Saudi Arabia plans to supply Syrian rebels with anti-aircraft missiles the same time reports have surfaced that Al Qaeda already has their hands on similar missiles that are to be used against the Syrian Air Force but also can be turned against Israeli planes.

A classified report received by the German foreign intelligence service referred to by Der Spiegel Sunday states that the Saudi kingdom wants to arm rebels with shoulder-launched surface-to-air missiles can target low-flying aircraft including helicopters. Saudi Arabia has in mind to send rebels the European-made Mistral-class MANPADS, an acronym for man-portable air-defense systems.

An Egyptian newspaper reported Monday that Saudi Arabia actually has been supplying  shoulder-held anti-aircraft missiles to rebels “on a small scale” about two months ago. The reported Saudi supplies began shortly before the United States announced it would likely send arms to Syrian rebels.

Arming Syrian rebels negates to a certain extent Israel’s efforts to stymie the sale of Russian SA-300 anti-aircraft missiles, one of the most advanced in the world.

Israel may have kept anti-aircraft missiles out of the hands of Assad, but they are destined for both Al Qaeda and Hezbollah, which presumably already has more than few.

The Obama administration’s green light for arming rebels gave Saudi Arabia the go-ahead to send them anti-aircraft missiles. They clearly are intended to defend the rebels against the Syrian Air Force, but what happens if Hezbollah captures the weapons?

The Obama administration no doubt took into consideration that terrorist organizations have easy access to rebels’ weapons.

His official’s belated conclusion that Syrian President Bashar Assad has been using chemical weapons against Syrians perhaps left him with no choice but to lift his objections to arming rebels.

But the day-after could be disastrous.

The SA-7 missile does not come close to the SA-300 in terms of sophistication, but the downing of one Israeli aircraft by terrorists would be catastrophic from all aspects.

Besides the loss of lives, it would fuel to no end the Arab urge to annihilate Israel. Israel would have no choice but to retaliate whether in Syria in Lebanon, with the possible escalation on the side of Hezbollah and Iran.

Several defense systems have been tested to protest airplanes from the SA-7 missile, but the weapon’s heat-sinking technology would hone in on an airplane engine once the targeted craft tries to intercept the missiles.

This can be overcome by the anti-missile missile’s sending out high-temperature flares to lure the missile away from the plane. The defense system is said to be 90-percent effective, and that other 10 percent could be the catalyst for a regional war.

The Associated Press reported last week that manuals for using the missiles were discovered by France in Al Qaeda’s offices in Mali. The same missiles are believed to be in Iraq Somalia and Afghanistan, many of them having been smuggled out of Libya during the rebellion against Muammar Gaddafi.

The United States previously tried to keep the MANPADs out of the hands of terrorists. The United States was so worried about this particular weapon ending up in the hands of terrorists that the State Department set up a task force to track and destroy it as far back as 2006.

Terrorists in Kenya fired them at a plane full of Israel tourists in 2002, but the missiles missed their target, possibly due to lack of training.

The SA-7 anti-aircraft missile has been used against more than 40 civilian airplanes in the past four decades, causing more than 800 deaths, according to the U.S. Department of State.

The manuals in Al Qaeda’s hands might overcome that hurdle.

The SA-7 weighs only 30 pounds and can be packed into a duffel bag.  The total time required to fire the missile is six seconds.

Originally published at Rubin Reports.

Here is what I wrote in October 2010. The leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, Muhammad al-Badi, had just given a sermon calling for the overthrow of Egypt’s government, which happened four months later, and a jihad against the United States, a country he considered weak, foolish, and retreating from the Middle East. I declared that this was:

“One of those obscure Middle East events of the utmost significance that is ignored by the Western mass media, especially because they happen in Arabic, not English; by Western governments, because they don’t fit their policies; and by experts, because they don’t mesh with their preconceptions.”

Two and a half years ago, who would ever have thought that the United States would enter an alliance with the Muslim Brotherhood? There were hints in President Barack Obama’s Cairo speech, yet now it is clear that this is the new basis for regional security sought by the Obama Administration.

For all practical purposes the closest allies to the United States are no longer Israel, Saudi Arabia, and a moderate Egypt but an Islamist Egypt, an Islamist regime in Turkey, and the Syrian rebels led by the Brotherhood.

And literally every mainstream media outlet, every expert who speaks in public, every Democrat and the majority of Republican politicians still don’t realize that this is true.

There have been in American history the Truman Doctrine (help countries fight Communist takeover), the Nixon Doctrine (get local middle-sized powers to take part of the burden of the Cold War from the United States), the Carter Doctrine (defend Gulf Arab states from Iranian aggression), and the Reagan Doctrine (go on the offensive against Soviet expansionism). Now we have the Obama Doctrine:

An alliance with the Muslim Brotherhood to transform the Middle East. 

Is this really an improvement on a situation based on alliances with pro-Western dictators? Now they are still dictators but are also anti-American and even more oppressive than their predecessors. After all, the old dictators, as horrible as they were, were content with the status quo (except for Iraq where the overthrow came without a new extremist regime taking power) . The Islamist ones want the fundamental transformation of their societies. By our times, the old dictators were resigned to the regional situation. The Islamist ones want a wave of new revolutions, terrorism, wars against Israel. And sooner or later they will strike out against America, just as they give their Salafist allies a free rein to do so.

The occasion for declaring that an alliance with the Muslim Brotherhood and similar groups is the new Obama Doctrine is, of course, the decision to supply arms to the Syrian rebels. As recently as April 28—a mere six weeks ago!—the New York Times was talking of an imminent rebel victory! Now, however, panic has set in about a total rebel collapse. This has prompted a rush to give weapons to the rebels.

The weapons will be given to the Supreme Military Council which runs the Free Syrian Army (FSA). But while the FSA is nominally led by defected military officers, in fact  most of its soldiers hold views close to the Muslim Brotherhood. Thus, the fig leaf will be that these guns are being given to “moderates”—like the people Senator John McCain met with—while actually they will be given to people whose politics encompass hatred for Jews, Christians, the West generally, and ready to engage in what in American politics has come to be known as Homophobia and a War on Women.

If the rebels were to win, this would mean imposing a Muslim Brotherhood government on Syria. Let’s remember that the political opposition organization the United States recognizes and has financially supported is overwhelmingly run by the Brotherhood and it refuses to admit real moderates and Kurds on a serious level. Note that this is the second Muslim Brotherhood entity the U.S. government has provided with weapons. The first was the Egyptian government, to which despite its questionable human rights record the Obama Administration has no objection to helping. The shipment of weapons is not even postponed as a gesture.

Thus, Egypt is an anti-American client state of America. And so is Tunisia. So, too, is Turkey, which is sort of a Muslim Brotherhood regime in Turkish style. The Turkish regime, it should be remembered, is the chief adviser to the Obama Administration on Syrian affairs and its favorite government in the region.

Iran is ending it s first contingent of approximately 4,000 Hezbollah terrorist organization fighters, all of them Shi’ite Muslims, to fight with the Assad regime days after the Obama administration announced it will arm rebels, mainly Sunni Muslims who have been aided by the Sunni Muslim Al Qaeda’s proxy, Al Nusra.

American arms to rebels in Syrians have to pass through Jordan or Turkey. Add to this anti-Syrian and anti-Iran alliance the Sunni kingdom in Saudi Arabia, which would like nothing more to see the Iranian regime collapse, along with its threat to build a nuclear bomb and its ambition to dominate a pan-Islam state throughout the Middle East.

Ditto for the Gulf States.

Iran has thrown down the gauntlet by its sending Hezbollah troops to help Syrian President Bashar Assad. Both countries are dependent on each other.

A victory by Assad is unthinkable. It would totally destroy American’s image of a world power.

If the rebels can overcome Hezbollah and Assad’s army, Iran would be severely weakened, if not decimated.

Until then, Israel faces increasing instability in Lebanon, dominated by pro-Syrian and Hezbollah, and in Syria.

The Obama administration’s decision to take sides  in the Syrian Civil War sucks up Jordan and Turkey as totally dependent on success for the United States, and Israel can only pray that the instability does not turn the Golan Heights into an active war zone.

Once the Al Qaeda-linked terrorists get their hands on weapons, they always can be turned on Israel in the future, the exact same threat that Israel faces against Hezbollah.

Everyone is turning against everyone, and the best outcome for Israel in the Sunni-Shi’ite war is that both sides lose.

The United States also might wish for the same. It is backing the Sunni Muslims, whose terrorists carried out the 9/11 attacks.

The Muslim Brotherhood government in Egypt has broken off with Syria. Hamas, headquartered in Syrian only two years ago, now is accused by Assad as training rebels to attack his regime with Kassam rockets.

One interesting sidebar to this proxy war is the Palestinian Authority.  Does anyone remember  that the PA-Israeli issue is supposed to be the heart of all of the problems in the Middle East?

Translated from Hebrew by Sally Zahav with permission from the author.

Among scholars of the Middle East, the term “sushi” is used as shorthand for the expression, “Sunni-Shi’a.” Anyone interested in the history of Islam knows that the seeds of the Sunni-Shi’a conflict were planted the moment Muhammad, the prophet of Islam, closed his eyes forever, in the year 632 CE, without leaving a mechanism for choosing a successor to lead the nation. The conflict that developed as a result, has become an open, bloody battle over the years, and it has been a thread in the fabric of Islamic history throughout all of its 1400 years. This conflict is being expressed on many levels: personal, familial, political and religious. The battle between the two factions of Islam is “for the whole pot,” and it continues to this very day.

In modern times, attempts have been made to bridge over the conflict and to find common ground between the factions of Islam, in order to create a sense of calm between the factions, on the basis of which it will be possible to manage states such as Iraq, Syria and Lebanon, where the two factions live side by side, Shi’ites and Sunnis.

Even the Egyptian Sheikh Dr. Yusuf al-Qaradawi, who is the Mufti (religious arbiter) of the Emirate of Qatar, has spoken and written about the need to find a way to “bring the schools of thought closer together,” as if Shi’a is another legitimate school of thought, in addition to the four Sunni schools: Hanafi, Maliki, Shafi’i and Hanbali. In the good, old days, they used to call the Shi’a faction the “Jafari school,” after one of the fathers of Shi’a.

The rapprochement year between the Sunni and Shi’a was 2006, following the Second Lebanon War, when Hezbollah managed to create the impression that it had won a “divine victory” over Israel. After all, Hasan Nasrallah had survived despite 33 days of heavy Israeli attacks, some of which were aimed at him personally. Hezbollah was compared favorably with the armies of the Arab countries, which had failed in all of their attempts to destroy the state of Israel, and were defeated by Israel’s army in only six days in 1967.

As a result of the Second Lebanon War, Hasan Nasrallah declared in every public arena—especially on his al-Manar (“the beacon”) television channel—that the victory belongs to the whole Arab and Islamic nation, creating for himself the image of being the only leader in the Middle East doing the right thing, ignoring the objections of the infidel West and its paltry servants, meaning most of the rulers of the Arab states. Bashar Assad declared that Hezbollah’s way is the only way to fight and the only method that can defeat the Zionist enemy.

During the war, in the summer of 2006, great crowds across the the Middle East erupted in emotional demonstrations where pictures of Hasan Nasrallah were held high, and those who wanted to make a point also carried pictures of Bashar Assad, the great supporter of Hezbollah. It was convenient for everyone—including religious figures such as Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi—to ignore the fact that Hezbollah was a Shi’ite group, backed by Iran, because if the Sunni Hamas movement ended up in the same boat as Hezbollah, what evil could possibly have sprung from the Lebanese “al-Muqawama wal-mumana’a” (“Resistance and Defense”) movement, which supports all of the “liberation movements” regardless of religious sect?

The al-Jazeera channel, which serves as a mouthpiece for the Sunni Muslim Brotherhood movement, embraced Hezbollah and dedicated many hours of positive programming to it, and in many Islamic societies—including Israel’s—more than a few people crossed over from the Sunni side of Islam to the Shi’a. Only a small group of Saudi religious authorities were not overcome by the waves of sympathy for Hezbollah. They always had a jaundiced view of the Shi’ite dominance of Lebanon, as well as its influence on the collective Arab discourse.

But enthusiasm for Hezbollah has not survived the storm buffeting the Middle East ever since December 2010, known romantically in the media as “the Arab Spring,” as if presently in the Middle East the birds are chirping, the trees are budding, the flowers are blooming, the butterflies are fluttering, people are smiling and there is an air of rising optimism.

The Obama administration is ready to arm Syrian rebels, and military planners are proposing a limited no-fly zone up to 25 miles within Syria, allowing rebels to freely train in Jordan and receive arms without Syrian interference from the air.

The drastic change in policy follows the American government’s conclusion that Syrian President Bashar Assad has crossed the “red line” and has been using chemical against Syrians, killing more than 100 people.

The no fly zone would be enforced from Jordanian territory, from where military bases would be used to fly within Jordanian airspace, according to The Wall Street Journal. The type of arms to be delivered to rebels has not been determined, but the CIA will train opposition forces  to use them.

An official of the Obama administration confirmed Thursday evening that Assad has used chemical weapons.

“The Assad regime has used chemical weapons– sarin– on a small scale multiple times over the past year,” said Deputy National Security Advisor for Strategic Communications Ben Rhodes

He added that more than 100 people have been killed in the chemical attacks, which have been documented as recently as two weeks ago in Damascus.

Israel, Britain and France previously have said chemical weapons have been used on Syrians, but the President Barack Obama had reasoned that he wanted to confirm without a doubt who has been using them and under what circumstances before responding.

President Obama is determined to deploy U.S. soldiers on Syrian territory, and the decision to arm the rebels was taken over the opposition of those who fear that that many of the weapons will end up in the hands of Al Qaeda and other terrorists, leaving the United States open to charges that is backing one theorist group against another, namely Hezbollah, which has fighting along side Assad’s forces.

Military strategists in the Obama administration have said that a limited no-fly zone would enable rebel forces to train in Jordan and to receive arms without the interference of Syrian aircraft.

A no-fly zone could turn the tide that has gone in Assad’s favor and will help rebel forces maintain control of areas where they have fought off Assad’s forces.

His regime is holding on to power but losing support among the general population, which is suffering from shortages of food, medicine and fuel as well as a collapsing economy. Government employees are not receiving their salaries, according to Asaad Al-Saleh, an Assistant Professor of Arabic and Comparative Literature at the University of Utah.

He wrote in the Yemen Times that the lack of American action has been interpreted by Assad as “green light” “to continue destroying the country.”

The quickly changing face of the Syrian civil war has left the United States with the dilemma of having to decide whether to arm the rebels, which are heavily backed by Al Qaeda, or remain on the sidelines and allow Hezbollah to continue to prop up Assad by crushing the opposition with more brutality.

Whether or not the Obama administration could have avoided putting itself in a corner of thorns is arguable, but its totally misreading the Syrian conflict make its position all the more difficult.

All polls show that the American public overwhelmingly does not want the United States getting involved in another messy conflict.

After the President Barack Obama’s Council of Sages’ decision to “engage” the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and dump Hosni Mubarak, then U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton decided that Syrian President Bashar Assad should remain in power in the face of the sprouting Arab Spring protests in Syria more than two years ago She solidly backed Assad, calling him a “reformer.”

It took more than a year and tens of thousands of murders before the Obama administration realized it could not back a man whom Pulitzer Prize journalist Joel Brinkley once called “the most dangerous man in the world.”

The United States huffed and puffed and Assad’s goon quads tortured and murdered thousands of Syrians, but all that changed was a situation that went totally out of control.

If the control of a dictator is better than the control by anarchy, Assad would have been the man to back, except that American experts without much contact with reality continued to totally misread the social mood in the Middle East.

The United States cannot be seen as allowing a butcher like Assad to continue to rule.

But the last year of devastation and anarchy has allowed Al Qaeda and offshoots to fill the same vacuum that the License government left in the southern part of the country more than 20 years ago.

Jihadists from the Al Qaeda-affiliate Jabhat al-Nusra are taking care of the social needs of Syrians, a copy-cat tactic perfected by Hezbollah in southern Lebanon.

“They don’t push their ideology at us,” Hassan, a driver, told Fox News. “They aren’t corrupt like the others. What they capture from government bases they distribute.”

Like Hezbollah, the al-Nusra terrorists are brutal and ruthless when at war, no less than so than Assad’s loyalists.

When Assad lost control of areas in the civil war, leaving millions of people not only without basic necessities but also without some kind of due process of law.

“We promise that we will ensure accountability for anyone committing violations and they will be sent to the Sharia court,” said one al Nusra notice that was posted. “Anyone who might have a complaint against any element of the Islamic state, whether the Emir or an ordinary soldier, can come and submit their complaint in any headquarters building of the Islamic state.”

In Aleppo, “You see streets being cleaned by al-Nusra and schools organized by al-Nusra and also more moderate groups cleaning streets and operating school,” German filmmaker Marcel Mettelsiefen told Fox.

“Most civilians are saying [al-Nusra] may be quite radical, but at least they are helping and doing things, and the strategy is working.”

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry is meeting with Defense Secretary Chuck Hague this week to discuss the rebels’ urgent request for arms as Assad prepares for a massive assault to retake Aleppo.

Kerry, like his predecessor, talks a lot and says almost nothing.

“We are determined to do everything that we can in order to help the opposition to be able … to save Syria,” Kerry told reporters at a news conference with British Foreign Secretary William Hague Wednesday.

“People are talking about what further options might be exercised here … but we don’t have anything to announce at this moment.”

The Obama administration reportedly is split on what to do, but to some extent it can blame itself.

Officials for years have sought political solutions in a region where leaders do not play by American and British rules of democracy and “engagement.”

“Our efforts in Syria have been to try to save lives, to prevent radicalization, to send a message to the regime that in the end there does have to be a political solution,” said Britain’s Foreign Secretary William Hague.

The Assad regime escalated the spillover of the civil war Wednesday with a helicopter-mounted missile attack on a Sunni Muslim Lebanese urban center, wounding at least two people, including a schoolteacher.

It was the first time Syrian forces loyal to Syrian President Bashar Assad have attacked a Lebanese city, having limited previous attacks to villages near the border.

Thousands of Syrian refugees have fled to Arsal, and the deployment of Lebanon-based Hezbollah fighters into Syria has fueled tension and violence in Lebanon.

Mossad chief Tamir Pardo met with a senior Turkish intelligence officer this week to discuss Syria and Iran, as well as the protest movement in Turkey, according to the country’s independent Hurriyet newspaper.

The meeting was secret, and the newspaper did not provide details except from sources who said Pardo and Turkish intelligence agency undersecretary Hakan Fidan shared information on Iran and Syria as well as the continuing protest movement in Turkey. Some of that information is that the Iranian Revolutionary Guards and Assad are planting seeds against Turkey.

The Syrian civil war has spilled over into Turkey, where Syria has attacked rebels on the border several times. Tens of thousands of refugees have fled to Turkey, making it a source of worry for Assad who already is paranoid enough.

Iran also may be interested in stirring up unrest in Turkey, partly because of its necessity to keep Assad in power and partly because of the possibility that Israel could use Turkish air space to attack Iranian nuclear facilities.

Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who dumped Israel’s friendship four years and raced into the waiting arms of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Syrian President Bashar Assad, beat a hasty reverse last year.

He totally misjudged his newfound friends and now finds Syria and its ally Iran breathing down its neck. Erdogan’s belligerent attitude has kept him from publicly embracing Israel, and he continues to support Hamas in Gaza.

Hurriyet reported that Pardo wants to meet with Erdogan, who has not yet replied one way or another.