News Release

ISIS: Is U.S. Goal to Build Up Islamists, Divide and Rule and “Chaos”?

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MALACHY KILBRIDE, malachykilbride at yahoo.com
Kilbride is an organizer with the National Campaign for Nonviolent Resistance and with Campaign Nonviolence which have organized a protest in front of the White House at 10 a.m. today. The speakers include David Swanson, davidcnswanson at gmail.com, and Medea Benjamin, medea.benjamin at gmail.com, who appeared on “Democracy Now!” this morning.

NAFEEZ AHMED, iprdoffice at gmail.com, @nafeezahmed
Ahmed is an investigative journalist who writes for The Guardian and other outlets. He recently wrote the piece “How the West Created the Islamic State,” which states: “Missing [from the outrage over ISIS’s actions] has been any acknowledgement of the integral role of covert U.S. 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.

“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.”

Writing that the U.S. has pursued a “divide and rule” policy, Ahmed notes: “‘It’s not that we don’t want the Salafis to throw bombs,’ said one U.S. 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.'” Ahmed notes a report titled “Dividing Our Enemies” by the U.S. Joint Special Operations University and Strategic Studies Department.

Ahmed continues: “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, U.S. 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 as well as Jordan (and NATO member Turkey) — in…coordinating the most virulent elements among Syria’s rebels under the tutelage of U.S. 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’ was a foregone conclusion of the strategy.”

Ahmed also notes a series of studies that advocated some form of chaos in the Mideast to further U.S. and Israeli interests associated with RAND Corp analyst Laurent Muraweic and Richard Perle, formerly of the Defense Policy Board.

Ahmed is executive director of the Institute for Policy Research & Development, and author of A User’s Guide to the Crisis of Civilization. His just published novel, Zero Point, predicted a new war in Iraq to put down an Islamist insurgency against the Maliki regime.