Within hours of Israel practically unilaterally declaring a cease fire on November 27 in Lebanon, sitting across the table from the Lebanese government with whom it has not been warring - that Hezbollah that was conspicuously not at that table - HTS forces surged out of Idlib, Syria and began rapidly to take clay. Idlib has been under the purview of Turkey, and it is Erdogan, Turkeys Machiavellian ruler, that seems to have been unleashed by Israel to seize Syria.
Erdogan has bleated all manner of dire deprecations and condemnations of Israel for it's genocidal ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people in Gaza, but this stopwatch timing of the HTS assault from Idlib reveals he has most obviously coordinated the attack he has unleashed with Israel, completely contradicting the smoke and mirrors he has belched out for the benefit of the largely Muslim population of Turkey. What is even more duplicitous is the response of Russian President Vladimir Putin, fresh from meeting with Erdogan in Astana during the BRICS deliberations a week or so prior to this military assault. Erdogan has been instrumental in enabling Russia to sidestep US and EU sanctions, serving as a conduit for Russian oil and gas that enabled the EU to buy them from unsanctioned Turkey, pretending they weren't buying energy from Russia contrary to the sanctions regimes that limited how much and at what price Russia sells it's mineral resources.
"The foreign ministers of the three guarantor countries — Russia, Iran and Turkey — are in close contact with each other," Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova told reporters on Wednesday."
"In a phone call on Tuesday, Russian President Vladimir Putin told Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan that the conflict needed a "speedy end," and condemned "terrorist aggression against the Syrian state."-Moscow Times
HTS forces, the latest iteration of a baffling and bewildering evolution of Islamic Jihad in Syria, have quickly taken Aleppo, moved on to Hama, and may be skipping right past Homs to strike Damascus in the rush to end the Alawite rule of Bashar Assad - who has wisely moved camp to Moscow in the face of the quick collapse of Syrian control of the country.
I include here a handy list of the forces active in the fighting in Syria.
The statements of the HTS forces reveal why Israel first disengaged from Hezbollah only hours before the attack in Syria began, as the ostensibly Muslim fighters are obviously proxies for Israel, and originally supplied by the US CIA Director George HW Bush who created al Qaeda decades ago under President Jimmy Carter.
The initial claims of the US and Israel to be opposed to al Qaeda have by now been thoroughly refuted, and these terrorist forces are clearly US and Israeli proxies as they always have been.