This video is called The Bahraini police open fire on peaceful protesters.
By Lamiat Sabin in Britain:
Syria foreign aid scandal ‘the tip of the iceberg’
Tuesday 5th December 2017
Campaigners warn aid money also funding ‘security’ in despotic regimes
A BILLION-POUND foreign aid scheme that has been suspended over claims that it was bankrolling extremist groups in Syria should be completely shut down, campaigners said yesterday.
The British government suspended the scheme after a BBC Panorama investigation found that taxpayers’ cash had been diverted into the hands of terrorist groups.
However Global Justice Now warned that the revelation could be “the tip of the iceberg” with British money from the fund also being funnelled into dodgy projects in 70 other countries.
A report by the campaign group, published yesterday, claims that the secretive Conflict, Stability and Security Fund (CSSF), which financed the project in Syria, also supports police and military units with poor human rights records.
This includes an alleged £3.5 million to teach police in the authoritarian Gulf state of Bahrain how to “command and control” demonstrators, including the use of water cannon and dogs.
Aisha Dodwell of Global Justice Now said: “It is shocking that the British government is funding security forces across the world, including in some of the most tyrannical regimes.
“When you add in that some of these funds come from the aid budget, it just gets more scandalous.
“Already in its short life the CSSF has been involved in a number of scandals.
“We believe it is not fit for purpose and should be closed down. Aid money must be spent on poverty alleviation and the UK should be standing against human rights abuses, not enabling them.”
The BBC Panorama programme Jihadis You Pay For, which was aired last night, showed that officers from the Free Syrian Police (FSP) — the civilian police force backed by Britain — have been working with courts accused of torture and summary executions.
It found documents suggesting police officers in Aleppo province were forced to hand over funds to extremist group Nour al-Din al-Zinki and evidence that al-Qaida affiliate Jabhat al-Nusra had hand-picked police officers for two stations in Idlib.
When Adam Smith International — the British company that runs the project — visited one police station, supposedly the base for 57 police officers, they could not find a single officer.
Labour’s shadow secretary of state for international development Kate Osamor shared Global Justice Now’s concerns, saying: “This investigation is likely to be only the tip of the iceberg: the government must now open up its books so the public can understand the true extent of the problem.”
Dear Kitty. Some blog 
Reblogged this on sdbast.
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Tuesday 5th December 2017
posted by Morning Star in Editorial
IT SHOULD not have taken a BBC Panorama investigation to get the government to pull funding for the “Free Syrian Police Force” which ended up lining the pockets of murderous fanatics.
The nature of the revolt in Syria has been clear for years, and the fact that behind innocuous-sounding labels (“Free Syrian Army,” “Syrian National Coalition”) lurk violent extremists has been pointed out to, and even acknowledged by, their Western sponsors for just as long.
Whatever the nature of the original uprising in 2011, once the civil war began the opposition rapidly became dominated by a variety of Wahhabi terrorist groups committed to building an “Islamic” state of one kind or another, whether or not they were part of Isis.
The United States admitted as long ago as 2015 that there were no “moderate” rebels left in Syria.
Experienced observers of the region, including the Independent’s Robert Fisk and Patrick Cockburn, have pointed to the way groups portraying themselves as liberal when appealing for Western funding talk quite differently when addressing Syrian audiences in Arabic, and that a fixation with exterminating Syria’s Shi’ite and Christian communities was a common theme among most rebel groups.
This, perhaps, is what David Cameron was referring to when he admitted that the 70,000 “moderate” rebels he proposed backing two winters ago — supposedly to fight Isis, more probably to prevent a Syrian government victory in the war — were not the sort of people you’d invite to tea with the Liberal Democrats.
Again and again the extremists have been armed and equipped by our allies.
In 2014 Isis released video footage of its fighters celebrating the arrival of an airdrop containing US weaponry, intended for Kurdish forces but dumped in the wrong place.
In 2015 we learned that “Pentagon-trained rebels in Syria are reported to have betrayed their American backers and handed their weapons over to al-Qaida in Syria immediately after re-entering the country” after Division 30, the US-backed group in question, did a deal with the Nusra Front (as al-Qaida in Syria termed itself at that time).
In the same year, Amnesty International reported that Isis forces possessed large quantities of US-made weapons, some seized after it had militarily defeated rival groups the US had armed, others donated or sold to the terror group through corrupt connections in Iraq.
Payments made to this supposed police force in Aleppo — whose payroll apparently included dead and fictitious officers — were handed over to the Nour al-Din al-Zinki terror group, which achieved notoriety when it beheaded a small boy it accused of being a spy and broadcast a video of the child’s murder. (This did not stop the group, one of the controlling forces in Aleppo before its recapture by government troops, remaining a trusted source of information on alleged atrocities in the city by the Syrian military for the likes of the Guardian).
The “Free Syrian Police” were not even a unified organisation, so the fact that some individuals adopting its title were linked to courts involved in torture and the summary execution of detainees is hardly surprising.
As for individuals being chosen by the Nusra Front to serve in the police force, this merely reinforces the message of the arms dumps handed over to the terrorists.
Britain’s foreign aid budget, as noted previously by this newspaper, funds a number of appalling things, from profiteering school chains to privatisation of utilities in Third World countries.
That it provided our money to the same terrorist groups which carry out murderous attacks on innocent people across Asia and Europe is a scandal. But it isn’t new.
It is sadly consistent with everything Nato has promoted in Syria since the war in that country began.
http://morningstaronline.co.uk/a-eb5b-Jihadist-aid-is-no-accident#.WicJPXmDMdU
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Tuesday, 5 December 2017
Tory Govt used millions of taxpayers’ money to fund terrorist groups in Syria
LAST night’s BBC Panorama programme entitled ‘Jihadists You Pay For’ has blown the lid off one of the ways in which British imperialism has been secretly funding the jihadist terrorists in Syria for years.
These allegations centre on Adam Smith International (ASI), a British based company specialising in ‘foreign aid’, which runs a project funded by the UK government to plough millions of pounds of taxpayers’ money into supporting the Free Syrian Police (FSP) a force that operates within territories in Syria that are under the control of the so-called Free Syrian Army.
This was the ‘rebel’ force, a collection of jihadist groups, set up and financed in 2011 by Western imperialism to overthrow the legitimate Syrian government of Bashar al-Assad. The FSP was set up five years ago as an unarmed community police force that would patrol and police those areas still under the control of the FSA.
They were claimed to be the Syrian equivalent of community police in Britain, unarmed, keeping order, helping old ladies across the road and earning the trust of their communities in the rebel-held areas of Aleppo, Idlib and Daraa provinces.
On paper they were not just an unarmed police force but were completely independent of the extremist groups who control these areas and would never cooperate with these terrorist groups.
The reality has turned out to be vastly different. The Panorama programme has exposed that the FSP’s main function has been to divert millions of pounds of aid from the British government straight into the pockets of Jabhat al-Nusra, the Syrian branch of al-Qaeda, along with other Islamist groups and that, far from not collaborating with these jihadists, the FSP has been up to their necks with supporting the courts run by them.
The Panorama investigation uncovered the following damning facts – namely that the FSP cooperated with the courts set up by the terrorists that carry out summary executions – including the case of two women who were stoned to death.
That cash and funds paid to the FSP was regularly handed over to these terrorist groups and that officers in the ‘neutral’ police were handpicked by an extremist group while dead or fictitious members of the FSP were on the payroll with their wages going straight into the coffers of these groups.
So much for the FSP bringing the ‘rule of law’ to these areas as the ASI and the Tories claimed, in their enthusiasm to use taxpayer’s money to bankroll the entire scam. Last April, Tory foreign secretary Boris Johnson announced that the UK would give a further £4 million to the scheme that supports the FSP.
The ASI has strongly refuted the claims made by Panorama but the programme has uncovered an ASI report from July 2016 which reveals that the company knew that 20% of all police salaries were being handed over and that the FSP was working hand in hand with the courts run by the terrorist groups.
This cooperation carried on despite allegations of torture and summary executions by some of these same courts. Immediately the Panorama story broke, the Tories panicked and suspended aid to the FSP fearful that the exposure of their covert funding of jihadist terrorist groups would create a massive crisis for a government that is just one more crisis away from collapse.
It is unbelievable that the Tories were unaware of where millions of pounds in cash was going. After all, they keep a firm grip on every pound they withhold from the NHS or cut from the welfare system.
No £4 million for the NHS but perfectly OK to spend on funding terrorists! So much for the war on terrorism – it’s the Tory government that funds the terrorist war against the Syrian people and at the same time conducts a vicious war of austerity against the working class at home.
The only way to put an end to terrorism against the people of the world and workers in Britain is to kick out this Tory government and go forward to a workers government that will end all imperialist military intervention and stop all aid to the terrorists. This is the way forward.
https://wrp.org.uk/news/13874
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