Eric Zuesse, originally posted at strategic-culture.org
The invasion and occupation of Syria by tens of thousands of jihadists who were recruited from around the world to overthrow Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad, was financed mainly by U.S. taxpayers and by the world’s wealthiest family, the Sauds, who own Saudi Arabia and the world’s largest oil company, Aramco. America’s international oil companies and major think tanks and ‘charitable’ foundations were also supportive and providing propaganda for the operation, but the main financing for it came from America’s taxpayers, and from the Saud family and from the Government that they own.
One of the best articles that the New York Times ever published was by Mark Mazzetti and Matt Apuzzo, on 23 January 2016, “U.S. Relies Heavily on Saudi Money to Support Syrian Rebels”. They reported that, “the C.I.A. and its Saudi counterpart have maintained an unusual arrangement for the rebel-training mission, which the Americans have code-named Timber Sycamore. Under the deal, current and former administration officials said, the Saudis contribute both weapons and large sums of money, and the C.I.A takes the lead in training the rebels. … From the moment the C.I.A. operation was started, Saudi money supported it.” Furthermore, “The White House has embraced the covert financing from Saudi Arabia — and from Qatar, Jordan and Turkey.” But “American officials said Saudi Arabia was by far the largest contributor to the operation.” The invasion and occupation of Syria by jihadists from around the world was primarily a Saud operation, though it was managed mainly by the U.S. Government.
Prior to the failed U.S.-backed coup-attempt on 15 July 2015 to replace Tayyip Erdogan as Turkey’s President, Turkey was part of the U.S-Saudi alliance to overthrow and replace Syria’s Government. But afterwards, Turkey increasingly switched against the U.S. and Sauds, and toward instead supporting the target of the Sauds and of America’s aristocrats: Syria. And, so, Turkey has increasingly joined Syria’s alliance, which includes Iran and Russia. That’s one of the major geopolitical changes in recent decades.
The NYT continued: “The Saudi efforts were led by the flamboyant Prince Bandar bin Sultan, at the time the intelligence chief, who directed Saudi spies to buy thousands of AK-47s and millions of rounds of ammunition in Eastern Europe for the Syrian rebels. The C.I.A. helped arrange some of the arms purchases for the Saudis, including a large deal in Croatia in 2012.”
The U.S. preferred to be supplying the jihadists weapons that weren’t from U.S. manufacturers, in order to impede any tracing back to the United States the arming of the movement to oust and replace Syria’s secular, committedly non-sectarian, Government. The Sauds — who are just as committedly sectarian, and are even supporters of the extreme fundamentalist Wahhabist sect of Sunni Islam — likewise tried to cover their tracks in this operation, but their tracks were financial. The Sauds have been especially skillful at covering their tracks. Prince Bandar bin Sultan al-Saud was a buddy of George W. Bush, and had secretly donated over a million dollars in cash to Al Qaeda prior to the 9/11 attacks, according to Osama bin Laden’s financial bagman, who had picked up personally each one of the million-dollar-cash donations to that organization until 9/11 and who named amongst those donors not only Prince Bandar but also Prince Salman al-Saud, who subsequently became King Salman, who is now the father of Crown Prince Salman, who recently murdered the Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi. Crown Prince Salman is also a close friend of America’s current ‘prince’, Jared Kushner, the U.S. President’s son-in-law. So, the Saud family are very close with America’s Republican aristocrats, perhaps even closer than they are with America’s Democratic aristocrats. But especially because of the business links, the Sauds are deeply influential throughout America’s aristocracy. Not only is Saudi Arabia the world’s most oil-rich country, but it is also the world’s largest purchaser of weapons from Lockheed Martin and the other American ‘defense’ contractors, which sell exclusively to the U.S. Government and to the governments that are allied with it (such as to Saudi Arabia). So, those corporations depend upon the Sauds more than upon any other family, even than any single American family.
The Saud family are also crucial allies with Israel’s aristocracy, who include such American billionaires as the Republican Sheldon Adelson and the Democrat Lesley Wexner.
Prince Bandar was also reported by the FBI to have financed directly from his personal checking account the U.S. stays, and the pilot-training, of at least two of the 15 Saudis who were among the 19 jihadists who carried out the piloting and plane-seizings on 9/11. So, if Bandar didn’t (perhaps in consultation with George W. Bush) actually plan those attacks himself, he at least was one of their chief financial backers.
The NYT article also mentioned that “In late 2012, according to two former senior American officials, David H. Petraeus, then the C.I.A. director, delivered a stern lecture to intelligence officials of several gulf nations at a meeting near the Dead Sea in Jordan. He chastised them for sending arms into Syria without coordinating with one another or with C.I.A. officers in Jordan and Turkey. Months later, Mr. Obama gave his approval for the C.I.A. to begin directly arming and training the rebels from a base in Jordan, amending the Timber Sycamore program to allow lethal assistance. Under the new arrangement, the C.I.A. took the lead in training, while Saudi Arabia’s intelligence agency, the General Intelligence Directorate, provided money and weapons, including TOW anti-tank missiles,” so as to conquer Syria, for the Sauds.
These authors were, however, misguided when they wrote that “While the intelligence alliance is central to the Syria fight and has been important in the war against Al Qaeda, a constant irritant in American-Saudi relations is just how much Saudi citizens continue to support terrorist groups, analysts said.” That “support” to jihadists, to the extent that it was financial, came actually not from “Saudi citizens,” but from the Saudi aristocracy, mainly from the Saud family itself. Moreover, in a monarchy — which Saudi Arabia is — there are no actual “citizens”; there are only the monarch and his or her “subjects” not “citizens” (citizens such as exist in a democracy — even it’s only a so-called one). There are only the monarch and his/her subjects — especially in an absolute monarchy, such as Saudi Arabia. So: that term “citizens” was a false and misleading term in that context.
On 6 March 2013, Britain’s Guardian bannered regarding General Petraeus “From El Salvador to Iraq: Washington’s man behind brutal police squads” and reported his having created the death squads in El Salvador and designed the post-Saddam Iraqi torture program for trying to extract from detainees (though the Guardian failed to note this) whatever information they might have about Saddam Hussein’s role in the 9/11 attacks. Nothing was mentioned in the Guardian, about 9/11, but only that “The aim: to halt a nascent Sunni insurgency in its tracks by extracting information from detainees” — but nothing was said there about what type of “information” was being sought, or why. “With Petraeus’s almost unlimited access to money and weapons, and Steele’s field expertise in counterinsurgency, the stage was set for the commandos to emerge as a terrifying force.” But force for what? The Guardian offered nothing on that.
Thierry Meyssan at Voltairenet, on 9 May 2011, headlined “What you don’t know about the Bilderberg-Group” and he wrote: “The operation was controlled in reality by William J. Donovan, the former commander of the OSS (the U.S. intelligence service during the war), now in charge of building the American branch of the new secret service of NATO, Gladio [2]. … Moreover, the security of each subsequent meeting was not provided by the police of the host country, but by the soldiers of the NATO Alliance.” Meyssan said that “Henry Kissinger is the main person responsible for invitations to the Bilderberg Group.” Another of the “core group” was “Henry R. Kravis: U.S. financier, investment fund manager KKR. He’s a major fundraiser for the Republican Party.” Meyssan called this “The Lobby of the most powerful military organization in the world [NATO].”
Furthermore:
During the last U.S. presidential elections, it was reported that Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton disappeared on June 6, 2008, in order to negotiate an end to their rivalry. In reality, they participated in the annual conference of the Bilderberg Group in Chantilly, Virginia (USA). The following day, Mrs. Clinton announced that she was retiring from the race. … According to our sources, something else happened. Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton concluded a financial and political agreement. Senator Obama bailed out his rival financially and offered her a position in his administration (Clinton refused the vice-presidency and instead chose the State Department) in exchange for her active support during the campaign against McCain. Then, the two leaders were presented by James A. Johnson to the Bilderberg Conference, where they assured the participants that they would work together. [Hillary had a solid record and reputation as a neoconservative and as a supporter of overthrowing Syria’s Government.] Barack Obama had already been NATO’s candidate for a long time. [But his campaign rhetoric had nonetheless caused worries amongst the Establishment.] Mr. Obama and his family have always worked for the CIA and the Pentagon. [3] Moreover, the initial funds for his campaign were provided by the Crown of England, via a businessman named Nadhmi Auchi. [See, e.g.: this and this and this and this.] In presenting the Black Senator to the Bilderbergers, the Atlantic Alliance was, in fact, organizing public relations at the international level for the future president of the United States.
Of course, that was even before Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2009.
On 11 December 2018, Meyssan headlined “Whom does Emmanuel Macron owe?” and he wrote that, “he owes his electoral campaign mostly to Henry Kravis, the boss of one of the world’s largest financial companies, and to NATO – a considerable debt which weighs heavily today on the solution to the Yellow Vests crisis.” Macron had first met “Henry and Marie-Josée Kravis, in their residence on Park Avenue in New York [1]. (This meeting probably took place in 2007. Thereafter, Emmanuel Macron systematically visited the Kravis couple whenever he was in the USA, and Henry Kravis welcomed him in his offices on Avenue Montaigne when he visited Paris.) The Kravis couple, unfailing supporters of the US Republican Party, are among the great world fortunes who play politics out of sight of the Press.” Furthermore:
In December 2014, Henry Kravis created his own Intelligence agency, the KKR Global Institute. He nominated at its head the ex-Director of the CIA, General David Petraeus. With the Kravis couple’s private funds (the KKR investment funds), and without referring to Congress, Petraeus pursued operation «Timber Sycamore» which had been initiated by President Barack Obama. This was the largest weapons traffic in History, implicating at least 17 states and representing many thousands of tons of weapons worth several billion dollars [7]. As such, Kravis and Petraeus became the main suppliers for Daesh [8].
On 6 June 2017, Meyssan headlined “Confrontation at Bilderberg 2017” and wrote:
There exist no photographs of the meeting of the Bilderberg Group, whose work is confidential. Security for the meeting is not handled by the FBI, nor the Virginia police force, but by a private militia organised by NATO.
The Bilderberg Group was created in 1954 by the CIA and MI6 in order to support the Atlantic Alliance. …
The 2017 meeting is also described there: Among the Board of Directors, mostly international corporate luminaries, was “Marie-Josée Drouin-Kravis: Economic columnist in print and broadcast media in Canada. Researcher at the very militaristic Hudson Institute. She is the third wife of Henry Kravis.”
Both Petraeus and his two KKR sponsors are regular attendees at the Bilderberg meetings. What financial stake — if any — in assisting the Sauds to take over Syria, KKR has, is not known. But if there is such, then the U.S. Government’s recent decision to quit its military occupation of Syria will presumably be, to that extent, unfavorable for KKR, and unpopular amongst the 150 companies in which it holds stock.
The great investigative journalists Dilyana Geytandzhieva, Andrey Fomin, Manlio Dinucci, Thierry Meysan, and the South Front site, have, in several articles, documented that the Governments of U.S., UAE, Qatar, and mainly Saudi Arabia, are financing and overseeing a multibillion-dollar privately operated weapons-smuggling operation to Sunni jihadist groups such as Al Qaeda in Africa, the Middle East, Pakistan, and Asia. Meyssan writes:
In less than three years, Silk Way Airlines transported at least one billion dollars’ worth of armament.
One thing leading to another, journalist Dilyana Gaytandzhieva uncovered a vast system which also supplied the jihadists not only in Iraq and Syria, but also in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Congo – also paid for by the Saudis and the Emiratis. Some of the arms delivered in Arabia were redirected to South Africa.
The arms transported to Afghanistan were delivered to the Talibans, under the control of the US, which is pretending to fight them. …
Although, according to the international treaties, neither civil nor diplomatic flights are authorised to carry military material, requests for recognition as «diplomatic flights» require the explicit detailing of the cargo transported. However, at the request of the US State Department, at least Afghanistan, Germany, Saudi Arabia, Bulgaria, Congo, the United Arab Emirates, Hungary, Israël, Pakistan, Poland, Romania, Serbia, Slovakia, the Czech Republic, Turkey and United Kingdom closed their eyes to this violation of international law, just as they had ignored the CIA flights to and from their secret prisons. …
According to Sibel Edmonds – ex-FBI agent and founder of the National Security Whistleblowers Coalition – Azerbaïdjan, under President Heydar Aliyev, from 1997 to 2001 hosted in Bakou the number 2 of Al-Qaïda, Ayman el-Zawahiri. This was done at the request of the CIA. Although officially wanted by the FBI, the man who was then the number 2 of the international jihadist network travelled regularly in NATO planes to Afghanistan, Albania, Egypt and Turkey. He also received frequent visits from Prince Bandar ben Sultan of Saudi Arabia [11].
International relations are controlled by international corporations, but the identities of the persons who control those are often hidden; so, it’s not easy to say whom has been enriched by the invasion and occupation of Syria. And, probably, there won’t be funding for investigative journalists to do the costly research to find out whom those persons actually are. But they controlled both Obama and Trump, both of whom carried out their policy on Syria.
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Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of They’re Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010, and of CHRIST’S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity.
