BEN JOHNSON/
A news report in Eastern Europe reveals that the endless tangle of Ukrainian corruption may have one final victim: Middle Eastern Christians.
Western governments largely celebrated the collapse of Bashar al-Assad's government in Syria, marking the end of a six-decade-long dictatorship led by the nation's Alawite minority. But so did international jihadist groups and terrorist organizations, recognizing the military force that captured the capital city of Damascus -- Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, or HTS -- as one of their own.
Yet the region's ever-diminishing Christian population sees HTS as a potentially existential threat. And Ukrainian, and possibly U.S., intelligence and military officials see HTS members as former students.
Ukraine, Possibly U.S., Trained Islamist Rebels in Syria
Islamic fundamentalist "rebel groups based in the Idlib region -- which is said to include members of the Turkestan Islamic Party (TIP) -- had received operational training from special forces troops from the Khimik group of Ukraine's Main Intelligence Directorate (HUR). The training team focused on tactics developed during the war in Ukraine, including on the use of drones," reported the Kyiv Post in a story titled "Ukrainian Trained, Turkish Sponsored Syrian Rebels Lead Assault on Aleppo" on December 1.
Idlib is controlled by the "former" al-Qaeda affiliate Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), the group which just overwhelmed the capital.
Why is Ukraine training foreign Islamists? The Ukrainian military sees HTS as an ally against Russia, which has had a long alliance with Syria. "We will keep killing Russians anywhere and everywhere until the complete victory of Ukraine," declared the head of the Main Directorate of Intelligence of the Ministry of Defence of Ukraine (HUR), Major General Kyrylo Budanov, last May. The Ukrainian military is killing Russian soldiers in Syria to prevent them from shifting to the European front. In regional parlance, they're "fighting them over there, so they don't have to fight them over here." In the process, they are training jihadist rebels.
It is virtually a foregone conclusion Ukrainian military forces are using U.S. funds to train these jihadists -- or at a minimum, since money is fungible, U.S. donations and "loans" are offsetting the cost of training armed Syrian Islamists. President Joe Biden, whose family has close ties with Ukraine, has made funding Ukraine a top priority of his foreign policy.
Unfortunately, he has not given financial accountability equal priority. Time magazine reported last November that "corruption has grown rife" in the Ukrainian government -- a development observers of the region had long known. "People are stealing like there's no tomorrow," a top aide to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky told the publication.
"The question here is, 'Where is the money?'" asked Daria Kaleniuk, executive director of the Anti-Corruption Action Center in Ukraine. "Corruption can kill." U.S. aid already underwrites virtually every sector of Ukrainian society, even apart from corruption.
Military experts believe the U.S. directly trained and equipped HTS or other Islamist forces in Syria as part of their broader geostrategic mission. The U.S. government under then-President Barack Obama launched an aggressive campaign to arm and train Syrian rebels a decade ago.
Lt. Gen. (Ret.) William G. Boykin, executive vice president of Family Research Council, told "Washington Watch with Tony Perkins" on Monday that although he is not certain, "It would not surprise me if we didn't have a CIA hand in" training HTS or its allies via "some covert action going on in there to train and equip these people."
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