About half a
year ago, in an unprecedented move, the Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard
tried
to pass a bill to prohibit the US government
funding terrorists. As Gabbard repeatedly supported, there is no such
thing as 'moderate rebels' in Syria. Every group under plenty of
names there, has only one mission: overthrow Assad government.
Gabbard said clearly that the US and its allies in the region,
support all these terrorist groups under various names.
It appears
that another fact justifies Gabbard's position, as the US and Canada,
unexpectedly avoided to enlist a supposedly new organization as
terrorist group. Specifically, as CBC
reports:
In
early 2015, al-Qaeda's international leader Ayman al-Zawahiri,
thought to be hiding in Pakistan, set al-Nusra free of its formal
subordination to al-Qaeda. "The brotherhood of Islam that
exists among us is stronger than any passing or changing
organizational ties," he said in a taped statement,
instructing the group to integrate itself into the wider Syrian
revolt. Al-Nusra changed its name to Jabhat Fateh al-Sham (Front for
the Conquest of the Levant), and continued to gobble up other Syrian
jihadi groups, often by force.
But
the West wasn't buying it. The U.S. and Canada simply added the new
name as another alias of al-Nusra on their terrorist listings. Both
countries are normally careful to capture all the aliases of
terrorist groups, including minor variations in spelling and
punctuation. (Islamic State has 46 permutations of its name listed by
Public Safety Canada; al-Nusra has six).
But
then in January of this year, the group shifted again, nominally
dissolving itself and joining with four other jihadi groups. It
altered its name, changing the word "Jabhat" (Front) to
"Hay'at" (Organization), and "Fateh" (Conquest)
to "Tahrir" (Liberation).
The
military commander of the group continues to be al-Jawlani, whom the
U.S. has branded a Specially Designated Global Terrorist. On
Wednesday, the U.S. government posted a $10-million reward for him.
The reward notice states that al-Nusra is "at the core of HTS,"
which is led by a triumvirate that also includes Egyptian Abu Khayr
al-Masri, the number two of the global al-Qaeda organization.
The
U.S. State Department's Nicole Thompson told CBC News on Monday:
"We're still looking at the extent of the merger and how
Hay'at Tahrir al-Sham really functions, but we believe these actions
are an al-Qaeda play to bring as much of the Syrian opposition under
its operational control as possible, thereby making groups that merge
with HTS part of al-Qaeda's Syria network."
"In
that sense, it is not unlike the formation of the Mujahideen Shura
Council in Iraq in 2006, which eventually brought the better part of
the Iraqi Sunni resistance under al-Qaeda's control and morphed into
the Islamic State of Iraq that same year."
And
yet HTS has not been designated in the U.S. as a terrorist group.
Canada, which usually follows the U.S. listing closely, has also not
listed the group.
Recall that,
Gabbard received intense criticism from the warmongering
establishment for actually pursuing the most reasonable development:
stop the US taxpayers' dollars from going to arm and fund terrorists.
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