The European Union and the McJihad in Syria

Interesting developments have been taking place in the European Union. Red flags are going up across the EU, with officials in the European Union and various EU member states expressing fears about their returning nationals fighting in Syria.

The red flags started going up when warnings were issued in the Netherlands about Dutch citizens going to fight in Syria. Belgium followed. Then the European Police Office (Europol), the EU’s law enforcement agency that handles criminal intelligence, reported that the fighting in Syria had the potential of creating a future wave of terrorism that could threaten the European Union’s members in their EU Terrorism Situation and Trend Report (TE-SAT) for 2013. In regards to Syria, the Europol report reads:  “Syria emerged as the destination of choice for foreign fighters in 2012. A number of EU nationals were arrested in Belgium, France, the Netherlands and the UK related to travelling to or returning from Syria” (TE-SAT 2013:p.22).

The EU Counter-Terrorism Coordinator, Gilles de Kerchove, then stated that about five hundred EU citizens—especially from Britain, France, and Ireland—were inside Syria fighting alongside the anti-government forces with the objective of toppling the government in Damascus. Monsieur de Kerchove would express the same concerns as Europol about these EU citizens returning to the EU from the battlefields in Syria. His concerns would be echoed in London.

Even as his government was working to legalize a transfer of British arms to anti-government forces in Syria, the British Foreign Secretary, William Hague, was warning of the threat posed to Britain from British fighters returning home from Syria. Soon afterward, Germany confirmed that German citizens were taking part in the fighting to topple the Syrian government. Earlier than this, news would also come out that one Danish citizen, who was a former US prisoner in Guantanamo fighting in Syria, was killed.

The concept of “blowback” or the unintended consequences of intelligence operations is getting old. On the one hand people from countries like Britain and France flood into Syria as fighters against the Syrian government, while on the other hand they are scaring their own populations about these fighters with their scaremongering. In most cases the foreign fighters from the EU that entered Syria were essentially given the green light and allowed by their own respective government to go fight there. The situation was the same in Libya where American, British, Canadian, French, and Irish citizens fought to topple the Libyan Jamahiriya. One American citizen from Arizona, Eric Harroun, returning to the United States from Syria would face trial for fighting alongside Al-Nusra, but his father Darryl Harroun would let the secret out that Eric was working for the CIA in Syria.

Turning Point?

A turning point is on the horizon, pointing to a renewed push against the Syrian government. Richard Ottaway, a British MP from William Hague’s own British Conservative Party and the chair of the Foreign Affairs Select Committee of the British House of Commons, announced that he believed that Hague’s announcement was tied to British plans to openly intervene in Syria as a means of “undermining” the foreign jihadists. In Orwellian terms, the foreign fighters are being used as a pretext to further arm the anti-government forces in Syria.

The foreign fighters and anti-government forces fighting in Syria have been working with the US and its allies either directly or indirectly. By now the bankruptcy of America’s so-called “War on Terror” should be obvious to most. From the get go it was not a war on terror but a “War by Terror.” Those who have been labeled as terrorists and jihadists by the US government and its allies in many cases have been America’s own foot soldiers in a slow burning imperialist war of conquest.

Source:Global Research

M.D