PRESS RELEASE
After Gen. Flynn’s Revelations: McClatchy Papers Expose More on Obama’s Help to Syrian Jihadists
Aug. 14, 2015 (EIRNS)—The U.S. military, and intelligence analysts, were sounding the alarm to the Obama administration very early in the Syrian civil war that the jihadists of Al Qaeda were gaining ground and taking over the Syrian opposition on the ground, but “Senior officials chose to look the other way, however, and flog a misleading narrative of a viable moderate force,” wrote McClatchy investigative reporter Hannah Allam on Aug. 13 in a lengthy article that has been published by McClatchy papers throughout the United States (Miami Herald, Sacramento Bee, and others).
“By all accounts—internal memos, intelligence briefings, dispatches from the ground—conventional wisdom was that the extremists were recruiting or routing mainstream fighters, and that the loosely affiliated moderate factions known collectively as the Free Syrian Army were no match for the more disciplined and better armed jihadists.
“Extensive interviews with Syria policymakers from the Obama administration, some of whom spoke on the record and others who requested anonymity so as to freely describe the administration’s behind-the-scenes debates, reveal that the Obama administration was warned early on that al Qaida-linked fighters were gaining prominence within the anti-Assad struggle.”
Allam zeroes in on Secretary of State John Kerry’s testimony to Congress in the first week of September 2013, in which he told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that the Syrian “opposition is getting stronger by the day,” and that “Al Qaida and the bad guys” were only about 15 to 25 percent of it.
While Allam doesn’t mention the statements made to Al Jazeera by former DIA head, Gen. Michael Flynn, that the rise of the jihadists was a “willful decision” of the Obama administration, the former U.S. government officials who agreed to be quoted—former Ambassador Robert Ford, former State Department official Jeffrey Feltman, and former Ambassador Ryan Crocker—all provide anecdotal confirmation that they and the institutional “Syria watchers” were all well-informed that the jihadists had overrun the moderates and had taken over the war.
The article can be read at: http://www.miamiherald.com/news/nation-world/world/article 31034067.html#storylink=cpy
