Leaked files reveal that the UK’s “MAO CASEVAC” program provided advanced medical technology, ambulances, and facilities to aid “rebels” in Syria, at a cost of millions.
On February 6, Syria and Turkey were rocked by devastating back-to-back earthquakes. Ever since, people in these countries and the region have been subjected to a particularly merciless – yet illuminating – crash course in Western double standards on humanitarian aid.
While aid and assistance have flowed into Istanbul and Damascus from all neighbors, initially many governments were reticent to dispatch anything at all to Syria, because US and EU sanctions made it illegal for planes to land in its airports.
It meant that those eager to provide humanitarian assistance could not dispatch it, for fear of dire repercussions. Such concerns were well-founded. Washington enforces sanctions with an iron fist, and any individual or state breaching them faces severe penalties.
Giving in to intense global public pressure, the US Treasury on February 10 enacted a 180-day waiver on certain sanctions imposed on Syria, to allow for vital earthquake relief to reach the country.
Still, neither Washington nor its constellation of international allies has provided any meaningful assistance to Damascus whatsoever, despite the death toll in the country grimly ratcheting daily.
Meanwhile, Israeli regime officials expressed the readiness to bomb Iranian aid deliveries arriving by land. And, in the end, they ended up bombing the people still recovering from the shock of a colossal human tragedy.
Complicating matters further, terrorist groups that still occupy portions of Syrian territories, such as Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) in the northwest, are blocking the government’s attempts to distribute provisions, a spokesperson for HTS in Idlib telling Reuters no shipments would be permitted to pass its checkpoints, on the basis, “we won’t allow the regime to take advantage of the situation to show they are helping.”
These pockets crisscross the country, an enduring and shameful legacy of the West’s failed decade-long dirty war against Damascus.
Almost never acknowledged by the mainstream media, their continued presence is particularly relevant to consider now, for they are relics of a time when the Western world was only too eager to invest vast sums to flood Syria with medical aid, albeit in service of “regime change”.
According to White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre, who said in a news briefing with reporters that the White House rules out designating Mexican cartels as foreign terrorist organizations.
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