Pattern of Canadian Complicity and coverup in Syria must end

The recent exposé by Richard Kerbaj in his new book, The Secret History of the Five Eyes, of a Canadian spy, Mohammed Al Rasheed, who trafficked British citizens to ISIS in Syria, including schoolgirls, and provided their information to the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, demonstrates a pattern of Canadian government complicity and coverup in the US-led, failed, regime change operation in Syria.

The Harper and Trudeau governments have been willing accomplices, since at least 2011, of the US empire in its illegal meddling in the sovereign state of Syria. Here’s a partial list of Canada’s dirty role in Syria:

– In December 2011, Canada’s ambassador to Tunisia, Glenn Davidson, was tasked with the job of organizing the pre-conference to launch the Friends of Syria Group of Countries (FSG) in Tunis in February 2012. The FSG was the coalition of countries the USA used to insert, fund, and supply terrorist mercenary forces into Syria to be used as its proxy warriors on the ground;

– The Harper government unilaterally broke off diplomatic relations with Syria in May, 2012, and delegated an ambassador to the Syrian National Council, the pretender government created by the USA;

– Canada’s Foreign Minister, John Baird, invited members of the Syrian National Council to Ottawa in December 2011 and later travelled to Turkey to attend international conferences in support of the proxy warriors. In addition, Defence Minister Peter MacKay invited key figures of the Syrian armed opposition to the Halifax International Security Forum, a major Department of Defence and NATO gathering;

– In June 2013, the Harper government hosted a meeting of the Sanctions Sub-Committee of the FSG which drew up the harsh regime of unilateral international economic sanctions which has today impoverished 80% of the Syrian people. These sanctions are illegal because they lack the approval of the UN Security Council;

– The Trudeau government supported the Syrian White Helmets with at least 7.5m dollars of funding and toured the group’s spokespersons in Canada. The White Helmets, a propaganda tool of the West against Syria, were a creation of British intelligence in the person of John LeMesurier, who later died under mysterious circumstances in Turkey, after allegations of financial corruption.

– The most notorious fraud committed by the White Helmets was to stage a fake chemical attack in Douma, Syria, in 2018 and to try to blame the fake on the Syrian government. Inspectors of the Organization for the Prohibtion of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) recognized the fraud at once and submitted detailed reports. However, the OPCW had become politicized by large voluntary grants from Canada and other NATO countries and suppressed the inspectors’ reports. The result was that the USA, UK, and France launched missiles attacking Damascus, which was an act of undeclared war;

– Later, when the Syrian Arab Army liberated Daria, hundreds of White Helmets and their Al Nusra terrorist allies fled into Jordan, where Trudeau’s Global Affairs Minister, Chrystia Freeland, took credit for their “rescue” with the help of the apartheid state of Israel, through its illegally-annexed Golan Heights, into Israel. In the process, several hundred of the fugitives disappeared. Many of the rest were given refugee status in Canada;

– Successive Canadian governments participated in the US coalition to fight ISIS/Daesh in Syria and Iraq, although it is now clear that the organization was created by the USA and its allies, such as Saudi Arabia and Israel, to provide a pretext for the USA to maintain its hold on Iraq and its illegal occupation of the eastern third of Syria. Canada provided fighter jets, reconnaissance, and refueling aircraft for the coalition and military trainers for the Kurdish separatist state in Iraq, and later for the Iraqi army;

– The RCMP and CSIS monitored ISIS recruiting efforts in Canada but did not prevent some 160 Canadians from travelling to Syria to join ISIS in violation of Canadian law. Some of the volunteers, including women, perished in Syria or went missing, or were arrested and are imprisonned by the Kurdish proxies of the USA in occupied Syria. The Canadian government has apparently only laid charges against one of these detained Canadians;

In response to the allegations that CSIS intelligence asset, Al-Rasheed, was trafficking people to Syria, including two schoolgirls who allegedly perished there and one who is still a prisoner of Kurdish proxies of the USA, Justin Trudeau defended CSIS and repeated the mantra that CSIS is “bound by strict rules, by principles and values that Canadians hold dear” and is now overseen by a new oversight body. He promised to “ensure to follow up on this.” However, we know from his previous campaign promises and from his failures to open the investigation into the Afghan torture scandal (for which Harper prorogued parliament) or to respond to calls to investigate the role of Canadian “peacekeepers” in Haiti, that Trudeau’s promises are worthless.

Clearly, Canada does not deserve its benign reputation in international affairs.

The SSM calls on the government of Canada to cease and desist from any further meddling in the internal affairs of Syria and rather that it end its illegal sanctions regime against Syria (and twenty other countries of the world) and instead re-establish diplomatic relations with the legitimate government of Syria in Damascus.