Former UK Ambassador to Syria Peter Ford joined Loud & Clear to discuss the shipments.
The weapons were sent to NATO-friendly Balkan states and then shipped to Syrian rebels in violation of end user agreements. Shell casings had "sequential codings; in other words, these anti-armour missiles… were not individual items smuggled into Syria," Fisk wrote. "These were shipments, whole batches of weapons that left their point of origin on military aircraft pallets."
"It's very clear that the authorities' in the Western countries concern is simply to turn a blind eye to what they knew was going on: a passing on of these weapons to terrorists," Ford told Loud & Clear hosts John Kiriakou and Brian Becker. "They must have known. They cannot not have known. The world knew that Saudi Arabia was supplying ISIS and all these other jihadi gangs in Syria with weapons, for them to sign off on these deals for arms that are not even stocked in the Saudi military."
"It shows clear connivance and just going around these countries' own laws; that's in the case of the US and the UK. This has been gun running on a major scale comparable with Iran Contra," Ford noted.
— Sharmine Narwani (@snarwani) March 13, 2018
"It's a failure of on the part of mainstream investigative journalists, if that's not an oxymoron. I don't think the mainstream does much real investigation," Ford said. "It's a simple lack of interest on the part of the media and the opposition parties, whether it be Democrats or Labour, because they've been willing to go along with the prevailing narrative about Syria and turn a blind eye to support, more or less overt support… for very questionable extremist, radical islamist organizations."
— Jeffrey Kaye (@jeff_kaye) July 31, 2018
Meanwhile, after liberating the city of Douma, the Syrian Army uncovered a makeshift chemical weapons facility run by the Islamist organization Jaish al-Islam. Douma is a city the Syrian Army themselves were said to have targeted with chemical weapons. "Many chemicals had ‘Made in Saudi Arabia' labels," a Syrian Army source told Sputnik News. A similar facility was discovered in East Ghouta.
— Syrian Digital Media (@SyriaDM) March 13, 2018
"There are a couple striking aspects to these revelations," Ford said. First, is that Saudi Arabia was a "conduit for the arms," he said. The country is "itself a fountainhead for jihadi, Wahhabi-inspired extremism. This makes it even more egregious"
"Secondly, when you look at the detail of what these weapons are, they almost turned the tide of battle in Syria — the TOW anti-tank guns are very deadly, and there was a moment in 2015, I think it was, when things were looking very black for the Syrian government," Ford said.
"This is what probably brought in the Russians," the former diplomat noted.
