A bitter row has erupted between Kiev and Warsaw, after Volodymyr Zelensky renamed a Ukrainian military unit the “Heroes of the UPA”. The UPA - Ukrainian Insurgent Army - was an ultranationalist faction heavily implicated in the Holocaust, which slaughtered up to 100,000 Polish civilians during World War II. In addition to commemorating the mass-murdering militant group, the corpse of Andriy Melnyk, leader of UPA parent the Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN-B), was reburied in Kiev. At a grand accompanying ceremony, Zelensky declared:

The unspeakable horrors inflicted upon Poles - and Communists, Jews, Romani and other “undesirables” - by Melynk and his fellow Nazi collaborators were of course unmentioned. So too that the genocidal nationalism practiced and preached by Melynk was covertly promoted and sponsored for decades by Anglo-American intelligence, within and without Ukraine. The ongoing proxy conflict is a direct product of this little-known spectral meddling, which was specifically concerned with promoting cultural and ethnic difference, and enmity, between Russians and Ukrainians globally.

As this journalist has previously revealed, in August 1957 the CIA secretly drew up elaborate plans for a US special forces invasion of Ukraine. Intended to collapse the wider Soviet Union, the Agency’s conspiracy depended heavily on recruiting local fascists as footsoldiers. A significant stumbling block to the Agency’s plot, however, was much of Ukraine’s population actually harbouring “few grievances” against Russians or Communism. “Points of conflict” between Russians and Ukrainians, which could be exploited by the CIA to foment a mass uprising, were scant.

The Agency lamented how “the long history of union between Russia and Ukraine, which stretches in an almost unbroken line from 1654 to the present day,” had resulted in “many Ukrainians” having “adopted the Russian way of life.” Moreover, the similarity of their “languages, customs, and backgrounds,” and the “great influence” of Russian culture in Ukraine, meant the overwhelming majority of Ukrainians felt “little national antagonism.” Yet, the CIA believed “important grievances exist,” and “under favorable conditions” Ukrainians would assist US invaders.

Unmentioned in the invasion planning documents, the CIA had since 1949 been covertly striving to create those “favorable conditions.” A key Agency asset used for the purpose was OUN-B chief Mykola Lebed. In 1943, he proposed to “cleanse the entire revolutionary territory” - today’s western Ukraine - of its Polish population, to prevent any future Polish state from claiming the region. A post-war US Army counterintelligence report branded Lebed a “well-known sadist,” and Nazi collaborator.

The nucleus of Lebed’s international fascist agitation was Prolog, a New York-based publishing firm. A 1966 CIA memo noted this “cover organization” for the Ukrainian Supreme Liberation Council (ZP/UHVR) was established to conduct “clandestine activity.” It approvingly added that Prolog’s work “contributes to Ukrainian nationalist ferment and to intellectual resistance to Soviet repression by exploiting existing and encouraging new deviationist tendencies” in Ukraine. Elsewhere, the Agency declared it was “important to continue to encourage divisive manifestation” of this sort. The explicitly stated objective was triggering “nationalist flareups” in the USSR:

‘Existing Suspicions’

A late 1953 Agency memo documents how the CIA for years broadcast “black radio transmissions” in Ukrainian from a secret CIA installation in Athens, Greece. “Soviet officialdom, Soviet military forces stationed in the Ukraine, the indigenous civilian population…the underground movement and the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA)” were an intended target audience of 40 million people, upon whom the Agency wished to have a “significant propaganda impact.” Produced by ultranationalist emigres who’d fled Ukraine after World War II, the project sought to foment insurrectionary anti-Communist violence:

Publicly, the station’s US-made broadcasts - which included Ukrainian folk songs - were “attributed to a notional group of Ukrainian Anti-Communists.” There was no connection “actual or implied, with any established Ukrainian emigre group.” It was of the utmost importance too the CIA’s hand in creating and running the station was concealed - “every effort will be made to keep this risk at a minimum.” However, the operation’s ruinous spoils were considered well-worth the hazards.

“It will provide a wedge which can be driven deeper between the Soviets and the Ukrainians and would exacerbate existing suspicions and antagonisms between the two ethnic factions,” the CIA declared. The Agency also sought to create a wider “psychological climate” among Ukrainian audiences which would be “more favorable” to other anti-Soviet operations it was simultaneously conducting. Moreover, it was forecast “Soviet reaction to the broadcasts may indicate certain areas of vulnerability or sensitivity not heretofore recognized,” which could be further exploited.

‘Imperial Policy’

The CIA’s efforts to encourage Ukrainian nationalism and separatism endured throughout the Cold War. Via avowed CIA front the National Endowment for Democracy, overt US assistance was provided to Rukh (The People’s Movement of Ukraine). One of Soviet Ukraine’s first opposition parties, Rukh is widely considered to have played a key role in securing Ukraine’s ‘independence’ in December 1991. Four months earlier, US President George H W Bush had visited Kiev and given an infamous speech in which he cautioned Ukrainians against embracing “suicidal nationalism based upon ethnic hatred.”

His comments enraged Ukrainian nationalists, and Stateside anti-Soviet hawks. Yet, Bush’s fears were well-founded. By this point, Yugoslavia was rapidly disintegrating, engulfed by ever-violent fratricidal tensions. His administration was thus formally committed at this time to preserving the Soviet Union in some form, and undertook ill-fated measures in service of this goal. Too little, too late, that mission’s failure set Ukraine hurtling towards all-out conflict with Russia. As long-desired by the CIA, “antagonisms between the two ethnic factions” now run deep.

In a bitter twist, it was precisely because the NED-orchestrated February 2014 Maidan coup was led by rabidly anti-Russian nationalist elements that a majority of Ukrainians did not support the Maidan movement. As a contemporary Washington Post analysis noted, Viktor Yanukovych remained “the most popular political figure in the country,” and no poll conducted to date had ever indicated mass support for the uprising. Surveys conversely showed “large majorities” of Ukrainians opposed the violent storming of regional governments by Maidan insurrectionists.

This hostility was spurred by “anti-Russian rhetoric and the iconography of western Ukrainian nationalism…not [playing] well among the Ukrainian majority.” Washington Post noted how Neo-Nazi party Svoboda was at Maidan’s forefront. Its leader Oleh Tyahnybok had infamously praised the UPA for fighting “against the Moskali [Russians], Germans, Zhydy [Jews] and other scum.” His words were not well-received by the 50% of Ukraine’s population residing in regions that had “strongly identified with Russia” for over two centuries. “Nearly all are alienated by anti-Russian rhetoric and symbols”:

Fast forward to now, and in response to Ukraine’s state-level glorification of the ultranationalist UPA and its lead genocidaire Andriy Melnyk, Polish President Karol Nawrocki has announced he will seek to strip Zelensky of the Order of the White Eagle, Warsaw’s highest honour, bestowed in 2023. Meanwhile, premier Donald Tusk has cursed the Ukrainian leader’s actions as “[wounding] our historical sensitivity,” and “worrying from the point of view of our relations.”

Authorities in Kiev appear entirely unconcerned their close neighbour and proxy war ally has been so egregiously insulted. A Foreign Ministry spokesperson claimed Zelensky had not wished to cause any offence. “Our history confirms only Moscow benefits from disputes between Ukrainians and Poles,” they said. Besides, for Ukrainian soldiers, “the struggle of the UPA symbolises strictly the opposition to Moscow’s imperial policy.” As the CIA always intended, two antithetical versions of history are now effectively at war in Donbass. A more devastating modern day example of divide and conquer in action one would be hard-pressed to identify.

On April 12th, a political earthquake in Hungary upended 16 years of continuous rule by Viktor Orban. It was a period characterised by ever-mounting and fractious confrontation between Budapest and the European Commission, the EU’s executive body. Now, Orban’s exit has removed a major barrier to EU federalisation, and militarisation. Brussels’ fingerprints are plastered all over his departure from office, and the Commission now evidently perceives an ideal opportunity to exert its will not only over the bloc’s 27 member states, but beyond.

Countless legitimate criticisms could be levelled against Orban, and his lengthy run in power. He himself proudly characterised his ruling ideology as a fundamentally illiberal, nationalist project. Budapest under his stewardship clashed with Brussels on rule-of-law concerns spanning academic, judicial and media freedom, migration, minority rights, and social justice issues. Yet, Orban also stood firm against ongoing attempts to erode EU member state sovereignty, and promoted opposition across the bloc to construction of a fully federalized, continent-spanning superstate governed by the unelected Commission.

New prime minister Peter Magyar exploded onto Hungary’s political scene in March 2024, having no history of activism or prior public platform. Attacking Orban’s government for corruption while supporting greater EU integration, he was instantly anointed Budapest’s leader-in-waiting by Western politicians and news outlets. His unprecedented rise was significantly assisted by a vast anti-Orban media and civil society ecosystem locally, lavishly funded by Brussels. Obvious questions about whether Magyar’s abrupt, stratospheric success was truly organic haven’t been asked in the mainstream.

Over Orban’s last term in office too, the EU waged devastatingly effective, open financial warfare on Hungary. From late 2022 onwards, Brussels began freezing tens of billions in funds owed to Budapest, due to an array of rule-of-law concerns. It represented a significant proportion of the country’s GDP. To unlock these sums and finance everything from infrastructure repairs to stimulus for businesses affected by the COVID19 pandemic, Orban’s government needed to pass 27 separate reforms - dubbed “super milestones”. Authorities rejected many demands outright.

The withheld funds added to already grave economic woes locally, including high inflation, rising unemployment, and stagnant wages. This handed Magyar a highly compelling campaign platform - he promised to instantly unlock the cash upon taking office, when Budapest was again “a fully-fledged member of the EU.” Within days of Magyar’s election victory, a Commission delegation duly visited Hungary to discuss unfreezing over €30 billion in initial assistance. Magyar subsequently boasted how much-needed EU resources would “soon arrive.”

With Hungary brought to heel, the EU Commission is quickly moving to repeat the ploy in neighbouring Serbia and Slovakia, cutting the pair off from sizeable funds to ‘correct’ their behaviour. Both countries have long-frustrated the domestic and international designs of Brussels and Berlin in different ways. With inter-bloc opposition neutralised, never has the Commission been so assertive in pursuing its objectives. The implications for how the EU acts internationally, and its constituent member states and populations progressively unable to resist Brussels’ diktats, are massive.

‘European Continent’

On April 22nd, EU Commission chief Ursula von der Leyen declared: “we must succeed in completing the European continent so that it does not fall under Russian, Turkish or Chinese influence.” A Commission spokesperson clarified von der Leyen’s unprecedentedly combative comments specifically referred to future EU expansion into the West Balkans, much of which formerly comprised Yugoslavia. Opposition to EU membership is widespread throughout the region, especially in Serbia, while the Turkish government formally categorises it as a major foreign policy “priority”.

These statements thus rankled Ankara, itself a longstanding EU candidate country with strong cultural, economic, and historic ties to the West Balkans. Under von der Leyen’s bold, belligerent vision for future Europe, Turkey will be categorised alongside Beijing and Moscow as an unwelcome regional contaminant. Endless rounds of sanctions have almost completely cut off Russia from the bloc since February 2022, in every way. Concurrently, numerous Chinese investment projects in the EU have been rejected, while import of Beijing’s goods in key sectors is increasingly restricted.

Moreover, less than 24 hours after Orban’s defeat, von der Leyen bombastically called for an end to EU member state veto power on foreign policy matters. This is a deeply troubling shift. Advocates of greater EU federalism and integration - including outspoken, high-ranking Commission apparatchiks - have long-argued for ending the requirement of member state unanimity in sensitive policy areas, including enlargement, defence and security. Many Europeans reject the move. However, no EU member state is now likely to push back.

Under Orban, Budapest recently vetoed an EU membership plan for Ukraine, a €90 billion loan to Kiev, appropriation of frozen Russian assets, bloc-wide bans on importing Moscow’s oil and gas, and other controversial matters. With vetoes done away with, major foreign policy decisions could be made by Brussels with just 15 of the EU’s 27 member states agreeing. European governments and/or citizens unsupportive of these moves would have little recourse to oppose such changes, even if directly affected by them.

This could eventually extend to construction of a unified EU army. In October 2025, the EU Commission’s Defence, Industry and Space department published the so-called “Readiness Roadmap 2030”. It demands member states invest heavily in their militaries and war-fighting capabilities, while establishing joint bloc projects, such as a European drone force, in formal alliance with Ukraine. Meanwhile, in January EU Defence and Space Commissioner Andrius Kubilius proposed creating a 100,000-strong standing European rapid reaction force.

That same month, laws requiring German men aged 17 - 45 to obtain approval from the Bundeswehr if they intend to leave the country for more than three months came into effect. The move reintroduces military conscription, if not enough citizens voluntarily enlist. Due to widespread outcry, the requirement was dropped in early April. Weeks later though, officials in Berlin formally unveiled ominous Bundeswehr strategy documents, outlining plans for Germany to possess Europe’s biggest army by 2039. The papers identify Russia as Europe’s gravest threat.

Before vetoes have even been axed, EU member state opposition to the Commission’s foreign agenda is already precipitously shrinking. Brussels’ threats of financial penalties have prompted Slovak premier Robert Fico to jettison all objections to loaning Ukraine tens of billions. He also intends to visit Kiev, to prove his commitment to supposed European values. Given Fico was elected on a popular platform of ending his country’s financial and material support for Ukraine, and undoing EU-encouraged anti-Russian sanctions, the domestic implications could be significant.

‘Russian Disinformation’

In August 2023, the highly controversial EU Digital Services Act came into force. Under its terms, the EU Commission, member state election authorities, and EU-funded NGOs are granted enormous power to police online speech, under the cover of countering “disinformation”. Repeatedly in recent years, Brussels has activated a little-known “rapid response system” around European elections, to demand social networks censor supposedly problematic content, and ban offending users. If social networks fail to act as required by the Commission, they face massive fines and other penalties.

The strict EU-wide censorship regime established by the DSA’s adoption operated almost entirely hidden from European citizens, until the US Senate Judiciary Committee published a report in February this year exposing the Act’s abuse by Brussels. While the DSA has been used to compel platforms to remove false and hateful content, it is also routinely exploited to censor dissenting viewpoints, including Eurosceptic speech. The EU Commission can resultantly exert extraordinary online narrative control within member states and across the continent, at particularly sensitive political junctures.

Slovakia’s September 2023 parliamentary election was hotly-contested, with Fico’s Smer party under relentless attack by pro-Western politicians, NGOs, and media outlets. Fico’s policies are locally popular - many Slovaks even perceive him as too soft - and he won cleanly. Yet, the Judiciary Committee report reveals Brussels engaged in determined skullduggery via the DSA to deny Smer victory. In the months leading up to the vote, the Commission secretly submitted a variety of censorship requests to major social networks via the rapid response system.

Over the week prior to election day, this activity intensified substantially. The EU Commission provided TikTok with spreadsheets listing supposedly “problematic” Slovak accounts publishing “political content”, to be suppressed if not outright banned. In many cases, these users had seemingly done nothing actionable. This included a “well-known and popular” Slovak influencer primarily publishing “non-problematic” posts, “focused on entertainment.” Local users sharing political humour, and a Communist party member, were among other apparently innocuous accounts also in the Commission’s censorship crosshairs.

The rapid response mechanism was likewise put into play around the 2024 European parliament elections. Underscoring the vote’s importance from the EU Commission’s perspective, representatives of social networks were explicitly warned behind-closed-doors Brussels would “take enforcement actions” if they failed to act on censorship requests, in the vote’s leadup. Under direct threat of financial and legal retaliation, Google, Meta and TikTok purged a vast quantity of “misinformation” from their platforms at the Commission’s explicit behest.

TikTok alone censored over 45,000 pieces of content. Problematically, EU parliamentarians vote for the EU Commission’s president, and confirm its commissioners. The Commission was thus via the DSA ideally positioned to insulate itself and EU policies from online criticism throughout Europe, while promoting pro-EU political parties running for election. The DSA’s potential impact on Orban’s loss is difficult to quantify. On March 16th an EU spokesperson activated the “rapid response system”, to deal with purported “Russian disinformation” in Hungary’s election.

‘Romanian Democracy’

In December 2024, Romania’s constitutional court cancelled the country’s ongoing presidential election, after upstart outsider Calin Georgescu won the vote’s first round. Running on a Eurosceptic, nationalist platform - including ending Bucharest’s financial and military support for the nearby Ukraine proxy war - contemporary polls showed Georgescu was en route to becoming President via landslide. The shocking annulment was justified by authorities on the grounds a supposedly wide-ranging cloak-and-dagger Russian influence campaign conducted via TikTok had promoted his candidacy, skewing the vote’s result.

No evidence supporting this incendiary charge ever surfaced. Still, EU and US officials publicly endorsed the election’s autocratic voiding. Western media outlets unquestioningly reported that the cancellation was entirely proper, due to malign Muscovite meddling. A contemporary BBC analysis nonetheless admitted Georgescu was hugely - and organically - popular with Romanians, at home and abroad. The British state broadcaster conceded “fatigue” with Bucharest’s pro-NATO political establishment is common locally, and among Romania’s massive diaspora.

Devastating Westernising ‘reforms’ enacted since the fall of Communism mean Romanians harbour ever-multiplying legitimate grievances, entirely unaddressed in the mainstream. Per the BBC, in the annulment’s aftermath, “even those who feared a President Georgescu - and believe Russia was backing him - now worry about the precedent just set for Romanian democracy.” Suspicion widely abounded locally the vote’s cancellation was influenced by foreign actors. The Senate Judiciary report amply exposes how Brussels played a central role in sabotaging Bucharest’s 2024 presidential election.

Before, during and after the vote, “the European Commission took its most aggressive censorship steps” yet uncovered. With the rapid response mechanism activated in advance, authorities in Bucharest “repeatedly made content takedown requests” to social media platforms, using “expansive interpretations” of the DSA and local laws. This extended to demanding TikTok block videos of Georgescu not merely for Romanian audiences, but globally. The social network was wary of the “potential for political influence” on the election, posed by EU-enforced “unjustified removal of legal content.”

For example, TikTok was ordered to censor social media posts purely on the basis they were “disrespectful” to Bucharest’s governing pro-EU Social Democratic Party, with no stated legal rationale. Once Georgescu prevailed in the first round, DSA-inspired censorship orders became “even more aggressive.” Romanian regulators were sufficiently emboldened to order TikTok to purge “all materials” merely featuring images of Georgescu from its platform. In concert, EU-funded NGOs in Romania and the wider region dispatched spreadsheets to social networks “containing hundreds of censorship requests.”

While some of the content earmarked for suppression “may have been genuinely objectionable,” much of the material in question simply set out Georgescu’s policy stances. Bucharest and the EU Commission also pressured TikTok to validate the narrative that its platform was illicitly exploited by the Kremlin to promote Georgescu. After extensive trawling though, TikTok’s internal security team found zero indication of any “coordinated influence operation” to boost his candidacy whatsoever.

However, TikTok’s repeated appeals to Romanian authorities and the EU Commission that Russia hadn’t meddled in the 2024 presidential election were ignored, and remained concealed from public view. In a perverse twist too, the Commission thereafter launched a formal investigation under the DSA into TikTok’s moderation practices for political speech, due to the platform’s supposed role in subverting Romanian democracy. Georgescu was banned from standing in a re-run, which led to the election of a pro-EU coalition government. The administration collapsed on May 5th.

‘Change Policies’

This followed weeks of constantly ratcheting political crisis, during which left-leaning ministers within the ruling coalition resigned over the government’s locally-despised economic austerity measures. Brussels has made Romania unlocking almost €2 billion in state aid contingent on implementing savage public spending cuts, wage and pension freezes, and tax hikes. With public anger rising and the country teetering on the brink of a major recession, on April 23rd EU financial services commissioner Maria Luis Albuquerque quietly journeyed to Bucharest for the first time.

During her visit, she met with representatives of Romania’s finance ministry, stock exchange, National Bank, private investment firms, and trade unions, to discuss “the economic future of Europe.” Albuquerque’s presence was perceived locally as a clear signal Brussels is keeping a close eye on developments, and expects business as usual from Bucharest come what may. The EU Commission surely has little to fear. Due to the overturned November 2024 election, perspectives critical of NATO and the EU have been ruled contrary to the country’s constitution.

Despite surging public agitation for radical change, any Romanian political candidate or party espousing those perspectives is now barred from seeking, let alone occupying, high office. It must never be forgotten how in the wake of Syriza winning a clear mandate to end Brussels-imposed austerity in Greece in January 2015, European Commission vice president Jyrki Katainen bluntly declared: “We don’t change policies depending on elections.” As Greece was part of the eurozone, its government’s economic and political agenda was controlled by Brussels and Berlin, not Athens.

Syriza had little choice but to break all its campaign pledges, and reverse its longstanding ideological positions. The Greek people suffered immensely, and still do. Conversely, Western banks that recklessly loaned vast sums to Athens to fuel an unsustainable economic boom profited enormously from the eurozone crisis, and consequent austerity in Greece. The EU and IMF provided Athens with bailout loans that repaid German and other European lenders, while leaving Greece even more heavily indebted. Unemployment, poverty, and brain drain remain rampant today.

Despite the misery inflicted on Athens via membership of the euro, the single currency has engulfed further EU member states in the years since. Lithuania joined in 2015, Croatia eight years later, and Bulgaria in 2026. Czechia, Denmark, Poland, Romania and Sweden are all expected to join in due course. Magyar’s Hungary is now committed to doing so by 2030. The stage is set for “completing the European continent,” in von der Leyen’s sinister phrase, without citizens or governments anywhere standing in the way.

On May 13th, French outlet RTL published an explosive report, entirely unremarked upon by English language media. It exposed how Ukrainian military and intelligence units are covertly operating in Mali on France’s behalf, in coordination with both ethnic Tuareg rebels and Al Qaeda-linked forces determined to crush the country’s revolutionary government. Furthermore, Kiev is keen to expand and escalate its African operations yet further, and destabilise neighbouring countries. Ukrainian militancy, long-encouraged by the CIA and MI6, has now decisively developed into an international threat.

In August 2020, elements of Mali’s military staged a coup, overthrowing Ibrahim Boubacar Keïta. Ever since, its government has sought to neutralise Western influence locally, while pursuing radical economic policies for the good of the population. French forces were booted out in 2022 after almost a decade of occupation. Mali has instead looked to China and Russia for economic, military and political assistance, while founding the revolutionary Alliance of Sahel States (AES) with neighbouring Burkina Faso and Niger.

Polling shows Malians almost universally embrace their government, and its close alliance with Moscow. However, Bamako’s military administration has throughout its lifetime battled incursions from ethnic Tuareg rebels, backed by murderous extremist groups. Since late April, they have conducted combined offensives, capturing several towns, executing deadly strikes on major cities, attacking state buildings, and murdering Defense Minister Sadio Camara via car bomb. Moreover, government forces backed by Russia’s Africa Corps have been ejected from several key areas.

Bamako and Moscow characterise the bloody upheaval as a thwarted coup attempt. Nonetheless, the situation remains volatile, and potentially grave. RTL now reveals the Al Qaeda-linked unrest has been orchestrated and practically supported all along by “Ukrainian soldiers on the ground, who are cooperating with the Tuareg rebels.” In turn, France can “continue to operate” in Mali “indirectly”. Through Kiev’s cutouts, Paris provides “operational support” to the unpopular and savage local counter-revolutionary insurgency, in the absence of her own occupying army.

Per RTL, “France relies in particular on numerous French-speaking Ukrainian soldiers who served in the Foreign Legion.” It’s not just French-sponsored Ukrainian soldiers attempting to foment civil war and regime change via brute force in Mali. Units of Kiev’s fearsome CIA and MI6-constructed military intelligence agency, the GUR, are also present in profusion. By “limiting its operational support to these Ukrainian proxies, France is thus avoiding direct cooperation with jihadists linked to Al-Qaeda” into the bargain:

‘Syrian Scenario’

RTL reports how “a Franco-Ukrainian alliance” to crush troublesome anti-imperial governments in Africa has been long in the making. Strikingly, Kiev took the lead. At the start of 2025, Ukrainian intelligence proposed a “detailed plan” to their French counterparts, “to dislodge the juntas from the Sahel region, and push back the Russian enemy” from the continent altogether. Paris reportedly “did not follow up on this proposal, particularly due to security concerns.” Yet, “the lock has now been lifted.”

To date, a fusion of battle strategies “seems to favor the jihadists, who are currently allied with Tuareg separatists” - not merely in Mali, but potentially wherever in the region Russian forces are present. As RTL notes, several Sahel countries harshly condemned Ukraine’s involvement in a brutal July 2024 rebel ambush, which allegedly killed 84 Wagner fighters, and 47 Malian soldiers. At the time, a GUR spokesperson boasted how Kiev’s support to the rebels “enabled a successful military operation against Russian war criminals.”

Ukraine’s centrality to the bloodshed was openly advertised, prompting West African governments to issue statements making clear Kiev’s local “interference” was highly unwelcome. Several summoned their respective Ukrainian ambassadors for verbal drubbings. Such was the opprobrium, the BBC contemporaneously enquired whether the operation represented an “own goal in Africa,” threatening to wreck “peaceful Ukrainian diplomacy.” Undeterred, Kiev’s military and intelligence conniving in the Sahel has only ratcheted since. RTL reports that Paris sees this counter-revolutionary activity as “proving its worth in the region.”

The Ukrainian-enabled capture of “major” cities by Mali’s local Al Qaeda affiliate has reportedly “caused a stir between the ruling junta and its Russian ally.” Moreover, Defense Minister Sadio Camara’s assassination was “another blow” directly aimed at Russia’s presence in Mali. Described as “number two in the junta” and “Moscow’s man”, Camara “had been trained in Russia.” Whether his death will be militarily or politically impactful is an open question. But there are ominous indications Ukraine foresees a long engagement in the Sahel.

A lengthy essay published April 29th by Militarnyi, Ukraine’s most prominent military news site, lays bare Kiev’s brutal cloak-and-dagger strategy in Mali and beyond. Headlined Islamist Offensive in Mali: The Prospect of a Syrian Scenario, it details how the successes of Ukraine’s Al Qaeda army in Mali - including Camara’s assassination - are part of a wider military and intelligence operation concerned with “dislodging Russian-Chinese influence from the region” altogether. Damascus being overwhelmed by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham in mere days in December 2024 is cited as inspiration.

“The fall of Assad in Syria and the ascent of the radical Islamist [HTS] demonstrate that the radical wing’s transition to a moderate format occurs at the moment it takes power, assumes responsibility, and requires legitimization from the international community,” Militarnyi remarks. Kiev’s Mali machinations work in tandem with disruption of Moscow’s supply of food and agrochemicals to Sahel’s revolutionary governments, via “systemic Ukrainian drone strikes on Russian refining and chemical production.” These attacks aim to degrade “the capacity of Russia’s leading fertilizer firms.”

Militarnyi promises, “the intensity of Ukrainian strikes against Russian chemical sites will continue to climb.” Meanwhile, Kiev has significantly contributed to the “intensified Islamist offensive” in Mali, dispatching instructors “disseminating FPV drone tactics among insurgent forces” locally. “Rebel battlefield effectiveness” has therefore been “materially boosted”. Beijing is also in the crosshairs of Ukraine’s Sahel offensive, as Moscow’s “hard-power backing” of AES governments - and the “popular loyalty” they enjoy among their populations due to grain and fertilizer deliveries - provides a “security umbrella for Chinese investments.”

‘Clandestine Maneuvers’

An October 2023 Washington Post investigation shed shocking light on the “raging shadow war” waged by Ukrainian intelligence, throughout the West’s proxy conflict with Russia. It documented how many of Kiev’s high-profile foreign operations, including targeted assassinations of figures such as Daria Dugin, were the work of “elite teams of Ukrainian operatives drawn from directorates…formed, trained and equipped in close partnership with the CIA.” From 2015 onwards, US spies “forged deep new bonds” with Ukrainian security and intelligence services, almost rebuilding them “from scratch” entirely.

Notwithstanding the CIA’s separate effective takeover of the SBU, the Agency’s “extensive transformation of the GUR” alone extended to spending many millions of dollars creating new headquarters for the GUR’s “paramilitary division and a separate directorate responsible for electronic espionage.” The CIA has since 2015 variously provided Kiev “with advanced surveillance systems, trained recruits at sites” in Ukraine as well as the US, and much more besides. “The new capabilities were transformative,” turning Kiev’s spying agencies into “potent allies against Moscow.”

In that capacity, the GUR intercepted hundreds of thousands of “separate communications” from Russian military and FSB units on the CIA’s behalf daily. Strikingly, the GUR also “began recruiting operatives for its own new active measures department.” Already, just over 18 months into the proxy war, the department’s activities had reportedly raised significant concerns within the CIA and Ukraine itself. Namely, the GUR’s use of “cutthroat tactics that may seem justified now…but could later prove difficult to rein in.”

An anonymous former senior CIA official warned the Washington Post, “we are seeing the birth of a set of intelligence services that are like Mossad in the 1970s.” They feared Kiev’s CIA-enhanced “proficiency” at assassinations and other black ops carried “broader risks”, if Ukraine’s “intelligence operations” against third countries “become even bolder.” With eerily precise foresight, they predicted chaos wrought overseas by Kiev’s CIA-trained GUR shadow army “might cause rifts with partners,” placing “serious tension” on Ukraine’s “broader strategic goals.” Just as in Mali now.

Despite these anxieties, at sites first on Ukrainian then US soil, “GUR operatives were trained on skills ranging from clandestine maneuvers behind enemy lines to weapons platforms and explosives.” The military intelligence agency has also launched “dozens of attacks” on targets in Russia, including buildings and “noncombatants”, using its deadly in-house drone fleet. A senior Ukrainian operative angsted how such operations play into “Putin’s false narrative” that Kiev poses “a growing danger to ordinary Russians,” and “Ukrainians are coming for them.”

Kiev’s demonic alliance with Al Qaeda in the Sahel amply demonstrates how her CIA and MI6-assisted military and intelligence capabilities definitively represent a “growing danger”, to average citizens the world over. Kiev is openly plotting to replicate HTS’ violent takeover of Damascus, first in Mali, then in Burkina Faso and Niger. Extremist-occupied territories are to multiply, while economic warfare impoverishes and enfeebles the military governments, damaging their domestic popularity. Then, they can be brought to heel via forced capitulation, or outright regime change.

It’s been publicly confirmed Kiev’s clandestine assistance was instrumental in toppling Assad. Now, as Militarnyi openly brags, Ukraine’s alliance with Al Qaeda in Mali is helping drive “a revival of contacts” between AES and the West. This has led to “the first publicly confirmed US diplomatic engagement” with all three Alliance members, in March. The CIA and MI6 have built a monster in militarised Ukraine, which is now training its proxy crosshairs globally with devastating effect. A new World War has begun.

On April 15th, Declassified UK published a bombshell investigation exposing how in the mid-1990s, senior British political and military officials were well-aware NATO expansion into Central and Eastern Europe “would provoke [the] Russians,” and likely trigger all-out war. Hitherto unreported Ministry of Defence files reveal London knew Moscow’s “sensitivities” over a “hostile military alliance” enlarging up to its borders were profound, and based on very “real” concerns. Yet, NATO’s dangerous crusade to absorb Central and Eastern Europe continued apace, ultimately producing the Ukraine proxy conflict.

Since the so-called Special Military Operation’s February 2022 eruption, British officials have relentlessly reiterated the mantra the proxy war was “unprovoked”. However, a declassified March 1995 Foreign Office memo noted “there was a widespread psychological and intellectual perception in Moscow that NATO was a real threat.” In May that year, then-Prime Minister John Major succinctly articulated Russian anxieties to his Irish counterpart John Bruton, as a “fundamental fear…of encirclement.” Concerns about EU membership were comparatively muted:

Still, in 1997 NATO invited Czechia, Hungary, and Poland to join, which they did two years later. In 2004, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania simultaneously joined the military alliance. So too did ex-Warsaw Pact members Bulgaria, Romania, Slovakia, and former Yugoslav republic Slovenia. Declassified UK shows how back in August 1996, British Defence Intelligence prepared a NATO enlargement study specifically forecasting that these countries joining could trigger war, and an alliance military operation launched via Article 5 of the NATO treaty in response.

This refers to collective self-defence, under which NATO members are obligated to come to each other’s defence if attacked. In the scenario, Defence Intelligence assumed “Russia has vehemently opposed NATO membership for the Baltic states and has threatened retaliation to preserve her own security against a perceived hostile military alliance on her borders.” In the real world, Boris Yeltsin made at-times irate public statements about NATO enlargement into the Baltics at the time, while lobbying US President Bill Clinton on the issue behind closed doors.

NATO expansion continued regardless. In December 1996, Declassified UK reports then-Russian premier Viktor Chernomyrdin privately warned Major: “Russia could not stop NATO enlarging, but this would create a fragile situation which could explode.” Other declassified files from this time show senior apparatchiks in London were acutely aware of Moscow’s “concern,” “fears,” “hostility,” “negative attitudes,” and “resentment” over alliance enlargement. Both Major and his successor Tony Blair explicitly pledged in person to Kremlin officials that NATO wouldn’t “move up to Russia’s borders.”

However, a secret September 1996 policy paper made clear Britain was committed “to enlarge NATO to the East,” even if “Russian acquiescence is not possible.” In February 1997, Russia’s deputy foreign minister Nikolai Afanasievsky angrily branded public discussions in Western capitals of admitting former Soviet republics to the alliance a “blatant provocation” in a meeting with Jeremy Greenstock, Britain’s ambassador to Moscow. Greenstock reassured his Russian opposite number NATO had “no intention” of admitting former Soviet states “at this stage” - which, technically, was true.

‘Russian Problem’

A March 1997 Foreign Office memo forecast rapid NATO enlargement would “antagonise,” and ultimately “provoke,” Russia into a belligerent counter-response. Yeltsin’s “anxiety” about the “possible accession of Ukraine, the Baltic states and other states of the former Soviet Union” was considered the “most difficult issue” affecting Western relations with Moscow. A more staggered approach was thus required. That month, John Major met with NATO secretary general Javier Solana, who spoke of “Russians fears about NATO troops and equipment moving eastwards.”

Reflecting the deep unpopularity and distrust of NATO expansion among many sections of the Russian public and political class, Solana relayed to Major how Moscow’s foreign minister Yegeny Primakov “had more or less begged him for help in giving the Russians reassurance about NATO forces not moving eastwards.” A month later, Yeltsin dispatched a strongly worded private letter to John Major:

Hitherto unreported declassified CIA files amply demonstrate Washington’s cognisance of vehement public and state-level Russian opposition to NATO military action and enlargement not only in the former Warsaw Pact and Soviet Union, but the former Yugoslavia, dates back even further. A January 1993 CIA memo discussed “Serbia and the Russian Problem”. The Agency perceived it necessary - but potentially difficult - to secure Moscow’s acquiescence to US and UN actions being taken against the Serbs over the Bosnian civil war.

At the time, the newly-inaugurated Clinton White House was openly mulling direct intervention in the ever-worsening humanitarian crisis, up to and including all-out invasion. A year prior, Washington had imposed crippling sanctions on what remained of Yugoslavia over the bloodshed. The CIA felt it urgent to “sensitize [Clinton’s] new policy-making team to the growing danger of Russian alienation” from “Western policy toward Serbia.” The Agency feared “historical relations” between Belgrade and Moscow could “work against an effective international response” - in other words, overt US involvement.

“While the US cannot mortgage its Yugoslav policy to Russia, Washington should probably work harder at consulting Moscow before new policies are established,” the CIA memo cautioned. The Agency sought to explain “why Russian unease over Western policy toward Serbia may well lead to a veto of [UN Security Council] resolutions on the use of force.” The CIA reported how the Russian government had “grown increasingly concerned about the possible use of force against Serbia,” before outlining “five driving forces behind the concern.”

Among them was “Pseudo-Geopolitics”. Problematically for Yeltsin, and in turn the CIA, Pentagon and White House, “some Russians” were asking “why the West and the US in particular should inject itself in an area that Russia always regarded as its traditional sphere of influence.” While the CIA scornfully declared “the West should not take this argument very seriously in today’s world,” the agency warned that argument was “being made” at a public and political level in Russia, and the Kremlin “must deal with it.”

Another “concern” was “Slav Brotherhood”. The CIA observed how “romantic nationalists” in the country were replacing the Marxist slogan “workers, unite”, with “Slavs, unite.” Resultantly, Russian “ultranationalists” considered Moscow to be “duty bound to come to the aid of Serbs.” Without outlining why, the CIA believed that “for some of the same reasons cited above, we should not take this too seriously, but it cannot be dismissed if other players aid their racial or religious brothers.”

‘Dangerous Precedent’

The Balkans are of enormous cultural, economic, historic, military, political, and strategic importance to Russia. Yugoslavia had in the immediate aftermath of World War II been directly aligned with the Soviet Union, before the pair split in 1948. Thereafter, Belgrade and Moscow enjoyed harmonious albeit intermittently tense relations. It was entirely understandable why Russia and Russians would be anxious about destructive US-led actions against collapsing Yugoslavia, which was being forcibly broken up into easily exploitable Western puppet states, and future NATO members.

However, the CIA - and White House, and NATO - took for granted that in a unipolar world of unchallenged and unchallengeable US global hegemony, the notion Russia had any sphere of influence in the world, and interests outside her own borders, should not be taken “very seriously” in policy planning considerations - if at all. The West’s casual disregard for Moscow’s clearly-stated red-lines and obvious concerns became significantly ingrained, and turbocharged, with the March - June 1999 bombing of Yugoslavia.

Chinese and Russian aversion to the campaign was forecast throughout Western capitals. Hence, NATO avoided Beijing and Moscow’s inevitable UNSC vetoes on unilateral military action by invoking the UN Charter’s self defence clause, to bomb Yugoslavia without a Security Council vote. An eerily prescient April 1999 New Statesman article warned NATO’s unauthorised, illegal bombing was no “one off”, but “just the beginning” of a “brave new world”, in which the military alliance acted as a worldwide “riot squad.”

When the campaign erupted, by then prime minister Yevgeny Primakov was literally mid-air, en route to the US for an official meeting. He immediately ordered the pilot to return to Russia. Despite Primakov’s protests, the Yeltsin administration did not come to Belgrade’s rescue, instead encouraging Serb leader Slobodan Milosevic to surrender to NATO. Nonetheless, as a declassified June 1999 cable from Britain’s Moscow embassy dispatched to all London’s top overseas diplomatic missions reported, the alliance’s bombing of Yugoslavia had “left Russia bruised and bewildered.”

There was shock in the country, from the streets to its highest levels, that “NATO resorted to military action in the face of direct Russian opposition.” The campaign was widely regarded as “setting a dangerous precedent for military action without UNSC authority,” therefore “reducing the weight of the Russian veto.” This was not only perceived as a “blow” to the UNSC, but outright “threat to Russian interests…setting an unacceptable precedent for action out of area, circumventing the Security Council if necessary”:

‘Intervention Elsewhere’

As a result of NATO’s illegal 78-day-long bombing of Yugoslavia, which killed thousands - including children - and violently disrupted daily life for millions, Russia suspended formal dialogue with NATO. The high-level Moscow station cable noted, “there are signs that Russia may be interested in resuscitating” the dialogue, “but an early return to the status quo ante is politically impossible.” It added:

However, the Russian military was said to have “stood out for their vociferous rhetoric and active promotion of what they perceive to be Russia’s interests as a great power.” Moscow-based foreign policy analysts had “focussed in response” to the bombing “on the possibility of aligning Russian policies” with China and India, “but so far without much conviction as to whether this will prove practicable.” Nonetheless, the option was being widely discussed by influential political thinkers, “confidence” in the West locally having been grievously “undermined”.

The cable forecast that “rebuilding mutual trust” between NATO, its member states and Moscow following the alliance bombing of Yugoslavia was “likely to be a slow process.” It was believed an impending European Council meeting on creating a European Security and Defence Policy in Cologne, Germany would “be an important first opportunity to show Moscow that we continue to attach importance to working with Russia”:

The same unambiguous pledge had been “made separately” to the similarly outraged and disquieted Chinese, by Blair and senior diplomats. However, the bombing of Yugoslavia rapidly did become a precedent for further unilateral Western military action “out of area”, whether conducted under NATO’s auspices or not. Along the way, independent states like Libya were reduced to open-air slave markets. Meanwhile, the remnants of countries shattered by NATO imperialism were hoovered up by the alliance, one by one, with ever-rapacious speed.

Again, the British well-knew Western actions in the former Yugoslavia gravely enhanced Russian concerns about NATO-enforced unipolarity, and the alliance’s inexorable expansion ever-closer towards Moscow’s borders. In September 1999, then-foreign secretary Robin Cook’s private secretary wrote to Blair, warning how the Russians had found recent unilateral Anglo-American economic and kinetic warfare waged against Iraq and Yugoslavia “particularly hard to swallow”:

‘Strong Divisions’

A February 2000 Foreign Office brief for a meeting between Blair and NATO secretary general George Robertson noted, “Russian opposition to NATO expansion has become even more hardline as a result” of Yugoslavia’s bombing. Undeterred, the alliance continued getting bigger, with British military and intelligence figures at the forefront of this push. Chief among them was Chris Donnelly, a longtime Ministry of Defence apparatchik elevated to NATO in 1989, just in time for the collapse of the Warsaw Pact and Yugoslavia.

As a scathing academic review of his 2004 work Reforming For Wars Of The Future noted, “if any one man has played a central role in the process of NATO enlargement and in providing constructive support for military reform in the newly liberated countries of East-Central Europe, it has been Chris Donnelly.” In many cases, states became ensconced in NATO despite significant public and political opposition. Strikingly, Donnelly himself admitted in January 2002 NATO was fundamentally not a defensive military alliance.

“Small armies from small countries cannot do much,” he explained, so “NATO runs better as a political alliance.” Donnelly left NATO in 2003. His thinking on NATO enlargement remained hugely influential thereafter. In early 2004, the alliance’s in-house magazine NATO Review published an essay he wrote on constructing a NATO “for the Greater Middle East.” An October 2006 US Army War College paper discussing how to embroil Ukraine in the War on Terror cited Donnelly’s 1997 thesis on “defence transformation in the new democracies.”

Ukraine was tentatively put on the NATO path at the alliance’s April 2008 summit. In February that year, then-US ambassador to Moscow Bill Burns - CIA chief under Joe Biden’s presidency - cabled Washington that Moscow was “particularly worried” about how “strong divisions in Ukraine over NATO membership.” “Much” of the country’s “ethnic-Russian community” opposed joining, and it “could lead to a major split, involving violence or at worst, civil war.” This would force Russia to “decide whether to intervene; a decision Russia does not want to have to face.”

NATO’s own polling from 2011 suggested less than 20% of Ukrainians supported joining. Yugoslavia’s bombing was “particularly unpopular” locally - “for many…the image of NATO still evokes a sense of fear.” A week later, Burns outlined Moscow’s likely responses to Georgia and Ukraine being offered NATO membership to the White House. In respect of Georgia, “the prospects of subsequent…armed conflict would be high” - indeed, Russo-Georgian war came to pass in August 2008. Meanwhile, Burns’ observations about Ukraine reverberate today as a prophet’s curse wretchedly validated:

A stunning investigative report by Hebrew-language outlet Ynet has laid bare the embarrassing cataclysm not only of the US-Israeli war on Iran, but the Zionist entity’s long-running effort to destroy the Islamic Republic and wider Resistance via covert and overt military and intelligence operations. Violent Mossad-orchestrated protests, Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei’s murder, and a Kurdish invasion were intended to produce regime change and “total victory” over Tehran. Yet, as Ynet bitterly concludes: “what started as a far-reaching Israeli move, rich in imagination, final in its solution, ends in heartache.”

In granular detail, the investigation tracks how the Zionist entity’s deranged scheme germinated in the minds of Israeli intelligence, military, and political chiefs, before the Trump administration was comprehensively sold on the plot. Along the way, Ynet exposes extraordinary and hazardous levels of delusion and imperial hubris at the highest levels of Tel Aviv and Washington. For example, Benjamin Netanyahu sincerely - and dangerously - believed Israel’s criminal September 2024 assault of Lebanon, and the June 2025 12 Day War, had decimated Hezbollah and Iran.

This perspective was shared by Mossad, which had been building a vast, dedicated anti-government army in Tehran since 2022. The Zionist entity was wholeheartedly convinced its local proxy forces had the power to collapse the entire Islamic Republic. “Fostering mass protest,” encouraging “armed resistance of minorities” - specifically, Kurds within and without Iran - while assassinating Supreme Leader Ali Khameinei were in “parallel” parts of a three-pronged coup d’etat strategy. Netanyahu truly believed “total victory” over the Resistance was in grasp across every West Asian theatre. Ynet reports:

The operation was intended to be put into action this June. Yet, in January, with “tens of thousands” of Mossad-directed insurrectionists in the streets of Tehran and other Iranian cities, the Zionist entity felt conditions had sufficiently “ripened” to make a decisive move. Mossad’s “influence organization” in the Islamic Republic was birthed in 2022, reaching “operational maturity two and a half years ago” - coincidentally around the time of October 7th. Ynet bleakly boasts of the “effort and sophistication” of the Zionist entity’s clandestine army of murderous anti-government rioters in Tehran:

Mossad pitched its braindead regime change plan directly to the CIA, Pentagon Central Command was informed of it by visiting Zionist Occupation Forces chief of staff Eyal Zamir, while Trump got personally lobbied by Netanyahu. The President - “convinced there were no limits to the capabilities of the military system at his command” after Nicolas Maduro’s January 3rd kidnap - and his administration were a highly receptive audience. Trump indicated his endorsement of the conspiracy on January 13th, publicly informing Iranians “help is on its way.”

A vast US military buildup in West Asia immediately began, while supposed peace talks with Tehran were ongoing. The negotiations were of course a con, intended to lull the Resistance into a false sense of security before the next phase of Israel’s intended palace coup commenced. On February 28th, Zionist-American airstrikes rained down on Tehran. Israel and the US felt certain Iran’s leadership had been eliminated or scattered, and the Islamic Republic’s command and control system “severely beaten.” But then, catastrophe started to erupt.

‘Popular Uprising’

While the Supreme Leader was killed - demonically celebrated by Western media as “the assassination of the century” - sending Iran’s leadership temporarily underground, “an orderly change of government, in accordance with Khamenei’s will,” was successfully executed. Iran’s command and control system wasn’t in reality significantly disrupted, returning to full capacity within hours. No defections were forthcoming. Still, “euphoria” abounded in Washington and Tel Aviv. Trump - who privately “welcomed the Israeli hit” - issued a video statement urging the Iranian people to take power by violence, warning:

Netanyahu joined the insurrectionary call. Meanwhile, genocidal US-Israeli bombing was in reality stoking incendiary public anger in Iran and beyond. Among the most egregious atrocities, a deliberate Zionist-American airstrike on a primary school killed 156 young girls, sparking fiery international condemnation, vengeful mourning throughout West Asia, and UN investigations. Iranians of all ethnicities and faiths instead took to the streets in substantial numbers to grieve Khamenei, while celebrating his son Mojtaba’s ascension to Supreme Leader. Immediately, the IRGC moved to blockade the Strait of Hormuz.

Despite the closure being an absolutely inevitable upshot of Zionist-American aggression against Iran, which Western intelligence assessments universally long-forecast, Ynet reports the US was “not ready for this move and its devastating economic consequences.” Trump’s threats to Tehran not to blockade the Strait were ignored. The riddle of why Washington was so caught off guard is answered by Netanyahu’s personal assurances to Trump the Islamic Republic would crumble in mere days. Astonishingly, there was no contingency plan beyond that.

In the meantime, another cog in the Zionist-American regime change operation in Tehran was also decisively faltering. “After 100 hours of air activity…a ground invasion from Kurdish militias based in Iraq” was supposed to commence. An invasion force had been training there over prior weeks, preparing “to reach the Kurdish region of Iran” and link up with fighters locally before a “mass march” on Tehran. For inspiration, Tel Aviv looked to Damascus being overwhelmed by MI6-supported HTS forces in mere days in December 2024.

However, Ynet reports Iranian intelligence learned “in advance about the planned invasion,” and supposedly informed Turkey, prompting Recep Erdoğan to personally demand Trump call it off. Regardless, the entire proposal was by any objective measure manifest insanity. After reports emerged in early March of the CIA training Kurdish militants “with the aim of fomenting a popular uprising in Iran,” even Zionist think tank pundits and diaspora activists warned invasion was a recipe for total disaster, which would unite Iranians of every extraction in opposition.

Undeterred, Kurdish invasion remained a fundamental component of Israel’s regime change strategy against Tehran, throughout the war. When a tentative ceasefire was struck on April 7th, after 40 days of devastating Iranian strikes, Ynet reports Israeli officials wondered why the military intervention never came to pass. Did the US not believe in the operation in the first place? Perhaps Trump changed his mind after Erdoğan picked up the phone? Or was “the whole idea a fantasy, with no chance of being realised?”

‘Inadvertent Effects’

That the Zionist entity was so convinced its self-evidently misguided, suicidal mission could possibly succeed is all the more damning, given the contents of a July 2025 report from Tel Aviv’s highly influential Institute for National Security Studies. A withering appraisal of the 12 Day War, the think tank acknowledged Iranian “regime change” had been an avowed Zionist objective from that conflict’s inception, which failed spectacularly. INSS still advocated for destroying the Islamic Republic, but cautioned against pursuing certain strategies.

Strikingly, the think tank warned against employing precisely the regime change tactics depended upon by the ZOF and Mossad, during the latest Zionist-American war on Iran. For one, INSS correctly predicted any Israeli military effort - particularly civilian bombing - intended to ignite mass anti-government protests had no chance of success. Such actions during the 12 Day War had conversely produced an intense “anti-Israel wave” among Iranians, who “exhibited a notable degree” of “rallying around the flag” in response.

Iranians’ determination “to defend their homeland at a critical moment against an external enemy” endured after the 12 Day War ended, to the extent all traces of public dissent in the Islamic Republic “almost completely disappeared” in the conflict’s wake. INSS likewise vehemently cautioned against encouraging “separatist tendencies” in Iran - such as Kurdish militancy. Due to “heightened public sensitivity to any perceived foreign attempts to promote ethnic fragmentation,” separatist insurrection, let alone outright invasion, would unite “large segments” of the Iranian public “against Israel.”

Moreover, a particularly prophetic portion of INSS’ report strongly cautioned against assassinating Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, as doing so “would not necessarily result in regime change,” and inevitably backfire. The think tank precisely foretold Tehran “would likely have little difficulty selecting a successor, who could prove to be more extreme or more capable.” INSS likewise predicted the Iranian government instead being strengthened, and anti-Zionist sentiment skyrocketing in the country and beyond, leaving any subsequent “efforts to destabilize the regime through popular protest” dead on arrival.

All these humiliating outcomes duly happened following February 28th. Elsewhere, INSS forecast military-driven Israeli regime change efforts in Iran could compel the Islamic Republic to seek nuclear weapons capability “as an existential insurance policy.” This hasn’t yet materialised, although Western officials now widely fear it may. Meanwhile, ever since the ceasefire was implemented, talks between Washington and Tehran have been stuck in seemingly implacable stalemate. While US officials remain committed to imposing sharp limits on Iran’s nuclear research, the Islamic Republic refuses to even negotiate the issue.

Furthermore, Tehran has made clear its chokehold over the Strait of Hormuz will only be loosened when the Empire stops blockading the country, and ends the conflict. While Netanyahu still harbours reveries of shattering the Islamic Republic, the Empire lacks anything like the required economic and military muscle. Meanwhile, heavily overextended Tel Aviv has blundered into a colossal trap in Lebanon. The Resistance is waiting and watching intently. In recklessly seeking self-evidently unattainable “regime change” in Iran, the Zionist entity has only hastened its own permanent destruction.

Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s April 13th announcement Rome will suspend a longstanding defence agreement with Israel sent shockwaves throughout Europe. Historically, Italian governments - even when led by figures who abhor Zionism - have enjoyed constructive, close ties with Tel Aviv. The pair’s security, intelligence and military apparatuses also have a long-running clandestine relationship. In fact, Mossad’s putrid overseas spying, assassination and sabotage nexus was effectively born in Italy, and has wreaked havoc in the country ever since.

Details of how Zionist spies secured a firm foothold in Italy are provided in a fascinating paper by academic Massimiliano Fiore. Drawing on archival sources, he “traces the evolution of Israeli clandestine activity” in Rome, exposing how Zionist intelligence connivances were waged in and against the country even before the entity’s May 1948 founding, and throughout Tel Aviv’s subsequent war of erasure against Palestine. Several case studies map Mossad’s evolving and ever-bolder criminality in Italy, which informed how the agency operates globally ever after. Fiore’s research is in turn heavily indebted to the groundbreaking work Mossad Base Italy, by veteran reporter Eric Salerno.

The story begins in the wake of the United Nations General Assembly’s November 1947 Partition Plan, which proposed giving Zionist colonisers 55% of Palestine’s territory. Arab leaders immediately began preparing to resist the entity’s construction, training soldiers in Palestine and neighbouring states for the purpose. In response, Israel’s founder David Ben-Gurion issued a directive to Zionist paramilitary and intelligence factions to secure weapons for the impending genocidal war over Palestine - which resulted in the Nakba - while denying arms to Arab forces.

Fiore records how the chief of Mossad le-Aliyah Bet and Rekhesh - respectively, the spying and arms procurement wings of notorious Zionist paramilitary Haganah - immediately “established a sabotage unit in Rome that quickly became an operational hub of Israeli covert activity in Italy and across Europe.” Thereafter, Zionist operatives “exploited Italy’s political ambiguity and physical infrastructure to conduct a sustained campaign of sabotage and interception.” The academic dubs this covert contest on Italian soil “a secret front” in the 1948 war.

Rome’s ports and air and sea transport corridors “played a critical role in sustaining Israeli supply” of weapons for the 1948 war, while disrupting the flow of arms to Arab militaries. Moreover, Zionists “sought to shape the Mediterranean balance of power” for malign geopolitical purposes. Their covert actions - “conducted under conditions of political tolerance and diplomatic constraint” - forged strong bonds with the Italian state, while threatening Rome’s status “as a strategic bridge between Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East” in Israel’s favour.

The incipient Mossad’s cloak-and-dagger conniving in Italy had a devastating impact. A June 1948 CIA memo observed how the “European headquarters” of Zionist intelligence “operated under cover in Rome,” through which “clandestine transport of munitions by air” to Palestine was conducted with “the knowledge and collusion” of Italian authorities. Without European citizens, Arab governments or the ‘international community’ noticing, Rome had been secretly transformed into an international nucleus of “illegal traffic in arms for the Jewish underground.”

‘Riskier Measures’

Rewind to March 1948, and Czechoslovakia’s government approved the delivery of 8,000 rifles, 200 machine guns and six million rounds of ammunition to Syria. Set to sail next month on the Lino, a 450-ton Italian freighter, Zionist operatives were determined the shipment would not reach West Asia. First, its passage was impeded by Haganah warning authorities in Rome a ship laden with weapons was headed to Italy. Given the “charged political atmosphere” preceding the country’s election, officials quickly moved to impound the Lino.

On the night of April 10th, a Zionist sabotage squad descended on the vessel and attached explosive charges, before slipping away undetected. The ship sank without casualties, or attribution. Per Fiore, the Italian media speculated weapons aboard might have been headed to local Communists, which “[deflected] suspicion away from Zionist involvement.” While a small operation, the Lino’s sinking was seismic. The effort “demonstrated how limited resources, local networks, and deniable maritime sabotage could produce disproportionate effects, disrupting adversary supply while avoiding interstate escalation.”

The Lino operation’s success prompted the formal establishment in May 1948 of a “Unit for the Sabotage of Enemy Supply in Europe”, headquartered in Rome. It rapidly became a “central hub for intelligence, logistics, and coordination” across Italy and Europe, for Zionist spies. “Jewish operatives and instructors already active on the continent” joined its ranks, receiving training in all manner of skullduggery, assisted by Italian military and intelligence veterans. Among them were battle-hardened fascists, whose World War II experiences informed future Israeli operational practices.

Meanwhile, a Syrian initiative to recover the sunken Lino’s consignment was ongoing. The weapons and ammunition were successfully salvaged and repaired, then redirected to their original destination on a vessel called the Argiro. But Zionist spies were watching, and intended to seize the shipment. Via bribery and elaborate deception, operatives infiltrated the ship’s crew, clearing the way for Zionist militants posing as a security escort to board the vessel while en route to West Asia. On August 21st, the Argiro was captured, and directed to Palestine.

Five days later, Zionist naval forces commandeered the Argiro, seizing the materiel before sinking the ship outright. The lethal cargo reached Haifa four days later, and was sent to Zionist militants fighting in Jerusalem. The Italian crew was temporarily detained rather than killed or disappeared, although the captain died from tuberculosis in captivity before being returned home, raising the spectre of an international incident erupting between the expanding settler colony and Rome.

Fiore notes the Argiro effort was an early example of “strategic appropriation” by Zionist spies, foreshadowing future operations in which “intelligence, deception, and procurement functioned as mutually reinforcing instruments.” This journalist has documented how a similar approach was applied in the early 1960s, during the entity’s criminal quest to clandestinely acquire nuclear weapons. Furthermore, the Argiro’s takeover amply illustrated how Zionist agents in Italy were willing to undertake “progressively riskier measures”, which could inflame public, political tensions with Rome. But the burgeoning Mossad had little to fear.

‘Diplomatic Buffer’

In early 1949, Zionist militants attempted to blow up motor torpedo boats in an Italian shipyard that had been purchased by Egypt. Fiore records how the operation prioritised concealment and “strict deniability” to avoid “diplomatic repercussions”, and benefitted from an insider providing access to the site. However, the plot’s executors, led by an explosives specialist centrally involved in the Lino’s sinking, were caught in flagrante by local police. In June that year, the group’s leader was sentenced to three years in prison for possessing explosives.

This prompted “sustained diplomatic intervention” from the fledgling Zionist entity’s highest levels, resulting in the convicted agent being freed under a presidential pardon. A “calculated act of executive leniency,” the move set a precedent that endured for decades ever after, and may do so today. The same month the Zionist spies were busted, Italian premier Alcide De Gasperi granted local Mossad chief Ada Sereni informal carte blanche to conduct clandestine operations in the country.

Accordingly, Mossad activities not merely in Italy, but the world over, subsequently emphasised “deception, improvisation, and operational daring.” As long as the activities of Zionist spies “remained beneath the threshold of public escalation,” authorities in Rome would “close one eye - preferably two.” It was the beginning of a policy of strategic ambiguity, whereby Italy sought to maintain amicable relations with the Arab and Muslim world and Tel Aviv simultaneously. It was hoped Rome could avoid being dragged into the Palestinian conflict, therefore preserving “political equilibrium”.

Under the auspices of this clandestine concord, the Zionist entity benefitted enormously from “selective enforcement” of local laws, political pardons if its operatives and/or schemes were exposed, and other indulgences. Mossad could thus exploit Rome “as a transit corridor, logistical base, and diplomatic buffer.” However, Tel Aviv routinely flouted the terms of this dispensation, gravely compromising the country’s “political equilibrium”. Israel couldn’t tolerate Palestinian resistance fighters and groups smuggling weapon or travelling without hindrance through Italy, or enjoying political protection locally.

This blind eye to Palestinian resistance became known as the “Lodo Moro” agreement, so-called because it was instituted by veteran Italian statesman and repeat prime minister Aldo Moro. Mossad sought to harshly penalise Rome for such leniency towards the Palestinian cause. Questions abound over Zionist involvement in numerous high-profile acts of terror perpetrated in Italy subsequently, such as the August 1980 bombing of Bologna Centrale railway station, which killed 85 people and wounded over 200, and political assassinations - including Moro’s own.

An ardent anti-Zionist, Moro was ostensibly kidnapped by the Red Brigades, a left-wing guerrilla movement, in March 1978. He was killed after 55 days in captivity. Numerous knowledgeable sources have testified to successive parliamentary inquiries and official investigations over the decades since how Mossad infiltrated and assisted the Red Brigades, seeking to influence the group’s activities from inception. Moreover, there was likewise a little-known but hugely impactful Zionist hand in the notorious CIA and MI6-run Operation Gladio from the very beginning.

Chaos unleashed by Gladio greatly furthered Mossad’s quest to destabilise Italy, in service of boosting Israel’s financial, military and political support from the US. There is little chance of Tel Aviv’s geopolitical position being challenged by Rome today. Yet, incidents such as the mysterious late March attack on an Italian oil pipeline raise obvious questions about whether the local Zionist wrecking network constructed decades ago remains in place, and still sends incendiary warnings to the country’s government not to step too far out of line.

On April 8th, the Zionist entity struck a demonic blow to the heart of Beirut, dropping 1,000 pound bombs in densely packed residential areas, killing untold civilians and injuring many more. One of Lebanon’s most dire mass-killings since the end of the 1990 civil war, it marked the resumption of Israel’s avowedly genocidal invasion. With bombs raining down apace even as rare in-person talks between the pair near, Zionist Occupation Force-backed settlers are moving quickly to establish a permanent presence in the country’s south.

Whatever abrupt pause in the war on the Islamic Republic can be sustained by duelling Iranian and US blockades of the Strait Of Hormuz must be viewed in the context of the Zionist entity’s longstanding determination to annex Lebanese territory, in service of ‘Greater Israel’. Tel Aviv’s criminal incursion ignited March 16th, Orwellianly dubbed by officials a “targeted ground operation against key targets.” It was not until 10 days later that major news outlets deigned to call it an invasion.

On March 23rd, Tel Aviv’s finance minister Bezalel Smotrich - a self-proclaimed fascist - urged the ZOF to formally annex southern Lebanon. Since then, over a million people have been displaced, thousands killed, and civilian infrastructure razed en masse. While a significant chunk of the country is now occupied, the cost for Tel Aviv was substantial. Unrelenting Hezbollah fire produced heavy casualties and record equipment and vehicle losses, including 21 Merkava main battle tanks in a single day on March 26th.

On April 2nd, Israeli media openly advertised the impending ceasefire in the war on Iran. It was revealed the Zionist entity was preparing to intensify its air campaign against Lebanon, due to enormous damage inflicted by the Resistance upon the ZOF. Tel Aviv reportedly planned to “[reduce] the current focus on Iran,” in order to support “Israeli ground forces attempting to seize Lebanese territory.” Were it not for hell being unleashed from the skies, the ZOF would currently be in big trouble.

On April 5th, the ZOF’s Northern Command chief admitted Tel Aviv had grossly overestimated damage inflicted upon Hezbollah during its October 2024 invasion of Lebanon. Entity political and military chiefs had long-claimed the Resistance faction was obliterated by the illegal intervention. The ZOF estimated 70 - 80% of Hezbollah’s rocket capabilities were destroyed during the conflict. This reverie was comprehensively shattered by hundreds of the group’s projectiles successfully targeting Tel Aviv daily, throughout the Zionist-American war on Iran.

No wonder that conflict is now on hold. Hezbollah remains a redoubtable adversary, which can independently, and in tandem with its Resistance comrades, thwart Tel Aviv’s seizure of Lebanese territory, and permanently expel Zionist settlers from northern Palestine. This wreaks havoc with Greater Israel’s construction, which Benjamin Netanyahu openly yearns to be his enduring political legacy, and literal ‘get out of jail free’ card. Hence, southern Lebanon must be annexed, and Hezbollah neutralised. But attempting to do so will, as before, end in fatal catastrophe.

‘Forced Expulsions’

In June 1982, Zionist militants invaded Lebanon, ostensibly to drive Palestinian freedom fighters away from the entity’s claimed northern border. Quickly, it became apparent ethnic cleansing, massacres, and land theft were the ZOF’s true goal. As a declassified July 1983 US National Intelligence Council assessment noted, ultra-Zionists then as now were aggressively demanding outright annexation of Lebanon’s south. Which is precisely what temporarily came to pass, until Hezbollah expelled the ZOF decisively in 2000. Along the way, obvious lessons weren’t learned by Tel Aviv.

The Council predicted the ZOF would create a puppet state in the south, to fulfil “some day-to-day governing tasks,” while “real power will remain in Israeli hands.” Despite judging the costs “of semi-permanent occupation” to be “not inconsequential,” they were nonetheless “manageable”, due to the entity’s “proven track record” of suppressing “unrest” in territory it illegally occupies. “Forced expulsions, use of local surrogates, and ruthless counterintelligence operations” by the ZOF were correctly forecast, which the NIC believed would negate “increasingly” hostile local opposition.

The Council assessed the ZOF would “[get] a handle on the guerrillas in the next six - 12 months.” This prediction couldn’t have been more wrong. Unmentioned by the Council, Hezbollah was quickly founded following the Zionist entity’s invasion. Inspired by the Islamic Revolution and assisted by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, the group rapidly gained in strength, spreading radical fervour among Lebanese citizens of every faith, until forcibly purging ZOF militants from Lebanon outright in May 2000.

Hezbollah’s success - repeated with an unprecedented battering of Zionist invasion forces in 2006 - inspired new generations of Resistance fighters, including Hamas. Today, the faction is the most popular and potent political and social force in Lebanon, embraced by citizens across confessional lines. Bashar Assad’s fall also did not, contrary to widely-held assumptions, make it remotely difficult for Iran to equip and coordinate with Hezbollah. A failure to comprehend these inconvenient truths has led the Zionist entity into disastrous ruin in Lebanon, yet again.

On March 27th, ZOF chief of staff Eyal Zamir issued a grave warning during a security cabinet meeting. Namely, Israel’s military “is going to collapse in on itself,” due to “mounting operational demands and a deepening manpower shortage,” which could rapidly prove catastrophic. Already, an infantry battalion intended to be deployed to Lebanon had been redirected to the West Bank, to “keep the peace” as armed settlers carried out violent if not murderous attacks on Palestinians. The ZOF would’ve struggled to field further forces in either Greater Israel theatre.

Then on April 3rd, the ZOF openly admitted “its goal of disarming Hezbollah” was “unrealistic, as it would require the military to launch a full-scale invasion of Lebanon,” which Tel Aviv wasn’t able to wage. In other words, the Resistance was undefeated, and Lebanese territory couldn’t be stolen. Having been engaged in perpetual, multi-front war since October 7th 2023, the exhausted Zionist entity lacked the muscle to achieve its Lebanese goals while also targeting the West Bank and Iran, contrary to intelligence, military and political forecasts.

‘Last Minute’

Israel was so ruinously overextended attempting to wage all-out war on the entire Resistance - without AnsarAllah even fully joining the fight - it was reportedly considering an extraordinarily desperate solution. Namely, inviting Syria’s MI6-installed extremist government to battle Hezbollah. Ahmed al-Sharaa’s regime is maintained in power exclusively via a brutal, repressive domestic security and military apparatus. Forces could not be deployed in sufficient numbers to counter Hezbollah, without risking major domestic upheaval. However, Hebrew-language outlet Maariv reported April 5th this suicidal pact was being seriously contemplated:

Under the auspices of these “understandings”, the ZOF would “take over southern Lebanon, while the Syrians will act in northern Lebanon against Hezbollah.” However, the US reportedly “very much [preferred] not to reach such a scenario.” After all, it would be a deeply hazardous Faustian bargain, imperilling al-Sharaa’s already brittle rule. While he and his army of ISIS fighters may detest Hezbollah, the overwhelming majority of Syrians reject alliance with Israel, at a time local Resistance elements are growing in strength.

Al-Sharaa’s relentless, servile quest for cordial relations with Tel Aviv is a key source of public antipathy towads his illegitimate rule. Behind-closed-doors talks that began upon his December 2024 seizure of power culminated this January with the signing of a “joint mechanism”. Through it, Syria and Israel were to share intelligence, and peaceably resolve grievances old and new. This astonishing capitulation by al-Sharaa laid the foundations for formal normalisation of relations between the two countries, which successive Syrian governments steadfastly refused ever since Israel’s creation.

However, during al-Sharaa’s flying visit to London in late March, he revealed how despite positive “direct and indirect dialogue,” the Zionist entity “changed its mind at the last minute,” and normalisation remains unforthcoming. The reasons for this sudden change of heart weren’t stated. One explanation could be that for all al-Sharaa’s eager subjugation of his country and government to Israel, he opposes Netanyahu’s insatiable expansionism. In September 2025, al-Sharaa cautioned other countries in West Asia could be affected by Tel Aviv’s deranged Greater Israel designs.

With Hezbollah supposedly dismantled, and Syria at last transformed into a doting Anglo-American puppet state, Greater Israel could be advanced without hindrance - or so Netanyahu thought. In reality, the “great opportunity” about which he boasted from the Golan Heights following Bashar Assad’s fall has become a dangerous trap. Unable to sustain a grand battle against the triumphant Islamic Republic even with US help, Israel is now overextending itself yet further in southern Lebanon. Hezbollah isn’t fazed one iota, and the Resistance is watching intently.

As history old and new amply shows, the Empire and its Zionist proxy underestimate AnsarAllah, Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran, and the wider Resistance at their immense peril - but persist in doing so. Over and again across decades, the same failed strategies are applied without success, then aren’t subsequently revised. The Empire’s crushing past defeats by the Resistance are spun as victories, and/or promptly forgotten about. All along though, in the real world, the Zionist-American death machine is ever-weakened, and Palestine’s long-overdue liberation grows irresistibly closer.

Leaked documents expose how prolific Western government contractor Torchlight, staffed by British military and intelligence veterans, has covertly trained “commercial and government clients” the world over in GCHQ’s digital espionage and cyberwar strategies. Cloak-and-dagger techniques to “discredit, disrupt, delay, deny, degrade, and deter” target adversaries and populations, honed for kinetic and psychological warfare and regime change overseas, have become a commodity, open for unregulated use by undisclosed private sector and state actors.

Central to these efforts was GCHQ journeyman Andrew Tremlett. While serving as Torchlight’s head of digital intelligence, he was “responsible for all programmes with a cross-cutting SIGINT [signals intelligence], cyber, electronic warfare or OSINT [open source intelligence] dimension.” A leaked CV notes he spent over 18 years toiling for British intelligence, “primarily” GCHQ. One of his key duties was “[working] with international partners to assist in the formation and development of intelligence departments.” In other words, constructing analogues of MI5, MI6 and GCHQ abroad.

This activity reportedly paid a “great dividend not only” to the “host nation” in question, but also the British government, “by establishing an enduring intelligence sharing partnership” between the pair. However, Tremlett “spent a significant portion of his career” within GCHQ’s notorious Joint Threat Research Intelligence Group (JTRIG). Exposed by NSA leaker Edward Snowden in 2014, this shadowy unit plays a “major part” in GCHQ’s activities, executing the agency’s most depraved operations.

This includes cyberattacks and propaganda efforts, such as pushing “mass messaging” against target countries, organizations, groups and individuals via social media platforms, with an emphasis on “unsavory information”. “False flag” connivances, in which JTRIG conducts malign actions designed to appear as if an adversary was responsible, is likewise a core component of the unit’s remit. JTRIG was heavily involved in spreading pro-insurrectionary messaging during the Arab Spring, while attempting to overthrow Zimbabwe’s longtime ruler Robert Mugabe, and prevent Argentina taking over the Falklands.

On top of establishing “strategic enduring relationships with foreign partners thereby expanding GCHQ’s potential delivery platform,” Tremlett provided “direct specialist intelligence support” to British special forces, including the SAS, in “counter-terrorism” and “counter insurgency”. This placed him in charge of supporting “the most specialized and discreet areas of UK special forces operations.” Tremlett’s experience in these fields was duly harnessed by Torchlight as a major selling point, when pitching its training programs to “commercial and government clients.”

‘Device Seizure’

Other leaked Torchlight documents offer candid insight into the firm’s training of “government clients”, clandestinely delivered on London’s dime. For example, from June 2019 - March 2020, the firm sought to enhance “the ability of evidence gathering agencies” by Jordan’s most secretive security and intelligence services, specifically in the field of “digital media exploitation”. Alumni learned “to effectively extract data from digital devices,” assisting domestic surveillance and prosecutions, while “[enabling] the sharing of evidence” between Amman and London.

Andrew Tremlett led the initiative. Project files note he was “instrumental in determining” Jordan’s “requirement” in the desired fields. After visiting the headquarters of Amman’s Public Security Directorate, the GCHQ journeyman “was able, through close collaboration, to review digital forensics documentation, conduct a physical site survey, observe digital forensic practices, and undertake an informal discussion with members of staff to gauge levels of skills [and] training, understanding and awareness.” This insider knowledge, it was forecast, would be “pivotal in delivering real change and capability improvement.”

Tremlett’s key takeout was Jordan’s digital forensics specialists were “satisfactorily equipped” in respect of hardware and software, “but were not adequately trained to fully exploit the potential of the equipment they possess.” They were also unable to utilise these resources “to enable UK – Jordan cooperation or evidence sharing.” For example, Amman’s spooks use EnCASE, a court-approved digital forensics suite that can analyze, collect and preserve evidence gleaned from digital devices. Likewise, Jordan’s spying apparatus employs FTK, capable of uncovering hidden or deleted data, including browsing history, from hard drives and smartphones.

Most disquietingly, Amman’s intelligence apparatus also enjoy access to Cellebrite. Controversies surrounding the Israeli-created “forensics” tool have abounded ever since its 2007 launch. The firm has dispatched representatives to Saudi Arabia to hack into smartphones. Cellebrite’s tech frequently supports prosecutions of dissidents in Bahrain, presaging their detentions, torture, and extended imprisonment on political charges. Between 2017/18, Cellebrite assisted the Western-backed government of Myanmar’s persecution of Reuters reporters, who revealed state-directed genocidal attacks on the country’s Rohingya population.

Such scandals have been no deterrent to Western governments widely adopting the company’s technology. It is evident British police, security and intelligence agencies are no exception. The leaks record how Tremlett is an expert in Cellebrite’s use. His “significant” experience in the field would purportedly provide Jordan “additional perspective of digital exploitation and how intelligence gained from device seizure and analysis can enhance and drive the intelligence cycle and enrich other intelligence sources,” such as “open source” spying.

That Amman was covertly taught GCHQ’s darkest arts is disturbing. It is an imprisonable offence to criticize the country’s ruler, King Abdullah II – a member of the Hashemite dynasty installed by the British following World War I, and British Army veteran – or state officials and institutions. Countless individuals rot in jail for mild condemnation of Amman’s ruling elite online. Journalists at home and abroad perpetually walk on eggshells, liable for arrest and imprisonment if they publish “fake news” about Jordan’s government.

Repression in Jordan ratcheted significantly in the wake of the Gaza genocide’s eruption. By April 2024, at least 1,500 people had been arrested for participating in Palestine solidarity protests. Many activists were targeted under Amman’s widely-criticized Cybercrime Law, which criminalizes political speech on social media. In 2021 alone, the year after Torchlight’s training ended, there were 6,605 separate prosecutions under the sweeping legislation. More recent figures are unavailable.

‘Online Behaviour’

In this context, it is noteworthy Tremlett’s GCHQ position focused heavily on “counter-terrorism” and “counter insurgency”. Leaked slides of a 2012 JTRIG presentation offer some examples of how the unit targeted overseas opponents in this manner. Indeterminate “Iran work” was opaquely cited as a successful example of “blog writing” efforts. “Significantly disrupting” the Taliban by bombarding the group with a “blizzard” of text messages, calls, and faxes, while deleting its members’ “online presence”, was likewise venerated. The latter approach was praised as “very annoying!!”.

Tremlett’s expertise in “seized media exploitation” as a result of his JTRIG service also raises questions about what “commercial and government clients” are truly being taught by Torchlight. The leaked JTRIG presentation makes repeated reference to planting information on “compromised” target devices, including “potential ‘damming’ [sic] information, where appropriate.” Cellebrite of course allows end users to break open captured smartphones and computers. The ease with which falsely incriminating data could be placed in seized devices is evident.

Elsewhere, the presentation sets out methods to “discredit a target”. First and foremost: “set up a honey trap…a great option…very successful when it works…get someone to go somewhere on the internet, or a physical location to be met by a ‘friendly face’. JTRIG has the ability to ‘shape’ the environment on occasions.” Other options included changing a target’s “photos on social networking sites,” writing a blog post “purporting to be one of their victims,” and emailing or texting “their colleagues, neighbours, friends etc.”

A separate leaked document on JTRIG’s operations notes the unit is engaged in “uploading YouTube videos containing ‘persuasive’ communications…setting up Facebook groups, forums, blogs and Twitter accounts that encourage and monitor discussion on a topic…Establishing online aliases/personalities who support the communications or messages in YouTube videos, Facebook groups, forums, blogs etc…Establishing online aliases/personalities who support other aliases.” JTRIG also sets up “spoof trade sites…that may take a customer’s money and/or send customers degraded or spoof products.”

The document furthermore provides examples of JTRIG’s online human intelligence endeavors. Such initiatives “typically involve establishing an online alias/personality who has a Facebook page, and membership of relevant web forums.” These false personae then “befriend” a target in order to spy on them, or influence their behavior. “Interactions with the target may be informed” by a combination of signals intelligence, “monitoring of the target’s online behaviour,” and intelligence gathered by MI6 “on-the-ground.” Online interactions can in turn “facilitate [MI6] contact” in real life.

In detailing JTRIG’s “counter-terror” initiatives targeting Muslims at home and abroad, and Irish republicans, the unit was reportedly involved in “disrupting the dissemination of extremist material over the internet; discrediting extremist sites and individuals/groups; conducting online [human intelligence]; and hosting extremist sites” in order to entrap individuals in an astroturf dragnet. Tremlett’s role in tutoring Torchlight’s corporate and governmental clients in tricks of the “electronic warfare” trade suggests these strategies are now far from JTRIG’s unique preserve.

In the process, untold parties now possess the technology and insight to replicate JTRIG’s chaos-wreaking specialities on their own rivals, adversaries and populations, without oversight or public cognisance. It is all but inevitable countries such as Jordan, if not many others, have employed the unit’s techniques to ensnare Palestine solidarity activists, and other troublesome ‘enemies within’. Little will victims know the trail of their repression leads straight back to London, courtesy of Torchlight.

On March 7th, shadowy British intelligence contractor Siren Associates launched Monitor Lebanon. The “real-time situational awareness platform” is “designed to help individuals and organisations understand and navigate Lebanon’s rapidly evolving security environment.” The tool sifts vast swaths of “open-source information” from “news agencies, verified social media accounts, Telegram channels, conflict monitoring initiatives, and traffic data systems.” Framed as an indispensable resource helping journalists, “humanitarian” workers, local businesses and concerned citizens stay safe as Israel’s genocidal invasion intensifies, the reality is far more sinister.

At the core of Monitor Lebanon is a constantly updated interactive incident map, visualising “reported security events and key operational information.” The data is highly detailed, including information on “affected areas, road conditions, hospital locations, and other indicators that help users understand how developments may affect movement and access.” A press release announcing the platform’s launch asserts Monitor Lebanon was initially constructed to provide Siren Associates staff with “a clearer view” of local events, before being rolled out for general public use:

One might reasonably ask how Siren could produce such a granular national incident data mapping project instantly upon the Zionist entity reigniting hostilities with Hezbollah, and invading southern Lebanon in pursuit of outright annexation. For almost two decades, the firm - staffed by British military, intelligence and policing veterans - has largely operated out of public view, albeit in plain sight. As this journalist revealed in September 2021, Siren reaps tens of millions annually from the British state, for “professionalising” Lebanon’s Internal Security Forces.

Siren accordingly boasts numerous former high-ranking ISF operatives among its staff, and intimate relationships with senior politicians, government ministries, and other components of Beirut’s security, military, and intelligence apparatus. The firm also runs programs to identify and groom future ISF leaders. In May 2019, Siren founded Lebanon’s first Command and Control Centre on London’s dime. The installation provides the ISF with “state-of-the-art equipment, information and communication technology systems, [and] an analysis and planning room,” to strengthen Beirut’s spying capabilities.

Such penetration by definition also grants British intelligence a candid backdoor to - and influence over - all the ISF’s activities, and investigations. Data harvested on Lebanese citizens by Siren in the years since has expanded precipitously, in both volume and variety. For example, the firm quietly built COVAX, digital infrastructure underpinning the Lebanese government’s COVID19 vaccine rollout. Users could register, schedule appointments, and receive vaccine certificates. Over four million people used the service, logging extraordinary amounts of personal information in the process.

‘Security Crises’

This laid the foundations of Siren’s extensive digital penetration into the private lives of Lebanon’s population thereafter. In 2021, the World Bank provided Beirut with $246 million to relieve economic hardship locally. Siren exploited its COVAX experience and infrastructure to establish a resource, DAEM, “in record time.” It allowed citizens to apply for social assistance. Carole Alsharabati, Siren’s longtime research chief, has explained “the idea [was] to deploy a system that was fully digitized from A to Z, just like we did for the vaccine”:

Alsharabati described Lebanon at the time as a “very difficult environment,” with the experience of building DAEM “a wild journey.” The country lacked a unique ID system, digital identification mechanisms, established data governance rules, or even internal procedures or capabilities. However, “nothing stood in the way of Siren’s determination to tackle these and many other challenges.” Evidently, the British and Lebanese governments were happy with the results. It was just the beginning of Siren’s new role in Beirut, constructing deeply intrusive databases on citizens.

This work has been replicated in multiple different fields over the years, culminating with Monitor Lebanon’s recent launch. Much of this activity passed entirely under the public radar. It was not until December 2024 Siren’s central COVAX role was openly admitted on the company’s official website, for example. That same month, Siren announced it had built a bespoke resource for the ISF, collating “operational data to inform decision making around mission planning, resourcing and management.”

Under the project’s auspices, British intelligence created a network of six separate Command and Control Centres across the country, linked digitally to 22 regional operation rooms. A “digital platform that enables the capture and analysis of crime and operational data” was also developed. In December 2024 too, Siren disclosed how it had introduced “e-governance tools connecting more than 20 ministries, 1,000 municipalities and 1,500 mukhtars [local governments].” Unmentioned was a major scandal that erupted over this effort upon its rollout two years prior.

Al-Akhbar alleged the platform produced by Siren wasn’t secure, and permitted the firm to harvest the data of millions of users. Dubbed IMPACT, the resource helped citizens access a variety of government services, including applying for welfare payments. The British embassy in Beirut, which funded the platform to the tune of $3 million, denied any wrongdoing, as did Siren. Nonetheless, local digital rights group SMEX expressed grave concerns over the security of private information stored by IMPACT, which was highly sensitive in nature.

That Siren hoards an enormous amount of invasive personal data as a result of its work for and with the ISF is underlined by an April 2025 study, funded by Britain’s International Development wing. It probed “irregular maritime migration from Lebanon over the past three years,” placing the phenomenon in the context of Beirut’s “ongoing political, socio-economic, and security crises.” Siren’s research sought to ascertain “who is migrating, why they are choosing to leave by sea, and what risks they face - particularly across gender lines.”

‘Own People’

In September 2025, Siren’s contract with the British Foreign Office to continue its “reform” of the ISF - dubbed “Lebanon Internal Security Assistance Programme” - was renewed. Markedly, the mammoth sum allocated to the company for completing this work - £46,360,490 - is substantially higher than in previous years. We are left to ponder whether a portion of that vast total bankrolled Monitor Lebanon’s construction, in advance of further expected Zionist entity aggression against the country.

Disturbing indications British intelligence is shaping the West Asian theatre in service of all-out war with Iran have abounded ever since October 7th 2023. In November that year, it was revealed London sought unfettered access to Lebanon’s ground, air and sea territory, to conduct “emergency missions”. British forces would’ve been permitted to travel armed, in uniform, wherever they wished in the country, while enjoying immunity from prosecution for committing any crime.

Public outcry over the plan surely contributed to its rejection by Beirut. Nonetheless, while formal British military occupation of Lebanon never came to pass, an unblinking eye is trained on the country and its people, thanks to Siren Associates. The military and security utility of this panopticon from the Zionist entity’s perspective couldn’t be clearer. Such insight could be used to identify and locate Hezbollah members and their supporters, and other local citizens considered problematic and targeted for liquidation, ala Palantir’s predictive espionage platforms.

It is no coincidence many of Siren’s digital government resources overlap with services and support provided by Hezbollah. British intelligence has for years conducted covert operations to neutralise the Resistance group’s societal influence, and create parallel structures to those it manages. For example, under the terms of a clandestine Foreign Office-funded youth radicalisation effort, London created an alternative to Beirut’s Hezbollah-run Ministry of Youth and Sport. It was hoped “young, talented students and graduates” would thus reject the group, and serve as effective British assets.

There is little sign of these initiatives having borne fruit. A promptly retracted March 23rd Daily Telegraph report documented how Lebanese Christians wholeheartedly embrace Hezbollah, and are determined to resist Western-inspired efforts by Beirut’s Army to disarm the Resistance faction. “How can we as Christians in this area not be with Hezbollah?” a local citizen, living in a village strongly supportive of the group, asked the newspaper defiantly:

Despite the practical impossibility of disarming Hezbollah, it is a fantasy long-harboured by Western powers, which has gained in ever-mounting urgency since the Zionist genocide in Gaza commenced. A September 2025 British parliament factsheet expressed intense optimism former LAF commander Joseph Aoun’s election that year would spell the end of Hezbollah’s armed wing, and thus the group outright. That same month, US special envoy to Syria Tom Barrack openly proposed equipping the LAF “so they can fight their own people.”

He acknowledged Israel’s deranged belligerence against the Palestinians and its neighbours since October 7th 2023 had significantly bolstered Hezbollah’s public support, while providing “zero” incentive for the group to give up its arms voluntarily. Aoun’s election has failed to dismantle Hezbollah, and the Zionist entity is now unsuccessfully attempting to finish the job. While Israel’s catastrophic military losses accumulate daily, innocent Lebanese civilians are still being killed in significant numbers. Line of responsibility for their deaths could lead directly back to London, courtesy of Siren Associates.

As the criminal Zionist-American war on Iran enters its second month, the conflict has proven so ruinous for the aggressors that dire alarm is being widely sounded. Embarrassing failure to subdue the Islamic Republic from the air has raised the prospect of a US ground operation of some kind, widely perceived as a suicide mission. Washington has also burned through over 850 Tomahawk missiles and 1,000 air-defense interceptors, at a rate the Pentagon finds “alarming”. In the process, Israel is rapidly approaching total disarmament.

On March 24th, elite British state-connected ‘think tank’ RUSI published a withering post mortem of the war’s first 16 days. An in-house “ledger tool” tracking the “intense consumption of advanced munitions” by the US and Zionist entity calculates 11,294 fires over this period, which cost a total of approximately $26 billion to produce. Resultantly, US - and thus Israeli - inventories of long-range interceptors and precision strike weapons “are nearing exhaustion.” And it will perhaps cost double that staggering amount to replenish what has been lost.

The Resistance shows no signs of slowing its onslaught, with every indication Tehran’s munitions production continues apace in wartime. Even the Western media has acknowledged Iran’s drone and missile arsenal costs a fraction to produce of the past and future outlay involved in shooting them down. Per RUSI, the war on Iran has exposed a “critical vulnerability” at the core of the Empire’s warfighting capabilities: a “strategically ruinous cost-exchange ratio that the West’s industrial capacity is not prepared to sustain.”

Over a dozen different munitions were fired by the US and Israel over the conflict’s first 16 days, “at a rate that appears to be unsustainable.” Now, Tehran’s relentless barrage “continues to drain the coalition’s most critical assets” - RUSI calculates missile and drone attacks have averaged 33 and 94 strikes daily, on average. By contrast, the organisation’s analysis shows “the magazine abyss” for Washington and Tel Aviv is “coming soon”. Moreover, Rheinmetall’s CEO has cautioned the Empire’s global munitions stockpiles are “empty or nearly empty.”

The Zionist-American war on Iran has thus become “a contest of endurance,” in which “the decisive advantage shifts to the actor that can sustain its defensive economy and replenish its most critical assets.” Based on current battle trends, the Islamic Republic firmly holds that advantage, and will continue to do so. The US could be mere weeks away from running out of ground-attack missiles - including much-vaunted ATACMS - and THAAD interceptors. RUSI similarly forecasts Israel’s Arrow interceptors will “likely” be “completely expended” come April.

On top of enormous expense, even at pre-war production levels, it would take years to replace what was spent in just over two weeks against Iran. As this journalist documented on March 24th, Tehran’s closure of the Strait of Hormuz has thrown the Empire’s already shattered defence industrial base into total disarray. Commodities and components central to constructing and maintaining digital and electronic systems, and precision-guided munitions, which hitherto transited the Strait daily in abundance are now scarcer and ever-rising in cost.

‘Constant Alert’

Iran has not only overwhelmed and disarmed the Zionist entity and imperial targets throughout West Asia via systematic, staggered blitzes of drones and missiles. Crippling at least 12 US and allied radars and satellite terminals throughout the region has dented interception rates far further, while increasing the number of munitions necessary to shoot down the latest barrage blasted from Tehran - often unsuccessfully. Up to 11 Patriot interceptors can be fired at an Iranian missile, up to eight at a single drone.

As a March 26th report by highly influential Zionist ‘think tank’ JINSA observes, “Iran’s attacks have imposed mounting costs on every component of the defensive architecture.” The Islamic Republic entered the conflict “with a deliberate plan to degrade US and [allied] capabilities by attacking each element of their air defense architectures.” In the process, “some of the most capable and expensive sensors” in Washington’s global inventory have been destroyed, with little chance of near-term repair.

These sensors in many cases explicitly provide the Zionist entity with an “early warning” system. A gaping and ever-widening hole has thus been torn in Tel Aviv’s detection and warning network. As such, Iranian drone swarms - “frequently drawing on Russian tactical innovations from the Ukraine war” - are routinely proving “far harder to detect and defeat” than missiles, hitting twice the number of targets with pinpoint accuracy. Some US sensor systems cannot detect low-altitude Shahed volleys - including those specifically designed to counter drones.

It is not just Shaheds that have wreaked havoc. The entire Resistance is increasingly deploying fiber-optic guided drones “immune to electronic warfare jamming,” and first-person-view drones “for precision strikes against point targets,” JINSA reports. Other Iranian drones are equipped with jet engines, making them significantly faster than Shaheds, and interception even more problematic. As the conflict evolves too, Tehran has increasingly relied on ballistic missiles carrying cluster warheads, which release up to 80 submunitions at high altitude that scatter across areas spanning several miles.

JINSA assesses over half of the total Iranian missiles fired during this conflict to date carried cluster warheads, compared with three known uses during the calamitous 12 Day War. “Even a successful intercept does not guarantee the bomblets are stopped” - if interceptors fail to strike these missiles before they reenter the Earth’s atmosphere, they still disperse submunitions in the air, or release them upon impact. These attacks don’t deliberately target Israeli civilians, but nonetheless make daily life miserable for the settler colony’s population:

‘Highly Capable’

However, the Resistance is predominantly concerned with fulfilling its “deliberate plan to degrade” US and Israeli defensive capabilities, to drive the former out of West Asia permanently and make the region safe for Palestine’s final liberation. On this score, JINSA notes the “devastating effects” of Iran’s drones and missile barrages on supposedly invulnerable targets. For example, the Pentagon estimates a single Resistance strike on the US Navy Fifth Fleet headquarters in Bahrain cost approximately $200 million.

It’s one of over a dozen US bases in the Gulf to sustain “significant damage.” Fighter jets have been destroyed, and American soldiers injured and killed in sizeable numbers, with survivors sent scurrying to local hotels. Iran has resolved to target these makeshift, remote bases. Concurrently, the Empire’s local air defense batteries are thoroughly preoccupied with “sufficiently defending” devastated US military installations, “to create the conditions for additional assets and repair teams to flow into theater.”

When they will arrive, how long they will take to restore what has been lost, and whether doing so will be remotely safe, remains to be seen. Meanwhile, “Iranian fire against shipping in the Gulf has proven even harder to stop than attacks on land targets.” Over half of known Resistance projectiles fired at vessels in the Gulf and Strait of Hormuz have hit their targets. With Gulf governments depleting almost their entire interceptor stocks since February 28th, what comes next could be catastrophic:

To say the least, from the Empire’s perspective, none of this should be happening. The Zionist-American war on Iran was intended to be a one-sided aerial gangbeating lasting only a few days, which would culminate with the Islamic Republic’s collapse, or at least total capitulation. There was seemingly no sense in Washington, Tel Aviv, or other imperial centres of power that Tehran could fight back at all, let alone bring America’s military machine to its knees.

Yet, the inevitable upshot of kickstarting a major conflict with the Resistance was entirely predictable, and indeed widely predicted. None other than JINSA released an assessment in September 2024 warning how Iran had developed a “large and highly capable missile and drone force,” designed to render US bases in West Asia “unuseable” and “overwhelm” air defences. JINSA acknowledged this capacity posed a dire threat to the Zionist entity and regional US assets - but argued more missile interceptors could sufficiently counter the menace.

That appraisal was authored by former CENTCOM commander Frank McKenzie, who oversaw the Empire’s disastrous retreat from Afghanistan. On March 20th, he openly boasted how the war on Iran was unfolding according to a strategy drawn up by CENTCOM over “many years”, and “my fingerprints are on this war plan.” McKenzie’s failure to take acknowledged threats seriously, and delusional belief in the ultimate invincibility - and inexhaustibility - of US and Israeli air defences, surely accounts for the conflict rebounding so spectacularly against the aggressors.

JINSA’s latest report is likewise rife with fantastical optimism. It argues Iran can be defeated by the Empire pressuring its vassals to move their US-supplied air defences to the Gulf, forming a coalition with “partners” in Europe and West Asia “to escort shipping through the Strait of Hormuz,” and other hallucinatory plots. In a bitter irony, on March 5th, the report’s author cheered how “Iran’s missile firepower has almost run out.” When will the imperial braintrust acknowledge the Zionist entity’s very real disarmament?

Since the criminal Zionist-American war on Iran erupted, the Strait of Hormuz has remained stubbornly closed. Despite Donald Trump’s dire threats, Tehran has brought maritime traffic to a total standstill. The Empire has futilely scrambled to assemble an international coalition to reopen the economically vital waterway ever since, only to be rebuffed. NATO allies have been slammed for making a “foolish mistake”, by refusing to help militarily secure the Strait. In truth, there is no hope it can be forcibly reopened in the foreseeable future.

As Bloomberg reports, while discussions are ongoing among G7 members over potential methods of restarting trade in the Strait, the general consensus among US allies is this can’t happen until hostilities ease, or outright end. Bank of America’s head of research has ominously warned oil prices could rise above $200 per barrel “if disruptions persist for multiple months.” He forecasts that if the Strait isn’t reopened within days, its closure could precipitate a global recession.

Tehran imposing a blockade on the Strait was absolutely inevitable, and widely predicted, in the event of war. Even if the conflict ends soon, lasting damage has already been inflicted in many economic spheres, and the effects will be increasingly felt by average citizens in the form of higher prices for essential goods. Global shipping has been thrown into disarray, with major logistics firms cancelling routes in West Asia, producing higher transport and insurance rates, and delays. Again, increased costs will be passed onto consumers.

In all, approximately 11% of global maritime trade passes through the Strait annually, accounting for 20% of the world’s total oil supply. Iran’s blockade, coupled with Resistance strikes on refineries throughout the region, will cause lasting chaos in energy markets and impact availability for years to come. Yet, despite a preponderant mainstream focus on the implications of the Strait’s closure for oil and gas, many vital commodities underpinning the operation of major industries worldwide also regularly transit through in substantial quantities.

Their availability and cost is in some cases likewise wildly fluctuating, impacting agriculture, construction, manufacturing, and in turn many fields of everyday life for countless people. And this is only the beginning. Approximately one third of the world’s seaborne fertilizer supply passes through the Strait every year. Before the war, Gulf states ranked highly among international fertilizer suppliers. Up to 43% of global trade in urea - a fundamental component of food production - flowed from the region.

The price of urea can affect production costs by as much as 90%. Now spring is upon us, and planting season has commenced across the West, urea has abruptly become a scarce commodity. Many farmers are already operating without profit, and grave concerns about how long this can be sustained widely proliferate. The prospect of Western sanctions on Russia - a major producer of fertilizer - being lifted to ameliorate the market bedlam grows increasingly likely as time goes on.

Sulfur is a core element of fertilizer production, and pre-war, the Strait provided up to 45% of the world’s supply. As an essay by elite US military academy West Point cautioned on March 13th, the price of sulfur has to date surged 25%, “squeezing one of the most consequential inputs to modern industrial power.” Sulfuric acid is not only vital for basic economic functions, “but also modern warfighting.” In a bitter irony, the Strait of Hormuz’s blockade will cripple Washington’s defence industry - and ability to maintain its conflict with Iran:

Copper provides the “clearest example” of why the Strait’s blockade is “a warfighting problem” of historic proportions for the Empire. The widely-used metal is “embedded in the transformers, motors, and communications hardware” enabling US bases “to operate and defense factories to function.” This quickly translates into “a readiness and resilience problem” for the military. It will take over 30,000 kilograms of copper to replace US radar systems destroyed by the Resistance in Bahrain and Qatar alone.

Thousands of kilograms of copper will also be required to fix or replace other damaged US communication equipment, sensors, and radars in Jordan, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE. “Active constraints on American combat power” posed by Iran’s Strait of Hormuz embargo are not restricted to copper supply, however. Similar issues are posed by restricted access to cobalt and nickel, “critical for the high-temperature alloys in jet engines” and crucial lithium-ion batteries powering drones and tactical-level electronics.

Semiconductor shortages will compromise an array of US military utilities, spanning F-35 fighter jet avionics to interceptor and missile guidance systems. Moreover, Washington’s defence industry “cannot surge”, despite Donald Trump’s demands contractors “quadruple” munitions production. US orders for vital war-fighting commodities cannot be “scaled independently in a defense emergency.” America’s supply chains are “fundamentally broken from a defense perspective,” and “utterly ineffective” when global markets tighten. In brief, the Empire’s defence industrial base is “tethered to conditions” Washington itself cannot control - but Tehran now can.

Per West Point, “this has become a paralyzing, real-time problem for the defense industrial base.” The collective “combat endurance” of US-Israeli forces attacking Iran is strictly limited by the “invisible industrial foundations” required to replenish their capabilities, which are now subject to an insurmountable Resistance chokehold. When it is loosened, and on what terms, is entirely for the Islamic Republic to decide. This devastating blow to US military capabilities and procurement capacity comes at a time when the Empire’s bloated warfighting machine is already collapsing.

According to an official US Government Accountability Office factsheet, almost two decades of perpetual, costly conflict has degraded Washington’s military readiness to the extent it cannot “adapt to growing threats posed by major powers” such as China or Russia, or “other adversaries”. Iran, and the Resistance, slot into the latter category. Of particular concern are the US Air Force and Navy - the very military assets now deployed to West Asia, which reap the majority of US war spending.

The GAO reports how US fleets of air and sea craft are ageing and failing, with “a lack of parts, maintenance delays, and other problems” hindering or outright preventing their maintenance and repair. Washington’s facilities for restoring weapons systems and equipment, and naval shipyards, are in “poor condition”. In human terms, the US Navy is chronically understaffed, its massively overworked sailors suffering dangerous levels of fatigue, their “heavy workloads” leading to “fatal ship collisions.”

Elsewhere, a review of whether 15 separate US fighter and ground airplanes met their annual mission capable goals in 2023 found none had done so. The GAO found the Army has “put new equipment into the field before plans for the facilities, personnel, and training” are ready. This is also true of the Navy, which has long-banked on a three-dozen-strong fleet of littoral combat ships, “designed to operate in shallow waters close to shore” to restore its defensive and offensive capabilities, including minesweeping.

However, the Navy “hasn’t demonstrated that this type of ship can perform its intended missions.” A palpable real-life demonstration of the total unsuitability of Washington’s littoral combat ships for “intended missions” is provided by the war on Iran. Three littoral vessels were dispatched to West Asia in 2025, to fill capability and capacity gaps produced by the decommissioning of four Avenger class minehunters deployed in the region for decades beforehand. Since the conflict began, they have vanished from the theatre.

Two have been sighted in Singapore, not merely out of the line of fire, but literally across the globe, right when concerns abound widely Tehran may mine the Strait of Hormuz, and Trump has promised to reverse any attempt to do so with brute force. A Navy spokesperson claims the pair are receiving “maintenance and logistics” support at Changi Naval Base. It remains to be seen whether, and when, they will return to West Asia.

Meanwhile, the Empire is rapidly running out of aircraft carriers, with the USS Gerald Ford having withdrawn from the Red Sea, where it led the Zionist-American war on Iran, following over 300 days of non-stop service. After reports emerged about its onboard toilets hazardously clogging, a fire on the ship raged for 30 hours, injuring sailors and incinerating a significant portion of the crew’s bedding quarters, forcing many to sleep on tables and floors. It is now in Crete, under repair.

For years, it has been increasingly clear the US military is outgunned, outnumbered, and outproduced by an ever-growing number of adversaries, and wouldn’t survive first contact with an actual war. Now the Empire has blundered into a historic, potentially lethal crisis entirely of its own making, this impotence couldn’t be writ larger. The US and Israel’s kinetic strikes on Iran are faltering, and the economic conflict has been decisively lost. The longer this grinds on, the more they will lose.

The Zionist-American war on Iran was intended to be a lightning strike routing, fought exclusively from the air, lasting only a few days. Instead, Washington and its Israeli proxy have blundered into a major multi-front conflict, which could well threaten the Empire’s very existence. The initial US aerial bombardment’s centrepiece was Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei’s February 28th murder. Initially hailed by Western media as “the assassination of the century,” the vile act has resulted in catastrophe for the perpetrators.

The Islamic Republic’s relentless battering of Zionist entity civilian centres and military and intelligence infrastructure, and US bases throughout West Asia, hasn’t been deterred one iota. Vast crowds took to the streets of Tehran in vengeful mourning. Their righteous anger has pullulated throughout the Arab and Muslim world. Ever since, incensed Shiites have violently clashed with security forces in multiple major Pakistani cities. Meanwhile, Bahrain teeters on the brink of all-out revolution. Now, Mojtaba Khamenei, the slain Supreme Leader’s son, has taken his place.

Iranian citizens of every ethnic and religious extraction braved US-Israeli airstrikes to celebrate his ascension. Commonly perceived as a hardliner with strong ties to the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps, expectation the new Supreme Leader will adopt a considerably less conciliatory, patient approach than his father is widespread. Western sources forecast Mojtaba may decide the Islamic Republic “must move quickly to obtain nuclear weapons in order to forestall future US and Israeli attacks,” overturning Ali Khamenei’s longstanding fatwa against their development by Tehran.

US President Donald Trump has declared he is “not happy” with Mojtaba taking power, and Israeli apparatchiks are likewise perturbed by the development. Nonetheless, this was an inevitable upshot of assassinating the former Supreme Leader. There was also no reason to believe doing so would precipitate the Islamic Republic’s collapse, or lead to Tehran’s military submission. It begs the obvious question of why Washington and Tel Aviv electively helped install a ruler more committed than ever to expelling the Empire from West Asia.

Similarly, Hezbollah’s extraordinary broadsides of the Zionist entity since Khameinei’s assassination should dispel any notion - as perpetuated by Israeli political and military chiefs - the group was obliterated by Tel Aviv’s criminal October 2024 invasion of Lebanon. That incursion was prefaced by an operation in which thousands of pagers used by senior Hezbollah operatives were detonated simultaneously, having been wired with explosives by Mossad pre-purchase, killing and injuring many. A week-and-a-half later, the group’s Secretary General Hassan Nasrallah was lethally targeted in a Zionist entity airstrike.

Evidently, the Resistance cannot be crushed via high-level assassinations. In fact, such actions actively strengthen its members. This inconvenient reality has been well-known to the CIA since at least 2009. In July that year, the Agency produced a top secret assessment laying out the pros and cons of liquidating “high value targets” (HVTs). It was prepared in advance of Barack Obama’s CIA chief Leon Panetta shifting US “counter-terror” operations from capturing and torturing high-level suspects, to outright executing them.

The assessment concluded HVT operations “can play a useful role when they are part of a broader counterinsurgency strategy,” and sought to “assist policymakers and military officers involved in authorizing or planning” such strikes. However, it listed many “potential negative effects” of “high value” assassinations. Israel’s past killing of Hamas and Hezbollah leaders were specifically cited as examples of how the strategy can spectacularly backfire. We have witnessed the CIA’s unheeded cautions play out in real-time since February 28th.

Foremost among prospective blowback from HVT operations is the risk high-level assassinations can increase an “insurgent” group’s support. This occurs when killing a target “[strengthens] an armed group’s bond with the population, radicalizing an insurgent group’s remaining leaders, creating a vacuum into which more radical groups can enter, and escalating or deescalating a conflict in ways that favor the insurgents.” Such actions can also “[erode] the ‘rules of the game’ between the government and insurgents,” thus exacerbating “the level of violence in a conflict”:

The CIA assessment noted several historical instances of supposed HVT successes. When high-level targets have “prominent public profiles”, assassinations can in specific instances shatter a target group. However, this was not the case with Hamas or Hezbollah. The pair “carry out state-like functions, such as providing healthcare services,” so higherups are well-known to citizens of Gaza and Lebanon. Yet, their “highly disciplined nature, social service network, and reserve of respected leaders” mean they can easily “reorganize” in the wake of assassinations.

The Zionist entity had by this point been engaged in “targeted-killings” against Hamas, Hezbollah, and other Resistance groups since the mid-1990s. However, their “decentralized command structures, compartmented leadership, strong succession planning, and deep ties to their communities” made them “highly resilient to leadership losses.” Undeterred, Tel Aviv’s high-level assassinations continued apace. In the early 2000s, Hamas founder Sheikh Yassin and the group’s leader in Gaza Abdel Aziz al-Rantisi were murdered. However, the killings “strengthened solidarity” between Resistance factions, while “[bolstering] support for hardline militant leaders.”

The obvious lessons of this wanton bloodletting remained unlearned by the Zionist entity, once the Gaza Holocaust erupted. In June 2024, elite imperial journal Foreign Affairs published a report unequivocally headlined Hamas Is Winning. It boldly concluded “Israel’s failing strategy makes its enemy stronger.” The outlet also recorded how “according to the measures that matter,” Hamas was considerably bigger and more powerful than on October 7th 2023. Israel had thus stumbled into a deeply ruinous attritional war, with a “tenacious and deadly guerrilla force.”

Hamas’ surging popularity with Palestinians throughout the Gaza genocide was found to have significantly enhanced the group’s “ability to recruit…[and] attract new generations of fighters and operatives.” This granted Hamas the ability to launch “lethal operations” in areas previously “cleared” by the IOF “easily”. Foreign Affairs charged the Zionist entity, to its “great detriment”, failed to comprehend how “the carnage and devastation it has unleashed in Gaza has only made its enemy stronger.”

It is not merely Hamas that has been galvanised by the Gaza genocide. Israel’s “carnage and devastation” has greatly expanded the ranks and resolve of the entire Resistance, while its constituent members have won hearts and minds globally in ever-mounting numbers. Tel Aviv and its Anglo-American puppetmasters have no good choices left to make, in a criminal war of choice waged against an indefatigable adversary committed to total victory, the likes of which they have never faced before.

The calamitous outcomes of Zionist-American conflict with Iran were amply spelled out in a June 2025 report by the Israel-based Institute for National Security Studies. Among its prescriptions, INSS cautioned against assassinating Ali Khamenei, as the Islamic Republic “would likely have little difficulty selecting a successor, who could prove to be more extreme or more capable,” while uniting the Iranian public and government more than ever. The consequences of disregarding this prophetic curse will reverberate throughout West Asia for centuries.

On March 4th, CNN exposed how the CIA is working to arm Kurdish militants in Iraq, “with the aim of fomenting a popular uprising in Iran.” A ground operation is expected to commence within days, the Agency having secretly funnelled money and weapons to separatist elements for months. The plan is for armed Kurds to pin down Iranian forces, precipitating mass insurrectionary demonstrations. There are ample grounds to believe even if the deranged operation goes ahead, it will inevitably end in disaster.

Within hours, The Atlantic expanded on CNN’s exclusive with a bold report, “The Coming Invasion Of Iran”. It revealed how “thousands of Iranian Kurdish militants are gathering in Iraqi Kurdistan, set to receive American and Israeli financial and military support to launch a major attack on Iranian territory.” A quintet of Kurdish Iranian political parties have begun preparing “thousands” of their supporters in Iraq to strike, and received “significant funds for arms and logistical support” from for the purpose.

The Atlantic failed to question the legality or morality of this strategy. Still, a welter of think tank apparatchiks and supposed regional ‘experts’ urged against exploiting Kurds as ground forces, warning it would “lead Iran to disintegration or civil war.” Results for the country and wider region were universally predicted to be absolutely catastrophic. A representative of the rabidly Zionist, anti-Islamic Republic Foundation for Defense of Democracies forecast a Kurdish invasion would be “almost guaranteed to end in a failed state.” Even a diaspora “pro-democracy” activist cautioned:

Despite the inevitable prospect of invading Kurds being massacred in large numbers by Iran’s redoubtable one-million-strong army, “the battle seems to be already on.” The Financial Times spells out how Israel is unconcerned about the consequences of this mission, both for Tehran herself, and any Kurds doing the fighting and dying. Tel Aviv “couldn’t care less about the future” or “the stability of Iran.” A nameless Zionist entity military intelligence officer told the outlet, “we want to ensure Iran stays in disarray”:

One might ask why yet again, Kurdish elements appear all too willing to serve as CIA and MI6 proxy footsoldiers, given the sordid history of London and Washington exploiting them as cannon fodder before invariably abandoning them to literal fate. Only in January, Kurds in Rojava were left defenceless as HTS forces in Syria violently seized their territory, letting loose thousands of hardened ISIS prisoners. However, leaked files reveal how British intelligence conducts propaganda campaigns targeting Kurds, which could serve as a potent recruitment tool.

‘Political Marginalisation’

In April 2015, The Stabilisation Network - a shadowy British government contractor spun out of ARK, an MI6 front - secretly published an extensive “target audience analysis” of Iraqi citizens. The research was conducted in service of a covert psychological warfare campaign, waged by London to shore up support for Prime Minister Haider Abadi’s government among the non-Shiite population, while deterring them from backing or in any way assisting ISIS. Among the targets were Iraqi Kurds.

The Stabilisation Network observed how a sizeable number of Kurds were “largely disaffected” with the Iraqi government, and harboured little interest “in a unified Iraq.” Some had “extreme attitudes.” Over the course of intensive focus groups with locals, it was consistently found that while Kurdish respondents almost universally rejected ISIS, the extremist group’s key propaganda messages had a “significant resonance” with them. For example, a clear majority of surveyed Kurds rejected Baghdad’s territorial integrity, agreeing with Daesh’s proposition their country’s borders “should be changed.

Relatedly, 48% of Kurds endorsed ISIS messaging on how “the border between Iraq and Syria was drawn by Europeans,” and “people who actually live near this border have the right to reject this history.” The Stabilisation Network ranked “the unresolved Kurdish hope for an independent homeland” as among the “most salient grievances Iraqi Kurds carry,” but also the “least likely to be resolved in the short to medium term.” A concomitant desire for “retribution” was found to be commonplace.

Kurds were furthermore considerably more likely than other Sunnis in Iraq to perceive Tehran as possessing “too much influence” locally. While 54% of Iraqi respondents overall said this argument made “no sense at all”, over 90% of surveyed residents of Kirkuk and Sulaymaniyah supported this view - and that ISIS was “rejecting this foreign interference.” The former is a disputed territory, fought over for decades by Arabs, Kurds, and Turkmen. The latter is a key city in Baghdad’s Kurdistan Region, bordering Iran.

“Disillusionment” with the Iraqi government was “widespread” among Sunnis, and again Kurds in particular. This stemmed from the perception they had “been marginalised and, interestingly, abandoned [emphasis in original] by political leaders” locally. Particular “antipathy” was reserved for the government of Prime Minister Nouri Maliki, 2006 - 2014. He was widely perceived by Sunni respondents as pursuing “sectarian” policies producing “political marginalisation and disenfranchisement” of non-Shiites, and thus being “in favour of a certain sect.” Maliki was moreover “seen by some to serve the interests of Tehran.”

“Many respondents blamed the previous Maliki administration for the sectarian problems that existed in Iraq, as well as the rise of [ISIS],” the target audience analysis concluded. Others “discussed a belief that an Iranian-controlled Shiite government in Baghdad was trying to marginalise and ‘annihilate’ Sunnis in Iraq.” British intelligence argued “perceived and real” grievances over Maliki’s rule were “more manageable” than others in getting respondents to accept Baghdad’s established territorial units, and the central government.

However, this was entirely contingent on Haider Abadi governing with a pro-Sunni bias, to the detriment of Iraq’s far larger Shiite population. After serving just one term, he was succeeded by a series of solidly Shiite leaders. Fast forward to this January, and Maliki was nominated by Iraq’s “coordination framework” to become Prime Minister again. The move sparked outrage among local Sunnis, and instant, ominous threats from Washington. Maliki defiantly condemned “blatant American interference in Iraq’s internal affairs.”

With the soon-to-be premier refusing to budge, the White House has promised to sanction Baghdad if Maliki is permitted to take office. This was no doubt welcome news to the Kurds identified by British intelligence, who surely feared a resurgence in supposed Iranian influence in the country, and discrimination towards non-Shiites, whether “real” or not. Of course, the same target audience believes Iraq’s borders “should be changed,” and reside in areas some Kurds wish to integrate into their own territory via force, which border Iran.

‘Contentious Issues’

It would be unsurprising if this precise Kurdish target audience has been selected to invade the Islamic Republic today. The same demographic was for years in the firing line of elaborate psyops inspired by The Stabilisation Network’s analysis, managed by InCoStrat. The British and US government contractor, staffed by military and intelligence veterans, created a clandestine “army” of “advocates” in Iraq, to wage a “content insurgency” undermining ISIS’ appeal. Iraqis, including Kurds, “with strong understanding of cultural contexts” were recruited to oversee “product design.”

“Developing a network of local partners is fundamental,” InCoStrat declared in leaked files related to the project. The exploitation of Iraqis as “content insurgents” also conveniently concealed Britain’s involvement in the connivance, which was considered of paramount importance. InCoStrat sought to achieve an “echo chamber” and “communications vortex”, in which ostensibly independent local NGOs, social media platforms, “local communication channels” and influencers pumped out MI6-approved messaging. A dedicated “news bureau” would produce “high demand material” for dissemination throughout Iraq, West Asia, and beyond.

InCoStrat leveraged “existing networks” nationwide for the project, training locals in “advocacy”, social media use, journalism, cybersecurity, and “content production”. In addition to the “narratives” created by the firm’s “content insurgents” dominating news outlets domestically and abroad, InCoStrat sought to encourage “productive, intra-sectarian dialogue” between different target audiences. By creating a space for Iraqis of all extractions to “vent their opinions and frustrations around contentious issues and historical grievances,” it was hoped they would become “actively involved in the resolution” of those grievances.

Markedly, among those targets were Kurds who “do not necessarily believe in the Iraqi government and are more likely to favour an autonomous Kurdistan.” There is no indication InCoStrat’s secret “army” of Iraqi propagandists, or its accompanying infrastructure, were ever dismantled. We are left to ponder whether the chorus of Sunni anger that erupted upon Maliki’s nomination as Prime Minister was surreptitiously British-influenced, or amplified.

It would likewise be unsurprising if InCoStrat’s psychological warfare apparatus has been exploited to rally targets behind the mission of invading Iran. Regardless, the stage has now been formally set for Iraqi Kurds to become “actively involved in the resolution” of their “historical grievances” - namely, carving out an “independent homeland” from Iraqi and Iranian territory. As The Stabilisation Network found, the sense Kurds have a “right to reject” established borders is pervasive. So much so, consistent, catastrophic Anglo-American betrayal can once again be perilously overlooked.

In the weeks leading up to the Empire’s catastrophic decision to instigate war against Iran, negotiations between Tehran and Washington were intensively ongoing. The Islamic Republic was ordered to accept sharp limits on her ability to develop ballistic and hypersonic missiles, and agree to never stockpile enriched uranium. The former stipulation was a significant sticking point, for such restrictions would gravely undermine Iran’s national and regional security architecture. However, Tehran was intensely relaxed about ceding the latter.

On February 28th, mere hours before the US and Israel unleashed hell on Iran from the skies, it was widely reported Tehran had undertaken to “ensure forever” she would not develop or possess nuclear weapons. This pledge was entirely in keeping with consistent messaging from senior Islamic Republic officials, including Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, assassinated that same day in Judeo-American airstrikes on his official residence. From the mid-1990s onwards, Khamenei had consistently endorsed a fatwa against the acquisition, development and use of nuclear weapons.

Still, concerns about Iran’s supposed nuke ambitions have lain at the core of direly ever-worsening relations between Iran and the US since May 2018, when Donald Trump shredded the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action mediated with Tehran by Washington three years earlier. Under its terms, the Islamic Republic granted the International Atomic Energy Agency virtually unhindered access to its secret nuclear complexes, in return for sanctions relief. The deal was torn up despite the IAEA consistently certifying Iran’s compliance.

The JCPOA was inked following a period in which public and state attitudes across the West - and its vassal states - towards the Islamic Republic became highly belligerent. From 2006 onwards, governments and international bodies - including the EU and UN - one by one imposed ravaging sanctions against Tehran, devastating its economy, influence, and standing. Within six years, Iran was the most sanctioned country on Earth. Ever since, these excessively punitive measures have produced soaring inflation, unemployment, preventable deaths, and other egregious ills.

As pressure on Iran ratcheted, numerous United Nations Security Council resolutions demanded Tehran cease enriching uranium, and cooperate with the IAEA. In November 2011, the Association expressed “serious concerns regarding possible military dimensions to Iran’s nuclear programme.” Throughout this period too, mainstream media became awash with scaremongering reports the Islamic Republic would imminently develop nukes, if she hadn’t done so already. Israel, and the wider West, were purportedly under urgent threat.

This demonising narrative was relentlessly disseminated by senior Western government officials, military and spying apparatchiks, think tank pundits, and ‘journalists’. Yet, no evidence was ever presented to support the bombastic charge. The grim truth is Iran’s alleged nuclear desires are a fable, cooked up by British intelligence. What follows is the sordid tale of how MI6 operatives infiltrated ostensibly independent international institutions, then manipulated them and Western governments, ultimately leading the world to perilous, potentially nuclear conflict.

‘Information Operations’

In October 2008, The Daily Telegraph reported on a leaked assessment of then-Presidential candidate Barack Obama, prepared by London’s ambassador to Washington. While identifying many areas of consensus, it foresaw a “potential clash” between Downing Street and an impending Obama administration, over Iran “his desire for ‘unconditional’ dialogue with Iran.” This was at odds with Britain’s commitment to the UNSC’s “requirement of prior suspension of enrichment before the nuclear negotiations proper can begin.” It was thus necessary to change the future White House incumbent’s thinking.

Unbeknownst publicly, during this time MI6 was embroiled in a covert operation to “develop understanding” among foreign governments of the Islamic Republic’s apparent quest for nukes, and therefore “pressurise Iran to negotiate.” A leaked CV of Nicholas Langman, longtime British intelligence dark arts specialist and head of MI6’s Iran Department 2006 - 2008, boasts how he “generated confidence” in its assessment Tehran secretly had a dedicated program to develop nuclear weapons among “European, US and Middle Eastern agencies.”

Then, from 2010 - 2012 Langman led an “inter-agency” effort to comprehensively infiltrate the IAEA, while “[building] highly effective and mutually supportive relations across government and with senior US, European, Middle and Far Eastern colleagues for strategy.” These dark handshakes with MI6 “enabled major diplomatic success [sic] of Iranian nuclear and sanctions agreement.” Britain’s central, clandestine role in corralling global public and political opinion behind the fraud Iran was pursuing nuclear weapons capabilities, and producing all that followed, has never been acknowledged by the mainstream media.

Nonetheless, Langman’s intimate involvement in the con is deserving of intense scrutiny. He holds the dubious distinction of being publicly ‘burned’ as an MI6 operative on two separate occasions. First, in 2001 it was revealed Langman had been active in Paris at the time of Princess Diana’s fatal car crash in the city on August 31st 1997, and was charged with conducting “information operations” to deflect widespread public speculation British intelligence was responsible for her death.

Then, in 2005 he was exposed by Greek authorities for overseeing the abduction and torture of 28 Pakistani guestworkers in Athens, suspected of having contact with the individuals accused of perpetrating the 7/7 bombings in London that year. Langman moved straight from this post to running MI6’s Iran Department. That he wasn’t reprimanded over the Greek incident strongly suggests he enjoyed a high level of protection, and London approved of his vicious intelligence-gathering methods - known to invariably elicit false testimony from detainees.

Was MI6 ‘intelligence’ Tehran posed a global nuclear hazard the result of torture? Regardless, as forecast by London’s ambassador to the US, the Obama administration was during its first year in office formally committed to non-interference in the Islamic Republic’s affairs. This policy was enforced so stringently, a State Department official almost lost his job for endorsing protests in Tehran in June 2009. Evidently, Britain’s interventions with foreign partners and the IAEA were decisive in shifting the White House away from conciliation, and towards war.

‘No Return’

MI6’s black propaganda operation was most welcome to senior Zionist entity officials, in particular Benjamin Netanyahu. Ever since the early 1990s, Israel’s current Prime Minister had been publicly warning on a regular basis that Tehran was on the verge of acquiring nukes. He was widely mocked for crying wolf. British intelligence provided seemingly independent verification of Netanyahu’s bogus claims, and influenced Western states into adopting hostile stances on the Islamic Republic. This connivance was of enormous benefit to Tel Aviv.

In the decades since the Islamic Revolution, Iran has supported an ever-expanding and strengthening nexus of anti-Zionist Resistance forces across West Asia. This includes Palestine. The MI6-triggered sanctions significantly hampered Tehran’s ability to provide practical, material and financial assistance to these groups. They also severely truncated the Islamic Republic’s involvement in battling CIA and MI6-sponsored extremist proxy forces and outright civil wars in neighbouring Iraq and Syria, over the past two decades.

Not coincidentally, following the historically devastating sanctions being imposed on Iran, Israeli assaults on the Occupied Territories and their populations, and Zionist theft of Palestinian lands and property, ratcheted significantly. With opposition weakened, the slow motion genocide of Gaza inexorably gathered pace, ultimately leading to Hamas’ Operation Al-Aqsa Flood on October 7th. With Gaza now flattened and ripe for Zionist seizure, Tel Aviv is preparing to commit a second Holocaust in the West Bank. Lawmakers in the Knesset have passed legislation facilitating its formal annexation.

A fantastical desire to neutralise Iran outright before moving in on the West Bank may lie behind the conflict waged since February 28th, with the spectre of nuclear weapons an ideal cover. Israel justified its calamitous 12 Day War on an intelligence dossier, which concluded the Islamic Republic had reached the “point of no return” in acquiring nukes. Its findings relied heavily on a May 2025 IAEA report that provided zero fresh information, but concluded Tehran supposedly maintained “undeclared nuclear material” until the early 2000s.

However, London has reasons of her own for seeking to subjugate Iran. Nationalisation of the country’s vast oil reserves by elected leader Mohammad Mossadeq in May 1951 crippled British Petroleum’s vast profits locally, placing Britain on a war footing with Tehran. Mossadeq was unseated in an MI6-orchestrated coup two years later, leading to the brutal reign of Shah Pahlavi, who presided over a highly pliant Anglo-American colony. The Islamic Revolution sent Pahlavi fleeing in 1979, and relations with London have been largely sour since.

The US-led War On Terror was heavily influenced by British Prime Minister Tony Blair’s rabidly interventionist perspectives, which discounted any and all considerations of international law. In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, Blair privately wrote to President George W. Bush, urging him to exploit “maximum” global sympathy produced by 9/11 to launch military interventions across West Asia. The first two targets on the list were Afghanistan and Iraq, both former British imperial holdings.

Were it not for the Empire getting so ruinously bogged down and overstretched in the War On Terror’s initial phases, Iran - which is sandwiched between Afghanistan and Iraq - would likely have been targeted for regime change and occupation by Anglo-American forces following those two conflicts. Today, an invasion of the Islamic Republic seems ominously close to fruition. However, Britain won’t allow the US to use her bases to strike Tehran, and wishes to stay out of the conflict she was instrumental in starting entirely.

From January 11th - 13th, Lithuania marked the 35th anniversary of the “January Events”. Three tumultuous days in 1991 culminated in a widely-publicised mass shooting of protesters at Vilnius’ TV Tower, with 14 killed and over 140 injured. Soviet forces were purportedly responsible. The bloodshed elicited an avalanche of international sympathy for Lithuania, leading to multiple states recognising the republic as an independent country. It was a pivotal event in the USSR’s breakup, and remains widely celebrated throughout the Baltics and beyond today.

Officially observed as the Day of the Defenders of Freedom in Lithuania, in March 2019 a local court found 67 Russian defendants guilty - overwhelmingly in absentia - for the January 13th massacre. Yet, for decades suspicion has swirled there was much more to the incident than met the eye. It has been openly admitted by ultranationalist figures at the forefront of the January 1991 unrest the mass killing was a deliberate ploy in a wider conspiracy to secure Vilnius’ independence, and shatter the Soviet Union.

Audrius Butkevicius, who later became Lithuania’s defence minister, was a chief leader of Vilnius’ battle against Moscow. He has repeatedly admitted that on January 13th, he deliberately directed nationalist activists to positions on-the-ground where they would be shot and potentially slain. In conversations with exiled Baltic Russophone journalist Galina Sapozhnikova, Butkevicius declared: “I accept the responsibility solemnly for us using nonviolent struggle techniques in a situation where people could die.” However, he has consistently blamed the Soviet Red Army for the slaughter.

In 2018, Sapozhnikova published The Lithuanian Conspiracy and the Soviet Collapse: Investigation into a Political Demolition. Her little-known book contains interviews with leading participants on both sides of the “January Events”, and individuals who have dared challenge the established narrative of the time. That Soviet forces cold-bloodedly murdered innocent, defenceless Lithuanians is a fundamental facet of the country’s foundational mythos. In June 2010, Vilnius passed a law criminalising questioning what precisely happened in January 1991, and many have fallen foul of its sweeping terms since.

Politika, a Lithuanian publisher, was raided by armed police in March 2017 under the legislation as it prepared to release Sapozhnikova’s work. Computers and documents were seized, while the organisation’s chief was arrested and interrogated. Local stores were understandably “scared to sell” the book subsequently. Given its contents, law enforcement’s heavy-handed response was inevitable. Multiple interviewees made bombshell disclosures unambiguously indicating the January 13th executions were a false flag, carried out by ultranationalists led by Butkevicius, to be bogusly blamed on Soviet forces.

Perhaps ironically, the most incendiary revelations were proffered by Butkevicius himself. “We knew quite clearly what actions the opponent would take, and hoped for a conflict…for the army to arrive to restore order,” he told Sapozhnikova of the vast protests in Vilnius that triggered the Red Army’s January 1991 intervention, which led to the mass shooting. “But we outplayed them…the tanks rolled in and…foreign journalists and camera crews shot the whole scene,” having been invited by Lithuanian authorities to document local events days in advance.

‘Psychological Warfare’

Butkevicius was an avid disciple and close friend of Gene Sharp. Known as the “Machiavelli of nonviolence”, Sharp was intimately enmeshed within the US defence and intelligence establishment for much of his life. Along the way, he published a number of pamphlets on “nonviolent” protest strategies that have inspired insurrectionary movements the world over, while providing in-person training to countless would-be revolutionaries. As Sapozhnikova writes, Sharp “openly taught” Estonian, Latvian and Lithuanian nationalists “how to dismantle the Soviet Union,” giving lectures in Moscow throughout 1991.

At these conferences, Sharp’s Civilian-Based Defense was circulated to Baltic separatists. Butkevicius has said of the work, “I would rather have this book than the nuclear bomb.” Its contents directly informed their independence struggle. Due to his “interest in psychological warfare,” Butkevicius began exchanging letters with Sharp in 1987. The pair’s connection quickly blossomed. They first met in February 1991 in Vilnius. Come the mid-1990s, Butkevicius worked “for a whole year” for Sharp’s spooky Albert Einstein Institute. He told Sapozhnikova of their bond’s origins:

Sharp was one of many “foreign specialists and political strategists” openly advocating methods for resisting Soviet authority, and collapsing the USSR, within the country itself in its final years. That this was permitted by Moscow is quite extraordinary. Numerous KGB veterans consulted by Sapozhnikova confirmed they were well-aware of machinations by US regime change operatives locally, including CIA apparatchiks, but the Soviet leadership was unconcerned. Alexander Osipov, a Lithuanian KGB counterintelligence specialist, summarised the situation bluntly: “there was a betrayal from [Mikhail] Gorbachev’s side.”

Osipov recalled how from the late 1980s onwards, information on the activities of local counter-revolutionary elements, and their Western sponsors, was “sent to Moscow on a daily basis.” However, his superiors took no action, even when “traitors and treason” were uncovered. If fifth columnists or spies were exposed in agencies and departments of the state, his superiors simply “[recommended] we fire them.” In the summer of 1989, the motivation for this concerted inertia was reportedly “made clear” to Osipov.

During a visit to Moscow, he claims a senior KGB official informed him, “it has been decided to give up the Baltics.” Thereafter, Osipov’s role was reduced to simply “observing the situation” on-the-ground. He witnessed “chaos and pressure” ratchet in Lithuania with some velocity. Regular separatist protests steadily swelled in size to many thousands of people, while local TV was “methodically hammering” the message home to audiences that Vilnius must split from the Soviet Union all along.

In the days leading up to the “January Events”, Osipov and his coworkers “noted the mass arrival of a huge amount of press and assumed that something was about to happen.” A superior warned him to stay at home, “and it would be even better if you had witnesses watching you.” In other words, the risk of local Soviet military and intelligence officials being fitted up for a planned, impending crime of some kind was significant, and well-understood by those in the loop.

Osipov is under no illusions about what occurred on January 13th 1991. “The new government of independent Lithuania needed just a bit more to tip the scales in their favor…In order to finally unite the Lithuanian people, they needed a little blood,” he told Sapozhnikova. “The picture is fairly clear…there are dozens of witness testimonies” indicating people were “shot from above and [nearby] roofs.” These areas were occupied by opposition elements aligned with Butkevicius, not the Red Army.

‘Official Version’

For two decades, it remained an open, unexamined, unspoken secret in Lithuania that Soviet forces likely weren’t culpable for the January 13th 1991 massacre. Mikhail Golovatov, head of the Red Army unit deployed to Vilnius TV Tower, testified in 2004 how “not a single shot was fired from our side,” amply demonstrated by none of their ammunition having been expended during the operation. Moreover, an officer within their expedition was killed alongside Lithuanian civilians, as the unit came under fire from opposition-occupied sites.

It was not until November 2010 the incident became subject of significant national controversy, however. During a radio interview, prominent Lithuanian statesman Algirdas Paleckis publicly declared “our people were shooting our own” on January 13th 1991. A “21st century inquisition” then erupted. Paleckis was prosecuted for “denying Soviet aggression”, the very first person to be charged under the June 2010 law prohibiting critical discussion of how Lithuania became an independent country. He was concurrently subject to relentless media attacks.

At his resultant trial, Paleckis presented 12 separate witnesses who saw opposition “provocateurs” shooting from roofs of buildings at the voluminous crowds below, contrary to the official narrative Red Army soldiers on the ground opened fire. He also provided Lithuanian government forensics reports showing at least six victims were killed by hunting rifle rounds, from a vertical 50 - 60 degree angle. He was found innocent in January 2012, but then convicted upon appeal, and forced to pay a 3,000 euro fine.

Sapozhnikova notes, “there were separate punishments for the witnesses who supported Paleckis and told the court what they had witnessed with their own eyes.” Many people he personally knew from serving as Vice-Mayor of Vilnius, who were encouraged in January 1991 by “burly men” to approach the TV tower killing zone “fearlessly” as the Red Army “only have blanks”, weren’t called to testify. They thus evaded adverse consequences for the high crime of telling the truth.

In many conversations with Lithuanians who knew the reality of the “January Events” while travelling through the country, Sapozhnikova enquired “why did you remain silent for so many years?” They universally responded, “because we wanted independence.” Asked why only many years later were people willing to go on record about what they knew, her interviewees typically replied, “because independence turned out to be worse than the Russian yoke.” As Paleckis told the journalist:

‘Nonviolent Struggle’

There is a glaring paradox at the Lithuanian counter-revolution’s core. Butkevicius boasted of the centrality of “Sharp’s books and insights” to the success of the Baltics’ independence crusade, specifically “psychological warfare” and “civil disobedience”. Such was the supposed potency of these techniques, “I could have dragged all of Russia into a war on Communists,” he bragged to Sapozhnikova. Yet, far from “nonviolent”, the “January Events” that all but guaranteed Vilnius’ secession from the Soviet Union climaxed with a hail of bullets, and many killed.

Strikingly, both Butkevicius and Sharp openly admitted to Sapozhnikova “nonviolent” revolutions in fact require violence to succeed. Butkevicius downplayed the January 1991 “carnage”, on the basis “a lot more people would have died” if his separatist clique employed “old guerilla warfare methods.” The Baltics had a history of armed resistance against Communism. For over a decade following World War II, Nazi collaborators and Holocaust perpetrators popularly known as the Forest Brothers waged a brutal, ill-fated insurgency against Soviet authorities, with CIA and MI6 assistance.

Sharp repeatedly spoke affectionately of the Forest Brothers. In conversations with Sapozhnikova, he framed the Baltics’ “nonviolent” independence campaign as a modern version of their guerrilla war. “Nonviolent struggle actually doesn’t mean that you are safe,” Sharp admitted. “It means less people might be killed, than when resorting to violence.” Given “authoritarian governments and dictatorships are very dependent on violence,” when mass movements “begin to threaten them, even using only nonviolent action, you shouldn’t be surprised that the regime will be killing people off.”

Sharp cited the example of CIA-supported Chechen militants, who “unwisely…chose violence to achieve independence,” given Russia was militarily “more powerful” - “it makes no sense to choose armed struggle, when your opponent is that strong.” He declared the genius of “nonviolent methods” was their employment meant “authorities won’t know what to do with you…because if they unleash force, it will cause an immediate international reaction.” Of course, Sharp’s assorted pamphlets conveniently don’t acknowledge the ultimate end goal of “nonviolent” protest techniques is getting activists murdered.

Nonetheless, supposedly government-inflicted citizen deaths and ensuing “international reaction” have been core components of multiple Sharp-inspired colour revolutions and US regime change operations. Sharp was present in Beijing during the April - June 1989 Tiananmen Square protests, and wrote an “eyewitness account” of “nonviolent struggle in China.” He neglected to mention the George Soros-endorsed demonstrators who occupied the Square lynched and immolated several unarmed People’s Liberation Army soldiers, actively seeking to provoke a savage counter-response from authorities. As prominent student protester Chai Ling contemporarily explained:

That counter-revolution failed. An obvious lesson to draw was the best way “nonviolent” activists can produce bloodshed, and a negative “international reaction”, is to covertly carry out killings themselves. The shooting of protesters by unidentified snipers featured in the April 2002 CIA-backed attempted overthrow of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, in numerous countries during the initial stages of the Arab Spring, and Ukraine’s 2014 Maidan Coup. In October 2023, a Kiev court ruling demonstrated beyond any doubt that the massacre was an opposition-executed false flag.

An extraordinary political scandal has erupted in Britain, raising the prospect Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s already embattled government could tumble. On February 5th, it was revealed Labour Together, a dubious ‘think tank’ intimately intertwined with the Labour party, paid shady PR firm APCO Worldwide tens of thousands of pounds to spy on journalists. Primary targets were reporters exposing damning information on Labour Together’s finances, and central role in Starmer’s corrupt rise to power. Others were considered “significant persons of interest”, for reasons unclear - including me.

The controversy became turbocharged on February 14th, when The Times published a frontpage investigation into how two of the outlet’s staff, Gabriel Pogrund and Harry Yorke, were subjects of intense focus in APCO’s operation. In November 2023, the pair revealed how £730,000 had been surreptitiously funnelled to Starmer’s 2020 leadership campaign via Labour Together. The organisation’s then-chief, Morgan McSweeney - who resigned as the Prime Minister’s top adviser on February 8th in disgrace - failed to declare the funding, a longstanding criminal offence under British law.

The story prompted Labour Together to hire APCO, which runs propaganda campaigns for notorious Zionist entity weapons merchant Elbit Systems. The company was tasked with digging up dirt on a number of figures, including Pogrund and Yorke, and identifying their information sources. A resultant APCO report charged - without evidence - damaging leaked information on Labour Together’s finances originated from a Russian hack of Britain’s Electoral Commission in 2023. This was shared with the National Cyber Security Council, a unit of notorious signals spying agency GCHQ.

While the NCSC declined to launch a probe, senior government ministers briefed pliant journalists the non-existent “Russian hack” had been referred to GCHQ. These backroom interventions successfully blunted media interest in scandals surrounding Labour Together. Mainstream outlets left the story alone thereafter. Meanwhile, The Guardian threatened Paul Holden, who led investigations into Labour Together’s corruption, with publication of a libelous article alleging he was being scrutinised by British security services for receiving illegally obtained information from Russia. The Guardian dropped the non-story due to legal threats.

This journalist has directly fallen victim to such underhand tactics. In summer 2022, I was contacted by a Politico contributor. Asked to provide comment on a series of investigations published by The Grayzone on the leaked emails of disgraced MI6 chief Richard Dearlove and veteran BBC and Channel 4 journalist Paul Mason, I acquiesced. Politico did not inform me the resultant article would reveal the NCSC was formally investigating Russia’s supposed hack of the leaked emails in question.

Newly-released correspondence exposes how that story was fed directly to Politico by the NCSC, after Mason reported me to the GCHQ division. Mainstream journalists who had hitherto taken a keen interest in the leaked material abruptly went quiet. The content was nonetheless explosive, revealing how Mason had among other things secretly sought to bankrupt and deplatform The Grayzone. He conspired in this deranged scheme with Amil Khan, a veteran British intelligence-adjacent psychological warfare operative who now runs “counter-disinformation” specialist Valent Projects.

The Grayzone had previously reported on Valent’s cyber skullduggery. These investigations caused Khan to harbour a bitter grudge against the outlet, and this journalist particularly. A leaked May 2022 Valent report falsely charges that I’m a “regular contributor to Russian state-affiliated media.” Meanwhile, a series of ‘X’ posts I published about Valent the previous year was branded a “doxxing attack”, which “suggested access to information obtained through espionage/security links.” In reality, the information contained therein was found via internet search engines, and websites including LinkedIn.

Khan is among a constellation of individuals tied to the highest levels of the Labour party and Labour Together, potentially implicated in perpetuating the bogus “Russian hack” narrative pushed by APCO. When Labour Together hired the firm’s London office to do its dirty work, APCO was run by Kate Forrester, wife of Starmer’s then-head of communications Paul Ovenden. A year after APCO was tasked, the firm hired Mark Simpson. He had spent the past five years as Starmer’s chief international policy adviser.

Among the many mysteries surrounding APCO’s targeting of journalists on bogus grounds, why I was considered a “significant person of interest” is particularly perplexing. When the smear effort was launched, I had publicly mentioned Labour Together just once, in the context of the organisation founding state-endorsed censorship outfit the Center for Countering Digital Hate. I wasn’t involved in any investigations into Labour Together’s financial wrongdoing. I had nonetheless asked Khan long prior about Valent’s work for the organisation, which was once openly advertised on his company’s website.

Khan didn’t respond. Nonetheless, in the wake of Labour’s defeat in the 2019 General Election, Valent produced a report for Labour Together, Power and Persuasion: Understanding the Right’s Digital Playbook. It analysed a variety of highly controversial dirty online tricks pulled by the ruling Conservatives over the election campaign. This included running Facebook advertisements that appeared to be posted by other political parties, and covertly managing pages and accounts attacking Corbyn from a seemingly left-wing, pro-Labour perspective.

While branding these ruses “highly questionable”, lead author Amil Khan went on to propose “progressive parties” adopt similar techniques. For example, the Conservatives published deceptively edited videos of Labour politicians that made them appear incompetent. Khan’s report appeared to advocate such dishonesty, observing how “rather than damage the Conservative campaign,” this ploy “seems to have been a well-considered tactic used to bait traditional news outlets to give senior campaign figures airtime, which they could then use to repeat campaign messages.”

Khan explained how “repetition of key talking points, even in contexts that could be seen as negative, results in supporters imbibing the message.” If a Conservative official was provided the opportunity to repeat the words “[Jeremy] Corbyn is dangerous” on primetime TV, “even in the context of having to defend a faked video, viewers who have heard the talking point in many other contexts will focus on that and not the issue the official is having to answer for.”

Khan positively cited a Sky News reporter’s appraisal of this malign strategy, as “sinister but effective.” He actively endorsed emulating the Conservatives’ secret management of astroturf social media pages, which targeted “a spectrum of audience groups,” and “spent their money on targeting those people with content designed to address their interests.” Khan also proposed investing in “smart, data-driven digital communication capability,” to assist parliamentary candidates at a hyper-local level. While an introductory note from Labour Together praised Valent’s research, Khan’s analysis was as ever woeful.

For instance, he stated the Conservative party used a variety of data to gather “information on voters” and influence their behaviour, including CCTV footage, and “data from online transactions.” A cursory glance at the source of these claims - a “privacy notice” on the party’s official website - amply indicates there is no suggestion whatsoever this information is stored or used for electoral purposes, if that was even possible.

Still, Khan’s work was well-received by Labour, by then led by Starmer due to Labour Together’s lavish, undeclared assistance. Conveniently, Khan stood to personally profit from his report’s proposals being adopted by the party. In January 2021, leaked records indicate Valent submitted a detailed quote for “providing digital communications support services” to Labour party councillors running for re-election. Khan would deliver a “two-day digital campaigning masterclass” for candidates, while assisting with their branding, logos, publicity brochures and more.

Khan sought to give “individuals with little previous experience of professional social media use practical skills and knowledge to improve their ability to campaign in elections.” This included tutorials on “social media content creation”, and constructing “social media infrastructure,” such as “setting up Facebook business accounts…targeting by geography/demography/interests,” and “learning from ads analytics.” Just as Valent’s report for Labour Together advocated. Accordingly, Khan has publicly cheered the Labour party’s online conniving since.

For example, in May 2022 he effusively praised Labour bulk-buying attack adverts on Conservative Home, the “online bible” of Conservative party members. While the stunt was widely criticised by Labour supporters, Khan believed it to be “top notch digital trolling.” The caper was repeated in advance of the 2024 General Election. This January, Valent Projects announced it had raised over a million pounds to support its rollout of a patented AI interface, which tracks “how bad actors seek to manipulate information flows” online.

Prospective clients include “governments and multilateral organisations worried about hostile state interference.” Betting is high Valent’s innovation will be used for the purposes of censorship and suppression online, under the guise of “countering disinformation”. It’s all but inevitable social media users expressing the ‘wrong’ opinions, and independent journalists publishing inconvenient truths, will be in the firing line. In the meantime, official investigations into the APCO scandal should clearly consider Amil Khan a “significant person of interest.”

In late January, the US Department of Justice dumped millions of documents detailing the criminal activities of US oligarch and serial paedophile Jeffrey Epstein, including his vast rolodex of paedophilic celebrities, financiers, politicians and public figures. The tranche is so vast, independent journalists and researchers have barely scratched the surface yet. But preliminary investigations amply demonstrate Epstein was centrally enmeshed with multiple foreign spy agencies. First and foremost, the Zionist entity’s notorious Mossad. The horrors wrought on West Asia as a result are incalculable.

A recurrent phenomenon in the newly-released documents, emails and text messages is Epstein and his grand global nexus seeking to profit from Western-inflicted misery the world over. On March 18th 2014, in the Maidan coup’s immediate, violent aftermath, he emailed Ariane de Rothschild, a French banker and CEO of the Edmond de Rothschild Group since March 2023, due to her marrying into the famous, powerful Jewish family. Epstein was exhilarated. “Ukraine upheaval should provide many opportunites [sic],” he wrote.

De Rothschild was drained after a “very long day sitting on bank board,” but delighted to hear from her close friend. “Miss our talks and hope you’re well,” she gushed. “Will be at home tomorrow night, will you be free? And let’s discuss Ukraine.” The “opportunities” Epstein perceived in the shattered post-coup country, as it plunged into Western-sponsored civil war, could’ve ranged from an untapped reservoir of young girls and vulnerable women, to pillaging the country’s vast resources.

In July 2011, Epstein emailed associate Greg Brown, declaring “the Libyans now are legit, but need real help,” adding “they must be careful there will be many claims on that money.” He was referring to Tripoli’s frozen overseas assets, seized by Western powers in March that year, after the country plunged into insurrectionary violence. Epstein fired off this missive right when NATO’s bombing of Libya graduated from striking government forces to actively supporting rebel advances, as foreign fighters closed in on the country’s capital.

Brown excitedly responded, “there are already $80 billion in frozen funds/assets internationally,” and perhaps “three to four times this number in sovereign, stolen and misappropriated assets.” He was working with MI6 and Mossad veterans to “identify stolen assets and get them recovered.” If they could “identify/recover 5% to 10% of these monies and receive 10% to 25% as compensation,” the Anglo-Israeli private spying network could reap “billions of dollars”.

However, this paled in comparison to gains to be had once the Western-sponsored National Transitional Council unseated Libya’s longtime leader Muammar Gaddafi. “The real carrot is if we can become their go-to guys because they plan to spend at least $100 billion next year to rebuild their country and jumpstart the economy,” Brown salivated. He reminded Epstein the country was “rich”, with a small population but “the ninth largest crude oil & natural gas reserves on the planet.” Gaddafi was murdered by rebel forces that October.

‘Secret Weapon’

Numerous declassified materials amply indicate Epstein was a journeyman intelligence asset, with connections to several ostensibly separate spying agencies. Tellingly, some heavily redacted communications contain references to Sensitive Compartmented Information Facilities (SCIF). These buildings are used by US intelligence and government agencies to exchange top secret information, and access requires the highest security clearance. In a secret January 2018 discussion with political strategist Steve Bannon, Epstein bragged how his sprawling New York mansion was “similar to a SCIF.”

Bannon was one of many right-wing figures Epstein courted. Another was Peter Thiel, the billionaire founder of shadowy data harvester Palantir. In June 2014, Epstein emailed to say he increasingly lent credence to Thiel’s “‘intentionality’ argument” - the proposal that the “mess” unfolding across the Arab and Muslim world over recent years was what then-US President Barack Obama “really wanted”. Epstein remarked, “we would have to admit a strategy brilliantly executed.” Thiel fired back:

Thiel was well-placed to know this was the Obama administration’s strategy. Birthed with seed funding from In-Q-Tel, the CIA’s venture capital arm, Palantir made vast sums serving as the War On Terror’s “Secret Weapon”. It was used to hunt “bad guys” at war with the US, and Israel - the key beneficiary of West Asia being set on fire during this period. Not coincidentally, the Zionist entity has for years employed a variety of Palantir products. Thiel commented in July 2024, the Gaza Holocaust well-underway:

Accordingly, there are indications Epstein was in the employ of both US and Israeli intelligence. In a February 2016 email exchange with Thiel, he declared, “as you probably know I represent the Rothschilds.” The banking dynasty was instrumental in Israel’s creation, funding construction of colonial settlements in Palestine from the late 1800s onwards. Epstein’s own ties to the Zionist entity were deep and cohering. From September 2010 - March 2019, he formally met with prominent Israeli politician and military veteran Ehud Barak over 60 times.

Barak was a repeat visitor to Epstein’s private island, Little St James. On at least one occasion, in January 2014, Barak visited with his wife, and specifically left his security detail behind. In June that year, Epstein arranged for Barak to meet Thiel. The Israeli politician was such a frequent guest at Epstein’s New York apartment on 301 East 66th Street, his staff referred to the lodgings internally as “301.”

‘Terrorism Financing’

In January, Barak sought to distance himself from Epstein, claiming he “deeply regret[s] having any association with him.” However, their bond was intimate, warm, and long-running. Epstein’s 2008 conviction for sex offences didn’t dim their connection, and come November 2018, Barak referred to Epstein as a “great friend” in discussions with Jabor Yousef Jassim Al Thani, a businessman and member of the Qatari royal family. An FBI investigation was opened into Epstein on June 12th 2018.

That same day, Epstein lodged an order for six 55 gallon drums of sulfuric acid, “with fuel and insurance charge for transport,” with now-defunct, Florida-based Gemini Seawater Systems. It would be unsurprising if he’d been tipped off about the Bureau probe. Someone within the FBI, or a foreign spying agency keeping a close eye on the agency, could’ve alerted him. Just as Epstein maintained ties between different foreign services, he enjoyed relations with high-ranking state figures the world over.

Jabor Yousef Jassim Al Thani was but one Gulf royal who the paedophile financier counted as a close confidante. Epstein was evidently considered a go-to figure when Qatar was seeking to communicate with Israel. In February 2010, Al Thani wrote to Epstein that the “Israeli operation…doesn’t help anyone.” He referred to the brazen assassination of Palestinian resistance fighter Mahmoud al-Mabhouh in Dubai the previous month, by Mossad. A day earlier, local authorities formally blamed the notorious spy agency for the killing, triggering a media firestorm.

In July 2017, following the UAE and Saudi Arabia leading Arab states in severing diplomatic relations with Qatar, and imposing a US-supported land, air and sea blockade on the monarchy in advance of a planned land invasion, Epstein wrote to Al Thani, offering him advice on how Dubai could rescue herself. “I think Qatar should stop kicking and arguing,” and make nice with the Zionist entity, he proposed. “Let the heat come down a bit.”

In reference to the monarchy’s support for Hamas, he suggested “Qatar needs to come out against terrorism,” as “the smell of terrorism financing will be around for years.” Epstein went on to reference Indian Prime Minister Modi’s recent international jaunt, where he’d met Trump in June, before becoming the first-ever Indian prime minister to visit the Zionist entity. Modi also snubbed the Palestinian Authority, eliciting condemnation from PA officials. Epstein reported:

Troublingly, Epstein’s filial alliance with Ehud Barak overlapped with Barak serving as Tel Aviv’s defence minister, raising the obvious question of whether Epstein in any way directly influenced Israeli policy during this time, or acted as an advocate and broker for the Zionist entity with other countries in West Asia and beyond. Barak solicited Epstein’s input with his public writing, including a draft of his book My Country, My Life: Fighting for Israel, Searching for Peace, which was released in May 2018.

That month, Barak’s wife emailed Epstein while visiting New York demanding an “urgent short meeting” between Epstein and her husband. One day later, Donald Trump withdrew from the Iranian nuclear agreement, in favour of a “maximum pressure” campaign. In July 2018, Barak’s private surveillance firm Toka broke cover publicly for the first time, announcing it had raised $12.5 million in seed funding from investors including venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz.

Andreessen Horowitz invested in several ventures also backed by Jeffrey Epstein, including CoinBase. It is unknown whether Epstein invested in Toka, although his interest in such a company would be clear. The firm is stacked with former Israeli cyber spies, and has patented technology capable of locating security cameras and webcams, hacking into them, then altering their live feeds without trace. Such a resource removes any need for real-life individuals to oversee “honey trap” operations, and targets to take the bait.

On February 2nd, the BBC published an extraordinary report on how the Trump administration “has declared a stark policy shift” towards Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger, the governments of which have sought to eradicate all ties to Western imperial powers, and forged the Alliance of Sahel States (AES). The independent bloc is a revolutionary enterprise, with the prospect further countries will follow its members’ lead. Washington is under no illusions about the new geopolitical realities unfolding in Africa.

The British state broadcaster records how Nick Checker, State Department African Affairs chief, is due to visit Mali to convey US “respect” for the country’s “sovereignty”, and chart a “new course” in relations, moving “past policy missteps.” Checker will also express optimism about future collaboration with AES, “on shared security and economic interests.” This is an absolutely unprecedented development. After military coups deposed the elected presidents of all three countries 2020 - 2023, the trio became Western pariahs.

France and the US initially aimed to isolate and undermine the military governments, halting “cooperation” projects in numerous fields. Meanwhile, the Economic Community of West African States, a neocolonial union of which all three were members, first imposed severe sanctions on Burkina Faso, Mali, and Niger, before its combined armed forces prepared to outright invade the latter in summer 2023. The three countries didn’t budge, and in fact welcomed Western isolation, forging new international partnerships and strengthening their ties. ECOWAS military action never came to pass.

In January 2025, the trio seceded from the union and created AES. Western-funded, London-based Amani Africa branded the move “the most significant crisis in West Africa’s regional integration since the founding of ECOWAS in 1975,” claiming it dealt “a significant blow to African…cooperation architecture.” Meanwhile, Burkina Faso’s leader Capt Ibrahim Traoré has become a media hate figure. A disparaging May 2025 Financial Times profile slammed him as a cynical opportunist leading a “Russia-backed junta”, and his supporters a “cult”.

As the BBC unwittingly explains, such antipathy towards Traoré stems from establishing himself “as a standard-bearer in resisting ‘imperialism’ and ‘neocolonialism’.” Via “vigorous social media promotion, he has gained huge support for this stance and personal popularity among young people across the continent and beyond,” ever since seizing office in September 2022. Far from just talk, Traoré and his fellow AES “junta” leaders have systematically neutralised malign Western influence locally, while pursuing left-wing economic policies for the good of their populations.

France and the US have proven markedly powerless to hamper, let alone reverse, this seismic progress. While officials in Paris and Washington hitherto relentlessly hammered AES members over “democracy and human rights”, the BBC reports such concerns will be wholly “absent from the agenda” when State Department officials now visit Mali. In other words, the Empire recognises it no longer has the ability to dictate the composition or policies of regional governments, and must engage administrations on their own terms.

‘Despotic Governments’

While generating only occasional mainstream interest, the push by Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger to purge their countries of Western imperialism has been remarkable in scope, and efficacy. French and US media programmes and channels have been blocked throughout AES. In August 2022, Paris’ forces were sent packing from Mali after a nine-year-long occupation. Two years later, Russian soldiers took over an airbase in Niger housing American forces at the government’s invitation, after authorities demanded Washington withdraw from the country.

These defenstrations have had a knock-on effect in the wider region. For example, in November 2024 Chad abruptly terminated France’s longrunning local military presence. Around the same time, Senegal ordered the French close their base in Dakar. The last troops departed in July 2025, leaving Paris with no permanent army installations in Central or West Africa. Meanwhile, efforts by AES members to drive Britain, France and the US out of every major sector of their economies are ongoing.

Right when Chad and Senegal were bidding bon voyage to French forces, Niger seized control of local mining firm Somaïr, a component of state-owned French nuclear company Orano. Somaïr provided a quarter of the uranium supply to European nuclear power plants. Resultantly, EU imports of uranium from Russia rose by over 70%, despite supposedly crippling sanctions imposed over the Ukraine proxy war. In another bitter irony, Moscow has concurrently cemented itself as an ever-increasingly close economic and military ally of AES member states.

This burgeoning relationship has triggered a predictable chorus of condemnation and fearmongering from Western journalists, politicians and pundits. Yet, a March 2024 poll published by the German Friedrich Ebert Stiftung Foundation found 98% of Malians approve of their country’s bond with Russia, with 83% being “very satisfied” and 15% “rather satisfied”. More generally, the same survey highlighted how Mali’s “junta” enjoys overwhelming public support, about which Western governments can only fantasise.

In all, 81% of respondents believed life in Mali had improved since the military administration took office. A staggering 99% expressed satisfaction with the work of security forces, 95% were optimistic about the country’s future prospects, and 87% rejected calls for an election. Similar results were found in a poll of Burkina Faso’s population that August. Stunningly, 66% of citizens said military coups were wholly legitimate and necessary, if “elected leaders abuse their power for their own interests.”

As a fascinating paper by Senegalese academic Ndongo Samba Sylla forensically details, ever since supposed independence was granted to Africa in the 1960s, France and her closest allies have worked concertedly to ensure the continent’s constituent countries are ruled by pliant puppets. Along the way, the West has “shown no scruples in backing odious civilian or military regimes” favourable to their interests. This produces “choiceless democracies” across Africa, with “despotic governments” that come to power “through fraudulent elections and…do not create any welfare for their people.”

‘Lasting Solutions’

Sylla cites the example of Chad, where France sustained corrupt, brutal dictator Idriss Deby Itno in office 1990 - 2021. Following his death, Emmanuel Macron diplomatically backed his son’s “unconstitutional succession”. The French President’s unabashed advocacy for an illiberal, nepotistic power grab in the former colony is to be contrasted with his furious censure of the military coups in Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger, demands they hold elections, and calls for “financial sanctions from African countries, the West and its financial institutions.”

France could impose sanctions directly on the trio due to Paris’ control of the financial arm of ECOWAS. Membership ties African states to the CFA Franc, a currency created after World War II that allowed Paris to maintain grossly iniquitous trading relationships with its African colonies, when its economy was ravaged and overseas empire rapidly unravelling. The CFA Franc makes it cheap for members to import from France and vice versa, but prohibitively expensive for them to export elsewhere.

Such forced dependency creates a captive market for the French, and by extension Europe, decisively blunting local development. Member states are impotent to enact meaningful policy changes, as they lack control over their own economies, forced to take orders from the IMF, World Bank and Western investors. As Sylla remarks: “No matter who you elect, they will have to stick with the basic economic policy blueprint.” Creating a replacement currency is AES’ next major challenge - although its members have already started constructing a central bank.

AES’ continued existence, and successes, are anathema to Paris. Following “decolonisation” in Africa until today, the French have launched 50 overt interventions in Africa - which doesn’t account for assassinations of anti-imperialist leaders, palace coups, rigged elections and other skullduggery employed to maintain France’s mephitic, exploitative grip over her former holdings. Delusions of keeping the continent wedged under their heels have not faded, despite the dramatic collapse of their local clout. In April 2024, General Francois Lecointre, former French Army Chief of Staff, declared:

Residents of AES evidently beg to differ, and stand ready to defend their leaders from foreign destabilisation. US officials aren’t unwise to the region’s new power dynamic. In an October 2025 interview with Le Monde, Trump confidante and State Department senior advisor for Africa Massad Boulos rejected any suggestion Washington would criticise the Sahel’s military governments, as while “democracy is always appreciated…people are free to choose whatever system is appropriate for them.” The anti-imperialist struggle continues apace in Africa. For now, the revolutionaries are winning.

On August 25th 2025, this journalist documented how the 1975 Helsinki Accords transformed “human rights” into a highly destructive weapon in the West’s imperial arsenal. At the forefront of this shift were organisations such as Amnesty International, and Helsinki Watch - the forerunner of Human Rights Watch. Supposedly independent reports published by these organisations became devastatingly effective tools for justifying sanctions, destabilisation campaigns, coups, and outright military intervention against purported overseas “rights” abusers. A palpable example of HRW’s utility in this regard is provided by Yugoslavia’s disintegration.

In December 2017, HRW published a self-laudatory essay boasting how its publication of “real-time field reporting of war crimes” during the Bosnian civil war’s early stages in 1992, and the organisation’s independent lobbying for a legal mechanism “to punish military and political leaders responsible for atrocities” committed in the conflict, contributed to the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia’s establishment. Documents held by Columbia University “reveal the fundamental role of HRW” in the ICTY’s May 1993 founding.

These files moreover detail HRW’s “cooperation in various criminal investigations” against former Yugoslav officials by the ICTY, “through mutual exchange of information.” The organisation is keen to promote its intimate, historic ties with the Tribunal, and how the ICTY’s work spurred the International Criminal Court’s creation. Yet, absent from these hagiographic accounts is any reference to HRW’s pivotal contribution to manufacturing public and political consent for Yugoslavia’s breakup, which produced the very atrocities the organisation helped document and prosecute.

In November 1990, HRW founding member Jeri Laber authored a tendentiously-titled op-ed for The New York Times, “Why Keep Yugoslavia One Country?”. Inspired by a recent trip to Kosovo, Laber described how her team’s experience on-the-ground in the Serbian province had led HRW to harbour “serious doubts about whether the US government should continue to bolster the national unity of Yugoslavia.” Instead, she proposed actively facilitating the country’s destruction, and laid out a precise roadmap by which Washington could achieve this goal.

Namely, by offering financial aid exclusively to Yugoslavia’s constituent republics, “to help them in a peaceful evolution to democracy,” while sidelining “weak” federal authorities from any and all “economic support”. She forcefully concluded, “there is no moral law that commits us to honor the national unity of Yugoslavia.” Coincidentally, mere days earlier, US lawmakers began voting on the Foreign Operations Appropriations Act, which codified Laber’s prescriptions as formal government policy.

Under the legislation’s auspices, Washington would provide no “direct assistance” to Yugoslavia’s federal government whatsoever. Moreover, financial aid would be withheld from the country’s constituent republics unless they all convened elections under US State Department supervision within six months. In a stroke, Belgrade’s central authority was neutralised, and the seeds of bitter, bloody wars of independence throughout the multiethnic, multifaith socialist federation were sown. Shockingly, Human Rights Watch was well-aware this was an “inevitable” consequence of terminating Yugoslav “national unity”.

‘Multinational Experiment’

In January 1991, HRW published an investigation, Human Rights In A Dissolving Yugoslavia. Laber was lead author, and its findings relied heavily on her visit to Kosovo the previous year. The report claimed the Serbian province was home to “one of the most severe situations of human rights abuse in Europe today,” due to the Yugoslav army’s mass-deployment. Kosovo resultantly teemed with soldiers and roadblocks. Numerous anonymous local Albanians told HRW lurid tales of atrocities, supposedly committed by the military and security forces against civilians.

The report briefly acknowledged Serbs, and Kosovo’s other ethnic and religious minorities, had previously “suffered abuse” from elements of the province’s Albanian population, and local governments “composed predominantly of ethnic Albanians.” It also noted prior HRW missions to Kosovo concluded the Yugoslav military’s mission was “to protect the Serb minority.” However, the report asserted there was now “no justification” for the army’s presence, and its true purpose was to “subjugate ethnic Albanian identity” locally on the Serbian government’s behalf.

That non-Albanians “suffered abuse” in Kosovo before the Yugoslav army’s arrival is quite an understatement. As The New York Times reported in November 1982, Albanian ultranationalists had in recent years embarked on a savage “war of terror” to create a Kosovo “cleansed of all Slavs.” That year alone, 20,000 terrified Serbs fled the province. In 1987, the outlet recorded how this barbarous crusade had intensified to such a degree, Yugoslav officials and citizens across the federation feared the outbreak of civil war.

“There is no doubt Kosovo is a problem of the whole country, a powder keg on which we all sit,” Slovenian Communist chief Milan Kucan, who three years later led his republic’s independence from Yugoslavia, was quoted as saying. “Officials in Belgrade” of every ethnic and religious extraction viewed the “challenge” of Kosovo Albanian secessionists as “imperiling the foundations” of the country’s “multinational experiment”. They cautioned of the “Lebanonizing” of their state, comparing the situation to the “Troubles” in British-occupied Ireland:

Earlier in 1987, Belgrade’s nine-strong Presidency, led by Sinan Hasani - himself a Kosovo Albanian - formally condemned the actions of ultranationalists in the province as “counter-revolutionary”. In the parlance of socialist Yugoslavia, this was the gravest qualification that could be bestowed by the country’s leadership. Hasani remained part of the Presidency in February 1989, when its members unanimously declared a state of emergency in Kosovo, leading to the military’s deployment.

HRW singularly failed to probe this complex, essential context in its report. There was also no recognition whatsoever the situation in Kosovo for non-Albanians remained fraught at this time, to the extent Serbs escaping brewing ethnic tensions elsewhere in Yugoslavia were explicitly warned not to seek refuge in the province by authorities. These omissions are all the more unpardonable given HRW’s distorted view of events in Kosovo was central to the report’s conclusion - the US should sanction the Yugoslav federal government for human rights violations.

This finding was reached despite HRW conceding it was widely believed such punitive action against Belgrade would “inevitably” lead to the federation’s disintegration, with “human rights virtually guaranteed to suffer” as a result. The organisation however did “not endorse this position”, believing it of far greater urgency Washington “express its disapproval” over purported abuses in Kosovo via destructive sanctions. Meanwhile, HRW unbelievably stressed it took “no position on whether Yugoslavia should or should not stay together as a country.”

‘Communal Violence’

Fast forward to December 2002, and Jeri Laber testified as an “expert” witness during Slobodan Milosevic’s ICTY prosecution. Under cross-examination by the indicted former Serbian and Yugoslav President, she exhibited an absolutely staggering ignorance of socialist Yugoslavia’s culture, history, legal and political systems, and much more besides. For example, Laber was unaware Tito, the federation’s founder and longtime leader, was - famously - a Croat. Her pronounced lack of local comprehension proved particularly problematic when Milosevic dissected an August 1991 HRW report, on the Croatian civil war.

The probe made a number of bold claims regarding that conflict, describing “the resurrection of Croatian nationalism” producing the deadly standoff “as a reaction to 45 years of Communist repression and Serbian hegemony,” leaving Croats “bitter” over how Zagreb was, in Yugoslavia, “a vassal” of Belgrade. HRW strongly suggested - without evidence - Milosevic was personally responsible for fomenting local tensions and violence. Western sponsorship of Nazi-venerating Croat leaders, who openly advocated total erasure of their republic’s Serb population, was unmentioned.

Milosevic asked Laber how HRW could’ve possibly concluded Croatia’s membership of socialist Yugoslavia amounted to almost half a century of “Serbian hegemony”, given a Serb occupied the office of Prime Minister just once throughout the federation’s history, for a four-year-long period. He further questioned her cognisance of Belgrade’s three federal premiers 1982 - 1992 all being Croats, that Croats led and dominated Yugoslavia’s defence apparatus during the Croatian conflict itself, and how “all ethnicities were represented proportionally” in the country’s government and military by law.

Laber confessed to not knowing a single one of these inconvenient truths, fatally undermining the claims of every HRW report published on Yugoslavia under her watch - which inspired the ICTY’s formation, and prosecutions. Flailing on the witness stand, she resorted to arguing the countless flagrantly bogus assertions in HRW’s assorted Yugoslav investigations weren’t intended to be taken as her organisation’s own independent findings, or in any way rooted in reality, but merely reflected what some people locally had voiced to HRW researchers:

Such crucial, self-nullifying caveats were of course not included in any of HRW’s reports on Yugoslavia’s collapse and the numerous internecine conflicts that resulted, which the organisation actively encouraged and facilitated. That Laber’s witless pronouncements informed and justified US policy, despite her ignorance of the most basic facts about Yugoslavia, is a disquieting testament to the woeful quality of ‘expertise’ routinely exploited in pursuit of Washington’s imperial goals. What the federation’s breakup would produce was entirely predictable, and indeed contemporaneously predicted by scholar Robert Hayden.

In a December 1990 New York Times op-ed, Hayden - an actual expert on Yugoslavia - harshly condemned Laber’s strident call for the US to shatter the federation in the newspaper the previous month as “remarkable for its lack of comprehension.” He rightly warned, “those who would break up the country are strong nationalists, not likely to treat minorities within their own borders well,” while recording how the federal military’s interventions helped “forestall armed conflict” in Croatia that August, which could’ve easily spread across the country.

Comparing Belgrade’s present situation to the US civil war’s leadup, Hayden charged it was “truly bizarre…‘human rights’ activists so cavalierly advocate policies that are likely to turn Yugoslavia into the Lebanon of Europe.” With eerily precise foresight, he warned if Belgrade’s federal authority collapsed, “the republics are almost certain to fight one another because of the large minority populations that are scattered through the country.” His dire premonitions today reverberate as a prophet’s curse wretchedly validated:

Since January 13th, government forces have torn across North East Syria. It marks a brutal end to an autonomous region - typically referred to as Rojava - effectively governed by the US-backed, Kurdish-dominated Syrian Democratic Forces for over a decade. While a Washington-brokered ceasefire agreement provides for the SDF’s integration into Damascus’ Western-appointed government, the de facto HTS-controlled military shows every sign of seeking to permanently erase and neutralise all traces of Rojava.

Civilians and SDF fighters have been slaughtered since the region’s takeover. Ahmed al-Sharaa’s thugs have been assisted in their massacres by the freed inmates of local detention centres, among them a profusion of ‘former’ ISIS butchers. These facilities were created in 2019 to accommodate the population of territory once claimed by Islamic State, and today house tens of thousands of people. Markedly, government forces specifically targeted the prisons when their assault on Rojava commenced, strongly suggesting igniting mass jailbreaks locally was a deliberate objective.

Rojava’s ISIS refugee camps posed a complex and seemingly irresolvable problem for the autonomous territory. Inhabitants could only be repatriated with the consent of their home country’s government, which in many cases refused. The Al-Hol camp proved particularly problematic. Housing exclusively women and children, detainees were overwhelmingly the wives and sons and daughters of Islamic State fighters. The former often never renounced their commitment to Daesh, while the latter are stateless.

A September 2019 Washington Post report painted a horrifying picture of Al-Hol as a “cauldron of radicalization”, in which hardcore ISIS adherents enforced the group’s strictures upon the wider population through brutal violence, including murder. SDF guards could do nothing but attempt to “contain” offenders physically, while Islamic State’s extremist ideology spread “uncontested”, with tens of thousands of children a literally “captive audience”. The facility was struck by al-Sharaa’s goon squad on January 20th, sending clusters of its captives, and the SDF, fleeing.

Al-Hol is now under government control, the fate of its approximately 30,000 inhabitants uncertain. However, there are grounds to believe the camp’s population was primed in advance to expect, and welcome, the arrival of al-Sharaa’s fighters. Leaked documents expose how The Global Strategy Network, a psychological warfare specialist founded and staffed by British intelligence veterans, has maintained a secret presence in Al-Hol for years, covertly perpetuating MI6-approved propaganda messaging every step of the way.

The putative Syrian government’s destruction of Rojava significantly consolidates its hold on power nationally. The SDF occupied territory home to the country’s primary oil- and wheat-producing areas, seizure of which provides a sizeable windfall. There is moreover zero prospect of a breakaway Kurdish state emerging, which the territory’s leaders had repeatedly mooted following HTS’ December 2024 capture of Damascus. These developments will be warmly greeted throughout Western corridors of power - first and foremost perhaps, London.

As this journalist has previously exposed, HTS was groomed for years prior to its violent palace coup by Inter-Mediate, an MI6-linked consulting firm run by Jonathan Powell, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s national security adviser. Inter-Mediate has maintained a dedicated office within Syria’s Presidential palace ever since. Starmer cheered Bashar Assad’s fall as an opportunity for London to “play a more present and consistent role throughout the region.” That plan is now being put into action.

‘Moderate Version’

The leaked files show Global Strategy began constructing a psychological warfare infrastructure within Al-Hol almost immediately upon its founding, in the wake of Islamic State’s formal March 2019 defeat. Contrary to mainstream reports that the SDF had comprehensively crushed ISIS, the documents note the group continued to conduct “operations” against “military and intelligence assets” in Rojava. This meant “Daesh remains a clear and present danger” locally, “continuing to deploy acts of violence against an ever-expanding list of adversaries.”

There were other issues making Global Strategy’s mission difficult, and deeply dangerous. As “Daesh proactively involved women in both its civilian administration and military operations,” this meant Islamic State was “able to wield significant influence in Al-Hol, in spite of its wider loss of formal territorial control, by using the ‘true believers’...to proselytise and enforce on its behalf.” The “spectrum” of residents spanning “active Daesh supporters” to those “actively victimised by Daesh” was also said to be “highly complex and unclear.”

Moreover, ISIS bombarded detainees with propaganda, while exploiting Al-Hol “as a critical element of its wider communications,” supporting “proactive and aggressive outreach around the issue.” Some Daesh-distributed imagery juxtaposed “poor living conditions” in the camp “with nostalgic recollections of the ‘golden age’ of the Daesh proto-state.” ISIS leaders also frequently made public statements about Al-Hol, calling the camp’s existence “the worst and most important matter” while urging their supporters “to free [the] sisters and tear down the walls restricting them.”

Despite this, Global Strategy boasted of its ability to maintain a “full-time team presence” in Al-Hol, and beam relentless psyops to inmates via the infrastructure of Western-funded local radio station ARTA. Dedicated local print and social media platforms would follow. The intelligence cutout pledged to create a network of “media centres” throughout the camp, which would serve as “gathering spaces”. There, detainees could cook food, drink tea and socialise, as their children enjoyed a dedicated play area, and varied Global Strategy-concocted programming was broadcast all day:

This included a “morning show…a multi-segment programme focusing on the camp’s problems and concerns and the work of aid agencies and civil society organisations in the camp, with entertainment breaks and useful community information.” In the afternoons, “a lighter socio-cultural and entertainment programme focusing on local popular culture, as well as useful community information, with entertainment breaks (quizzes, song dedications, horoscopes, etc.)” was transmitted. “Religious” shows were a regular staple too.

These broadcasts “focused on different questions in Islam and its relation to society,” promoting “a moderate version of Islam” and challenging “extremist ideas and practices, during which moderate local religious figures will be hosted as guests.” Children were considered key targets, with educational programmes providing “accessible and engaging classes in literacy, sciences, literature and history, mixed with entertainment breaks and games.” Vast sums were surreptitiously sunk into this project by British intelligence, without any public oversight or cognisance whatsoever.

‘HTS Domination’

The stated goal of Global Strategy’s clandestine operation in Al-Hol was deradicalisation. To call the effort a failure would be an understatement. From the camp’s creation until the present day, media and think tank reports routinely warned Al-Hol was a key nucleus for the “resurgence” of ISIS. An April 2025 Frankfurt Peace Institute investigation referred to young boys housed at the camp as a “human reservoir” for Islamic State’s “Cubs of the Caliphate” program, via which they were trained in the art of killing.

This begs the obvious question of whether Global Strategy’s objective was truly to counter extremism. The firm’s psychological warfare initiatives have a disquieting tendency to not only actively assist ISIS, but produce the precise opposite effect of that formally intended. For years, Global Strategy managed wide-ranging efforts to “undermine” HTS in the areas of Syria it dominated. However, in leaked documents, the company acknowledged these initiatives were actively assisting HTS’ “growing influence” in the country.

Resultantly, many Syrians regarded HTS as “synonymous with opposition to Assad.” It is surely no coincidence that in September 2025, former-MI6 chief Richard Moore admitted his agency had courted HTS for years prior to its seizure of Damascus. This clandestine bond was struck despite British intelligence being under no illusions mainstream accounts of the group’s split from Al Qaeda were fantasy. A leaked 2020 Foreign Office file noted “HTS domination” actively provided “space for [Al Qaeda]-aligned groups and individuals to exist” in the country.

This peaceful coexistence helped Al Qaeda “maintain an instability fuelled safe haven…from which they are able to train and prepare for future expansion” outside Syria. We thus must ask ourselves whether Global Strategy’s actual aim in Al-Hol was to convert detainees to the ‘right’ kind of militancy, from the perspective of British intelligence. The cutout’s unparalleled reach into the camp could easily have been exploited to prepare inmates for the day al-Sharaa’s forces liberated them.

Either way, Syria’s Al Qaeda-affiliated government has now been granted a vast “human reservoir” of grateful former inmates, who can be called upon to assist in brutal crackdowns on internal dissent, massacres of Alawites and other ethnic and religious minorities, and more widely shoring up an ideal Anglo-American puppet state locally. It is not for nothing Damascus was granted a greenlight to capture Rojava at US-mediated talks with Israel in Paris in early January, where al-Sharaa signed a locally-despised accord with the Zionist entity.