This week, the insane British and French mis-rulers gave notice that they intend pouring fuel on the Syrian crisis – a crisis that they largely instigated – by openly sending more heavy weapons to the Western-backed mercenaries tearing that country apart.
It should be patently obvious that the murderous rampage against Syrian civilians that is entering its third year could not be sustained if it were not for the relentless Western government and media support. Now this Western remote-control killing machine is to be fitted with a higher murderous gear, thanks to the diplomatic engineering of Britain and France in removing the European arms embargo on Syria.
This is the conduct of arsonists who rush to a fire that they have started, and while claiming to be firefighters, these same protagonists are laden with more inflammable material undeterred by the sound of screaming voices.
The truly insane thing about these criminal European regimes is that the evil fruit of their nefarious work is rampant not just in Syria, but contemporaneously across the Middle East and Africa.
London and Paris finally got their way in goading the European Union to officially lift the arms embargo on Syria, paving the way for Britain and France to begin funneling weapons to the Al Qaeda-linked militants doing the West’s bidding to sabotage the government of President Bashar al Assad and effect the long-held objective of regime change in Syria.
Britain and France are cynically maintaining the ridiculous fiction that this increased weapons supply will bring peace to Syria – in the face of overwhelming evidence that such a move will do the exact opposite.
Moreover, the increased British and French firepower to myriad self-styled jihadist brigades in Syria threatens to escalate sectarian bloodshed across the entire Middle East, pulling Lebanon, Iraq and other countries into an all-out internecine conflagration.
This is not a prediction. It is a description of what is already happening as a result of the criminal foreign policies of London, Paris, Washington and their regional allies.
On Tuesday, the day after Brussels lifted its arms embargo on Syria, French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius was in the West African country of Niger warning about the perils of “international terrorism” and how the North and West African states must “pull together to defeat this threat.” Fabius (and Britain’s Hague) should be renamed “minister for foreign arson.
Last week, Niger was the scene of a deadly twin suicide attack in which 35 people, including 10 militants, were killed. The attacks on a Niger army barracks in the city of Agadez and a French-owned uranium mine in Arlit are believed to the first such terrorist incidents in that country since its independence from the former colonial ruler, France, in 1960.
Fabius claimed that the militants behind the twin assaults launched their attacks from southern Libya. This was also the view of Niger’s President Mahamadou Issoufou. Despite a denial by the Libyan government of any such link, it is plausible that the militant groups behind the attacks in Niger have at least been materially galvanized by the various NATO-backed jihadist brigades that overthrew the Libyan government of Muammar Gaddafi at the end of 2011.
The double bombings last week in Niger were claimed to be a joint operation by the Movement for Oneness and Justice in West Africa (MUJWA) and the Signed in Blood group led by Moktar Belmoktar. Both organizations are self-declared affiliates of Al Qaeda in the Maghreb and the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG).
The latter led the NATO regime-change operation, starting in early 2011, against Libya’s Gaddafi with weapons and money supplied by NATO powers and their Persian Gulf Wahhabi allies of Saudi Arabia and Qatar. NATO also provided the seven-month aerial bombardment campaign that was crucial for the Libyan jihadists’ defeat of Gaddafi. This is the same nefarious nexus that is ripping Syria asunder.
NATO’s regime-change operation in Libya has since created a lawless country overrun by fractious militia, where even the former Western sponsors of the militia are no longer safe. The killing of US Ambassador Christopher Stevens in Benghazi in September 2012 is perhaps the most graphic indicator of the mayhem that the NATO powers have unleashed on Libya, formerly one of Africa’s most developed states. Since then, British and French consular sites and personnel have also come under attack and their staff have had to be withdrawn from that North African country.
This is a foretaste of the kind of chaos that will escalate in Syria and the wider region now that Britain and France have opened the floodgates for arming the like-minded Wahhabi mercenaries in Syria. President Assad predicted this very outcome several months ago, and he was derided for it by the Western regimes and their propaganda media.
It is credibly reported that the Libyan jihadists have been major suppliers of NATO and Wahhabi Arab weaponry into Syria. They have also sent fighters to join the estimated 10,000-20,000 foreign mercenaries marauding in Syria.
The NATO-Arab weapons supplied to Libya to oust Gaddafi have also found their way to the ideologically similar groups that span the vast Maghreb, Sahel and Sahara terrains. It was these arms and fighters that energized the Islamist MUJWA and Ansar Dine that took over northern Mali early last year.
France mounted a full-scale troop invasion and aerial bombing campaign in Mali on 11 January this year allegedly to defeat “Islamist extremists” threatening the sovereignty of its former Malian colony. Securing the rich uranium and other mineral resources of Mali, as in Niger, are of course the real Western agenda.
The same groups, along with Belmoktar’s Signed in Blood, were involved in the deadly siege of the Amenas gas plant in Algeria in January earlier this year, in which 37 workers were killed. That siege was said to be in retribution for France’s military intervention in Mali “to liberate the northern territory.”
Now these same groups are behind the twin bombings in Niger, which destroyed a central part of the uranium mine owned by French company, Areva. The attackers said it was also revenge for the ongoing French military operations in neighboring Mali.
How clear does it have to get before the European public start to connect the criminal reality of their political rulers? These so-called governments in London and Paris are nothing but a gang of arsonists, setting whole countries on fire with explosive repercussions – all fuelled by reckless imperialist self-interest.
Like the fire-bombing tactics of cities during the Second World War by Western criminal regimes, these present-day terrorist fires in the Middle East and Africa, once unleashed, are becoming self-reinforcing and out of control. What’s more, through unremitting economic austerity, these mis-rulers are, in effect, extorting public welfare money from workers, unemployed, the elderly and sick to pay for their criminal conflagration abroad.
Originally published: Finian Cunningham (Press TV)
Finian Cunningham is a prominent expert in international affairs. The author and media commentator was expelled from Bahrain in June 2011 for his critical journalism in which he highlighted human rights violations by the Western-backed regime. He is a Master’s graduate in Agricultural Chemistry and worked as a scientific editor for the Royal Society of Chemistry, Cambridge, England, before pursuing a career in journalism. He is based in East Africa where he is writing a book on Bahrain and the Arab Spring. He co-hosts a weekly current affairs programme, Sunday at 3pm GMT on Bandung Radio