WikiLeaks Secret Cable: ‘Overthrow the Syrian Regime, but Play Nice With Russia’

by Tyler Durden

Hours after the overnight US-led missile strikes on Syria, WikiLeaks republished a crucially important diplomatic cable through its official media accounts confirming that Saudi Arabia’s long term strategy in Syria has been to pursue regime change “by all means available.” According to the leaked internal Saudi government document, this is the kingdom’s proposed end-goal even should the United States at any point show “lack of desire” due to the threat of Russian response and possibility of a ‘great power’ confrontation.

With American lawmakers and media pundits already urging President Trump to escalate and sustain attacks against Syria, it must be remembered that close US allies like Israel and Saudi Arabia have long coordinated to create the conditions that might tip the US administration toward full military action resulting in regime change in Damascus. And more recently, fresh off his weeks-long tour of the US, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman has both slammed previous proposals of US troop withdrawal in Syria and declared eagerness “to work with allies on any military response in Syria if needed.”

It is also essential to recall that the al-Qaeda linked group which originated the claims of a government orchestrated chemical attack on civilians in the Damascus suburb of Douma, called Jaish al Islam (JAI), is and has always been state sponsored by the Saudi regime. The Guardian, among others, reported beginning in 2013 that Saudi Arabia founded and trained the group, spending millions. 

Secret Saudi cable produced by WikiLeaks: Saudi Arabia “must seek by all means available and all possible ways to overthrow the current regime in Syria” even should the United States at any point show “lack of desire.”

Notably, as Russia as well as some Western counter-terror experts continue to point the finger at Jaish al Islam (and the “White Helmets”) for staging the Douma “chemical attack” in order to provoke the US military response, it has emerged through past reporting that JAI itself had used chemical weapons against Kurdish militias in Aleppo’s Sheikh Maqsoud district in 2016 (and it appears that the Saudi-backed group openly admitted to carrying out prior chemical attacks according to The Daily Beast).

Given this current context and the continued rapid unfolding of the crisis, the previously leaked ‘secret’ Saudi memo published by WikiLeaks takes on new significance and meaning: did the Saudis finally trigger their “by any means available” scenario (a ‘chemical incident’) at a moment when their proxies were collapsing in the face of overwhelming Syrian Army victory? 

The below article and translation was originally authored by Brad Hoff in 2016 for WikiLeaks and Foreign Policy Journal, and is used here with permission.  

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Secret Intel Memo: Overthrow the Regime “by all means available”

A WikiLeaks cable released as part of “The Saudi Cables” in the summer of 2015, now fully translated here for the first time, reveals what the Saudis feared most in the early years of the war: Russian military intervention and Syrian retaliation. These fears were such that the kingdom directed its media “not to oppose Russian figures and to avoid insulting them” at the time.

Saudi Cable: Overthrow the Syrian Regime, but Play Nice with Russia https://t.co/m20O20X3Uz

— WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) April 14, 2018

Saudi Arabia had further miscalculated that the “Russian position” of preserving the Assad government “will not persist in force.” In Saudi thinking, reflected in the leaked memo, Assad’s violent ouster (“by all means available”) could be pursued so long as Russia stayed on the sidelines.

The following section of the leaked cable is categorical in its emphasis on regime change at all cost, even should the U.S. vacillate for “lack of desire”:

“The fact must be stressed that in the case where the Syrian regime is able to pass through its current crisis in any shape or form, the primary goal that it will pursue is taking revenge on the countries that stood against it, with the Kingdom and some of the countries of the Gulf coming at the top of the list. If we take into account the extent of this regime’s brutality and viciousness and its lack of hesitancy to resort to any means to realize its aims, then the situation will reach a high degree of danger for the Kingdom, which must seek by all means available and all possible ways to overthrow the current regime in Syria. As regards the international position, it is clear that there is a lack of ‘desire’ and not a lack of ‘capability’ on the part of Western countries, chief among them the United States, to take firm steps…”

Amman-based Albawaba News—one of the largest online news providers in the Middle East—was the first to call attention to the WikiLeaks memo, which “reveals Saudi officials saying President Bashar al-Assad must be taken down before he exacts revenge on Saudi Arabia.” Albawaba offered a brief partial translation of the cable, which though undated, was likely produced in early 2012 (based on my best speculation using event references in the text; Russia began proposing informal Syrian peace talks in January 2012).

Russian Hardware, a Saudi Nightmare

Over the past weeks Saudi Arabia has ratcheted up its rhetoric on Syria, threatening direct military escalation and the insertion of special forces on the ground, ostensibly for humanitarian and stabilizing purposes as a willing partner in the “war on terror.” As many pundits are now observing, in reality the kingdom’s saber rattling stems not from confidence, but utter desperation as its proxy anti-Assad fighters face defeat by overwhelming Russian air power and Syrian ground forces, and as the Saudi military itself is increasingly bogged down in Yemen.

Even as the Saudi regime dresses its bellicose rhetoric in humanitarian terms, it ultimately desires to protect the flow of foreign fighters into Northern Syria, which is its still hoped-for “available means” of toppling the Syrian government (or at least, at this point, permanent sectarian partition of Syria).

U.S. State Department Confirmation

The U.S. State Department’s own 2014 Country Report on Terrorism confirms that the rate of foreign terrorist entry into Syria over the past few years is unprecedented among any conflict in history:

“The rate of foreign terrorist fighter travel to Syria–totaling more than 16,000 foreign terrorist fighters from more than 90 countries as of late December–exceeded the rate of foreign terrorist fighters who traveled to Afghanistan and Pakistan, Iraq, Yemen, or Somalia at any point in the last 20 years.”

According to Cinan Siddi, Director of the Institute for Turkish Studies at Georgetown’s prestigious School of Foreign Service, Russian military presence in Syria was born of genuine geopolitical interests. In a public lecture recently given at Baylor University, Siddi said that Russia is fundamentally trying to disrupt the “jihadi corridor” facilitated by Turkey and its allies in Northern Syria.

The below leaked document gives us a glimpse into Saudi motives and fears long before Russian hardware entered the equation, and the degree to which the kingdom utterly failed in assessing Russian red lines.

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A full translation of the text

Philosophers stone – selected views from the boat http://philosophers-stone.co.uk