A news report that is coming out of Eastern Europe has revealed that the ever tangled web of corruption that exists within Ukraine — you know, the country we’ve sent billions upon billions of dollars to prop up in their conflict with Russia — may have ensnared yet another victim: Middle Eastern Christians. This is precisely why our Founding Fathers, particularly our first commander-in-chief, President George Washington, warned us about getting involved in foreign entanglements.
You might say that sounds a bit isolationist, but there was a reason that was such a popular way of thinking at the time.
When the administration of Bashar al-Assad in Syria was overthrown this past weekend, many governments in the West were just tickled pink as it seemingly brought to an end an almost 60 year dictatorship that was being led by the Alawite minority. Guess who else was thrilled to the gills? Radical Islamic jihadist groups and various terrorist organization, claiming that Hayat Tahrir al-Sham or HTS as it’s known, which is the military force that took the Syrian capital of Damascus, as one of their brothers-in-arms.
Whenever terrorists are happy about a collapsing government, that’s bad news for a whole lot of different folks in the area. Especially Christians. The few Christ-followers who still exist in the region believe HTS to be a major threat to their safety. However, according to Prophecy News Watch, Ukrainian intelligence, and possibly U.S. intelligence as well, look at HTS as their former students.
Islamic fundamentalist “rebel groups based in the Idlib region — which is said to include members of the Turkestan Islamic Party (TIP) — had received operational training from special forces troops from the Khimik group of Ukraine’s Main Intelligence Directorate (HUR). The training team focused on tactics developed during the war in Ukraine, including on the use of drones,” reported the Kyiv Post in a story titled “Ukrainian Trained, Turkish Sponsored Syrian Rebels Lead Assault on Aleppo” on December 1. Idlib is controlled by the “former” al-Qaeda affiliate Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), the group which just overwhelmed the capital.
The publication in question is hardly a source of “Russian disinformation.” The Kyiv Post recently boasted, “Our publication has just been listed by the NewsGuard Internet Trust Tool as one of the world’s top providers of reliable journalism with a perfect rating of 100%. In other words we have made it into the same league as The Guardian, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, New York Times and Politico.”
Why is Ukraine training foreign Islamists? The Ukrainian military sees HTS as an ally against Russia, which has had a long alliance with Syria. “We will keep killing Russians anywhere and everywhere until the complete victory of Ukraine,” declared the head of the Main Directorate of Intelligence of the Ministry of Defence of Ukraine (HUR), Major General Kyrylo Budanov, last May. The Ukrainian military is killing Russian soldiers in Syria to prevent them from shifting to the European front. In regional parlance, they’re “fighting them over there, so they don’t have to fight them over here.” In the process, they are training jihadist rebels.
Need another sign that this is a bad thing? How about these actions having the approval of the Biden-Harris administration?
“The Assad regime’s … reliance on the brutal support of Russia and Iran led inevitably to its own collapse,” bragged Secretary of State Antony Blinken after the regime was overthrown.
All the hard earned tax dollars Uncle Sam is draining from our bank accounts is being sent over to Ukraine where they are using it to train radical Islamic jihadists. Or it’s at least off setting the cost of doing so. Either way, we’re basically helping Islamic terrorists get training and weapons which will then be used to violently persecute Middle Eastern Christians. This is beyond shameful and unacceptable.
Unfortunately, he has not given financial accountability equal priority. Time magazine reported last November that “corruption has grown rife” in the Ukrainian government — a development observers of the region had long known. “People are stealing like there’s no tomorrow,” a top aide to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky told the publication.
“The question here is, ‘Where is the money?'” asked Daria Kaleniuk, executive director of the Anti-Corruption Action Center in Ukraine. “Corruption can kill.” U.S. aid already underwrites virtually every sector of Ukrainian society, even apart from corruption.
Experts within the military are convinced that the U.S. has been involved in directly training and even equipping HTS and other Islamic forces in the nation of Syria as part of a grander geostrategic mission. If you remember, former President Barack Obama put into action an operation to aggressively arm and train rebels in Syria over a decade ago.
Lt. Gen. William G. Boykin, who is retired and serving as the executive vice president of Family Research Council, sat down for a conversation with “Washington Watch with Tony Perkins” on Monday where he said that while he can’t be certain, “It would not surprise me if we didn’t have a CIA hand in” training HTS or its allies via “some covert action going on in there to train and equip these people.”
“They did a good job” of honing the militia bands’ fighting skills, Boykin said in his chat with Perkins. “But you’ve got to know who your enemy is.”
HTS leader Abu Mohammed al-Jawlani became inspired to take up arms after he saw the 9/11 attackers, whom he extolled as “exceptional,” taking Osama bin Laden as a personal idol. In 2003, he moved to Mosul, Iraq, to join Saraya al-Mujahideen, which later joined al-Qaeda. Al-Jolani distinguished himself as a terrorist in the Islamic State in Iraq (ISI), moving up the ranks. U.S. forces arrested him in 2006.
A handful of years later, he then created the al-Nusra Front, which became an affiliate of terrorist organization al-Qaeda with help from Islamic State founder Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. While the group separated from al-Qaeda back in 2016, HTS and many of its components are still in contact with the group’s leadership according to information from the United Nations.
The rebranded HTS, which now boasts of its “diversity,” stands for “Organization for the Liberation of the Levant.” Al-Jawlani insists he no longer has broader aims at a worldwide jihad and wishes to concentrate on creating an Islamic state inside Syria … one, he insists, will respect the human rights of religious minorities. On December 5, al-Jawlani issued a message to the primarily Greek Orthodox Christian town of Muharda, promising that “we have treated the sons of the Christian religion well in Idlib and Aleppo, and in the same way we will protect you and your property.”
“However, none of this changes the fact that there are many jihadists in its [HTS] ranks, and we must therefore expect that the organization also acts like a jihadist group that commits acts of violence against religious and ethnic minorities,” Middle East analyst Guido Steinberg went on to say about the situation Christians in region are facing. He then spoke to a German news outlet stating that HTS may initiate “a reign of terror for the population, especially in the districts of Aleppo populated by Christians and Kurds.”
“The fear that minorities including Shias, Kurds, and Alawites might be feeling right now, stems from the poor human rights records of both HTS and factions of the Turkish-backed Syrian National Army who have joined HTS in its recent operation,” Hiba Zayadin, a senior researcher in the Middle East and North Africa Division of Human Rights Watch explained. “Previous abuses of both groups include mistreatment of religious and ethnic minorities including violence, forced displacement, as well as destruction of cultural and religious heritage.”
The Commission of Inquiry on Syria within the United Nations has accused HTS of executing people, torturing them, using sexual violence, and destroying non-Islamic religious locations.
The Maronite Catholic Archbishop of Aleppo, Joseph Tobji, reports that, even now, the militants have begun removing Christmas decorations.
“Before Syria’s civil war began, Aleppo was one of Syria’s most Christian cities. Out of a prewar population of around 2 million, around 200,000 were Christians. Today, only about 20,000 Christians live in Aleppo,” noted Christian Solidarity International. Islamists believe that Christians in their lands “should be made dhimmis – a protected people who are kept in legal subjugation and pay an additional tax called the jizya.”
It’s utterly abhorrent to think that our money could be used by these sick and twisted jihadists to do great harm to our brothers and sisters in the Middle East. Pray that once President-elect Donald Trump takes office he will rectify this situation as quickly as possible.
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