The French and the British governments push for arming their own jihadists in Syria

The situation with the attempts by the British and the French government to get a green light for their arms supplies to the Syrian terrorists is somewhat schizophrenic. Both French and British mass media are full of reports on jihadist “volunteers” from Britain and France fighting in Syria on the side of the armed opposition groups.

For years, Paris and London have been talking about the danger emanating from their homegrown jihadist radicals. And now Paris and London push for sending sophisticated arms to… those same people, fighting Syrian government.

Is it possible that government officials in Britain and France are ignorant about their own press reports? No, since some of these reports are based on government sources. The French daily Le Figaro two days ago quoted the French minister of the interior, Manuel Valls, as saying that there were “several dozen” French citizens who went to “do jihad” (the very secular minister’s own innocuous way to put it) in Syria.

“Some of them went to the land of their ancestors in order to re-Islamize it,” Le Figaro noted casually, stressing that the actual number of fighters could be much higher than the one indicated by the minister – “between 50 and 80 people”, as Le Figaro’s prize-winning Middle East reporter Georges Malbrunot put it. It is interesting to see in what way minister Valls wisely calmed his concerned compatriots:

“Whatever the actual number, it is certainly superior to the handful of other French citizens who went to make sacred war against their own army in Mali.”

Superior, but similar. Obviously, the French jihadists in Syria and Mali are similar in convictions, methods and arms – especially if the European embargo on arms’ shipments to the terrorists is lifted, as the French and British governments demand. The Jihadists have convictions and, as the French philosopher Renee Descartes would put it, they have a method.

They want a medieval Islamist government in Mali and a similar one in Syria. The problem is that the French government obviously does not have any other “method” besides schizophrenia since it is fighting on different sides in two similar wars.

The same truth applies to the British government. Khalid Mahmood, a British MP, had the following comment on the reports that more than 100 British jihadists have traveled to Syria to fight on the armed opposition groups side there: “You have the British Muslims going to join the fight because they believe they are doing the right thing. And they are also encouraged by the Foreign Secretary saying we should resist this, so they actually feel they are doing the right thing,” Mr. Mahmood said in an interview to the Voice of Russia.

Indeed, the British Foreign Secretary William Hague has been pushing hard for arming the terrorists in Syria. Meanwhile, Valentina Soria, a research fellow in the security matters at the Royal United Service Institute, uses pretty much the same argument that the French minister Valls used in order to put the veil of decency on what could otherwise be described as abetting international terrorism.

She compares the amounts of British jihadists leaving for the Syrian war to the number of jihadists that had left Britain several years earlier for the Iraqi war.

“The Iraqi war was much more powerful in that sense. It really fuelled radicalization across the Muslim community in the UK,” Valentina Soria told the VoR’s London bureau.

The problem is that the jihadist wars in Iraq and Syria are not alternatives to each other, they could rather be named “complementary” goods on the international market of jihadist destinations. The Iraqi prime minister, Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, recently tried to attract the attention of the international community to the large number of al-Qaeda’s activists from Iraq fighting on the armed groups’ side in Syria.

What is most important, it is the fact that both the French and the British governments pretend not to notice the likeliest beneficiaries of their possible arms supplies to Syria. The same is true about Americans, whose training of the Jihadi “fighters” in Jordan is a sort of a publicly known secret, with hundreds of “graduates” possibly joining the same groups that had killed American servicemen in Iraq just a year or two ago.

Source: Nytimes.com- By: Dmitry Babich

B.N