Huh? That makes as much sense as Assad thinking that the West is arming ISIS and Al Quaeda (who hate the west).
The Independent says the bulk of arms that end up in Islamist rebel hands are sent from wealthy gulf states like QatarWith that said, here is a
good investigation into the claims that the West has attempted to rebrand Al Qaeda Levant as a "moderate" faction and ignored so-called moderates who fought alongside groups the West considered enemies, if it meant an alliance of convenience between jihadists and the West to destroy the Assad regime (this radio report is a must-listen)
Rather notably, when a Swede was arrested by British security after the Swede tried to join jihadi groups in Syria,
the charges were embarrassingly dropped with the defendant's lawyers suspecting the British were sending weapons to the same people the Swede wanted to joinHere is a BBC report on which countries are giving weapons to factions in SyriaAlso I just found this article - the West funded the wrong side
Reports were cited that MI6 had cooperated with the CIA on a “rat line” of arms transfers from Libyan stockpiles to the Syrian rebels in 2012 after the fall of the Gaddafi regime.For the past year, US, British and other western forces have been back in Iraq, supposedly in the cause of destroying the hyper-sectarian terror group Islamic State (formerly known as al-Qaida in Iraq). This was after Isis overran huge chunks of Iraqi and Syrian territory and proclaimed a self-styled Islamic caliphate.
The campaign isn’t going well. Last month, Isis rolled into the Iraqi city of Ramadi, while on the other side of the now nonexistent border its forces conquered the Syrian town of Palmyra. Al-Qaida’s official franchise, the Nusra Front, has also been making gains in Syria.
A revealing light on how we got here has now been shone by a recently declassified secret US intelligence report, written in August 2012, which uncannily predicts – and effectively welcomes – the prospect of a “Salafist principality” in eastern Syria and an al-Qaida-controlled Islamic state in Syria and Iraq. In stark contrast to western claims at the time, the Defense Intelligence Agency document identifies al-Qaida in Iraq (which became Isis) and fellow Salafists as the “major forces driving the insurgency in Syria” – and states that “western countries, the Gulf states and Turkey” were supporting the opposition’s efforts to take control of eastern Syria.
Raising the “possibility of establishing a declared or undeclared Salafist principality”, the Pentagon report goes on, “this is exactly what the supporting powers to the opposition want, in order to isolate the Syrian regime, which is considered the strategic depth of the Shia expansion (Iraq and Iran)”.
Which is pretty well exactly what happened two years later. The report isn’t a policy document. It’s heavily redacted and there are ambiguities in the language. But the implications are clear enough. A year into the Syrian rebellion, the US and its allies weren’t only supporting and arming an opposition they knew to be dominated by extreme sectarian groups; they were prepared to countenance the creation of some sort of “Islamic state” – despite the “grave danger” to Iraq’s unity – as a Sunni buffer to weaken Syria.
Seems this was all done not for democracy, it was done to balkanize Syria and drive ethnic and religious group against one another. The goal was never to have a strong Syrian state, it was to destroy it
*EDIT
Just got to a bit on the Radio report where Joe Biden's talking about the problem for the West is its allies, Saudis, Turks and Emirates so determined to destroy Assad that they poured millions of dollars of weapons into anyone willing to fight Syria, so the West would've had to have risked alienating the Sunni states or Syria