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Was bombing of Mariupol theater staged by Ukrainian Azov extremists to trigger NATO intervention?

Testimony by evacuated Mariupol residents and warnings of a false flag attack undermine the Ukrainian government’s claims about a Russian bombing of a local theater sheltering civilians.
 
by Max Blumenthal 

Part 7 - The red line: lessons from Syria

Was the bombing of the Donetsk Academic Regional Drama Theater of Mariupol a false flag attack executed by Azov extremists to trigger NATO intervention, as some local residents claimed? If so, it was hardly the first cynical deception deployed by Ukraine’s government to draw the West into the conflict, and was unlikely to be the last.

On March 16, the day of the incident at the theater, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken declared that “we have real concerns that Russia could use a chemical weapon, another weapon of mass destruction.” In the next breath, Blinken pointed to Syria, where he claimed “we’ve seen them use or acquiesce to [chemical weapon] use.

It was in Syria where the administration of President Barack Obama imposed its “red line” policy declaring that any chemical attack would automatically trigger a US military response. That policy set the stage for a series of incidents that appear to have been carried out by foreign backed Syrian opposition forces to compel the US to intervene against Damascus.

In the deadliest incident, hundreds of civilians were killed when sarin-filled rockets were fired – apparently from insurgent-controlled territory – at multiple sites in the Damascus suburb of Ghouta on August 21, 2013. After Obama blamed the Syrian government and prepared to launch strikes, dissenting administration officials leaked to the media that the intelligence blaming Damascus was in fact no “slam dunk,” a clear reference to the CIA’s pre-Iraq war fabrications. Journalist Seymour Hersh subsequently reported that the US had collected significant intelligence pointing to insurgent guilt in Ghouta. It was this information, Hersh reported, that convinced Obama to abandon his so-called “red line.”

Under President Donald Trump, the US attempted to revive the “red line” by bombing Syria over chemical weapons allegations in 2017 and 2018. But significant evidence in both cases points to staged incidents carried out by insurgents. In the case of the April 2017 incident in Khan Sheikhoun, Trump ignored intelligence and launched airstrikes on the Syrian military. And in the Damascus suburb of Douma the following year, OPCW investigators found no evidence of a chemical attack, but had their findings doctored and censored as US officials worked to pressure and co-opt the organization.

As a former US ambassador in the Middle East told journalist Charles Glass, “The ‘red line’ was an open invitation to a false-­flag operation.

Dubious allegations of a Russian attack on the theater in Mariupol have failed to trigger the Biden administration’s red line. The question now is how far Ukraine’s government is willing to go to trigger the no fly zone it needs to hold off the imminent defeat of its military forces.

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