Credit: Asiatimes:

By Pepe Escobar

A Kalashnikov in Iraq, until recently, sold for US$100. Now it’s at least $1,000, and most probably $1,500 (those were the days when Sunnis joining the resistance in 2003 could buy a fake Kalashnikov made in Romenia for $20).

Destination of choice of the $1,500 Kalashnikov in 2012: Syria. Network: al-Qaeda in the Land of the Two Rivers, also known as AQI. Recipients: infiltrated jihadis operating side-by-side with the Free Syrian Army (FSA).

Also shuttling between Syria and Iraq is car bombing and suicide bombing, as in two recent bombings in the suburbs of Damascus and the suicide bombing last Friday in Aleppo.

Who would have thought that what the House of Saud wants in Syria – an Islamist regime – is exactly what al-Qaeda wants in Syria?

Ayman “The Surgeon” al-Zawahiri, al-Qaeda’s number one, in an eight-minute video titled “Onwards, Lions of Syria”, has just called for the support of Muslims in Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon and Turkey to topple Bashar al-Assad “pernicious, cancerous regime”. They had been responding, in kind, even before The Surgeon came into the picture. Not only those, but especially transplanted Libyan “freedom fighters”, formerly known as “rebels”.

Who would have thought that what NATOGCC (North Atlantic Treaty Organization-Gulf Cooperation Council) wants for Syria is exactly what al-Qaeda wants for Syria?

So when the Assad regime, for all its ghastly military offensives that essentially victimize civilians caught in cross fire, says it’s fighting “terrorists”, it’s not exactly bending the truth. Even that ubiquitous, proverbial entity, the unnamed “US official”, is blaming AQI for the recent bombings. Same for Iraq’s Deputy Interior Minister Adnan al-Assadi; “We have intelligence information that a number of Iraqi jihadists went to Syria.”

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