US, allies still dedicated to ouster of Assad: International rights lawyer

An international human rights lawyer in Paris says the United States and its Western allies are still dedicated to the ouster of the government of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

Arno Develay made the remarks in an interview with Press TV on Friday while commenting on a report which says that after billions of dollars spent and over 10,000 terrorists killed, the ISIL Takfiri group is no weaker than it was when the US-led bombing campaign began in August last year.

The assessment was made by American intelligence agencies and US military commanders on the ground agree with it, according to the Associated Press.

“Clearly, the campaign to eradicate the so-called Islamic State, or ISIS, [serves] as a pretext for the coalition to maintain their military policy of intervention over Syria,” Develay said, using another acronym for the terrorist group.

“We saw that in spite of the official policy of providing logistical support to the government of Iraq, several bombing raids either missed their targets or ended up dropping cargo supplies which ended up in ISIS' possession,” he added.

“More to the point, air support was nowhere to be found as the Iraqi army was attempting to prevent these terrorists from capturing the city of Ramadi,” he stated.

“This military disaster ended up allowing ISIS to secure the highly-strategic province of Anbar and thus consolidate their supply-lines between the territories straddling Syria and Iraq,” the analyst continued.

The ISIL terrorists, who were initially trained by the CIA in Jordan in 2012 to destabilize the Syrian government, now control large parts of Iraq and Syria.

US warplanes have been conducting airstrikes against ISIL in Iraq since early August 2014. Some Western states have also participated in some of the strikes in Iraq.

Since late September 2014, the US and some of its Arab allies have been carrying out airstrikes against ISIL inside Syria without any authorization from Damascus or a UN mandate.

“On a more worrying note, the recent Turkish bombing raids across its border with Syria; a move allegedly aimed at curbing ISIS activities, has essentially been targeting Kurdish forces, thus preventing an ally of the coalition from conducting its own operations against the terrorists,” Develay noted.

“We now hear about the establishment of a ‘no-fly zone’ several dozen miles inside Syria along the border with Turkey. This notion has notably been featuring prominently in the British prime minister's recent interventions these last few days,” he stated.

“In addition, Turkey will most likely make available to Western military planes, its own bases, which will thus make it logistically easier to increase bombing raids over Syrian territory until such raids become permanent,” the rights activist stated.

“If we were then to envision a scenario whereupon the Syrian regular forces manage to register military successes against ISIS on the ground; what prevents anyone remotely able to understand what is really going on in the region from imagining that these bombing raids won't target Syrian regular forces?” he asked.

In his concluding remarks, Develay said that “it is also important to take into consideration that no effort has been undertaken to cut-off financial support to [ISIL]; that is the flow of money and arms being channeled to these groups by Saudi Arabia.

“Indeed, the kingdom has seemingly taken it upon itself to check Shia power in the entire region while the United States works diplomatically to engage Iran via the Vienna nuclear deal.

“It is thus a regional situation comparable to Japanese Kabuki theatre: a casting of shadows aimed at obfuscating the real objective of the West and its allies, which remains the toppling of Bashar al-Assad.”

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