Al Qaeda alive and ruthless in Syria.
Washington brings Syria’s Al Qaeda in from the cold
Ten years after Washington launched a bloody war for regime change in Syria that has left some half a million dead and the country in ruins, the US media has begun an unmistakable propaganda campaign to rehabilitate the principal American proxy ground force in this war, Al Qaeda.
This was the significance of an extraordinary interview that aired last week on the Public Broadcasting Service’s (PBS) Frontline program. Its subject was Abu Mohammad al-Jolani, the founder of the Syrian affiliate of Al Qaeda. The US State Department has declared Jolani a “Specially Designated Global Terrorist,” with a $10 million bounty on his head.
It grew to become one of the largest operations in the history of the CIA, with a reported annual budget of nearly $1 billion. Washington kept up the pretense that its arms and money were flowing to “vetted” and “moderate” Syrian “rebels.” In reality, it was the militias linked to Al Qaeda, which included Islamist fighters from Turkey, Iraq, Libya and as far away as Chechnya and China’s Xinjiang region, that dominated the anti-Assad forces and became the biggest beneficiaries of US largesse.
The interview conducted by Frontline’s Martin Smith was essentially a “media show”—Smith’s words—staged to whitewash the bloody history of the Al Nusra Front’s terrorism in Syria and provide Jolani with a forum for proclaiming the front’s current iteration, Hayat Tahrir Al-Sham (HTS), a legitimate political force and natural ally of Washington. The terrorist designation attached to himself and his organization was “unfair” and “political,” Jolani said.
Smith asked Jolani to take a pledge: “Will you say here and now then, very clearly, that you as a former Al Qaeda leader … will not support … any attacks against the United States?” The Al Qaeda veteran readily accepted.
Frontline’s bid to rehabilitate Jolani, the chief of this regime, was not a one-off. This was made clear Wednesday with the publication by the New York Times of a feature article by its Middle East correspondent Ben Hubbard based on an HTS-sponsored visit last month to Idlib. Hubbard described the area as “Syria’s last bastions under rebel control.”
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https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2021/04/08/syri-a08.html
