Saudi Arabia’s Minister of State for Foreign Affairs Adel Al-Jubeir has recently called out Iran for its alleged “support of terrorist groups, its ballistic missile program and its destabilizing effect” in the Middle East even though Iran has not attacked a country in more than 200 years.

The Saudi Gazette, an English-language online daily newspaper published in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia who describes itself as “The Tone of Truth and Moderation” reported on October 21st ‘Iranians are on a rampage — Al-Jubeir’ on a Q&A event that took place at the Chatham House, a think tank based in London with Al-Jubeir. Al-Jubeir claimed that “Iran’s hand is in almost all countries in the region… Iranians are on a rampage and have been on a rampage since 1979″ and that there is an ‘Iran Problem’ — its support of terrorist groups, its ballistic missile program and its destabilizing effect in the region and unless we deal with those problems, “we will always have an Iran problem as they keep on meddling in the internal affairs of other countries.”

Al-Jubeir said the Iran poses problems when it comes to the internal affairs of other countries, so is he talking about Syria who its President, Bashar al-Assad has invited not only Iran but also Russia to help fight the Islamic State? Let’s go back to 2011, during the start of the Syrian conflict which began as an uprising against the Assad government, there were U.S. backed moderate rebels and members of ISIS and other terrorist groups that came from Iraq, Libya and elsewhere who infiltrated the demonstrations.

Professor Tim Anderson, a Senior Lecturer in Political Economy at the University of Sydney and an author of several books including ‘The Dirty War on Syria: Washington, Regime Change and Resistance’ and ‘Daraa 2011: Syria’s Islamist Insurrection in Disguise’ described how the Syrian civil war actually began:

A double story began on the Syrian conflict, at the very beginning of the armed violence in 2011, in the southern border town of Daraa. The first story comes from independent witnesses in Syria, such as the late Father Frans Van der Lugt in Homs. They say that armed men infiltrated the early political reform demonstrations to shoot at both police and civilians. This violence came from sectarian Islamists. The second comes from the Islamist groups (‘rebels’) and their western backers, including the Washington-based Human Rights Watch. They claim there was ‘indiscriminate’ violence from Syrian security forces to repress political rallies and that the ‘rebels’ grew out of a secular political reform movement

Iraq, Libya and Syria did not want to be controlled by the U.S. and its allies in the Middle East including Israel and Saudi Arabia, so they were targeted for regime change, now they are destabilized and the results are never-ending conflicts, increased poverty and even human trafficking in regards to Libya, so the revolution against the Syrian government was anything but organic.

The US-Saudi Alliance: Supporting Terrorists One Step At A Time

Investigative journalist, Seymour Hersh published ‘The Red Line and the Rat Line’ in the London Review of Books in April 2014 where he interviewed an anonymous former pentagon official who claimed that the U.S. diplomatic post located in Benghazi, Libya existed for the purpose of sending weapons through a secret pipeline to the Syrian rebels who were fighting Syrian government forces. Hersh elaborated on the Obama administration’s role in sending weapons from Libya through Turkey and finally into the hands of the terrorists or the moderate rebels within Syria’s borders:

The full extent of US co-operation with Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar in assisting the rebel opposition in Syria has yet to come to light. The Obama administration has never publicly admitted to its role in creating what the CIA calls a ‘rat line’, a back channel highway into Syria. The rat line, authorised in early 2012, was used to funnel weapons and ammunition from Libya via southern Turkey and across the Syrian border to the opposition. Many of those in Syria who ultimately received the weapons were jihadists, some of them affiliated with al-Qaida

That’s just one side of the story. The majority of fighters that made their way into Syria were trained and armed in Jordan by the CIA and other Western intelligence agencies under ‘Operation Timber Sycamore’ that began in 2011 and supposedly lasted until 2013 according to the mainstream media. The pipeline to ISIS was through Saudi Arabia according to a September 2016 report by The New York Times ‘U.S. Relies Heavily on Saudi Money to Support Syrian Rebels’:

When President Obama secretly authorized the Central Intelligence Agency to begin arming Syria’s embattled rebels in 2013, the spy agency knew it would have a willing partner to help pay for the covert operation. It was the same partner the C.I.A. has relied on for decades for money and discretion in far-off conflicts: the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

Since then, the C.I.A. and its Saudi counterpart have maintained an unusual arrangement for the rebel-training mission, which the Americans have code-named Timber Sycamore. Under the deal, current and former administration officials said, the Saudis contribute both weapons and large sums of money, and the C.I.A takes the lead in training the rebels on AK-47 assault rifles and tank-destroying missiles

In June 2016, another report by The New York Times ‘C.I.A. Arms for Syrian Rebels Supplied Black Market, Officials Say’ suggested that weapons delivered to Jordan that were intended for the Syrian rebels were stolen by Jordanian intelligence operatives and sold on the black market ending up in the hands of ISIS and other terrorists groups. “The theft, involving millions of dollars of weapons, highlights the messy, unplanned consequences of programs to arm and train rebels — the kind of program the C.I.A. and Pentagon have conducted for decades — even after the Obama administration had hoped to keep the training program in Jordan under tight control.” Well, the world knows who supported ISIS and it was not Iran.

Iran is also guilty in the attacks on the Aramco oil facility according to Saudi Arabia. “Saudi Arabia is convinced, from the evidence we have gathered, that Iran is involved in the Aramco oil facilities attacks” besides the fact that the Houthi
resistance in Yemen has claimed credit for the attacks. Al-Jubeir claimed that “Iran’s targeting of these facilities indicate Tehran’s hostile intentions in the region.” How would Iran even remotely benefit from such an attack in the first place? “We are convinced that the missile attacks on Saudi facilities came from the North, not South” meaning that they are convinced, but in reality, they have no proof “We don’t want war but we also can’t sit idle and be attacked constantly by Iran and its proxies. What Iran needs to do is very simply to act like a normal country and stop its destabilizing the region with murderous actions,” Al-Jubeir said. However, Saudi Arabia itself has been involved in a relentless bombing campaign in Yemen, one of the poorest countries in the Middle East since March of 2015. Death and misery is the only result for the Yemeni people. This geopolitical tragedy is the making of U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East that has backed the Saudi’s destruction of Yemen. The Guardian’s Mohamed Bazzi wrote an opinion piece on October 19th ‘America is likely complicit in war crimes in Yemen. It’s time to hold the US to account’ on the full-picture of what is actually going on with Saudi Arabia’s barbaric war on Yemen:

The full scope of human suffering in Yemen has been partly obscured because the UN stopped updating civilian deaths in January 2017, when the toll reached 10,000. And while the actual death toll is far higher, many news reports still rely on the outdated UN figures. In June, an independent monitoring group, the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project, released a report detailing more than 90,000 fatalities since the war began in 2015.

In April, the United Nations Development Programme issued a report warning that the death toll in Yemen could rise to 233,000 by the end of 2019 – far higher than previous estimates. That projection includes deaths from combat as well as 131,000 indirect deaths due to the lack of food, health crises such as a cholera epidemic, and damage to Yemen’s infrastructure

The U.S., Israel and Saudi Arabia are the destabilizing factors in the Middle East. Human rights for Saudi Arabia is non-existent in its foreign policy as well as their internal affairs with its own citizens. However, when it comes to human rights in Saudi Arabia, I should mention an important milestone that did occur on September 2017, I mean it was a breakthrough for human rights around the world, Saudi women were finally allowed to drive! Imagine that. Since 1957, Saudi Arabia was the only country in the world where women were not allowed to drive due to Wahhabism, a strict form of Sunni Islam where women and men are not allowed to mix or mingle in any way. Saudi Arabia’s ruler, King Salman bin Abdulaziz al-Saud announced that Saudi women could drive starting on June 24, 2018. What an achievement.

Of course, I am being sarcastic. Saudi Arabia, in my view is possibly the worst dictatorship on the planet is launching an all-out propaganda war against Iran, albeit, Iran is not perfect, it has its own domestic issues, but for a country like Saudi Arabia to criticize and accuse Iran of being hostile and dangerous is absurd. Saudi Arabia is on a rampage in Yemen and Syria, and don’t forget the rampage it has on its own citizens when it comes to women’s rights, torture, public beheadings and other human rights abuses.

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Timothy Alexander Guzman writes on his blog, Silent Crow News, where this article was originally published. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

All images in this article are from the author