is backing Nusra.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights meanwhile reported that US-led air-strikes targeted ISIS fighters battling Nusra Front for control of the northern town of Suran. The Observatory portrayed it as intervention on the side of Nusra. "It's the first time that the international coalition has supported non-Kurdish opposition forces fighting the Islamic State," Observatory director Rami Abdel Rahman told AFP. (The report places the strikes in Aleppo governorate, although Suran is in Hama.) The US has previously carried out air-strikes against the Nusra Front and other Qaeda-aligned groups in Syria. The battle for Suran comes amid reports of clashes between ISIS and Qaeda-aligned forces in Libya as well as Syria.

ISIS and Nusra appear to be in a race to take Damascus. ISIS militants on June 10 blew up a pipeline feeding natural gas from eastern Syria to the suburbs of the capital. ISIS has previously sold oil to the Damascus regime, but now appears bent on denying it resources to hasten its collapse. (AFP, June 10)

  1. US and Mossad backing ISIS: yet more bullshit

    When even the perennially wacky conspiranoid website Global Research adds a disclaimer saying the report has "not been fully corroborated," you know you are about to read absolute bullshit. That's what they do in picking up the July 15, 2014 story from Bahrain's Gulf Daily News claiming that Edward Snowden released documents revealing that the US and Mossad have been backing ISIS in a secret strategy called the "Hornet's Nest." The report states (with incorrect use of quotation marks): 

    According to documents released by Snowden, "The only solution for the protection of the Jewish state "is to create an enemy near its borders". [Sic]

    Leaks revealed that ISIS leader and cleric Abu Bakr Al Baghdadi took intensive military training for a whole year in the hands of Mossad, besides courses in theology and the art of speech..

    We'd love to know why we should believe this when a.) no names or dates of the supposed documents are given; b.) we aren't even told what agency or agencies issued the supposed documents; c.) the brief report (a total of five sentences) can't even be bothered to get basic punctuation right; d.) very bloody likely that Mossad trained "cleric" (sic!) Baghdadi in Islamic "theology"; and (most of all) e.) it has been reported nowhere else, except conspiranoid echo-chamber sites that picked it up from Gulf Daily News, like Global Research and Hang the Bankers. This of course has not stopped Facebook partisans, who are still posting this jive a year later as if it vindicates their wacky theory.

    The PolitiFact website deconstructed the hoax, tracing it back to a post on an obscure Arabic-language website based in Germany, Shababek.de. From there it got picked up by Gulf Daily News and the rest in the usual game of telephone. Depressingly, PolitiFact notes that the hoax has been propounded by Iranian state media and (less predictably) the Palestinian Authority. It also notes that nobody has been able to find any reference to the "Hornet's Nest" in Snowden's cache of released documents, and that even Glenn Greenwald himself tweeted that he's "never heard him (Snowden) say any such thing, nor have I ever heard any credible source quoting him saying anything like that."

    Shut the fuck up, conspiranoids. You're only making matters worse.

  2. US created ISIS: yet more stupid bullshit

    Conspiranoids are disseminating an annoying story from India TV last month with the lurid and totally dishonest title "And now it is confirmed, Islamic State (ISIS) is a US creation." It seizes upon a Defense Intelligence Agency document (dated only "Aug. 12"—no year) released by the right-wing Judicial Watch (PDF), and quotes the following text:

    IF THE SITUATION UNRAVELS THERE IS THE POSSIBILITY OF ESTABLISHING A DECLARED OR UNDECLARED SALAFIST PRINCIPALITY IN EASTERN SYRIA […] AND THIS IS EXACTLY WHAT THE SUPPORTING POWERS TO THE OPPOSITION WANT, IN ORDER TO ISOLATE THE SYRIAN REGIME, WHICH IS CONSIDERED THE STRATEGIC DEPTH OF THE SHIA EXPANSION (IRAN AND IRAQ).

    The "supporting powers to the opposition" are earlier named as "the West, Gulf countries, and Turkey." However the account does not quote the very next paragraph in the document—or note that the primary concern of the document is the resurgence of al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI, today ISIS):

    THE DETERIORATION OF THE SITUATION HAS DIRE CONSEQUENCES ON THE IRAQI SITUATION AND ARE AS FOLLOWS:

    THIS CREATES THE IDEAL SITUATION FOR AQI TO RETURN TO ITS OLD POCKETS IN MOSUL AND RAMADI, AND WILL PROVIDE A RENEWED MOMENTUM UNDER THE PRESUMPTION OF UNIFYING THE JIHAD AMONG SUNNI IRAQ AND SYRIA…

    So rather than planning the establishment of a "Salafist principality" in eastern Syria, the document is warning of the potential for this outcome! And "supporting powers" in this context obviously refers to the Gulf states and Turkey—not the US. 

    We do wonder… Are the conspiranoids really dumb enough to believe their own propaganda? Or do they just hope that we are?

    1. US created ISIS: still more stupid bullshit

      The conspiranoids (including RT and Real Clear Politics) are now jumping on an Al Jazeera interview with ex-DIA chief Michael T. Flynn, who admits that he saw the above-cited document. This despite the fact that Al Jazeera's Mehdi Hasan keeps hounding him (on no evidence) over supposed US support for ISIS, and Flynn repeatedly denies it. Finally, he breaks down and says "we totally blew it early on" by not supporting the rebels, and thereby allowing the jihadis to fill the vaccuum (a point we've made ourselves). "We should have done more," he says. In other words, the exact opposite of the US-created-ISIS thesis. But Hasan happily persists in his line of questioning, oblivious to Flynn's actual answers. The conspiranoids ignore all this, instead zeroing in on the following exchange:

      HASAN: You are basically saying that even in government at the time you knew these groups were around, you saw this analysis, and you were arguing against it, but who wasn’t listening?

      FLYNN: I think the administration.

      HASAN: So the administration turned a blind eye to your analysis?

      FLYNN: I don’t know that they turned a blind eye, I think it was a decision. I think it was a willful decision.

      HASAN: A willful decision to support an insurgency that had Salafists, Al Qaeda and the Muslim Brotherhood?

      FLYNN: It was a willful decision to do what they're doing.

      First, note that even this passage actually says nothing about ISIS. But (more to the point), in context, it is clear that Flynn is criticizing the "very confused" Obama policy and the president's "poor leadership"—not saying the US intentionally created ISIS. He is not even saying the US intentionally "supported an insurgency that had Salafists" and the rest—if you actually listen to the quoted passage in context. A June piece on Foreign Policy notes that Flynn has been a harsh critic of the administration's Syria policy since leaving his post.

      So here we have a dishonest interview by Al Jazeera being dishonestly distorted by RT and its legions of Facebook volunteers to convey the opposite of what it actually says…

  3. Iran spews more ISIS conspiranoia, suckers lap it up

    Here we go again. The perennially wacky conspiranoid site Global Research (of course) jumps on claims from Iran's official Fars News Agency citing a commander of the Popular Mobilization Units, a network of Shi'ite militias, as claiming that an Israeli colonel, named as Yusi Oulen Shahak of the Golani Brigade, was captured while leading ISIS forces in Iraq. It seems to have been reported nowhere else. We've heard similar jive from exactly the same dubious sources before.

  4. Israel buying ISIS oil?

    OK, we are agnostic about this one, but Al-Araby al-Jadeed cites an anonymous source in Iraqi intelligence as saying that ISIS oil is making its way to the Israeli port of Ashdod—although the route sounds a little vague. Presumably through Turkey, although this is not explicitly stated.