US funding Daesh militants operating in Syria, Iraq: Pundit
Press TV has interviewed Michel Chossudovsky, with the Center
for Research on Globalization in Montreal, to discuss Russia's decision
to provide Damascus with military supplies and humanitarian aid.
What follows is a rough transcription of the interview.
Press TV:
Russia’s call for the world to join and help the Syrian government in
fighting ISIL terrorists, seems to have fallen on deaf ears at least in
Washington. Instead, we have the US president saying that Moscow’s
strategy in Syria is doomed to failure. Two questions here: First of
all, what is Russia’s strategy that the West is so opposed to? And
second: Why is the West so worried about what it calls an alleged
Russian build-up in Syria?
Chossudovsky: Well
first of all we have to distinguish between axis of aggression against
the sovereign state which is what the United States is doing under the
humanitarian mandate of going after ISIL when in fact we know and it is
amply-documented that the ISIL is supported financed by the United
States and its allies and what we might describe as bilateral military
cooperation between two sovereign states namely Syria and the Russian
Federation and that is something which has been ongoing you know for
many, many years between the two countries. Russia has a naval base in
the Mediterranean and it is also providing Syria with its air defense
system, the S-300, as well as other areas of cooperation particularly
focusing on training and weapons systems and so on. I do not think that
implies in any way that they would be deploying ground forces. That will
not happen.
And this is not something new; it is part of a
longstanding relationship between the two governments. Now with regard
to Obama, it is somewhat of a, well, diabolical statement. Since
September of last year, and we now...commemorating one year of US
humanitarian bombings directly against Iraq and Syria, there have been
53,000 sorties during that period those that official figures of which
over 7,000 (6,700) have been what they call strike sorties. Now I would
suspect that a large number of the 57,000 sorties are in fact get
towards delivering weapons and supplies to the ISIS (ISIL) which are the
foot soldiers of the Western military alliance fighting the Syrian
government forces.
