Terror attacks reaction to Syrian army’s gains: Activist

Press TV has interviewed Eric Draitser, founder of stopimperialism.com in New York, to discuss the recent terrorist attacks in Syria.

The following is a rough transcription of the interview.

Press TV: Now speaking of the situation, it is this recent spate of deadly attacks and the bombings are coming in the backdrop of Syrian army’s ostensible advances on certain areas, strategic cities, in Kinsabba and others and how do you see the implications of this playing out?

Draitser: Well certainly it is a reaction to the fact that the Syrian Arab army along with its allies, including the Russians and Hezbollah, have been making these significant gains, reasserting their control over these cities and strategic corridors and particularly in the south of the country but also that largely speaking the north-south corridor stretching from Idlib in the north all the way to Dara’a in the south that includes Homs, that includes Hama, that includes Damascus and includes Latakia as well.

All of these various cities have seen advances by the Syrian Arab army and its allies and so this is clearly and quite predictably unfortunately the blowback from that, the repercussions of that, that the terrorist actions have been seen as attempting to undermine not only that progress to terrorize the civilians but also to undermine any potential political deal because of course these developments come against the backdrop of a so-called cessation of hostilities which at least in theory has been agreed to by Foreign Minister Lavrov of Russia and Secretary of State Kerry of the United States and some of the other interested parties.

And so what is interesting I think and what it is noteworthy is that the Russians and the Syrians have clearly and unequivocally said any cessation of hostilities does not include al-Qaeda’s affiliate, al-Nusra and it does not include Daesh, the Islamic State, both of which are regarded as terrorist organizations by the United Nations.

So this is really I think the political backdrop against which we have to understand these most recent attacks.

Press TV: What more needs to happen on the ground in terms of these bombings unfortunate as they may be for the international community to as a matter of fact come to the conclusion that those moderate, let’s say rebels, that they refer to are indeed none more than terrorists. Can a consensus be finally achieved?

Draitser: Well I would not one hundred percent agree with that assessment because the moderate “label” it is not simply a pure mythology. It is a political currency. It is a term that is used by the Western powers and the Western media in order to justify an increasingly unjustifiable policy.

This is not to make an equivalence between the head chopping death squads of the Islamic State and some of the so-called Free Syrian Army, so-called rebels. They are not the same. They do not come from the same volume. Many of the terrorists come from Chechnya, they come from Afghanistan, they come from Pakistan, they come from God knows where else, all over the world streaming into Syria, being funded and fomented by Turkey, by Israel, by the United States, by Saudi Arabia, by all of these forces.

This is not one hundred percent the same as some of the indigenous Syrians who have taken anti-Assad position. But we do know and this is clear from even Western sources that the so-called Free Syrian Army, the so-called moderates are directly intermingled and intertwined with some of the al-Qaeda factions, of al-Nusra, the Ahrar al-Sham, proxies of Saudi Arabia, the Islamic State, Daesh, all of these things they are not the same but they are in many ways connected.

That is what the Russians have been arguing from the very beginning and that is why it is so difficult to accept this artificial delineation that we see in the Western mainstream media of the so-called moderate rebel. That is for political and public relations consumption. It is not the reality on the ground.

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