First setbacks for the Muslim Brotherhood

This article is an extract from the book Fake wars and big lies. See Contents.

The “Arab Spring” in Syria

As of 4 February 2011, date of the opening of the meeting in Cairo,
the coordination of the Arab Spring in Syria was handled by the
Facebook account “Syrian Revolution 2011”. The title alone is
enough to indicate that the operation was intended to quickly
overthrow the Syrian Arab Republic, as had been the case for the
other “colour revolutions”, since the objective was not to change the
mentalities, but only the leading elites and a few of the country’s
laws. On the same day as its creation, “Syrian Revolution 2011”
launched an appeal for a demonstration in Damascus which was
relayed by al-Jazeera, while Facebook reported tens of thousands of
“Followers”. Computer magic. This account was to play a central
role over the next five years. Every Friday, the Muslim day for
prayer, it dedicated itself to one of the Brotherhood’s objectives.

On 22 February, John McCain was in Lebanon. He met various
leaders of the pro-Saudi Coalition of 14 March, including deputy
Okab Sakr, to whom he entrusted the delivery of arms to the
Islamists responsible for terrorist attacks in Syria [1]. He then left Beirut
and went off to explore the Syrian border. He chose the village of
Ersal as the future base of operations.

In spite of the appeals from the mysterious Syrian Revolution 2011
account, it was not until mid-March that events began to heat up in
Syria. The Brotherhood gathered in Daraa, a town in the South of
Syria, near the border with Jordan. It was reputed for being heavily
Ba’athist, and also home to ex-jihadists from Afghanistan and Iraq.
The Brotherhood hijacked a demonstration by civil servants who
were demanding a pay rise, and began destroying the Palace of
Justice. The same day, supervised by Mossad officers, they attacked
a centre of Syrian military intelligence outside the town, used
exclusively for surveillance if Israeli activity in the occupied Golan
Heights.

Reporting on the event, al-Jazeera claimed that the inhabitants of
Daraa were protesting after the police had tortured children who had
tagged slogans hostile to President Assad. Confusion reigned while
the vandals continued the destruction of the town centre. Over the
following weeks, three groups of Islamists rambled through the
country, attacking poorly-defended secondary targets. The
impression of instability was generalised, even though the attacks
concerned only three distinct locations at a time. In the space of a
few weeks, there were more than 100 deaths, mainly policemen and
soldiers.

President Assad’s reaction was the opposite of what was expected –
instead of imposing a local Patriot Act, he abrogated the state of
emergency which was still in force – Syria is still at war with Israel,
which occupies the Golan Heights – and dissolved the State Security
Court. He passed a law guaranteeing and organising the right to
demonstrate, denounced an operation instigated from overseas, and
called on the People to support the Institutions. He convened the
Chiefs of Staff and forbade soldiers to use their weapons if there was
any risk of causing collateral civilian deaths.

Taking the President at his word, the Brotherhood attacked a military
convoy in Banias (hometown of the traitorous ex-vice President
Abdel Halim Khaddam) for several hours, in full view of the
population. Fearing that the spectators might be killed or wounded,
the soldiers obeyed their President and did not use their weapons. A
dozen of them were killed. The sergeant who was commanding the
detachment lost both his legs when he covered a grenade with his
body to protect his men. The operation was organised from Paris by
Khaddam’s Salvation Front and the Muslim Brotherhood. On 6 June,
120 policemen were killed in a similar situation in Jisr al-Shughur.

Demonstrations hostile to the Syrian Arab Republic were held in
several towns. Contrary to the image that was propagated by the
Western medias, the demonstrators never called for democracy. The
slogans they chanted most were – “The People want the régime to
fall”, “Christians to Beirut, Alawites to the grave”, “We want a Godfearing
President”, “Down with Iran and the Hezbollah”. Several
other slogans mentioned “liberty”, but not in the Western sense of
the word. The demonstrators were calling for the freedom to practise
Sharia law.

At that time, people believed that only al-Jazeera and al-Arabiya
were trustworthy sources of information – media that had supported
the régime changes in Tunisia and Egypt. They were therefore
persuaded that in Syria too, the President would abdicate and that the
Muslim Brotherhood would take power. The vast majority of Syrians
were witnessing what they thought was a “revolution”, and were
preparing for a new Islamist government. It is very difficult to count
the number of Syrians who demonstrated against the Republic, or
who supported the Muslim Brotherhood. We can only report that
hundreds of small-scale demonstrations took place throughout the
country, and that the largest of them gathered close to 100,000
people in Hama. [2] Its organisers were received by President Assad in Damascus. When he asked them what they were demonstrating for,
they answered that they wanted to “forbid Alawites to enter Hama”.
The astonished President – himself an Alawite – ended the interview.

On 4 July in Paris, there was a public conference, organized by the
Brotherhood and the Israeli government behind the scenes, to get the
French leaders on board. Responding to the appeal of “philosopher”
Bernard-Henry Levy and the ex- and future Ministers for Foreign
Affairs Bernard Kouchner and Laurent Fabius, [3] representatives from
the right, centre, and left, and some ecologists, lent their support to
what was presented to them as a struggle for democracy. No one
noticed the presence in the room of the real organisers of the event –
Alex Goldfarb (advisor to the Israeli Minister for Defense) and
Melhem Droubi (world head of external relations for the
Brotherhood), who had come specially from Saudi Arabia.

In August, a Syrian National Council was founded in Istanbul, on the
model of the Libyan National Transitional Council. It consisted of
long-time expatriates from Syria, others who had recently left, and
the Muslim Brotherhood. The bizarre idea that this group was
seeking to establish a “democracy” was ostensibly made plausible by
personalities from the extreme left wing, such as professor Burhan

Ghalioun, who was named its President. Yet this man had been
working for years with the NED and the Muslim Brotherhood.
Although he was a layman, he had been writing speeches for Abassi
Madani (President of the Islamic Salvation Front of Algeria) since he
was exiled in Qatar. This was also the case of George Sabra and
Michel Kilo, who had been working with the Brotherhood for more
than thirty years, and who had followed the Trotskyists to the NED
in 1982. Under the direction of the Libyan Mahmud Jibril, Sabra
notably worked on the foreign versions of the children’s TV
programme “Sesame Street”, produced by the French Lagardère
Media and by al-Jazeera of Qatar, with RAND Corp. researcher
Cheryl Benard, wife of Zalmay Khalilzad, US ambassador to the UN
and then Iraq. Similarly, human rights careerist Haytham Manna was
manager of investments for the Sudanese Brotherhood.

Qatar bought the rotating presidency of the Arab League from the
PLO for $400 million. In violation of the statutes, it suspended the
Syrian Arab Republic, even though it was a founding member of the
organisation. Then it proposed an on-site Observer Mission presided
by Sudan (still governed by the Brotherhood). It designated the exhead
of the secret services and ex-ambassador to Qatar, General
Mohammed Ahmed Mustafa al-Dabi, to direct the work. Every
member state sent observers, in order to represent all tendencies. The
Syrian Arab Republic agreed to host the League and allowed the
Mission to deploy over all its territory. This was the first and only
time that a pluralist organisation had gone into the field, met with all
the protagonists, and visited the whole country. It was actually the
only trustworthy external source of information throughout the whole
conflict.

The nomination of General al-Dabi was unanimously saluted by all
parties. He had negotiated the separation of Sudan and South Sudan,
and was proposed by many Arab states for the Nobel Peace Prize.
However, it appeared from a reading of the preliminary reports that
the Sudanese had no intention of writing a report made to order, but
to conduct an authentic and pluralist investigation. Suddenly, the
international media changed their tune, and accused al-Dabi of
responsibility for the genocide in Darfur. All those who had
approved his nomination now demanded his resignation. The
General resisted angrily.

Finally, a status report was published, attesting to the fact that there
was no revolution in Syria. The Mission confirmed that the violence
had been considerably exaggerated, that the army had withdrawn
from the towns, that there was no repression, that the victims were
mostly soldiers and policemen, that more than 5,000 prisoners whose
names had been transmitted to the authorities had been freed, and
that foreign medias who request to cover the events had been
allowed to do so.

Qatar, in a fit of anger, paid $2 billion to Sudan to recall General al-
Dabi, but he refused to allow the League to nominate his successor.
Bereft of its commander, the Mission was dissolved at the beginning
of 2012.

Furious at seeing the Syrian Arab Republic pull through, the
Brotherhood decided to create an Islamic emirate. After several
attempts, they chose a new neighbourhood of Homs, Baba Amr,
where tunnels had previously been dug and fitted to ensure a supply
route in case of a siege. 3,000 combatants gathered there, including
2,000 Syrian Takfiri. They were members of a sub-group of the
Brotherhood, “Excommunication and Immigration”, created under
Sadat.

They set up a “Revolutionary Tribunal”, judged and condemned to
death more than 150 inhabitants of the neighbourhood, and then cut
their throats in public. The rest of the inhabitants fled, with the
exception of about forty families. The Takfiri then built barricades at
all the points of access to the area, and these were heavily armed by
the French Special Forces. The terrorist campaign of the first year
gave way to a war of position, in conformity with the plan laid out in
2004 in “The Management of Savagery”. From that point on, the
Islamists received weapons from NATO which were more
sophisticated than those of the Syrian Army, which had been under
an embargo since 2005.

One morning, the Syrian Arab Army entered Baba Amr, whose
defences had been de-activated. The French, the journalists and a few
leaders fled, to reappear a few days later in Lebanon. The Takfiri
surrendered. The war that had just begun seemed to be ending
already, like in Lebanon in 2007, when the Lebanese army defeated
Fatah al-Islam. But the Islamists were not done yet.

A new operation was being prepared from Jordan, under NATO
command. The plan was to attack Damascus in the context of a
gigantic psychological operation, but this was cancelled at the last
moment. The Islamists who had been abandoned by France in Baba
Amr were now decommissioned by the United States, who were
discussing a possible sharing of the Middle East with Russia. A
promise of peace was signed in Geneva, on 30 June 2012.

The end of the “Arab Spring” in Egypt

In Egypt, the Brotherhood dominated the new parliament, or
“constituent assembly,” which was of the opinion that the new
Constitution – drawn up specifically to expedite its election – did
little more than reiterate a slightly amended old text, although it had
been approved by referendum at 77%. It therefore designated a
Constituent Assembly of 100 members, this time including 60
Brothers.

The Brotherhood stressed that the young democrats could undermine
the power of the army. Its campaign for the Presidential election was
the occasion to call for the regeneration of the country by the Qu’ran.
Yusuf al-Qaradawi preached that it was more important to fight
homosexuals and re-instate the Faith than to fight Israel for the
recognition of the rights of the Palestinian People [4]. While the Sunni
population massively boycotted the election, the Brotherhood
prevented the election from being held in Christian villages and
towns, so that 600,000 citizens were unable to vote.

However, the
election results favoured General Ahmed Shafik, Mubarak’s ex-
Prime Minister, who won by a slim margin of 30,000 votes. The
Brotherhood then threatened the members of the Electoral
Commission and their families until, 13 days later, it decided to
proclaim victory for Brother Mohamed Morsi [5]. The “international
community” praised the democratic character of the election.

Mohamed Morsi was an engineer who had worked for NASA. He
had United States nationality and secret defence security clearance in
the Pentagon. As soon as he came to power, he began work to
rehabilitate and favour his own clan, and to reinforce the bonds with
Israel. On the anniversary of Sadat’s execution, he received the
assassins at the Presidential palace. He nominated Adel Mohammed
al-Khayat, one of the leaders of Gamaa Al-Islamiya, (the group
responsible for the 1997 massacre in Luxor), as governor for that district. He persecuted the democrats who had demonstrated against
certain aspects of Hosni Mubarak’s politics (but not his resignation).
He supported a vast campaign of pogroms by the Muslim
Brotherhood against the Christians, and covered up their abuses –
lynchings, destruction of the archbishoprics, and the burning of
churches. Simultaneously, he privatised major businesses and
announced the possible sale of the Suez Canal to Qatar, which was
then sponsoring the Brotherhood. From the Presidential palace, he
telephoned Ayman al-Zawahiri, world leader of al-Qaeda, at least
four times.

Finally, opposition to Morsi became unanimous; excepting the
Brotherhood, all political parties, even the Salafists, demonstrated
against him. 33 million citizens took to the streets and called on the
army to give the country back to the People. Taking no notice of the
street, President Morsi ordered the army to prepare to attack the
Syrian Arab Republic in order to come to the assistance of the Syrian
Muslim Brotherhood. That was to be the final straw.

On 3 July 2013, at the hour that Washington’s offices close for the
long weekend of the Independence Day national holiday, the army
carried out a coup d’état. Mohamed Morsi was imprisoned, while the
streets became a battlefield – the Muslim Brotherhood and their
families on one side, and the law enforcement agencies on the other.

The war against Syria

It is said that “in politics, promises only bind those who believe in
them”. One month after the Geneva 1 conference and the peace
agreement, and a few days after the “Friends of Syria” Conference in
Paris, war was authorised once again. Instead of a NATO action
supported by a few jihadists, this was a jihadist attack supported by
NATO. Its code name was “Damascus Volcano and Syrian
Earthquake”.

An army of 40,000 men, trained in Jordan, crossed the border and
charged towards the Syrian capital, at the same time as a terrorist
bombing killed top Syrian leaders at a meeting of the National
Security Council. The army and the intelligence services lost their
commanders in the attack.

The jihadists were mercenaries who had been recruited from among
the poor of the Muslim world. Many of them did not speak Arabic,
and had received only one week of military training. Some of them
believed they were fighting Israelis. After suffering considerable
losses, they retreated.

In the long war which followed, the Syrian Arab Army attempted to
defend its population centers, against the jihadists, who tried to make
life impossible in the vast expanses of the desert. They enjoyed an
infinite supply of reinforcements. Every month, new fighters arrived
to replace the dead and the deserters. All the petty criminals of the
Muslim world came to try their luck for a few hundred dollars a
month. Recruitment centres were opened publicly in countries like
Tunisia and Afghanistan, and more discreetly in countries like
Morocco and Pakistan. However, the fatality rate of these
legionnaires was extremely high.

In July 2013, according to Interpol, some very sophisticated escape
operations were carried out in nine states in order to free the Islamist
leaders and transfer them to Syria. For example:
– On 23 July, between 500 and 1,000 prisoners escaped from the
prisons in Taj and Abu Ghraib (Iraq).
– On 27 July, 1,117 prisoners escaped from Kouafia prison in
Benghazi district, Libya by a riot inside the prison combined with an
attack from outside.
– On the night of 29 to 30 July, 243 Taliban escaped from the prison
in Dera Ismail Khan in the Pakistani tribal areas.

The Syrian Arab Army cremated most of the combatants’ corpses,
while retaining those that could be identified. They were sent back to
their families. Several states discreetly set up repatriation networks,
for example Algeria, with the Emir Abdelkader Foundation. Yet the
Syrian Arab Army still holds more than 30,000 corpses that were
identified, but never claimed.

Those Western states which had at first sent Special Forces recruited
from amongst their own soldiers with double nationality – generally
Muslims with origins in the Maghreb – later organised their own
networks to recruit jihadists. Thus, in France, a network was set up in
prisons with Salafist mosques, like the one in the Rue Jean-Pierre
Timbaud in Paris. These several thousand individuals were added to
the tens of thousands from the “Greater Middle East”. Although we
do not know for certain how many people took part in the war, it is
estimated that the total number of jihadists fighting in Syria and Iraq,
both locals and foreigners, has been more than 350,000 since 2011.
This is more than any regular army of the European Union, and twice
that of the Syrian Arab Army.

The ideological unity of the jihadists was guaranteed by the “spiritual
head of the Free Syrian Army”, sheikh Adnan al-Aroor. This
colourful personality was able to reach a vast public by way of his
weekly TV programme. He inflamed passions by calling for the
overthrow of the tyrant, and supported a paternalistic, authoritarian
vision of society. As time went on, he drifted towards sectarian
appeals for the massacre of Christians and Alawites. He originally he
came from a family of delinquents, betrayed his brothers to the
police, and escaped a prison sentence by joining the Syrian Arab
Army. As a non-commissioned officer, he was arrested for raping
young recruits. He then fled to Saudi Arabia, where he became a
sheikh in the service of Allah.

The jihadists usually received basic weaponry, and had access to an
unlimited supply of ammunition. They were organised in katibas or
brigades, small units of a few hundred men, whose commanders
received ultra-sophisticated equipment, notably portable
communication kits relaying live satellite images of the movements
of the Syrian Arab Army. They were therefore fighting an
asymmetrical war against the Syrian Arab Army, who were certainly
better trained, but whose weapons all dated from before 2005, and
who had no access to satellite imagery.

In contrast to the Syrian Arab Army, whose units were all
coordinated and placed under the authority of President Bashar al-
Assad, the jihadist katibas were continually skirmishing between
themselves, as on all battlefields where rival “warlords” struggle for
superiority. However, all the factions received reinforcements, arms,
ammunition and intelligence from a single central command, NATO
LandCom, situated in Izmir (Turkey), and whom they were therefore
obliged to obey. But the United States had great difficulty in making
this system work, because many of the participants were attempting
to conceal their operations from their allies – for example, the French
in secret from the British, or the Qataris to the detriment of the
Saudis.

As soon as a territory was evacuated by the Syrian Arab Army, the
jihadists who occupied it dug in. They built tunnels and bunkers. The
Saudis had sent the billionaire Osama Bin Laden to Afghanistan
because he was a specialist in public works. He supervised the
construction of tunnels in the mountains – or more exactly, the
enlarging of subterranean riverbeds. In Syria, NATO civil engineers
came to supervise the construction of gigantic lines of defence,
comparable to those of the Central Powers during the First World
War.

(To be continued …)