US Fuelled Rise of ISIL in Iraq, Syria: Report

Monday, 6 July 2015

US Fuelled Rise of ISIL in Iraq, Syria: Report

Local Editor

The United States and its Western allies have been playing with jihadi groups as they exploited their existence, a report said few days ago.

In a report entitled “Now the truth emerges: how the US fuelled the rise of Isis in Syria and Iraq,” Seumas Milne said that both UK and US were providing assistance to extremists groups operating in Iraq and Syria.

“The war on terror, that campaign without end launched 14 years ago by George Bush, is tying itself up in ever more grotesque contortions,” the report published b y The Guardian on Friday said.

The writer argued that a trial in London the trial in London of a Swedish man, Bherlin Gildo, accused of terrorism in Syria, collapsed after it became clear British intelligence had been arming the same rebel groups the defendant was charged with supporting.

“The defense argued that going ahead with the trial would have been an “affront to justice” when there was plenty of evidence the British state was itself providing “extensive support” to the armed Syrian opposition.”

That didn’t only include the “non-lethal assistance” boasted of by the government (including body armor and military vehicles), but training, logistical support and the secret supply of “arms on a massive scale”, the report added.

“For the past year, US, British and other western forces have been back in Iraq, supposedly in the cause of destroying” ISIL, the columnist said in the report, adding that this was after the Takfiri group overran huge chunks of Iraqi and Syrian territory and proclaimed a so-called Islamic caliphate.
He noted meanwhile, that the military campaign against ISIL was not going well as the Takfiri group seized Ramadi in Ira and Palmyra in Syria.

The writer also cited 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-Qaeda-controlled Islamic state in Syria and Iraq.

That doesn’t mean the US created Isis, of course, though some of its Gulf allies certainly played a role in it – as the US vice-president, Joe Biden, acknowledged last year, the report said, noting however, that there was no al-Qaeda in Iraq until the US and Britain invaded, and that the US has certainly exploited the existence of ISIL against other forces in the region as part of a wider drive to maintain western control.

“The calculus changed when ISIL started beheading westerners and posting atrocities online, and the Gulf states are now backing other groups in the Syrian war, such as the Nusra Front. But this US and western habit of playing with jihadi groups, which then come back to bite them, goes back at least to the 1980s war against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, which fostered the original al-Qaida under CIA tutelage,” the report said.

“What’s clear is that Isis and its monstrosities won’t be defeated by the same powers that brought it to Iraq and Syria in the first place, or whose open and covert war-making has fostered it in the years since. Endless western military interventions in the Middle East have brought only destruction and division. It’s the people of the region who can cure this disease – not those who incubated the virus,” the report concluded.