How the US, Turkey and Israel are propping up a senior al-Qaeda who still has a bounty on his head to lead Syria still “defeats” my eyes. For the first time Israel is having a field day in Syria with its soldiers now operating as far afield as Damascus.
As history shows this habit of propping up leaders who have no regard for humanity just for short term gains has always come back to haunt them in the long run.
In the 1980s, the US in bid to fight the Soviet Union entrusted the CIA with creating a group of anti-Soviet jihadis. In 1985 some of the Mujahideen were invited to the White House where then-U.S. President Ronald Reagan gestured toward his guests and stated,“These gentlemen are the moral equivalent of America’s Founding Fathers.”
It didn’t take long before these anti-Soviet jihadis became a thorn in America’s flesh. From them evolved Al-Qaeda and Taliban .As U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton later admitted in 2010, “We trained them, we equipped them, we funded them, including somebody named Osama bin Laden … And it didn’t work out so well for us.”
Hamas, which is now giving Israel lots of trouble, was created by the Israelis themselves to fight the Palestinian secularist led by Yasser Arafat who had started exerting great pressure on Israel for the return of Palestinian land. The then Israeli military governor of Gaza, Brig. Gen. Yitzhak Segev, would later admit how working in collaboration with Mossad he was given a special budget to fund radical Islamist factions within the Palestinian movement.
This was to achieve two goals: to split the nationalist Palestinian movement led by Arafat and to sabotage the implementation of the two-state solution agreed in Washington. By the time they were realising they had created a much troublesome enemy it was too late.
In 2014 in a 25-minute video,Al Jolani stated that he was committed to fighting America and its allies. I believe he still holds these views but at the moment he will take things easy and appear friendly because he knows what he is after.But very very soon he will put on his wolf skin. That’s when those propping him up will realise they had created a monster.
In my view, they would have forced Assad to step down to allow the creation of a representative interim government, followed by a free and fair election organised by the UN, working closely with Arab countries.
Courtesy Levin Odhiambo Opiyo
