May 10, 2016

Charles Lister Asks "Moderate Rebels" To Hide Their Cooperation With Al-Qaeda

Dear moderate Jihadis in Syria,

your cooperation with al-Qaeda terrorists is fine with me.

But please cover it up.

Thx

Your Jihad advisor

Charles Lister



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At the end of April an influential Jihadist scholar in Syria, Sheikh Abdallah Muhammad al Muhaysini, lauched a new recruiting campaign. A few days later al-Qaeda's leader Ayman az-Zawahiri also called for all Muslims to join Jihad in Syria. The son of Osama Bin Laden, Hamza, also issued such a call. This is an unprecedented recruiting campaign which points to new upcoming offensives.

More and more experts wake up to the long term danger that an entrenched al-Qaeda in Syria poses. Al-Qaeda has little income from taxes or oil but must have some obviously quite generous individuals and state sponsors in the Gulf region. It has more money to spend than the "western" financed mercenaries and can afford to parade the nicer fire trucks. This lets it gain local support. The "water" the Jihadi "fish" can swim in.

Propagandists like Lister try to sell al-Qaeda in Syria as a "moderate" force. It is nothing like that. It is the same al-Qaeda with the same agenda then the one entrenched in the Pakistan-Afghanistan border area. The more homegrown Salafist Jihadis of Ahrar al Shams in Syria are now the Taliban of Syria and Turkey is taking up Pakistan's duplicitous role.

Like in Afghanistan in the 1980s the U.S., while probably not directly supporting al-Qaeda, is indirectly facilitating it because it is an effective fighting force which can be used to further short term U.S policy aims. The U.S. delivers thousands of tons of weapons to "moderate" rebels in Syria even as it know that these give half of each haul to their al-Qaeda allies. It also protects al-Qaeda from being bombed by Russian forces during the on and off ceasefire.

But al-Qaeda is still al-Qaeda and its brutal fight for its ideology will not stay in Syria. Just like its earlier incarnation did not restrict its fight to Afghanistan but came back to bite its former sponsors.

Posted by b on May 10, 2016 at 18:08 UTC | Permalink

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