Well, everyone, welcome to this week's CCW lunchtime seminar.
If you're enjoying your delicious sandwiches, I'm very pleased to introduce Dr. John Eichner,
who is an American human rights activist, a CEO of Christian Solidarity International.
And Susan, the board of the American Anti-Slavery Group and is a member of the Institute of Historic Research at the University of London.
He served as Karzai's main representative to the U.N. and Geneva,
and he's appeared before the U.S. House of Representatives Subcommittee on Africa
and the Congressional House Rights Caucus and the U.N. Commission on Human Rights.
In his role as an advocate, Dr. Ryder has testified on behalf of Sudanese slaves and other victims of the National Islamic Front's jihad,
Islamic holy war against the country's black African Christians, other minority groups.
He has frequently briefed senior policymakers at the White House and the State Department.
And his talk today is on social pluralism, religious cleansing and hybrid warfare in contemporary Syria.
But before we look, we hear this fascinating talk. I should blurb two special events next week's plus time seminar.
Same time, same place by Alonzo Akintola.
What's a man tracing the ideology in an ideological struggle?
What are the Niger Delta Milton conflicts about? And then especially the Violent non-State Actors Seminar at on Wednesday.
It's tomorrow at 515 and All Souls in the work room, with all typical of Rutgers talking about winning the fight against the Mafia.
How civil society can meet the challenge. But not further ado, Dr. Ivor, thank you very much, John,
for the welcome and the hospitality and a great thanks to Ruth for getting me here and in good shape and making everything work so smoothly.
As you will have gathered from the introduction.
I'm not your military man, and I had to think long and hard before I accepted the invitation to speak in a seminar series that focuses on warfare.
But my work always has been connected with warfare.
In my earliest days that had to do with the Cold War.
And then after the collapse of the Soviet Union, and when I went to CSI, I was immediately involved in in war zones,
visiting Nagorno-Karabakh at the time when it was blockaded in the in 1991 was my first trip there.
And then I spent many years focusing on Sudan and the fact that he openly declared jihad that was waging there during the North-South civil war.
And more recently I then going to Iraq and in Syria and Iraq since 2006 and Syria since 2013.
Very regularly with regard to my human rights work, and you can approach human rights from different very different perspectives.
And the work that I do with CSI focuses on endangered, especially religious communities, those who who are facing existential threats.
That's why I want to see the Armenians in Karabakh and Southern Sudanese and now in visiting,
you know, and documenting what's happening to the religious minorities in in Iraq and Syria.
And, of course, there is a military dimension, and I'm an observer of that.
And what I want to do today is to, as you'll see from my title, connect dots between social pluralism,
religious cleansing and what I choose to call hybrid warfare in Syria to make these connections.
Because from my perspective, I see what is happening to people, what is happening to communities, and then try to understand how it's happening.
We know what is happening and how what needs to be done to bring it to an end.
So I'd like to stick with the prepared text as much as possible.
I'll try to keep eye on on time, but to gallop through this and hopefully you'll be interested enough to raise questions and we might have a
lively debate afterwards and I look forward to leaving leaving the seminar wiser than I was when I arrived.
As a non-military person, I really am very eager to hear what people have to say who approached this from a different perspective.
But regarding social pluralism. For centuries, Syria has been a mosaic of different religious and ethnic communities.
And reliable statistics are hard to come by. But I'm.
The eve of the Arab Spring uprisings, roughly half of the or sorry, roughly 70% of Syrians were Sunnis,
Christians and Alawites, made up about 10 to 15% of the population each.
Shiites, well-versed in Ismailis and Druze are among the smaller minority communities.
And not only do these or do these communities existence in Syria, they enjoy extensive religious freedom,
provided the West emphasised that provided they do not stray into the realm of opposition politics.
The social freedom extends also to secular people who do not wish to identify with the religious community.
Freethinkers, liberated women. Homosexuals.
Before the current war,
Syria had a well-earned reputation providing more social pluralism than any other Sunni Arab majority country in the Middle East.
Since the early 1970s, the guarantor of this pluralistic social system has been the Assad dictatorship as Alawites,
Hafiz and now his heir, Bashar al-Assad, have a strong interest in protecting the country's religious minorities.
This protection was acknowledged by President Obama in 2014 when he met with religious leaders from the Middle East.
For centuries, until the end until the end of the Ottoman Empire in 1918,
all of these religious minority communities had experienced persecution under Sharia based Sunni rule.
Since coming to power, the Assad regime has rested politically on the basis of the religious minorities,
non-Islamist, Sunnis and various other secularised people.
The main instruments for ensuring the stability of the system had been the Alawite dominated network of intelligence,
intelligence and security agencies. He relied on them to brutally crush 1980 and 1982, a muslim Brotherhood led Sunni insurrection.
The Sunni Islamist Brotherhood had posed the main threat to the Assad regime throughout the late 1970s and early eighties.
But after it was crushed, there was no further direct challenge to the Assads socially pluralistic system.
Until the Arab Spring uprisings. But today, social pluralism is no longer a feature of life in much of Syria today.
It is being destroyed by the peculiar form of warfare that has been waged there over the past five years.
There are important aspects of the current conflict in Syria that are unique to our times and points to the future development of warfare.
But there are also those that hearken back to the past. In 2014, the former director of the CIA and Secretary of Defence, Leon Panetta,
spoke of the conflict in Syria as a kind of 30 years war of the sort that devastated Central Europe in the 17th century,
destroying one third of the population of Germany in the process.
And Panetta was not far off the mark. There are some striking similarities.
Among them are the interventions of the great powers, the multitude of armed forces,
the use of proxies, including mercenaries, and the apocalyptic magnitude of the death and destruction.
Not since the Moghul,
the Mongol invasion of the 13th century has warfare been more grisly for the Syrian people and ruinous for its economy and infrastructure.
Reliable statistics are very hard to come by,
but the figures that are in currency today seem to be generally accepted that about half a
million people just off half a million Syrians have perished as a result of the conflict.
Half of the population of 22 million have been displaced.
7 million of the homeless displaced have found refuge inside Syria overwhelmingly in government controlled areas,
while 4 million have sought refuge abroad.
What I've seen on the ground confirms the UN report's conclusion that the war in
Syria has produced the world's largest humanitarian crisis since World War two.
Within with the country's economy and infrastructure in ruins, there is little hope for an early end to this catastrophe.
For the people of Syria. As in Europe's 30 years war of religion, the conflict has taken on a markedly sectarian character,
and this became apparent already in the summer of 2011.
And that was a major factor in Cece's decision that autumn to issue a genocide warning.
We warned that the. Religious minority communities are facing the possibility of genocide, but it fell on deaf deaf ears.
However, last March, Secretary of State John Kerry issued a genocide determination.
It expressed abhorrence at the religious cleansing committed by the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, which he declared was inherent in its ideology.
Kerry identified the victimised communities by name.
You see these Christians, Shiite Muslims, while also noting that others,
in particular Sunni Muslims and Kurds, were also victims of various crimes against humanity.
One of the most important factors that led to this genocide determination was
Washington's desire to legitimise its military operations in Syria and Iraq,
operations that, by their very nature also killed, maim and displace civilians.
Kerry wanted the world to know that these U.S. led military actions were, as he said, fully warranted by the Islamic State's genocidal deed.
This falls into line, of course, with the doctrine of humanitarian intervention.
Though Kerry's statement is correct insofar as it goes,
but he neglected to draw attention to the fact that the religiously cleansed areas of Syria extend far beyond the borders of the Islamic State.
Other perpetrators of religious cleansing are also in play.
Today, a huge swathes of territory running roughly 500 miles, and you can see it from here.
It runs so close to the Mediterranean through northern Syria, down to the outskirts of Baghdad, is actually been religiously cleansed.
And now you would be hard pressed to find members,
any non Sunnis living there and those that are there are maybe old people that were too old to get away the ill,
or there are always some few people who just say, we're not going and they're going to die here or they'll have to kill me before I leave.
But for all practical purposes, this huge area has been religiously close to non Sunnis.
There are also large pockets of religiously cleansed territory in central and southern Syria, such as Dara Province,
the Duma suburb of Damascus, and some of the towns that had been religious, that some of the major towns that have been religiously cleansed.
We're talking about urban areas are Raqqa, Idlib, Palmyra, al-Khateeb, Daraa,
the northern part of there also, and of course, eastern Aleppo, which is in the news.
Still, other areas have been emptied of their religious minorities,
but conditions were subsequently established that enabled them to return to their homes if they wish to do so.
Among them, the Kabore Valley, a Syrian villages not far from from Raqqa or the Armenian town of Kassab,
near the Turkish border in the northeast, or the old city of Homs, Sadat and Blue Hill.
And I visited all of these places apart from Kassab.
Syria's religiously cleansed areas are coterminous with territory that is or
had has been conquered and controlled by the anti-government Sunni rebels.
They range from the Islamic State to those called moderate by their American,
European and Sunni Islamist regional backers, in particular Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkey.
And for short, I will refer to this nameless American led constellation of states as the an A,
the snake prop prop up pop up from time to time in my talk, that is to say, the American led network of alliances.
And President Obama, of course, referred to this reality in his 2014 West Point speech,
noting that this configuration of power is unrivalled in the history of nations
and made a special point of saying that the U.S. military component has no peer.
The assortment of Sunni rebel forces that control territory in Syria have very relationships with the United States
since the Islamic State's effort to capture bad Baghdad and Irbil following its unopposed conquest of Mosul in 2014.
The United States and its LNA partners have been waging war against the Islamic State.
The and its current relationship is ambiguous with al-Qaida's longtime affiliate, the al-Nusra Front, recently rebranded as an ex al-Qaida affiliate.
Jabhat Fatah al-Sham conquest of Syria.
Other so-called moderate groups such as the safe Free Syrian Army are shadowy and are subject to frequent re formations,
name changes and shifting alliances within the rebel movement.
They are furthermore, overtly or covertly financed, trained and armed by members of the elite.
But there is something that virtually all of these so-called moderate armed groups have in common with al Qaeda and the Islamic State.
They're all driven by a strong sense of Sunni supremacism.
This is an important common denominator between all powerful groups of the armed opposition.
A declassified Department of Defence Intelligence Agency report dated August 2012, provides confirmation of this.
It states the Salafist, the Muslim Muslim Brotherhood and Al Qaida.
Iraq. It states are the major driving forces for the insurgency in Syria.
The report made no mention of moderate rebels that made this omission for the obvious reason
that non-Islamist Sunni forces are not a significant factor in the armed opposition.
Even the the Ayeni backed Syrian political opposition in exile is dominated by the Muslim Brotherhood,
that one of the key conditions for genocide is the prevalence of a racially or religiously discriminatory ideology
or worldview that upholds a utopian vision of a homogenous society as the foundation of political unity.
Secretary Kerry, in his genocide determination, rightly noted that the Islamic State embraces and promotes such an ideology.
But such an ideology is not unique to Al Qaeda or the Islamic State.
All three of the dominant Islamist tendencies that were referred to in the Defence Department Defence Department's report do so.
One of the fundamental principles on which their common ideology is based is this Sunni supremacism.
This principle encourages and provides legitimation for religious cleansing.
They ought to make clear here that Sunni suppression is not the only form of religious or ethnic chauvinism in the field,
but it is in Syria the most powerful form in terms of numbers, history, tradition and resources.
Sunni supremacism is on full display in the writings of the late chief ideologue of the Muslim Brotherhood, Sayed Sayed Khattab.
And there are no shortages of authorities to cite.
But I think it's worth highlighting because on the one hand, his movement is regarded by the United States as a as a legitimate political actor.
Both the Bush and Obama administrations regard to Turkey under Islamic other under the Muslim Brotherhood
linked Justice and Development Party as a model for a democratic transformation of the Middle East.
And on the other hand, as David Von Drehle notes in the Smithsonian magazine, a direct line of influence runs from Khattab to Osama bin Laden.
Thus, Khattab inspires Islamist tendencies ranging from a member of the NATO alliance to al Qaeda and its Islamic State spin off.
I will not go into details about the about the tabs suddenly supremacism.
I have many quotations. And if it's felt desirable or necessary, we can return.
We can return to his ideology. But the fact is that the main lines are shared throughout the Islamist world,
and this Islamist ideology dominates the armed opposition to the Syrian government.
That was this Sunni supremacism that stoked up and drove the Muslim Brotherhood's Iraq
insurrection against the Alawite Assad regime in the late 1970s and early eighties.
And that was a precursor of the current rebellion,
which in turn was preceded by a Sunni led rebellion against the infidel French during the mandate period.
Then, as now, Sunni supremacism struck a chord with a strand of Syria's Sunni population for many centuries until the end of the First World War.
Syria's rulers were Sunnis, according to various Sunni schools of Islamic law.
They had a God given right to rule over non-Sunni Sunnis, all of which should be subject to legal and social disadvantages.
I'm told I don't speak Arabic, so I take it on the basis of my friends that to do.
I'm told that there is an old Arabic adage that is a widespread currency today,
and it goes Sunnis are born to rule while Shiites are born to lash themselves.
It's a kind of a part of the popular culture of the region.
When Assad assumed power in the early 1970s, it was perceived by many Sunnis as an affront against God's law.
Robert Kaplan has perceptively compared Assad's ascent to power, to an untouchable,
becoming a major maharajah in India or a Jew becoming the Tsar in Russia.
This outrage, Kaplan added, was an unprecedented development, shocking to the Sunni majority population,
which had of which had monopolised power for so many centuries.
The Sunni supremacism is certainly not embraced by all Sunni Syrians, but it is still very much alive and well.
And the spirit, if not the letter of this ideology, inspires all significant sections of the armed opposition.
And I will jump over another section here.
Why? Where I have descriptions of the religious cleansing of a particular town of Marula, which brings to life the reality of religious cleansing.
What the Christian residents of that particular town encountered.
And again, if there's sufficient interest or need to, I can go back to that during a Q&A.
So what was the key factor that created condition for the current Sunni insurgency to result in extensive religious cleansing?
I would maintain that it is externally driven hybrid warfare.
How far said al-Assad was able to contain and crush the Muslim Brotherhood's insurrection in 1982,
mainly because it had no significant external support.
His son, Bashar, has not been so fortunate.
Within months of its outbreak, the Arab Spring uprising was transformed into a Sunni sectarian insurrection.
Mosques became the starting point for anti-government demonstrations that were soon vocalising
incitement to genocide in the form of the slogan Alawites to the Grave and Christians to Beirut.
The Obama administration opted not to remain on the sidelines.
Already, the Bush administration had imposed economic sanctions against Syria in 2004 following the U.S. invasion of Iraq the previous year.
The declared reason for the Bush sanctions was Syrian support for Hamas and Hezbollah and for allowing
Syrian territory to be used by Sunni insurgents for launching attacks against U.S. occupied Iraq.
In 2009, the Obama administration renewed these sanctions.
Syrian Syria had long been a thorn in Washington's flesh.
And when the uprisings in the spring of 2011 shook the regimes of the region to their foundations,
the Obama administration believed the time was ripe for revolutionary change in its address to the American nation.
On May 12th, 2011, he had, he declared,
it will be the policy of the United States to promote reform across the region and to support transitions to democracy.
Regarding Syria, the president condemned the violent means of repression used by the Syrian authorities against demonstrators,
and he emphasised the close relationship between Damascus and Iran.
So there were in part humanitarian reasons for intervention, and then there were geopolitical reasons, the relationship between Damascus and Iran.
He then instructed President Assad Assad to lead a transition to democracy or to step out of the way.
And should he disobey the warning, he said the regime will continue to be challenged from within and will continue to be isolated abroad.
The Bashar al-Assad did not obey. And as a result, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton declared in July that the Syrian president had lost legitimacy.
The next month, President Obama announced that for the sake of the Syrian people, the time has come for Assad to step aside.
Now is the time for action. Obama articulated a clear and simple policy objective.
It was regime change. In doing so, he cited grave human rights abuses as factors to to legitimise his own policy.
But the American goal was presented so much differently and I believe, more credibly.
One year later, by a previous cited Department of Intel, IT Department of Defence Intelligence Analyst,
he or she noted in a secret memorandum that the foreign backers of the armed rebellion aimed
at the establishment of a declared or undeclared Salafist principality in eastern Syria,
that the defined function of the envisaged Islamist Sunni stan was to isolate the Syrian regime,
which has considered the strategic depth of the Shia expansion.
In other words, its its purpose was to break the Shiite crescent.
The analyst also dismissed the notion of regime change, saying that the regime will survive and have control over Syrian territory.
If we are left to the mercy of the Freedom of Information Act,
we are not likely to know with any degree of certainty exactly what the Obama administration's endgame for Syria was at the time.
But what we do know is that the Assad regime, as predicted by the analyst,
still controls much territory in Syria and Islamist principalities have indeed been established in eastern Syria.
The principal one being the Islamic State. The severance of the Shiite Crescent by the establishment of a de facto or de jure or a Sunni polity
strikes me as a more credible geopolitical goal than simply the removal of President Assad from power.
It is clear that the achievement of Washington's strategic goal in Syria was not to be left exclusively to the to the Syrian people.
President Obama had already stated in May that the United States would continue to promote democratic transition.
Jail and also to face considerable pressure from outside the country.
The question for the Obama administration was how to achieve its policy goal.
His preliminary instinct, according to Jeffrey Goldberg,
was to lean back on what had been by that time known to most White House insiders as a cryptic way for describing the Obama military doctrine.
And it was don't do stupid [INAUDIBLE].
White House staff understood this tongue in cheek presidential decree to mean don't make the same fatal political mistake
that Bush made when he committed thousands of American boots on the ground for an invasion and occupation of Iraq.
Obama was neither a pacifist or an isolationist.
He was and is a progressive internationalist.
Was ideologically convinced that the United States should pursue vigorously the goal of global liberal hegemony.
In the tradition of all post Cold War U.S. presidents.
This means the projection of American power to fill vacuums wherever and however they may arise.
President Obama had no doubt about the United States ability to do this in the case of Syria.
He believed that the smart wars for the development of this liberal global hegemony would be those fought somewhat
along the lines projected by Lieutenant Colonel Frank Hoffman in this influential study conflict in the 21st century,
the rise of hybrid warfare. I'm sure that that's well known to everybody here.
Now that U.S. intervention in Syria appears, at least to me,
to correspond to a great extent to Hoffman's description of what hybrid warfare actually is and how it plays out.
But there are many debates surrounding the concept hybrid warfare, and there is no universally agreed definition of what it is.
Some deny that it constitutes a new, distinct form of warfare.
In an article in Nature Review, one author asks, Does it even exist?
And recommends that NATO policy makers should forget everything,
hybrid and focus on the specificity and the interconnectedness of the threats they face.
This author might be right, but the fact is his advice is largely ignored.
The term hybrid warfare continues to be used by the highest officials of the Western alliance,
mainly to brand a threat emanating from Russia and also to some extent, the Islamic State.
Now, NATO's does have a very short official definition, which is so short and loose that it's really not particularly helpful.
But the outgoing supreme allied commander of Europe, General Breedlove, has put a little bit of meat on that very bare bone.
He portrays the hybrid warfare as allegedly undertaken by Russia and Ukraine and the U.S. in the Middle East as a continuum of threat,
including unconventional and conventional methods.
These methods exploit non attractive means like cyber information, warfare, surprise, deception, extensive use of proxy and special forces.
On the unconventional side, there is the use of political sabotage, economic pressure,
intelligence operations and special operations, and the posturing of conventional forces for a wide range of options.
I think that's a fairly helpful definition used by NATO's leadership,
since this concept has does have some definition and creeps into the rhetoric of NATO leaders.
I take the liberty of using it to brand the United States efforts to achieve its strategic objectives in Syria.
Let's take a brief look at the Obama administration's playbook for creating an Islamist Sunni stan in eastern Syria.
As President Obama was ramping up pressure against the Assad regime during the spring of truth.
That summer of 2011, economic sanctions were the principal overt action on public display.
He announced the imposition of what he called unprecedented sanctions to deepen the financial isolation of
the Assad regime and further disrupt its ability to finance a campaign of violence against the Syrian people.
These actions are indeed unprecedented in appear to be wreaking enormous death and destruction while bombs,
bullets and beheadings capture media headlines,
the sanctions quietly kill and gravely damage whatever economic activity and infrastructure survives of the of the hard war.
We can see from hindsight that economic sanctions in Iraq between the Gulf War and the
overthrow of Saddam Hussein so weakened the state that it became largely dysfunctional.
And we can expect similar results in Syria.
Should these draconian sanctions remain in place? It should be noted here that there is enormous enthusiasm in Washington,
or at least there was up until Election Day about the use of sanctions as a coercive instrument for the advancement of American interests abroad.
Economic sanctions are a weapon of war that can be employed at low cost in terms of both blood and treasure.
Yet they can have powerfully destructive impacts as the globalised banking system develops.
With the US dollar dominating international financial transactions, the might and reach of this instrument spreads globally.
In a recent report entitled The New Tools of Economic Warfare Effects and Effectiveness of Contemporary U.S. Financial Sanctions,
a team at the Centre for U.N. Security for a new U.N. security under the leadership of Michele Flournoy,
a former deputy secretary of defence under Obama, and she was widely touted to be Hillary Clinton's Secretary of Defence.
Now this report highlighted the significance of financial sanctions for the impact for the United States global aspirations.
When they concluded sanctions may become one of the most important instruments of economic competition or hybrid warfare in the future,
with undeniable staying power because of their utility and projecting power to achieve desired to achieve desirable policy outcomes.
Syria provides a wonderful laboratory for examining the effectiveness of this tool of economic warfare.
Information warfare is another important aspect of Washington's Syria strategy.
The U.S. government using its full range of covert and overt instruments of what used to be called psychological warfare during the Eisenhower
and Kennedy eras has largely succeeded in creating a dominant and powerful media narrative designed to delegitimize the Syrian government.
Linked Leaked Clinton emails show to Google's Jared Cohen,
who seems to embody what we might today call the digital military complex, has been involved in this process.
One of the most advanced aspects of this program is the establishment and funding of an extensive media network in rebel held territories.
It is made up mainly of so-called citizen reporters, NGOs and activists purporting to rise to represent civil society.
They feed outlets like the opposition related Syrian Observatory on Human Rights
with information and broadcast footage that is then forwarded to the media.
Much of the output is human rights related, but religious cleansing doesn't feature in it.
These two aspects of the destabilisation strategy impact religious cleansing insofar
as they render the Syrian state incapable of effectively protecting its citizens,
including the non-Sunni minorities. But the lethal and non-lethal aid to the armed opposition has a has a very direct impact.
The details of material support may never be known,
but the main players in the American led network of alliances acknowledge that they provide both kinds of support.
I just had an email message today from a colleague who said that a new Foreign
Office report says that the UK has devoted £65 million of non-humanitarian aid and.
A declared purpose is to serve. The purpose of this aid is to bolster moderate governments and improve the lives, the lives of ordinary citizens.
So this is non-humanitarian aid that is being used to bolster moderate governance and improve the lives of ordinary citizens.
I must say, I don't know many I don't talk to many Syrians when I travel there who would buy such Orwellian, Orwellian proclamations.
Now Washington's model for Syria appears to be the Reagan administration's policy for supporting Mujahideen Shia jihadists,
including Afghan Arabs, out of which Al Qaida emerged against the infidel Soviet Union.
Just what is delivered and by whom and to whom is shrouded in mystery.
But every now and again, the public is able to catch a glimpse of the aid for Syrian rebels.
And the investigations into the attack against the U.S. consulate in Benghazi revealed that the CIA was sending ex Gadhafi weapons,
including missiles, to an unidentified anti-government rebels in Syria via Turkey.
The Syrian operations of the Benghazi CIA centre were meant to be to be kept secret, but the agency has acknowledged that its,
together with partners, provide support for Syrian rebels out of facilities both in Turkey and in Jordan.
The White House was embarrassed when it emerged that all of the equipment,
that all of the equipment that reached Syria out of a $500 million rebel training and support program, ended up in the hands of the al-Nusra Front.
A similar scandal was revealed when the New York Times reported that Syria bound weapons that were shipped in to Jordan by the CIA
and Saudi Arabia had systematically been stolen by Jordanian intelligence operatives and sold to arms merchants on the black market.
Perhaps the greatest embarrassment for the Obama administration came when Vice President Joe Biden,
in off the cuff remarks at Harvard, stated that Washington's Sunni regional partners in particular the Turks,
the Saudis and the Emiratis had poured hundreds of millions of dollars and tons of weapons into al Nusra,
Al Qaida and the extremist elements of jihad coming from other parts of the world.
The vice president furthermore admitted that the United States was not able to provide support to support weapons to moderate forces,
because there, in his words, is no moderate middle assisting in Syria.
Maybe we can come back to this in Q&A and also to the reference that I made about Afghanistan, Reagan's Afghan policy being a model,
because we see a theme in American policy and it goes back to the time of the British in their dealings with even Saudi in Arabia,
that jihad can be a useful instruments of projecting power and promoting your interests.
And it appears that this is in play in Syria today.
The US armed forces have intervened more directly on the ground in Syria since
Washington and its partners opted to wage war against the Islamic State in 2014.
American planes are regularly bombing positions in Syria, and but it's not only from from the air.
The U.S. has established its own airport facility in Hasakah province.
American and other and special forces are on the ground training opposition forces.
Washington acknowledges that there are at least 300 American special forces in the country,
but there could be and probably are many more who are involved in covert actions that cannot be identified.
Half a dozen or so of these special forces made headlines last September when they were
roughly expelled by their Free Syrian Army hosts while being threatened with slaughter.
A YouTube video shows Free Syrian Army soldiers shouting They are crusaders and infidels down with America.
Get out, you pigs. They're coming to Syria to occupy it.
These are the same kinds of insults that are routinely hurled at religious minorities by Sunni supremacist rebels in Syria.
Now. My conclusion writing at the beginning of this year in military review, Charles Bartles, an analyst at Fort Leavenworth,
summed up the Russian military's perception of how Washington,
directly or through its extensive network of alliances and intelligence relationships, puts hybrid warfare into play.
Much of what Bartels has to say was based on Anthony Cordesman,
a detailed eyewitness account of the Russian Ministry of Defence 2014 Moscow Conference on International Security.
Bartels wrote Instead of an overt military invasion,
the first volleys of a U.S. attack come from the instalment of the political opposition through state propaganda,
CNN, the BBC, the Internet and social media and nongovernmental organisations.
After successfully instilling political dissent, separatism and or social strife,
the legitimate government has increasing difficulty maintaining order as the security situation deteriorates.
Separatist movements can be stoked and strengthened and underhand.
Special operations with private military forces can be introduced to battle the government and cause further havoc.
Once the legitimate government is forced to use increasingly aggressive methods to maintain order.
The United States gains the pretext for the imposition of economic and political sanctions and sometimes even military sanctions,
such as no fly zones, to tie the hands of the besieged governments and promote further dissent.
The character of the war waged against Syria by the United States and its allies corresponds to a large
degree to what the Russian military views as the standard pattern of contemporary American hybrid warfare.
Whether or not we choose to call the kind of warfare that Washington and its allies practice in Syria hybrid warfare,
there is little doubt that these interventions have caused material, you know, extensive damage to out throughout the country.
They've contributed to religious cleansing. And so all of the various aspects of this manmade catastrophe.
The new president elect of the United States has made sounds suggesting that he might not continue to prosecute his predecessor's war in Syria.
We will see anything can happen. But should this come to pass, the dynamic of religious cleansing will be considerably diminished,
and Syria's remarkable social pluralism will have at least a chance of survival.
Thank you very much for your attention.