Russia Says Syrian Mercenaries (supported by CIA) Behind Chemical Attacks

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Russia Says Syrian Mercenaries (supported by CIA) Behind Chemical Attacks

July 10, 2013 - According to Russia’s ambassador to the United Nations, the Syrian mercenaries supported by the CIA and funded by Saudi Arabia and Qatar are behind chemical attacks in Syria. The Russians claim the weapons used include the poison gas sarin.

Ambassador Vitaly Churkin said a Russian scientific team accessed the site of an attack in Khan al-Assal where 26 people were killed and 86 injured during a chemical attack on March 19. The weapon used in the attack, an unguided Basha’ir-3 rocket, was produced by the Free Syrian Army, according to the Russian team.

“Therefore, there is every reason to believe that it was the armed opposition fighters who used the chemical weapons in Khan al-Assal,” Churkin said.

Following Churkin’s remarks, the United States expressed doubt the mercenaries had used chemical weapons.

According to White House spokesman Jay Carney, the United States has yet to see any evidence suggesting anyone other than the Syrian government “had the ability to use chemical weapons, or has used chemical weapons.”

On Wednesday, the British parliament’s intelligence committee warned in its annual report about the consequences of al-Qaeda and other Salafist mercenaries in Syria obtaining chemical weapons.
“Al-Qaeda elements and individual jihadists in Syria currently represent the most worrying emerging terrorist threat to the U.K. and the West,” the report states.

“There has to be a significant risk that some of the country’s chemical weapons stockpile could fall into the hands of those with links to terrorism, in Syria or elsewhere in the region” if the Bashar al-Assad regime falls, the report concludes. “If this happens, the consequences could be catastrophic.”

The United States and Israel continue to insist the al-Assad regime is behind chemical attacks inside Syria.

“Following a deliberative review, our intelligence community assesses that the Assad regime has used chemical weapons, including the nerve agent sarin, on a small scale against the opposition multiple times in the last year,” Deputy National Security Advisor for Strategic Communications Ben Rhodes said in a written statement last month. “The use of chemical weapons violates international norms and crosses clear red lines that have existed within the international community for decades.”

In June, Obama said that the deployment of chemical weapons by the Syrian government had crossed a “red line” and prompted him to provide direct military aid to the CIA’s mercenaries operating in the country.

Russia has dismissed a report produced by the United States and used by Obama to declare a “red line” in Syria as a fabrication. “Information about the usage of chemical weapons by [Syrian President Bashar] Assad is fabricated in the same way as the lie about [Saddam] Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction [in Iraq],” Alexei Pushkov, head of the Russian lower house of parliament’s international affairs committee, said on Twitter in June, according to RIA Novosti.

In April, Israel’s senior military intelligence analyst said that his country found evidence that the Syrian government used chemical weapons repeatedly, although it did not provide conclusive evidence.

 

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Arms Airlift to Syria Rebels Expands, With Aid From C.I.A.

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.

As it evolved, the airlift correlated with shifts in the war within Syria, as rebels drove Syria’s army from territory by the middle of last year. And even as the Obama administration has publicly refused to give more than “nonlethal” aid to the rebels, the involvement of the C.I.A. in the arms shipments — albeit mostly in a consultative role, American officials say — has shown that the United States is more willing to help its Arab allies support the lethal side of the civil war.

From offices at secret locations, American intelligence officers have helped the Arab governments shop for weapons, including a large procurement from Croatia, and have vetted rebel commanders and groups to determine who should receive the weapons as they arrive, according to American officials speaking on the condition of anonymity. The C.I.A. declined to comment on the shipments or its role in them.

The shipments also highlight the competition for Syria’s future between Sunni Muslim states and Iran, the Shiite theocracy that remains Mr. Assad’s main ally. Secretary of State John Kerry pressed Iraq on Sunday to do more to halt Iranian arms shipments through its airspace; he did so even as the most recent military cargo flight from Qatar for the rebels landed at Esenboga early Sunday night.

Syrian opposition figures and some American lawmakers and officials have argued that Russian and Iranian arms shipments to support Mr. Assad’s government have made arming the rebels more necessary.

Most of the cargo flights have occurred since November, after the presidential election in the United States and as the Turkish and Arab governments grew more frustrated by the rebels’ slow progress against Mr. Assad’s well-equipped military. The flights also became more frequent as the humanitarian crisis inside Syria deepened in the winter and cascades of refugees crossed into neighboring countries.

The Turkish government has had oversight over much of the program, down to affixing transponders to trucks ferrying the military goods through Turkey so it might monitor shipments as they move by land into Syria, officials said. The scale of shipments was very large, according to officials familiar with the pipeline and to an arms-trafficking investigator who assembled data on the cargo planes involved.

“A conservative estimate of the payload of these flights would be 3,500 tons of military equipment,” said Hugh Griffiths, of the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, who monitors illicit arms transfers.

“The intensity and frequency of these flights,” he added, are “suggestive of a well-planned and coordinated clandestine military logistics operation.”(Continued)

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