The revelations contradict the official
line of Western government on their policies in Syria, and raise
disturbing questions about secret Western support for violent extremists
abroad, while using the burgeoning threat of terror to justify
excessive mass surveillance and crackdowns on civil liberties at home.
Among the batch of documents obtained by Judicial Watch through a federal lawsuit, released earlier this week, is a US Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) document then classified as “secret,” dated 12th August 2012.
The DIA provides military intelligence in
support of planners, policymakers and operations for the US Department
of Defense and intelligence community.
So far, media reporting has focused on the
evidence that the Obama administration knew of arms supplies from a
Libyan terrorist stronghold to rebels in Syria.
Some outlets have reported the US intelligence community’s internal prediction of the rise of ISIS. Yet
none have accurately acknowledged the disturbing details exposing how
the West knowingly fostered a sectarian, al-Qaeda-driven rebellion in
Syria.
Charles Shoebridge, a former British Army and Metropolitan Police counter-terrorism intelligence officer, said:
“Given the political leanings of the organisation that obtained these documents, it’s unsurprising that the main emphasis given to them thus far has been an attempt to embarrass Hilary Clinton regarding what was known about the attack on the US consulate in Benghazi in 2012. However, the documents also contain far less publicized revelations that raise vitally important questions of the West’s governments and media in their support of Syria’s rebellion.”
The West’s Islamists
The newly declassified DIA document
from 2012 confirms that the main component of the anti-Assad rebel
forces by this time comprised Islamist insurgents affiliated to groups
that would lead to the emergence of ISIS. Despite this, these groups
were to continue receiving support from Western militaries and their
regional allies.
Noting that “the Salafist [sic],
the Muslim Brotherhood, and AQI [al-Qaeda in Iraq] are the major forces
driving the insurgency in Syria,” the document states that “the West,
Gulf countries, and Turkey support the opposition,” while Russia, China and Iran “support the [Assad] regime.”
The 7-page DIA document states that
al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI), the precursor to the ‘Islamic State in Iraq,’
(ISI) which became the ‘Islamic State in Iraq and Syria,’ “supported the
Syrian opposition from the beginning, both ideologically and through
the media.”
The formerly secret Pentagon report notes
that the “rise of the insurgency in Syria” has increasingly taken a
“sectarian direction,” attracting diverse support from Sunni “religious
and tribal powers” across the region.
In a section titled ‘The Future Assumptions of the Crisis,’ the
DIA report predicts that while Assad’s regime will survive, retaining
control over Syrian territory, the crisis will continue to escalate
“into proxy war.”
The document also recommends the creation
of “safe havens under international sheltering, similar to what
transpired in Libya when Benghazi was chosen as the command centre for
the temporary government.”
In Libya, anti-Gaddafi rebels, most of whom were al-Qaeda affiliated militias, were protected by NATO ‘safe havens’ (aka ‘no fly zones’).
‘Supporting powers want’ ISIS entity
In a strikingly prescient prediction, the Pentagon document explicitly forecasts the probable declaration of “an Islamic State through its union with other terrorist organizations in Iraq and Syria.”
Nevertheless, “Western countries, the Gulf
states and Turkey are supporting these efforts” by Syrian “opposition
forces” fighting to “control the eastern areas (Hasaka and Der Zor),
adjacent to Western Iraqi provinces (Mosul and Anbar)”:
“… there is the possibility of establishing a declared or undeclared Salafist Principality in eastern Syria (Hasaka and Der Zor), and this is exactly what the supporting powers to the opposition want, in order to isolate the Syrian regime, which is considered the strategic depth of the Shia expansion (Iraq and Iran).”
The secret Pentagon document thus
provides extraordinary confirmation that the US-led coalition currently
fighting ISIS, had three years ago welcomed the emergence of an
extremist “Salafist Principality” in the region as a way to undermine
Assad, and block off the strategic expansion of Iran. Crucially, Iraq is labeled as an integral part of this “Shia expansion.”
The establishment of such a “Salafist
Principality” in eastern Syria, the DIA document asserts, is “exactly”
what the “supporting powers to the [Syrian] opposition want.” Earlier
on, the document repeatedly describes those “supporting powers” as “the
West, Gulf countries, and Turkey.”
Further on, the document reveals that
Pentagon analysts were acutely aware of the dire risks of this strategy,
yet ploughed ahead anyway.
The establishment of such a
“Salafist Principality” in eastern Syria, it says, would create “the
ideal atmosphere for AQI to return to its old pockets in Mosul and
Ramadi.” Last summer, ISIS conquered Mosul in Iraq, and just this month has also taken control of Ramadi.
Such a quasi-state entity will provide:
“… a renewed momentum under the presumption of unifying the jihad among Sunni Iraq and Syria, and the rest of the Sunnis in the Arab world against what it considers one enemy. ISI could also declare an Islamic State through its union with other terrorist organizations in Iraq and Syria, which will create grave danger in regards to unifying Iraq and the protection of territory.”
The 2012 DIA document is an Intelligence
Information Report (IIR), not a “finally evaluated intelligence”
assessment, but its contents are vetted before distribution. The report
was circulated throughout the US intelligence community, including to
the State Department, Central Command, the Department of Homeland
Security, the CIA, FBI, among other agencies.
In response to my questions about the strategy, the
British government simply denied the Pentagon report’s startling
revelations of deliberate Western sponsorship of violent extremists in
Syria. A British Foreign Office spokesperson said:
“AQ and ISIL are proscribed terrorist organisations. The UK opposes all forms of terrorism. AQ, ISIL, and their affiliates pose a direct threat to the UK’s national security. We are part of a military and political coalition to defeat ISIL in Iraq and Syria, and are working with international partners to counter the threat from AQ and other terrorist groups in that region. In Syria we have always supported those moderate opposition groups who oppose the tyranny of Assad and the brutality of the extremists.”
The DIA did not respond to request for comment.
Strategic asset for regime-change
Security analyst Shoebridge, however, who
has tracked Western support for Islamist terrorists in Syria since the
beginning of the war, pointed out that the secret Pentagon intelligence
report exposes fatal contradictions at the heart of official
pronunciations:
“Throughout the early years of the Syria crisis, the US and UK governments, and almost universally the West’s mainstream media, promoted Syria’s rebels as moderate, liberal, secular, democratic, and therefore deserving of the West’s support. Given that these documents wholly undermine this assessment, it’s significant that the West’s media has now, despite their immense significance, almost entirely ignored them.”
According to Brad Hoff, a former US Marine
who served during the early years of the Iraq War and as a 9/11 first
responder at the Marine Corps Headquarters in Battalion Quantico from
2000 to 2004, the just released Pentagon report for the first time
provides stunning affirmation that:
“US intelligence predicted the rise of the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL or ISIS), but instead of clearly delineating the group as an enemy, the report envisions the terror group as a US strategic asset.”
Hoff, who is managing editor of Levant Report
— ?an online publication run by Texas-based educators who have direct
experience of the Middle East?—?points out that the DIA document “matter-of-factly”
states that the rise of such an extremist Salafist political entity in
the region offers a “tool for regime change in Syria.”
The DIA intelligence report shows, he said,
that the rise of ISIS only became possible in the context of the Syrian
insurgency?—?“there is no mention of US troop withdrawal from Iraq as a
catalyst for Islamic State’s rise, which is the contention of
innumerable politicians and pundits.” The report demonstrates that:
“The establishment of a ‘Salafist Principality’ in Eastern Syria is ‘exactly’ what the external powers supporting the opposition want (identified as ‘the West, Gulf Countries, and Turkey’) in order to weaken the Assad government.”
The rise of a Salafist quasi-state entity
that might expand into Iraq, and fracture that country, was therefore
clearly foreseen by US intelligence as likely?—?but nevertheless
strategically useful?—?blowback from the West’s commitment to “isolating
Syria.”
Complicity
Critics of the US-led strategy in the
region have repeatedly raised questions about the role of coalition
allies in intentionally providing extensive support to Islamist
terrorist groups in the drive to destabilize the Assad regime in Syria.
The conventional wisdom is that the US
government did not retain sufficient oversight on the funding to
anti-Assad rebel groups, which was supposed to be monitored and vetted
to ensure that only ‘moderate’ groups were supported.
However, the newly declassified Pentagon
report proves unambiguously that years before ISIS launched its
concerted offensive against Iraq, the US intelligence community was
fully aware that Islamist militants constituted the core of Syria’s
sectarian insurgency.
Despite that, the Pentagon continued to
support the Islamist insurgency, even while anticipating the probability
that doing so would establish an extremist Salafi stronghold in Syria
and Iraq.
As Shoebridge told me, “The documents show
that not only did the US government at the latest by August 2012 know
the true extremist nature and likely outcome of Syria’s
rebellion”?—?namely, the emergence of ISIS?—?“but that this was
considered an advantage for US foreign policy. This also suggests a
decision to spend years in an effort to deliberately mislead the West’s
public, via a compliant media, into believing that Syria’s rebellion was
overwhelmingly ‘moderate.’”
Annie Machon, a former MI5 intelligence officer who blew the whistle
in the 1990s on MI6 funding of al-Qaeda to assassinate Libya’s former
leader Colonel Gaddafi, similarly said of the revelations:
“This is no surprise to me. Within individual countries there are always multiple intelligence agencies with competing agendas.”
She explained that MI6’s Libya operation in
1996, which resulted in the deaths of innocent people, “happened at
precisely the time when MI5 was setting up a new section to investigate
al-Qaeda.”
This strategy was repeated on a grand scale in the 2011 NATO intervention in Libya, said Machon, where the CIA and MI6 were:
“… supporting the very same Libyan groups, resulting in a failed state, mass murder, displacement and anarchy. So the idea that elements of the American military-security complex have enabled the development of ISIS after their failed attempt to get NATO to once again ‘intervene’ is part of an established pattern. And they remain indifferent to the sheer scale of human suffering that is unleashed as a result of such game-playing.”
Divide and rule
Several US government officials have
conceded that their closest allies in the anti-ISIS coalition were
funding violent extremist Islamist groups that became integral to ISIS.
US Vice President Joe Biden, for instance, admitted
last year that Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Qatar and Turkey had funneled
hundreds of millions of dollars to Islamist rebels in Syria that
metamorphosed into ISIS.
But he did not admit what this internal Pentagon document demonstrates?—?that the entire covert strategy was sanctioned and supervised by the US, Britain, France, Israel and other Western powers.
The strategy appears to fit a policy scenario identified by a recent US Army-commissioned RAND Corp report.
The report, published four years before the
DIA document, called for the US “to capitalise on the Shia-Sunni
conflict by taking the side of the conservative Sunni regimes in a
decisive fashion and working with them against all Shiite empowerment
movements in the Muslim world.”
The US would need to contain “Iranian power
and influence” in the Gulf by “shoring up the traditional Sunni regimes
in Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Pakistan.” Simultaneously, the US must
maintain “a strong strategic relationship with the Iraqi Shiite
government” despite its Iran alliance.
The RAND report confirmed
that the “divide and rule” strategy was already being deployed “to
create divisions in the jihadist camp. Today in Iraq such a strategy is
being used at the tactical level.”
The report observed that the US was forming
“temporary alliances” with al-Qaeda affiliated “nationalist insurgent
groups” that have fought the US for four years in the form of “weapons
and cash.” Although these nationalists “have cooperated with al-Qaeda
against US forces,” they are now being supported to exploit “the common
threat that al-Qaeda now poses to both parties.”
The 2012 DIA document, however, further
shows that while sponsoring purportedly former al-Qaeda insurgents in
Iraq to counter al-Qaeda, Western governments were simultaneously arming al-Qaeda insurgents in Syria.
The revelation from an internal US
intelligence document that the very US-led coalition supposedly fighting
‘Islamic State’ today, knowingly created ISIS in the first place,
raises troubling questions about recent government efforts to justify
the expansion of state anti-terror powers.
In the wake of the rise of ISIS, intrusive
new measures to combat extremism including mass surveillance, the
Orwellian ‘prevent duty’ and even plans to enable government censorship
of broadcasters, are being pursued on both sides of the Atlantic, much
of which disproportionately targets activists, journalists and ethnic
minorities, especially Muslims.
Yet the new Pentagon report reveals that, contrary to Western government claims, the
primary cause of the threat comes from their own deeply misguided
policies of secretly sponsoring Islamist terrorism for dubious
geopolitical purposes.
