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 →