““My constant cry was that our biggest problem is our allies — our allies in the region were our largest problem in Syria,” Biden told his listeners in remarks subsequently posted on the White House YouTube channel (go to 1:32:00 if you want to skip the earlier speech). “The Turks were great friends,” he notes, adding that he recently spent considerable time with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and they have “a great relationship.” Ditto the Saudis and the Emiratis. But when it came to Syria and the effort to bring down President Bashar Assad there, those allies’ policies wound up helping to arm and build allies of al Qaeda and eventually the terrorist “Islamic State.”…………”
Joe Biden was right of course. There are facts that I and many others have been pointing out for three years. As soon as that first Syrian uprising started against the Al Assad regime in 2011, the Wahhabi and Muslim Brotherhood money, weapons and intolerant ideology started flowing in to Syria. Soon, bored and indoctrinated young Wahhabi Jihadis started flowing into Syria from the Persian Gulf region. That early Syrian uprising was lost to the newly-imported sectarian narrative.
The absolute tribal princes and potentates from Riyadhh and Doha and Abu Dhabi did not see a people’s uprising in Syria, even though their vast media claimed that they did. For obvious reasons these rulers are not into into liberation movements. They just saw an opportunity to finally gain a foothold in Syria, spread their Wahhabi ideology, and give the annoying Iranian mullahs a black eye. Not necessarily in that order.
In other words, they have sought to buy Syria and its people with petroleum money. Just as they are seeking to buy American and other Western foreign policy regarding the Arab uprisings from Egypt to Bahrain to Syria to Yemen. With some significant success.
The Turks did their part for ‘the cause’: as I have opined before, the Erdogan regime never saw a Jihadi terrorist that they could turn back from entering Syria (and hence Iraq). Money, weapons, and volunteers from the Arab world and Europe continued to flow into the civil war through what I called the Erdogan Trail.
Joe Biden was right: with allies like these…………
Cheers
Mohammed Haider Ghuloum