The Muslim Brotherhood as Assassins

by Thierry Meyssan

We continue the publication of Thierry Meyssan's book, "Before Our Eyes". In this episode, he describes the creation of an Egyptian secret society, the Muslim Brotherhood, and its reactivation after the Second World War by the British secret service. Finally, the use of this group by MI6 to carry out political assassinations in this former Crown Colony.

https://www.voltairenet.org/article206724.html

See also: http://yourdemocracy.net.au/drupal/node/34254

This is the most comprehensive and most accurate history of the magic tricks performed by the world powers "under our noses".

The latest machinations of Trump "calling off obliteration of Iran about 10 minutes before a strike" is part of the game of tricks in which all the options are quantified and executed with high precision. Our main problem is that like in any magic trick, we don't know "how it's done" nor what the outcome will be. And do not forget the magician who recently tried to replicate a Houdini trick and drowned... In this Game of Trumps, we could all die... and they don't care. It's about control and power — and there is bugger all we can do, except expose the slay of hand when we can see it.

In a parody of an old Time magazine, posted on Twitter, Donald Trump sees himself in power until ... the year 90 000. While the presidential elections are looming, the American president is well on track in his campaign.

The 45th President of the United States will surely be remembered for his ability to "troll" both the media and his opponents. An example on June 21, Donald Trump published on his Twitter account a video channeling the cover of the famous Time Magazine of October 22, 2018. One can see there various signs supporting the candidacy of the tenant of the White House for 2024 , 2028, 2032 or 2036

https://francais.rt.com/international/63188-quand-donald-trump-se-reve-president-video

TIME MAGAZINE: How Trumpism Will Outlast Trump

...

This is where the writers come in–including an older breakaway group, the reform conservatives–or “reformicons.” All through the Obama years, and even before, reformers like New York Times columnist Ross Douthat and National Review editor Reihan Salam tried to steer the GOP away from the stale dogma of Club for Growth antigovernment tax cutting and onto a new path of problem solving. “Trump is a reform conservative in strategy, if not in the particulars of substance,” Douthat said during the campaign. The dean of the reformicons, Yuval Levin, editor of the quarterly wonkfest National Affairs, saw this too. “People like me who thought Republicans were crazy for ignoring working-class voters? Trump proves it. They were crazy,” Levin said in 2016, when Trump was closing in on the nomination. But undoing the whole structure of the Reagan legacy was too far to go. That structure is being gleefully torn down by American Affairs, founded as a pro-Trump publication. Its Harvard-educated editor, the 32-year-old polymath Julius Krein, has moved away from Trump–Krein renounced his support after the white-nationalist violence in Charlottesville–but continues to publish biting critiques of establishment thinking. “What are defined as global norms,” Krein recently wrote, “are mostly just the (often selfish and parochial) preferences of the powerful–in this case, a relatively thin stratum of Western elites.” As a result, “the more democracy is defended in the name of ‘pluralism,’ the more rigidly moralistic it becomes.” This statement could come from either the far left or the far right. One could imagine Bannon saying it–and also the leftist Slavoj Zizek, who has contributed to American Affairs.

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Gus prediction: see: http://www.yourdemocracy.net.au/drupal/node/33682

This could be why Gus prefers Pete as an alternative... pete...

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In 1951, building on the foundations of the old organisation of the same name, the Anglo-Saxon secret services put together a secret political society called the Muslim Brotherhood. At first they used it to assassinate personalities who resisted them, and then, starting in 1979, as mercenaries against the Soviets. At the beginning of the 1990’s, they incorporated the Brotherhood into NATO, and in 2010, attempted to force it into power in the Arab countries. The Muslim Brotherhood and the Sufi Order of the Naqshbandi were financed with at least $80 billion annually by the ruling Saudi family, which made them one of the most powerful armies in the world. All jihadist leaders, including the leaders of Daesh, belong to this military structure.

Four empires disappeared during the First World War – the German Reich, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Tsarist Holy Russian Empire, and the Ottoman Sublime Porte. The victors utterly lacked any sense of reason in the conditions they imposed on the defeated. Thus, in Europe, the Treaty of Versailles determined conditions which were unacceptable and unbearable for Germany, falsely blamed as the sole responsible for the conflict. In the Orient, the carving up of the Ottoman Caliphate was not going well. At the San Remo Conference (1920), in accordance with the secret Sykes-Picot agreements (1916), the United Kingdom was authorised to set up a Jewish homeland in Palestine, while France was allowed to colonise Syria (which included, at the time, what is now Lebanon). However, in what was left of the Ottoman Empire, Mustafa Kemal led a revolt both against the Sultan, who had lost the war, and against the Western powers, who were taking control of his country. At the Sèvres Conference (1920), the Caliphate was chopped into little pieces in order to create a variety of new states, including a Kurdistan. The Turko-Mongol population of the provinces of Thrace and Anatolia rose up and carried Kemal to power. Finally, the Lausanne Conference (1923) traced the frontiers we know today, gave up on the idea of Kurdistan, and organised gigantic population transfers which caused more than half a million deaths.

But just as in Germany, Adolf Hitler was to contest his country’s lot, so, in the Near East, a man stood up against the new division of the region. An Egyptian schoolteacher founded a movement to re-establish the Caliphate which the Westerners had defeated. This man was Hassan al-Banna, and his organisation was the Muslim Brotherhood (1928).

In principle, the Caliph was the successor of the Prophet, to whom all owe obedience – it was therefore a very coveted title. There had been several great lines of Caliphs in succession – the Omeyyads, the Abbassids, the Fatimids and the Ottomans. The next Caliph would have to be the man who seized the title – and as it happened, this was the “General Guide” of the Brotherhood, who was quite comfortable with the idea of becoming the master of the Muslim world.

The secret society spread rapidly. Its intention was to work from within the system in order to re-establish Islamic institutions. Applicants had to swear fealty to the founder not only upon the Qu’ran, but also on a sabre or a revolver. The aim of the Brotherhood was exclusively political, even though it expressed itself in religious terms. Hassan al-Banna and his successors never spoke about Islam as a religion, nor did they evoke Muslim spirituality. For them, Islam is no more than a dogma, a submission to God and the exercise of Power. Obviously, the Egyptians who supported the Brotherhood did not see it this way. They followed it because it claimed to follow God.

For Hassan al-Banna, the legitimacy of a government was not to be measured by its representativeness, the way we evaluate that of Western governments, but by its capacity to defend the “Islamic way of life”, in other words, the way of life of 19th century Ottoman Egypt. The Brotherhood never considered that Islam has a History, and that Muslim ways of life vary considerably according to region and era. Neither did it imagine that the Prophet had revolutionised the Bedouin society in which he lived, or that the way of life described in the Qu’ran is no more than a stage meant for those particular men. For them, the disciplinary rules of the Qu’ran – Sharia – do not correspond to a given situation, but fix inalterable laws upon which Power can rely.

For the Brotherhood, the fact that the Muslim way of life had often been imposed by the sword justified the use of force. The Brotherhood would never admit that Islam may have been spread by example. This did not prevent al-Banna and his Brothers from standing for election – and losing. If they condemned political parties, it was not because of opposition to the multi-party system, but because by separating religion from politics, they would succumb to corruption.

The doctrine of the Muslim Brotherhood was the ideology of “political Islam” – “Islamism” – a word which was destined to become all the rage.

In 1936, Hassan al-Banna wrote to Egyptian Prime Minister Mostafa El-Nahas Pasha. He demanded: 
 legislative reform, and the conformity of all tribunals with Sharia law; 
 recruitment within the armies to create a volunteer force under the banner of jihad; 
 connection between all Muslim countries, and the preparation for the restoration of the Caliphate, in realization of the unity demanded by Islam.

During the Second World War, the Brotherhood declared itself to be neutral. In reality, it mutated into an Intelligence service for the Reich. But from the point at which the United States entered the war, when the fortune of arms seemed to be changing sides, it played a double game, and sold information about Germany to the British. In this way, the Brotherhood revealed its total absence of principles and pure political opportunism.

On 24 February 1945, the Brothers tried their luck and assassinated the Egyptian Prime Minister in the middle of a parliamentary session. This was followed by an escalation of violence – a movement of repression against the Brotherhood, and a series of political assassinations, going as far as the murder of the new Prime Minister on 28 December 1948, and in retaliation, the killing of Hassan al-Banna himself, on 12 February 1949. A short time afterwards, a tribunal instituted by martial law condemned most of the Brotherhood to prison sentences, and dissolved their association.

This secret organisation was in reality no more than a band of assassins who hoped to grab power by masking their ambition behind the Qu’ran. Its story should have ended there. Unfortunately, it did not.

The capacity of the Brotherhood to mobilise people and turn them into assassins obviously intrigued the major Powers.

Despite his denials, Sayyid Qutb was a Freemason. He published an article entitled « Why I became a Freemason », published in the magazine al-Taj al-Masri (the « Crown of Egypt »), on 23 April 1943.

Two and a half years after its dissolution, a new organisation was formed by the Anglo-Saxons, who re-used the name “Muslim Brotherhood”. Because all its historical leaders were incarcerated, ex-judge Hassan al-Hudaybi was selected as General Guide. Contrary to what is often believed, he represented no historical continuity between the old and the new Brotherhood. It transpired that a unit of the old secret society, the “Secret Section”, had been tasked by Hassan al-Banna with perpetrating attacks for which he denied all responsibility. This organisation within the organisation was so secret that it had not been affected by the dissolution of the Brotherhood, and was now available to his successor. The Guide decided to disown the “Secret Section”, and declared that he wanted to attain his objectives only by peaceful means. It is difficult to establish exactly what happened at that moment between the Anglo-Saxons, who wanted to recreate the old society, and the Guide, who believed he was simply reviving its audience from within the masses. In any case, the “Secret Section” survived, and the authority of the Guide waned in favor of other Brotherhood leaders, triggering a great internecine struggle. The CIA gave Sayyid Qutb a leadership position within the Brotherhood. Qutb, a Freemason [1], was the theoretician of jihad, whom the Guide Hudaybi had condemned, before being forced to come to terms with MI6.

It is impossible to specify the relations and degrees of hierarchy between these men, on one hand because each foreign branch enjoyed its own autonomy, and on the other, because the secret units within the organisation no longer necessarily answered either to the General Guide, or the local Guide, but sometimes directly to the CIA and MI6.

During the period following the Second World War, the British attempted to re-organise the world in order to keep it out of Soviet hands. In September 1946, in Zurich, Winston Churchill launched the idea of the United States of Europe. On the same principle, he also launched the Arab League. In both cases, the aim was to unify these regions without Russia. From the beginning of the Cold War, the United States, for their part, created associations tasked with accompanying this movement for their own profit – the American Committee on United Europe and the American Friends of the Middle East [2]. In the Arab world, the CIA organised two coups d’état, first of all in favour of General Hosni Zaim in Damascus (March 1949), then with the Free Officers in Cairo (July 1952). The goal was to support the nationalists who were believed to be hostile to the Communists. It was in this state of mind that Washington sent SS General Otto Skorzeny to Egypt, and Nazi General Fazlollah Zahedi to Iran, accompanied by hundreds of ex-Gestapo officers, with whom they hoped to direct the anti-Communist conflict.

Unfortunately, Skorzeny schooled the Egyptian police in a tradition of violence. In 1963, he chose the CIA and the Mossad over Nasser. As for Zahedi, he created the SAVAK, the cruelest political police force of the time.

While Hassan al-Banna had defined the objective – seizing power by manipulating religion – Sayyid Qutb defined the means – jihad. Once the adepts had admitted the supremacy of the Qu’ran, it could be used as a foundation for organising them into an army and sending them into combat. Qutb developed a Manichean theory which distinguished “Islamist” from “evil”. This brainwashing enabled the CIA and MI6 to use adepts to control the nationalist Arab governments, then to destabilise the Muslim regions of the Soviet Union. The Brotherhood became an inexhaustible reservoir of terrorists under the slogan – “Allah is our goal. The Prophet is our leader. The Qu’ran is our law. The jihad is our way. Martyrdom is our vow”.

Qutb’s ideas were rational, but not reasonable. He applied an ironclad rhetoric of Allah – Prophet – Qu’ran – Jihad – Martyrdom, which left no room for any discussion at any point. He placed the superiority of his logic over human reason.

Reception of a delegation of the secret society by President Eisenhower at the White House (23 September 1953).

The CIA organised a conference at Princeton University on “The Situation of Muslims in the Soviet Union”. It was the occasion for the United States to receive a delegation of the Muslim Brotherhood led by Sa’id Ramadan, one of the heads of its armed branch. In his report, the CIA officer in charge of the summary noted that Ramadan was not a religious extremist, but rather resembled a fascist – a way of underlining the exclusively political character of the Muslim Brotherhood. The conference ended with a reception at the White House, hosted by President Eisenhower, on 23 September 1953. The alliance between Washington and jihadism was formed.

(From left to right) Hassan el-Banna married his daughter to Saïd Ramadan, which made Ramadan his successor. The couple gave birth to Hani (Director of the Islamic Centre in Geneva) and Tariq Ramadan (who became a full professor with the chair of contemporary Islamic studies at the University of Oxford).

The CIA, which had resuscitated the Brotherhood to use against the Communists, first of all used it to help nationalists. At that time, the Agency was represented in the Middle East by middle-class anti-Zionists. They were rapidly ousted and replaced by senior civil servants of Anglo-Saxon and Puritan origin, graduates from major universities, all favourable to Israel. Now Washington entered into conflict with the nationalists, and the CIA turned the Brotherhood against them.

Said Ramadan and Abdul Ala Mawdudi hosted a weekly broadcast on Radio Pakistan, a station created by the British MI6.

Sa’id Ramadan had commanded a few combatants from the Brotherhood during the brief war against Israel in 1948, then helped Sayyid Abul Ala Maududi to create the paramilitary organisation Jamaat-i-Islami in Pakistan. The point was to fabricate an Islamic identity for the Muslim Indians so that they could constitute a new state, Pakistan. Jamaat-i-Islami in fact drew up the Pakistani constitution. Ramadan married the daughter of Hassan al-Banna, and became the head of the armed branch of the new “Muslim Brotherhood”.

Meanwhile, in Egypt, the Brotherhood had taken part in the coup d’état by General Mohammed Naguib’s Free Officers – Sayyid Qutb was their liaison officer. They were tasked with eliminating one of their leaders, Gamal Abdel Nasser, who had opposed Naguib. Not only did they fail, on 26 October 1954, but Nasser took power, subdued the Brotherhood, and put Naguib under house arrest. Sayyid Qutb would be hanged a few years later.

Forbidden in Egypt, the Brotherhood fell back to the Wahhabi states (Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the Emirate of Sharjah), and to Europe (Germany, France and the United Kingdom, plus neutral Switzerland). Each time, they were received as Western agents fighting the growing alliance between the Arab nationalists and the Soviet Union. Sa’id Ramadan was issued a Jordanian diplomatic passport, and settled in Geneva in 1958. From there that he directed the destabilisation of the Caucasus and Central Asia (both Pakistan-Afghanistan and the Soviet Fergana Valley). He took control of the Committee for the construction of a mosque in Munich, which enabled him to supervise almost all the Muslims in Western Europe. With the assistance of the American Committee for the Liberation of the Peoples of Russia (AmComLib), which is to say the CIA, he had at his command Radio Liberty /Radio Free Europe, a radio station financed directly by the US Congress to spread the philosophy of the Brotherhood [3].

After the Suez Canal crisis and the spectacular about-face of Nasser to join the Soviets, Washington decided to provide unlimited help to the Muslim Brotherhood in the fight against the Arab nationalists. A senior officer of the CIA, Miles Copeland, was charged – in vain – with selecting a personality within the Brotherhood who could play, in the Arab world, a role equivalent to that of Pastor Billy Graham in the United States. It was not until the 1980’s that a preacher of that calibre was found – the Egyptian Yusuf al-Qaradawi.

In 1961, the Brotherhood established a connection with another secret society, the Order of the Naqshbandis. This was a sort of Muslim Freemasonry which mixed Sufi initiation with politics. One of their Indian theorists, Abu al-Hasan Ali al-Nadwi, published an article in the Brotherhood’s magazine. The Order is ancient, and represented in many countries. In Iraq, the grand master was none other than the future vice-President, Izzat Ibrahim al-Douri. He would support the attempted coup d’état by the Brotherhood in Syria, in 1982, and then the “Return to Faith Campaign” organised by President Saddam Hussein in order to restore an identity to his country after the imposition of the Western no-fly zone.

In Turkey, the Order would play a more complex role. It would include as its directors both Fethullah Gülen (founder of the Hizmet movement) and President Turgut Özal (1989-1993), as well as Prime Minister Necmettin Erbakan (1996-1997), founder of the Justice Party (1961) and the Millî Görüş movement (1969). In Afghanistan, ex-President Sibghatullah Mojaddedi (1992) was the Order’s grand master. In 19th century Russia, with the help of the Ottoman Empire, the Order had raised up Crimea, Uzbekistan, Chechnya and Daghestan against the Tsar. Until the fall of the USSR, we would hear nothing more of this branch – just as in the Chinese Xinjiang region. The proximity between the Brotherhood and the Naqshbandis is very rarely studied, given the a priori Islamist opposition to mysticism and Sufi orders in general.

The Saudi headquarters of the World Islamic League. In 2015, its budget was superior to that of the Saudi Ministry of Defence. The world’s major buyer of weapons, Saudi Arabia acquired arms which the League distributed to the organisations of the Muslim Brotherhood and the Naqshbandis.

In 1962, the CIA encouraged Saudi Arabia to create the Muslim World League and finance both the Brotherhood and the Naqshbandi Order to work against the nationalists and the Communists [4]. The organisation was first of all financed by Aramco (Arabian-American Oil Company). Amongst the twenty or so founding members, we note the presence of three Islamist theorists whom we have already mentioned – the Egyptian Sa’id Ramadan, the Pakistani Sayyid Abul Ala Maududi, and the Indian Abu al-Hasan Ali al-Nadwi.

De facto, Arabia, which suddenly disposed of enormous liquidities thanks to the commerce in oil, became the godfather of the Muslim Brotherhood all over the world. At home, the monarchy entrusted them with the educational system for schools and universities, in a country where almost no one knew how to read or write. The Brotherhood had to adapt to its hosts. Indeed, their allegiance to the King prevented them from swearing loyalty to the General Guide. In any case, they organised around Mohamed Qutb, Sayyid’s brother, in two tendencies – the Saudi Brotherhood on one side, and the “Sururists” (adepts of Sheikh Surur) on the other. The Sururists, who are Saudis, attempted to create a synthesis between the Brotherhood’s political ideology and Wahhabi theology. This cult, of which the royal family are members, lived by an interpretation of Islam which was born of the Bedouin tradition, iconoclast and anti-historic. Until Riyadh came into all its petro-dollars, it made traditional Muslim schools anathema, which, in return, considered it heretical.

In reality, the politics of the Brotherhood and the Wahhabist religion have nothing in common, although they are compatible – except that the pact linking the Saud family with the Wahhabist preachers cannot exist within the Brotherhood – the idea of a “divine right” monarchy clashes with the Brotherhood’s greed for power. It was therefore agreed that the Sauds would support the Brotherhood everywhere in the world, on the condition that they abstain from entering politics in Arabia.

The Saudi Wahhabi support for the Brotherhood provoked extra rivalry between Arabia and the two other Wahhabi states – Qatar and the Emirate of Sharjah.

From 1962 to 1970, the Muslim Brotherhood took part in the civil war in North Yemen, and attempted to re-enlist the monarchy on the side of Saudi Arabia and the United Kingdom against the Arab nationalists, Egypt and the USSR – a conflict which foreshadowed what was to happen over the next half-century.

In 1970, Gamal Abdel Nasser managed to negotiate an agreement between the Palestinian factions and King Hussein of Jordan, which put an end to the “Black September” terrorist group. But on the evening of the Arab League summit which met to ratify the agreement, he died, officially from a heart attack, but was far more probably assassinated. Nasser had three vice-Presidents – one from the left wing who was extremely popular; a centrist, a very public figure; and a conservative at the bidding of the United States and Saudi Arabia – Anwar el-Sadat. Under pressure, the left-wing vice-President declared himself unfit for the function. The centrist vice-President preferred to abandon politics. Sadat was therefore designated as the Nasserian candidate. This drama is played out in many countries – the President chooses a vice-President from among his rivals in order to extend his electoral base, but when he dies, the vice-President replaces him and ruins his heritage.

Sadat, who had served the Reich during the Second World War, and professed great admiration for the Führer, was an ultra-conservative soldier who served as Sayyid Qutb’s alter-ego, a liaison officer between the Brotherhood and the Free Officers Movement, the group of nationalist authors who instigated the 1952 revolution in Egypt. As soon as Sadat gained power, he freed the Muslim Brothers who had been imprisoned by Nasser. The “faithful President” was the Brotherhood’s ally for anything concerning the Islamisation of society (the “Corrective Revolution”), but its rival when politically profitable for him. This ambiguous relationship was illustrated by the creation of three armed groups, which were not factions within the Brotherhood, but exterior units under its orders – the Islamic Party of Liberation, the Islamic Jihad (under Sheikh Omar Abdul Rahman), and Excommunication and Immigration (the “Takfiri”). All of them claimed to be following the instructions of Sayyid Qutb. Armed by the secret services, the Islamic Jihad launched attacks against the Coptic Christians. Far from mitigating the situation, the “faithful President” accused the Copts of sedition, and imprisoned their Pope and eight of their bishops. Finally, Sadat intervened in the government of the Brotherhood and took a stance in favor of the Islamic Jihad against the General Guide, whom he arrested [5].

On instructions from US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, Sadat convinced Syria to join with Egypt to attack Israel and restore Palestinian rights. On 6 October 1973, while the Israelis were celebrating Yom Kippur, the two armies took the Hebrew country in a pincer movement. The Egyptian army crossed the Suez Canal, while the Syrian army attacked from the Golan Heights. However, Sadat only partially deployed his anti-aircraft cover, and halted his army 15 kilometres to the East of the Canal – meanwhile, the Israelis attacked the Syrians, who discovered that they were trapped and screamed conspiracy.

It was only when the Israeli reserve forces had been mobilised, and the Syrian army was surrounded by Israeli troops, that Sadat ordered his army to continue its progression, before halting it once again to negotiate a cease-fire. Observing the Egyptian treason, the Soviets, who had already lost an ally with the death of Nasser, threatened the United States and demanded an immediate cessation of combat.

Ex-liaison officer with Sayyid Qutb for the « Free Officers » and the Brotherhood, the « believer president », Anouar el-Sadate, was to be proclaimed as the « sixth caliph » by the Egyptian parliament. Here, this admirer of Adolf Hitler is in the Knesset alongside his partners Golda Meïr and Shimon Peres.

Four years later – still pursuing the CIA plan – President Sadat went to Jerusalem and signed a separate peace treaty with Israel, to the detriment of the Palestinians and of Syria. From then on, the alliance between the Muslim Brotherhood and Israel was sealed. All the Arab peoples decried this treason, and Egypt was excluded from the Arab League, whose headquarters were moved to Algiers.

Responsible for the « Secret Wing » of the Muslim Brotherhood, Ayman al-Zawahiri (currently the head of Al-Qaïda) organised the assassination of President Sadate (6 October 1981). 

In 1981, Washington decided to turn the page. The Islamic Jihad was ordered to eliminate Sadat, who had outlived his usefulness. He was assassinated during a military parade, while the Parliament was preparing to proclaim him the “Sixth Caliph”. In the presidential box, seven people were killed and 28 wounded, yet sitting next to the President, his vice-President General Mubarak survived. He was the only person in the box wearing body armour. He succeeded the “faithful President”, and the Arab League could now be repatriated to Cairo.

Translation 
Pete Kimberley

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Sir James MacQueen Craig, specialist of the Middle East, convinced the United Kingdom to use the Muslim Brotherhood for secret operations outside of Egypt. It was also Craig who conceived the plan for the « Arab Springs » on the model of the operation led in 1915 by Lawrence of Arabia.

In 1972-1973, an official from the Foreign Office – and probably MI6 as well – Sir James Craig, together with the British ambassador to Egypt, Sir Richard Beaumont, began an intense lobbying campaign aimed at harnessing the Muslim Brotherhood for use by the United Kingdom and the United States in the struggle against the Marxists and the nationalists, not only in Egypt, but also all over the Muslim world. Sir James was soon to be nominated as Her Majesty’s ambassador in Syria, then in Arabia, and would find an attentive ear at the CIA. Much later, he was to become the designer of the “Arab Springs”.

In 1977, Jimmy Carter was elected President of the United States. He appointed Zbigniew Brzeziński as his National Security Advisor. Brzeziński decided to use Islamism against the Soviets. He gave the Saudis the go-ahead to increase their payments to the Islamic World League, organised regime changes in Pakistan, Iran and Syria, destabilised Afghanistan, and made US access to oil from the “Greater Middle East” a national security objective. Finally, he entrusted the Brotherhood with military equipment.

This strategy was clearly explained by Bernard Lewis during the meeting of the Bilderberg Group [1], organised by NATO in Austria, April 1979. Lewis, an Anglo-Israeli-US Islamologist, assured that the Muslim Brotherhood could not only play a major role against the Soviets and provoke internal trouble in Central Asia, but also balkanise the Near East in favour of Israel.

Contrary to a widely-held belief, the Brotherhood was not happy about following the Brzeziński plan – it was looking further afield. It had obtained the assistance of Riyadh and Washington for the creation of other branches of the Brotherhood in other countries – branches that were to come to fruition later on. The King of Arabia granted an average of $5billion annually to the Muslim World League, which extended its activities in 120 countries and financed various wars. As a point of reference, $5 billion was the equivalent of the military budget of North Korea. The League obtained advisory status for the Economic and Social Council of the United Nations, and the post of observer for UNICEF.

General Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq, the first Head of State to be a member of the Muslim Brotherhood outside of Egypt, allowed combatants of the Brotherhood to have access to a rear base in their fight against the Afghan Communists.

In Pakistan, General Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq, the Army Chief of Staff, trained at Fort Bragg in the United States, overthrew President Zulfikar Alî Bhutto and had him hanged. A member of the Jamaat-e-Islami, in other words the local version of the Muslim Brotherhood, he went on to Islamise Pakistani society. The Sharia was progressively established – including the death penalty for blasphemy – and a vast network of Islamic schools was set up. It was the first time that the Brotherhood had been in power outside of Egypt.

In Iran, Brzeziński convinced the Shah to abdicate, and organised the return of Imam Ruhollah Khomeini, who defined himself as a “Shiite Islamist”. In his youth, in 1945, Khomeini had met Hasan al-Banna in Cairo, and convinced him not to exacerbate the Sunni/Shiite conflict. Later, he translated two books by Sayyid Qutb. The Brotherhood and the Iranian Revolutionaries agreed on social subjects, but not at all on political questions. Brzeziński realised his mistake the very day that the Ayatollah arrived in Teheran. Khomeini immediately went to pray at the tombs of the martyrs of the Shah’s régime, and called on the army to revolt against imperialism. Brzeziński committed a second error by sending Delta Force to save the US spies who were being held hostage in their embassy in Teheran. Even if he was able to hide from Western eyes the fact that these “diplomats” were actually spies, he made a laughing-stock of his soldiers with the failed mission “Eagle Claw”, and convinced the Pentagon that it was necessary to find a way of defeating Iran.

Saudi billionaire Oussama Ben Laden, hero of the Western powers against the Soviets.

Brzeziński set up “Operation Cyclone” in Afghanistan. Between 17,000 and 35,000 Muslim Brothers from about 40 countries came to fight the USSR, which had come to the defence of the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan, at its request [2]. There had never been a “Soviet invasion”, as US propaganda pretended.

The men of the Brotherhood came to reinforce a local coalition of conservative combatants and the local Muslim Brotherhood, including the Pashtun Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and the Tajik Ahmad Shah Massoud. They received the major part of their armament from Israel [3] – officially their sworn enemy, but now their partner. All these forces were commanded from Pakistan by General Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq, and financed by the United States and Saudi Arabia. This was the first time that the Brotherhood had been used by the Anglo-Saxons to wage war. Among the combatants present were the future commanders of the wars in the Caucasus, of the Indonesian Jemaah Islamiyah, the Abu Sayyaf group in the Philippines, and of course al-Qaeda and Daesh. In the United States, the anti-Soviet operation was supported by the Republican Party and a small group from the extreme left, the Trotskyists of Social Democrats USA.

The Carter-Brzeziński strategy represented a change of scale [4]. Saudi Arabia, which up until then had been financing the Islamist groups, found itself tasked with managing the war funds for the fight against the Soviets. The general director of Saudi Intelligence, Prince Turki (son of King Faisal), became an indispensable personality for all the Western summits on Intelligence.

The Palestinian Abdallah Azzam and the Saudi Oussama Ben Laden were trained in Riyadh by Mohammad Qutb, Sayyid Qutb’s brother. They successively directed the Muslim Brotherhood combatants in Afghanistan.

In the early phases, so many problems arose between the Afghans and Arabs that it was impossible to get them to fight together against the Communists. Prince Turki first sent the Palestinian Abdallah Azzam, the “Imam of Jihad”, to bring order to the Brotherhood, and run the Kabul office of the Muslim World League, but the office did not do well and was closed. Azzam was then succeeded by billionaire Osama Ben Laden. Both of them had been trained in Saudi Arabia by Sayyid Qutb’s brother.

During Carter’s term, the Muslim Brotherhood also undertook a long campaign of terror in Syria, including the assassination, by the Muslim Brotherhood’s “Fighting Vanguard”, of non-Sunni cadets at the Military Academy of Aleppo. The “Vanguard” were able to use training camps in Jordan, where the British handled their military instruction. During these “Years of Lead”, the CIA managed to broker an alliance between the Muslim Brotherhood and the small group of ex-Communists under Riyadh al-Turk. He and his Syrian dissident friends, Georges Sabra and Michel Kilo, had split with Moscow during the Lebanese civil war to support the Western camp. They affiliated themselves with the US Trotskyist group, Social Democrats USA. Together, the three men drew up a manifesto in which they affirmed that the Muslim Brotherhood formed the new proletariat, and that Syria could only be saved by US military intervention. Finally, the Brotherhood attempted a coup d’état in Syria in 1982, with the support of the Iraqi Ba’ath Party (which was collaborating with Washington against Iran) and Saudi Arabia. The combats which followed at Hama caused 2,000 deaths according to the Pentagon, 40,000 according to the Brotherhood and the CIA.

After that, hundreds of prisoners were slaughtered in Palmyra by the brother of President Hafez al-Assad, Rifaat, who was dismissed and forced into exile in Paris when he attempted, in his turn, a coup d’état against his own brother. The Trotskyists were imprisoned, and most members of the Brotherhood fled either to Germany (home of ex-Syrian Guide Issam al-Attar), or to France (like Abu Musab the Syrian). Chancellor Helmut Kohl and President François Mitterrand granted them asylum. Two years later, a scandal broke out within the opposition – which was in exile at the moment of division – $3 million had disappeared out of an envelope of $10 million donated by the Muslim World League.

During the 1980’s, the Muslim World League received instructions from Washington to transform Algerian society. Over a period of ten years, Riyadh paid for the construction of mosques in the villages of Algeria. Each time, a dispensary and a school were built alongside the mosques. The Algerian authorities were delighted with this assistance, especially since they were no longer able to guarantee the people’s access to health care and education. Progressively, the Algerian working classes distanced themselves from the state which was no longer much use to them, and grew ever closer to these generous mosques.

President Bush senior, ex-Director of the CIA, became friendly with the Saudi ambassador, Prince Bandar ben Sultan ben Abdelaziz Al Saoud, head of the Intelligence services of his country, who was later to become his opposite number. Bush considered him as his adopted son, which is how the Prince gained the nickname Bandar Bush.

When Prince Fahd became the King of Saudi Arabia in 1982, he nominated Prince Bandar (son of the Minister for Defence) as ambassador to Washington, a post he retained for the duration of Fahd’s reign. His function was double – on one side, he looked after Saudi-US relations, on the other, he served as an interface between the Director of Turkish Intelligence and the CIA. He became friends with the vice-President and ex-Director of the CIA, George H. W. Bush, who considered him as his “adopted son” (whence his nickname “Bandar Bush), then with Secretary for Defense Dick Cheney and the future Director of the CIA, George Tenet. He made his way into the social life of the elite and also had an entrée into the Christian cult of the Pentagon Chiefs of Staff, called The Family, as well as the ultra-conservative Bohemian Club of San Francisco.

Bandar directed the jihadists from the Muslim World League. He negotiated with London for the purchase of weapons from British Aerospace for his kingdom, in exchange for oil. These record-breaking “pigeon” contracts, in Arabic “Al Yamamah”, would cost Riyadh between 40 and 83 billion pounds sterling, of which an important part would be transferred to the Prince by the British. A corruption and fraud scandal arose, but was suppressed by the Saudi and British governments.

In 1983, President Ronald Reagan entrusted Carl Gershman, ex-leader of the aforementioned Trotskyites, Social Democrats USA, with the directorship of the new National Endowment for Democracy [sic] [5]. This was an agency which depended on the “Five Eyes” agreement, camouflaged as a NGO. It was the legal window for the secret services of Australia, Britain, Canada, the United States and New Zealand. Gershman had already worked with his Trotskyist comrades and his Muslim Brotherhood friends in Lebanon, Syria and Afghanistan. He set up a vast network of associations and foundations that the CIA and MI6 used to help the Brotherhood wherever possible. He pledged allegiance to the “Kirkpatrick Doctrine”, which basically states that all alliances are justified so long as they serve the interests of the United States (against its rivals, who are ipso facto “totalitarians”.

In this context, the CIA and MI6, who, at the peak of the Cold War, had created the World Anti-Communist League (WACL), used this organisation to supply the necessary funds for the jihad in Afghanistan. Oussama Ben Laden belonged to the organisation, which included several Heads of State [6]

In 1985, the United Kingdom, faithful to its tradition of academic expertise, equipped itself with an institute tasked with studying Muslim societies and the ways in which the Brotherhood could influence them – the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies.

Hassan el-Tourabi and Omar el-Bechir imposed the presence of the Muslim Brotherhood in Sudan. In the particularly sectarian and reactionary context of their country, they entered into dissidence with the Brotherhood before they destroyed one another mutually.

In 1989, the Brotherhood succeeded in perpetrating a second coup d’état, this time in Sudan, on behalf of Colonel Omar el-Bechir, who wasted no time in nominating the local Guide, Hassan al-Turabi, as President of the National Assembly. In a conference held in London, al-Turabi announced that his country was going to become the rear base for all the Islamist groups in the world.

Also in 1989, the Islamic Salvation Front (FIS) arose in Algeria, based around Abassi Madani, while the party in power collapsed under the weight of numerous scandals. The FIS was supported by the mosques “gifted” by the Saudis, and as a result, by the Algerian people who had been frequenting them for a decade. FIS won the local elections, due more to rejection of the country’s leaders than by belief in the ideology of FIS. Considering the failure of the politicians and the categorical impossibility of negotiating with the Islamists, the army carried out a coup d’état and cancelled the elections. The country sank into a long and murderous civil war about which we knew very little, but which claimed more than 150,000 victims. The Islamists did not hesitate to practise both individual and collective punishments, for example when they massacred the inhabitants of Ben Talha – guilty of having voted despite the fatwa forbidding them to do so – and destroyed the village. Evidently, Algeria served as a laboratory for new operations. The rumour spread that it was the army, not the Islamists, who had massacred the villagers. In reality, several senior officers from the secret services, who had been trained in the United States, joined the Islamists and spread confusion.

In 1991, Osama Bin Laden, who returned to Saudi Arabia as a hero of the anti-Communist struggle at the end of the war in Afghanistan, officially fell out with the King, while the “Sururists”, or followers of Sheikh Surur, rose up against the monarchy. This insurrection, the “Islamic Awakening”, lasted for four years, and ended with the imprisonment of the principal leaders. It showed the monarchy – who imagined that they enjoyed total authority – that by mixing religion and politics, the Brotherhood had created the conditions for a revolt via the mosques.

In this context, Osama Bin Laden claimed that he had proposed the aid of a few thousand veterans of the Afghan war to fight Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, but astonshingly, the King seemed to prefer the million soldiers from the US and their allies. Allegedly as a result of this disagreement, Bin Laden left for exile in Sudan – but in reality, his mission was to regain control of the Islamists who had escaped the authority of the Brotherhood and had risen up against the Saudi monarchy. With the Sudan’s Islamist leader Hassan al-Turabi, he organised a series of popular pan-Arab and pan-Islamic conferences, to which he invited the representatives of Islamist and Nationalist movements from about fifty countries. The aim was to create, at the party level, the equivalent of what Saudi Arabia had already succeeded in doing with the the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation, which brought States together. The participants did not know that these meetings were paid for by the Saudis, and that the hotels where they met were under CIA surveillance. Everyone participated, from Yasser Arafat to the Lebanese Hezbollah.

The FBI managed to convict the BCCI, a gigantic Muslim bank which had become, over time, the bank used by the CIA for its secret operations, particularly the financing of the war in Afghanistan – but also the narco-traffic in Latin America [7]. When the BCCI was declared bankrupt, its smaller clients were not reimbursed, but Osama Bin Laden managed to recover $1.4 billion to continue the Muslim Brotherhood’s work for Washington. The CIA then transferred its activities to the Faysal Islamic Bank and its subsidiary, Al-Baraka.

Translation 
Pete Kimberley

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First setbacks for the Muslim Brotherhood

by Thierry Meyssan

We are continuing the publication of Thierry Meyssan’s new book, « Right Before Our Eyes ». In this episode, the luck of the draw changes hands. US-Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi was overthrown in the wake of gigantic demonstrations, while the invasion of Damascus failed.

This article is an extract from the book Fake wars and big lies. See Contents.

Despite fielding 40,000 committed men, the Muslim Brotherhood failed to take the Syrian capital. Far from welcoming their « liberators », the population resisted and the operation was a fiasco.

As of 4 February 2011, date of the opening of the meeting in Cairo, the coordination of the Arab Spring in Syria was handled by the Facebook account “Syrian Revolution 2011”. The title alone is enough to indicate that the operation was intended to quickly overthrow the Syrian Arab Republic, as had been the case for the other “colour revolutions”, since the objective was not to change the mentalities, but only the leading elites and a few of the country’s laws. On the same day as its creation, “Syrian Revolution 2011” launched an appeal for a demonstration in Damascus which was relayed by al-Jazeera, while Facebook reported tens of thousands of “Followers”. Computer magic. This account was to play a central role over the next five years. Every Friday, the Muslim day for prayer, it dedicated itself to one of the Brotherhood’s objectives.

The Haririst deputy Okab Sakr

On 22 February, John McCain was in Lebanon. He met various leaders of the pro-Saudi Coalition of 14 March, including deputy Okab Sakr, to whom he entrusted the delivery of arms to the Islamists responsible for terrorist attacks in Syria [1]. He then left Beirut and went off to explore the Syrian border. He chose the village of Ersal as the future base of operations.

In spite of the appeals from the mysterious Syrian Revolution 2011 account, it was not until mid-March that events began to heat up in Syria. The Brotherhood gathered in Daraa, a town in the South of Syria, near the border with Jordan. It was reputed for being heavily Ba’athist, and also home to ex-jihadists from Afghanistan and Iraq. The Brotherhood hijacked a demonstration by civil servants who were demanding a pay rise, and began destroying the Palace of Justice. The same day, supervised by Mossad officers, they attacked a centre of Syrian military intelligence outside the town, used exclusively for surveillance if Israeli activity in the occupied Golan Heights.

Reporting on the event, al-Jazeera claimed that the inhabitants of Daraa were protesting after the police had tortured children who had tagged slogans hostile to President Assad. Confusion reigned while the vandals continued the destruction of the town centre. Over the following weeks, three groups of Islamists rambled through the country, attacking poorly-defended secondary targets. The impression of instability was generalised, even though the attacks concerned only three distinct locations at a time. In the space of a few weeks, there were more than 100 deaths, mainly policemen and soldiers.

President Assad’s reaction was the opposite of what was expected – instead of imposing a local Patriot Act, he abrogated the state of emergency which was still in force – Syria is still at war with Israel, which occupies the Golan Heights – and dissolved the State Security Court. He passed a law guaranteeing and organising the right to demonstrate, denounced an operation instigated from overseas, and called on the People to support the Institutions. He convened the Chiefs of Staff and forbade soldiers to use their weapons if there was any risk of causing collateral civilian deaths.

The Guide of the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood, Ali Sadreddine al-Bayanouni (a refugee in London), allied himself with ex-vice President Abdel Halim Khaddam (a refugee in Paris). The latter fled his country when it was discovered how he and Ghazi Kanaan, the head of the Intelligence services, had hidden the pillage of Lebanon by the Saudi Rafic Hariri.

Taking the President at his word, the Brotherhood attacked a military convoy in Banias (hometown of the traitorous ex-vice President Abdel Halim Khaddam) for several hours, in full view of the population. Fearing that the spectators might be killed or wounded, the soldiers obeyed their President and did not use their weapons. A dozen of them were killed. The sergeant who was commanding the detachment lost both his legs when he covered a grenade with his body to protect his men. The operation was organised from Paris by Khaddam’s Salvation Front and the Muslim Brotherhood. On 6 June, 120 policemen were killed in a similar situation in Jisr al-Shughur.

Demonstrations hostile to the Syrian Arab Republic were held in several towns. Contrary to the image that was propagated by the Western medias, the demonstrators never called for democracy. The slogans they chanted most were – “The People want the régime to fall”, “Christians to Beirut, Alawites to the grave”, “We want a Godfearing President”, “Down with Iran and the Hezbollah”. Several other slogans mentioned “liberty”, but not in the Western sense of the word. The demonstrators were calling for the freedom to practise Sharia law.

At that time, people believed that only al-Jazeera and al-Arabiya were trustworthy sources of information – media that had supported the régime changes in Tunisia and Egypt. They were therefore persuaded that in Syria too, the President would abdicate and that the Muslim Brotherhood would take power. The vast majority of Syrians were witnessing what they thought was a “revolution”, and were preparing for a new Islamist government. It is very difficult to count the number of Syrians who demonstrated against the Republic, or who supported the Muslim Brotherhood. We can only report that hundreds of small-scale demonstrations took place throughout the country, and that the largest of them gathered close to 100,000 people in Hama. [2] Its organisers were received by President Assad in Damascus. When he asked them what they were demonstrating for, they answered that they wanted to “forbid Alawites to enter Hama”. The astonished President – himself an Alawite – ended the interview.

On 4 July in Paris, there was a public conference, organized by the Brotherhood and the Israeli government behind the scenes, to get the French leaders on board. Responding to the appeal of “philosopher” Bernard-Henry Levy and the ex- and future Ministers for Foreign Affairs Bernard Kouchner and Laurent Fabius, [3] representatives from the right, centre, and left, and some ecologists, lent their support to what was presented to them as a struggle for democracy. No one noticed the presence in the room of the real organisers of the event – Alex Goldfarb (advisor to the Israeli Minister for Defense) and Melhem Droubi (world head of external relations for the Brotherhood), who had come specially from Saudi Arabia.

Burhan Ghalioun left Syria at the age of 24, and pursued a university career in Paris. At the same time, with the help of the NED, he created the Arab Organization for Human Rights in 1983 in Tunisia. When the Algerian Abassa Madani (from the Islamic Salvation Front) left for exile in Qatar, the secular Ghaioun helped him to write his speeches. In June 2011, he participated in the Conference for the National Salvation of the Muslim Brotherhood and, on a proposition from the United States, was elected a month later to the presidency of the Syrian National Council (SNC). As from then, he was paid a salary by the State Department for « representing the Syrian People ».

In August, a Syrian National Council was founded in Istanbul, on the model of the Libyan National Transitional Council. It consisted of long-time expatriates from Syria, others who had recently left, and the Muslim Brotherhood. The bizarre idea that this group was seeking to establish a “democracy” was ostensibly made plausible by personalities from the extreme left wing, such as professor Burhan

Ghalioun, who was named its President. Yet this man had been working for years with the NED and the Muslim Brotherhood. Although he was a layman, he had been writing speeches for Abassi Madani (President of the Islamic Salvation Front of Algeria) since he was exiled in Qatar. This was also the case of George Sabra and Michel Kilo, who had been working with the Brotherhood for more than thirty years, and who had followed the Trotskyists to the NED in 1982. Under the direction of the Libyan Mahmud Jibril, Sabra notably worked on the foreign versions of the children’s TV programme “Sesame Street”, produced by the French Lagardère Media and by al-Jazeera of Qatar, with RAND Corp. researcher Cheryl Benard, wife of Zalmay Khalilzad, US ambassador to the UN and then Iraq. Similarly, human rights careerist Haytham Manna was manager of investments for the Sudanese Brotherhood.

Qatar bought the rotating presidency of the Arab League from the PLO for $400 million. In violation of the statutes, it suspended the Syrian Arab Republic, even though it was a founding member of the organisation. Then it proposed an on-site Observer Mission presided by Sudan (still governed by the Brotherhood). It designated the exhead of the secret services and ex-ambassador to Qatar, General Mohammed Ahmed Mustafa al-Dabi, to direct the work. Every member state sent observers, in order to represent all tendencies. The Syrian Arab Republic agreed to host the League and allowed the Mission to deploy over all its territory. This was the first and only time that a pluralist organisation had gone into the field, met with all the protagonists, and visited the whole country. It was actually the only trustworthy external source of information throughout the whole conflict.

The nomination of General al-Dabi was unanimously saluted by all parties. He had negotiated the separation of Sudan and South Sudan, and was proposed by many Arab states for the Nobel Peace Prize. However, it appeared from a reading of the preliminary reports that the Sudanese had no intention of writing a report made to order, but to conduct an authentic and pluralist investigation. Suddenly, the international media changed their tune, and accused al-Dabi of responsibility for the genocide in Darfur. All those who had approved his nomination now demanded his resignation. The General resisted angrily.

Finally, a status report was published, attesting to the fact that there was no revolution in Syria. The Mission confirmed that the violence had been considerably exaggerated, that the army had withdrawn from the towns, that there was no repression, that the victims were mostly soldiers and policemen, that more than 5,000 prisoners whose names had been transmitted to the authorities had been freed, and that foreign medias who request to cover the events had been allowed to do so.

Qatar, in a fit of anger, paid $2 billion to Sudan to recall General al- Dabi, but he refused to allow the League to nominate his successor. Bereft of its commander, the Mission was dissolved at the beginning of 2012.

Young Abou Saleh became a permanent correspondent for France 24 and Al-Jazeera in the Islamic Emirate of Baba Amr (Homs). There he directed the imaginary two-month bombing of the neighbourhood by « régime forces », participated in the sentencing to death of 150 inhabitants of the area, delivered a deathbed address to his spectators (photo), then, suddenly recovered, he set fire to a pipeline, etc. He fled from Paris when the Emirate collapsed, and reappeared later on in Idleb.

Furious at seeing the Syrian Arab Republic pull through, the Brotherhood decided to create an Islamic emirate. After several attempts, they chose a new neighbourhood of Homs, Baba Amr, where tunnels had previously been dug and fitted to ensure a supply route in case of a siege. 3,000 combatants gathered there, including 2,000 Syrian Takfiri. They were members of a sub-group of the Brotherhood, “Excommunication and Immigration”, created under Sadat.

They set up a “Revolutionary Tribunal”, judged and condemned to death more than 150 inhabitants of the neighbourhood, and then cut their throats in public. The rest of the inhabitants fled, with the exception of about forty families. The Takfiri then built barricades at all the points of access to the area, and these were heavily armed by the French Special Forces. The terrorist campaign of the first year gave way to a war of position, in conformity with the plan laid out in 2004 in “The Management of Savagery”. From that point on, the Islamists received weapons from NATO which were more sophisticated than those of the Syrian Army, which had been under an embargo since 2005.

One morning, the Syrian Arab Army entered Baba Amr, whose defences had been de-activated. The French, the journalists and a few leaders fled, to reappear a few days later in Lebanon. The Takfiri surrendered. The war that had just begun seemed to be ending already, like in Lebanon in 2007, when the Lebanese army defeated Fatah al-Islam. But the Islamists were not done yet.

A new operation was being prepared from Jordan, under NATO command. The plan was to attack Damascus in the context of a gigantic psychological operation, but this was cancelled at the last moment. The Islamists who had been abandoned by France in Baba Amr were now decommissioned by the United States, who were discussing a possible sharing of the Middle East with Russia. A promise of peace was signed in Geneva, on 30 June 2012.

In Egypt, the Brotherhood dominated the new parliament, or “constituent assembly,” which was of the opinion that the new Constitution – drawn up specifically to expedite its election – did little more than reiterate a slightly amended old text, although it had been approved by referendum at 77%. It therefore designated a Constituent Assembly of 100 members, this time including 60 Brothers.

As soon as President Moubarak resigned, forced by Washington, Sheik Youssef Al-Qaradâwî returned to Qatar in a private jet. Administrator of the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies presided by Prince Charles, and spiritual advisor of Al-Jazeera, he hosted a weekly programme about the charia. On Tahrir square, he rejected democracy and called for the execution of homosexuals.

The Brotherhood stressed that the young democrats could undermine the power of the army. Its campaign for the Presidential election was the occasion to call for the regeneration of the country by the Qu’ran. Yusuf al-Qaradawi preached that it was more important to fight homosexuals and re-instate the Faith than to fight Israel for the recognition of the rights of the Palestinian People [4]. While the Sunni population massively boycotted the election, the Brotherhood prevented the election from being held in Christian villages and towns, so that 600,000 citizens were unable to vote.

The Presidential Electoral Commission « confirmed Mohamed Morsi as President of Egypt, in order to avoid a bloody destiny for the country if [it proclaimed] the election of General Ahmed Shafiq ».

However, the election results favoured General Ahmed Shafik, Mubarak’s ex- Prime Minister, who won by a slim margin of 30,000 votes. The Brotherhood then threatened the members of the Electoral Commission and their families until, 13 days later, it decided to proclaim victory for Brother Mohamed Morsi [5]. The “international community” praised the democratic character of the election.

Press conference at the headquarters of the Muslim Brotherhood with the World Guide of the Brotherhood and President Mohamed Morsi.

Mohamed Morsi was an engineer who had worked for NASA. He had United States nationality and secret defence security clearance in the Pentagon. As soon as he came to power, he began work to rehabilitate and favour his own clan, and to reinforce the bonds with Israel. On the anniversary of Sadat’s execution, he received the assassins at the Presidential palace. He nominated Adel Mohammed al-Khayat, one of the leaders of Gamaa Al-Islamiya, (the group responsible for the 1997 massacre in Luxor), as governor for that district. He persecuted the democrats who had demonstrated against certain aspects of Hosni Mubarak’s politics (but not his resignation). He supported a vast campaign of pogroms by the Muslim Brotherhood against the Christians, and covered up their abuses – lynchings, destruction of the archbishoprics, and the burning of churches. Simultaneously, he privatised major businesses and announced the possible sale of the Suez Canal to Qatar, which was then sponsoring the Brotherhood. From the Presidential palace, he telephoned Ayman al-Zawahiri, world leader of al-Qaeda, at least four times.

Finally, opposition to Morsi became unanimous; excepting the Brotherhood, all political parties, even the Salafists, demonstrated against him. 33 million citizens took to the streets and called on the army to give the country back to the People. Taking no notice of the street, President Morsi ordered the army to prepare to attack the Syrian Arab Republic in order to come to the assistance of the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood. That was to be the final straw.

On 3 July 2013, at the hour that Washington’s offices close for the long weekend of the Independence Day national holiday, the army carried out a coup d’état. Mohamed Morsi was imprisoned, while the streets became a battlefield – the Muslim Brotherhood and their families on one side, and the law enforcement agencies on the other.

It is said that “in politics, promises only bind those who believe in them”. One month after the Geneva 1 conference and the peace agreement, and a few days after the “Friends of Syria” Conference in Paris, war was authorised once again. Instead of a NATO action supported by a few jihadists, this was a jihadist attack supported by NATO. Its code name was “Damascus Volcano and Syrian Earthquake”.

An army of 40,000 men, trained in Jordan, crossed the border and charged towards the Syrian capital, at the same time as a terrorist bombing killed top Syrian leaders at a meeting of the National Security Council. The army and the intelligence services lost their commanders in the attack.

The jihadists were mercenaries who had been recruited from among the poor of the Muslim world. Many of them did not speak Arabic, and had received only one week of military training. Some of them believed they were fighting Israelis. After suffering considerable losses, they retreated.

In the long war which followed, the Syrian Arab Army attempted to defend its population centers, against the jihadists, who tried to make life impossible in the vast expanses of the desert. They enjoyed an infinite supply of reinforcements. Every month, new fighters arrived to replace the dead and the deserters. All the petty criminals of the Muslim world came to try their luck for a few hundred dollars a month. Recruitment centres were opened publicly in countries like Tunisia and Afghanistan, and more discreetly in countries like Morocco and Pakistan. However, the fatality rate of these legionnaires was extremely high.

In July 2013, according to Interpol, some very sophisticated escape operations were carried out in nine states in order to free the Islamist leaders and transfer them to Syria. For example: 
 On 23 July, between 500 and 1,000 prisoners escaped from the prisons in Taj and Abu Ghraib (Iraq). 
 On 27 July, 1,117 prisoners escaped from Kouafia prison in Benghazi district, Libya by a riot inside the prison combined with an attack from outside. 
 On the night of 29 to 30 July, 243 Taliban escaped from the prison in Dera Ismail Khan in the Pakistani tribal areas.

The Syrian Arab Army cremated most of the combatants’ corpses, while retaining those that could be identified. They were sent back to their families. Several states discreetly set up repatriation networks, for example Algeria, with the Emir Abdelkader Foundation. Yet the Syrian Arab Army still holds more than 30,000 corpses that were identified, but never claimed.

Those Western states which had at first sent Special Forces recruited from amongst their own soldiers with double nationality – generally Muslims with origins in the Maghreb – later organised their own networks to recruit jihadists. Thus, in France, a network was set up in prisons with Salafist mosques, like the one in the Rue Jean-Pierre Timbaud in Paris. These several thousand individuals were added to the tens of thousands from the “Greater Middle East”. Although we do not know for certain how many people took part in the war, it is estimated that the total number of jihadists fighting in Syria and Iraq, both locals and foreigners, has been more than 350,000 since 2011. This is more than any regular army of the European Union, and twice that of the Syrian Arab Army.

On the Saudi television channel al-Safa, Syrian Sheikh Adnan Al-Arour called for the massacre of the Alaouites. He was to become the religious reference of the Free Syrian Army (FSA).

The ideological unity of the jihadists was guaranteed by the “spiritual head of the Free Syrian Army”, sheikh Adnan al-Aroor. This colourful personality was able to reach a vast public by way of his weekly TV programme. He inflamed passions by calling for the overthrow of the tyrant, and supported a paternalistic, authoritarian vision of society. As time went on, he drifted towards sectarian appeals for the massacre of Christians and Alawites. He originally he came from a family of delinquents, betrayed his brothers to the police, and escaped a prison sentence by joining the Syrian Arab Army. As a non-commissioned officer, he was arrested for raping young recruits. He then fled to Saudi Arabia, where he became a sheikh in the service of Allah.

Meeting at the US National Security Council , on 13 June 2013 at the White House. We recognise Gayle Smith (second from the right) and Brother Rashad Hussain (fourth from the left). The National Security Advisor, Tom Donilon, also took part in the meeting, but is not seen in the photo. Above all, we may recognise the representative of the Muslim Brotherhood and assistant of Youssef al-Qaradâwî, Sheik Abdallah Bin Bayyah (second from the left with a turban).

The jihadists usually received basic weaponry, and had access to an unlimited supply of ammunition. They were organised in katibas or brigades, small units of a few hundred men, whose commanders received ultra-sophisticated equipment, notably portable communication kits relaying live satellite images of the movements of the Syrian Arab Army. They were therefore fighting an asymmetrical war against the Syrian Arab Army, who were certainly better trained, but whose weapons all dated from before 2005, and who had no access to satellite imagery.

In contrast to the Syrian Arab Army, whose units were all coordinated and placed under the authority of President Bashar al- Assad, the jihadist katibas were continually skirmishing between themselves, as on all battlefields where rival “warlords” struggle for superiority. However, all the factions received reinforcements, arms, ammunition and intelligence from a single central command, NATO LandCom, situated in Izmir (Turkey), and whom they were therefore obliged to obey. But the United States had great difficulty in making this system work, because many of the participants were attempting to conceal their operations from their allies – for example, the French in secret from the British, or the Qataris to the detriment of the Saudis.

As soon as a territory was evacuated by the Syrian Arab Army, the jihadists who occupied it dug in. They built tunnels and bunkers. The Saudis had sent the billionaire Osama Bin Laden to Afghanistan because he was a specialist in public works. He supervised the construction of tunnels in the mountains – or more exactly, the enlarging of subterranean riverbeds. In Syria, NATO civil engineers came to supervise the construction of gigantic lines of defence, comparable to those of the Central Powers during the First World War.

Translation 
Pete Kimberley

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For 8 years, the Voltaire Network has been unable to open a bank account in a Western country. Whatever the location, after having received a primary agreement, we were informed that our account had been refused by the Central Bank of the country concerned, but without any reason being given. Everything transpires as if there existed a confidential international black list shared by the Central Banks.

Today we are obliged to reimburse the money invested for the hosting and maintenance of the site over the last few years – a total of 48,000 Euros.

A collection box system – the Internet site Leetchi - was created in France by a branch of the Crédit Mutuel Arkéa for the collection of donations. In last June, this site was blocked by the Justice Department after it had acted to close down a collection on behalf of the boxer Christophe Dettinger, accusing him of wanting to avoid paying his legal expenses, but to put money aside in order to pay any eventual fines, which is illegal. Mr.Dettinger was charged with having bare-knuckled some gendarmes (in riot gear) who were manhandling a woman during a Yellow Vests demonstration.

Then came the sudden appearance of second collection box system, Le Pot Commun. It is in all points absolutely identical to the first. Its Internet site is the copy and paste of Leetchi, which leads us to believe that it is run by the same company. Two weeks ago, we contacted them to organise a collection. They accepted our request as well as the administrative credentials we had sent them. However, when we gave them the order to transfer the money already collected to a designated bank account which had been opened for the occasion, they no longer replied. On 25 July, they wrote that the order had been recorded, but not executed. We wrote to them several times. They did not answer. Suddenly, on 1 August, they closed our collection and sent a message to all our donors announcing they would reimburse them, allegedly « at their demand ».

To sum up: 

We still have to reimburse 48,000 Euros, and we don’t have a penny. Your money did not reach us. 

Le Pot Commun has refused to honour the contract – not because of the suspicion of a possible infraction, but entirely by discrimination against our political opinions. 

Le Pot Commun has stolen the sum already gathered (47,771 Euros).The fact that it has taken on itself to reimburse our donors protects it from legal proceedings for theft on the donors’ part, but not on ours. 

In order to pay back our donors, Le Pot Commun has linked files that they had no right to connect. It has composed an illegal, nominative, political file which includes, apart from the name of the collection, the names of the donors and their bank information.

At this stage, we do not know who is at the origin of these offences.

The Voltaire Network was founded in 1994 at the European Parliament. It first of all united governmental political parties, national trade unions, and newspapers in order to defend the freedom of expression in France, which was threatened by a legal amendment. As from 1999 and the entry of France into war against Serbia, it turned its gaze towards foreign policy, to which it applied its critical attention. After the attacks of 2001, it published many enquiries on this subject with the support of all its members. However, in 2002, when its founder and president, Thierry Meyssan, published a compilation of the events of 9/11, many organisations withdrew their support. Progressively, the Voltaire Network became a source of information and analysis concerning many on-going conflicts. Its articles are today translated into several languages and figure in the Press reviews of numerous governments.

The continuation or disappearance of the Voltaire Network is therefore a political issue on an international scale.

We are asking you: 

To check that you have been reimbursed for your donation without added expenses. In the Dettinger affair, several people complained that they had been robbed. If this case should arise, contact us via [email protected] 

To come to our help as quickly as possible by sending a bank transfer to the dedicated bank account, opened for this purpose by our representative in France, Alain Benajam. As for the motive of the transfer, please write PRECISELY « Soutien à Voltairenet.org ». Here is the bank information:

Name : Alain Benajam

IBAN : FR76 1659 8000 0113 8513 8000 182 
BIC : FPELFR21 
RIB : 16598 00001 13851380001 82

We will keep you informed about what happens next. This affair will enable us all to judge whether or not France still operates by the rule of law.

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The Voltaire Network (French: Réseau Voltaire) is a Lebanon-based alternative media outlet with connections in South America and the Middle East. The organisation was founded in 1994 as a left-wing think tank in support of free speech and secularism in France. It split in 2003 and was disbanded in 2007. It was re-founded as the International Voltaire Network (Réseau Voltaire International) in Lebanon. Its current leader is Thierry Meyssan.

The Voltaire Network publishes a free website available in 17 languages (Arabic, English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Turkish, and others) and two online databases.

The Voltaire Network was founded in the context of a campaign in favour of freedom of speech, which the founders thought was put into jeopardy by new laws enshrined in the French penal code. After the campaign the association lived on, specialising in the study of far-right movements and religions. It was vocal notably in preventing the French government from funding the religious part of the Pope's visit to France, and in initiating an investigation of the French Parliament regarding the French far-right militia group Department of Protection-Security. Since 1999, the Réseau Voltaire has dealt with international issues, including daily news about the bombings of Serbia by NATO.

Several senior members of the Réseau have complained about a lack of control of the administration council over actions of the president and general secretary. They alleged that the president fostered an environment that suppressed criticism and failed to focus impartially on the board's general goals. Furthermore, they also cited what they believed to be an excessive critique of American foreign policy that was not balanced by reporting on the lack of political freedoms in the Middle East, where most network members tended to operate. The group also suggested that politically illiberal organizations or political figures believed to sponsor anti-Semitic views were treated uncritically. One example was Entretien avec le Hezbollah (Meeting with the Hezbollah) which presented the group, which is closely allied to Iran, as a "social group of Muslim inspiration, comparable to the Liberation theology in South America". Chairman Messyan was said to have visited Tehran to discuss his alternative theories positing that the United States conducted the 9/11 attacks as a false flag operation to justify intervention in Muslim affairs.[1]

Three members of the administration council (Michel Sitbon, Gilles Alfonsi and Jean-Luc Guilhem) resigned in February 2005, over what they consider to be an adhesion to the theory of the so-called "Clash of Civilizations", although the Network's publications clearly oppose the theory as a neo-conservative strategy to control the world's last remaining oil reserves, and the instrumentalisation of the network. They object that "With the pretext of resisting American Imperialism, lenience toward Chinese and Russian imperialisms and closeness with Islamists is symptomatic of a latent anti-Semitic drift among the direction." They also claim the existence of links with intelligence agencies, arguing that the Voltaire Network had been constructed against such organizations. However, they also underline that the new stance of the direction shouldn't cause the previous work of the network to be forgotten.[2] Since 2002, these members had been in conflict with Bruno Drweski, director the Communist review La Pensée. These accusations were denied by the Réseau Voltaire, which evokes mere "changes in dimension."[3] Founding member Michel Sitbon cited the arrival of controversial personalities like Claude Karnoouh [fr] (who was never actually an administrator) and Bruno Drweski, while the Réseau, in a 2005 declaration, said that "administrators favourable to a French petty political conception of the association have been put in minority. They resigned either before or during the general assembly"

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We are ending the publication of the section of Thierry Meyssan’s book « Right Before Our Eyes » which deals with the Muslim Brotherhood. In this episode, the Brotherhood, with Daesh, realises its dream to re-establish the Caliphate. Thus the first terrorist state managed to function for two years – with the help of the Western powers.

The early membership of the al-Nusra Front (al-Qaeda in Syria) were Syrians who went to fight in Iraq after the fall of Baghdad in 2003. They returned to Syria to participate in the planned insurgency against the Republic, which was later postponed until July 2012. For two years – until 2005 – they benefited from the aid of Syria, which allowed them to circulate freely, believing they had come to fight the US invader. However, when General David Petraeus arrived in Iraq, it became apparent that their true function was to fight the Iraqi Shiites, to the greater glory of the occupiers. In April 2013, the Islamic Emirate in Iraq, from which they all originated, was reactivated under the name of the Islamic Emirate in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL or ISIS). The members of the al-Nusra Front, who now had their own leading roles of in Syria, refused to rejoin to their parent company.

John McCain in occupied Syria. At the forefront to the right, we can recognise the Director of the Syrian Emergency Task Force. In the doorway, at the centre, the spokesman for Northern Tempest (Al-Qaïda), Mohammad Nour. The families of the Lebanese hostages accused the « senator » of complicity in kidnapping. McCain claimed that he did not know Nour, and had infiltrated this photo, which was published by his parliamentary secretariat.

In May 2013, an American Zionist association, the Syrian Emergency Task Force, organised a trip by Senator McCain to rebel-occupied areas in Syria. He met various criminals, including Mohammad Nour, spokesman for the katiba Northern Tempest (al-Qaeda), which had kidnapped and imprisoned 11 Shiite Lebanese pilgrims in Azaz, Syria. A photograph published by his Press service showed McCain in deep discussion with leaders of the Free Syrian Army, some of whom also displayed the black Al-Qaeda flag of the al-Nusra Front. Some doubt arose about the identity of one of these men. I wrote later that he was actually Daesh’s future Caliph, which the Senator’s spokesperson vehemently denied [1]. As this man had also been a translator for journalists, there was room for doubt. The spokesperson insisted that my theory was absurd, since Daesh had several times made death threats against the Senator. But shortly afterwards, with no worries about contradicting himself, John McCain declared on TV that he knew the leaders of Daesh personally, and was “in permanent contact with them”. Supposedly he entertained no illusions about the Islamists, but he could brag that he had learned a thing or two in Vietnam, and was supporting them against “Bashar’s régime” out of strategic necessity. So even before the events in Syria began, McCain had organised their weapons supply from Lebanon, where he chose the village of Arsal as a rear base of operations. His fact-finding tour of jihadist Syria would help in planning Daesh’s future operations.

John McCain was part of the Staff for the Free Syrian Army. In front to the left, the senator was talking with the man who was later to play the rôle of « Caliph Ibrahim » for Daesh. . The « Caliph » is an actor who had never occupied any post of responsibility. According to John McCain, this is not the Caliph, but simply someone who looks like him. Nonetheless, the senator later admitted that he was in « permanent contact » with Daesh.

In December 2013, the Turkish police and Ministry of Justice determined that for a number of years, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan had been secretly meeting with Yasin al-Qadi, the banker of al-Qaeda. Photographs showed that he came in a private plane, and was welcomed once the surveillance cameras of the airport had been switched off. US vice-President Dick Cheney was at that time (and probably still is) a personal friend of Al-Qadi. He was taken off NATO’s wanted list only on 5 October 2012, and off the State Department list on 26 November 2014, but had been coming to see Erdoğan for a long time before that. He admitted financing Bin Laden’s Arab Legion in Bosnia-Herzegovina (1991-95), as well as Bosnian President Alija Izetbegović. According to the FBI, he also played a central role in the financing of the attacks against the US embassies in Tanzania and Kenya (1998). The FBI also pointed to Al-Qadi as the owner of the software firm Ptech, (now Go Agile) suspected of having play a role in international terrorism (the 9/11crimes, in particular) .

The security cameras at Istanbul airport recorded Bilal Erdogan welcoming the treasurer of Al-Qaïda, Yasin el-Kadi.

A short time afterwards, the Turkish police searched the headquarters of the IHH and interrogated Halis B., the suspected leader of al-Qaeda in Turkey, and İbrahim Ş., second-in-command of the organisation for the Near East. Erdoğan managed to fire the policemen and free the suspects.

On the Saudi public channel Al-Arabiya, an officer of Daesh declared that the organisation is commanded by Prince Abdul Rahman Al-Faiçal.

In January 2014, the United States began a vast programme for the development of an unnamed jihadist organisation. Three training camps were set up in Turkey, in Şanlıurfa, Osmaniye and Karaman [2]. Huge supplies of weapons arrived for ISIL, arousing the envy of al-Nusra. For several months, the two groups fought each other mercilessly. France and Turkey, who were not aware of the plan, at first of sent ammunition to al-Nusra (al-Qaeda) to help them get their hands on ISIL’s treasure trove. Saudi Arabia demanded to be given the leadership of ISIL, and proclaimed that would now be commanded by Prince Abdul Rahman al-Faisal, brother of the Saudi ambassador to the United States and the Saudi Minister for Foreign Affairs.

Gradually, the situation became clearer – on 18 February, the White House convened the heads of the secret services of Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Qatar and Turkey. The US National Security Advisor, Susan Rice, told them that Prince Bandar was not recovering from his injuries, and would be replaced by Prince Mohammed bin Nayef as supervisor of the jihadists. But Nayef had no natural authority over people, and this only whet Turkish appetites. Rice also shared the new organization chart of the Free Syrian Army, and told the assembled spy chiefs that Washington would entrust them with a vast secret operation to redraw the borders. At the beginning of May, Abdelhakim Belhaj (ex-officer of al-Qaeda, military governor of Tripoli, and founder of the Free Syrian Army) went to Paris to inform the French government about the US-jihadist plans, and to end the war waged by France against ISIL. Notably, he was received at the Quai d’Orsay, the Foreign Ministry. From 27 May to 1 June, several jihadist chiefs were invited for consultations in Amman, the capital of Jordan.

An extract from the report supervised by the CIA in Amman, drawn up by the Turkish Intelligence services (document published by the Kurdish daily « Özgür Gündem » on 6 July 2014).

According to the minutes of the meeting, the Sunni combatants were to be regrouped under the banner of ISIL (Islamic Emirate of Iraq and the Levant). They would receive vehicles and massive amounts of Ukrainian weaponry. They were to take control of a vast zone straddling Syria and Iraq, mainly desert, and would proclaim an independent state there. Their mission was to cut the Beirut-Damascus-Baghdad-Teheran route and obliterate the Franco-British frontiers of Syria and Iraq. Iraqi ex-vice-President Izzat Ibrahim al-Douri, who was master of the Order of the Naqshbandis in his country, announced that he would bring 80,000 veteran soldiers of Saddam’s army with him. The CIA confirmed that 120,000 combatants from the Sunni tribes of Al-Anbar province would join ISIL as soon as it arrived, and would supply them with heavy weaponry that the Pentagon would deliver, officially for the Iraqi army. Masrour “Jomaa” Barzani, head of the secret services of the Kurdistan Regional Government, brokered an agreement allowing his government to annex the disputed territories of Kirkuk as soon as ISIL annexed Al-Anbar. Less obvious is the reason for the presence of Mullah Krekar, who was serving a prison sentence in Norway, and who nonetheless arrived in a special NATO aircraft. For many years he had been playing an important role in the ideological preparation of the Islamists for the proclamation of the Caliphate. But that question would not be examined during the meeting.

At the same moment, at West Point military academy, President Barack Obama announced the resumption of the “war on terrorism” with an annual budget of $5 billion. The White House later announced that this programme included the training of 5,400 “moderate rebels” annually (therefore not the Muslim Brotherhood).

In June, the Islamic Emirate launched attacks, first of all in Iraq, then in Syria, and proclaimed a caliphate. Until then, Daesh – this was the name it was given, based on its Arab acronym – was only supposed to be composed of a few hundred combatants, but miraculously, it was suddenly swollen by several hundred thousand mercenaries. The gates of Iraq were opened to them by ex-officers of Saddam Hussein, who were taking revenge on the government of Baghdad, and by Shiite officers who had emigrated to the United States. Daesh grabbed the weapons that the Pentagon had just delivered to the Iraqi army, and cash reserves from the Central Bank of Mosul. Simultaneously, and in coordinated fashion, the Regional Government of Kurdistan annexed Kirkuk and announced that there would be a referendum on self-determination. In order to prevent jihadists from competing groups of the Islamic Emirate from crowding into Turkey, Ankara closed its frontier with Syria.

As soon as it was settled in, Daesh installed civil administrators trained at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, some of whom had recently taken part in the US administration of Iraq. Instantaneously, Daesh had a state administration apparatus at its disposition, in conformity with the US army’s theory of state-building. This was a miraculous makeover for what had been only a minor terrorist group a few weeks earlier.

Almost everything had been planned in advance. So, when Daesh took the Iraqi military airports, it immediately inherited combat-ready airplane and helicopter pilots. These could not have been ex-Iraqi air force pilots, since combat efficiency was considered to be lost after six months without flight experience. But the planners had forgotten to supply the necessary technical teams, which meant that part of the equipment could not be used.

Daesh also was given a media arm, apparently composed mostly of MI6 specialists, who were tasked with editing newspapers as well as staging the violence of Allah. This was another change for the jihadists. Until now, they had used violence to terrorise the population. From now on, they would magnify it in order to shock and hypnotise them. Remarkably polished and well-filmed, their videos would burn into people’s minds and recruit the fans of snuff movies.

John McCain and Abdelhakim Belhaj. At the moment this photo was taken, Interpol was looking for Belhaj as the Emir of Daesh in the Maghreb.

The astonishing success of Daesh attracted Islamists from all over the world. If al-Qaeda had been their reference during the time of Osama Bin Laden and his cohort of look-alikes, Caliph “Ibrahim” was now their new idol. One by one, the majority of jihadist groups in the world swore allegiance to Daesh. On 23 February 2015, the Prosecutor General of Egypt, Hichem Baraket, notified Interpol that Abdelhakim Belhaj, military governor of Tripoli, was the head of Daesh for the whole of Maghreb.

Daesh exploited Iraqi and Syrian oil [3]. Crude oil was transported either via the pipe-line controlled by the Kurdistan Regional Government of Iraq, or by tank trucks owned by the Turkish companies Serii and SAM Otomotiv, via the border posts of Karkamış, Akçakale, Cilvegözü and Öncüpınar. A part of the crude oil was refined for Turkish use by Turkish Petroleum Refineries Co. (Tüpraş) in the city of Batman. It was then shipped to Ceyhan, Mersin and Dortyol on ships of the Palmali Shipping & Agency JSC, the company of Turko-Azeri billionaire Mubariz Gurbanoğlu. Most of the crude oil was transported to Israel, where it received false certificates of origin, thence to Europe (including France, at Fos-sur-Mer, where it was refined). The rest was sent directly to Ukraine.

This system was perfectly well known to industry insiders, and was mentioned at the World Petroleum Council (15 to 19 June in Moscow). The speakers assured that Aramco (USA/Saudi Arabia) organised the distribution of Daesh’s oil in Europe, while Exxon-Mobil (the Rockefeller company that rules Qatar) sold the oil stolen by al-Nusra [4]. A few months later, during a hearing of the European Parliament, the representative for the European Union in Iraq, ambassador Jana Hybaskova, would confirm that the member states of the EU were sponsoring Daesh by buying their oil.

At first, the UN Security Council was incapable of denouncing this traffic – at best, its President noted that trading with terrorist organisations was forbidden. We had to wait until February 2015 for the vote on resolution 2199. Mubariz Gurbanoğlu then retired, selling several of his ships (Mecid Aslanov, Begim Aslanova, Poet Qabil, Armada Breeze and Shovket Alekperova) to BMZ Group Denizcilik ve İnşaat A.Ş., the maritime company belonging to Bilal Erdoğan, son of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. Bilal continued the traffic. It was only in November 2015, during the G20 summit in Antalya, that Vladimir Putin accused Turkey of violating the UN resolution and selling Daesh’s oil. When President Erdoğan denied it, the head of operations for the Russian army, General Serguei Rudskoy, presented satellite images at a public Press conference, showing 8,500 tanker trucks crossing the Turkish border. The Russian air force immediately destroyed the trucks present in Syria, but the greater part of the traffic continued via Iraqi Kurdistan, under the responsibility of its President Massoud Barzani. Work was then begun on expanding the oil terminal “Yumurtalık” (linked to the Turko-Iraqi Kirkuk-Ceyhan pipeline), boosting its storage capacity up to 1.7 million tons.

These tank trucks all belonged to Powertans, a company which had obtained the monopoly for the transport of oil on Turkish territory, without it being put out for competitive bids. It was owned by the very mysterious Grand Fortune Ventures, based first in Singapore, then transferred to the Cayman Islands. Behind this financial set-up was Çalık Holding, the company belonging to Berat Albayrak, President Erdoğan’s son-in law and his Minister for Energy [5].

The oil which travelled via the Kurdish pipeline was also sold in the same way. However, when the Iraqi government denounced the Barzani clan’s complicity with Daesh, and the theft of Iraqi public property which they had organised together, Ankara feigned surprise. Erdoğan blocked the income of the Iraqi Kurds in a Turkish bank account, while waiting for Erbil (the capital of Iraqi Kurdistan) and Baghdad to clarify their positions. Although this money was supposedly blocked, income was generated by investing it, which was not declared to the Turkish Budget, but paid to Erdoğan’s AKP (Justice and Development Party).

In September 2014, the Caliph purged the cadres of his organisation. The North African officers in general and the Tunisians in particular were accused of disobedience, condemned to death and executed. They were replaced by Georgian Chechens and Chinese Uyghurs. The Georgian Military Intelligence officer Tarkhan Batirashvili became the Caliph’s right-hand man, under the name of “Abou Omar al-Chichani”. Innocently, Georgian Minister for Defence and ex-head of the “Abkhazian government in exile” (sic) Irakli Alassania, announced at the same time that his country was preparing to set up training camps for Syrian jihadists.

On 13 September, reacting to the large-scale atrocities and the execution of two US journalists, President Obama announced the creation of an anti-Daesh Coalition. During the battle of Kobane in northern Syria, the USAF kept the game going by bombing Daesh on certain days and dropping them weapons and ammunition on other days.

According to the US Press, Frenchman David Drugeon, an officer of the French military services, was the explosives expert who trained Mohammed Merah and the Kouachi brothers. The French Minister for Defence denied having employed him, although the US Press maintains its statement. He was conveniently declared missing after an allied bombing.

The Coalition declared it was leading an operation against a certain Khorasani group of al-Qaeda in Syria. Although there is no proof whatsoever that this group actually existed, the US media claimed that it was led by an explosives expert on mission for the French secret services, David Drugeon, which the French Defense Minister denied. The American media then claimed that Drugeon, on behalf of the French secret services, had trained Mohammed Mera (accused in the attacks in Toulouse and Montauban in 2012) and the Kouachi brothers (blamed for the attack on Charlie Hébdo in Paris in 2015).

In order to increase its resources, Daesh levied taxes in the territories it controlled, ransomed prisoners, and smuggled antiques. The latter activity was supervised by Abu Sayyaf al-Iraqi. The stolen artefacts were brought to Gaziantep, in Turkey, not far from Aleppo. Then they were either delivered directly to the collectors who had ordered them, via transport companies like Şenocak, Devran, Karahan and Egemen, or sold at the Coppersmith Bazaar in Gaziantep [6].

Additionally, when Afghan President Hamid Karzai left power, he took the transport of opium and Afghani heroin from the Kosovars and handed it over to the Islamic State Caliphate. For many long years, the family of the Afghan President – notably his brother Ahmed Wali Karzai, until his assassination – had reigned over the main opium cartel. Under the protection of US armed forces, Afghanistan produced 380 tons of heroin per year of the 430 tons available on the world market. This commerce had enriched the Karzai clan by $3 billion in 2013. Daesh was tasked with transporting the drugs to Europe via its African and Asian subsidiaries.

On 21 May 2017, President Donald Trump announced in Riyadh that the United States had abandoned the idea of creating a Sunnistan (Daesh Caliphate) straddling the border between Iraq and Syria, and would cease to support international terrorism. He directed all Muslim states to do the same. This speech had been carefully prepared with the Pentagon and Prince Mohamed Ben Salman, but not with London.

While Saudi Arabia obediently began dismantling the gigantic system of support for the Muslim Brotherhood that it had developed over sixty years, the United Kingdom, Qatar, Turkey and Malaysia refused to follow this US initiative.

Just as in Afghanistan, MI6 had changed the name of the « United Islamic Front for the Salvation of Afghanistan » to « Northern Alliance », in order to secure the support of Western public opinion for the « resistants against the Taliban », so, in Myanmar, MI6 changed the name of the « Movement for the Faith » to the « Army for the Liberation of the Rohingyas of Arakan ». In both cases, the Muslim Brotherhood was not to be mentioned.

In August 2017, London launched the Army for the Liberation of the Rohingyas of Arakan against the Burmese government. For a month, international public opinion was flooded with truncated news clips blaming the exodus of the Muslim Royinghas from Myanmar to Bengal on the crimes of the Burmese Buddhist army. This is the beginning of the second phase of the war of civilisations – after the Muslim attack on the Christians, now we saw the Buddhist attack on the Muslims. However, the operation was interrupted when Saudi Arabia ceased its support for the Army for the Salvation of the Rohingyas, whose headquarters was in Mecca [7].

Three days after the terrorist attacks in Sri Lanka, the Saudi Minister for Foreign Affairs sent a secret cable to his embassy in Colombo. He requested that as far as possible the ambassador should confine his entire staff for three days and forbid them absolutely to frequent the areas which were to be destroyed by the attacks (source - Alahed News).

Finally, the United States, Iran and Iraq chased Daesh out of Iraq, while Syria and Russia chased them from Syria.

A vast operation was then mounted by Daesh in Sri Lanka on the occasion of the Christian holiday of Easter, on 21 April 2019, killing 258 people and wounding 496.

The re-establishment of the Caliphate, imagined in 1928 by Hassan el-Banna, had been attempted by President Anouar el-Sadate for his own personal profit, which cost him his life. It was finally realised by Daesh, but ended in failure. The resistance of the Arab populations was too strong, and President Trump’s opposition prevented the pursuit of the experience. It is not possible for the moment to determine whether the Islamic Emirate had received the Guide’s mandate to proclaim itself as a Caliphate, or if it had profited by Western support to do so. In any case, the jihadists did not stop there.

(To be continued …)

Translation 
Pete Kimberley

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News from the Voltaire Network

by Thierry Meyssan

After fundraising in favor of the Voltaire Network was illegally diverted by a bank and many other banks have closed or refused to open an account for a funding campaign, Thierry Meyssan takes stock of the legal and financial situation of the association.

A month ago, we asked for your help to pay back a debt that jeopardized the continuation of our work. The outstanding sum was collected in a few days but the website that collected it did not forward it to us and illegally returned it to the donors.

However, we have since collected 26,000 euros from an account opened by Alain Benajam and the related PayPal account.

The bank that manages this account, panicked at the fuss around our kitty and blocked any transaction as the law allows it. In the end, we recovered that money and that account was closed.

We negotiated with our creditor. We transfer the money already collected and got a reprieve for the rest, knowing that our readers are ready to refund and that the problem is not one of cash, but of transfer.

These repeated problems confirm the existence of an international blacklist that prevents us from benefiting from banking services for political reasons.

In the tradition of Voltaire, we have never dissociated political analysis from the defense of fundamental freedoms. It is very important for us to make the law triumph. In 2001-03, we were sued by a multinational company asking us for 1 million euros in damages for using the name of its brands and its logo during a boycott campaign. We had indeed denounced the closure of a profitable and surplus plant because the shareholders of the firm wanted to invest its value in an even more juicy operation. From our point of view, property rights, like all rights, have limits and the owners could not put hundreds of workers out of work, not out of economic necessity, but out of financial gain alone. This affair was announced as the Iron Pot against the Pot of Earth. We then argued in Court that the right of expression is superior to trademark law and that we were entitled to nominally and visually designate this multinational by its logo in the context of a democratic debate. The Court of Appeal of Paris has agreed with us [1] and we have also partially won at the political level since a law was passed in France governing this type of dismissal.

So that our problems can not be repeated, we are putting in place a sustainable system of fundraising. It will probably take more than a month and can not be done in the time allotted to us to repay our claim.

Regardless of these steps, we wish to file a complaint against the two companies managing the fundraising website. Their infringement does not only concern the Voltaire Network association, but all the donors, so you yourself: you have given money to this website with the commitment that it would be transmitted to us. Instead, it has been sent you back under a false pretext. We consider this to be a "breach of trust".

A donor was not reimbursed because the bank card he had used has now expired. He had to ask for this money to get it. Another has been repaid in the form of credit, but cannot withdraw cash, etc.

To cover the rest of our debt, we opened a new PayPalaccount, this time backed by our lawyer’s bank account.

We ask you to make your contribution urgently so that we can continue to support this website and present our analysis of international relations.

Thank you in advance.

Translation 
Roger Lagassé

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Unfortunately, we're not in a position to help, but you might. The Voltaire Network is a mighty source of information about the Middle East — often rightfully contrariant to the mainstream media and to our lying political masters — that used to be filed by other journalists who are now too old to post.