After a lengthy investigation into a massive secret weapons trafficking network supplying multiple terrorist groups in Syria has led to a leading journalist being interrogated and fired for her role in the detailed expose.
Dilyana Gaytandzhieva lost her job and was put through a grueling interrogation by Bulgarian authorities after reporting that a covert airline responsible for supplying weapons to extremist groups in Syria, which used opium as currency had connections to the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency.
Gaytandzhieva authored the damning report for the Bulgarian paper, Trud Newspaper. It revealed that an airline based out of Azerbaijan had been running weapons to Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Turkey using diplomatic cover provided by the CIA. The operation was developed to function as a primary line of support for rebels fighting against Syrian President, Bashar al Assad.
Those same channels, it is now well known, have been the source of weapons feeding the ISIS war machine. Now, along with largely substantiated suspicions that the Obama administration directly created ISIS, it has also become clear that the CIA has direct connections to other prominent terrorist group’s arms supplies. The US-Gulf-NATO Concord has long been known to be the main supplier of rebel forces in Syria, and that the Islamic State has built its military might using weapons stolen from rebels.
Trud Newspaper was the first to report on these secret and illegal channels from the CIA to the weapons caches of ISIS. Up until now, we have been expected to believe that ISIS has been able to terrorize an entire region using second-hand scraps the group was able to pilfer from untrained civilian rebels.
The subsequent report provided a detailed account of the exact logistical chain of custody that the weapons were comported along before eventually ending up in the hands of ISIS fighters on battlefields in Iraq and Syria.
Gaytandzhieva traveled to Aleppo where she managed to take photographic and video evidence of shipping containers in jihadist underground warehouses bearing labels linking them to the airline and to American intelligence. She was also able to get her hands on dozens of secret internal documents that were leaked to her from an anonymous source. The documents appear to contain communications between the government of Bulgaria and the Embassy of Azerbaijan in Sofia. They portray a clear path of movement for weapons and opium on Silk Way Airlines, which began as an entirely undocumented operation.
Silk Way Airlines, according to the documents, was not to be subjected to official inspections in any of the nations it passed through which include, Saudi Arabia, Israel, Germany, Denmark, Sweden, and US Special Operations Command (USSOCOM) jurisdictions.
The airline has been under investigation from numerous entities concerning weapons trafficking to the Saudi war in Yemen. During this spate of investigations, Balkan Insight; a military monitoring organization, exposed similar weapons cargo movements coming in and out of Serbia.
Second only to the CIA’s having been found providing diplomatic cover and material contributions to the opposition is the fact that a number of American corporations were also implicated by Gaytandzhieva’s report. These companies had been performing complementary roles while functioning as contractors for the U.S. government. The military contractor Purple Shovel was found to have been the recipient of multiple no-bid contracts which were valued altogether at just over $50 million as part of an effort to arm and train Syrian rebels. Gaytandzhieva’s report makes clear and direct links between Purple Shovel and a number of other private U.S. military contractors to the weapons shipment carried by Silk Way.
One of the leaked documents contains a manifest concerning several tons of tank-busting grenades purchased by Azerbaijan’s Ministry of Defense. But the shipment never completed its journey to the small Islamic country. The documents show that the shipment was instead delivered to an air base in Incirlik, Turkey- where, as it happens, a joint covert U.S./NATO primary command center exists. This base was established primarily to conduct secretive military operations in Syria.
But despite the fact that Gaytandzhieva’s report was months old, and well substantiated with photographic evidence, testimony and leaked documents, it never got much attention in the western media. Later on, however, after Al Jazeera picked up the story and attributed the original reporting to Gaytandzhieva, did we get the news that she was interrogated by Bulgarian authorities and summarily fired from her job.
~ Liberty Planet
