During a Peace Islands Institute conference on MENA press freedom Saturday, Noam Chomsky told a group at Boston College that "pretty credible reports" suggested Turkish intelligence had given information to Syrian al-Qaeda wing Nusra Front about the whereabouts of a group of freshly-trained US-backed Syrian rebels earlier this year.
If you follow the US's intervention in Syria, the US's rocky train-and-equip program is an easy milestone to remember. Chomsky is referring to an incident in September, just before the program was officially dropped, when some 50 fighters almost immediately handed over their US weapons to Nusra after completeing training and crossing into Syria.
"The United States has spent billions of dollars to try and train so-called moderate Syrians to join in the war against Assad and the Islamic State," he said. "They were immediately wiped out or deserted by Nusra front, who was apparently waiting for them. It seems the Front was informated by Turkish intelligence."
The program's official numbers have actually not been in the billions. But the package cost was in the millions—$500 million, to be exact. And while this is the first time the Turkish government's been directly implicated in the September blunder, the country's been accused of helping Islamist groups in the Syrian conflict before.
In February, US intelligence chief James Clapper said Turkey's porous Syrian border allowed for the free flow foreign fighters—a problem he said Ankara had done little to stem. He also said the country did not seem so concerned with the Daesh (ISIS) in general.
"Public opinion polls show in Turkey they don't see ISIL as a primary threat,” he told the Senate Armed Services Committee back then.
Obviously, Chompsky's comments this month were much stronger, and he failed to name where the "credible reports" were coming from. Still, the claims are not exactly unheard of.
See the conference clip in which Chomsky mentions the aid, below. Via YouTube.
