Finian Cunningham
Kurdish
fighters have been used by the US to ostensibly defeat the remaining
Islamic State holdouts in eastern Syria. But what is emerging is not a
final defeat of the terrorists, more a redeployment to further
destabilize the Arab country.
Potentially,
the Kurds could wind up not with the regional autonomy they desire, but
as part of a rebranded American dirty war army whose ranks include the
very terrorist the Kurdish militias have been successfully battling
against.
President
Donald Trump has been lately crowing about how US-backed Kurdish forces
have wiped out the IS self-proclaimed caliphate around Baghouz in
eastern Syria. “They’re losers… they’re gone tonight,” he boasted about
supposedly vanquishing the jihadists.
However,
things are not that clear-cut. Syria’s envoy to the United Nations
Bashar al Jaafari dismissed Trump’s victory celebrations as a “bluff”.
He said that IS was not defeated in areas under US control, but rather
were being shunted off to various camps for retraining.
There are credible reports that
thousands of jihadists who surrendered or were captured in the fighting
around Baghouz have since been relocated by US forces to its military
base at al Tanf near the border with Iraq and Jordan, as well as to
nearby refugee camps such as Rukban, where some 40,000 detainees are
held. Suspiciously, the Americans are refusing international access to
these camps, even for UN humanitarian relief agencies. As Russia’s
Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov pointed out recently, the detention
centers are being used by the Americans as a pretext for illegally
occupying Syrian territory.
No comments:
Post a Comment