The New American Game of ‘Divide and Rule’ in Syria

Rasa - The strategy of "Divide and Rule" is once again being used by the United States in occupied Syria. As we speak, the War Party is backing various terror proxy forces in conflicts between each other and the Syrian state, both as a means of undermining their influence and consolidating its own authority.

News ID: 435877

Date: 18 January 2018 - 22:09

RNA - The new escalation of the crisis, however, threatens to spiral into a full-scale regional war-by-proxy:

Over the weekend, the US announced its intention to establish a 30,000-strong force along the North Syrian border, a terror proxy group which would be mostly composed of Kurdish forces backed by Arab groups. Turkey and Syria have been both quick to complain about this colonial plan, but Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov offered more serious concerns about the long-term ramifications of this new force. Lavrov warned that in making the region controlled by US-backed forces a more permanent fixture, they threaten to lead to an outright partition of Syria itself, with a large part of the country wholly out of the central government’s control.

Ironically, the US had long opposed the suggestion of any partition in Syria, insisting that they would not accept any post-war situation that increased regional autonomy or established a federal system. US policy, however, seems to be headed toward maintaining such autonomy, if only to give them a pretext to keep military assets in Syrian Kurdistan through the new game of divide and rule.

The new strategy sets out US government policy options for prosecuting what it describes as “the long war against adversaries in the Muslim world, who are bent on forming a unified Islamic world to supplant Western dominance”.

Muslim world adversaries include the resistance front members of Iran, Syria, Iraq, Hezbollah, Ansarullah and Hamas that participate in the political process as well. War-party Washington sees the resistance front in the region that challenge the prevailing geopolitical order as adversaries to be countered and weakened. That says why it refuses to withdraw troops from post-ISIL Syria.

The War Party-sponsored strategy calls for exploiting fault lines along the Syria-Turkish border between the various Salafi-Takfiri groups and Kurdish forces to turn them against each other and against the Syrian-Turkish states. The idea is to make use of internal conflicts, for instance between proxy groups focused on overthrowing their national governments and transnational terrorists like Qaeda-allied Nusra Front to justify partition for protection.

This appears to be the new strategy in Syria, where rebel forces, despite affiliations with Al-Qaeda and ISIL, receive covert US aid to overthrow the central government in Damascus and ultimately partition Syria. To that end, war-party Washington is establishing the 30,000-strong force along the North Syrian border. The plan is not to help the pro-partition alliance to execute a military campaign to stamp out Al-Qaeda and ISIL elements that are present locally. It is packaged appropriately for partition with their help.

Funding, training and weaponizing these terror proxies is not a particularly bright idea in terms of recent US foreign policy by proxy warfare and the inevitable blowback effect - case in point: ISIL. Supporting these violent groups for America’s own foreign policy objectives is also incredibly damaging to its own regional allies, democratic or peaceful voices, and other civil society actors.

It is still stunning to see that the UN has kept quiet on the US arms shipments to militant and terrorist groups in Syria after its 6-year-long inaction in the face of the US military meddling in another sovereign state without a UN mandate.

After all, the multi-year CIA arms smuggling program in Syria was one of the most embarrassing failures of the US war there, and that’s really saying something. Massive amounts of arms were shipped to Syria with little accountability, and subsequent repots have shown a lot of the arms ended up with ISIL, Al-Qaeda, and other terrorist factions. It’s not clear how this bad idea would even conceivably work at this point, however, with most of the rebels holding little to no territory in Syria, and the CIA never particularly good at making sure their arms get to the intended factions. Resuming the smuggling would likely just compound the problem of US arms making the rounds to various terrorist groups that will ultimately use them to fight the US and its Arab allies.

In relationship to the preparations for creating the “New Middle East” there have been attempts, with partial success, to deliberately create divisions within the populations of the Middle East and Central Asia through ethno-cultural, religious, sectarian, national, and political differentiations. Aside from fuelling ethnic tensions, such as those between Kurds and Arabs in Syria, a sectarian divide is being deliberately cultivated within the ranks of the people of Syria which consider themselves liberated by the allied forces from ISIL’s reign of terror.

These divisions, however, are being fuelled by the US and Israeli intelligence apparatus. The intelligence agencies of Arab regimes within the American-Israeli orbit have also been involved in the construction of these divisions. This divide is also being cultivated with the help of various terrorist groups. Both Syria and its Iranian-Russian allies are aware that the US and Israel intend to partition post-ISIL Syria. It was openly mentioned over the weekend by the Pentagon regime.

It is no sin to question motives though, especially when circumstances call for it, but it is a sin and a crime to mislead the masses. This new program has been created to justify animosity against Iran and Russia and those perceived to be in the same camp, such as Syria and Hezbollah. The idea is to undermine their recent victories against US-backed ISIL and Al-Qaeda.

With the peoples of a partitioned Syria divided against each other, their resources (Northern oil and gas) can then be controlled by the US and they themselves governed and further manipulated with greater ease. This is part of the objective of the new American game of divide and rule all along. In this effort, local groups and terror proxies are partners.

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