Syria

How Idrees Ahmad Whitewashes British Imperialism in Palestine and Syria

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Regime change advocates are writers or propagandists who want to alter the governments in the Global South and replace them with a government to Western likening. This can be done directly when a Western power sends its army overseas, militarily invades the nation-state and rids the country of the existing government as in Iraq or indirectly as in the case of Libya were local proxy forces were used and with the help of superior Western air power (NATO) the hitherto existing Libyan government was removed. As the world witnessed in the run up to the Iraq war in 2003, journalists, academics and think-tank professionals who advocate for these pro-Western regime change operations tend to be whitewashers, deceivers, liars or outright conmen. Naturally, these traits inevitably seep out into their published works.

In the past, this writer has dealt with the regime-change enthusiast Robin Yassin-Kassab highlighting the hoax in his book about the war on Syria. The University of Cambridge academic Dr. Priyamvada Gopal has denounced anyone who doesn’t accept Western regime change narrative on Libya and Syria as either “Gaddafists” or “Assadists”. So it was inevitable that this esteemed Cambridge don is not indifferent to a little sleight of hand analysis in her much acclaimed tome, Insurgent Empire.

Dr. Muhammad Idrees Ahmad of the University of Sterling is another enthusiastic advocate for regime change in the Global South and he too can also be found wanting in the sincerity department. Ahmad and Yassin-Kassab both edited what appeared to be an anti-imperialist website, Pulse. A website edited by two people that sprang out of nowhere which claimed or at the very least implied it was against the war in Iraq and also pro-Palestine. Yet once the upheaval in Libya began in 2011 and the British government began advocating for military intervention, Idrees Ahmad and Yassin-Kassab began denouncing anyone who opposed Western military intervention in Libya. Continue reading →

Did Moazzam Begg Mislead Channel 4 News About his role in the War on Syria?

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The War on Terror is like any other war in that there are inevitable twists and turns. An enemy at the start of a war may for some remarkable reason be an ally by the gruesome end of the war. The War on Terror began as a war specifically against al-Qaeda, (which had its origins in Western support for fighters in Afghanistan against the Soviet Union in the 1980s), after they had allegedly attacked the United States in September 2001. Lately, in Syria the West was in a de-facto alliance with Islamist groups closely linked with al-Qaeda. It is within this inevitable context that one needs to appreciate the fate of former Guantanamo Bay detainee Moazzam Begg since his release from the notorious Caribbean detention camp in 2005.

In February 2014 he was detained and held on remand in Belmarsh by the British authorities only to be released in October of the same year uncharged. The previous years had seen him travelling to the war zone in Syria on ostensibly humanitarian pretexts. But according to a BBC report, British authorities alleged that Begg had attended a terrorist training camp between October 2012 and April 2013. Upon his release from Belmarsh he gave an interview to Channel 4 News where he acknowledged that British domestic intelligence, MI5, green lighted his journey to war torn Syria. When the reporter, Darshna Soni asked him whether he fought or trained anyone to fight, Begg replied, Continue reading →

Robin Yassin-Kassab: A Case Study of Israel in Syrian Regime-Change Propaganda

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The unvarnished truth about the war in Syria can inadvertently seep out even in the most unlikely places. That is, among the regime-change peddlers and propagandists. Admittedly, one needs to be highly attentive but it’s right there in front of one’s eyes for any objective observer. So if we turn to one of Britain’s leading regime-change propagandists, Robin Yassin-Kassab, co-author with a certain Leila al-Shami of the much praised apologia for the Western backed insurgency in Syria, “Burning Country: Syrians in Revolution and War”, he clearly states that the uprising was militarised and weaponised from the beginning. In fact, he writes that all Syrians were purchasing smuggled weapons “since the crisis began. These were ubiquitous in the Lebanese, Turkish and Iraqi border areas where the black market thrived and the armed conflict burned earliest.”[i]

Needless to say, it isn’t the first time that external actors have attempted to use Syria’s borders as a pathway to overthrow its government. In 1957, British and American intelligence planned “to stage fake border incidents as an excuse for an invasion by Syria’s pro-western neighbours.” This 1957 plot, according to The Guardian, called for funding of a “Free Syria Committee” and the arming of “political factions with paramilitary or other actionist capabilities.” If this plot had materialised, the Free Syria Committee, no doubt, would have had an army. 

For some strange reason, Yassin-Kassab neglects to mention in his propaganda book the other border through which arms flowed, namely Israel’s. Throughout the war against Syria there have been rumours that Israel has been supporting and arming Syrian fighters, collectively known as the Free Syrian Army (FSA). The official story now is that Israel began supporting militants in 2013 and not when the insurgency began in 2011. The first time Yassin-Kassab even hints at Israeli involvement in the war on Syria appears well into the second half of his book where he recounts an act of brutal sectarianism committed by al-Qaeda’s franchise, Jabhat al-Nusra in 2015 in southern Syria on the border with Zionist entity. In retaliation, for the sectarian killing of 23 Druze inhabitants by al-Qaeda rebels, local Druze in the occupied Golan attacked an ambulance carrying wounded and rescued Syrian rebel fighters being transferred to Israel for hospitalisation. But according to Yassin-Kassab, it is nothing but “Assadist media conspiracy theories which imagine Israel and Nusra in alliance”.[ii] Continue reading →

How Yassin-Kassab Portrayed the Jihadi Capture of Aleppo as “Liberation”

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Robin Yassin-Kassab has distinguished himself as one of Britain’s leading regime-change propagandists. Whether it’s Libya, Syria or Venezuela, Mr. Yassin-Kassab can be handsomely relied upon to supply the clever and poetic armoury to push forward narratives to facilitate Western imperialism militarily overhauling a nation-state not to its predisposition. For most of the last decade, Syria was his favoured target for spewing regime-change propaganda. His byline has furnished The Guardian, Foreign Policy, Newsweek as well as the media of the Gulf state despots such as Al-Jazeera, The National and Al-Araby. Yassin-Kassab’s main contribution to the Syria regime-change campaign culminated in a book he co-authored with a certain Ms Leila Al-Shami titled, ‘Burning Country: Syrians in Revolution and War’.

War or regime-change propaganda is obviously nothing new. For the hundred years before the outbreak of the war on Syria, the Western establishment have provided bogus claims as pretext for war. Among the most infamous are Huns eating Belgian babies during World War One; Vietnam’s Gulf of Tonkin when the United States directly attacked Vietnam on the pretext of falsely claiming it was attacked by the Vietnamese; Iraqi soldiers removing babies from incubators in Kuwaiti hospitals in 1990; Weapons of Mass Destruction falling in the hands of al-Qaeda peddled by George Bush and Tony Blair regimes; Iraq’s purchase of Uranium from Niger; African mercenaries on Viagra killing and raping their way through Libya before the regime-change in Libya commenced. This essay argues that Yassin-Kassab’s account in ‘Burning Country’ of what happened in Aleppo in July 2012 must be seen in this ignoble historical context of regime-change propaganda. He begins his account of Aleppo with the following:   Continue reading →

When British (ex) Foreign Secretary William Hague sent condolences to an al-Qaeda “martyr”.

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The ‘enemy of my enemy is my friend’ is one of the most simplest proverbs to understand. As far as the Middle East and Muslim majority countries are concerned it was employed first by the British, and then the United States when the latter inherited the mantle of defending western interests during the Cold War. As the Financial Times admitted just after the recent jihadi attacks in England:

“…armed Islamists were viewed as cold war allies of the west. Osama bin Laden’s mujahedin and the CIA were on the same side in the fight against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan.”

So it was no surprise in 2014, that when a young British-Libyan jihadi was killed in Syria, former British foreign secretary, William Hague sent condolences Continue reading →