'NATO-backed death squads fuel violence in Syria'

Kofi Annan has praised Syria's cooperation, warning that implementing the six-point peace plan is key to peace. Annan left Syria earlier this month after meeting with the Syrian president to discuss the violence in the country.

Meanwhile, the Syrian president has visited the central city of Homs. Bashar al-Assad visited areas where heavy battles between government forces and armed gangs have been taking place. He also met and spoke with soldiers and residents of the area. The crowds of citizens and military personnel pledged to defend Syria and Assad from any harm.

Syria has been gripped by violence since last year. Thousands of people have been killed in unrest. Damascus has blamed the violence on armed gang backed by foreign countries.

What follows is the transcription of a Press TV Interview with Webster Griffin Tarpley, author and historian from Washington.

Press TV: Syria has agreed to a peace plan by Kofi Annan but how much does it correspond to the crisis in Syria?

Tarpley: The problem with the peace plan is that it fails to recognize that the origin of the problem are these foreign death squads, NATO-backed death squads, that have been introduced into the country over the last year or more and of course they have gathered a certain amount of indigenous population, people with various grievances against the regime.

Therefore, we cannot imagine that there is anybody to negotiate with and this, I think, is the problem. Who can Assad actually negotiate with? Now a looming ominously behind all of this is what is coming on Sunday is this conference of the co-called ‘Friends of Syria’, this time in Istanbul after the failure of the one in Tunisia.

They are now attempting it for a second time and they are trying to make sure that this one does not fail the way that the previous one did. We are reading all about this in the columns of Al Akhbar of Beirut.

What is planned is this buffer zone, in other words, the Turkish armed forces or Gendarmerie will seize a part of northern Syria and make that into a safe haven for these death squads and that they can regroup and continue their attacks into Syria.

Look at this Istanbul conference. On the surface, it looks like a coalition of the willing as we had in the previous decade ten years ago to attack Iraq. This one looks more and more like the Munich conference of September 1938, the one with [Adolf] Hitler, [Benito] Mussolini, [Neville] Chamberlin and [Edouard] Daladier.

In those days, the goal was to carve Czechoslovakia and today it is Syria. In those days, the buffer zone was called the Sudetenland and today it is called the northern area around Idlib. Russia was not invited to that one; Russia will not be invited to this one.

The people in Turkey are now very unhappy with Erdogan. I think Prime Minister Erdogan is very much on the hot seat because of his very bungling administration on this crisis.

According to the Turkish press, Erdogan had been conned by Obama in effect. Erdogan had been told by Obama in those phone calls that we hear so much about that Obama is constantly on the phone to Erdogan.

Obama had convinced Erdogan that the Syrian government of Assad Ba’ath Party was about to fall several months ago. Now that has not happened. There is a growing awareness in the Turkish parties, in the CHP Party and also in other parties, that Assad is not about to fall and therefore, Erdogan has crawled all the way out on a limb as a result of this foolish decision.

We have also got Devlet Bahceli of the Nationalist Party, one of the main opposition parties has pointed again to that meeting of Obama with Erdogan in South Korea in the last day or two, when Erdogan said that he agrees 100 percent on Syria with Obama. That is very ominous.

And what Mr. Bahceli points to is that there is a secret plan now for the occupation of Syria and the dismemberment of it including the creation of a Kurdish entity, as he calls it a peshmerga in the northern part of Syria which is going to be a tremendous problem for Turkey then because by now, you have got a kind of independent Kurdish entity in northern Iraq if you add that to the one in Syria, those might begin to coalesce, that will then pose the question of the breakup of the Turkish state and Erdogan is the one who has gotten Turkey into this fix.

Press TV: Let’s talk about the opposition that is creating obstacles in the way of reforms taken up by the Assad administration, reforms that the US itself has contradictingly described as a good step forward in the way for peace in Syria. Now couple that with the very same foreign backed opposition in Turkey which you spoke about.

The opposition is struggling to form an interim government in case the ongoing regime change succeeds in its efforts. Do you expect these efforts to succeed the fact of regime change?

Tarpley: No, I do not think so because this so-called Syrian National Council is of course a bad joke. They have a split; they have a schism every week. They have been called upon to accept the Kofi Annan plan and all the imperialists want them to accept it and they refuse to accept it.

They do not even give lip service to the idea of negotiating with Assad. They say that that is too late. Now in the deeper level, what the Syrian government is asking for and I think quite correctly so is what assurances are there that if the Syrian government declares a ceasefire that these death squads and their supporters will also stop shooting.

There are no such assurances. The second thing is if you are going to pacify this situation, what assurance is there that the armed rebels, terrorists really, inside Syria are going to allow themselves to be disarmed and then turn around and take part in the campaign for parliamentary elections which are currently scheduled for the 7 May. No assurance of that either.

When Hilary Clinton today says that the Syrian army has got to get out of these cities, this is completely one-sided; this is this Orwellian approach that the West has had to this. It is simply ignoring the fact that there are death squads on the ground and that NATO put them there.

MSK/JR