While the Russo-Syrian coalition is targeting Islamist terror groups in Syria, Qatar, Washington's close Middle Eastern ally and the chief financier of the Muslim Brotherhood, has negotiated the liberation of 26 imprisoned al-Qaeda jihadists from a Lebanese prison.
"Qatar is part of the US-Saudi-Qatari-Turkish war to overthrow Syria's Russia-allied leader, Bashar al-Assad. The royal owners of Qatar, the Thani family, want to build through Syria a gas-pipeline to get Qatar's gas into Europe to supplant Russia's gas there. Russia's ally Assad stands in the way of that," Zuesse writes in his article for Global Research.
"This is the reason why the American side refers to Assad as a 'dictator,' but doesn't refer to its own allies as being 'dictators' or 'regimes' — not even the Saudis," the author remarks.
Zuesse adds that the former wife of Daesh's founder, Sheikh Ibrahim Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi, has also been released along with al-Qaeda jihadi thugs in accordance with the Qatari request.
Furthermore, another freed al-Qaeda operative is Sheikh Mustafa al-Hujairi, known for his close cooperation with al-Nusra Front, the Abdullah Azzam Brigades and Daesh, the US author emphasizes.
The investigative historian calls attention to the fact that regardless of what numerous insurgent groups in Syria are called — al-Nusra Front (al-Qaeda in Syria), Abdullah Azzam Brigades, Daesh (IS/ISIL) and etc. — all of them are jihadi Sunni fundamentalists. None of them are "moderates": any categorization of these Islamist groups would be deceptive, he underscores.
Meanwhile, US officials and Western mass media continue to portray Bashar al-Assad as a brutal tyrant and his supporters as "bad guys"; at the same time, the so-called "moderate rebels" and other militants who are fighting against Bashar al-Assad are being depicted as "good guys" no matter who they really are.
"It's straight out of George Orwell's 1984, but this is now real," Zuesse notes gloomily.
