October 1st marked the 10th anniversary of US aid worker Peter Kassig’s kidnap in Syria. He was beheaded by Daesh just over a year later. Today, his tragic death, and the many agonising months in which his family desperately battled to secure his release without assistance from the US government, are largely forgotten. But his disappearance and murder may be one of the most significant events in the Syrian proxy war. That it is not recognised as such is likely no accident.

In November 2022, The Cradle published a groundbreaking investigation into whether British intelligence played any role in the murder of US journalist James Foley, another ISIS abductee beheaded in August 2014. Foley was kidnapped by Muhammad Emwazi, also known as “Jihadi John”. He was part of Katibat al-Muhajireen, a terror group protected and sponsored by British intelligence, and entered Syria through a pipeline established and maintained by British intelligence.

In advance of their successive slayings, Foley and Kassig were imprisoned together by Daesh. As we shall see, this may well have been no coincidence. Kassig himself was in a prime position to know, and expose, inconvenient truths about the West’s covert dirty war in Syria. Which, just over a month prior to his capture, had come very close to becoming overt.

‘No public documents’

In his 2015 book Hunting Season, James Harkin provides a detailed account of Kassig’s kidnap and incarceration. He was detained at a time Daesh was kidnapping Westerners, particularly journalists, on a regular basis.

Kassig was no journalist, but “an idealistic former US Army Ranger,” imprisoned in Raqqa after an ambulance laden with medical equipment in which he was travelling through northeast Syria was stopped at an extremist group checkpoint. Harkin records that at this time, “even ISIS didn’t usually stop ambulances.” This strongly suggests the kidnap was targeted. 

Kassig was eventually moved to a Daesh prison in Sheikh Najjar, where he was held with several other Western captives, including Foley, and his British collaborator John Cantlie. Over the following months, the detainees regularly discussed how they’d been caught. Kassig was reportedly “convinced that someone who he knew intimately had sold him out.” He speculated it was “an activist who knew when he went in and when he left,” and spoke about this “day and night” with another prisoner.

Harkin suggests that if Kassig was betrayed, “it might well have been someone he’d come across during his time working as a medical instructor and logistics manager for ARK,” October 2012 - June 2013. Harkin describes ARK as a “conflict research consultancy with offices in Turkey,” which was charged by Western governments with distributing “nonlethal aid” to the Syrian opposition, and “helping activists overthrow the regime” of Bashar al-Assad.

As Harkin notes, for ARK, “secrecy was paramount,” and its operations were “intentionally opaque,” with “almost no public documents” tracking its activities. The company was staffed by British and US military and intelligence veterans, “pollsters and policy advisers, a consultant who previously worked for a [psyops] firm, and a development professional with experience in ‘in-country information-gathering’.” 

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Kassig’s “sometime Syrian girlfriend who also worked for ARK” told Harkin that “the organization panicked after his kidnapping,” and “instructed everyone to keep quiet about his time there.” It is not at all clear why. In fact, there are many reasons to believe ARK, or one of its representatives, was one way or another responsible for his betrayal.

Strikingly, Harkin records that “Kassig didn’t much like ARK,” and four months prior to his kidnapping, “he’d quit to focus on his own humanitarian missions inside Syria.” The reasons for Kassig’s antipathy aren’t stated, although one explanation could be that he well-understood the firm was not concerned with providing aid, but achieving far darker and more destructive objectives. Namely, fomenting all-out Western war against Damascus.

‘Future transitional Syria’

ARK’s Syrian operations were expansive. The firm trained and equipped a several-thousand-strong network of content creators, founded the controversial, extremist-linked White Helmets and Free Syrian Police, created opposition magazines, newspapers and radio and TV stations, produced documentaries, provided media training to opposition elements, created and ran activist groups, and somehow even more besides. The end result was a never-ending deluge of pro-regime change propaganda disseminated locally and internationally.

In submissions to the British Foreign Office, ARK boasted of its Syrian employees’ “history of activism from the earliest days of the revolution,” and vast networks in the country. This provided the company “credibility among and access to” the breadth of the anti-Assad opposition, including “leading members of the National Coalition and the interim government.”

As Sharmine Narwani revealed back in May 2014, the “peaceful” protests in Syria that kickstarted the “revolution” were from the very beginning riddled with foreign actors, and extremely violent. This account is amply confirmed by records of the Central Crisis Management Cell, a cross-government body set up by Damascus in March 2011 to manage responses to the crisis. They were unearthed, and translated into English, by the Commission for International Justice and Accountability (CIJA).

CIJA was spun out of ARK in May 2011, to prosecute Syrian government officials for war crimes. On top of training local investigators “in basic international criminal and humanitarian law,” in service of a “domestic justice process in a future transitional Syria,” the Commission collaborated closely with dangerous armed groups, to smuggle sensitive documentation out of abandoned government buildings, in opposition-occupied areas of the country.

Investigations by The Grayzone indicate CIJA was not only frequently in extremely close quarters with al Nusra and Daesh in this capacity, but paid them handsomely for their assistance in securing files. This included material seized from Raqqa after its January 2014 capture, at which time Daesh was massacring Alawites and Christians. That same year, a Commission spokesperson boasted: 

“No organization other than the CIJA is…building prosecution-ready case files with evidence pointing to the criminal liability of high and highest ranking individuals within the [Syrian] regime.”

CIJA received vast sums from Western governments, including states at the forefront of the Syrian proxy war, for its work. This is understandable, given that the Commission’s ability to capture government documents from occupied territory, let alone prosecute Assad government officials, was wholly contingent on Western intervention, and outright regime change. 

That CIJA was founded just two months after the initial protests began, and its founders already foresaw a “future transitional Syria” at this point, unambiguously indicates ARK and its assorted assets in the country believed even then that intervention was imminently forthcoming. Which suggests the entire “revolution” unfolded according to a predetermined script.

Kassig quit ARK in June 2013, right when the company was priming Syrians for war. And, potentially, coordinating with opposition elements on the forthcoming Ghouta false flag. Did Kassig, whose commitment to helping vulnerable Syrians appears wholly sincere, know what was coming, and wanted no part of that? Did the risk of him going public with this information once intervention didn’t come to pass necessitate his murder?