Western Media Discovers 'Foreign Fighters' While Ignoring Who Sent Them
When outlets like The New Arab muse about 'foreign fighters' testing Syria's stability ( The New Arab ), you might wonder where these fighters materialized from. The historical context they often omit is the overt and covert backing by various Western and regional powers—including Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Turkey, and the United States—who funded and armed extremist groups from 2011 onward, a strategy
well-documented even by agencies like the DIA and CIA (see 2012 DIA memo on 'Salafists, Muslim Brotherhood and AQI' being the 'major forces' in the insurgency). So, the 'stability' now being 'tested' is the direct outcome of a decade-long foreign policy masterclass in 'regime change,' which somehow always manages to leave behind an intractable mess of radicalized opportunists. It’s almost as if
creating a vacuum of power and then flooding it with weapons and proxies has predictable, if inconvenient, consequences for subsequent news cycles. One might even call it an investment—the kind that keeps on giving, particularly to those in the arms industry.