Above image - from the blog I quoted below; original caption:"An opposition poster showing Assad and the Islamic State as two sides of the same coin"
Below: the symbol of the order to which Bashar Al Assad is a member, the Roman Catholic Royal Order of Francis I, sub-order of the Constantinian order of the popish crusaders:
"........the regime’s entire strategy is modelled on a KGB-perfected tactic: provocation (provokatsiya), which aims to have your enemies do your work for you by discrediting themselves with violence against civilians and other cruelties, isolating them from the civilian population and allowing them to be destroyed....."
"...Put crudely, the I.S.’s military strength comes from the remnants of Saddam Hussein’s military-intelligence apparatus and the Caucasus’ Salafi-jihadists....".
Above video - "Tour of the military council officers in Kenitra inside center (Q) in a hilltop warm" - Presenting Russian intelligence presence in Syria: “...[The video] shows what appears to be a Syrian officer conducting a tour of the facility for the rebels, pointing at photographs, maps and captions on the walls, in Russian and Arabic. The symbols of Syrian intelligence and the 6th Directorate of Russian military intelligence (GRU) which deals with signal intelligence (SIGINT) are shown there side by side. In the photographs, Russian and Syrian officers can be seen collecting and analyzing intelligence together. … The officers are directed, according to standing orders on the wall, to listen in to communications of the rebel groups. Also on the wall, is a map detailing locations of Israel Defense Forces positions in the north of Israel.” - URL of video: http://youtu.be/9GDDbYfp7Sc
[contained in the link in the below article]
Below an article from the blog The Syrian Intifada - a-shab yurid iskat an-nizam, umasking the heavy Russian FSB/GRU hand in the Syrian civil war.
Keep in mind also the Russian Israeli military agreement of Sept. 2010,
Friday, December 12, 2014
Jerusalgrad - 5 - ...to hide the agreement?
http://control-avles-blogs.blogspot.it/2014/12/jerusalgrad-5-to-hide-agreement.html
....when you read about the involvement of Israel in the Syrian civil war. Probably Putin is guaranteeing Israel that Assad will not constitute a real threat, in the name of the common crusade against the Islamic fundamentalists. Israel has surely been enrolled in the Jesuits' crusade against Sunni, and will key part in the geo-political displacement of the super-Whore, the coming Cathorthodox Eurasian church born from the absorption of Orthodoxy by Catholicism. Keep in mind that the military agreement Moscow-Tel Aviv was just of the same year when [see deeply the article below]:
"When Baghdadi took over the I.S. in 2010, it was a foreign-led organisation in Iraq—as Nusra is now in Syria."Have a nice reading.
To to directly on the original page - URL: https://kyleorton1991.wordpress.com/2014/10/21/russian-intelligence-and-the-war-in-syria/
Russian Intelligence and the War In Syria
10 Replies
Abu Omar a-Shishani, while in Georgian military, now as I.S. leader in Syria/Iraq
Two days later the plot thickened when a further video was uploaded to YouTube, showing the rebels touring a captured regime intelligence station in Tel al-Hara:
“[The video] shows what appears to be a Syrian officer conducting a tour of the facility for the rebels, pointing at photographs, maps and captions on the walls, in Russian and Arabic. The symbols of Syrian intelligence and the 6th Directorate of Russian military intelligence (GRU) which deals with signal intelligence (SIGINT) are shown there side by side. In the photographs, Russian and Syrian officers can be seen collecting and analyzing intelligence together. … The officers are directed, according to standing orders on the wall, to listen in to communications of the rebel groups. Also on the wall, is a map detailing locations of Israel Defense Forces positions in the north of Israel.”This has rather unsettled Jerusalem because there is evidence Russia “has deep intelligence penetration into Israel“. Israel has been drawn into the Syrian war, and has provided humanitarian to Syrians and military help some rebels to protect her borders. The fact that Moscow was looking to blunt Israel’s role in Syria, since Russia is well “[a]ware that Israel could topple the Assad regime if it deems it necessary,” was not a shock. “Russians are Russians,” as one ex-senior intelligence official put it, and “the facts had been basically known,” but “the nature of the intelligence being collected and the fact that the Russian officers left traces … were rather unexpected.”
Putin’s Russia’s being Assad’s key international backer was no secret. Three times Moscow used its veto on the U.N. Security Council to shield Assad even from condemnation. Russia also orchestrated the chemical weapons “deal” in September 2013 that spared the Assad regime airstrikes for its chemical massacre at Ghouta and gained the regime a measure of legitimacy in the West, which became a de facto partner of the regime in the removal of those weapons. Russia’s “aid has been critical to the regime’s sustainment,” and there have long been hints that Moscow’s shoring-up “critical capabilities” for Assad was a more hands-on job than diplomatic protection and weapons donations.
The primary case is the murder of Marie Colvin and Remi Ochlik in February 2012:
“The crackdown in Homs carries a grim echo of Grozny, both in its use of signals intelligence to track down and silence the regime’s enemies and in its bloody determination to obliterate any opposition, including Western journalists. … Multiple reports have suggested that Syrian forces used phone signals to pinpoint [Colvin’s] location and then launched a rocket barrage that resulted in her death … [T]he Syrian regime (thanks to its Russian advisors) now has the tools of electronic warfare to crush this popular uprising … Moscow sold Damascus nearly $1 billion worth of weapons in 2011 … With these high-tech weapons comes the less visible Russian-supplied training on technologies, tactics, and strategies.”There was then the still-unclear case of the Russian mercenaries who were revealed to be in Syria in November 2013. By all accounts this was not a Kremlin initiative and indeed ran somewhat contrary to Putin’s interests right at that moment when he had shattered the Obama administration’s Middle East policy. Egypt’s military had just liquidated the elected government and massacred those who protested about it, the “Arab Spring” on which Obama (partly) bet had run aground, and now President Obama had let the proxy regime of America’s regional foe, Iran, off the hook because he hoped to win good-will from Iran for a nuclear deal he was working on in secret from all of his allies. The Kremlin saw a chance to make clear that it would be a real backer: it would (if the cash was supplied upfront) supply the weapons and diplomatic protection right to the end, not like Obama did with Hosni Mubarak. But if Vladimir Putin was now the go-to guy for getting a problem solved in the Middle East—and even the Saudis thought he might be—then he couldn’t brook off-the-books operations from blundering amateurs with connections to his security agencies.
By December 2013, Russia was running drones “around the clock” for the Assad tyranny to not only track and analyse the rebels, but target them with airstrikes.
These recent revelations are also not the first about Russian SIGINT facilities in southern Syria. In February 2012, the Washington Times reported that Moscow had upgraded a surveillance facility south of Damascus—i.e. Deraa or Quneitra (Golan Heights)—that had been “able to monitor air traffic in Israel as far south as Tel Aviv, as well as northern Jordan and western Iraq,” so that it could now spy on communications in “all parts of Israel and Jordan and as far south as the northern part of Saudi Arabia.” Nor is this facility—likely the facility now in rebel hands—the only one the Russians are believed to have in the area.
Beyond these specifics, the regime’s entire strategy is modelled on a KGB-perfected tactic: provocation (provokatsiya), which aims to have your enemies do your work for you by discrediting themselves with violence against civilians and other cruelties, isolating them from the civilian population and allowing them to be destroyed. In the Syrian context, provocation means destroying the nationalist rebels and having the Islamic State (I.S.) become dominant in the insurgency, then making the local population and the world choose between the Assad regime and the takfiris, sure they will choose the former and hopeful that Assad might even get Western help in putting down the insurgency. There is good evidence that there are infiltrators of the Syrian intelligence services (the mukhabarat) in the I.S. and Nusra to guide the jihadists into discrediting themselves, but many of the Assad regime’s methods of building up the jihadists and destroying the moderates have been more subtle.
However in the two previous cases where this strategy of forcing a binary choice between a cruel tyranny and a takfiri opposition has been done before, namely Chechnya and Algeria, infiltration was a major part of the regimes’ counter-terrorism policy. In Chechnya, the Russians thoroughly penetrated the insurgency to such an extent that Shamil Basayev, Emir between 2003 and 2006, was described as “a GRU staff member with a great deal of work experience.” The Algerian regime if anything outdid the Russians, taking control of the Islamist insurgency and directing it to wholesale massacre that the Islamists took loud “credit” for.
Shamil Basayev’s role in the Chechen jihad goes back to the early 1990s. With his brother, Shirvani, also a GRU agent, Shamil led attacks into Abkhazia in 1991-92 that were co-ordinated with Moscow, which was wary at that time of an overt attack into Georgia, but which nevertheless maintained designs on the province. In 1999, a month before the apartment building bombings that the Russian internal security agency, the Federal Security Service (FSB), stands accused of orchestrating, and which at the very least the FSB knew of and did nothing to stop, Basayev led a jihadist incursion into Dagestan. In doing so, he got his weaponry from GRU stocks in Moscow, not secret mujahideen caches in Chechnya, according to Boris Kagarlitsky.
Shamil Basayev
Just as the Syrian resistance has notably suffered more from the Islamic State than Assad has, the Chechen resistance suffered more from the Salafi-jihadists than Putin did. In both cases the rebels suffered direct repression from the jihadists and were left alone by the “international community” to fight a merciless regime because the holy warriors tainted their cause in Western perception with terrorism.
There is also the matter of Russia’s relationship with al-Qaeda’s leader, Ayman az-Zawahiri, who is at least the spiritual leader of a large contingent of the Salafi-jihadists in Syria. In December 1996, while trying to meet with the Chechen jihadists, Zawahiri was arrested by the Russians. Zawahiri was at this time the leader of Egyptian Islamic Jihad (EIJ), which was implicated in the assassination of Anwar Sadat, a man the Soviets utterly hated. The KGB had tried to topple Sadat through “active measures”—including but not limited to saying he was a Hitlerite, an agent of the Jews, and that he could no longer satisfy his own wife—and the increased sponsorship of oppositionists, which included not just Communists but the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood and the EIJ.
In the dragnet after Sadat’s murder, Zawahiri was picked up and tortured into giving up a comrade closer to the centre of the plot than he. That Zawahiri broke under torture—and felt guilty about it—would have been known to the FSB, but they did not force Zawahiri’s secrets from him; indeed their official position is, incredibly, that they did not know who they had in their custody. Evgenii Novikov has another suggestion:
“Chechnya was enjoying a period of actual independence from Moscow. The Kremlin was having great difficulty finding ‘agents of influence’ … At the same time, Moscow knew that representatives of al Qaeda and other foreign Islamic fundamentalists were present in Chechnya and exercised strong influence on the Chechen leaders, especially on the military commanders. It would have been logical, therefore, for the Russians to try to persuade Zawahiri to cooperate with them in directing the activities of Arabs in Chechnya, in getting information … and in influencing the Chechen leadership. It may not have been too difficult for Russian officers to persuade Zawahiri to go along with such a plan. … [M]ethods of torture during interrogation used by KGB officers would have truly almost scared Zawahiri to death. Execution very likely was just one threat. … At a minimum, Zawahiri would have had to agree to cooperation with Russian intelligence to save his life and to buy his freedom.”Zawahiri was let go in May 1997—with all his possessions—and allowed to meet up with Ibn al-Khattab (a.k.a. Samir Saleh Abdullah as-Suwailem), a Saudi who was a leading figure in the...
Ibn al-Khattab
Up to 1,000 Chechens and Dagestanis have made their way to the Fertile Crescent for jihad, and they are professionalised and militarily effective in a way most of the rest of the foreigners are not. Put crudely, the I.S.’s military strength comes from the remnants of Saddam Hussein’s military-intelligence apparatus and the Caucasus’ Salafi-jihadists.
I.S.’s leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, has two main deputies, Abu Muslim al-Turkmani in Iraq and Abu Ali al-Anbari in Syria, both of whom come from the upper echelons of Saddam’s military. When Baghdadi took over the I.S. in 2010, it was a foreign-led organisation in Iraq—as Nusra is now in Syria. Baghdadi undertook a vigorous campaign of “Iraqization,” which included “an assassination campaign against any of his commanders suspected of potential disloyalty” that placed the I.S.’s military command in the hands of men “Baghdadi knows and trusts intimately.” Hisham al-Hashimi, the foremost expert on I.S.’s internal structure has noted that the foreign Arabs and Westerners who join the I.S. tend to be used in the media and shari’a departments. In other words, most of the foreigners spend most of their time taking selfies and distributing hashtags.
Take Iftekar Jaman, an important British I.S. facilitator: he was killed in his very first operation in Deir Ezzor in December 2013. One of the men Jaman helped get to Syria, Mashudur Choudhury, became the first Brit convicted of Syria-related terrorism offences after I.S. sent him home after three weeks. He had gotten “really scared” after a jihadist fired at him in a mock training exercise. I.S. accepts Euro-trash, calcified killers from the Caucuses, ex-Ba’athists, and sadists, criminals, and psychopaths of all hues, but Choudhury didn’t make the cut. Ouch.
Omar a-Shishani
The Chechens have also undergone the I.S.-Qaeda split, and Muslem a-Shishani (Murad Margoshvili) is the leader of the Qaeda/ Nusra-aligned Chechens. Where Batirashvili has almost no religious credentials, Margoshvili is a veteran jihadist, who fought alongside Arab jihadists in Chechnya for years. Margoshvili has an incredible back-story. Having taken up with the Chechen jihad in 1995, Margoshvili was arrested in Russia in 2003 on gun-running and terrorism charges, but was, amazingly, acquitted in 2006, and while actually in the courtroom was nearly kidnapped by masked men but managed to escape and formed a....
Muslem a-Shishani
Given the significance of the Chechens in “Syraq” it is an important question where their allegiances lie. Put simply: How many Chechen jihadists in Syria and Iraq are under Moscow’s sway? The Chechens are ostentatiously frightening, even among the takfiris, discrediting the insurgency locally and internationally, making Assad look like the lesser evil. Some of the Chechens’ military effectiveness surely comes from the long struggle against the Kremlin. Just as surely some of it comes from long experience for the Kremlin.
John Schindler pointed out recently that the role of intelligence agencies in manipulating terrorist groups is an old story, though few seem to notice. The Assad regime and its Iranian and Russian backers bet from the start on portraying the insurgency as jihadist, and the regime then certainly took steps to try to make it so. Iran has a long record of using al-Qaeda and its Zarqawi’ite offshoot to further its ends, including allowing al-Qaeda to finance its fighters in Syria ostensibly against Assad. Iran has faced repeated accusations of directly infiltrating the Islamic State. The likelihood that Russia—the inventor of most of these tactics and certainly the master at using them—isn’t involved in them inside Syria seems vanishingly small, especially when the bulk of the work, namely recruitment of reliable and time-tested agents, was already done.
It’s especially important to clarify this now as serious people propose that Assad, Iran, and Putin are our allies in the fight against Islamic terrorism. If it turns out that these putative enemies of jihadism have not only an interest in, but are taking an active part in, making the terrorism problem worse, it might be worth reconsidering the present drift of Western policy; it would mean the view of Assad and his backers as undesirable but unavoidable allies against jihadism is exactly wrong.
* * *
"......@ Terrance – are you kidding that Assad has savaged Christians and Jews? Christians were thriving and building churches in Syria before the U.S. sponsored Sunni insurgency. There were no Jews in Syria either, like in many other Mid East countries. I hope Assad annihilates FSA and ISIS....."
Monday, March 9, 2015
"Focused on ISIS" - 3: ISIS = UKRAINIAN INDEPENDENCE
http://control-avles-blogs.blogspot.it/2015/03/focused-on-isis-2-isis-ukrainian.html
Friday, February 27, 2015
"Focused on ISIS" - 2: ISIS = ASSAD's MILITIA [Jesuit-approved]
http://control-avles-blogs.blogspot.it/2015/02/focused-on-isis-2-isis-assads-militia.html
Thursday, March 5, 2015
PUTIN's gun - with ARGENTINIAN bullets.
http://control-avles-blogs.blogspot.it/2015/03/putins-gun-with-argentinian-bullets.html
