Russia is bombing “terrorists” in Syria, and the US is understandably peeved. A day after the bombing began, US President Barack Obama's defence secretary, Ashton Carter, complained that most Russian strikes “were in areas where there were probably no ISIL [IS] forces.” Anonymously, US officials also accused Russia of deliberately targeting CIA-sponsored “moderate” rebels to shore-up the regime of Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad. Only two of Russia's 57 air strikes have hit the Islamic State (IS) group, opined Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu in similar fashion. The rest have hit “the moderate opposition, the only forces fighting IS in Syria,” he said. Such claims have been dutifully parroted across the Western press with little scrutiny, bar the odd US media watchdog. But who are these moderate rebels? The first Russian air strikes hit the rebel-held town of Talbisah, north of Homs and home to Al-Qaeda's official Syrian arm, Al-Nusra Front, and the pro-Al-Qaeda Ahrar Al-Sham, among other local rebel groups. Both Al-Nusra Front and IS have claimed responsibility for vehicle-borne IEDs (improvised explosive devices) in Homs, which is 12 km south of Talbisah. The Institute for the Study of War (ISW), a US-based monitoring group, reports that as part of “US and Turkish efforts to establish an IS ‘free zone' in the northern Aleppo countryside,” Al-Nusra Front “withdrew from the border and reportedly reinforced positions in this rebel-held pocket north of Homs city.” In other words, the US and Turkey are actively sponsoring “moderate” Syrian rebels in the form of Al-Qaeda, which the Washington-based risk analysis firm Valen Globals forecasts will be “a bigger threat to global security” than IS in coming years. Last October, US Vice-President Joe Biden conceded that there was “no moderate middle” among the Syrian opposition. Turkey and the Gulf powers armed and funded “anyone who would fight against Al-Assad,” including “Al-Nusra,” “Al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI),” and the “extremist elements of jihadis who were coming from other parts of the world,” he said. This external funding enabled the Islamist factions to systematically displace the secular Free Syria Army (FSA) leaders, culminating in the rise of IS. In other words, the CIA-backed rebels targeted by Russia are not moderates. They represent the same melting pot of Al-Qaeda-affiliated networks that spawned the IS group in the first place. And they rose to power in Syria not in spite of, but because of, the US rubber-stamping of the jihadist funnel through its so-called “vetting” process. This summer, for instance, Al-Qaeda-led rebels received accelerated weapons shipments in a US-backed operation to retake Idlib province from Al-Assad. Notice here that the US priority was to rollback Al-Assad's forces from Idlib, not to fight IS. Yet the brave Western press, so outspoken on Russian duplicity, somehow overlooked how this anti-IS coalition operation failed to target a single IS fighter. Since Russia's intervention, that press has been particularly coy about the fact that Washington's “moderate” rebels include the likes of Al-Nusra Front, Ahrar Al-Sham and the Islamic Front. While Al-Nusra Front is Al-Qaeda's Syrian branch, Ahrar Al-Sham openly “cooperates with the Syrian affiliate of Al-Qaeda and has welcomed former associates of Osama bin Laden,” according to the New York Times. “While its leaders say they seek to create a representative government, they avoid the word ‘democracy' and say Islam must guide any eventual state.” The Islamic Front, Syria's largest opposition group, consisting of tens of thousands of fighters, aims to establish an “Islamic state” in Syria, rejects democracy and secularism, and welcomes Al-Qaeda foreign fighters as “brothers who have come to help us.” Islamic Front leader Zahran Alloush is on record as having praised Osama bin Laden, endorsed cooperation with Al-Nusra Front, and repeatedly called for the total extermination of Shia and Alawite communities in the Levant. These are the “moderates” the US has empowered in the name of fighting IS. The US has evaded formal responsibility for doing so by using the best covert operation traditions: plausible deniability by passing the buck. Since 2012, the CIA-run clandestine rebel-vetting programme has been conducted outside Syria in partner countries like Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Jordan and Turkey. Although CIA and US military personnel oversee the programme, they “vet” rebels largely through “intelligence” provided by its own allies. The supposedly rigorous vetting process includes “psychological exams,” gathering of “biometric data,” and running the names of candidates “through US databases” and “with regional allies for checks.” Recruits already known to the US government are easily checked using internal data. But for new recruits the US depends on the “expertise” of its coalition partners like Saudi Arabia and Turkey. Still, CIA personnel were “helping allies decide which Syrian opposition fighters” would receive arms. But the relationship between the “moderate” FSA and the jihadist factions, including IS, has grown increasingly porous. German journalist Jurgen Todenhofer, who spent ten days inside IS, reported last year that IS militants were being “indirectly” armed by the West. “They buy the weapons that we give to the Free Syrian Army, so they get Western weapons. They get French weapons … I saw German weapons, I saw American weapons,” he said. The CIA knew what was happening: classified intelligence assessments year after year have shown that most Saudi, Turkish and Qatari arms have ended up with “hardline Islamic jihadists, and not the more secular opposition groups.” The CIA programme has not been shut down, although it has predictably failed to arm moderates despite seeding nearly 10,000 rebel fighters, many of whom have joined the IS terrorists the West is supposed to be fighting. Instead, the Pentagon has been tasked with establishing a “new,” separate, “moderate” rebel-training programme. Unsurprisingly, that programme has virtually collapsed, even as the CIA continues to arm the jihadists that pretend to hate IS while cooperating with IS to fight Al-Assad. Just last month, in extraordinary testimony before the US Senate Armed Services Committee, General Lloyd Austin, who leads the anti-IS strategy at US Central Command, admitted that there were only “four or five” US-trained “moderate” rebels in Syria currently fighting IS. So who is really fighting IS? This doesn't mean that questions about Russia's strategy are unjustified. Clearly, Russian President Vladimir Putin's self-serving intervention in Syria is about keeping the brutal Al-Assad in power by crushing the rebel forces seeking his removal. But Western journalists obediently mimicking the US State Department line have universally failed to ask the sort of questions they rightly ask of Russia: namely, why is the US-led coalition refusing to bomb IS extraction wells and oil truck convoys? A sobering Greenwich University study in the UK, published by the Maritime Security Review in March, on the Islamic State's illicit oil-trafficking networks comes to some surprising conclusions on this issue. Authored by George Kiourktsoglou, a lecturer in maritime security and former Shell strategist, and Alec Coutroubis, acting head at the University's Faculty of Engineering and Science, the study finds that US, Turkish and Gulf air raids on IS “oil-manufacturing facilities” have not gone far enough. “Extraction wells in the area of bombardments have yet to be targeted by the US or the air-assets of its allies, a fact that can be readily attributed to the at times ‘toxic' politics in the Middle East,” the article says. The scholars, who have previously given evidence before the UK parliament's Foreign Affairs Select Committee, further report that despite large convoys transporting IS oil through Syria, Iraq and Turkey, “allied US air-raids do not target the lorries out of fear of provoking a backlash from locals” (although killing up to a thousand Syrian civilians is apparently fine). As a result, “the transport operations are being run efficiently, taking place most of the time in broad daylight.” So the US is not targeting IS's financial lifeline in its black market oil infrastructure, but instead is teaming up with the same Al-Qaeda-affiliated groups that spawned IS in the first place to undermine Al-Assad. And Russia, for all its muscle-flexing rhetoric, sees its main priority as countering US-led efforts to topple Al-Assad by targeting his most immediate opponents. This is, in other words, a new Cold War between competing empires, the unending victims of which are the Syrian people. As for IS, it is little more than the proxy child of a conflict that looks set to escalate. The writer is an investigative journalist and international security scholar tracking what he calls the “crisis of civilisation”.
