Viewpoint - September 18, 2014

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How the West Created the Islamic State
Source: NAFEEZ AHMED, Counter Punch

Part 1 - OUR TERRORISTS

"This is an organisation that has an apocalyptic, end-of-days strategic vision which will eventually have to be defeated," Gen Martin Dempsey, chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, told a Pentagon press conference in August.

Military action is necessary to halt the spread of the ISIS "cancer," said President Obama. Yesterday he called for expanded airstrikes across Iraq and Syria, and new measures to arm and train Iraqi and Kurdish ground forces.

"The only way to defeat [IS] is to stand firm and to send a very straightforward message," declared Prime Minister Cameron. "A country like ours will not be cowed by these barbaric killers."

Missing from the chorus of outrage, however, has been any acknowledgement of the integral role of covert US and British regional military intelligence strategy in empowering and even directly sponsoring the very same virulent Islamist militants in Iraq, Syria and beyond, that went on to break away from al-Qaeda and form 'ISIS', the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, or now simply, the Islamic State (IS).

Since 2003, Anglo-American power has secretly and openly coordinated direct and indirect support for Islamist terrorist groups linked to al-Qaeda across the Middle East and North Africa. This ill-conceived patchwork geostrategy is a legacy of the persistent influence of neoconservative ideology, motivated by longstanding but often contradictory ambitions to dominate regional oil resources, defend an expansionist Israel, and in pursuit of these, re-draw the map of the Middle East.

Now despite Pentagon denials that there will be boots on the ground - and Obama's insistence that this would not be another "Iraq war" - local Kurdish military and intelligence sources confirm that US and German special operations forces are already "on the ground here. They are helping to support us in the attack." US airstrikes on ISIS positions and arms supplies to the Kurds have also been accompanied by British RAF reconnaissance flights over the region and UK weapons shipments to Kurdish peshmerga forces.

Divide and Rule in Iraq

"It's not that we don't want the Salafis to throw bombs," said one US government defense consultant in 2007. "It's who they throw them at - Hezbollah, Moqtada al-Sadr, Iran, and at the Syrians, if they continue to work with Hezbollah and Iran."

Early during the 2003 invasion and occupation of Iraq, the US covertly supplied arms to al-Qaeda affiliated insurgents even while ostensibly supporting an emerging Shi'a-dominated administration.

Pakistani defense sources interviewed by Asia Times in February 2005 confirmed that insurgents described as "former Ba'ath party" loyalists - who were being recruited and trained by "al-Qaeda in Iraq" under the leadership of the late Abu Musab Zarqawi - were being supplied Pakistan-manufactured weapons by the US. The arms shipments included rifles, rocket-propelled grenade launchers, ammunition, rockets and other light weaponry. These arms "could not be destined for the Iraqi security forces because US arms would be given to them", a source told Syed Saleem Shahzad - the Times' Pakistan bureau chief who, "known for his exposes of the Pakistani military" according to the New Yorker, was murdered in 2011. Rather, the US is playing a double-game to "head off" the threat of a "Shi'ite clergy-driven religious movement," said the Pakistani defense source.

This was not the only way US strategy aided the rise of Zarqawi, a bin Laden mentee and brainchild of the extremist ideology that would later spawn 'ISIS.'

According to a little-known November report for the US Joint Special Operations University (JSOU) and Strategic Studies Department, Dividing Our Enemies, post-invasion Iraq was "an interesting case study of fanning discontent among enemies, leading to 'red-against-red'
[enemy-against-enemy] firefights."

While counterinsurgency on the one hand requires US forces to "ameliorate harsh or deprived living conditions of the indigenous populations" to publicly win local hearts and minds, "the reverse side of this coin is one less discussed. It involves no effort to win over those caught in the crossfire of insurgent and counterinsurgent warfare, whether by bullet or broadcast. On the contrary, this underside of the counterinsurgency coin is calculated to exploit or create divisions among adversaries for the purpose of fomenting enemy-on-enemy deadly encounters."

In other words, US forces will pursue public legitimacy through conventional social welfare while simultaneously delegitimising local enemies by escalating intra-insurgent violence, knowing full-well that doing so will in turn escalate the number of innocent civilians "caught in the crossfire." The idea is that violence covertly calibrated by US special operations will not only weaken enemies through in-fighting but turn the population against them.

In this case, the 'enemy' consisted of jihadists, Ba'athists, and peaceful Sufis, who were in a majority but, like the militants, also opposed the US military presence and therefore needed to be influenced. The JSOU report referred to events in late 2004 in Fallujah where "US psychological warfare (PSYOP) specialists" undertook to "set insurgents battling insurgents." This involved actually promoting Zarqawi's ideology, ironically, to defeat it: "The PSYOP warriors crafted programs to exploit Zarqawi's murderous activities - and to disseminate them through meetings, radio and television broadcasts, handouts, newspaper stories, political cartoons, and posters - thereby diminishing his folk-hero image," and encouraging the different factions to pick each other off. "By tapping into the Fallujans' revulsion and antagonism to the Zarqawi jihadis the Joint PSYOP Task Force did its 'best to foster a rift between Sunni groups.'"

Yet as noted by Dahr Jamail, one of the few unembedded investigative reporters in Iraq after the war, the proliferation of propaganda linking the acceleration of suicide bombings to the persona of Zarqawi was not matched by meaningful evidence. His own search to substantiate the myriad claims attributing the insurgency to Zarqawi beyond anonymous US intelligence sources encountered only an "eerie blankness".

The US military operation in Fallujah, largely justified on the claim that Zarqawi's militant forces had occupied the city, used white phosphorous, cluster bombs, and indiscriminate air strikes to pulverise 36,000 of Fallujah's 50,000 homes, killing nearly a thousand civilians, terrorising 300,000 inhabitants to flee, and culminating in a disproportionate increase in birth defects, cancer and infant mortality due to the devastating environmental consequences of the war.

To this day, Fallujah has suffered from being largely cut-off from wider Iraq, its infrastructure largely unworkable with water and sewage systems still in disrepair, and its citizens subject to sectarian discrimination and persecution by Iraqi government backed Shi'a militia and police. "Thousands of bereaved and homeless Falluja families have a new reason to hate the US and its allies," observed The Guardian in 2005. Thus, did the US occupation plant the seeds from which Zarqawi's legacy would coalesce into the Frankenstein monster that calls itself "the Islamic State."

Bankrolling al-Qaeda in Syria

According to former French foreign minister Roland Dumas, Britain had planned covert action in Syria as early as 2009: "I was in England two years before the violence in Syria on other business," he told French television: "I met with top British officials, who confessed to me that they were preparing something in Syria. This was in Britain not in America. Britain was preparing gunmen to invade Syria."

Leaked emails from the private intelligence firm Stratfor, including notes from a meeting with Pentagon officials, confirmed that as of 2011, US and UK special forces training of Syrian opposition forces was well underway. The goal was to elicit the "collapse" of Assad's regime "from within."

Since then, the role of the Gulf states - namely Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, and Jordan (as well as NATO member Turkey) - in officially and unofficially financing and coordinating the most virulent elements amongst Syria's rebels under the tutelage of US military intelligence is no secret. Yet the conventional wisdom is that the funneling of support to Islamist extremists in the rebel movement affiliated to al-Qaeda has been a colossal and regrettable error.

The reality is very different. The empowerment of the Islamist factions within the 'Free Syrian Army' (FSA) was a foregone conclusion of the strategy.

In its drive to depose Col. Qaddafi in Libya, NATO had previously allied itself with rebels affiliated to the al-Qaeda faction, the Islamic Fighting Group. The resulting Libyan regime backed by the US was in turn liaising with FSA leaders in Istanbul to provide money and heavy weapons for the anti-Assad insurgency. The State Department even hired an al-Qaeda affiliated Libyan militia group to provide security for the US embassy in Benghazi - although they had links with the very people that attacked the embassy.

Last year, CNN confirmed that CIA officials operating secretly out of the Benghazi embassy were being forced to take extra polygraph tests to keep under wraps what US Congressman suspect was a covert operation "to move surface-to-air missiles out of Libya, through Turkey, and into the hands of Syrian rebels."

With their command and control centre based in Istanbul, Turkey, military supplies from Saudi Arabia and Qatar in particular were transported by Turkish intelligence to the border for rebel acquisition. CIA operatives along with Israeli and Jordanian commandos were also training FSA rebels on the Jordanian-Syrian border with anti-tank and anti-aircraft weapons. In addition, other reports show that British and French military were also involved in these secret training programmes. It appears that the same FSA rebels receiving this elite training went straight into ISIS - last month one ISIS commander, Abu Yusaf, said, "Many of the FSA people who the west has trained are actually joining us."

The National thus confirmed the existence of another command and control centre in Amman, Jordan, "staffed by western and Arab military officials," which "channels vehicles, sniper rifles, mortars, heavy machine guns, small arms and ammunition to Free Syrian Army units." Rebel and opposition sources described the weapons bridge as "a well-run operation staffed by high-ranking military officials from 14 countries, including the US, European nations and Arabian Gulf states, the latter providing the bulk of materiel and financial support to rebel factions."

The FSA sources interviewed by The National went to pains to deny that any al-Qaeda affiliated factions were involved in the control centre, or would receive any weapons support. But this is difficult to believe given that "Saudi and Qatari-supplied weapons" were being funneled through to the rebels via Amman, to their favoured factions.

Classified assessments of the military assistance supplied by US allies Saudi Arabia and Qatar obtained by the New York Times showed that "most of the arms shipped at the behest of Saudi Arabia and Qatar to supply Syrian rebel groups... are going to hardline Islamic jihadists, and not the more secular opposition groups that the West wants to bolster."

Lest there be any doubt as to the extent to which all this covert military assistance coordinated by the US has gone to support al-Qaeda affiliated factions in the FSA, it is worth noting that earlier this year, the Israeli military intelligence website Debkafile - run by two veteran correspondents who covered the Middle East for 23 years for The Economist - reported that: "Turkey is giving Syrian rebel forces, including the al-Qaeda-affiliated Nusra Front, passage through its territory to attack the northwestern Syrian coastal area around Latakia."

In August, Debkafile reported that "The US, Jordan and Israel are quietly backing the mixed bag of some 30 Syrian rebel factions", some of which had just "seized control of the Syrian side of the Quneitra crossing, the only transit point between Israeli and Syrian Golan." However, Debkafile noted, "al-Qaeda elements have permeated all those factions." Israel has provided limited support to these rebels in the form of "medical care," as well as "arms, intelligence and food...

"Israel acted as a member, along with the US and Jordan, of a support system for rebel groups fighting in southern Syria. Their efforts are coordinated through a war-room which the Pentagon established last year near Amman. The US, Jordanian and Israeli officers manning the facility determine in consultation which rebel factions are provided with reinforcements from the special training camps run for Syrian rebels in Jordan, and which will receive arms. All three governments understand perfectly that, notwithstanding all their precautions, some of their military assistance is bound to percolate to al-Qaeda's Syrian arm, Jabhat Al-Nusra, which is fighting in rebel ranks. Neither Washington or Jerusalem or Amman would be comfortable in admitting they are arming al-Qaeda's Nusra Front in southern Syria."

This support also went to ISIS. Although the latter was originally founded in Iraq in October 2006, by 2013 the group had significantly expanded its operations in Syria working alongside al-Qaeda's al-Nusra until February 2014, when ISIS was formally denounced by al-Qaeda. Even so, experts on the region's Islamist groups point out that the alleged rift between al-Nusra and ISIS, while real, is not as fraught as one might hope, constituting a mere difference in tactics rather than fundamental ideology.

Officially, the US government's financial support for the FSA goes through the Washington DC entity, the Syrian Support Group (SSG), Syrian Support Group (SSG) which was incorporated in April 2012. The SSG is licensed via the US Treasury Department to "export, re-export, sell, or supply to the Free Syrian Army ('FSA') financial, communications, logistical, and other services otherwise prohibited by Executive Order 13582 in order to support the FSA."

In mid-2013, the Obama administration intensified its support to the rebels with a new classified executive order reversing its previous policy limiting US direct support to only nonlethal equipment. As before, the order would aim to supply weapons strictly to "moderate" forces in the FSA.

Except the government's vetting procedures to block Islamist extremists from receiving US weapons have never worked.

A year later, Mother Jones found that the US government has "little oversight over whether US supplies are falling prey to corruption - or into the hands of extremists," and relies "on too much good faith." The US government keeps track of rebels receiving assistance purely through "handwritten receipts provided by rebel commanders in the field," and the judgement of its allies. Countries supporting the rebels - the very same which have empowered al-Qaeda affiliated Islamists - "are doing audits of the delivery of lethal and nonlethal supplies."

Thus, with the Gulf states still calling the shots on the ground, it is no surprise that by September last year, eleven prominent rebel groups distanced themselves from the 'moderate' opposition leadership and allied themselves with al-Qaeda.

By the SSG's own conservative estimate, as much as 15% of rebel fighters are Islamists affiliated to al-Qaeda, either through the Jabhut al-Nusra faction, or its breakaway group ISIS. But privately, Pentagon officials estimate that "more than 50%" of the FSA is comprised of Islamist extremists, and according to rebel sources neither FSA chief Gen Salim Idris nor his senior aides engage in much vetting, decisions about which are made typically by local commanders.

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Original Article: How the West Created the Islamic State

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