Turkey unleashes Jihadi army

They’re at it again! Nato member Turkey is shipping thousands of Islamist ‘rebels’ to Libya to help prop up the unpopular, western-backed, ‘moderate’ Islamist regime of Fayez al-Sarraj.

The Guardian has just revealed (15/1/2020) that two thousand Syrian fighters are being shipped via Turkey from Idlib. Some have already been spotted fighting on the battlefields of Libya.

Last month phone footage of men with Syrian accents claiming to be in Tripoli surfaced on social media, in which one man said: “The Free Syrian Army is in Libya to defend Islam.”

An initial deployment of 300 men from the second division of the Syrian National Army (SNA), an umbrella of Syrian rebel groups funded by Turkey, left Syria through the Hawar Kilis military border crossing on 24 December, followed by 350 more on 29 December.

They were then flown to Tripoli, the Libyan capital, where they have been posted to frontline positions in the east of the city.

The deployment came after Turkey agreed last month to come to the aid of the Libyan prime minister, Fayez al-Sarraj, who is backed by the UN, in the face of advances by his rival, Khalifa Haftar, who is a secular patriot who opposes by Islamism and subservience to Western energy-grabbing.

Haftar’s troops have fought and eliminated Islamist gangs throughout their expanding territory in the country, which has been riven by civil war since Cameron, Sarkozy and Obama used their air forces to support the Islamist cut-throats who overthrew Colonel Gaddafi in 2011.

In an effort to stop a final Haftar victory, another 1,350 men crossed into Turkey on 5 January. Some have since been deployed to Libya with others still undergoing training at camps in southern Turkey. More men from the Islamist Sham Legion are also considering travelling to Libya.

The move threatens to complete the transformation of Libya into an Islamist state, as well as giving a way out for the Jihadis now cornered by the Syrian Army in the steadily shrinking Idlib pocket. The successful evacuation of Idlib would allow the Western backers of Islamist terrorism a way to keep their Useful Idiot Jihadi proxy army intact for future use.

However, it may not all work out as planned. Libyans are traditionally suspicious of Turks and this new interference will not go down well.  “This is a very different situation to Syria,” said Claudia Gazzini, a senior Libya analyst with the International Crisis Group. “Anti-Turkish sentiment is already strong because of Ankara’s intervention and could grow as a result of this, playing in Haftar’s favour.”

Haftar has received some backing from Russia and what happens next depends more than anything on Vladimir Putin. He may decide that having a mechanism to drain Idlib of thousands of ‘moderate jihadists’ will help to complete the victory of President Assad and cement Russian influence in the eastern Mediterranean.

Or he may consider that war already won and take steps to counter thus Turkish/Western aggression in Libya in order to help genuine Libyan nationalists and extend Russian influence further.

Europeans worried about the ongoing invasion of Africans and Muslims via Libya should hope for the latter, because a return to the stability of the Gaddafi-era under Haftar would shut down the people-smuggling operations of the Islamist warlords who currently still dominate much of the country.

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