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Wednesday, June 27

SouthFront tries to resolve claims that US aids Islamic State in Syria

From Elijah J. Magnier's June 27 report, The most complicated battle of Southern Syria: US forces under threat due to Israeli interference:
It is not a question of "conspiracy theory" here: the US is protecting ISIS in the north-east and Israel protects ISIS and other jihadists in the south. Both countries are preventing the eradication of terrorist jihadists and are stopping the Syrian army from liberating its own territory. In the meantime, Russia is walking in the middle of a minefield, as if the “war on terror” was the concern of Moscow, Tehran, Damascus and its allies only, and means nothing to Israel and the US.
Such accusations have been snowballing in recent weeks.  SouthFront takes a stab at untangling the mess in their June 27 Syrian War report, MILITANTS’ DEFENSE COLLAPSING IN SOUTHERN SYRIA (emphasis mine):
[...]
Two helicopters of the US-led coalition have evacuated two ISIS commanders from the area of Twaimin in the Syrian province of al-Hasakah, the Syrian state-run news agency SANA reported on June 25 adding that the goal of the move is “prolonging terrorist war on Syria”. The terrorists were allegedly transported to a US military facility in al-Shaddadi.
The Syrian government, Iran and Russia have repeatedly accused the US-led coalition of providing at least indirect assistance to ISIS [Islamic State] terrorists. The SANA has released a number of reports saying that aircraft of the coalition evacuate ISIS members from the combat zones in Syria to the coalition-occupied areas.
The US-led coalition officially rejects all the accusations claiming they're just propaganda. At the same time the US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) have released a number of statements accusing the SAA [Syrian Arab Army] and Russia of cooperating with ISIS and supporting the terrorism.
A weak media response of the coalition and SDF to the SANA accusations is linked with the fact that almost all the remaining strong points of ISIS in eastern Syria are located on the eastern bank of the Euphrates, declared by the [US] coalition as its zone of responsibility.
Thus, on one hand, the coalition is not hurrying up to fight ISIS because this move will undermine its already weak justification of the military presence in Syria. On the other hand, it has to show that it is fighting ISIS in an attempt to hide its current goals – to prevent the restoration of the Syrian territorial integrity under control of the Damascus government, to limit the Russian influence in the region and to assist Israel in opposing Iran.
The sentence I highlighted might not be checkmate but it means the Trump regime has a lot of explaining to do. 

Meanwhile claims of U.S. cooperation with Islamic State and other terrorist/hardline Islamist groups in Syria are helping fuel protests by the growing number of Syrians who've switched their allegiance from rebel groups to Syria's government. Magnier's report includes photographs of yet another of those protests with the caption:
In Ibta’ (rural Daraa, in Syria's south), “citizens raise the Syrian flag inviting the Syrian Army in their city and hoping it will liberate them from terrorists”.
The report also includes a photograph of Saudi Arabia's foreign minister with his arm around Ahmad al-Awda, commander of the Shabaa al Sunnah militant group in rural Daraa -- although al-Awda seems to have been kicked out in  2016 if Wikipedia's article on the group is correct. In any case it's a good guess the Saudis don't care who's commanding the group provided he does what they tell him to do.

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