US waging war against Syria in conjunction with ISIL: Western Analsyt

American journalist Don DeBar says the United States is in fact waging a war against the government and people of Syria in conjunction with the ISIL terrorist group.

Don DeBar, an anti-war activist and radio host in New York, made the remarks in a phone interview with Press TV on Wednesday while commenting on the recent purported beheading of American citizen Abdul-Rahman Kassig by ISIL militants.

On Tuesday, President Barack Obama ordered a review of the US policy on how to react to abduction of US citizens overseas in light of the murder.

“It’s almost a twilight zone announcement when one considers that he has more than one horse in the show. The United States is actually conducting a war against Syria in conjunction with ISIL/ISIS, who have been armed by the United States through its proxies, Saudi Arabia and others, and there is no hiding that they are using American armaments,” DeBar said.

“They are being financed by somebody who is buying tankers full of oil [from ISIL] that are visible to American surveillance equipment – satellites and such. The communications to order and distribute this oil and to deposit the funds – the proceeds of and sales and all that – are certainly on the radar of the American espionage apparatus that looks at the international banking transactions of just about everyone,” he added. “So it’s difficult for me to see how they are treating this group like a hostile entity.”

“In addition to that, there are multiple standards applied to how the US treats the abduction and/or killing of American citizens [which are] in place already,” DeBar continued.

“If you think about the Palestinian-American kid that was killed in last two months or so in Palestine by the Israelis, if you think about the Turkish-American kid that was killed by Israel when they boarded a ship bound for Gaza and executed him, there was no response from the American government whatsoever except perhaps to apologize to Israel for getting the kid’s blood on some Israeli soldier’s uniform,” he noted.

“Here they want to change policy because a former military operative of the United States – who allegedly became a civilian operative and then coincidently was fighting against the same Syrian government that the United Sates has termed an enemy – got executed by these people, if that did in fact happen,” DeBar pointed out. “How do you parse all of that to establish a policy when your actions themselves are – if they are as you’ve described them – completely and totally contradictory?”

On Sunday, ISIL terrorists released a video, saying they had beheaded Kassig. The video shows a masked militant standing over a severed head which he says is that of 26-year-old Kassig.

The family said in October that Kassig served in the US Army and was deployed to Iraq in 2007. The former Army Ranger returned to the Middle East as a medical worker after being discharged on medical grounds.

“I think a more useful thing to do would be to shine some light on what the United Sates is actually doing in the Middle East and elsewhere, but in this particular case, in Southwest Asia and [the] Middle East, with respect to Syria, with respect to Iraq, with respect to the Kurds, with respect to Turkey, with respect to Lebanon, with respect to Iran, and with respect to Israel/Palestine,” DeBar emphasized.

“There is an awful lot of military activity that’s going with American money, and American military hardware, and often [with] American troops and otherwise people who have … come apparently from nowhere to fight with Syria, leaving devastation . . . in its wake and it seems that no one sees this as being one war being conducted by the United States,” he stated.

“So for the president to review US policy and to announce a response set to the abduction of US citizens absent an accurate description of what’s actually happening there, seems to me like a sad joke,” the veteran journalist concluded.

Syria has been gripped by deadly violence since March 2011. Nearly 200,000 people have reportedly been killed and millions displaced due to the violence fueled by the militants.

The United States and its regional allies — especially Qatar, Saudi Arabia and Turkey — have been supporting the militants operating inside Syria since the beginning of the crisis.

The Obama administration has already outlined a $500 million program to train and arm 5,000 “moderate” militants in Syria to fight against ISIL and the Assad government, but according to the Pentagon, the number would be something between 12,000 and 15,000.