Student or spy? The curious case of Israeli woman who vanished in Iraq

By David Miller

The independent news portal, The Cradle on July 5 broke the news of Israeli citizen Elizabeth Tsurkov’s disappearance in Iraq, based on information from security sources in the country.

Hours later, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu confirmed her disappearance, claiming the Iraqi resistance group Kataeb Hezbollah had kidnapped her - an allegation the group vehemently denied.

Tsurkov is registered as a Ph.D. student at New Jersey-based Princeton University and is said to be a well-known “anti-occupation” activist in the Zionist entity. The news appeared some three months after she allegedly went missing in Iraq.       

It was not long before a raft of old tweets were unearthed showing that she had been in military intelligence while in the Israeli occupation forces during the 2006 Lebanon war and that she had remained in the Israeli military reserves until at least August 2011.

Was it possible, people wondered, that she was in Iraq for nefarious purposes?

On the one hand, her supporters have issued howls of outrage in her defence, saying she was a principled anti-Zionist or at least an anti-occupation activist (whatever that might mean) and friend of the Palestinians.

The University of Princeton, where she is a graduate student, also defended her on Twitter, indicating that she is in Iraq doing field research.        

However, Princeton research rules forbid grad students to travel to "Category X" countries as determined by the US State Department. Iraq is listed as a Category X country.

Furthermore, Tsurkov reportedly travelled on her Russian passport and thus disguised her status as an Israeli citizen (which would have resulted in her being barred from the country).

The Zionist regime statement gives a possible clue on this saying that she was visiting on her "own initiative" and thus not officially as a student.

This would allow her to vitiate the rules and also give her plausible cover should she be there on some kind of spying mission for the Israeli regime’s Mossad or any other agency. 

It would, however, surely raise questions for Princeton that confirmed her role as involving research. As we have seen travelling to undertake research for her PhD would be a clear breach of the research rules of the institution, which would be forbidden under the rules.

In addition, it seems Tsurkov also traveled illegally to Lebanon for three months, again on her Russian passport.  Importantly, she is not researching Lebanon for her PhD.

When she was in Iraq, Tsurkov let it be known in media interviews (in Arabic) that she was not Muslim and also that she opposed "Eastern" influence in Iraq, meaning the role of Iran.

How she discussed this could easily be seen as encouraging opposition to Iran or its Iraqi allies such as Kataeb Hezbollah in the Arab country. This would seem a plausible reason for her to be detained by the group, though there is no evidence to verify that.

Over the course of her life so far Tsurkov has had many experiences with intelligence agencies. In the period seemingly after she was an Israeli occupation forces reservist, Tsurkov engaged in research and advocacy in support of regime change in Syria, working directly with organisations known to be Western intelligence cutouts or proxies including Bellingcat, the Atlantic Council and an apparent CIA cut out, New Lines.

But the connections go way back.

Elizabeth Tsurkov: Innocent Student or Spy?

This episode examines the curious case of Elizabeth Tsurkov, the Russian Israeli who went missing in Iraq on March 26 this year.

They started when she was a child.  Her parents, Arkady and Ira, who now live in an illegal settlement in Palestine, were formerly citizens of the Soviet Union. 

While there, they were participants in a Zionist intelligence operation run by the ultra-secret Nativ intelligence agency. The leader of the operation in the Soviet Union was Anatoly Schcharansky (now known as a prominent Israeli politician under his Zionised name Natan Sharansky).

The campaign involved creating the false idea that there was a “new red anti-semitism” in the Soviet Union. Elizabeth’s father Arkady was Sharansky’s prison cellmate. Sharansky’s son wrote a piece about Elizabeth in the New York Times, titled “My brave, brilliant friend”

Her parents later left Russia for the Zionist colony and Tsurkov lived on Kibbutz Nir David, associated with Hashomer Hatzair, the “socialist” Zionist group.

As I have noted elsewhere, this is a group claiming to be socialist but which refused to allow Arabs to join their Kibbutzim and were by all accounts enthusiastic participants in the ethnic cleansing of the Nakba.

The Tsurkovs later relocated to the illegal settlement of Kfar Eldad in Gush Etzion near Hebron.  At the age of 9, Tsurkov celebrated the assassination of the Israeli premier by an extremist Zionist. His killer “is fêted in many Israeli circles”, as the Jewish News reports.

After joining military intelligence during the invasion of Lebanon in 2006, she remained a reservist until at least 2011. Since then, she has continued to work with intelligence agencies, though perhaps without being an officer in any particular agency.

She is listed as a Research Associate at the Forum for Regional Thinking in Tel Aviv. The forum was founded by former Israeli military intelligence officer Dror Ze’evi, the son of the former deputy head of Mossad, Benjamin Ze’evi.

Tsurkov is also attached to the hardline neoconservative Foreign Policy Research Institute, a grouping run off campus in 1970 by anti-war protestors amid revelations about its links with the Pentagon and CIA.

She can be seen discussing Syria at the FPRI in April 2020 on YouTube.

Tsurkov worked as a consultant with the Atlantic Council, and its open-source Intelligence research and propaganda unit, the Digital Forensic Labs, in a project which also involved collaboration with Belling Cat, the MI6 cutout.  

The study titled Breaking Ghouta advanced the now-discredited case that chemical weapons attacks had been carried out by the Syrian government. In reality, the alleged “chlorine” attacks examined by the OPCW were false flag attacks and the two key alleged “Sarin” attacks in Ghouta (2013) and Khan Sheikhoun (2017) were too.

These “attacks” sometimes involving real civilian casualties (and thus amounted to war crimes), were produced and choreographed by NATO proxy rebel groups with the assistance of a range of MI6-funded NGOs, “citizen journalists” and other actors.

Among those given “special thanks” in the report is Mayday Rescue, the MI6 cutout that has itself been implicated in war crimes in Syria through its involvement in faking chemical weapons attacks.

Recent revelations have indicated that in addition to the now-deceased British leader of the group – James Le Mesurier - having been a former military intelligence operative, his then-wife Emma was reportedly a serving MI6 operative during her time with Mayday.

In other words, Elizabeth Tsurkov can be identified as part of an intelligence-directed operation on Ghouta, whether wittingly or unwittingly.

Tsurkov’s connection to New Lines is also interesting. It is a dubious US-based think tank stuffed with neoconservative regime change fanatics including those involved in the NATO propaganda operations over Syria.

It appears to be funded by a poultry company, in which the founder and president Ahmed Alwani has invested. But given his role on the advisory board of the US military’s Africa Command, the output of the Institute and the regime change hacks and lobbyists involved, it is most likely CIA adjacent.

Was Tsurkov on a spying mission for Mossad, MI6 or the CIA in Iraq?  Nothing is clear yet.  What we can say is that she has many years of experience– going back to childhood - of close association with intelligence operatives (including her own father) and intelligence-adjacent organisations and cutouts.

Her mere presence in Iraq was illegal and would entitle authorities to detain her, but the additional multiple connections to intelligence agencies tell an altogether more murky story.

David Miller is the producer and co-host of Press TV’s weekly Palestine Declassified show. He was sacked from Bristol University in October 2021 over his Palestine advocacy. 

(The views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect those of Press TV)

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