Chris Bambery, a London-based political commentator, told Press TV on Monday that the presence of the American and British forces alongside the so-called army was crucial to their survival.
His comment was in regard to a report on the presence of UK Special Forces along with CIA-trained New Syrian Army (NSA), which is part of the FSA.
“They helped us with logistics, like building defenses to make the bunkers safe,” First Lieutenant Mahmoud al-Saleh said of the British forces.
A fighter from the Free Syrian Army poses next to the entrance of a tunnel used for taking cover from government shelling and reaching positions on the front line in the rebel-held Yarmouk refugee camp area, on the southern outskirts of Damascus, on May 25, 2016. (AFP)
West’s Intervention Tragedy
According to Bambery, the United States and Britain have been “desperate to build up” the militant group, which is vulnerable without support and cannot “essentially survive.”
"“The number of people from the Free Syrian Army going over to Daesh (ISIS / ISIL) and other Takfiri organizations has been a constant feature of this,” he said. “So without the West’s support, it would be impossible for those organizations to remain.”"
On the other hand, Bambery argued, the UK and US forces “need to maintain this faction that somehow they have a proxy army on the ground” to earn an upper-hand in negotiations to tackle a crisis that has gripped Syria since 2011.
“The fact that Britain and America have special forces in there and have been training and helping these people is not surprising [as] they have been protecting them and preventing them from being overrun,” he said. “And this is the tragedy of Western intervention in Syria.”
“This is not a fight with Daesh; there’s a third force; this moderate pro-Western force inside Syria, which is essentially a creation of the West.” he noted, calling for “Western intervention in Syria” to come to an end.
According to the Times, which initially revealed the British troops direct engagement in Syria Monday, the forces frequently cross into Syria to support the NSA, purportedly protecting them from attacks by the Daesh Takfiri terrorists.
Meanwhile, experts believe there is more to the UK’s involvement than simply battling the terrorists.
S/SH 11