‘A Willful Decision’ to Fuel the Rise of ISIS?

How Involved is America and ISIS?

Whether it was on purpose, or it was just allowed to happen, the United States had something to do with the origins of ISIS, and the genie is already out of the bottle. 

By Rick Brinegar

 

Depending on which sources you choose to rely upon, the postings which talk about the extent of the involvement of the United States in the creation of ISIS denote various levels of responsibility. Some say that America “didn’t interfere with the rise of” ISIS, or that America “created the conditions for” the formation of ISIS, or even that the United States “facilitated the rise of” ISIS.

 

Retired Lieutenant General Michael Flynn, former head of the Defense Intelligence Agency, confirmed recently that the U.S. not only chose to not interfere with the rise of anti-government Jihadist groups in Syria, from which ISIS was formed, but that it was a “willful decision” to do nothing to hinder Al-Qaeda-led rebels in their attempt to overthrow President Bashar Assad.

 

A secret Pentagon draft intelligence report, uncovered in 2012, had revealed that “the Salafist, the Muslim Brotherhood, and AQI [Al- Qaeda in Iraq] [were] the major forces driving the insurgency in Syria,” being supported by “the West, Gulf countries and Turkey.” (Salafism is the ultra-conservative movement associated with a literal and strict approach to Islam.) The United States wanted to isolate Assad’s Syrian regime and rollback “Shia expansion” “The intelligence was very clear” to the Defense Intelligence Agency, headed by General Flynn, that Salafist forces could unify the Jihadist Sunni forces in Iraq, Syria and the rest of the Arab world to create a dangerous Islamic State. General Flyn believes that the U.S. government refused to listen to the warnings from his department on purpose.

 

Could something as reprehensible as ISIS have been anticipated or even deliberately assisted? “It’s almost too much,” commented journalist Dr. Nafeez Ahmed, “It goes against the grain of so much we take for granted. So many assumptions about not just American, but Western kind of supremacy and the benevolence of our government that we would never do anything like this … it’s a big kind of leap.”

 

According to Ben Swann of Truth in Media, when Iraq’s infrastructure, society and government were destroyed, the United States “left behind a power vacuum” that would never have existed under Hussein.” Between 2006 and 2008, during the Iraq War, ISI (Islamic State in Iraq), a merger of several Iraqi insurgent groups, had strongholds in several areas of Iraq. In 2009, the group shifted their focus to the civil war in Syria, directing their efforts more toward creating an Islamic State than toward deposing Assad. In 2013, they changed their name to Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL, ISIS, IS), which is the same brutal and well-organized terrorist group still active today. CNN reported in 2013 that the weapons which were being given to Syrian rebels, though not “American-made,” were, nevertheless, “funded and organized by the CIA.”

 

What level of collusion between the U.S. and the originators of ISIS, then, are we talking about here? Seumas Milne of The Guardian won’t go so far as to say that the United State created ISIS, but he does assert that America “has certainly exploited the existence of Isis against other forces in the region as part of a wider drive to maintain western control.” Milnes believes that the 2012 Pentagon document clearly implies that, while the United States and its allies were supporting and arming the extreme Syrian opposition groups, “they were prepared to countenance the creation of some sort of “Islamic state…”

1 reply

Comments are closed.