Druze attack Military Ambulance Carrying al-Qaeda Terrorists

Military Ambulance that was attacked

Israeli papers are calling it a 'lynching'.  Another word might be justice.  Those who slaughter civilians aren't entitled to the benefits of Geneva Convention protection - be they al-Nusra or ISIS.

UN Disengagement Observer Force (UNDOF) troops move through Israel’s Golan Heights before crossing into Syria, August 31.. (photo credit:REUTERS/BAZ RATNER)

Despite the continuing pretence that Israel is only providing humanitarian assistance to Syrians, regardless of political affiliation, the truth is now widely known.  Israel has a de facto agreement with the Al Qaeda Al Nusra Front along the Syrian border.

Military Ambulance

This was highlighted a few days ago in a rather spectacular fashion when Syrian Druze from the village of Majdal Shams, who live in the Occupied Golan Heights, attacked an Israeli ambulance conveying 2 Al Nusra fighters to hospital, killing one and severely injuring another.  The reason for this was a recent massacre in North-West Syria near Idlib.

Meeting between al-Nusra and Israeli army earlier this year

Twenty-thousand Druze live in the Golan Heights as well as 110,000 in Israel.  Earlier in the year a Druze Sedki al-Maket, who photographed a meeting between Al Nusra and the Israeli security services, was arrested by Israel, which promptly instituted a gag order preventing news about it being published.  http://azvsas.blogspot.co.uk/2015/03/israel-supports-isis-and-al-qaeda-in.html

The feeble Israeli explanation beggars belief.  Does Israel provide ‘humanitarian medical assistance’ to fighters from Hamas or Hezbollah?  Does it return them to Gaza and Lebanon afterwards?  No, what it does do is hold up pregnant Palestinian women at checkpoints until they or their child dies.

Tony Greenstein

lynching

Total of 12 people detained for suspected involvement in ambulance attack that left one Syrian dead and another hurt

Israeli police said Thursday they arrested three more suspects in attacks by members of the Druze minority on military ambulances transporting wounded Syrians to the hospital.

In one of two incidents Monday, one Syrian was beaten to death and a second was hurt in an unprecedented outbreak of violence by Druze on the Golan Heights that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called a “lynching.”

 Two soldiers were also injured in the incident while trying to protect the wounded Syrians. Both soldiers were also members of the Druze community, according to a report in Israeli daily Yedioth Ahronoth Thursday.

Syria’s Druze are traditional allies of President Bashar aAssad, and have become caught up in the fighting.

“During the night, police and border guards in the north arrested three more suspects from the Druze community suspected of involvement in the events,” police spokeswoman Luba Samri said in a statement.

She said a gag order had been imposed on all other details of the investigation.

Police said they carried out a “wave of arrests” Wednesday, with media saying nine people had been detained.

Monday’s deadly incident took place hours after Druze in the neighboring Galilee region of Israel blocked and stoned a military ambulance they suspected was taking Syrian rebels to the hospital.

Both incidents demonstrate the anger felt by Druze towards the rebels and towards the Israelis, whom they suspect of providing medical help to the fighters.

Israel does not rule out the possibility that some of those given medical care are rebels.

Syria has said the two men in the ambulance were members of Al-Qaeda affiliate Al-Nusra Front. Israel says they were civilians.

The Druze are a secretive offshoot of Shiite Islam. Officials say there are 110,000 of them in northern Israel and another 20,000 on the Golan Heights.

New UN report reveals collaboration between Israel and Syrian rebels

NEW YORK – The Syrian ambassador to the UN has long complained of a Zionist conspiracy working with the Syrian rebels to overthrow President Bashar Assad.

Now, a report from the UN Disengagement Observer Force (UNDOF) reveals that Israel has been working closely with Syrian rebels in the Golan Heights and have kept close contact over the past 18 months. The report was submitted to the UN Security Council at the beginning of the month.

The documents show that Israel has been doing more than simply treating wounded Syrian civilians in hospitals. This and a few past reports have described transfer of unspecified supplies from Israel to the Syrian rebels, and sightings of IDF soldiers meeting with the Syrian opposition east of the green zone, as well as incidents when Israeli soldiers opened up the fence to allow Syrians through who did not appear to be injured.

At one point, a small tent city was erected around 300 meters away from the Israeli sector for about 70 families of Syrian deserters, the report said.

The Syrian army then sent a letter of complaint to UNDOF, warning them to evacuate the camp or it would be considered a target, and claiming that terrorists were using the camp to cross into Israel.

Israel’s health ministry says around 1,000 Syrians have received treatment in Golan hospitals, but maintains that only civilians are treated. The UNDOF report, on the other hand, says they have seen Israelis treating civilians as well as insurgents, including members of al-Qaida and Islamic State.

The report said UNDOF “observed at least 10 wounded persons being transferred by armed members of the opposition from the Bravo side across the cease-fire line.”

UNDOF has monitored the Golan Heights buffer zone between Israel and Syria since 1974. Six countries contributed to the 1,200-strong brigade.

UNDOF peacekeepers have been the target of kidnappings and attacks carried out by al-Qaida on the Syrian side since September, causing hundreds of troops to withdraw to across Israeli border.

Al-Qaeda’s Real Origins Exposed

Kerry with King Faisal

An interesting article but it doesn’t tell us much of what we didn’t know anyway.  Hilary Clinton has already admitted that the US created Al Qaeda to fight the Soviet Union in Afghanistan.
 
In Libya last year it was in alliance with Al Qaeda and In Syria the US, which never supports secular forces, supported Al Quaeda’s Al Nusra Front and destroyed the opposition to Assad.  SAl Qaeda are useful American puppets, they murder Jews and Christians and confessionalise the Middle East.  In Egypt their Salafist Party supported the Army Junta under al-Sisi.  Now that Bin Laden has been disposed of, things can go back to what they were.

Tony Greenstein



By Finian Cunningham
January 07, 2014

US top diplomat John Kerry must have taken us for fools. Earlier this week, speaking in Saudi Arabia, he warned that al-Qaeda in Syria and Iraq are “the most dangerous players in the region.”

The US secretary of state vowed Washington’s support for the Iraqi government in its fight to regain control of towns in its western province taken over by militants belonging to the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS).

That’s rich. The government of Syria is battling to root out these same al-Qaeda-linked militants. But in that country, Washington offers no such support. In fact, the priority there for Washington is to sack the government of President Bashar Al-Assad.

So, how does Kerry square that contradiction? In Iraq, al-Qaeda is a threat that needs to be defeated, whereas in Syria the very same organization is apparently not a threat, but the Syrian government is.
What’s even richer is that Kerry was issuing his warnings about al-Qaeda in the region surrounded by senior members of the House of Saud, who are known to all the world as the bankers, recruiters and weapons suppliers of this network.

Only a few months ago, media reports disclosed American diplomatic cables - going back to 2009 - in which the former US ambassador to Iraq explicitly stated that Saudi Arabia was financing and arming al-Qaeda extremists in Iraq.

American Ambassador Christopher Hill said then that intelligence showed that Saudi Arabia was “inciting sectarian violence” in the country.

Clinton Admits What We Knew

Hill added, “Intelligence sources reported that Saudi Arabia is based in the effort to destabilize the [Iraqi] government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki.”

Al-Qaeda in Iraq has since re-branded itself as the ISIS, also known as the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL). It is closely aligned with other extremist groups, such as Jabhat al-Nusra, Ahrar al-Shams, Liwa al-Islam and the Islamic Front.
 
The alphabet-soup nature of these myriad groups does not alter the fact that they all share the same extremist Saudi Wahhabi ideology, they operate under the flag of al-Qaeda, they have conducted the most vile atrocities against civilians, including Sunni, Shia and Christians, and they are all sponsored by Saudi Arabia.
 
Officially, the House of Saud maintains the risible fiction that it only supports “moderates” belonging to the so-called Free Syrian Army. But the unavoidable fact is that the oil-rich kingdom is the banker for the al-Qaeda-linked networks, as the former US ambassador to Iraq attested.
 
Even the mainstream Western media cannot hide that fact. In October 2013, the New York Times reported US officials admitting that weapons supplied to Saudi Arabia supposedly for the FSA were ending up in the hands of the extremist militants in Syria.
 
Iraqi sources this week confirmed that Saudi weapons supplied to the likes of the ISIS in Syria are now being used in that group’s resurgence in Iraq’s Western Anbar Province.
 
So there you have it. American weapons supplied covertly to Saudi Arabia are being used by al-Qaeda to inflict sectarian mayhem in Iraq, as well as in Syria, destabilizing both countries.

And yet John Kerry sitting alongside the Saudi terror sponsors has the audacity to publicly warn that al-Qaeda has become “the most dangerous player” in the region.

Kerry said during his Saudi visit, “This is a fight that belongs to the Iraqis.” Well actually, no. This is a fight in Iraq against terrorists sponsored by Saudi Arabia and the US.

Even more absurd was the American diplomat’s offer of military support to the Iraqi government against militants who have been armed by the US and its Saudi client.

“We are not contemplating putting boots on the ground [in Iraq]. This is their fight, but we’re going to help them in their fight.” 
Already, Washington has supplied the Iraqi government with Hellfire missiles and has promised to also send drones to the country, allegedly to combat al-Qaeda.
 
By boots on the ground, Kerry was referring to US troops, as opposed to al-Qaeda boots on the ground, which the US and the Saudis have already helped to mobilize, first in Syria, and now in Iraq.
That raises the seemingly bizarre scenario where the US is arming both sides in Iraq - the government and the al-Qaeda militants.
 
This should not, however, be seen as a contradiction, but rather as a cynical boon for the American weapons industry. First, create a terror problem, and secondly supply weapons to deal with that problem. That makes for a win-win outcome for American business.
 
None of this should be in the least bit surprising. The US has been working covertly with Saudi Arabia and British military intelligence for more than three decades to foster and fuel al-Qaeda extremists, beginning in Afghanistan to fight the Soviet Union from the late 1970s until 1990.
Since then, al-Qaeda has served as a protean ideological cover for imperialist predation in the Middle East and beyond. It has undergone many reinventions with mercurial name changes along the way. 
But the bottom line is that it is a Western/Saudi creation, which alternates between an enemy of convenience and a ruthless proxy for waging regime change.
 
The old Western ruse of “enemy” may have worked a few years back. But now the contradictions are playing simultaneously and in neighboring countries in such way that the ruse is exposed as a blatant lie.
 
Kerry and his Saudi terror cronies may like to fool themselves, but they are fooling no one else.

Finian Cunningham (born 1963) has written extensively on international affairs, with articles published in several languages. He is a Master’s graduate in Agricultural Chemistry and worked as a scientific editor for the Royal Society of Chemistry, Cambridge, England, before pursuing a career in journalism.