Syria expert and journalist Vanessa Beeley hit hard at the centrality of the British role in bringing Al Qaeda to power in Syria in both a May 27th article in UK Column and a May 30 discussion with The LaRouche Organization’s “Weekly Symposium with Diane Sare.”
Tracing the ongoing British colonial manipulation of the region to the 1916 then-secret Sykes-Picot Agreement, which divided the collapsing Ottoman Empire into British and French spheres of influence, Beeley pins the recent decades’ operations to control Syria, which resulted in bringing Al Qaeda’s Abu Muhammed al-Jolani to power, squarely on Tony Blair, beginning in the aftermath of 9/11.
Beeley documents how Blair, along with his former Chief of Staff (and later advisor to Keir Starmer) Jonathan Powell, used NGOs staffed with MI6 and other intelligence operatives, along with other “below the radar” operations, to hand select, groom, and “clean up” ISIS and Al Qaeda agent al-Jolani and install him as Syria’s president.
A https://wikileaks.org/clinton-emails/emailid/18488">leaked March 2012 email to then-U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton contains a forwarded message from Powell, who was traveling to Washington to brief American officials on his intelligence-linked NGO’s work in organizing “secret channels between insurgents and governments,” including in Syria, to which Clinton responded, “I’d like to see Powell when he’s in the Building.”
According to Beeley, her contacts in Damascus report that the high-end hotels are still full of Brits, and that Powell himself is currently in the country.
Beeley couches the recent announcement by the U.S. of the temporary lifting of the Caesar Sanctions in this ongoing operation. While claiming that the lifting of sanctions is out of concern for the people, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio promised “a full-scale civil war of epic proportions, basically the country splitting up.” In that context, Beeley asks the question, “Is Britain positioning itself at the helm of any new military or political client state answering to the West?”
Beeley quotes Lebanese journalist Marwa Osman on the more likely motive behind the lifting of sanctions:
“After years of fire and bloodshed, Syria is being offered a ‘lifeline’ by the same hands that tried to strangle it. The U.S. Treasury just graciously announced a 180-day suspension of Caesar Act sanctions ... because apparently that’s how long it takes to completely hand over your sovereignty. This isn’t diplomacy. It’s asset recovery. The same West that failed to topple Syria militarily is now repossessing it through blackmail ... and it just so happens they’ve been prepping al-Jolani for this starring role all along. And just in case it wasn’t clear: 180 days is the deadline: normalize or be re-sanctioned. Resistance or rent-a-state.”
