By Bill Van Auken
1 June 2013
In
a series of raids in the capital of Istanbul and in the southern
provinces of Mersin, Adana and Hatay near the Syrian border, Turkish
police rounded up 12 members of Syria’s Al Qaeda-affiliated Al Nusra
Front along with chemical weapons materials.
The
Turkish media initially reported that police recovered four and a half
pounds of sarin, the deadly nerve gas which had earlier been linked to
chemical weapons attacks inside Syria.
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While widely reported in the Turkish press, the arrests Wednesday have been virtually blacked out by the corporate media in the US. Newspapers like the New York Times,
which have openly promoted a US intervention in Syria, citing alleged
chemical weapons use by the regime of Bashar al-Assad as a pretext, have
posted not a word about the raids in Turkey.
The daily newspaper Zaman reported that “the al-Nusra members had been planning a bomb attack for Thursday
in [the Turkish city of] Adana but that the attack was averted when the
police caught the suspects. Along with the sarin gas, the police seized
a number of handguns, grenades, bullets and documents during their
search.”
The
city of Adana, approximately 60 miles from the Syrian border, has a
sizable Alawite Arab population that is sympathetic to the Syrian
government and hostile to the Sunni Islamist forces that have waged the
US-backed war for regime change on the ground in Syria.
The
Al Nusra Front, which has formally declared its allegiance to Al Qaeda,
was declared a foreign terrorist organization by the US State
Department last December. The United Nations Security Council added the
group to the body’s Al Qaeda sanctions blacklist Friday.
The
Syrian government had requested that the group be subjected to
sanctions as a terrorist organization last month, but the action was
initially blocked by Britain and France. Finally, an agreement was
reached to declare Al Nusra an alias for Al Qaeda in Iraq.
The
Al Nusra Front has been universally acknowledged as the most effective
fighting force of the so-called rebels seeking the Assad government’s
overthrow. Both Britain and France recently succeeded in overturning a
European Union ban on arms exports to Syria, clearing the way for them
to ship weapons to the “rebels.”
None of the arrested suspects have been identified. Turkish media reported that five of them were released late Thursday,
and seven are still being held for questioning. The government of
Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, which has provided
extensive material support for the Syrian opposition, has given no
public explanation of the police actions.
Adana provincial governor Huseyin Avni Cos denied on Thursday that sarin had been recovered in the raids but did allow that unknown chemicals had been found and were being analyzed.
The
arrests come little more than two weeks after twin terrorist car
bombings claimed the lives of 52 people in the Turkish city of Reyhanli
in southern Hatay province near the border with Syria. The Erdogan
government seized upon the incident to blame the Syrian government and
call for international intervention to topple Assad. It simultaneously
imposed an unprecedented gag order on the Turkish press to prevent
reporting on the extensive evidence that the attacks were the work of
Syrian opposition groups, which use Reyhanli as a supply base and who
have free movement across the Turkish-Syrian border.
Subsequently,
authorities arrested an army private on charges of “crimes against the
state” for allegedly leaking top secret cables that indicated the
government’s prior knowledge that the bombings were being planned by the
Al Qaeda-linked forces in Syria. RedHack, the Turkish hacker group
which made the cables public last week, denied that it had any contact
with the arrested private, who was identified as Utku Kali.
The Adana daily Taraf reported Thursday
that police are mounting road blocks and conducting searches in the
area for a vehicle loaded with explosives that is believed to have been
sent to the area by the US-backed anti-Assad forces.
The
discovery of sarin or some other lethal chemical weapons materials in
the hands of Al Nusra Front operatives in Turkey prompted calls by
Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov for an immediate investigation.
He condemned the continuing failure to send a United Nations inspection
team to Syria to investigate a chemical weapons incident last March
outside of the city of Aleppo.
“We
are highly disappointed that because of the political games, the UN
Secretariat failed to respond to that request swiftly,” Lavrov told
reporters.
These
“political games” refer to demands by Washington and its allies that
any UN team be given carte blanche to inspect any and all Syrian
facilities and interrogate anyone it chooses, along the lines of the
inspection regime created in Iraq in the run-up to the US invasion of
2003.
The
Assad government has charged that the March attack, which killed 26
people, 16 of them government soldiers, was carried out by the
Western-backed forces.
The
Obama administration has repeatedly declared the use of chemical
weapons by the Syrian government to be a “red line” or “game changer”
that would trigger unspecified US intervention. At the same time,
Washington and its European NATO allies have turned a blind eye to
evidence of chemical weapons use by the Islamist militias.
There
have been repeated claims by the Syrian opposition groups, as well as
by the British and French governments, of chemical weapons use by the
regime. Last month, however, Carla del Ponte, a leading member of the UN
commission of inquiry on Syria, stated that the bulk of the evidence
indicated chemical weapons use by the rebels.
The
latest development in Turkey suggests that the Western-backed Islamist
militias were preparing to launch another chemical weapons attack,
apparently against a Turkish civilian population, with the aim of
producing mass casualties that would be blamed on the Syrian regime and
create the conditions for a US-led intervention.
The
silence of the US media on the incident only demonstrates that it is
prepared to play the same role that it did in Iraq, working to sell a
war based upon lies to the American public. The experience of the past
decade of unending war, however, has made this task more difficult.
A Gallup poll released on Friday
found that more than two out of three Americans (68 percent) oppose any
US military intervention in Syria if “diplomatic efforts fail to end
the civil war in Syria.”
