Obama
might be cutting deals with Al Qaeda while world fixated on Snowden
VOR,
22
June, 2013
As the global public's eyes are fixed on Snowden, the US President Barack Obama might be using the moment to "downtone American attempts to 'cooperate' with the world's most infamous terrorist organization. A Syrian rebel group's pledge of allegiance to al-Qaeda's replacement for Osama bin Laden suggests that the terrorist group's influence is not waning and that it may take a greater role in the US-backed fight to topple Syrian President Bashar Assad.
The
pledge of allegiance by Syrian Jabhat al Nusra Front chief Abou
Mohamad al-Joulani to al-Qaeda leader Sheik Ayman al-Zawahri was
coupled with an announcement by the al-Qaeda affiliate in Iraq, the
Islamic State of Iraq, that it would work with al Nusra as well.
Lebanese
Sheik Omar Bakri, a Salafist who says states must be governed by
Muslim religious law, says al-Qaeda has assisted al Nusra for some
time.
"They
provided them early on with technical, military and financial
support, especially when it came to setting up networks of foreign
jihadis who were brought into Syria," Bakri says. "There
will certainly be greater coordination between the two groups."
The
United States, which supports the overthrow of Assad, designated al
Nusra a terrorist entity in December, nonethelss has taken no
definitive action to prevent the terrorist organization from fighting
on the side of the Syrian rebels.
Al
Nusra and groups like it have seen some of the most significant
victories against Syrian government forces in the course of the
2-year-old uprising in which Assad's forces have killed about 80,000
people.
Tamer
Mouhieddine, spokesman for the Syrian Free Army, a force made up of
Syrian soldiers who have defected, that they "are willing
to fight alongside any faction [including Al-Qaeda] targeting the
Assad regime, as long as it does not have a foreign agenda, which
seems now the case".
Given
that SFA works together with the US to topple Assad's regime and the
White House still does not oppose SFA's claims of this sort, the US
might well be "tacitly
cooperating with Al-Qaeda,
one of the political bloggers asserts.
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