With the mainstream media obsessing over Russia collusion conspiracies, this story slipped quietly under the radar, but considering the fact that the United States spent over 2 trillion dollars in Iraq, the news that former ISIS patrons/benefactors/sponsors or whatever you want to call it are about to rebuild Iraq should scare the hell out of the American taxpayer. And no, this is not a joke. The US has already enlisted Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Kuwait, our GCC partners that is, to, let me quote, “rebuild” in Iraq, in the aftermath of the US led coalition’s claimed victory against the Islamic State. Mind you, all these countries are well known for their contribution in creating and then sponsoring ISIS, but we’ll get at that in a moment, right after the break.
After Iraq declared victory over ISIS back in December of 2016, with a little help from Russia and Iran I might add, President Trump’s Secretary of State Rex Tillerson has said that coalition members must help with rebuilding Iraq’s atomized infrastructure. Here’s an excerpt from a Reuters article:
“The U.S. leads the coalition and hopes that after a three-year fight to defeat the militants it can count in large part on Gulf allies to shoulder the burden of rebuilding Iraq and on a Saudi-Iraqi rapprochement to weaken Iran’s influence in the country, which is run by a Shi‘ite led government. Donors and investors have gathered in Kuwait this week to discuss efforts to rebuild Iraq’s economy and infrastructure as it emerges from a devastating conflict with the hardline militants who seized almost a third of the country.”
Rex Tillerson also added:
“If communities in Iraq and Syria cannot return to normal life, we risk the return of conditions that allowed ISIS to take and control vast territory.”
However, it is pretty obvious for any educated person that an army with tens of thousands of fighters, (the Islamic State at its apogee), which has its own PR agency and recruits regionally and globally, having complex logistical networks cannot summon itself out of nothingness. The operational capacity demonstrated by the Islamic State’s army for years can be only possible with massive sponsorship. Enter the aforementioned ISIS patrons, which are all enlisted by the United States to rebuild Iraq. Speaking of ISIS sponsors, referring to Kuwait as a venue for investors and donors looking to rebuild war-torn Iraq is particularly hilarious, at least for those of you who remember an article published in the Telegraph back in 2014: “How our allies in Kuwait and Qatar funded Islamic State.”
Here’s a quote from the article:
“Islamic State (Isil), with its newly conquered territory, oilfields and bank vaults, no longer needs much foreign money. But its extraordinarily swift rise to this point, a place where it threatens the entire region and the West, was substantially paid for by the allies of the West.
Isil’s cash was raised in, or channelled through, Kuwait and Qatar, with the tacit approval and sometimes active support of their governments.”
The Telegraph piece paints Qatar and Kuwait as rogue states sponsoring international terrorism, which any “normie” would consider to be a betrayal of European Union (including UK) and US’s claimed war against ISIS in the middle east. However, the fact that Gulf Cooperation Council countries were funding and helping raising regular armies of terrorists and mercenaries was a well known fact to intelligence agencies. Here’s from a leaked document pertaining to US Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) back in 2012. The memo reads that the Gulf Cooperation Council and the United States tried to create a Salafist principality (quote) in eastern Syria, with the main purpose of isolating Bashar al Assad’s legitimate government. Here’s from the memo:
“If the situation unravels 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, which is considered the strategic depth of the Shia expansion (Iraq and Iran).”
And here are the supporting powers, as per the same memo:
“The West, Gulf countries, and Turkey support the opposition; while Russia, China, and Iran support the regime.”
The Salafist principality mentioned in the leaked document is well known to our readers by its “birth” name, i.e. the Islamic (Salafist) State, an international terrorist organization used by US and its allies in the Middle East as a proxy army to both (try to) topple and/or pressure Bashar al Assad’s regime in Damascus, and to create the perfect pretext for the permanent occupation of Syria by the US military (just like in Iraq). With ISIS now defeated, there are still various groups of mercenaries/militants fighting in Syria, and we must emphasize those fighting in Idlib (northern Syria), which are hard to distinguish from regular ISIS terrorists, both in terms of sponsorship (the states from which they receive weapons and money) and their hardcore Islamic ideology.
The same strategy was used by US in Iraq: Kurds were helped by the US in northern Iraq to diminish/isolate the (Shia’) government in Baghdad, then used as a pretext for Gulf Cooperation Council/US forces’ rapprochement: to alienate Sunni majority regions in Iraq from Baghdad’s influence. While the United States and GCC countries like to credit themselves with defeating the Islamic State, rather than with its inception, it’s a well known fact that Iran also played a major role in ISIS’ defeat. Even mainstream media recognized Iran’s key role in this extravaganza, and here are two examples: PBS’ “Iraq’s Shia Militias: The Double-Edged Sword Against ISIS” and the Atlantic’s “The Shia Militias of Iraq”. The plan was, as general Wesley Clark put it a while ago: first Syria, then Iran:
i.e. the proxy wars launched by GCC and the US against Iraq and Syria were actually aimed at Iran. The rise of ISIS in Syria was due to West’s failure to topple Assad’s regime in Damascus, which was supposed to be followed by Iran, but the momentum has been broken in Syria. Unlike Iran, which has a mutual defense treaty with Syria and also religious/socio-economic ties (including shared history) which all go back hundreds of years, US’s assumed role (as a mediator of sorts) in the Middle East stems only out of necons’ lust for power and world hegemony, both geopolitical and economic.
What now? Well, following ISIS’ defeat, Iraq seems willing to roll the Kurds back to their pre-ISIS-war boundaries, after ISIS vacated the territories currently occupied by Kurds and the same goes for Iraq’s highways, currently controlled by US contractors. Basically, Iraq is now trying to regain control over its territory. And the irony is that the same countries which helped ISIS to destroy Iraq’s infrastructure will now provide the money to rebuild it, most likely via GCC-US backed contractors, representing certain interests.
The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the Blog!
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