In March 2011, a peaceful demonstration against Syria President Bashar al-Assad, which arose out of the larger “Arab Spring” movement sweeping North Africa and the Middle East, was met with violent opposition by government troops. So began the Syrian Civil War.
By February 2016, 470,000 Syrians had been killed in the conflict, according to the Syrian Center for Policy Research, an independent Syrian research organization. More than 5.6 million Syrians have fled their country, creating a wave of refugees who first flooded Syria’s neighbors and then started heading to Europe and beyond, according to the UN. Another 6.1 million have been uprooted from their homes in Syria.
Syria is now in its eighth year of a war. That has major implications for the region, national security, and global security. While the Syrian conflict may have started out as a civil war, due to a complex web historical, religious, geographic and geopolitical factors, Syria now represents one of the world’s largest and riskiest challenges. It puts Russia and Iran on a possible collision course with the United States and its allies. Not to mention a refugee crisis of epic proportions.
But if you look closely, you might see that this is the standard “modus operandi” of a multinational organization bent on world domination—this is not the first time they have done this.
Why Syria is Important
Syria was once part of the ancient Assyrian kingdom which, for decades, enjoyed peace amongst its varied religious groups, including the majority Sunni Muslim population, Christians and the minority Shia Muslims. Syria shares its borders with Turkey to the north, Iraq to the east, Lebanon and the Mediterranean to the west, and Israel and Jordan to the south, making it a major strategic player in the Middle East.
This makes Syria extraordinarily valuable to Russia. Russia has had a naval station in Tartus for over 40 years. The Tartus base is Russia’s marine and naval power foothold in the Mediterranean region—they have made clear their plans to renovate and improve this base.
This region is a major transportation corridor for Intra-European trade—the flow of oil has major implications for Russia and the United States.
Syria is also a huge weapons buyer for Russia. According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute’s estimates, Russian arms exports to Syria in the five years from 2008 to 2012 totaled about $1.1 billion (at 1990 prices) out of a worldwide total of $35.2 billion.
For the United States, Syria represents a major strategic front from which to fight the global war on terror. That is why the United States wants a democratic (read friendly to the US) government. There is also the issue of oil and oil prices, as well as disruption to the global market. Remember, there are many oil pipelines that pass through Syria. This creates a national security issue for the United States, and we are already seeing rising gas prices. To the point that President Trump has considered releasing or selling oil from the National Strategic Petroleum Reserves as far back as May of 2017.
The War has Now Become a Sectarian (Religious) One
The “strife” and “civil revolt” was just the excuse to start a war that has now become divided along sectarian lines. Which of course, was the intent to begin with.
You see, it is expected that an average person of average intellect would hold a great number of grievances against Bashar al-Assad. In fact, most of his citizenry were already fed up with their inability to find jobs, heavily restricted freedoms, and even worse…the rampant political corruption. So it was the perfect hot bed in which to instill professional agitators.
The BBC reported how the strife in Syria and North Africa began: “In March 2011, pro-democracy demonstrations erupted in the southern city of Deraa, inspired by the ‘Arab Spring’ in neighboring countries.”
With this impetus, the people of Syria revolted. But their protest was met with “lethal force.” This then prompted the people into armed insurrection. In fact, the war in Syria has gone through three stages: shootings, mortar attacks (2012), and air strikes. Assad point-blank promised to destroy the rebellion of “foreign backed terrorism.” Therein lies the problem and the solution.
The lines of conflict are clearly drawn. You have Syria and its allies, Russia and Iran, versus the United States, Turkey, France, and Saudi Arabia—who back the anti-government rebels.
You see, the president’s loyalist forces are the Shia Alawite sect. By and large, anyone who fights for Assad is lumped into this group whether they are or not. According to The Guardian: “Over the past four years the vicious war in Syria has amplified sectarian sentiment so that Alawites are now identified en masse with Bashar al-Assad and Sunnis with the opposition.” Lebanon’s Hezbollah, a militant Shia group backed by Iran and supporting Assad, reinforces this binary narrative.
Further, according to several sources, the Syrian Civil War is an intensely sectarian conflict. The focus of the conflict has been identified by some as a ruling minority Alawite government and allied Shi’a governments such as Iran, pitted against the country’s Sunni Muslim majority who are aligned with the Syrian opposition and their Sunni Turkish and Persian Gulf state backers. However, Sunni Muslims make up the majority of the Syrian Arab Army and many hold high governmental positions. Others identify it as the secular Syrian government, made up of all religious groups pitted against the Islamist opposition, per Wikipedia.
All of which points us to the real puppet masters behind the scenes: The Muslim Brotherhood.
The Society of the Muslim Brothers, better known as the Muslim Brotherhood, is a transnational Sunni Islamist organization.
The Brotherhood’s stated goal is to instill the Quran and the Sunnah as the “sole reference point for…ordering the life of the Muslim family, individual, community…and state.”
In more civilized parts of the world, the Muslim Brotherhood supports mass “immigration” into neighborhoods until such time that the majority of the populace is Muslim. At that time, they become the largest voting block and take control of the government. Review my article “Following the Rise of Islam” for more information.
But in highly unstable countries, the Muslim Brotherhood’s approach is vastly different. They create internal strife, plant and install professional agitators, cause rebellions, and then use the resulting chaos to infiltrate Muslim extremists into other countries with legitimate fleeing refugees.
In another BBC report: “Europe has been inundated with, and is now fending off, unwelcome, militant, uncivilized ‘migrants’ (read: refugees) from Syria in the past few years. UN statistics indicate that ‘at least 6.1 million ordinary people have had to flee their homes inside Syria, while another 5.6 million have fled abroad.'”
As reported by the Jewish Library: “In an effort to possibly hide their militant Islamist rules from the eyes of Western observers, the Brotherhood removed the organizational by-laws from their main English language website in mid-February 2011. The bylaws, which were still available to Arabic readers, have long been a source of discussion and debate because of the group’s stated goal of establishing an Islamic state while uniting Muslims around the world. For example, section E of the bylaws states, ‘Need to work on establishing the Islamic State, which seeks to effectively implement the provisions of Islam and its teachings.’ Likewise, Section G reads as follows: ‘The sincere support for a global cooperation in accordance with the provisions of the Islamic Sharia…and constructive participation towards building a new basis of human civilization as is ensured by the overall teachings of Islam.”
Here are just a few of the questionable activities perpetuated by the Brotherhood:
The resistance movement in Afghanistan formed in opposition to the leftist policies of King Zahir Shah. The movement had connections to the Muslim Brotherhood.
Nasser’s successor in Egypt, Anwar Sadat, promised reforms, and that he would implement Shariah. However, Sadat’s peace treaty with Israel in 1979 angered the Brotherhood, which led to his assassination in 1981.
In 1989, the Jordanian Brotherhood’s political wing, the Islamic Action Front, won 23 out of 80 seats in Jordan’s parliament. King Hussein tried to limit their influence by changing the election laws, but in the 1993 elections, they became the largest group in the parliament. They strongly opposed the Jordanian-Israeli Peace Treaty in 1994.
In 1984, the Muslim Brotherhood was partially re-accepted in Egypt as a religious organization, but was placed under heavy scrutiny by security forces. It remains a source of friction even today.
The Russian government alleges that the Muslim Brotherhood is a key force in the ongoing Chechen revolt. Russian officials accused the Muslim Brotherhood of planning the December 27, 2002 suicide car bombing of the headquarters of the Russian-backed government in Grozny, Chechnya.
So, could the Muslim Brotherhood be the very “foreign backed terrorists” Assad was referring to? It would make sense.
Consider, on April 14, 2018, combined forces from Britain, the US, and France fired missiles in a stated effort to destroy alleged chemical weapons factories in Syria. The armed attack was in response to an alleged Syrian government-backed chemical weapons attack in the eastern town of Douma the week before.
But if you have been following me for any length of time, you know that this alleged “chemical attack” was highly dubious…at best. In fact, Syria and Russia both have claimed that no such chemical weapons assault ever occurred. Yet the US puts the blame at Putin’s feet and not Assad’s.
So why the fake news story of this chemical attack? As reported in the New York Times: In March 2018, Trump “froze more than $200 million in funds for recovery efforts in Syria while his administration reassesses Washington’s role in the Syrian conflict.” The American president indicated his belief that it was time for the 2,000 troops engaged in Syria to return home. But the “alleged” chemical attack on Douma changed US foreign policy, which counter-attacked, as previously noted.
Could this have been a black flag operation to continue US participation in the Syrian conflict? You decide. But the fact is we continue to be in Syria and the conditions there have only gotten worse.
Panos Moumtzis, U.N. Humanitarian Coordinator for the Syria crisis holds the opinion that the situation in Syria has gotten much worse this year. According to Global Security.org, he said: “We see in 2018 the humanitarian situation inside Syria being the worst we have seen since the war started: a very dramatic deterioration, massive displacement, disrespect of protection of civilians and people’s lives still being turned upside down.”
And just when you were under the belief that things couldn’t possibly get any worse in war-torn Syria, analysts are now speculating that anti-Muslim Israel will wage war with pro-Muslim Iran, in pro-Muslim Syria—because Iran has military installations in Syria. Remember, it was Israeli intelligence that was the organization that “convinced” the United States that there was a chemical attack in Douma.
So, could the United States have been lied to in order to keep us in Syria? You decide.
Why continue the sectarian violence in Syria? Because one more anti-Sunni Muslim government perishes (remember Hussein’s B’ath party and the invasion of Iraq), thus the objective of the Muslim Brotherhood is one step closer to fruition.
Clearly, there are puppets and puppet masters. To anyone who is paying attention, the Muslim Brotherhood is a clear and present danger to our national security and it is this writer’s opinion that they should be listed as a terrorist organization. At the very least, they should be described as an organization funding terrorism.
