LAST night’s BBC Panorama programme entitled ‘Jihadists You Pay For’ has blown the lid off one of the ways in which British imperialism has been secretly funding the jihadist terrorists in Syria for years.
These allegations centre on Adam Smith International (ASI), a British based company specialising in ‘foreign aid’, which runs a project funded by the UK government to plough millions of pounds of taxpayers’ money into supporting the Free Syrian Police (FSP) a force that operates within territories in Syria that are under the control of the so-called Free Syrian Army.
This was the ‘rebel’ force, a collection of jihadist groups, set up and financed in 2011 by Western imperialism to overthrow the legitimate Syrian government of Bashar al-Assad. The FSP was set up five years ago as an unarmed community police force that would patrol and police those areas still under the control of the FSA.
They were claimed to be the Syrian equivalent of community police in Britain, unarmed, keeping order, helping old ladies across the road and earning the trust of their communities in the rebe-held areas of Aleppo, Idlib and Daraa provinces.
On paper they were not just an unarmed police force but were completely independent of the extremist groups who control these areas and would never cooperate with these terrorist groups.
The reality has turned out to be vastly different. The Panorama programme has exposed that the FSP’s main function has been to divert millions of pounds of aid from the British government straight into the pockets of Jabhat al-Nusra, the Syrian branch of al-Qaeda, along with other Islamist groups and that, far from not collaborating with these jihadists, the FSP has been up to their necks with supporting the courts run by them.
The Panorama investigation uncovered the following damning facts – namely that the FSP cooperated with the courts set up by the terrorists that carry out summary executions – including the case of two women who were stoned to death.
That cash and funds paid to the FSP was regularly handed over to these terrorist groups and that officers in the ‘neutral’ police were handpicked by an extremist group while dead or fictitious members of the FSP were on the payroll with their wages going straight into the coffers of these groups.
So much for the FSP bringing the ‘rule of law’ to these areas as the ASI and the Tories claimed, in their enthusiasm to use taxpayer’s money to bankroll the entire scam. Last April, Tory foreign secretary Boris Johnson announced that the UK would give a further £4 million to the scheme that supports the FSP.
The ASI has strongly refuted the claims made by Panorama but the programme has uncovered an ASI report from July 2016 which reveals that the company knew that 20% of all police salaries were being handed over and that the FSP was working hand in hand with the courts run by the terrorist groups.
This cooperation carried on despite allegations of torture and summary executions by some of these same courts. Immediately the Panorama story broke, the Tories panicked and suspended aid to the FSP fearful that the exposure of their covert funding of jihadist terrorist groups would create a massive crisis for a government that is just one more crisis away from collapse.
It is unbelievable that the Tories were unaware of where millions of pounds in cash was going. After all, they keep a firm grip on every pound they withhold from the NHS or cut from the welfare system.
No £4 million for the NHS but perfectly OK to spend on funding terrorists! So much for the war on terrorism – it’s the Tory government that funds the terrorist war against the Syrian people and at the same time conducts a vicious war of austerity against the working class at home.
The only way to put an end to terrorism against the people of the world and workers in Britain is to kick out this Tory government and go forward to a workers government that will end all imperialist military intervention and stop all aid to the terrorists. This is the way forward.
