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by Manlio Dinucci
December 14, 2024
from
GlobalResearch Website
Abu Mohammed al-Jolani, today's
de facto ruler of Damascus, has an eloquent history:
he began his jihadist militancy in al-Qaeda's
ranks as an associate of
Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the
"caliph" who founded
ISIS, the Islamic State of
Iraq and Syria, in 2013.
In 2011, during the preparatory phase,
al-Baghdadi sent him to Syria with large sums of money for the
creation of the al-Nusra Front, a formally autonomous faction
but in reality, part of the
Islamic State.
The al-Jolani faction has been involved in the US-NATO operation to
destroy the Syrian state since its inception.
One of the reasons for this operation is the fact
that in July 2011 Syria, Iran and Iraq signed
an agreement for a pipeline that would connect Iran's South Pars
field, the largest in the world, to Syria and then to the
Mediterranean and Europe.
This would create an alternative energy corridor
to those through Turkey and other routes controlled by US and
European companies.
The covert war in Syria begins with a series of
terrorist attacks, mainly in Damascus and Aleppo.
Hundreds of elite British SAS specialists
operate in Syria alongside US and French units.
The operation is commanded from NATO ships in
the Turkish port of Alexandretta.
The strike force consists of an army of
Islamic groups from Afghanistan, Bosnia, Chechnya, Libya and
other countries.
The weapons arrive via an international network organized by
the CIA, which supplies them to
groups infiltrated into Syria, who have already been trained in
camps set up on Turkish and Jordanian territory.
The operation was directed from the advanced
headquarters of the US Central Command at the Al Udeid
airbase in Qatar.
At this point, in 2015, Moscow decided to
intervene directly in support of the Syrian army, at the request of
Damascus.
The intervention, carried out with air power,
showed that the US-led "anti-ISIS coalition" was pretending to
fight ISIS.
In just over two years, the Russian-Syrian
coalition has liberated about three-quarters of the country's
territory that had fallen into the hands of ISIS and other
US-backed movements.
In 2016, al-Jolani formally severed ties
with al-Qaeda and renamed the group Jabhat Fatah al-Sham, and
later in 2017 Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS).
Under Jolani, HTS became the dominant force in Idlib, the largest
'rebel' stronghold in Northwestern Syria.
With the support of Turkey in particular, al-Jolani's
faction is in preparation for a year-long operation in Syria.
It is being armed through clandestine
channels and trained by the Khimik special forces of
Ukrainian intelligence.
After entering Syria on 8 November, al-Jolani's
armed Islamist faction advanced rapidly and captured Damascus on 7
December.
The Syrian army put up no significant resistance, a symptom of
internal disintegration, as evidenced by the fact that while
President Assad was given asylum in Russia, the Syrian
embassy staff in Moscow hoisted the flag of the Islamist "rebels"
who had just taken Damascus.
While the USA confirms that it is in contact with the "rebels"
through Turkey, Israel seizes another piece of Syrian territory in
the Golan Heights and carries out hundreds of so-called "defensive"
air strikes against Syrian ports and airports.
The seizure of Syria by these forces is a major
blow,
-
to Iran, which sees its
front of resistance to the Israeli offensive in the Middle
East, supported by the USA, NATO and the EU, weakened
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to Russia, which will
almost certainly lose access to the Syrian port of Tartus,
the only berth for its military ships in the Mediterranean,
and risks the slowing down or interruption of the
north-south transport corridor through the Middle East that
allows it to bypass the blockade in the West...
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