In his commencement address at West Point, President Obama has announced that the U.S.is 'weighing military aid' for Syrian rebels. Separately, administration officials spoke off the record to reporters from the Associated Press and said that Obama and his team are planning to send U.S. military advisers to Jordan to train and equip certain moderate Syrian rebels.
Actually, the president has been covertly indulging his desire to intervene in Syria on the side of Islamist rebels without congressional oversight for quite some time, and its pernicious effect is starting to be felt. Just like the president's illegal intervention in Libya, our intervention in Syria has been like a rock dropped into a lake, sending ripples far beyond the original point of impact.
The training has mostly been done in Qatar and conducted by the CIA,although training of jihadis has also occurred in Jordan, where we already have almost 2,000 U.S. troops stationed and in camps along Syria's border with Turkey.
The president predictably lied about this when he was asked, but a documentary made by PBS ( hardly a right wing, anti-Obama platform) entitled " Syria: Arming the Rebels" actually shows jihadis training, holding up U.S. weapons and supplies and describe their journey from the Syrian battlefield to meet with their American handlers in Turkey and then being shipped to Qatar. Once there, they're instructed in sophisticated combat techniques, including one course on “how to finish off soldiers still alive after an ambush.”
As PBS notes "it appears the Obama administration is allowing select groups of rebels to receive US-made anti-tank missiles."
The United States has already spent $287 million so far in what's described as nonlethal aid for the rebels, with whom knows how much for military aid and training since the Obama Administration and the president still deny that took place. I mean, who are you going to believe? Barack Obama or your lying eyes?
In any event this new emphasis means that a lot more money and arms are headed to Syria. Secretary of State John Kerry is talking in the neighborhood of $5 billion. He also claims we have the ability to vet who the aid goes to, which is ridiculous given the facts on the ground unless we really are going to send boots on the ground to Syria to get involved and see who lines up next to us.
How have our efforts in Syria been turning out so far?
Well, first of all, as was apparent from the PBS documentary and other sources, we haven't really had all that much control of where the arms, money and supplies go, or really, even who gets trained.
It's a similar situation to what happened in Afghanistan back in the late 1970's when President Carter began arming the Afghan muhadejin to fight the Soviets. We sent the stuff to Pakistan and it was our dear friends the Pakistanis who decided who got what, not us. Any wonder the Taliban took over once the Soviets skedaddled?
What Syria is becoming is jihadi summer camp, with foreign fighters flocking there, picking up valuable experience and skills like how to make an IED that won't result in a work accident, gaining combat experience in Syria and Iraq and then ultimately heading back to their home countries to teach others. Al Nusrah and ISIS already run their own training facilities in Syria and in the parts of Iraq ISIS now controls.
The resurgence of al-Qaeda in Iraq, where ISIS now controls 3 of Iraq's 18 provinces can be directly linked to President Obama's covert decision to support and arm the Syrian rebels, and, as we will eventually find out when the truth about Benghazi surfaces, to his intervention in Libya. We have only estimates of how many jihadis with Western citizenship have been trained and indoctrinated there, and no one in the Administration is paying any attention to how many have received U.S. arms, money and training.
In late October 2013, Mike Rogers, chairman of the US House Intelligence Committee, warned that al Qaeda allies in Syria were now "talking about conducting external operations, which is exactly what happened in Afghanistan, which led to 9/11."
'External operations'...that's pretty much what's going on in Iraq right now.And it isn't just Iraq.
Hundreds of EU citizens have ended up in the ranks of ISIS (The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria), Al Nusrah and al-Qaeda, and a number of them who have returned are actively involved in terrorism on the home front.
In Belgium, for instance, Mehdi Nemmouche, the jihadi accused of killing four people in an attack on the Jewish museum in Brussels is a French national who spent time fighting in Syria and had a flag from ISIS in his possession as well as a Kalishnikov, a handgun, and jihad videos. None of this was news to the French Authorities that picked him up in Marseilles, since they had been attempting to track hi since they knew he had been fighting with ISIS in Syria.
Bomb threats were made against the Belgian Royal family after Belgian police arrested Ismail Abdelatif al Lal, a major al-Qaeda financier who was funding the recruitment and transport of Spanish and Moroccan Muslims to Syria. And the Belgian government ended up finally cancelling the government welfare benefits of 30 Belgian jihadis who were having the checks forwarded to banks in Turkey while they were fighting in Syria!
France's French Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve estimated that almost 400 jihadis who hold French passports are currently fighting in Syria. Back in March, former Interior Minister Manuel Valls "estimated that 700 French nationals or residents of France were more or less involved in the Syrian conflict, that 250 were currently in Syria, 99 were in transit to get there, 150 had showed interest in going there, 76 had already returned, and that 21 had died on Syrian soil."
Those whom have returned will bring interesting skills back home with them, and a number apparently already have.
There are instances of this happening all over Europe.
And the U.S.? The estimates of battle trained Syrian jihadis who've returned here range from 70 to fifty.
If we can't even vet our own citizens returning from Syria or stop them from going in the first place, how does the Obama team imagine it's going to vet who gets U.S. military aid and training?
And is it a major leap to conclude that these arms and more importantly the training will be turned against us someday?
If you look at President Obama and his team and their actions in Syria,in Libya, in Egypt, in Iraq and our funding of the new Hamas-Fatah government, you'd have to conclude that not only is our current regime tolerant and favorably disposed towards Islamists, they're now actually aiding and abetting them.
And as we've seen, such things have a history of backfiring....horrendously.
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