Quote:Journalist Interrogated, Fired For Story Linking CIA And Syria Weapons Flights.
'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.
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 Ajerbaijan - but which never made it to Ajerbaijan.
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."...'
SOURCE:
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