Marathon bombing: Syria's Assad warns U.S. about al-Qaeda victory

• BASHAR AL ASSAD
• APRIL 19, 2013
• BY: JIM KOURI

http://www.examiner.com/article/marathon-bombing-syria-s-assad-warns-u-s-about-al-qaeda-victory

In the midst of the U.S. law enforcement manhunt for the suspects who perpetrated the twin-bombings in Boston during that city's Patriots Day marathon, Syria's beleaguered President Bashar al-Assad claimed that United States officials are secret backers ofal-Qaeda on Wednesday and Thursday nights in Syria during TV interview. Assad said that those nations who back the Syrian rebels will pay dearly for their blind support of the al-Qaeda terrorist network.

The Syrian military forces have been fighting a brutal and bloody uprising since the spring of 2011 and during an interview with the state television news service, Al-Ikhbariya, Assad warned that American and European leaders are playing with fire by supporting the rebel militias.

"The West has paid heavily for funding Al-Qaeda in its early stages. Today it is doing the same in Syria, Libya and other places, and will pay a heavy price in the heart of Europe and the United States," Assad said during the interview, alluding to the accusations that the United States supported al-Qaeda and the Taliban during their battle against Russian troops in the 1980's.

But not everyone is listening to Assad's back-handed advice regarding al-Qaeda.Counterterrorism expert Neal O'Connor claims that Assad is hoping to get the U.S. and E.U. to back-off from their support of the rebels seeking his ouster.

Last week, the jihadist rebel group Nusra Front pledged allegiance to Al-Qaeda chief Ayman al-Zawahiri, who had previously urged rebels to establish an Islamic state in Syria.

Arguably the most powerful Syrian rebel militia fighting the Assad regime, the al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQII) group announced their merger with the Syrian-based Islamist rebels in the Nusra Front, and Assad heard about it through the news media.

Al-Qaeda in Iraq said that it had "thrown in" with the Nusra Front, a/k/a Jabhat al-Nusra, the most effective force among the rebel militias fighting to topple President Assad in Syria's civil war.

The Assad government claims that this announced alliance is proof that it is not facing a popular movement but rather a foreign-backed terrorist plot to turn Syria into another extremist caliphate and enslave the Syrian people.

The Syrian government-controlled state news agency reported that Nusra Front's alliance with al-Qaeda foreign fighters "proves that this [rebellion] was never anything more than a plot by the West and by [radical Islamic] terrorists to destroy the Syrian people."

But according to counterterrorism source O'Connor, talk of an alliance between the Nusra Front and al-Qaeda in Iraq has created deep concern among intelligence officials who had complained to the state news agency that cooperation between the groups had already occurred in several jointly perpetrated terrorist attacks.

The U.S. government has designated Jabhat al-Nusra a terrorist network due to its affiliation with al-Qaeda, and now admitted ties between the terrorist networks are likely to cause second thoughts about providing military aid to the rebels by the U.S. and European Union.

Meanwhile, Syrian civilians are caught in the middle of cruel and deadly warfare between the government and the equally vicious rebels and the killing appears to be increasing with hundreds of thousands of Syrians fleeing the killing fields that were once home, according to several human rights watchdogs such as Human Rights Watch.