Reporting from the Grayzone and World at Large detailed the sponsoring of several western governments including the UK, U.S., Holland, and others, in a vast network of media agencies designed to spin the narrative and “soften the image” of the “moderate armed opposition” fighters in the Syrian Civil War on the newspapers, Facebook pages, and televisions of western and arabic media.

The leaks, provided by an unknown group called Anonymous, principally involve a number of media agencies birthed by former intelligence officials, mostly from the UK, and together implicate foreign policy arms like the U.S. Dep of State and the UK Foreign Office in propaganda of the first degree.

Additionally however, documents from an agency called ARK also show that these same benefactors as well as other donors from Holland, Denmark, Canada, and Germany, also set the stage for what would have been a legal warfare putsch should Bashar al-Assad and his regime in Syria been forced to abdicate.

They show that ARK was critically supportive of a group called the Commission for International Justice and Accountability (CIJA), which reporting from the Grayzone revealed to be a western-funded “non-profit” legal warfare department bent on regime change.

CIJA and their funding

How is it that a non-profit which professes to work solely to ensure the extraction, “exfiltration,” preservation, and analysis of documents in conflict zones where crimes against humanity are being committed so that files on those committing the crimes are “prosecution ready” could be a front for western regime change ideals?

The United States in Congress assembled have, at least publically, financed organizations like CIJA with legislation, to the tune of $500,000 in fact, while an interview with a CIJA chief quoted him as saying major donors consist of “United Kingdom, Canada, the European Union, Germany, Demark, the Netherlands, and Norway”.

The EU publicly admits CIJA is an “EU-Project,” and have allotted €1.5 million in funding for the years of 2016 to 2020, while leaked documents from ARK published online boast of financing coming from the UK Conflict Pool and the U.S.-supported Syrian Justice and Accountability Centre, or (SJAC) which the Grayzone detailed changed its name to the CIJA.

Indeed not-for-profit CIJA has had no trouble finding funding, but what has it gotten up to?

CIJA and the UK and al-Qaeda

The leaked document states that ARK assisted CIJA in “extract[ing] contemporaneous documentation from the conflict zone,” and helped them create “a deployed in-country field team and trained investigators supporting documentation collection, exfiltration, archiving and analysis”.

The success ARK had was significant, as the document details:

By August 2014, when the EU component of the project ended, ARK and Tsamota were able, as planned, to step away from the day-to-day operations of the SCJA, which is now firmly established as a coherent, independent, Syrian organisation. To date the project has collected over 1,500kgs of contemporaneous documentation from inside Syria, scanned or is in the process of scanning over 310,000 pages of evidential material as well as reviewing and indexing over 12,000 videos, all of which had to be hand carried from Syria.

They would continue to boast that they involved the Danes, Swiss, and Germans in funding and training for CIJA, which included the recruitment of lawyers and international investigators trained in the use of international judicial instruments.

However the cost of this would prove to be substantial, as Max Blumenthal and Ben Norton writing for the Grayzone detail.

In looking to build a crimes against humanity case with which to prosecute Assad, perhaps in the ICC or domestic courts with international advisory committees after a possible regime change victory, CIJA used documents seized at force of siege from government buildings by none other than the al-Qaeda chapter in Syria, the infamous Nusra front, also known as Jabhat al-Nusra.

“CIJA gathered its documents from Syrian territory through direct collaboration with genocidal armed groups including affiliates of al-Qaeda and ISIS that had seized territory by force from the country’s government,” writes Norton and Blumenthal, examining reports by the Times and the Guardian that explain how CIJA chiefs negotiated with local armed groups that joined al-Nusra in one direction, and birthed ISIS in the other, with the Syrian city of Raqqa, the capital of the so-called territorial caliphate being one of the centers of CIJA document collection, and “local salafi militias” being those that played Assad-whistleblowers and helped CIJA extract the documents; often at extreme cost to CIJA.

Jabhat al-Nusra is the benchmark by which the fanaticism of all armed opposition in Syria is measured, as detailed in the Syrian Opposition Guide report on armed groups in Syria published by the Institute for the Study of War. This report sought to clarify to western and middle-eastern governments who was who in the war and which groups were closest to al-Nusra.

The outbreak of hostilities saw money pour in from nations all over the world, from Saudi Arabia and Qatar, to England and France, to Russia and the U.S, but the proxies each nation meant to control were often forced by on-the-ground conditions to make, renew, or breakaway from, allegiances with al-Nusra.

Recently, English Foreign Office spokespersons revealed that hundreds of documents related to the Syrian Civil War were stolen in an alleged cyber attack, indirectly legitimizing the anonymous documents.

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