How a US and Qatari regime change deception produced ‘Caesar’ sanctions driving Syria towards famine
Like the mysterious figure it is named for, the Caesar sanctions bill is the product of an elaborate deception by shadowy US- and Gulf-backed operatives. Instead of protecting Syrian civilians, the unilateral measures are driving them towards hunger and death.
by Max Blumenthal
Part 3 - The dubious origins of the “Caesar” file
In June 2019, The Grayzone exposed a non-profit widely praised in Western media, the Center for International Justice and Accountability (CIJA), as a US- and EU-funded regime-change initiative that aims to destabilize the Syrian government by subverting the international legal system.
As The Grayzone reported, CIJA field investigators worked directly with extremist militants – including Al Qaeda’s local affiliate – to gather documents from pillaged government offices and spirit them out of the country. CIJA even “pays rebel groups and couriers for logistical support,” the New Yorker acknowledged in a puff piece about the organization.
No trove of documents has been more valuable to regime-change lobbyists in Washington than the so-called “Caesar” file. In another profile of CIJA that omitted the role of the US State Department in establishing the group, the New York Times’ Anne Barnard claimed that Caesar “fled Syria with pictures of at least 6,700 corpses, bone-thin and battered, which shocked the world when they emerged in 2014.”
Caesar’s supposed escape from Syria, and the story of how he obtained the photos, closely mirrored the shady tactics that CIJA investigators used to obtain other documents they planned to exploit for prosecutions of Syrian former officials in Western courts.
According to Vanity Fair, “Caesar” was actively spying for the Syrian opposition since 2011, and working with a “handler” described as “a Syrian academic and human-rights figure named Hassan al-Chalabi.” This character (no relation to the late Iraqi con artist Ahmad Chalabi) was himself “running a shadowy intelligence network inside Syria,” according to the magazine.
Chalabi told Vanity Fair that he arranged for “Caesar” to be smuggled out of Syria with his files in 2013 with the help of the CIA-created Free Syrian Army and an obscure militia known as the Strangers Battalion. (Observers of the Syrian conflict has since identified the latter group to be a collection of Uyghur foreign fighters allied with Al Qaeda.)
Caesar then passed his files to the Syrian National Movement, a marginal group of Islamists that was funded and overseen by the government of Qatar.
From there, the files went to outfits like CIJA, Human Rights Watch, and the New York Times – and “Caesar” went to Capitol Hill.
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