US, UK and France training Syrian rebels in Jordan - reports

[Cheetah786]

Foreign instructors are training Syrian rebels in modern warfare in Jordan, suggest media reports from Europe. Sources claim the trainees will be the security force if Assad goes, while the combat skills they are being taught distort the picture.

In the past three months some 200 men have already received training in two camps in the east and the south of Jordan, Der Spiegel reports. The military training focuses on the use of anti-tank weaponry, the news magazine reported, citing what it said were participants and organizers. It adds that there are plans to provide training for a total of 1,200 fighters from the Free Syrian Army – the opposition force battling the regime of President Bashar Assad.

The report said that some of the Americans wore army uniforms, but it did not specify whether they worked for private firms or represented the US military.

Last October the Pentagon confirmed that a small group of US special forces and military advisers had spent the summer in Jordan training the country’s military to act in case Syria used its chemical weapons. Reportedly, select groups of Syrian rebels were trained, too.

As Britain’s The Guardian reported on Friday, the US is not alone in their efforts. UK and French instructors are also in Jordan training the Syria rebels.

Though the American, British and French Defense Ministries have not commented so far on the information about the FSA being trained in Jordan, this move does not contradict either the US plans for non-lethal directaid to Syrian opposition or British understanding of the EU arms embargo enforced on Syria.

"Such technical assistance can include assistance, advice and training on how to maintain security in areas no longer controlled by the regime, on co-ordination between civilian and military councils, on how to protect civilians and minimize the risks to them, and how to maintain security during a transition," the UK Foreign Minister William Hague told the British Parliament last Wednesday.

Der Spiegel’s source in Brussels shared that the EU embargo on arms supplies to Syria adopted in early March is “deliberately hazy.”

"When it comes to technical assistance, what it means in practice depends on who you ask. The Brits and the French, for example, are much more forward-leaning than others. The principle is that the assistance should be for the protection of civilians, but as we saw in Libya, that can be interpreted in different ways,” the source said.

In Libya the Western interference in the country’s affairs started with establishing a no-fly zone, ostensibly to protect the civilian population in a civil war, and ended with an allied military force helping the Libyan rebels storm the capital Tripoli to oust the country’s strongman Colonel Muammar Gaddafi. The leader finally was brutally murdered by militia without legitimate criminal investigations and court decisions.

Today Libya exists as a territory with nominal central authority and uncontrollable violence regularly sparking between groups of armed rebels and local Bedouins.

Jordanian intelligence is also taking part in training the Syrian rebels, busy filtering off radical Islamists (Salafists) from the candidates for advanced foreign training. The foreign instructors particularly prefer to choose former officers who have defected from the Syrian regular troops.

"The Americans now trust us more than the Turks, because with the Turks everything is about gaining leverage for action against the Kurds," a Jordanian insider in Amman explained to The Guardian.

Reportedly, the Americans are disappointed with the results of help being channeled to the Syrian opposition groups through Turkey, as Ankara has either failed or deliberately allowed the Islamist extremists to prevail the rebel activities in the northern Syrian front.

Other known sponsors of the rebels, Saudi Arabia and Bahrain, are also channeling their help to the Syrian opposition via Jordan.

In late February Secretary of State John Kerry announced that the US will provide the Syrian opposition with US$60 million in aid, including armored vehicles, non-lethal military equipment, and technical aid.

The Guardian reported that a small number of British special forces have already been stationed in Jordan beforehand so that once the West takes the decision to intervene in Syria directly they could act immediately. While they await the deployment order, they are busy training the rebels the modern warfare tactics.

The newspaper’s Jordanian source insists the training operation underway is of rather a moderate scale.

Yet Der Spiegel reports that the program is aimed at training up to 10,000 FSA fighters to form around a dozen combat-effective units. The Guardian earlier said that this force will be needed to restore order in Syria once President Bashar Assad is gone.

Though The Guardian insists the anti-Assad allies are likely to be training a police task force to maintain order in post-war Syria rather than to turn the war around, the training with anti-tank weaponry does not exactly fit into that picture.

At the same time an anonymous Jordanian official has expressed hope that this force might also give a hand to Jordan if the situation with the Syrian refugees deteriorates completely and hundreds of thousands of additional refugees flow into the country.

This can easily happen if the public services of the Syria’s southern city of Daraa collapse. In that case a possible 1 million refugees might seek shelter in Jordan.

Reportedly, Jordan has already accommodated over 320,000 refugees from Syria.

Since the beginning of conflict in Syria over two years ago now up to 70,000 people have been killed on both sides, reported Syrian activists. Over 1 million people have become refugees, fleeing the country to neighboring states.

US, UK and France training Syrian rebels in Jordan - reports ? RT News

 

[Cheetah786]

Stratfor leaks: NATO commandos in illegal special ops in Syria

Undercover NATO troops are already in Syria despite denials from their parent governments, according to a leaked brief from a highly-placed analyst.

*

The information comes from a hacked email from leading private US intelligence agency Stratfor, whose correspondence has been released by Wikileaks since February 27. The email appears to be written from the address of Reva Bhalla (bhalla@stratfor.com), the company’s director of analysis, for internal use, and details a confidential Pentagon meeting in December. The consultation is alleged to have been attended by senior analysts from the US Air Force, and representatives from its chief allies, France and the United Kingdom.

Western powers have categorically denied military involvement in Syria’s internal conflict, for which they have no international mandate. But if the information contained in the letter is reliable, a radically different picture of Western activity in Syria emerges.

The author of the letter claims that US officials “said without saying that SOF [special operation forces] teams (presumably from the US, UK, France, Jordan and Turkey) are already on the ground, focused on recce [reconnaissance] missions and training opposition forces.” A little later the US army experts expand on the role of the undercover commandos: “the idea 'hypothetically' is to commit guerrilla attacks, assassination campaigns, try to break the back of the Alawite forces, elicit collapse from within.”

Alawites are a minority Islamic sect, to which Syrian President Bashar Assad and his support base belong. For the past year he has battled an insurrection that has united a range of opponents, from pro-democracy activists to radical Sunni Muslims.

There have been previous allegations of a Western presence on the side of the rebels and on Monday 13 French officers were reportedly captured by the loyalist forces.

Despite the commandos’ already wide remit, the email states that the US experts “stress that this is all being done as contingency planning, not as a move toward escalation.”

If confirmed, the information will give ammunition to Russia and China, who have accused Western powers of paving the way for an invasion of Syria. These fears have already been cited as the reasons the two countries vetoed the US-backed UN resolution on Syria in February.
*US and allies wary about air strikes

The majority of the December meeting was dedicated to discussing the possibility of a US aerial attack on Syria, and offers an unvarnished glimpse into US foreign policy thinking.

The letter reports military experts as saying that the US has a “high tolerance for killings” and will not execute air strikes on Assad’s regime “unless there was enough media attention on a massacre, like the Gaddafi move against Benghazi.”

The strikes themselves would be “doable” but “the air campaign in Syria makes Libya look like a piece of cake.” All the same, a US Air Force intelligence officer is described as “obsessed with the challenge of taking out Syria's ballistic missile capabilities and chem [chemical] weapons.”

On Monday, Republican Senator John McCain called for an air strike on Syria, But the following day, President Obama spoke out against "unilateral action", noting that the situation in Syria was not as clear cut as in Libya.

If the US does end up staging another military intervention, it is not clear how much support it would receive. The French representative said to the author that “Syria won't be a Libya-type [sic] situation in that France would be gung-ho about going in. Not in an election year.” Meanwhile, Britain would be “reluctant” on the one hand, but on the other is “looking for ways to reassert itself on the continent [Europe]” following the renegotiation of the EU treaty.

This is the latest in a line of revelations from the 5 million emails obtained by Internet hacker group Anonymous in December and passed to Wikileaks, which is currently publishing them on a drip-drip basis. While Stratfor refuses to comment on the emails, it has not been able to refute their authenticity.

Stratfor leaks: NATO commandos in illegal special ops in Syria ? RT News

‘Unbridled hypocrisy?’ US criticizes Iran for aiding pro-Assad militias

American defense officials accuse Iran of training and aiding pro-regime militias in Syria. The accusations are hypocritical, coming from a country that does the same for the other side of the conflict, geopolitical analyst Eric Draitser told RT.

*US Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and General Martin Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, have shared their concerns about a growing Iranian presence in Syria and its role in backing the government of Bashar al-Assad during a news briefing at the Pentagon on Tuesday.

"There's now an indication that [Iranians] are trying to develop – or trying to train a militia within Syria to be able to fight on behalf of the regime," Panetta explained. It is “dangerous” that Iran supports a regime that “we think ultimately is going to come down,” he added.

Meanwhile, General Dempsey added that Iranian-trained militias are being used to take some pressure off of Syrian government forces, which have been worn out by the 18-month long war.

While Iran remains the Syrian government's only real ally in the region, Washington continues to provide “non-lethal aid” to the opposition. The total sum that had been officially spent by the US on humanitarian aid to Syrian rebels exceeds $76 million. Earlier this month, reports emerged that President Barack Obama had also signed a secret order allowing the CIA and other intelligence agencies to support opposition forces seeking to oust the Assad regime.

Eric Draitser, a geopolitical analyst for stopimperialism.com, told RT that these comments by US military officials have shown an “unbridled hypocrisy “ coming out of Washington.

RT: So, Leon Panetta criticizes Iran for working to form a pro-regime militia in Syria, thus aggravating the situation on the ground. What are these accusations based on?

Eric Draitser: Well I think these accusations arise out of US disapproval of this recent summit, which the Iranians put forward in Tehran, that brought together Russia and China and Venezuela and many other players around the world. The United States was kept out of the summit, as were many of the US client states including Qatar and Saudi Arabia. So clearly, the United States is upset at the fact the Tehran is trying to play a central role in conflict resolution, a conflict that the US has been fomenting now for a year and a half.

The comments of course illustrate something far beyond that, and that is the unbridled hypocrisy of Washington – accusing Iran of doing precisely what Washington has been doing, namely forming militias and engaging in fomenting civil war.

RT: Just recently, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton announced additional multi-million-dollar aid to the Syrian rebels, but at the same time Washington accuses Iran of interference. How fair is it that it's okay for them, but not Tehran to get involved?

ED: The United States is the pot calling the kettle black, essentially doing whatever it can to foment the chaos. To turn Sunnis against Shiites, to turn Alawites against Kurds and so forth, and try to destroy the Syrian state in that way. And then they turn around and say that the Iranians are doing the same thing by forming pro-Assad militias.

I think we could take it one step further to show that this really demonstrates the US’s desperation in Syria. They know that they are outmatched diplomatically, they are outmatched in terms of foreign policy. And so the only thing they can do is use Syria as an issue to demonize the Iranians, which is the ultimate enemy in the region for the US establishment.

RT: Is it possible for the rebels to win without the US meddling that you’ve mentioned?

ED: It is impossible for the so-called rebels to win anything without the support of the United States and their clients in the region. We know that the Free Syrian Army is little more than a disorganized gaggle of various terrorist organizations and other extremists. The Syrian National Council is made up primarily of US puppets from various think-tanks like the Brookings Institution and so forth. They have no clout in Syria.

There will be no cessation of violence, there will be none of these things until the United States determines that its policy of destroying Syria has failed and that they pull back from that. The so-called opposition will be left to fend for themselves, and they will surely be routed because they don’t have real support in Syria.
http://rt.com/news/us-accuse-iran-training-syria-militias-693/