There is growing evidence that Washington provided the initial impetus for the establishment of Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIS) or just Islamic State (IS) as it now calls itself, in it its misguided strategy of forging an alliance with Al-Qaeda and Jihadist aligned elements to overthrow Libya’s Gaddaffi and the attempted overthrow of Syria’s secular President Bashar al-Assad.
The latest high-ranking official to throw further light on this deception is former United States (US) Air Force Lieutenant General Thomas McInerney. Speaking on Fox News in America on Tuesday (September 2), he acknowledged that the US “helped build ISIS” as a result of the group obtaining weapons from the US Benghazi consulate in Libya which was attacked by jihadists in September 2012.
This was part of President Obama’s attempts in forging an Islamic military alliance – the Free Syrian Army (FSA) - to overthrow Syria’s Assad regime. Asked what he thought of the idea of arming so-called “moderate” Syrian rebels after FSA militants had kidnapped UN peacekeepers in the Golan Heights on August 28, 2014, McInerney said the policy had been a failure.
"We backed I believe in some cases, some of the wrong people and not in the right part of the Free Syrian Army and that’s a little confusing to people, so I’ve always maintained….that we were backing the wrong types."
McInerney then made reference to a Bret Baier Fox News special set to air on Friday (5 September) which will, “show some of those weapons from the US Benghazi consulate ended up in the hands of ISIS.
It is indeed ironic that the US State Department at the time hired the “February 17th Martyrs Brigade” – a radical Jihadist grouping, to provide security at the US diplomatic mission in Benghazi. Back in April 2013, House Republicans in the US Congress released an interim progress report on their investigation into the Benghazi killings, citing “numerous reports” that “the Brigade had extremist connections, and it had been implicated in the kidnapping of American citizens as well as in the threats against US military assets.”
It is now generally acknowledged that the US consulate in Benghazi was linked to an extensive illicit arms smuggling programme that saw weapons being trafficked to terrorists in Syria as part of the United States’ proxy war against the Assad regime. This included the airlift of more than 600 Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG) Jihadist militants to Syria to fight in the FSA against President Assad.
On August 1, 2013, CNN subsequently reported that dozens of people working for the CIA were on the ground that night, and that the agency was going to great lengths to make sure whatever it was doing, remained a secret and that the polygraph tests were being mandated in order to prevent operatives from talking to Congress or the media about a programme that revolved around “secretly helping to move surface-to-air missiles out of Libya, through Turkey, and into the hands of Syrian rebels.”
In June 2014, Jordanian sources revealed to reporter Aaron Klein that Syrian rebels who would later join the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIS), had been trained in 2012 by US special forces instructors working at a secret base in Jordan “as part of covert aid to the insurgents targeting the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in Syria”. Key Syrian rebel leaders had later defected to join ISIS when it effectively took over the FSA
The US and its allies like Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Turkey and Qatar, are indeed reaping the whirlwind of assisting and mentoring a new Islamic threat perhaps far more lethal than Al Qaeda. These revelations also explain the tardiness of US and UK reaction to the advancing IS elements and their extraordinarily slow response to desperate Iraqi government requests for urgent strategic assistance. IS militia having been trained by US special forces, arguably amongst the best in the world, also explains their dramatic and bewildering military successes and achievements on the battlefield.
[Sources: Global Research.Org; www.wnd.com; Libyan Regime Change Gone Mad, African Armed Forces Journal, September, 2013.]
African Armed Forces
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