The Truth Behind Syria’s Unrest — “Mostly Unarmed” Means Armed

Tony Cartalucci, Contributing Writer
Activist Post

Bangkok, Thailand August 3, 2011 – When the corporate-owned media claims Syrian protesters are “mostly unarmed” they are really saying in Orwellian terms, they are indeed armed.

Los Angeles Times: Syrian crackdown fans sectarian flames: “By unleashing military power against mostly unarmed Sunni Arab and ethnic Kurdish protesters, Assad’s regime, dominated by minority Alawites, a Shiite Muslim offshoot, has sharpened the region’s ethnic and sectarian divisions.”

The Australian: Syrian assault after troops ‘massacred’: “Syrian activists say more than 1300 people, mostly unarmed civilians, have died in the uprising inspired by popular revolts across the Middle East and North Africa.”

BBC: Syria crisis: UN report condemns crackdown on protests: “The use of live ammunition against mostly unarmed civilians has killed around 1,100 people, says the report.”

MSNBC: Syria’s Assad sacks governor of Hama in attempt to appease protesters: “Syrian rights groups say more than 1,400 people have been killed, most of them unarmed protesters, since mid-March.”

The Washington Post: Battle on Lebanese border illustrates broader implications of Syrian revolt: “The refugees also offered insights into the complexities of the battle underway for control of Syria between the Assad regime and the largely leaderless and the mostly unarmed popular protest movement.”

These concessions, however weaselly worded they are, indicate that the Syrian protesters are very much as armed as they are supported, funded, and trained by the United States government. More recently a July 31, 2011 Sky News report openly stated that a Syrian army assault in Hamah “prompted opposition gunmen to fire machine guns and set police stations on fire.” With this realization in mind, defenders of the ongoing unrest will say, just as they did regarding Libya, that these protesters are merely defending themselves against a genocidal government. However, the history of violence amidst the Syrian opposition is a well documented fact, as are US aspirations to sow this very sort of unrest in the name of self-serving “regime change.”

Syrian Opposition: Muslim Brotherhood & Ethnic Groups

The Muslim Brotherhood in the late 1970s and early 1980s had attempted to wage full-scale armed insurrection against the Syrian government. The high mark of their murder and mayhem (page 3) involved attacking a graduating class of artillery cadets, where 32 were executed by the Brotherhood. In 1982, the Brotherhood was cornered in their stronghold of Hamah and annihilated while their leadership fled the country. The Brotherhood’s leadership is now based, not surprisingly, in London where they are once again busy coordinating unrest in Syria with the full support of the Western media behind them.

Also worth noting is the mentioning of Kurdish protesters, long used by the United States and its allies to harass the various nations these stateless people live along the fringes of. Kurdish populations can be found in the region where the Turkish, Syrian, Iranian, and Iraqi borders converge. Citing the Fortune-500 funded Brookings Institution (page 19 of PDF) in their report “Which Path to Persia?” we are offered insight into just how the Kurds along with other ethnic groups are being used to sow chaos throughout Syria with the expressed goal of destabilizing and overthrowing the government, not for democracy, but for US regional interests. While the report specifically concerns Iran, as we will see, the current unrest in Syria fits in verbatim.

While the ultimate goal is to remove the regime, working with the internal opposition also could be a form of coercive pressure on the Iranian regime, giving the United States leverage on other issues. Iran under the Shah, for example, backed a Kurdish insurgency in Iraq and helped make the rebels quite potent. The Shah then abruptly sold out the Kurds in exchange for Iraqi concessions on demarcating the Iran-Iraq border. In theory, the United States could create coercive leverage by threatening the regime with instability or even overthrow and, after having done so, use this leverage to force concessions on other issues such as Iran’s nuclear program or support for militants in Iraq.

Elsewhere in the report it is admitted that the Shah’s assistance to the Kurds also included US support (Page 121, Page 134 of the PDF). Additionally, the report mentions how Kurds, along with other ethnic groups could be leveraged to create violent rebellions. The following passage alarming fits the current crisis in Syria to the letter.

For instance, the United States could opt to work primarily with various unhappy Iranian ethnic groups (Kurds, Baluch, Arabs, and so on) who have fought the regime at various periods since the revolution. A coalition of ethnic opposition movements, particularly if combined with dissident Persians, would pose a serious threat to regime stability. In addition, the unrest the groups themselves create could weaken the regime at home. At the least, the regime would have to divert resources to putting down the rebellions. At most, the unrest might discredit the regime overtime, weakening its position vis-à-vis its rivals.

With the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood based in London along with a myriad of other contrived Syrian “human rights groups” like the “Syrian Observatory for Human Rights,” providing rhetorical cover for violent, ethnically divided chaos in Syria’s streets all with the enthusiastic support from the very authors of “Which Path to Persia?” there is absolutely no doubt that Brookings’ designs have gone operational in Syria.

The Financial Times quoted Martin Indyk, one of the co-authors of “Which Path to Perisa?” as saying, “It was always a stretch but now it’s become clear that Assad is in cohoots with the Iranians and is suppressing his own people. Now the US has nothing to lose and everything to gain by making clear that we’re on the side of the Syrian people.” Indyk clearly is not only subjecting Syria to the fruits of his nefarious labor, but also trying to drag Iran, the object of his original obsession, into the US-designed conflagration.

Fellow “Which Path to Peria?” degenerate Bruce Riedel wrote a June 2011 analysis of the various possible cracks within Syria both militarily and ethnically that could end the Assad regime, an analysis that could easily serve as an addendum to his earlier work regarding the US-fueled subversion of Iran. In it he states, “If the army splits on Alawi-Sunni lines, the revolution will triumph. A blood bath could ensue, as decades of hatred leads to sectarian reprisals.”

Considering Riedel’s analysis it then becomes clear why the corporate media eagerly reports elaborate narratives such as the one revolving around alleged Syrian army deserter Darwish Mohammed Fidou whose story conveniently covers every aspect of the unfolding violence as well as encourages other soldiers to defect. Fidou’s story claims that dead Syrian security forces were the result of defecting army units and that protesters were merely carrying olive branches. Such stories, on par with the verified lies regarding Libya’s Qaddafi fleeing the country, are told in an attempt spur on the chaos and embolden both the opposition and possible defectors.

And while this is all fairly convincing, with a 2009 think tank report explicitly spelling out the very type of destabilization we see unfolding in Syria, there is additional evidence proving beyond a shadow of a doubt that the current unrest in Syria is indeed the product of US meddling and far from the spontaneous, indigenous uprising it is disingenuously portrayed as being.

The Syrian Unrest is US-funded

Syria has been slated for regime change since as early as 1991. In 2002, then US Under Secretary of State John Bolton added Syria to the growing “Axis of Evil.” It would be later revealed that Bolton’s threats against Syria manifested themselves as covert funding and support for opposition groups inside of Syria spanning both the Bush and Obama administrations.

In an April 2011 CNN article, acting State Department spokesman Mark Toner stated, “We’re not working to undermine that [Syrian] government. What we are trying to do in Syria, through our civil society support, is to build the kind of democratic institutions, frankly, that we’re trying to do in countries around the globe. What’s different, I think, in this situation is that the Syrian government perceives this kind of assistance as a threat to its control over the Syrian people.”

Toner’s remarks came after the Washington Post released cables indicating the US has been funding Syrian opposition groups since at least 2005 and continued until today.

In an April AFP report, Michael Posner, the assistant US Secretary of State for Human Rights and Labor, stated that the “US government has budgeted $50 million in the last two years to develop new technologies to help activists protect themselves from arrest and prosecution by authoritarian governments.” The report went on to explain that the US “organized training sessions for 5,000 activists in different parts of the world. A session held in the Middle East about six weeks ago gathered activists from Tunisia, Egypt, Syria and Lebanon who returned to their countries with the aim of training their colleagues there.” Posner would add, “They went back and there’s a ripple effect.” That ripple effect of course is the “Arab Spring,” and in Syria’s case, the impetus for the current unrest threatening to unhinge the nation and invite in foreign intervention.

Conclusion

While this does not absolve Assad from the corruption and abuses that may or may not be present in his government, it does lay out the fact that the chaos now slowly consuming the strategically located Middle Eastern nation is not the result of a spontaneous, indigenous political awakening, rather it is the result of a carefully planned, well funded, and meticulously organized foreign plot – verbatim torn from the pages of Brookings Institution’s “Which Path to Persia?” report pursuing American global hegemony, not democracy. As the Brookings’ report makes note of throughout its pages – for the various duped ethnic groups that took arms, funding, and encouragement from the US to rise up against the West’s enemies in the past, it was always betrayal and total annihilation, not democracy and freedom, that laid right around the corner for them.

Indeed, the final goal of the Syrian unrest is not democracy or freedom by any stretch of the imagination. It is but one component in a larger, incredibly ambitious, perhaps even desperate geopolitical gambit aimed at subjugating Northern Africa and the Middle East under a Wall Street-London centric global oligarchy. Controlling these regions hems in both China’s emergence as well as Russia’s attempted reemergence. The contrived “Arab Spring” is accompanied by concerted efforts to promote similar unrest in both Southeast Asia on China’s doorstep as well as around Russia’s peripheries – Belarus in particular.

For Syria, or indeed any nation on earth to truly progress forward toward a brighter future, solutions, programs, and movements must be centered around pragmatic, not political solutions. Burning police stations to the ground, waving placards, chanting, and toppling governments doesn’t put roofs over people’s heads or food in their stomach. Growing gardens, pursuing technical progress, learning trades, improving practical education, increasing local self-sufficiency while decreasing dependency on corrupt monopolistic corporations and governments does.

Tony Cartalucci’s articles have appeared on many alternative media websites, including his own at 
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