An
interview with the investigative journalist Nafeez Ahmed at the
RealNews network
Key
parts
"...
the origins of the group [ISIS] come from militant groups affiliated
to al-Qaeda that are operating in Iraq and Syria. And that's where it
gets murky, because, as we know, these groups were kind of engaged in
all kinds of militant activity fighting the Assad regime. They were
also active in responding to U.S. occupation after the 2003 invasion.
So there's a mix of different actors involved. So in Iraq we had
elements of even the Ba'ath party and ex-Saddam supporters who were
actually--according to many reports, they were being recruited by
these al-Qaeda militants."
"And
what makes it more murky is how these groups really became as kind of
virulent and kind of influential as they have, which is really the
kind of--you know, you follow the money. And you follow the money,
we're looking at the involvement of the Gulf states, which have
really empowered these groups over time and increased their ability
to operate. They've increased their arms, logistical trading. So
we've had the Saudis engaged in funding these groups in Syria."
"And
what makes it really more disturbing is, going deeper into that
evidence of the role of the Saudis and the Qataris and Kuwait, which
has been confirmed by various different sources, is really the way in
which the U.S. and the U.K. have overseen that process. And that's
something which isn't so much acknowledged in the mainstream, that
actually Britain and the United States were involved in knowingly
kind of facilitating the support to these groups, despite knowing
their links to al-Qaeda calling back as early as 2009."
"that
batch of files [obtained by WikiLeaks] contains some really
interesting correspondence, including correspondence where some
senior executives at Stratfor were describing meetings that they had
had with senior Pentagon officials and senior U.S. army officials
where those officials openly described how U.S. special forces and
British special forces had been operating in Syria long before the
kind of major, major civil unrest that kind of really broke out, and
they had been operating in kind of supporting these groups. And it
was very clearly stated by these officers at the time--and the emails
are there, people can check them out, and I've written about them in
some of my Guardian articles and some of my other articles
elsewhere--that they quite explicitly said that this is about
destabilizing the Assad regime from within. They had even explored
the possibility of airstrikes on targets. But the favored policy was
using these groups as a proxy force to destabilize Assad's regime."
"The
United States has for long time wanted to ensure that it kind of
sidelines Russia and Iran in all of these various pipeline projects.
So when Iran signed this kind of memorandum with Assad, that was kind
of considered like a major kind of strategic setback, and something
kind of needed to be done. And apart from that, there were also many
other--there was generally other kind of geopolitical issues apart
from the fact that Russia has a military base there. There's also
issues such as the role that Assad has played in relation to the
Middle East conflict, the support that they've provided to Hamas,
their relationship with the Iranians, and that whole general thing.
So there's this general perception of Syria being this part of the
so-called axis of evil in a way. You know. So the whole pipeline
thing kind of accelerated that fear, I think, and made them want to
do something."
"...
and we even have State Department cables, also leaked by WikiLeaks,
where literally we have State Department officials talking about how
there is going to be civil unrest in Syria very soon, very likely,
because of food prices and the strain on food due to these droughts
and due to the effect on farmers."
"...
when we look at the way in which we've been funding some of these
groups, it's kind of ironic that we have the very same people now
calling for boots on the ground, calling for a response, are the same
people that have been very loud in their support for arming some of
the most virulent of elements of these rebel groups."
"...
if we look at some of the reports that we've had over the last few
years of the plans for the region, there are certainly elements in
the Pentagon of a neoconservative persuasion who have seen the rise
of this kind of group in a way as a boon to reconfigure the Middle
East."
"...
one of the sources I looked at was a publicly available RAND report
that was published a couple of years. It was commissioned by the U.S.
army. And it was a kind of a thought piece. It was a policy briefing.
It was looking at policy options for the United States in essentially
reconfiguring the Middle East and exploring how to counter terrorism.
But those policy options were pretty Machiavellian in some ways [...]
there was a range of scenarios that were explored. One of them was
divide-and-rule, openly talking about empowering Salafi jihadists to
some extent in order to kind of weaken Iranian influence, openly
talking about empowering, using the Gulf states, because they have
access to the petroleum resources, so using them to kind of funnel
support to these groups that would eventually create kind of like a
vortex of intra-Muslim conflict that would get terrorists and
extremists on different sides fighting each other, that would weaken
all of them and allow U.S. interests and Israeli interests to kind of
consolidate their own kind of security while these guys are fighting
amongst themselves."
Full
interview:
http://adiritos.blogspot.gr/2014/09/the-powers-behind-islamic-state.html
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