Qatar and Israel Sitting In A Tree...

By Armine AKOPYAN (Armenia)

During the whole of the “Arab Spring” and the Syrian war in particular, the Arab press has kept the actions of the emir of Qatar, Saudi Arabia’s royal family and the leader’s of Israel and Turkey in their crosshairs. When confronted with the published facts, it is possible to believe that not a single one of these sides is acting alone, that they are united by common aims and interests and in achieving these, it is the people of the Middle East who are paying with their own blood and their own futures.

Qatari Emir Hammad Bin Khalifah alThani

With reference to Syrian information sources, the Islam Times reports on the activities of a group of foreign agents in Syria. This group is serving the interests of Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Israel and Turkey and consists of 16 members who are all citizens of either Israel, Turkey, Qatar or Saudi Arabia. Foreign agents have been operating under the guise of militant terrorists and the Syrian Freedom Army and have been kidnapping and murdering Syrians as well as Palestinian scientists and experts from a variety of fields. The Syrian army recently announced that seven members of this gang had been arrested and were being questioned.

A second gang of marauders has been putting rare museum pieces from Syria onto the international black market. Naturally, all of this is being done through Turkey. Factories are also being dismantled and and shifted to the Turkish territory. Trade in human organs is being established in Turkey just as it was in Kosovo at the beginning of the 2000s. The reluctant donors are Syrian refugees without the means to keep their families in Turkish refugee camps.

The head of the Saudi Intelligence Agency, Prince Bandar Bin Sultan, along with the leader of the Lebanese opposition party and member of the anti-Syrian coalition “14 March”, Samir Farid Geagea, are playing an important role in destabilising and aggravating the situation in Syria and neighbouring Lebanon. They are the ones sending armed groups of terrorists to fight with Syria and after Syria has fallen it will become the Lebanese Shi’ites turn. In addition, the Arabic online publicationIslam Times also mentions Prince Bandar bin Sultan’s other activities as Saudi Arabia’s ambassador to the United States from 1983 to 2005; he only managed to get himself appointed as head of the Saudi Intelligence Agency after organising several fatal terrorist attacks against high-ranking Syrian officials. The prince is now dreaming of making it to the royal throne in his own country and the only way he will manage this is if Syrian President Bashar Assad is assassinated.

Lebanese oppositionist Samir Geagea also has his eye on the very highest post – the presidential chair – and the only way he will be able to achieve that is by removing the Shi’ite Hezbollah.  As the publication points out, Israel and the USA have been pushing for the “mutual cooperation” of both. The only effective way to achieve if not Assad’s assassination then at least his downfall is terrorism. Al-Qaeda and its offspring “Jabhat an-Nusra” are just the kind of convenient instruments that can help interested parties overthrow any state system sooner or later. It has been reported that two “Jabhat an-Nusra” instructors have undergone Israeli training.  The plan is that in the future they will not just be fighting Hezbollah, but Lebanese Salafists as well. Among the militants are also Kurds, who are under the command of the Kurdish leader within al-Qaeda. Samir Geagea sees yet one more advantage for himself as a result of the Syrian war:  the concentration of Syrian Christian refugees in the Lebanon could lead to a political shift in religious terms and prepare his own path to the presidency.

Since 2010, Americans and Qatar have been buying up weapons from tribes in South Afghanistan. This was reported to the Iranian press by Afghan middleman Habibullah Kandahari and besides him, the Americans had also ordered weapons from seven other Afghans. Kandahari reports that he personally had provided 4,000 units over a period of six months. These included handguns and other types of firearms, for which their former owners were paid large sums of money. The Afghan middlemen handed over the purchased weapons to the Americans at Kandahar airport and were told nothing about the future fate of the weapons. So as not to cause any unnecessary curiosity or suspicion, the Americans said that the weapons were being bought to guarantee the safety of their own soldiers from the local population. According to Habibullah Kandahari, he had noted privately that the Americans had never been attacked by peaceful civilians, only armed groups. Weapons in Afghanistan were loaded onto Qatar aeroplanes and then taken through Jordan to Syria, where they ended up in the hands of terrorists. Qatar aircrafts, the same as American aircrafts, were able to land at airports in Afghanistan without difficulty and even without the knowledge of the local authorities. During one of the meetings of the National Security Council, the country’s president even ordered that the total lack of authority when it came to the Americans be looked into and clarified who should give consent for Qatar and American aircraft to land in Afghanistan without prior agreement and how this should be done. An Afghan security expert notes that in 2010, nobody had openly bought such quantities of weapons and dispatched them to Jordan, but following the first peaceful protests and demonstrations in Syria in 2011, weapons had been bought up openly.

Elections for the 19th Knesset were held in Israel on 21 January and were won by the party of the current Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu. The Israeli politician’s pre-election campaign was paid for by the emir of Qatar. Leader of the opposition party “Kadima” and former Minister of Foreign Affairs in Ehud Olmert’s cabinet, Tzipi Livni, told journalists that it had cost approximately USD 3 million. She also added that she was very close friends with the emir’s wife.

In getting rid of Palestinian leaders and scientists it finds undesirable both in Palestine itself and in Syria, and now paying for the pre-election campaign of an Israeli politician with extremely right-wing views, Qatar is aiming to close the Palestinian question for all Arabs once and for all and place it under the watchful control of the Muslim Brotherhood, or the Egyptian government, in other words. It will also tackle the issue of Jordan in the future, if the royal regime there can be toppled and power transferred to the Brotherhood. It would mean that the Palestinian question is laid to rest forever, since in the future part of the Palestinian population would have been resettled in Jordan and part of the population in Sinai. Which, as a matter of fact, is what the USA is trying to achieve with Israel.

The Lebanese coalition “14 March” has once again shown that it is not the interests of Lebanon that are being served, or even the interests of Christians, but centres that are completely strange and alien to Lebanon. The coalition’s activities are particularly damaging against the backdrop of the Syrian war, where anti-Syrian sentiment among part of the Lebanese population is escalating to such a level that it could spill over from the political arena into armed conflict and civil war.

With regard to everything that has been said here, one is reminded of a quote by Yitzak Rabin: “I would like Gaza to sink into the sea, but that won’t happen, and a solution must be found” . It seems that the Emir of Qatar and Netanyahu have come up with the same solution. And not just for Palestine…