Alwaght-The United States and its regional and western allies have been playing with terrorist groups as they exploited their existence, a new report reveals .
In a recent report entitled “Now the truth emerges: how the US fuelled the rise of ISIS in Syria and Iraq,” Seumas Milne said that both UK , US and some Persian Gulf states along with Turkey 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 the trial in London of a Swedish man, Bherlin Gildo, accused of terrorism in Syria, collapsed after it became clear that 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” ISIS, 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 ISIS was not going well as the Takfiri group seized Ramadi in Iraq 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 ISIS in Syria and Iraq .
The report stops short of blaming US for creating ISIS, by admitting that some of its Persian Gulf allies certainly played a role in it – as the US vice-president, Joe Biden, acknowledged last year. The report however notes that there was no al-Qaeda in Iraq until the US and Britain invaded, and that the US has certainly exploited the existence of ISIS against other forces in the region as part of a wider drive to maintain western control and hegemony .
"The calculus changed when ISIS started beheading westerners and posting atrocities online and the Persian 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, the so called, 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 .
It was recalibrated during the occupation of Iraq, when US forces led by General Petraeus sponsored an El Salvador-style dirty war of sectarian death squads to weaken the Iraqi resistance. And it was reprised in 2011 in the NATO-orchestrated war in Libya, where ISIS last week took control of Gaddafi’s home town of Sirte .
The writer notes that, “In reality, US and western policy in the conflagration that is now the Middle East (West Asia) is in the classic mould of imperial divide-and-rule. American forces bomb one set of rebels while backing another in Syria ".
"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 .
.
