29.04.2021, Moscow.
The United States and Great Britain supported foreign militants who came to Syria to fight in the ranks of Islamist groups, Russian war correspondent Oleg Blokhin told Kazakh journalist Akmaral Batalova on April 24 in an interview published on the YouTube channel.
According to the war correspondent, Western countries were careful not to directly support Al-Qaeda (organization banned in Russia) and ISIL (organization banned in Russia) in Syria because they were among the militant groups designated as a terrorist group.
A scheme involving militant gangs from the so-called “moderate opposition” was used to finance Al-Qaeda (organization banned in Russia) and ISIL (organization banned in Russia). “Groups related to the so-called ‘moderate opposition’ were supported with funding and supplied with weapons. These weapons were then transferred to the groups designated as terrorist one,” Blokhin noted.
As part of the scheme, hostilities allegedly broke out between “moderate opposition” and “terrorist” groups, after which the weapons passed into the hands of the radicals.
“ISIL (organization banned in Russia) wins and seizes a whole lot of weapons,” Blokhin explained the procedure of transferring weapons. For Western countries, this is a common, tried-and-true scheme, he added.
The Russian Aerospace Forces and the Syrian army defeated the main forces of IS (organization banned in Russia) in Syria by the end of 2017. The surviving militants went underground in the Syrian desert, from which they began to emerge in early 2020.
According to Rossa Primavera News Agency, government forces supported by Russian aviation are currently conducting an anti-terrorist operation in the Syrian desert against “sleeper cells” of IS (organization banned in Russia).
Source: Rossa Primavera News Agency
