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Long and dense with details that answer the many questions we had at the time. More at the link, so grab your stimulating beverage of choice and get comfortable. [PoliticalInsider] The road to Al Qaeda’s control of the Syrian province of Idlib actually started hundreds of miles across the Mediterranean in Libya.
In March 2011, after heavy lobbying from bigwigs including Secretary Crooked Hillary Clinton
...former first lady, former secretary of state, former presidential candidate, Conqueror of Benghazi, Heroine of Tuzla, formerly described by her supporters as the smartest woman in the world, usually described by the rest of us as The Thing That Wouldn't Go Away. Politix is not one of her talents, but it's something she keeps trying to do...
, President Obama authorized a bombing campaign in support of the jihadist insurgency fighting the government of Libyan leader Muammar Qadaffy
Continued from Page 4
...The late megalomaniac dictator of Libya, admired everywhere for his garish costumes, funny hats, harem of cutie bodyguards , and incoherent ravings. As far as is known, he is the only person who's ever declared jihad on Switzerland...
. Backed by NATO
...the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. A cautionary tale of cost-benefit analysis....
firepower, the rebels toppled Qadaffy and gruesomely murdered him in October.
Buoyed by their quick success in Libya, the B.O. regime set their sights on Damascus, by then a top regime change target in Washington. According to former NATO commander Wesley Clark, the Assad regime — a key ally of U.S. foes Iran,  Hezbollah, and Russia — was marked for overthrow alongside Iraq in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. A leaked 2006 U.S. Embassy in Damascus cable assessed that Assad’s "vulnerabilities" included "the potential threat to the regime from the increasing presence of transiting Islamist krazed killers," and detailed how the U.S. could "improve the likelihood of such opportunities arising."
The outbreak of the Syrian insurgency in March 2011, coupled with the fall of Qadaffy, offered the U.S. a historic opportunity to exploit Syria’s vulnerabilities. While the Arab Spring sparked peaceful Syrian protests against the ruling Ba’ath party’s cronyism and repression, it also triggered a largely Sunni, rural-based revolt that took a sectarian and violent mostly peaceful turn. The U.S. and its allies, namely Qatar
...an emirate on the east coast of the Arabian Peninsula. It sits on some really productive gas and oil deposits, which produces the highest per capita income in the world. They piss it all away on religion, financing the Moslem Brotherhood and several al-Qaeda affiliates. Home of nutbag holy manYusuf al-Qaradawi...
and The Sick Man of Europe Turkey
...the occupiers of Greek Asia Minor...
, capitalized by tapping the massive arsenal of the newly ousted Libyan government.
"During the immediate aftermath of, and following the uncertainty caused by, the downfall of the [Qadaffy] regime in October 2011," the Defense Intelligence Agency reported the following year, "...weapons from the former Libya military stockpiles located in Benghazi, Libya were shipped from the port of Benghazi, Libya, to the ports of Banias and the Port of Borj Islam, Syria."
The redacted DIA document, obtained by the group Judicial Watch, does not specify whether the U.S. was directly involved in these shipments. But it contains significant clues. With remarkable specificity, it detailed the size and contents of one such shipment in August 2012: 500 sniper rifles, 100 rocket-propelled grenade launchers with 300 rounds, and 400 howitzer missiles.
Most tellingly, the document noted that the weapons shipments were halted "in early September 2012." This was a clear reference to the killing by Death Eaters that month of four Americans — Ambassador Christopher Stevens, another State Department official, and two CIA contractors — in Benghazi, the port city where the weapons to Syria were coming from. The Benghazi annex "was at its heart a CIA operation," U.S. officials told the Wall Street Journal. At least two dozen CIA employees worked in Benghazi under diplomatic cover.
Although top intelligence officials obscured the Benghazi operation in sworn testimony before the House Intelligence Committee, a Senate investigation eventually confirmed a direct CIA role in the movement of weapons from Libya to Syria. A classified version of a 2014 Senate report, not publicly released, documented an agreement between President Obama and Turkey to funnel weapons from Libya to snuffies in Syria. The operation, established in early 2012, was run by then-CIA Director David Petraeus.
"The [Benghazi] consulate’s only mission was to provide cover for the moving of arms" to Syria, a former U.S. intelligence official told journalist Seymour Hersh in the London Review of Books. "It had no real political role."
THE DEATH OF A U.S. AMBASSADOR
Under diplomatic cover, Stevens appears to have been a significant figure in the CIA program. More than one year before he became ambassador in June 2012, Stevens was appointed the U.S. liaison to the Libyan opposition. In this role, he worked with the Al Qaeda-tied Libyan Islamic Fighting Group and its leader, Abdelhakim Belhadj, a warlord who fought alongside the late Osama bin Laden
...... who is now neither a strong horse nor a weak horse, but a dead horse......
in Afghanistan. After Qadaffy’s ouster, Belhadj was named head of the Tripoli
...a confusing city, one end of which is located in Lebanon and the other end of which is the capital of Libya. Its chief distinction is being mentioned in the Marine Hymn...
Military Council, which controlled security in the country’s capital.
Belhadj’s portfolio was not limited to post-coup Libya. In November 2011, the Al Qaeda ally traveled to Turkey to meet with leaders of the Free Syrian Army
... the more palatable version of the Syrian insurgency, heavily influenced by the Moslem Brüderbund...
, the CIA-backed opposition military coalition. Belhadj’s trip came as part of the new Libyan government’s effort to provide "money and weapons to the growing insurgency against Bashir al-Assad," the London Telegraph reported at the time. On September 14, 2012 — just three days after Stevens and his American colleagues were killed — the London Times revealed that a Libyan vessel "carrying the largest consignment of weapons for Syria since the uprising began," had recently docked in the Ottoman Turkish port of Iskenderun. Once unloaded, "most of its cargo is making its way to rebels on the front lines."
The known details of Stevens’ last hours on September 11 suggest that shipping weapons was at the top of his agenda. Although based in Tripoli and facing violent mostly peaceful threats, he nonetheless made the dangerous trek to Benghazi around the fraught anniversary of 9/11. According to a 2016 report from the House Intelligence Committee, one of Stevens’ last scheduled meetings was with the head of al-Marfa Shipping and Maritime Services Company, a Libyan firm involved in ferrying weapons to Syria. His final meeting of the day was with Consul General Ali Sait Akin of Turkey, where the weapons were shipped. Fox News later reported that "Stevens was in Benghazi to negotiate a weapons transfer."
With the Libyan channel shut down by Stevens’ murder, the U.S. and its allies turned to other sources. One was Croatia, where Saudi Arabia
 ...a kingdom taking up the bulk of the Arabian peninsula. Its primary economic activity involves exporting oil and soaking Islamic rubes on the annual hajj pilgrimage. The country supports a large number of princes in whatcha might call princely splendor. Fifteen of the nineteen WTC hijackers were Saudis, and most major jihadi commanders were Saudis, to include Osama bin Laden. Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman quietly folded that tent in 2016, doing terrible things to the guys running it, and has since been dragging the kingdom into the current century...
financed a major weapons purchase in late 2012 that was arranged by the CIA. The CIA’s use of the Saudi kingdom’s vast coffers continued an arrangement from prior covert proxy wars, including the arming of the mujahideen in Afghanistan and of the Contras in Nicaragua.
Although the B.O. regime claimed that the weapons funneled to Syria were intended for "moderate rebels," they ultimately ended up in the hands of a jihadi-dominated insurgency. Just one month after the Benghazi attack, the New York Times
... which still proudly displays Walter Duranty's Pulitzer prize...
reported that "hard-line Islamic jihadists," including groups "with ties or affiliations with Al Qaeda," have received "the lion’s share of the arms shipped to the Syrian opposition."
COVERTLY ARMING AN AL QAEDA-DOMINATED INSURGENCY
The B.O. regime did not need media accounts to learn that jihadists dominated the Syrian insurgency on the receiving end of a CIA supply chain.
One month before the Benghazi attack, Pentagon intelligence analysts gave the White House a blunt appraisal. An August 2012 Defense Intelligence Agency report, disseminated widely among U.S. officials, noted that "Salafi[s], the Moslem Brüderbund, and AQI [Al Qaeda in Iraq] are the major forces driving the insurgency." Al Qaeda, the report stressed, "supported the Syrian opposition from the beginning." Their aim was to create a "Salafist principality in eastern Syria" — an early warning of the ISIS caliphate that would be established two years later.
General Michael Flynn, who headed the DIA at the time, later recalled that his staff "got enormous pushback" from the Obama White House. "I felt that they did not want to hear the truth," Flynn said. In 2015, one year after Flynn was forced out, dozens of Pentagon intelligence analysts signed on to a complaint alleging that top Pentagon intelligence officials were "cooking the books" to paint a rosier picture of the jihadi presence in Syria. (The Pentagon later cleared CENTCOM commanders of wrongdoing.)
The Free Syrian Army (FSA), the main CIA-backed krazed killer force, also informed Obama officials of the jihadi dominance in their ranks. "From the reports we get from the doctors," FSA officials told the State Department in November 2012, "most of the injured and dead FSA are Jabhat al-Nusra
...formally Jabhat an-Nusrah li-Ahli al-Sham (Support Front for the People of the Levant), also known as al-Qaeda in the Levant. They aim to establish a pan-Arab caliphate. Not the same one as the Islamic State, though .. ...
, due to their courage and [the fact they are] always at the front line."
Jabhat al-Nusra (Al-Nusra Front) is Al Qaeda’s franchise in Syria. It emerged as a splinter group of Al Qaeda in Iraq after a falling out between AQI leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, and his then-deputy, Mohammed al-Jolani. In 2013, Baghdadi relaunched his organization under the name of Islamic State
...formerly ISIS or ISIL, depending on your preference. Before that they were al-Qaeda in Iraq, as shaped by Abu Musab Zarqawi. They're really very devout, committing every atrocity they can find in the Koran and inventing a few more. They fling Allah around with every other sentence, but to hear western pols talk they're not really Moslems....
of Iraq and Syria (ISIS). Jolani led his Syria-based Al Qaeda faction under the black flag of al-Nusra.
"[W]hile rarely acknowledged explicitly in public," Charles Lister, a Gulf state-funded analyst in close contact with Syrian krazed killer groups wrote in March 2015, "the vast majority of the Syrian insurgency has coordinated closely with al-Qaeda since mid-2012 — and to great effect on the battlefield." As one Free Syrian Army leader told the New York Times: "No FSA faction in the north can operate without al-Nusra’s approval."
According to David McCloskey, a former CIA analyst who covered Syria in the war’s early years, U.S. officials knew that "al-Qaeda affiliated groups and Salafi jihadist groups were the primary engine of the insurgency." This, McCloskey says, was "a tremendously problematic aspect of the conflict."
In his memoir, senior Obama aide Ben Rhodes acknowledged that al-Nusra "was probably the strongest fighting force within the opposition." It was also clear, he wrote, that U.S.-backed krazed killer groups were "fighting side by side with al-Nusra." For this reason, Rhodes recalled, he argued against the State Department’s December 2012 designation of al-Nusra as a foreign terrorist organization. This move "would alienate the same people we want to help." (Asked about wanting to help an Al Qaeda-dominated insurgency, Rhodes did not respond). 
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