US shipping weapons to Syrian Rebels - al - Nusra ( US declared terrorist organization ) .........By the way , al - Nusra is believed to have recently used chemical weapons ( alleged redline ) in Aleppo ...... US caught once again behaving hypocritically ! Iraq decides to ignore US demand to bar Iran overflights - an example of lies catching up with the US and Nato ?

http://news.antiwar.com/2013/03/27/officials-recent-arms-influx-preparing-rebels-to-attack-damascus/

Officials: Recent Arms Influx Preparing Rebels to Attack Damascus

Increase in Arms Smuggling Portends Push on Capital

by Jason Ditz, March 27, 2013

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On Monday, it was revealed that the CIA is overseeing what is being called a “sharp” increase in weapons being smuggled to the Syrian rebels from abroad. Officials are not only confirming this, but say it is part of a specific policy to set up an attack on the capital.

Syria’s government has mostly given up on fighting rebels in small battles nationwide, and has the bulk of its military forces in and around the capital city of Damascus. Arab officials say the surge in arms is part of a “master plan” to conquer Damascus militarily.

Exactly when the attack will come is still unclear, and the officials say it would take “days or weeks” for the push to begin in earnest. With Syria’s military having plenty of time to dig in around the capital, it could be a bloody siege indeed.

It does explain rebel interest in seizing the border zones with Turkey and Jordan, since the weapons are pouring in now on both fronts. Though rebel commanders continue to maintain “progress” in winning the war outright, they still seem stalemated in the major cities and added weapons don’t mean they’re going to run over Syria’s military.

The rebels also seem more divided than ever, with the CORF leadership in tatters and the Islamists openly clashing with secularists in the east. This could make it difficult to organize the sort of huge offensive outsiders seem to be envisioning.

and.......

http://news.antiwar.com/2013/03/27/former-un-monitor-urges-no-fly-zone-in-syria/

Former UN Monitor Urges ‘No-Fly Zone’ in Syria

Wants to 'Level the Playing Field' for Rebels

by Jason Ditz, March 27, 2013

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Norwegian General Robert Mood, the top figure in last year’s failed UN ceasefire monitoring mission, has urged Western military intervention in the Syrian civil war,imposing a “no-fly zone” across Northern Syria to help the rebels.

Mood says taking air superiority out of the hands of the Syrian government would “level the playing field,” but added that he opposes sending arms to the Syrian rebels.

NATO’s own leadership has repeatedly rejected calls to intervene directly in the civil war, though several of the nations (Britain especially) did express an eagerness to start throwing arms at the rebels.

Mood’s ceasefire monitoring mission ended fairly abruptly when the Syrian rebels announced they would no longer abide by a ceasefire brokered by Kofi Annan. The deal effectively forced Annan’s resignation and marks the last serious effort to get talks between rebels and government forces going, and the rebels now say they oppose any talks on general principle.

and.....





http://news.antiwar.com/2013/03/26/syrian-rebel-infighting-islamists-clash-with-secularists/

Syrian Rebel Infighting: Islamists Clash With Secularists

With Govt Mostly Out of Northeast, Rebels Fight Each Other

by Jason Ditz, March 26, 2013

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There have been long-standing concerns that the Syrian Civil War would, assuming the rebels win, simply lead to another war between secular and Islamist rebels. They don’t seem to be waiting for the first war to be over, however, as the Jabhat al-Nusra is in increasingly open warfare with the Farouq Battalions, a segment of the Free Syrian Army (FSA), in the northeast.

The attempted assassination of a top commander in the Farouqs, Mohammad al-Daher, has sparked anger across the region, and with FSA factions holding the border crossings in the area, could set the stage for a battle across the Jazira region, which the Syrian government has mostly abandoned in favor of defensive positions around Damascus.

The rhetoric has been setting the stage for this for awhile, with Jabhat al-Nusra calling the Farouqs thieves and non-believers, while al-Daher, speaking from his hospital bed, said he believes he will be killed “either by the regime of by the Jabhat. There is no difference, they are both dirty.”

This divide is a long-standing problem for the rebels, though realistically as foreign jihadists flock to the nation the Jabhat al-Nusra seems to be getting stronger while more and more secularists, scared by the Islamist tone of the rebel movement, are backing out.

http://news.antiwar.com/2013/03/26/nato-no-intention-to-intervene-militarily-in-syria/

NATO: ‘No Intention to Intervene Militarily in Syria’

Washington instead relegates itself to a proxy war in Syria

by John Glaser, March 26, 2013

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NATO reiterated on Tuesday it had no intention of conducting any military intervention in Syria’s conflict after a Syrian opposition leader again urged the United States to intervene on behalf of the rebels by protecting and reinforcing rebel-held areas.

Secretary of State John Kerry signs the guest book at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Amman, Jordan on March 23, 2013

“NATO has no intention to intervene militarily in Syria,” a NATO official said in response to a request from Syrian opposition leader Moaz Alkhatib for American forces to defend rebel fighters with Patriot missiles.

“I have asked Mr Kerry to extend the umbrella of the Patriot missiles to cover the Syrian north and he promised to study the subject,” Alkhatib said.

While the US has all but taken direct military action off the table, it has been increasing its involvement in the Syrian conflict by proxy, helping send arms from throughout the region to rebel fighters and even training some in neighboring Jordan.

The Obama administration claims these efforts to arm and train the Syrian rebels are intended to bolster the so-called moderate elements of the opposition, but intelligence officials have previously criticized America’s capacity to do so.

US interventionism in Syria is contributing to a proxy war being played out by virtually all the region’s players. Syria maintains Russia’s backing, as well as Iran’s, while Saudi Arabia, UAE, Jordan, Qatar, Turkey and others aggressively back the Syrian rebels, many of whom would prove dangerous if brought to power.

“The moderate political and military command structure the U.S. has been trying to foster within the Syrian opposition appears to be fracturing, a victim of bitter Arab regional rivalries,” writes The Washington Post‘s David Ingatius, with Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states promoting Sunni jihadists and Qatar and Turkey pushing for an Islamist-led government by the Muslim Brotherhood in Syria.

http://www.infowars.com/confirmed-us-shipping-weapons-to-syria-al-nusras-mystery-sponsors-revealed/

CONFIRMED: US Shipping Weapons to Syria – Al Nusra’s “Mystery” Sponsors Revealed

Tony Cartalucci
Infowars.com
March 25, 2013

While US President Barack Obama and the Western media lied in concert to the world regarding America’s role in supporting terrorists operating in Syria, it is now revealed that the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) has been shipping weapons to Syria via NATO-member Turkey and Jordan since at least early 2012. The New York Times in their article titled, “Arms Airlift to Syria Rebels Expands, With C.I.A. Aid,” admits that:

With help from the C.I.A., Arab governments and Turkey have sharply increased their military aid to Syria’s opposition fighters in recent months, expanding a secret airlift of arms and equipment for the uprising against President Bashar al-Assad, according to air traffic data, interviews with officials in several countries and the accounts of rebel commanders.

The airlift, which began on a small scale in early 2012 and continued intermittently through last fall, expanded into a steady and much heavier flow late last year, the data shows. It has grown to include more than 160 military cargo flights by Jordanian, Saudi and Qatari military-style cargo planes landing at Esenboga Airport near Ankara, and, to a lesser degree, at other Turkish and Jordanian airports.

The New York Times piece attempts to spin America’s role in arming militants in Syria. The Times continues by stating:

The American government became involved, the former American official said, in part because there was a sense that other states would arm the rebels anyhow. The C.I.A. role in facilitating the shipments, he said, gave the United States a degree of influence over the process, including trying to steer weapons away from Islamist groups and persuading donors to withhold portable antiaircraft missiles that might be used in future terrorist attacks on civilian aircraft.

This is categorically false. Already, in 2007, US officials had divulged plans to destroy Syria by arming sectarian extremists, using Saudi Arabia and other regional actors as proxies to launder US and Israel support through – maintaining a degree of credibility amongst the terrorist receiving the aid, as well as a degree of plausible deniabiliy for Washington and Tel Aviv politically. In Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Seymour Hersh’s 2007 New Yorker article,  “The Redirection: Is the Administration’s new policy benefiting our enemies in the war on terrorism?” the strategy was described as follows:

To undermine Iran, which is predominantly Shiite, the Bush Administration has decided, in effect, to reconfigure its priorities in the Middle East. In Lebanon, the Administration has coöperated with Saudi Arabia’s government, which is Sunni, in clandestine operations that are intended to weaken Hezbollah, the Shiite organization that is backed by Iran. The U.S. has also taken part in clandestine operations aimed at Iran and its ally Syria. A by-product of these activities has been the bolstering of Sunni extremist groups that espouse a militant vision of Islam and are hostile to America and sympathetic to Al Qaeda.

Perhaps more importantly, the report would also state:

Some of the core tactics of the redirection are not public, however. The clandestine operations have been kept secret, in some cases, by leaving the execution or the funding to the Saudis, or by finding other ways to work around the normal congressional appropriations process, current and former officials close to the Administration said.

Clearly, that “sense that other states would arm the rebels anyhow” was gleaned from premeditated conspiracies long-ago hatched between Washington, Tel Aviv, and Riyadh. And as the terrible consequences of this conspiracy come to fruition with tens of thousands dead, the West is eager to disclaim any and all responsibility, hoping sincerely that the public hasn’t the collective memory or intelligence to pick up a newspaper from 2007 and read what they had already admitted to planning.

“Mystery” of Al Qaeda’s al-Nusra Sponsorship Revealed   

The confirmed admission implicates NATO directly in militarily intervening in Syria’s ongoing conflict and reveals the source of arms and cash that have ended up primarily in the hands of Al Qaeda’s Syrian franchise, US designated terror front, Jabhat al-Nusra. (see here for other examples of US arming listed terror organizations)

The CIA, Western media, and Western politicians insist that they have taken every precaution to ensure the now admitted torrent of cash and weapons that have been flowing into Syria to compound and perpetuate the bloodbath, did not end up in the hands of terrorists. However, no plausible explanation has been given as to where al-Nusra is getting its cash and weapons from, or how it has managed to eclipse the extensively Western-backed “moderates,” to become the premier front in the fight against the Syrian people.

Indeed, the New York Times’ article “Syrian Rebels Tied to Al Qaeda Play Key Role in War,” states:

The lone Syrian rebel group with an explicit stamp of approval from Al Qaeda has become one of the uprising’s most effective fighting forces, posing a stark challenge to the United States and other countries that want to support the rebels but not Islamic extremists.

Money flows to the group, the Nusra Front, from like-minded donors abroad. Its fighters, a small minority of the rebels, have the boldness and skill to storm fortified positions and lead other battalions to capture military bases and oil fields. As their successes mount, they gather more weapons and attract more fighters.

The group is a direct offshoot of Al Qaeda in Iraq, Iraqi officials and former Iraqi insurgents say, which has contributed veteran fighters and weapons.

While the London Telegraph reports in their article, “Syria: how jihadist group Jabhat al-Nusra is taking over Syria’s revolution,” that:

And in recent weeks it is Jabhat al-Nusra, a radical jihadist group blacklisted by the US as terrorists and a group that wants Syria to be an uncompromising Islamic state governed by sharia, that is holding sway.

The group is well funded – probably through established global jihadist networks – in comparison to moderates. Meanwhile pro-democracy rebel group commanders say money from foreign governments has all but dried up because of fears over radical Islamists.

The effect is changing the face of the Syrian revolution

“The group is well funded – probably through established global jihadist networks – in comparison to moderates.” Could the London Telegraph be capable of such incomplete or incompetent reporting regarding what it seems to allude to as an unsolvable “mystery” regarding al-Nusra’s sponsors?

In October of 2012, the Land Destroyer Report published, “NATO Using Al Qaeda Rat Lines to Flood Syria With Foreign Terrorists,” which traced the logistical network now admitted to by the New York Times. This logistical network was then overlaid with Al Qaeda’s regional networks, documented extensively during the US occupation of Iraq by the US Army’s own West Point Combating Terrorism Center. The very regions along the Turkish-Syrian border, the Jordanian-Syrian border, and the Iraqi-Syrian border which served as recruiting and staging grounds for Al Qaeda terrorists during the Iraq War, now serve as the primary logistical hubs admittedly overseen by the CIA.

Image: (Left) West Point’s Combating Terrorism Center’s 2007 report, “Al-Qa’ida’s Foreign Fighters in Iraq” indicated which areas in Syria Al Qaeda fighters filtering into Iraq came from. The overwhelming majority of them came from Dayr Al-Zawr in Syria’s southeast, Idlib in the north near the Turkish-Syrian border, and Dar’a in the south near the Jordanian-Syrian border. (Right) A map indicating the epicenters of violence in Syria indicate that the exact same hotbeds for Al Qaeda in 2007, now serve as the epicenters of so-called “pro-democracy fighters.”

It is now admitted that thousands of tons of weapons have been smuggled into Syria by the US and its regional allies. While the Western media has attempted in the past to feign ignorance as to where Al Qaeda’s al-Nusra was getting their weapons from, it is now abundantly clear – al-Nusra’s power has expanded across Syria in tandem with the CIA’s ever-expanding operations along the nation’s borders. If the US is working directly with Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Turkey, to arm militants, who else could possibly be working to arm and fund al-Nusra on a greater scale if not this axis itself?

This criminal conspiracy appears to have escaped the UN’s competence and capabilities, requiring that states around the world mobilize an expedient response to the dangerous, unhinged and genocidal campaign being waged by the West against Syria. If the West refuses to end its direct fueling of the Syrian crisis or answer for how their weapons have ended up almost exclusively in al-Nusra’s hands, Syria’s allies must begin contemplating open and extensive aid to help the nation defend itself against overt international terrorism.

Reports indicate that it was al-Nusra who used chemical weapons in Syria’s northern city of Aleppo,according to the London Telegraph. An Al Qaeda terror front wielding WMDs, we are told, is the sum of all fears and the ultimate impetus driving the unending “War on Terror.” Through direct, intentional actions by the West itself, this nightmare has become a reality – one that must be addressed, lest the world descend into global anarchy or worse.

and.......

http://www.infowars.com/west-drops-syria-wmd-narrative-as-evidence-points-to-western-armed-terrorists/

West Drops Syria WMD Narrative As Evidence Points to Western-Armed Terrorists

Tony Cartalucci
Infowars.com
March 25, 2013

For the US, UK, France, and its regional partners including Israel, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Qatar, nothing would have suited their interests more than if the recent chemical attack reported in Aleppo Syria turned out to be (or could have been portrayed as being) the work of the Syrian government, or even “loose” weapons that had fallen into the hands of Al Qaeda terrorists the West both arms and condemns simultaneously.

However, a strange silence has fallen across the Western media regarding the chemical attack which Israel had even claimed to have “confirmed.”  Now, a recent report published in the London Telegraph by Channel 4 journalist Alex Thomson has produced convincing evidence that implicates the West’s terrorist proxies as the perpetrators, and goes far in explaining the otherwise inexplicable silence exhibited by Wall Street and London’s propaganda machine. Titled, “Syria chemical weapons: finger pointed at jihadists,” Thomson reported that:

The military’s version of events is that the home-made rocket was fired at a military checkpoint situated at the entrance to the town. The immediate effects were to induce vomiting, fainting , suffocation and seizures among those in the immediate area.

A second source – a medic at the local civilian hospital – said that he personally witnessed Syrian army helping those wounded and dealing with fatalities at the scene. That Syrian soldiers were among the reported 26 deaths has not been disputed by either side.

The military source who spoke to Channel 4 News confirmed that artillery reports from the Syrian Army suggest a small rocket was fired from the vicinity of Al-Bab, a district close to Aleppo that is controlled by Jabhat al-Nusra – a jihadist group said to be linked with al-Qaeda and deemed a “terrorist organisation” by the US.

Thomson describes his contact in Syria as “a trusted and hitherto reliable source.” Thomson’s report, coupled with the silence across the West’s governments and media houses, implies that indeed this version of the story falls closest yet to the truth. The West’s silence in the face of an otherwise spectacular opportunity to advance its agenda may also indicate its faltering legitimacy and the loss of confidence that it can rewrite, at will, reality to suit its agenda – as it has done so many times in the past.

The West also faces a growing crisis if its terrorist proxies continue using chemical weapons, whatever their origin. CNN had reported in December of 2012, in a report titled, “Sources: U.S. helping underwrite Syrian rebel training on securing chemical weapons,” that:

The United States and some European allies are using defense contractors to train Syrian rebels on how to secure chemical weapons stockpiles in Syria, a senior U.S. official and several senior diplomats told CNN Sunday.

The training, which is taking place in Jordan and Turkey, involves how to monitor and secure stockpiles and handle weapons sites and materials, according to the sources. Some of the contractors are on the ground in Syria working with the rebels to monitor some of the sites, according to one of the officials.

This would implicate the West directly in giving terrorists using chemical weapons against Syria’s population the knowledge and training to handle just such weapons. While the West continues to insist there is a divide between the terrorists it is arming, funding, and training, and the terrorists openly fighting under the banner of sectarian extremism, it is clear that even the US’ hand-picked “interim government” is run entirely by the sectarian extremist organization, the Muslim Brotherhood. Thomson’s report implicates the Al Qaeda affiliate al-Nusra as possibly being behind the attack, and notes that it is listed by the US as a “terrorist organisation.” However, so-called Syrian opposition leader, Moaz al-Khatib, had personally defended al-Nusra, openly admitting it was fighting alongside his Western-backed front.

As the West’s credibility crumbles regarding Syria, and as its “success” in Libya continues to burn, its arming, training, aiding and abetting of terrorists carrying out increasingly horrific atrocities which now appear to include the use of chemical weapons, will haunt them not only in their pursuit of transforming the Levant, but in many years to come, in regards to all of their geopolitical ambitions.

http://news.antiwar.com/2013/03/24/maliki-rejects-kerry-demand-to-bar-iran-overflights/

Maliki Rejects Kerry Demand to Bar Iran Overflights

Refuses to Make Any Changes Without Evidence

by Jason Ditz, March 24, 2013

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Secretary of State John Kerry made a surprise visit to Iraq today, visiting Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and pressing him to stop allowing Iranian flights to Syria from crossing over Iraqi territory, insisting they were carrying “arms and fighters” to the Syrian government.

This has been a long-standing complaint of the US, but officials have never presented any actual evidence to the public that this is the case, and today only insisted that the sheer volume of the overflights proved it must be weaponry. Maliki insisted that barring evidence they will not do anything.

Iran maintains that it is only shipping humanitarian aid to Syria, and Iraq has searched planes at random in the past, but insists that everything they found on those planes was exactly what Iran said, humanitarian aid. They have stopped the searches saying that there is no evidence to justify continuing them.

As the US picks up aid to the Syrian rebels, it is inevitable that they would hope to see Iraq clamp off the Assad government’s own sources. Yet with the Syrian rebels linked so closely to the Iraqi insurgency, the Iraqi government’s interests are decidedly different, and lacking evidence of any unlawful arms shipments in their airspace, there is little motivation for Iraq to do anything of the sort.