UK and USA knew about attempt by ISIS jihadist to takeover Iraq in advance

Monday, 23 June 2014

UK and USA knew about attempt by ISIS jihadist to takeover Iraq in advance

Head of Kurdish intelligence in Iraq says MI6 and CIA were warned of impending Isis-Baathist attack on Mosul and Baghdad but British and US governments failed to act

President Barack Obama who has recently rejected calls for early intervention in Iraq Photo: AP

MI6 and the CIA were handed intelligence outlining the planned takeover of northern Iraq by jihadists and their allies five months ago but the British and American governments failed to act on it, senior officials in Iraq have told The Telegraph.

The head of intelligence for the autonomous Kurdish regional government, which has links with the West, said he had repeatedly tried to send warnings both to the central government in Baghdad and to its allies, Britain and America.

But despite repeated attempts to impress on Washington and London the seriousness of the unfolding situation, he said there was no response from either government.

The claims were made as it emerged that as many as 500 British-born fighters have travelled to the Middle East in recent months to take up arms with the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (Isis).

The families of three young men from Cardiff on Sunday night pleaded for them to come home after two of them appeared in an Isis propaganda video urging British Muslims to join them in their holy war.

President Barack Obama on Sunday rejected fresh calls for early intervention in Iraq, saying: “What

we can’t do is think that we’re just going to play whack-a-mole and send US troops occupying various countries wherever these organisations pop up.”

The Kurds are trying to force the West to intervene again to protect them from the jihadi threat sweeping across the region. The Kurdish regional government’s autonomy is partly due to American and British intervention to provide military cover for their campaign against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq in the early Nineties after the first Gulf War.

“I have completely lost hope in America after listening to President Barack Obama,” the head of Kurdish intelligence, Lahur Talabani, said.

The extremist insurgency in Iraq has been growing ever since Britain and the United States pulled out troops, the last Americans leaving in December 2011.

Rooz Bahjat, one of Mr Talabani’s senior lieutenants, said of the warnings of conflict: “We had this information then, and we passed it on to your government and the US government.

“We knew exactly what strategy they were going to use, we knew the military planners. It fell on deaf ears.”

Mr Bahjat estimated there were now 4,000 foreign fighters with Isis, of whom 400 to 450 were British, including one who was killed last week in fighting in Jalawla, near the Iranian border.

He warned that they and the Isis leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, were now a greater threat to western countries than that posed by Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda in 2001. “Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi is now something Bin Laden could only dream of being,” he said.

There is a widespread sense in Iraq that Britain and America were so disillusioned by their failure to establish order in the country that they lowered their presence in the region. Since David Cameron’s government came to power in 2010, it has been explicit in refocusing Britain’s diplomatic efforts in the Arab world on its traditional allies in the Gulf.

This led to a downgrading of intelligence resources in Iraq. “Both the Americans and the British had options to upgrade their presence on the ground many months before this happened but seem not to have acted on that,” said Michael Stephens, an analyst at the Royal United Services Institute, a think tank.

“For one reason or another there was a feeling that Iraq was not an important foreign posting and as a result it was seen as a place where careers go to die rather than a place to build a career. That meant the assets that should have been available to us weren’t really there when this kicked off.”

A former head of counter-terrorism at MI6 told Sky News that up to 300 Islamist fighters from Iraq and Syria may have returned to the UK and could be planning attacks. Richard Barrett said the hundreds returning were an “absolute nightmare” for security services. He added that they did not have the resources to be able to look at all of them.