Here's a link
to the whole eManuscript.
PART 4:WHAT’S THE REAL STORY?
With the historical
background in Parts 2 and 3, we can now look at the deeper story behind ISIS.
AMERICA’S CLOSEST ALLIES IN THE MIDEAST SUPPORT ISIS
America’s top military official – the Chairman of the Joint
Chiefs of Staff, General Martin E. Dempsey – and Senator Lindsey Graham admitted last
September in a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing that America’s closest
allies are supporting ISIS:
SEN. LINDSEY GRAHAM (R), SOUTH
CAROLINA, MEMBER OF ARMED SERVICES COMMITTEE: Do you know any major Arab ally
that embraces ISIL?
GEN. MARTIN DEMPSEY, CHAIRMAN,
JOINT CHIEFS OF STAFF: I know major Arab allies who fund them.
GRAHAM: Yeah, but do they
embrace them? They fund them because the Free Syrian Army couldn’t
fight Assad. They were trying to beat Assad. I think they realized the
folly of their ways.
VIDEO: DEMPSEY: I know the Arab allies who fund
ISIS
4-Star General Wesley Clark – who served as the Supreme Allied
Commander of NATO – agrees:
- “Our friends & allies funded ISIS to destroy Hezbolla” VIDEO
attached
- CNN: Obama wants 3-year war; no geographic limits. Statement included
in this Video
- Vice President Joe Biden agrees: VIDEO
US VP Biden : We couldn’t convince our Middle
East Allies to stop supporting …
A German
minister says that U.S. ally Qatar funds ISIS.
ABC News reports:
The Sunni rebels [inside
Syria] are supported by the Islamist rulers of Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkey,
as well as the U.S., France, Britain and others.
The Independent headlines “Iraq crisis: How Saudi Arabia helped Isis take
over the north of the country”:
Some time before 9/11, Prince
Bandar bin Sultan, once the powerful Saudi ambassador in Washington and head of
Saudi intelligence until a few months ago, had a revealing and ominous
conversation with the head of the British Secret Intelligence Service,
MI6, Sir Richard Dearlove. Prince Bandar told him: “The time is not far off
in the Middle East, Richard, when it will be literally ‘God help the Shia’.
More than a billion Sunnis have simply had enough of them.”
***
There is no doubt about the
accuracy of the quote by Prince Bandar, secretary-general of the Saudi National
Security Council from 2005 and head of General Intelligence between 2012 and
2014, the crucial two years when al-Qa’ida-type jihadis took over the
Sunni-armed opposition in Iraq and Syria. Speaking at the Royal United Services
Institute last week, Dearlove, who headed MI6 from 1999 to 2004, emphasised the
significance of Prince Bandar’s words, saying that they constituted “a chilling
comment that I remember very well indeed”.
He does not doubt that
substantial and sustained funding from private donors in Saudi Arabia
and Qatar, to which the authorities may have turned a blind eye, has played
a central role in the Isis surge into Sunni areas of Iraq. He said: “Such
things simply do not happen spontaneously.” This sounds realistic since the
tribal and communal leadership in Sunni majority provinces is much beholden to
Saudi and Gulf paymasters, and would be unlikely to cooperate with Isis
without their consent.
***
Dearlove … sees Saudi strategic
thinking as being shaped by two deep-seated beliefs or attitudes. First, they
are convinced that there “can be no legitimate or admissible challenge to the
Islamic purity of their Wahhabi credentials as guardians of Islam’s holiest
shrines”. But, perhaps more significantly given the deepening Sunni-Shia
confrontation, the Saudi belief that they possess a monopoly of Islamic truth
leads them to be “deeply attracted towards any militancy which can effectively
challenge Shia-dom”.
Western governments
traditionally play down the connection between Saudi Arabia and its Wahhabist
faith, on the one hand, and jihadism, whether of the variety espoused by Osama
bin Laden and al-Qa’ida or by Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi’s Isis. There is nothing
conspiratorial or secret about these links: 15 out of 19 of the 9/11 hijackers
were Saudis, as was Bin Laden and most of the private donors who funded the
operation.
***
But there has always been a
second theme to Saudi policy towards al-Qa’ida type jihadis, contradicting
Prince Bandar’s approach and seeing jihadis as a mortal threat to the Kingdom.
Dearlove illustrates this attitude by relating how, soon after 9/11, he visited
the Saudi capital Riyadh with Tony Blair.
He remembers the then head
of Saudi General Intelligence “literally shouting at me across his office:
‘9/11 is a mere pinprick on the West. In the medium term, it is nothing
more than a series of personal tragedies. What these terrorists want is to
destroy the House of Saud and remake the Middle East.’” In the event, Saudi
Arabiaadopted both policies, encouraging the jihadis as a
useful tool of Saudi anti-Shia influence abroad but suppressing them at home as
a threat to the status quo. It is this dual policy that has fallen apart over
the last year.
Saudi sympathy for anti-Shia
“militancy” is identified in leaked US official documents. The then US
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton wrote in December 2009 in a cable
released by Wikileaks that “Saudi Arabia remains a critical financial
support base for al-Qa’ida, the Taliban, LeT [Lashkar-e-Taiba in Pakistan] and
other terrorist groups.”
***
Saudi Arabia and its allies
are in practice playing into the hands of Isiswhich is swiftly
gaining full control of the Sunni opposition in Syria and Iraq.
***
For all his gargantuan mistakes,
Maliki’s failings are not the reason why the Iraqi state is disintegrating.
What destabilised Iraq from 2011 on was the revolt of the Sunni in Syria and
the takeover of that revolt by jihadis, who were often sponsored by
donors in Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait and United Arab Emirates. Again and
again Iraqi politicians warned that by not seeking to close down the civil war
in Syria, Western leaders were making it inevitable that the conflict in Iraq
would restart. “I guess they just didn’t believe us and were fixated on getting
rid of [President Bashar al-] Assad,” said an Iraqi leader in Baghdad last
week. Of course, US and British politicians and diplomats would argue that they
were in no position to bring an end to the Syrian conflict. But this is
misleading. By insisting that peace negotiations must be about the departure of
Assad from power, something that was never going to happen since Assad held
most of the cities in the country and his troops were advancing, the US and
Britain made sure the war would continue.
***
Saudi
Arabia has created a Frankenstein’s monster over which it is rapidly losing control. The
same is true of its allies such as Turkey which has been a vital back-base for
Isis and Jabhat al-Nusra by keeping the 510-mile-long Turkish-Syrian
border open.
The Daily Beast (a
media company formerly owned by Newsweek) notes, in a story entitled “America’s Allies
Are Funding ISIS”:
The Islamic State of Iraq and
Syria (ISIS), now threatening Baghdad, was funded for years by wealthy donors
in Kuwait, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia, three U.S. allies that have dual agendas in
the war on terror.
***
The extremist group that is
threatening the existence of the Iraqi state was built and grown for years with
the help of elite donors from American supposed allies in the Persian
Gulf region.
***
A key component of ISIS’s
support came from wealthy individuals in the Arab Gulf States of Kuwait, Qatar
and Saudi Arabia. Sometimes the support came with the tacit nod of
approval from those regimes ….
Gulf donors support ISIS,
the Syrian branch of al Qaeda called the al Nusrah Front, and other Islamic
groups fighting on the ground in Syria ….
Donors in Kuwait, the Sunni
majority Kingdom on Iraq’s border, have taken advantage of Kuwait’s weak
financial rules to channel hundreds of millions of dollars to a host of Syrian
rebel brigades, according to a December 2013 report by The Brookings
Institution, a Washington think tank that receives some funding from the Qatari
government.
***
“The U.S. Treasury is aware of
this activity and has expressed concern about this flow of private financing.
But Western diplomats’ and officials’ general response has been a collective
shrug,” the report states.
When confronted with the
problem, Gulf leaders often justify allowing their Salafi constituents to fund
Syrian extremist groups ….
That’s what Prince Bandar bin
Sultan, head of Saudi intelligence since 2012 and former Saudi ambassador in
Washington, reportedly told Secretary of
State John Kerry when Kerry pressed him on Saudi financing
of extremist groups earlier this year. Saudi Arabia has retaken a leadership
role in past months guiding help to the Syrian armed rebels, displacing Qatar,
which was seen as supporting some of the worst of the worst organizations on
the ground.
Business Insider notes:
The Islamic State for Iraq and
the Levant … is also receiving private donations from wealthy Sunnis in American-allied
Gulf nations such as Kuwait, Qatar, and, possibly, Saudi Arabia.
***
As far back as March, Iraqi Prime
Minister Nouri al-Maliki has accused Saudi Arabia and Qatar of openly funding
ISIS as his troops were fighting them.
“I accuse them of inciting and
encouraging the terrorist movements. I accuse them of supporting them
politically and in the media, of supporting them with money and by buying
weapons for them,” he told France 24 television.
In Kuwait, donors have taken
advantage of weak terror financing control laws to funnel hundreds of millions
of dollars to various Syrian rebel groups, including ISIS, according to a December 2013 report by
The Brookings Institution, which receives some funding from the government of
Qatar.
“Over the last two and a half
years, Kuwait has emerged as a financing and organizational hub for charities
and individuals supporting Syria’s myriad rebel groups,” the report said,
adding that money from donors in other gulf nations is collected in Kuwait
before traveling through Turkey or Jordan to reach the insurgents.
***
Ironically, Kuwait is a staging area for individuals funneling money to an ISIS organization that is aligned
with whatever is left of the Baathist regime once led by Saddam Hussein.
In 1990, the U.S. went to war with Iraq over Hussein’s invasion and occupation
of Kuwait.
TURKEY SUPPORTS ISIS
NATO member Turkey has long been directly supporting ISIS.
The Jerusalem Post reports that an ISIS fighter says
that Turkey funds the
terrorist group.
A German news program – with English subtitles captions –
shows that Turkey is sending terrorists into Syria: Opposition Turkish
lawmakers say that the government is protecting
and cooperating with ISIS and Al Qaeda terrorists, and providing free
medical care to their leaders.
According to a leading Turkish newspaper (Today’s Zaman), Turkish nurses are sick of providing free medical treatment
to ISIS terrorists in Turkish hospitals.
Now, Turkey is
massively bombing the most effective on-the-ground fighters against ISIS.
As Time Magazine pointed out in June 2015:
Ethnic Kurds—who on Tuesday
scored their second and third significant victories over ISIS in the space of
eight days—are by far the most effective force fighting ISIS in
both Iraq and Syria.
And yet Turkey is
trying to destroy the Kurds. Time writes:
Since [Turkey announced that it
was joining the war against ISIS] it has arrested more than 1,000 people in
Turkey and carried out waves of air raids in neighboring Syria and Iraq.
But most of those arrests and air strikes, say Kurdish leaders, have
hit Kurdish and left wing groups, not ISIS.
TURKEY IS ALSO
SUPPORTING ISIS by buying its oil … its main source of funding. The
Guardian reported:
US special forces raided the
compound of an Islamic State leader in eastern
Syria in May, they made sure not to tell the neighbours.
The target of that raid, the
first of its kind since US jets returned to the skies over Iraq last August,
was an Isis
official responsible for oil smuggling, named Abu Sayyaf. He was almost
unheard of outside the upper echelons of the terror group, but he was well
known to Turkey. From mid-2013, the Tunisian fighter had been responsible for
smuggling oil from Syria’s eastern fields, which the group had by then
commandeered. Black market oil quickly became the main driver of Isis revenues
– and Turkish buyers were its main clients.
As a result, the oil trade
between the jihadis and the Turks was held up as evidence of an alliance
between the two.
***
In the wake of the raid that
killed Abu Sayyaf, suspicions of an undeclared alliance have hardened.
One senior western official familiar with the intelligence
gathered at the slain leader’s compound said that direct dealings between
Turkish officials and ranking Isis members was now “undeniable”.
“There are hundreds of flash
drives and documents that were seized there,” the official told the Observer.
“They are being analysed at the moment, but the links are already so clear that
they could end up having profound policy implications for the relationship
between us and Ankara.”
***
However, Turkey has openly
supported other jihadi groups,
such as Ahrar al-Sham, which espouses much of al-Qaida’s ideology, and
Jabhat al-Nusra, which is proscribed as a terror organisation by much of the US
and Europe. “The distinctions they draw [with other opposition groups] are thin
indeed,” said the western official. “There is no doubt at all that they
militarily cooperate with both.”
***
One Isis member says the
organisation remains a long way from establishing a self-sustaining economy
across the area of Syria and Iraq it controls. “They need the Turks. I know of
a lot of cooperation and it scares me,” he said. “I don’t see how Turkey can
attack the organisation too hard. There are shared interests.”
While the Guardian is one of Britain’s leading newspapers,
many in the alternative press have long pointed out Turkey’s support for ISIS.
ISRAEL SUPPORTS
ISIS
The Israeli air force has bombed near
the Syrian capital of Damascus, and attacked agricultural facilities and
warehouses (the Syrian government is the other main opponent of ISIS in Syria
besides the Kurds).
The Israeli
military recently admitted supporting Syrian jihadis.
Specifically, the Times of Israel reportedin June 2015:
Defense Minister Moshe
Ya’alon said Monday that Israel has been providing aid to Syrian rebels,
thus keeping the Druze in Syria out of immediate danger. Israeli officials have
previously balked at confirming on the record that the country has been helping
forces that are fighting to overthrow Syrian President Bashar Assad.
***
“We’ve assisted them under two
conditions,” Ya’alon said of the Israeli medical aid to the Syrian
rebels, some of whom are presumably fighting with al-Qaeda affiliate
al-Nusra Front to topple Syrian President Bashar Assad. “That they
don’t get too close to the border, and that they don’t touch the Druze.”
(Al Nusra is Al Qaeda, and closely affiliated with ISIS.)
The Times of
Israel reported in 2014:
A Free Syrian Army commander,
arrested last month by the Islamist militia Al-Nusra Front, told his captors he
collaborated with Israel in return for medical and military support, in a video
released this week.
In a video uploaded to YouTube Monday …
Sharif As-Safouri, the commander of the Free Syrian Army’s Al-Haramein
Battalion, admitted to having entered Israel five times to meet with Israeli
officers who later provided him with Soviet anti-tank weapons and light
arms. Safouri
was abducted by the al-Qaeda-affiliated Al-Nusra Front in the Quneitra
area, near the Israeli border, on July 22.
“The [opposition] factions would
receive support and send the injured in [to Israel] on condition that the
Israeli fence area is secured. No person was allowed to come near the fence
without prior coordination with Israel authorities,” Safouri said in the video.
***
In the edited confession video,
in which Safouri seems physically unharmed, he says that at first he met with
an Israeli officer named Ashraf at the border and was given an Israeli cellular
phone. He later met with another officer named Younis and with the two men’s
commander, Abu Daoud. In total, Safouri said he entered Israel five times for
meetings that took place in Tiberias.
Following the meetings, Israel
began providing Safouri and his men with “basic medical support and clothes” as
well as weapons, which included 30 Russian [rifles], 10 RPG launchers with 47
rockets, and 48,000 5.56 millimeter bullets.
Haaretz reported the same year:
The Syrian opposition is willing
to give up claims to the Golan Heights in return for cash and Israeli military
aid against President Bashar Assad, a top opposition official told Al Arab
newspaper, according to a report in Al Alam.
***
The Western-backed militant groups want
Israel to enforce a no-fly zone over parts of southern Syria to protect rebel
bases from air strikes by Assad’s forces, according to the report.
In a separate
article, Haartez also noted:
According to reports, Israel has also been
involved, and even provided active assistance in at least one
attack by rebel troops four months ago, when its communications and
intelligence base on Mount Hermon jammed the Syrian army’s communications
system and the information relayed between its fighting forces and their
headquarters.
Jacky Hugi – an
Arab affairs analyst for Israeli army radio – recently wrote:
The Israeli security
establishment should gradually abandon its emerging alliance with
the Syrian rebels …
***
It is a dangerous,
irresponsible gamble to choose Assad’s enemies and
encourage his collapse — it would be playing with fire.
THE U.S. SUPPORTS ISIS
Former CIA boss and 4-star general David Petraeus – who
still (believe it or not) holds a lot of sway in Washington – suggests we should arm Al Qaeda.
Quite a few mainstream Americans are also saying we should support Al Qaeda in Iraq
and Syria.
Influential New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman asks if we should arm ISIS itself,
so as to counter Iranian influence. This isn’t just empty rhetoric.
Former FBI translator Sibel Edmonds – deemed credible
by the
Department of Justice’s Inspector General, several senators (free
subscription required), and a coalition
of prominent conservative and liberal groups – says that the CIA and NATO started
recruiting and training people at a NATO base in Turkey – right near the Syrian
border – to stage terrorist attacks in Syria to overthrow the Syrian government
… and that this was the birth of ISIS:
In 2011, months and months
before Syria came in the headlines – anything about Syria was written on the
New York Times, Washington Post and CNN – we broke a story [background here, here, here and here]
based on my sources here in United States military but also in Turkey about
the fact that special CIA/NATO forces in a NATO base in Turkey,
which is in the southern portion of Turkey very close to the Syrian
border, they were bringing in, in Turkey, the CIA/NATO Gladio unit,
they were recruiting and bringing in people from northern Syria into these
camps, part of the US air force base in southern Turkey. They were training
them – military training – they were arming them, and they were basically
directing them towards create terror events inside Syria, not only against
Assad, but also in various villages and regions against the people, against
public.
***
That was the training and
beginning of the ISIS brand. It started as ISIL and then turned to
ISIS and now for short IS. This was completed by design, it was created and the
people who are part of the so called ISIS they were carefully selected, brought
into the U.S. NATO base in Turkey, they were trained they were funneled, and
this is what they were told to do. They created a new brand and a new brand
with purpose of replacing the old brand: Al Qaeda.
Sound like a
conspiracy theory?
Unfortunately, an internal U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency
(DIA) document produced recently shows that the U.S. knew that the actions of
“the West, Gulf countries and Turkey” in Syria might
create a terrorist group like ISIS and an Islamic caliphate.
By way of background, a non-profit organization called
Judicial Watch has – for many years – obtained sensitive U.S. government
documents through freedom of information requests and lawsuits. The government
just produced documents to Judicial Watch in
response to a freedom of information suit which show that the West has long
supported ISIS.
The documents were written by the U.S. Defense Intelligence
Agency (DIA) on August 12, 2012 … yearsbefore ISIS burst onto the world
stage. Here are screenshots from the documents (we have highlighted the
relevant parts in yellow):
Why
is this important? It shows that extreme Muslim terrorists – salafists, Muslims Brotherhood, and AQI (i.e. Al Qaeda
in Iraq) – have always been the “major forces driving the
insurgency in Syria.”
This verifies what the alternative media has been saying for
years: there aren’t
any moderate rebels in Syria (and see this, this and this).
Moreover, the newly-declassified document continues.. : [ To see picture press the web above ]
Yes, you read that correctly:
… there is the
possibility of establishing a declared or undeclared Salafist Principality in
eastern Syria (Hasaka and Der Zor), and this is exactly what
the supporting powers to the opposition want, in order to isolate the
Syrian regime ….
In other words,
the powers supporting the Syrian opposition – the West, our Gulf allies, and
Turkey wanted an Islamic caliphate in order to
challenge Syrian president Assad.
This is a big deal. A former British Army and Metropolitan
Police counter-terrorism intelligence officer and a former MI5 officer confirm that the newly-released
documents are a smoking gun.
And the former head of the DIA – Lieutenant
General Michael Flynn – confirmed its importance as well. By any measure,
Flynn was a top-level American military commander. Flynn served as:
- The
Director of the U.S. Intelligence Agency
- The
Director of intelligence for Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), the
main military agency responsible for targeting Al-Qaeda and other Islamic
terrorists
- The
Commander of the Joint Functional Component Command for Intelligence,
Surveillance and Reconnaissance
- The
Chair of the Military Intelligence Board
- Assistant
director of national intelligence
Flynn confirmed the
authenticity of the document in a new interview, and said:
[Interviewer] So the administration turned a blind eye to
your analysis?
[Flynn] I don’t know that they turned a blind eye, I
think it was a decision. I think it was a willful decision.
[Interviewer] A willful decision to support an insurgency
that had Salafists, Al Qaeda and the Muslim Brotherhood?
[Flynn] It was a willful decision to do
what they’re doing.
NBC News, the Wall Street Journal, CNN and others report that the U.S. has
committed to provide air power to support Muslim jihadis in Syria.
World Net Daily
reports that the U.S. trained Islamic
jihadis – who would later join ISIS –
in Jordan.
Der Spiegel and the
Guardian confirmed that the U.S., France
and England trained hundreds if not thousands of Islamic fighters
in Jordan.
----
POSTSCRIPT:
ISIS does not
represent mainstream Islam.
For example, the Intercept points out that ISIS has “more in common with Mao’s Red Guards or the Khmer Rouge than
it does with the Muslim empires of antiquity“.
Huffington Post reports:
Can you guess which books the wannabe jihadists Yusuf
Sarwar and Mohammed Ahmed ordered online from Amazon before they set out from
Birmingham to fight in Syria last May? A copy of Milestones by
the Egyptian Islamist Sayyid Qutb? No. How aboutMessages to the World: the
Statements of Osama Bin Laden? Guess again. Wait, The Anarchist
Cookbook, right? Wrong.
Sarwar and Ahmed, both of whom pleaded guilty to
terrorism offences last month, purchased Islam for Dummies and The
Koran for Dummies. You could not ask for better evidence to bolster the
argument that the 1,400-year-old Islamic faith has little to do with the modern
jihadist movement. The swivel-eyed young men who take sadistic pleasure in
bombings and beheadings may try to justify their violence with recourse to
religious rhetoric – think the killers of Lee Rigby screaming “Allahu Akbar” at
their trial; think of Islamic State beheading the photojournalist James Foley
as part of its “holy war” – but religious fervour isn’t what motivates most of
them.
In 2008, a classified briefing note on radicalisation,
prepared by MI5’s behavioural science unit, was leaked to the Guardian.
It revealed that, “far from being religious zealots, a large number of those
involved in terrorism do not practise their faith regularly. Many lack
religious literacy and could . . . be regarded as religious novices.”
The analysts concluded that “a well-established religious identity actually
protects against violent radicalisation“, the newspaper said.
For more evidence, read the books of the forensic
psychiatrist and former CIA officer Marc Sageman; the political scientist
Robert Pape [Pape found that foreign occupation – and not
religion – made certain Arabs into terrorists; the CIA’s top Bin Laden hunter agreed]; the
international relations scholar Rik Coolsaet; the Islamism expert Olivier Roy;
the anthropologist Scott Atran. They have all studied the lives and backgrounds
of hundreds of gun-toting, bomb-throwing jihadists and they all agree that
Islam isn’t to blame for the behaviour of such men (and, yes, they usually are
men).
Instead they point to other drivers of radicalisation ….
When he lived in the Philippines in the 1990s, Khalid
Sheikh Mohammed, described as “the principal architect” of the 11 September
attacks by the 9/11 Commission, once flew a helicopter past a girlfriend’s
office building with a banner saying “I love you”. His nephew Ramzi Yousef,
sentenced to life in prison for his role in the 1993 World Trade Center
bombing, also had a girlfriend and, like his uncle, was often spotted in
Manila’s red-light district. The FBI agent who hunted Yousef said that
he “hid behind a cloak of Islam”. Eyewitness accounts suggest the 9/11
hijackers were visiting bars and strip clubs in Florida and Las Vegas in the
run-up to the attacks. The Spanish neighbours of Hamid Ahmidan, convicted for
his role in the Madrid train bombings of 2004, remember him “zooming by on a
motorcycle with his long-haired girlfriend, a Spanish woman with a taste for
revealing outfits”, according to press reports.
No wonder Muslim leaders
worldwide condemn ISIS.
Similarly, the 9/11 hijackers used cocaine and drank
alcohol, slept with prostitutes and attended strip clubs … but they did
not worship at any mosque. See this, this, this, this, this, this, this and this.
As such, Islamic terrorists do not
necessarily represent Muslims as a whole.
====
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