Turkey supporting militants, tragic: Analyst

Press TV has conducted an interview with Kevin Barrett, a political commentator, to discuss recent developments on Syria.

Read a rough transcription of the interview below.

Press TV: This accusation that Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar support terrorists in Syria has been echoed time and again. Your thoughts?

Barrett: It is absolutely tragic, the way the governments of these countries have been lured into this ‘divide and conquer’ strategy, this fourth-generation warfare strategy to break up the Islamic world in order to allow Zionists and imperialists to continue to loot the resources and dominate the people of this region and keep them from realizing their true potential as a civilization and as a religious and spiritual group.

This is clear that Daesh is an instrument of the West and the Zionists and its purpose is to create this kind of sectarian strife through these very kinds of bombings. When the Americans invaded Iraq, the first thing they did was turn the Israelis loose to murder as many of the top Iraqi scientists as possible and then they sent special forces people to blow up mosques and blame the Sunnis for the Shia mosque bombings and vice versa. And we are seeing the results now.

But why would the leadership of these Muslim countries go along with that? Especially Turkey. I mean Qatar and Saudi Arabia… these countries are essentially gas stations for the West; they are not real countries. But Turkey is a very real Muslim country and it has potentials for leading the Islamic world and it is absolutely tragic and beyond stupid for the Turkish government to have been lured into this trap in Syria and be supporting these horrific terror attacks that are simply stirring up sectarian strife and creating a situation that will continue to reverberate with bloodshed down through the years.

It is time to stop it and the Turkish government really needs to look in the mirror and ask itself why it is doing this.

Press TV: And when you said… they are the products of Western backing… these terrorist groups. I mean, these groups… what possible place do they have in a civilized country’s future landscape?

Barrett: Obviously, they have no future at all; but unfortunately the way imperial powers have often operated is in a sort of Machiavellian fashion. And they find whatever tendencies towards independence are stirring in the lands that they try to dominate, and then they move in, and they take over these groups, they steer them, they create fake terror groups, they take tendencies that already exist and then turn them in a self-destructive direction.

And that is what the West has done with the Islamic Awakening. It has created these Takfiri groups, which are utterly destructive, which are purely serving Western geo-strategic interests, and it is using them in the same way it uses gangs of mercenaries and fascists in places like Ukraine.

All over the world, the United States government has been overthrowing the governments of foreign countries. Any government that asserts independence, the US uses gangsters and thugs to destabilize and overthrow that government, and that is precisely what they are doing here.

But it is very sad that they have taken on this kind of Muslim coloration, i.e. they are claiming that these Daesh-type groups are somehow radical Islamic groups when they are not. They are actually groups of thugs and mercenaries who are being deployed to actually try to destroy Islam and to stop the Islamic Awakening in its tracks.