Due to global public pressure, and despite rabid internal opposition, the US Treasury on February 10th enacted a 180-day waiver on certain sanctions imposed on Syria, to allow for vital earthquake relief to reach the country. Still, neither Washington nor its constellation of international allies have provided any meaningful assistance to Damascus whatsoever, despite the death toll grimly ratcheting daily. Meanwhile, Israeli officials have expressed a perverse readiness to bomb Iranian aid deliveries arriving by land.

Complicating matters further, hardline extremist groups that still occupy portions of Syrian territory, such as Hayat Tahrir al-Sham in the north west, are blocking the government’s attempts to distribute provisions, refusing shipments passage through its checkpoints. As an Idlib-based spokesperson for the group told Reuters, “we won’t allow the regime to take advantage of the situation to show they are helping.”

These pockets of resistance criss-cross the country, an enduring and shameful legacy of the West’s failed decade-long dirty war against Damascus. Almost never acknowledged by the mainstream media, their continued presence is particularly relevant to consider now, for they are relics of a time when the Western world was only too eager to invest vast sums to flood Syria with medical aid – in service of regime change.

Healthcare as Psychological Warfare

In August 2016, a remarkable and never before disclosed covert British intelligence operation began near Amman, Jordan. At a secret training site operated by London and Washington, Foreign Office contractor Torchlight – which this journalist has repeatedly exposed for assisting Britain’s infiltration of security and spying agencies across West Asia – extensively tutored violent groups funded and armed by the CIA and MI6 in providing medical assistance to opposition fighters.

Internal documents related to the effort note that at the time it was launched, injured fighters relied “on inadequately prepared and supported self-help at the point of injury, followed by ad hoc systems and capabilities to evacuate and treat them in a hostile and austere environment,” with an overwhelming reliance on civilian hospitals and healthcare infrastructure.

Moreover, CIA and MI6-supported extremist groups lacked “dedicated doctors”, and medical professionals locally, while willing to treat anyone whatever their ailments, remained “keen to maintain their independence” lest they be accused of serving as in-house doctors for armed actors. Even these practitioners often did not have access to high-tech equipment such as scanners for detecting internal bleeding, or blood products.

So it was Torchlight set about training 200 opposition actors every year for three years in all conceivable medical disciplines, and equipping them accordingly. While London was careful not to publicize the initiative’s existence in any way, its results were intended to be broadcast widely locally and internationally – for MAO CASEVAC’s objectives were as practical as they were psychological.

“If the MAO is able to provide this support then fighters will have greater confidence that they can be provided for in case of injury. Consequently, this will improve motivation, a sense of welfare, and the credibility of MAO troops, as well as reducing battlefield losses. This will add credibility to the MAO.”

As such, MAO CASEVAC was but one component of Britain’s wide-ranging information warfare blitzkriegthroughout the Syrian dirty war, designed to destabilise the government of Bashar Assad, while rebranding the murderous militant groups rampaging across the country as a “moderate” alternative. Its founding documents make these objectives very clear.

Noting that the British government sought to “foster a negotiated political transition” in Syria, these papers openly state that MAO CASEVAC’s  aim was to “generate pressure” on the Assad government.

This was predicated on the notion that regime change required “an empowered opposition on the ground,” capable of convincing locals, Western citizens and international bodies that they were courageous freedom fighters on a righteous mission, rather than a ragtag bunch of crazed fundamentalists complicit in countless hideous atrocities, wholly dependent on foreign backing to survive in every way.

‘Risk of Ricochet’

Another indication of MAO CASEVAC’s darker nature is provided in Torchlight documents on risks related to is operation. The training area in Jordan, provided to the company by British intelligence “at no cost to the project,” offered “accommodation, ablution, dining, classrooms, driving tracks, outside rural environment areas, and open space for equipment storage.”

“Other training conducted on the site involves live firing. Consequently third party personnel are in possession of weapons and live ammunition on the camp in addition to the Jordanian Security Personnel on site. Risk of ricochet from the live firing ranges onto the driving range and wider area behind. There is likely to be overlap of live firing and driving courses [emphasis added].”

Absent was any consideration of students joining al-Nusra Front or Daesh, and equipment being one way or another appropriated by these terrorist groups, but these considerations were writ large in leaked Foreign Office risk assessments of the fighter training program, which was likewise overseen by British intelligence cutouts.

Eerily, the Foreign Office, which funded the program to the tune of $21 million over the same timeframe as MAO CASEVAC, with up to 600 fighters trained annually as a result, was intensely relaxed about those prospects. Any loss of equipment would simply be “tolerated” by London to “a reasonable degree.”

The same was true of AJACS, a highly controversial British intelligence “aid” project that created the Free Syrian Police, which was run in coordination with Nour al-Din al-Zinki, a CIA-backed entity linked to heinous crimes against humanity, including the videotaped beheading of a Palestinian teenager in 2016. The implementing contractor of that effort, notorious Adam Smith International, simply didn’t consider it “cost effective” to prevent their participation.

All of which begs the question of whether the real objective behind MAO CASEVAC and other interrelated British intelligence operations in Syria was to insidiously bolster and equip the most violent, deranged elements on-the-ground.

At the very least, it’s evident whatever anxieties London may harbour today about humanitarian aid making its way to Damascus, an enemy state in dire need of respite, hasn’t historically applied to terrorist groups that further its interests in the country. Which may account for why they remain active there so long after the dirty war theoretically ended.