Eric Zuesse

The United States cooked up the idea of using fundamentalist-Sunni, Saudi-led-and-inspired mujahideen, or “Taliban,” as cheap fanatics to fight against the Soviet Union in 1979 in Afghanistan; and, then, after thus draining and ending the USSR by 1991, the royal Sauds and their friends U.S. Presidents — starting with the Bushes but including Clinton(s) and Obama — have continued it as a bad habit, which got out of control and has now ultimately forced millions of Syrians (and Libyans etc.) to leave their jihadist-infested homelands to seek safety in Europe. This influx is too many refugees, too fast for Europe (or anywhere) to absorb, and so has created a crisis that threatens the continued existence of the EU. Has Russia now effectively come to the rescue and saved the EU, and perhaps placed the U.S.-Saudi fundamentalist-Sunni genie back into its bloody destructive bottle? Perhaps so.

Europe’s enemies, the United States and its Sunni fundamentalist allies (Saudi Arabia, Qatar, UAE, Kuwait, and Turkey) almost succeeded in replacing Syria’s non-sectarian and secular Ba’athist government, by a Saudi-inspired fundamentalist-Sunni one; and, in the process, those enemies of Europe produced millions of Syrian and other refugees into Europe and elsewhere. In this ongoing crisis, Europe’s leaders, such as Angela Merkel (who as an East German has hated and feared Russians ever since childhood), are still allied with Europe’s enemies (those Sunni-fundamentalist-ruled nations, which compete against Russia in the oil-and-gas markets), but Russia’s intervention in the Syrian conflict has finally turned the tide against the jihadists, so that Europeans can, at long last, reasonably begin to hope again that this hell has reached its bottom, and that Europe’s future is heading back towards progress, instead of towards ever-increasing conflict and recession and soaring debt.

Until Russia, on 30 September 2015, entered the Syrian war to conquer the jihadists who were being paid by the fundamentalist Sunni governments and leaders of Saudi Arabia, Qatar, UAE, Kuwait, and Turkey — being paid to overthrow and replace the secular Ba’athist government of the nominally Shiite Syrian President Bashar al-Assad — until that Russian bombing-campaign began, ISIS and the other foreign jihadist groups were in the ascendancy in Syria. These foreign fighters, who came into Syria through U.S.-&-Saudi-allied fundamentalist-led Turkey (the Sauds’ agent in NATO), are the people who drove those millions of Syrians into exile abroad, into the EU and elsewhere.

But on March 25th, Ziad Fadel, one of the few reliably truthful (though purple-prosed) reporters on the Syrian conflict, reported at Syrian Perspective, the crucial news that:

The Syrian Army has racked up another victory over the Turk-supported and Saudi-financed terrorist group called ISIS. In 2 places, at the SyriaTel Tower atop a hill overlooking the “Necropolis” (Jabal Al-Quboor) and the Citadel of Palmyra, … the Syrian army stormed high fortifications set up by the terrorist rodents and destroyed them all killing every single vermin except those who absconded early to face certain death at the hands of ISIS itself or our vaunted Desert Falcons. … The Syrian Army has also liberated the 'Hotel District' including the Semiramis and Didiman. As I write, the army is pushing deep into the city aiming to establish control over the Fuel Station. Resistance has been sporadic, the rats mostly relying on booby-trapped vehicles and IEDs. Each rat has been assigned a platoon whose sole purpose is to expose him and kill him. According to Monzer, there are only about 600 rodents left in the city [Palmyra], some of whom are known to be preparing for a pullout or a negotiated surrender – an event which will not happen, by the way. They are in a true dilemma: if they surrender to our Falcons, they will die. If they escape to their litter-mates in Al-Raqqa or Al-Sukhna, they will, also, die. … We are only hours away from total liberation.

Palmyra is in the very heart of the vast Sunni-dominated part of Syria — the part that the U.S. and its fundamentalist-Sunni allies have been wanting especially to control so as to build, through that currently fundamentalist-Sunni-controlled area, oil and gas pipelines for Saudi Arabia and Qatar to transport their oil and gas into the EU. Here’s a map showing how central Palmyra is in the Sunni or ISIS-held region of Syria:

At the current rate of progress by Assad (still backed by Russian bombers) the Syrian army will soon be able to attack the Syrian headquarters of ISIS, which is in Raqqa. When that happens, then Assad, Russia, and all of Europe will have won this long and terrible war, which has become such a curse to the EU, even if not so much as it has been a curse to the Syrian people.

Even Newsweek, one of the U.S. Establishment’s main news-magazines, headlined on March 24th, “Will There Be a Coup Against Erdogan in Turkey?” and Michael Rubin reported there that, "The situation in Turkey is bad and getting worse. It’s not just the deterioration in security amidst a wave of terrorism. Public debt might be stable, but private debt is out of control, the tourism sector is in free-fall and the decline in the currency has impacted every citizen’s buying power.” Though the Turkish dictator the fundamentalist Sunni Tayyip Erdogan — who has arrested and replaced the management at the two Turkish news-media that had dared to report the truth about his having been supplying terrorists in Syria — may still have his friends in Washington, Riyadh, Doha, and Kuwait City, his position in Turkey itself is becoming increasingly perilous (and this is despite the $6B+ aid package that Obama and Merkel wrangled the EU to pay Turkey to ‘assist’ the EU to deal with the refugees that Turkey and its allies had helped to produce).

Rubin reported,

Turks — and the Turkish military — increasingly recognize that Erdogan is taking Turkey to the precipice. By first bestowing legitimacy upon imprisoned Kurdish leader Abdullah Öcalan with renewed negotiations and then precipitating renewed conflict, he has taken Turkey down a path in which there is no chance of victory and a high chance of de facto partition.

It’s beginning to appear that Barack Obama, Angela Merkel, and the Gulf Cooperation Council of all-fundamentalist-Sunni dictatorships, won’t be able to protect Erdogan’s hide, after all. Rubin continued:

Coup leaders might moot European and American human rights and civil society criticism and that of journalists by immediately freeing all detained journalists and academics and by returning seized newspapers and television stations to their rightful owners.

Turkey’s NATO membership is no deterrent to action: Neither Turkey nor Greece lost their NATO membership after previous coups. Should a new leadership engage sincerely with Turkey’s Kurds, Kurds might come onboard.

Neither European nor American public opinion would likely be sympathetic to the execution of Erdogan.

There is hope for the EU yet. If Russia hadn’t entered the war against the terrorists, would there be?

America was helping the jihadists to overthrow Assad — to overthrow the only secular government in the Middle East. How constructive has that been for Europe?

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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