Links between insurgents in Syria and KLA go back further than current cooperation

by Lizzie Phelan

Today it was reported that NATO's insurgents, (insert western and GCC media terms: freedom fighters/revolutionaries) have sought advice from the so-called "Kosovo People's Liberation Army".

 

The link between the KLA and the insurgents in Syria however goes back much further. The presence of wahabi forces (insert the western media term "Islamists") such as those who come under the banner of Al Qaeda today amongst those insurgents has been identified numerous times - see for example here, here and here . So how does this relate to Kosovo? In this video during the height of the war on terror, Hillary Clinton admits that the US government armed and financed the Mujahideen to fight against the Soviet backed government in Afghanistan in the 1980s. Many of those fighters from North Africa, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and other parts of the wider region, then joined the KLA who became NATO's allies in the criminal war against Serbia in the late 1990s, which continues to cause catastrophic suffering to those people to this day. At the same time the Libyan Al Qaeda wing, the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG), was being formed. The LIFG, and its most notorious figures like current military commander of Tripoli Abdelhakim Belhaj, were one of the most important components of the Libyan rebels (insert western and GCC media terms: freedom fighters/revolutionaries) that mainly unsuccessfully did NATO's ground work; hence the need for NATO to use more than 50,0000 missiles and bombs to wipe out the popular and military forces that were easily defeating those rebels.

The presence of such Libyan rebels in Syria has been well documented. However, also like in Libya, and as journalist Srdja Trifcovich says in the video above in Serbia before, in Syria the insurgents will depend wholly on NATO to employ its lethal airpower in order to even have a chance of achieving their aim of getting rid of the Syrian government of Bashar al-Assad. While such airstrikes like in Libya and Serbia would cause widespread destruction and devastation for the Syrian population for many years to come, there are far from any guarantees that it would cause the demise of the popularly supported Syrian government.