Source: HS
From small clandestine offices in countries as far flung as Qatar, Jordan, Turkey and Croatia, US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) officers have acted as brokers and overseers of a massive arms shipment programme to Syria’s opposition rebels.
With the operation shrouded in secrecy, the CIA declines to comment publicly on the arms supply. US officials instead talk of its existence in a kind of coded doublespeak referring to “a maturing of the opposition’s logistical pipeline.”
But exist it definitely does, and according to arms-trafficking investigators who are monitoring data on the weapons’ supplies, the scale of the shipments is huge.
“A conservative estimate of the payload of these flights would be 3500 tons of military equipment,” confirmed Hugh Griffiths, of the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, in a recent detailed analysis of the illicit transfer outlined in a New York Times (NYT) investigation.
“The intensity and frequency of these flights,” says Griffiths, are “suggestive of a well-planned and co-ordinated clandestine military logistics operation.”
According to the data compiled and information gleaned from Syrian rebel commanders, the NYT investigation reveals that, with CIA help, both Qatar and Saudi Arabia have been moving military material via Esenboga airport in Turkey to the opposition since, respectively, early and late 2012.
Read More...
No comments:
Post a Comment