After Seeing Video of Alleged Syrian “Allies” Beheading Boy, Trump Ends CIA Funding of So-Called Rebels

Early this year, President Trump saw a video taken by Zenki rebels in Aleppo. The footage shows a group of five bearded men holding a 12-year old boy in the back of a pickup truck.

One held the boy tightly by the hair and another slapped his face. Then one of the other men took a knife, sawed off the boy’s head and then proudly held it up like a trophy.

Trump wanted to know why the United States had backed Zenki if its members are extremists. The issue was discussed at length with senior intelligence officials, and no good answers were forthcoming, according to people familiar with the conversations.”

The more he learned about the program, and how extremists such as the Al Qaeda-affiliated Nusra group was fighting alongside the rebels, the more Trump realized the program had to end.

Stop a minute and consider this: President Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, John McCain and Lindsey Graham, along with many others, all were comfortable with funding and arming terrorists that are linked to a group that slaughtered more than 3,000 Americans on September 11, 2001.

Of course, in reporting news of the program’s end, the Washington Post characterized it as “a move long sought by Russia.” All Russia all the time for the fake news media.

Apologists for the Syrian rebels have tried to portray them as moderate secularists interested in establishing a democracy.

Although “Free Syrian Army” sounds secular and moderate, its constituents are ideologically diverse and include numerous extremists. Zenki, for example, was referred to as an FSA group well after its hardline beliefs were evident, and few FSA groups could be considered truly secular. Several prominent FSA organizations advocate Islamist ideas, meaning they believe that some version of sharia law should rule Syrian society.”

The irony is that Assad’s regime is truly secular, and has been for decades beginning with his father. The Assad family is part of the Alawite branch of Islam and thus disfavored by the Sunni and Shia branches.

Syria traditionally has allowed Muslims, Christians and Jews to live alongside each other in relative peace. But why let the facts stand in the way of globalist geopolitical interests?

As the rebel movement gained momentum and the U.S. kept pumping money and arms to the rebels, Russia decided to intervene on behalf of its Syrian ally Assad in September 2015. Working with Iran, another Assad ally, Russia provided the Assad regime with the military support needed to turn the tide against the rebels and regain captured territory from ISIS, which had taken advantage of the strife, and access to U.S. arms through rebel elements, to grow in Syria.

The Obama administration and the United Nations both tried to downplay the presence of Nusra and other extremists among the Free Syrian Army rebels

In October 2016, the U.N.’s special envoy for Syria, Staffan de Mistura, told reporters that Nusra accounted for only 900 to 1,000 of the 8,000 opposition fighters in Aleppo. After objections that this modest figure was too high, the U.N. revised its estimate downward, claiming Nusra had just 150 to 200 members within the Aleppo opposition. Advocates then seized on this low figure to argue that the insurgents inside the city deserved the full backing of the West. They ignored the fact that the other, non-Nusra rebels included many extremists—such as Zenki.”

Having seen how the Russian backing for Assad has stabilized the regime, and how disorganized the so-called rebels are, President Trump apparently concluded it makes no sense to throw good money after bad to prop up a CIA program that’s been a dismal failure.

The bottom line: Sunni jihadists and extremists are laced throughout the Syrian rebellion and have been for years. While pockets of acceptable allies remain, there is no evidence that any truly moderate force is effectively fighting Assad, and President Trump was right to end the program of CIA support for the Syrian opposition.”

What the Free Syrian Army apologists and fake news media have refused to tell the American public is that the entire Syrian civil war was not begun by a legitimate uprising of the Syrian people

Assad’s country is the battleground in a geopolitical war to see what countries will benefit from and control the flow of oil from the Middle East to Europe. For years, there’ve been competing pipeline projects that are sponsored by rival countries and Islamic factions, but economics appears to be a more dominant factor than religion.

Russia and Iran want a pipeline to flow through Syria to the Syrian coast that will carry Russian, Iranian and Iraqi oil, which would benefit Shia Muslims.

Sunni Muslim Saudi Arabia and Qatar want to route the pipeline through Syria to Turkey, which is the route backed by Western nations such as the United States that want to restrict the oil revenues of Iran and Russia.

Clearly, Assad favors the Russian-Iranian project of its allies, which made his regime a target to be overthrown.

Whether the Trump administration will continue a policy that leans toward Saudi Arabia remains to be seen, given his effort to work with Putin to combat ISIS and other radical Islamic groups. Because the United States has become a dominant player in the world energy market thanks to the fracking revolution, he can take his time in sorting out the right strategy.

Source: The Weekly Standard, Mint Press News