What I don't understand from this leaked report is the fear expressed by the Saudi author about Syria's revenge against Saudi Arabia:
The fact must be stressed that in the case where the Syrian regime is able to pass through its current crisis in any shape or form, the primary goal that it will pursue is taking revenge on the countries that stood against it, with the Kingdom and some of the countries of the Gulf coming at the top of the list.
I have never come across any articles that would substantiate this fear of retaliation, so I must conclude that this is simply a rationalization to justify their desire to rid Syria of Assad's administration. Most likely what underlies their dedication to the removal of Assad was his opposition to proposed pipelines from Qatar to Europe through Syria. In 2012 Pepe Escobar has argued that this was the case. In 2014 F. William Engdahl provided evidence that the Saudis were likely encouraged by the US to undertake a campaign to promote "rebel" armies in Syria and even provided CIA support for this project. As Engdahl wrote in his article:Washington neo-conservatives embedded inside the Obama Administration in a form of “Deep State” secret network, and their allied media such as the Washington Post, advocated US covert backing of a pet CIA project known as the Muslim Brotherhood. As I detail in my most recent book, Amerikas’ Heiliger Krieg, the CIA had cultivated ties to the terrorist Muslim Brotherhood death cult since the early 1950’s.Thus, it is understandable that the Saudis are now furious with the US and its apparent abandonment of this destabilization plan.
Now if we map the resources of known natural gas reserves in the entire Persian Gulf region, the motives of the Saudi-led Qatar and UAE in financing with billions of dollars the opposition to Assad, including the Sunni ISIS, becomes clearer. Natural gas has become the favored “clean energy” source for the 21st Century and the EU is the world’s largest growth market for gas, a major reason Washington wants to break the Gazprom-EU supply dependency to weaken Russia and keep control over the EU via loyal proxies like Qatar.
[Update: see also this recent article by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. posted in Politico, which gives a considerable amount of the history of US interference in the oil rich countries of the Mid-East-- specially (p. 2) in reference to the pipelines that Saudi Arabia and Qatar wanted to transport their gas through Syria.]
