2007, Seymour Hersh, The Re-direction, The New Yorker

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/03/05/070305fa_fact_hersh?currentPage=all


"To undermine Iran, which is predominantly Shiite, the Bush Administration has decided, in effect, to

reconfigure its priorities in the Middle East. In Lebanon, the Administration has coöperated with Saudi

Arabia’s government, which is Sunni, in clandestine operations that are intended to weaken Hezbollah,

the Shiite organization that is backed by Iran. The U.S. has also taken part in clandestine

operations aimed at Iran and its ally Syria. A by-product of these activities has been the bolstering

of Sunni extremist groups that espouse a militant vision of Islam and are hostile to America and

sympathetic to Al Qaeda."


Hersh has also warned the public of both a conspiracy by the West to use terrorists to overthrow the sovereign government of Syria which has unfolded exactly as was predicted years ago, as well as their use of chemical weapons. He has also exposed the systematic manner in which the West has lied about the August 21,
2013 gas attack in Damascus.

ISIS in Iraq stinks of CIA/NATO ‘dirty war’ op


William Engdahl is an award-winning geopolitical analyst and strategic risk consultant whose internationally best-selling books have been translated into thirteen foreign languages.


Published time: June 24, 2014 10:22


Iraqi Kurdish forces take position near Taza Khormato as they fight jihadist militants from the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) positioned five kilometers away in Bashir, 20 kms south of Kirkuk (AFP Photo / Karim Sahib)



For days now, since their dramatic June 10 taking of Mosul, Western mainstream media have been filled with horror stories of the military conquests in Iraq of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, with the curious acronym ISIS.

ISIS, as in the ancient Egyptian cult of the goddess of fertility and magic. The media picture being presented adds up less and less.

Details leaking out suggest that ISIS and the major military ‘surge’ in Iraq - and less so in neighboring Syria - is being shaped and controlled out of Langley, Virginia, and other CIA and Pentagon outposts as the next stage in spreading chaos in the world’s second-largest oil state, Iraq, as well as weakening the recent Syrian stabilization efforts.

Strange facts

The very details of the ISIS military success in the key Iraqi oil center, Mosul, are suspect. According to well-informed Iraqi journalists, ISIS overran the strategic Mosul region, site of some of the world’s most prolific oilfields, with barely a shot fired in resistance. According to one report, residents of Tikrit reported remarkable displays of “soldiers handing over their weapons and uniforms peacefully to militants who ordinarily would have been expected to kill government soldiers on the spot.”

We are told that ISIS masked psychopaths captured “arms and ammunition from the fleeing security forces” - arms and ammunition supplied by the American government. The offensive coincides with a successful campaign by ISIS in eastern Syria. According to Iraqi journalists, Sunni tribal chiefs in the region had been convinced to side with ISIS against the Shiite Al-Maliki government in Baghdad. They were promised a better deal under ISIS Sunni Sharia than with Baghdad anti-Sunni rule.

According to the New York Times, the mastermind behind the ISIS military success is former Baath Party head and Saddam Hussein successor, General Ibrahim al-Douri. Douri is reportedly the head of the Iraqi rebel group Army of the Men of the Naqshbandi Order as well as the Supreme Command for Jihad and Liberation based on his longstanding positions of leadership in the Naqshbandi sect in Iraq.

In 2009, US ‘Iraqi surge’ General David Petraeus, at the time heading the US Central Command, claimed to reporters that Douri was in Syria. Iraqi parliamentarians claimed he was in Qatar. The curious fact is that despite being on the US most wanted list since 2003, Douri has miraculously managed to avoid capture and now to return with a vengeance to retake huge parts of Sunni Iraq. Luck or well-placed friends in Washington?

The financial backing for ISIS jihadists reportedly also comes from three of the closest US allies in the Sunni world—Kuwait, Qatar and Saudi Arabia.

US passports?

Key members of ISIS it now emerges were trained by US CIA and Special Forces command at a secret camp in Jordan in 2012, according to informed Jordanian officials. The US, Turkish and Jordanian intelligence were running a training base for the Syrian rebels in the Jordanian town of Safawi in the country’s northern desert region, conveniently near the borders to both Syria and Iraq. Saudi Arabia and Qatar, the two Gulf monarchies most involved in funding the war against Syria’s Assad, financed the Jordan ISIS training.

Advertised publicly as training of ‘non-extremist’Muslim jihadists to wage war against the Syrian Bashar Assad regime, the secret US training camps in Jordan and elsewhere have trained perhaps several thousand Muslim fighters in techniques of irregular warfare, sabotage and general terror. The claims by Washington that they took special care not to train ‘Salafist’ or jihadist extremists, is a joke. How do you test if a recruit is not a jihadist? Is there a special jihad DNA that the CIA doctors have discovered?



Militants from the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) parading with an Iraqi army vehicle in the northern city of Baiji in the in Salaheddin province. (AFP Photo / HO / Youtube)


Jordanian government officials are revealing the details, in fear that the same ISIS terrorists that today are slashing heads of ‘infidels’ alongside the roadways of Mosul by the dozens, or hundreds if we believe their own propaganda, might turn their swords towards Jordan’s King Abdullah soon, to extend their budding Caliphate empire.

Former US State Department official Andrew Doran wrote in the conservative National Review magazine that some ISIS warriors also hold US passports. Now, of course that doesn’t demonstrate and support by the Obama Administration. Hmm...

Iranian journalist Sabah Zanganeh notes, "ISIS did not have the power to occupy and conquer Mosul by itself. What has happened is the result of security-intelligence collaborations of some regional countries with some extremist groups inside the Iraqi government."

Iraq’s Chechen commander

The next bizarre part of the ISIS puzzle involves the Jihadist credited with being the ‘military mastermind’ of the recent ISIS victories, Tarkhan Batirashvili. If his name doesn’t sound very Arabic, it’s because it’s not. Tarkhan Batrashvili is a Russian - actually an ethnic Chechen from near the Chechen border to Georgia. But to give himself a more Arabic flair, he also goes by the name Emir (what else?) Umar al Shishani. The problem is he doesn’t look at all Arabic. No dark swarthy black beard: rather a long red beard, a kind of Chechen Barbarossa.

According to a November, 2013 report in The Wall Street Journal, Emir Umar or Batrashvili as you prefer, has made the wars in Syria and Iraq “into a geopolitical struggle between the US and Russia.”

That has been the objective of leading neo-conservatives in the CIA, Pentagon and State Department all along. The CIA transported hundreds of Mujahideen Saudis and other foreign veterans of the 1980s Afghan war against the Soviets in Afghanistan into Chechnya to disrupt the struggling Russia in the early 1990s, particularly to sabotage the Russian oil pipeline running directly from Baku on the Caspian Sea into Russia. James Baker III and his friends in Anglo-American Big Oil had other plans. It was called the BTC pipeline, owned by a BP-US oil consortium and running through Tbilisi into NATO-member Turkey, free of Russian territory.

Batrashvili is not renowned for taking care. Last year he was forced to apologize when he ordered his men to behead a wounded ‘enemy’ soldier who turned out to be an allied rebel commander. More than 8,000 foreign Jihadist mercenaries are reportedly in ISIS including at least 1,000 Chechens as well as Jihadists Saudi, Kuwait, Egypt and reportedly Chinese Uyghur from Xinjiang Province.

Jeffrey Silverman, Georgia Bureau Chief for the US-based Veterans Today (VT) website, told me that Batrashvili “is a product of a joint program of the US through a front NGO called Jvari, which was set up by US Intelligence and the Georgian National Security Council, dating back to the early days of the Pankisi Gorge.”

Jvari is the name as well of a famous Georgian Orthodox monastery of the 6th century. According to Silverman, David J. Smith—head of something in Tbilisi called the Georgian Foundation for Strategic and International Studies, as well as the Potomac Institute in Washington where he is listed as Director of the Potomac Institute Cyber Centerr—played a role in setting up the Jvari NGO.

Silverman maintains that Jvari in Rustavi, near the capital, Tbilisi, gathered together Afghan Mujahideen war veterans, Chechens, Georgians and sundry Arab Jihadists. They were sent to the infamous Pankisi Gorge region, a kind-of no-man’s lawless area, for later deployment, including Iraq and Syria.

Batrashvili and other Georgian and Chechen Russian-speaking Jihadists, Silverman notes, are typically smuggled, with the assistance of Georgia’s Counterintelligence Department and the approval of the US embassy, across the Georgia border to Turkey at the Vale crossing point, near Georgia’s Akhaltsikhe and the Turkish village of Türkgözü on the Turkish side of the Georgian border. From there it’s very little problem getting them through Turkey to either Mosul in Iraq or northeast Syria.

Silverman believes that events in Northern Iraq relate to “wanting to have a Kurdish Republic separate from the Central government and this is all part of the New Great Game. It will serve US interests in both Turkey and Iraq, not to mention Syria.”

Very revealing is the fact that almost two weeks after the dramatic fall of Mosul and the ‘capture’ by ISIS forces of the huge weapons and military vehicle resources provided by the US to the Iraqi army. Washington has done virtually nothing but make a few silly speeches about their ‘concern’ and dispatch 275 US special forces to allegedly protect US personnel in Iraq.

Whatever the final details that emerge, what is clear in the days since the fall of Mosul is that some of the world’s largest oilfields in Iraq are suddenly held by Jihadists and no longer by an Iraqi government determined to increase the oil export significantly. More on this aspect in an upcoming article.

The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RT.

How these light-headed arabs allowed america to infiltrate them to get at islam is stil mystery to me. US will ignite fire and, they'll run. They've virtually thrown everywhere into chaos. How libyans fell for their tricks in fashion of democracy or freedom and killed one of the best leaders(muamar Ghaddafi) in the world and to landed themselves in the state of zero-peace from the most peaceful country in the world.
i wish NIGERIANS can learn from the experience of these victims of US tricks and deny them the chance to cause chaos in Nigeria.

We often give to the US powers she doesn't possess, let alone wield.

caseless: How these light-headed arabs allowed america to infiltrate them to get at islam is stil mystery to me. US will ignite fire and, they'll run. They've virtually thrown everywhere into chaos. How libyans fell for their tricks in fashion of democracy or freedom and killed one of the best leaders(muamar Ghaddafi) in the world and to landed themselves in the state of zero-peace from the most peaceful country in the world.
i wish NIGERIANS can learn from the experience of these victims of US tricks and deny them the chance to cause chaos in Nigeria.

No Nigerians cannot. They long to be, chosen, courted and lauded by a myriad of American NGOs and "think tanks" that seek to promote "democracy", "transparency" and "rule of law" just like they have done in places such as Libya, Iraq, Syria and countless others. Here is Banky W enjoying the lavish attention that the war criminal McCain's IRI has bestowed upon him.........We will never learn...

NairaMinted:

No Nigerians cannot. They long to be, chosen, courted and lauded by a myriad of American NGOs and "think tanks" that seek to promote "democracy", "transparency" and "rule of law" just like they have done in places such as Libya, Iraq, Syria and countless others. Here is Banky W enjoying the lavish attention that the war criminal McCain's IRI has bestowed upon him.........We will never learn...

i pity nigerians.

From Anthony Cartalucci....

US Feigns Concern Over Trapped Christians in Iraq Being Slaughtered by Washington's Own Mercenary Terrorist Hordes...

Beginning in 2011 (and actually even as early as 2007) the United States has been arming, funding, and supporting the Muslim Brotherhood and a myriad of armed terrorist organizations to overthrow the government of Syria, fight Hezbollah in Lebanon, and undermine the power and influence of Iran (which of course includes any other government or group in the MENA region friendly toward Tehran).

Hundreds of millions, billions in fact, have been funneled into the hands of terrorist groups including Al Nusra, Al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI), and what is now being called "Islamic State in Iraq and Syria" or ISIS. You can see clearly by any map of ISIS held territory that it butts up against Turkey's borders because it is precisely from NATO territory this terrorist scourge originated.

ISIS was harbored on NATO territory, armed and funded by US CIA agents with cash and weapons brought in from the Saudis, Qataris, and NATO members themselves. The "non-lethal aid" the US and British sent including the vehicles we now see ISIS driving around int.

They didn't "take" this gear from "moderates." There were never any moderates to begin with. The deadly sectarian genocide we now see unfolding was long ago predicted by those in the Pentagon - current and former officials - interviewed in 2007 by Pulitzer Prize-winning veteran journalist Seymour Hersh.

Read his 9 page report "The Redirection" which states explicitly:

"To undermine Iran, which is predominantly Shiite, the Bush Administration has decided, in effect, to reconfigure its priorities in the Middle East. In Lebanon, the Administration has coöperated with Saudi Arabia’s government, which is Sunni, in clandestine operations that are intended to weaken Hezbollah, the Shiite organization that is backed by Iran. The U.S. has also taken part in clandestine operations aimed at Iran and its ally Syria. A by-product of these activities has been the bolstering of Sunni extremist groups that espouse a militant vision of Islam and are hostile to America and sympathetic to Al Qaeda."

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2007/03/05/the-redirection

So when "Obama" feigns concern for religious minorities being slaughtered in front of the eyes of the world, remember this was the war he and his predecessor Bush have been frontmen for over the last 7 years. They knew this was going to happen. This IS what has been happening in Syria since 2011 and no one batted an eye and the cash, weapons, and covert support kept flowing.

Concern of religious minorities is to cover up increasingly bad PR but make no mistake, ISIS will be allowed to run over the Iraqi government if given the chance, create more havoc within Syria, and spread to Lebanon. It is a standing army that requires state sponsorship - so run down the list of nations capable of keeping this multi-billion dollar death machine's gears oiled and turning.

-The US
-The UK
-Saudi Arabia
-Qatar
-Turkey

Jordan has capitulated, aided, and abetted these terrorists as well along Syria's southern borders.

http://landdestroyer..com/2014/08/implausible-deniability-wests-isis.html

These ISIS lads are most times riding around in brand new trucks... The way I see it, they either raided a Toyota dealership or perhaps they are the recipients of Washington's so called "non-lethal aid" handed out so generously to the "moderates"........... You choose...

NairaMinted:

No Nigerians cannot. They long to be, chosen, courted and lauded by a myriad of American NGOs and "think tanks" that seek to promote "democracy", "transparency" and "rule of law" just like they have done in places such as Libya, Iraq, Syria and countless others. Here is Banky W enjoying the lavish attention that the war criminal McCain's IRI has bestowed upon him.........We will never learn...

At times it feels like only divine intervention of some sort can save us. We're too far gone. I wonder at times if the world is under some sort of powerful white spell. And I mean something really occult, which makes us lose all sense when confronted with them and their antics.

methinks there is a collective hypnotism going on seriously

ROSSIKE:

At times it feels like only divine intervention of some sort can save us. We're too far gone. I wonder at times if the world is under some sort of powerful white spell. And I mean something really occult, which makes us lose all sense when confronted with them and their antics.