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Back Story on Syria: Sibel Edmonds and Journalist Pepe Escobar

[audio http://peterbcollins.com/podcast/PBC_20111222p340.mp3]

 

Cutting through the disinformation and spin, Sibel Edmonds and Pepe Escobar reveal back stories about the conflict in Syria that are not reported in the mainstream media.  Edmonds has deeps sources in Turkey, Iran, Syria, and the US policy community, and has broken a number of recent developments at Boiling Frogs Post.  Pepe Escobar has also done great enterprise reporting and analysis at Asia Times.  Together, they add a great deal of information about the players who are fighting the Assad regime, the increasingly shrill calls for Assad’s removal from Washington and Paris, recent reports of likely NATO-aligned fighters assembling near the Jordan-Syria border.  Escobar sees this as a proxy battle between US/NATO/Israel and a growing alliance between Russa and China, with all eyes on the oil and gas reserves of the Caspian basin.  We discuss Turkey’s role in some depth, and its desire to crush the Kurds of northern Iraq and southern Turkey; we talk about Iran’s intentions toward Syria and Iraq after the US withdrawal, and Iran’s own “Kurdish problem”.  Escobar predicts that 2012 will be a year of “creative destruction”, and sees a return to pre-9/11 dynamics in the region.  He also describes the House of Saud as the international center of the counter-revolution in response to the “Arab Spring”.  Edmonds, who lived in Iran at the start of the Islamic revolution, talks about Iran’s interests, and Jordan’s billions of dollars in US military aid since 2007.  It’s best to look at a map of the region as you listen, so you can appreciate the geographical and resource ties of the various neighbors.