Journalist Fired Over Report of Illegal Weapons Supply to ISIS…By the US!

The country of Syria is in a very strange crossroads of sort, but not in its own civil war that’s raging, but rather in its location.  It sits between quite a few major countries of influence and the triangulation of three countries in particular happens to meet at the heart of Syria:  Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Bulgaria.

While most modern-day military historians will tell you that those countries don’t really have a very strong war chest (at least not without the help of the United States), they do hold one thing in common:  The CIA.

Bulgarian investigative reporter (a real one…not like the Fake News Industrial Complex version on CNN or from AP, for instance) named Dilyana Gaytandzhieva stumbled upon a very enticing story when she was assigned to cover the Bulgarian weapons-making industry.  She noted that al-Nusra (a Syrian version of al-Qaeda) was using weaponry that originated in her own home country.  While on site doing her report, she was contacted through someone who had “proof” that the American CIA and Saudi Arabia, as well as UAE, were supplying weapons through Bulgaria directly to ISIS and rebels who were fighting the Assad regime in Syria!

Obviously too much a good lead-in to pass up, Gaytandzhieva went to work attempting to uncover the links.  She was assisted heavily by several sources who supplied her with copies of highly sensitive documents which, in essence, proved the accusations.  But, like any good investigative reporter, she needed more.  She had the tenacity to pack up a crew, travel to different locations throughout Bulgaria where these weapons were being made and indirectly supplied to the CIA through a company called Purple Shovel and using a commercial airline company called Silk Way Airlines out of Azerbaijan.

After making a tremendously dangerous on-site report where she opened up caches of weapons and proved by the manifests that they were indeed being financed through the CIA, Saudi Arabia and Azerbaijan, Gaytandzhieva was summarily fired from her job and the investigation into the matter completely shut down by the Bulgarian government!

To add insult to injury, Gaytandzhieva was then hauled in for questioning by her own government on her sources and how she came by this information!

A months-long investigation which tracked and exposed a massive covert weapons shipment network to terror groups in Syria via diplomatic flights originating in the Caucuses and Eastern Europe under the watch of the CIA and other intelligence agencies has resulted in the interrogation and firing of the Bulgarian journalist who first broke the story. This comes as the original report is finally breaking into mainstream international coverage.

Investigative reporter Dilyana Gaytandzhieva authored a bombshell report for Trud Newspaper, based in Sofia, Bulgaria, which found that an Azerbaijan state airline company was regularly transporting tons of weaponry to Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates (UAE), and Turkey under diplomatic cover as part of the CIA covert program to supply anti-Assad fighters in Syria. Those weapons, Gaytandzhieva found, ended up in the hands of ISIS and al-Qaeda terrorists in Iraq and Syria.

While it’s long been understood that the US-Gulf-NATO coalition arming rebels inside Syria facilitated the rapid rise of the Islamic State as the group had steady access to a “jihadi Wal-Mart” of weapons (in the words of one former spy and British diplomat), the Trud Newspaper report is the first to provide exhaustive documentation detailing the precise logistical chain of the weapons as they flowed from their country of origin to the battlefield in Syria and Iraq. Gaytandzhieva even traveled to Aleppo where she filmed and examined labeled weapons shipping containers held in underground jihadist storehouses.

The Bulgaria-based journalist obtained and published dozens of secret internal memos which were leaked to her by an anonymous source as part of the report. The leaked documents appear to be internal communications between the Bulgarian government and Azerbaijan’s Embassy in Sofia detailing flight plans for Silk Way Airlines, which was essentially operating an “off the books” weapons transport service (not subject to inspections or tax under diplomatic cover) for the US Special Operations Command (USSOCOM), Saudi Arabia, Israel, Germany, Denmark, and Sweden. Silk Way Airlines has been the subject of other recent investigations involving weapons supplies for the Saudi war on Yemen. In addition, the military monitoring site Balkan Insight has exposed similar weapons cargo flights in and out of neighboring Serbia.

What must be understood about this report is that the Obama administration, which had mostly a hands-off attitude about ISIS and the Muslim Brotherhood, was literally working behind-the-scenes to train and arm ISIS and the rebels associated with them.  Lest we forget, Senator John McCain was an outspoken supporter for the Muslim Brotherhood when he visited with the Syrian “rebels” and claimed that we needed to give them all the love and nurturing that we would any ally in that region of the world.

This puts the Leftists and the RINO Establishment securely in lockstep with each other over ISIS’ development and growth during the Obama years and why those two groups chose not to do anything about the terror organizations rampage throughout the Middle East and Africa.

This also begs the question of the loyalties of the current CIA, as noted in this article, the Trump administration has put a halt to the funding of this program, yet it’s still somehow supplying the needed financing for these endeavors.  Who in the CIA is authorizing this supply to ISIS and why are we giving Eastern European weaponry to a group that we are then paying our own military to destroy?

But perhaps the more explosive finding involves private American companies contracting with the US government to help train and equip militants in Syria. An investigative series by Buzzfeed – the first of which was published in 2015 – named military contractor Purple Shovel LLC as the recipient of two no-bid contracts totaling more $50 million as part of the US train and equip program for Syria. Gaytandzhieva’s report definitively links Purple Shovel and other private American military contractors to the Azerbaijan Silk Way Airlines shipments. One leaked memo includes a cargo manifest for multiple tons of anti-tank grenades purchased in Bulgaria by Purple Shovel which were ostensibly designated for the official consignee – the Ministry of Defense of Azerbaijan – but which never made it to Azerbaijan. The documents, however, reveal that the military cargo was offloaded at Turkey’s Incirlik air base, which is one of the US and NATO’s main command centers for covert operations in Syria.

Though Gaytandzhieva’s report is months old and began through a series of smaller investigations, it gained little traction in Western or international press, even though it was promoted on social media and discussed among some of the world’s foremost experts on Syria and the Middle East. However, on Sunday Qatar-based Al Jazeera featured the story while reporting the shocking news that Gaytandzhieva had been interrogated by Bulgarian authorities before being fired from her newspaper:

Gaytandzhieva said on Thursday in a tweet that she was fired from her job at Trud after she was interrogated by the Bulgarian national security which tried to find out her sources.

She said she first got suspicious of the weapons transferred to Syria when she found Bulgarian-made weapons at the hands “terrorists” in Aleppo while reporting on the Syrian war there.

She said that she then traced those weapons to its Bulgarian manufacturer only to find out that those weapons were legally exported to Saudi Arabia, which in turn supplied it to “terrorists” in Syria.

I’ve just got fired for telling the truth about weapons supplies for #terrorists in #Syria on diplomatic flights https://t.co/wSJTRIzKnr

— Dilyana Gaytandzhiev (@dgaytandzhieva) August 24, 2017

Speaking to Al Jazeera by phone on Sunday from Bulgaria, Gaytandzhieva said: “Saudi Arabia, UAE and the US must stop using the cover of Silk Way Airlines diplomatic flights to supply Eastern European weapons which end up in the hands of terrorists around the world. Diplomatic flights are exempt from checks and inspection.”

When the CIA has been supplying arms to and training ISIS, as citizens paying taxpayers which then secretly fund these clandestine activities, we need to question the honesty and integrity of our elected officials who have signed off on this horribly unethical practice of financing those who are beheading innocents and murdering those who have nothing to do with the civil war in Syria.

If Senator McCain is culpable for the supplying of ISIS through funding to the CIA, he needs to be questioned by the Senate Judiciary Committee.  If the former president was remaining at arms-length from ISIS in the hopes that they would prevail in taking over the country and having yet another debacle take place as in Egypt where it took the military to take the Muslim Brotherhood out of power after they seized the seat of authority there.  If you remember, that was the time when Obama was making an impassioned plea to the Egyptian military general in charge to NOT imprison Muhammad Morsi, one of the leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood.

I understand that the chances of either McCain or Obama being questioned about their involvement or knowledge in these CIA missions is as remote as Donald Trump being supported by the Swamp RINOs or faux-Conservatives like Bill Kristol, but the fact remains that they ought to be questioned.  Of course, in the very off-chance that it does happen, and both McCain and Obama are summoned for questioning, we all know that some CIA flunky will be nailed for this whole situation and take the fall…with a nice payoff and a promise of silence after 15 years in the federal penitentiary, of course.

Source:  ZeroHedge