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 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."
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.
"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.