Robin Yassin-Kassab and the Syrian Revolution

Father & Son - Bashir and Hafez al-Assad

Assad & the Vortex of Terror

I went to a meeting tonight at Sussex University to hear Robin Yassin-Kassab, who is of mixed Syrian and English parentage, speak about the Syrian revolution and what has gone wrong.  Sponsored by Sussex Friends of Syria society it was both illuminating and depressing.

Devastation in the Syrian civil war

Robin is the co-author of a new book Burning Country about the Syrian revolution.

Robin Yassin-Kassab

The problem with the meeting was the controlled nature of the ‘conversation’ whereby an interlocutor posed a number of questions throughout, leaving little time for genuine discussion. Unfortunately Robin chose to shield himself, via his interlocutor, from criticism.

Syria Anadolu

It is somewhat unfortunate that the Sussex Friends of Syria Society felt the need to protect Robin from criticism.  It suggests that he is not so confident of the case he makes when subject to challenge.  Despite criticism of him as a war-monger by a number of people, I went with an open mind.  I went  away with a number of doubts as to his motives and political position, not least in view of his repeated attack on 'leftists' - as if there was a unified left position on Syria and in particular his support for Turkey's attacks on the Kurds.

Damascus

Robin Yassin-Kassab clearly has an encyclopedic knowledge of Syria and the different groups.  His knowledge of the revolutionary councils and the Syrian civil society, the democratic formations that have been thrown up in the struggle against the Assad regime is impressive.  What is less than impressive is his political judgement.

Protests at death of 6 people in Egypt

Robin accurately described the grisly record of the Syrian regime of Bashir al-Assad and before that Haffez al-Assad.  It is a regime to which the United States rendered prisoners to be tortured [see Daraa protests are the spark Syria needed] like Maher Arar who was kidnapped at John F Kennedy airport by US security and deported to Syria rather than Canada, even though he was a dual Canadian-Syrian citizen.  He was tortured and detained for a year in Syria before being released back to Canada. The Canadian government compensated him for his terrible ordeal but it is noticeable that the US Courts refused to allow a challenge to the actions of the US government.

It is a regime which has used barrel bombs and poison gas against civilians and which has killed the vast majority of the 250,000 people estimated to have died in the civil war, which uses torture as a matter of course and which ‘disappears’ those it tortures and kidnaps.

No one should believe that the road to revolution or peace in the Middle East goes through the Assad regime.

Likewise I have no doubt that he is right to say that Assad deliberately stimulated the growth of the Jihadi groups in Syria, both as a means of confessionalising the struggle and as a way of painting himself as the bulwark against Islamic terrorism.  He did this by, amongst other things, releasing some 1,500 Islamists in 2011 at the same time as he was slaughtering demonstrators on the street.

There is also no doubt that the Russian intervention and bombing on the side of Assad has made the situation far worse and further that their intense bombing, which has primarily targeted the civilian resistance against Assad has caused mass civilian casualties.  The Russian bombing has been targeted at civilian structures – schools, clinics and homes – and as such they have been guilty of war crimes.  It is, in this context, a pity that Stop the War Coalition hasn’t been more outspoken in condemning the Russian attacks.  Propping up Assad is not an answer to the present conflict.

I can even accept that many people joined Islamist groups like Jaysh al-Islam and Ahrar ash-Sham as a consequence of the oppressive qualities of the Assad regime.  There is no doubt that the Free Syrian Army or components thereof deserve support in their battles against both the Assad regime and Isis, although the FSA have also allied with the Al Qaeda group al-Nusra Front.

If this were all that Yassin-Kassab had to say about the struggle of the different groups in Syria, then he would be worth listening to. 

What Yassin-Kassab fails to perceive in what was often a rant against ‘leftists’ was that the Syrian revolution takes place in a context, viz. that Israel in particular wishes to see Syria split into its confessional parts – Sunni, Alawite, Kurdish.  A scenario that the United States will not be disappointed with.  In just the same way as the US attack on Iraq split the country into three and pitted Shi'ite against Sunni in a country where there had been little or no conflict between them before the invasion.

That is the context in which Hezbollah has come to the aid of the Assad regime.  It is also, to a lesser extent the reason why the Iranian regime has become involved in propping up Assad.

For Israel and the United States, Hezbollah is undoubtedly the key target, as it is the only force in the Arab world to have defeated Israel, in 2006.  The strengthening of imperialism will not, in the long terms, be of any comfort to the Syrian or the Iraq people. 

What I most took exception to was Yassin-Kassab’s support for Turkey’s shelling of the Kurdish PYD, on the grounds that they were operating in Arab areas and presumably because they were fighting some of the murderous Turkomen groups.  Yassin-Kassab also attacked the Kurdish PKK which is fighting against the genocidal Turkish regime of Erdogan in the South of Turkey.  The PKK was a nasty Marxist group from what I could ascertain rather than the self-defence group that is overwhelmingly supported by the Kurdish people.

Whilst professing support for Kurdish self-determination Yassin-Kassab also supports repression by the Turkish state, which is somewhat at odds with support for the self-determination of the Syrian people.  I wasn’t able to pursue the point because of the vigilance of Yassin-Kassab’s protectors at the meeting which suggests that this is rather a sore point.

I also interjected at the end of the meeting when Yassin-Kassab referred to fundamentalism in the region.  I pointed out that much of it was a product of a deliberate strategy by the West.  When I said that Saudi Arabia was the fount of fundamentalism in the region Yassin-Kassab demurred and when I pointed that the Saudi regime was a creation of British and then American imperialism he sought to locate the rise of the regime in the 17th century rather than as a product of the first world war and Britain’s sponsorship of Ibn Saud, which included both finance and weaponry, in his battles against his rivals in Arabia, in particular Sharif Hussein of Mecca [see Israel andSaudi Arabia - The Roots of a Special Relationship].  It is indicative of the fact that Yassin-Kassab fails to place the travails of the Syrian people in the context of Western imperialism.

Tony Greenstein

See After Tunisia: Robin Yassin-Kassab on Syria  and ‘I was terribly wrong’ - writers look back at the Arab spring five years on 

Members of Egyptian group Ultras Nahdawy during a demonstration against the death of six people at anti-regime protests west of Cairo, July 2015. Photograph: Belal Wagdy/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images


Robin Yassin-Kassab’s book Burning Country: Syrians in Revolution and War, co‑written with Leila al-Shami, is published by Pluto.

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.