After Assad: Ireland’s Role in Fueling Syria’s New Islamist Wave
The downfall of the al-Assad regime is being treated as a Syrian Berlin Wall moment within Irish diplomatic circles as evidenced by upbeat statements by An Taoiseach and similar signaling by the DFA.
Away from traditional Irish foreign policy stomping grounds in Lebanon and East Africa Dublin has played a small but measurable role in the thirteen-year-long slog of a conflict such as extending a line of funding to the Islamist-controlled Bab al-Hawa crossing.
From the hawkish Barry Andrews MEP who vocally pushed for a no-fly-zone in support of rebel forces during his tenure at GAOL to the mingling of Irish Trotslyists with Sunni militants, contrary to our national interest, Ireland has pushed and pushed for the demise of Baathism in Syria.
Increasingly subsumed to the backroom writ of the Democratic wing of the U.S. foreign policy establishment Syria has been ground zero in the weaponisation of Irish humanitarian networks similar to our recent blunders in Ethiopia and the backing of a doomed rebellion to the vexation of our traditional partners in Addis Ababa.
While Ireland has been spared the brunt of the Syrian exodus unlike Germany (a ballpark 2,500 Syrian refugees have been settled into the Republic) the conflict has also been a test run for semi-covet Islamic civil society networks operating in the orbit of Clonskeagh mosque.
Similarly, Cork’s Islamic Cultural Center is financed by the same Qatari coffers that have backed terrorism in the Levant for over a decade, which is a testament to the interwoven nature of Gulf money and Sunni extremism.
While it can be argued with some effect that the al-Assad regime had driven itself into the ground after decades of despotism neither Ireland, Europe nor Syria itself will likely benefit from the sectarian blackhole that will certainly emerge in the wreckage of the Baathist order.
A consequence of the neutering of Iran and Hezbollah and a geopolitical necessity to open a new front against Putinism in the Middle East, Assad is a victim of his tyranny as much as the billions thrown at him by a variety of enemy capitals from Ankara to Tel Aviv.
It’s back to the future season this Christmas with blowback expected to the citizenry and asylum departments of Europe following the collapse of one of the Arab world’s last semi-secular governments in Damascus.
While Ireland remains a relative backwater for state-funded Islamic extremism, at least in public, the two decades since the War on Terror commenced illustrates time and time and again how our lack of a security infrastructure.
Contrary to the jubilant tweeting from Iveagh House and the Department of Taoiseach Ireland’s interests lie with a safe, stable, and secular Syria and the wider Levant, something that we have lobbied specifically against with a foreign policy nexus increasingly captured by outside powers.
There is no positive spin for Ireland nor Europe in the days after the implosion of the Assad dynasty in Damascus with 13 years of dodgy aid work and blind negligence to the evolving problem of Islamism paving the way for another chapter of asylum madness.
rogue regime technocrat
@hamiolhs
The Free 