A US deal with al-Qaeda

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.

They've urged the West to mount an air campaign against Assad's mechanized forces.

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.

 Voice of Russia, USA Today/