Showing posts with label Pentagon. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Pentagon. Show all posts

22 April 2022

Was the massacre of over 700 civilians at Bucha perpetrated by the Ukrainian National Police and the Safari Unit and Azov Battalion?

If these Nazi-style execution of civilians were perpetrated by the Russians why did Bucha’s Mayor say nothing when he announced its 'liberation'?

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The wanton massacre of civilians, in a Nazi style execution, makes no sense from the perspective of the Russian forces. We know that they have fed and provided water to civilian inhabitants. Why would they want to perpetrate a massacre such as in Bucha? What possible good would it do them?

However the massacre of Russian supporting Ukrainians by fascist militias which abound in Ukraine today does undoubtedly make sense.

Russian Torture victim

Undoubtedly there will be individual instances of war crimes by Russian soldiers. All armies perpetrate such atrocities in times of war and where they happen they should be severely punished. But the story of a Russian massacre at Bucha doesn’t ring true. It is what the CIA’s paramilitaries in El Salvador and Nicaragua have done. It is the United States which set up the School of the Americas in order to train such groups in torture and murder.

Azov Torture Victim

On 30 March Russian forces left Bucha, a town on the outskirts of Kyev. They had been using Kiev as a diversion to split up Ukraine’s troops. They rerouted their troops to the Donbas to bottle up and destroy the 125,000 Ukrainian troops there.

The very next day a beaming Anatolii Fedoruk, the Mayor of Bucha, in a video on Bucha City Council’s official Facebook page, which was aired on Ukrainian TV channel Ukraine 24 TV,  announced, in a translated post accompanying the video that March 31 was:

the day of the liberation of Bucha. This day will go down in the glorious history of Bucha and the entire Bucha community as a day of liberation by the Armed Forces of Ukraine from the Russian occupiers.

Now you would have thought that if there were 700+ dead bodies scattered around town, that he might have noticed something? 

bodies with Russian packs

On 2nd April, the Communication Department of the National Police of Ukraine posted photos and a YouTube video on their website. They declared that their Special Unit, Safari (mainly Azov), would be carrying out a "cleansing operation" to "liquidate" pro-Russian "saboteurs" and "collaborators" on April 1st. They also asked residents to stay indoors and to not be alarmed. A female politician from the area also publicly broadcast the same message on television: that a "cleansing operation" was taking place, and for residents to stay indoors and not t panic. You can find the announcement here:

Special Forces Regiment SAFARI Begins Clearing Operation in Bucha from Saboteurs and Accomplices of Russia’.

The Safari consists of members of the Azov Battalion and one particularly notorious thug and murderer, Sergey Korotkikh, who according to Evan Reif is a man also known as Botsun, Malyuta. Bandit, Terrorist and most fitting of all, Nazi.

Sergey "Boatsman" Korotkikh was not only among the first Ukrainian forces in the town along with his squad of terrorists, he was making jokes about shooting civilians as he entered. He would later happily post these videos on his official telegram channel. Botsun is captured on film asking his commanding officer

“There are guys without blue armbands, can I shoot them?”

“Fuck yeah

Dead bodies with white armbands

Most of the victims were wearing white armbands (friendly to Russia), or had them used to tie their hands behind their backs. The photo of the alley shows multiple victims lying dead next to Russian ration packs. These ration packs are green with star symbols on them which you can see in the photographs. The Ukrainian State's public policy is to treat any civilian who trades eggs and other dairy goods for dry goods with the Russians as ‘collaborators’. The bodies in the street look placed, as they are lying in a symmetrical pattern which isn't natural--the victims wouldn't have fallen so perfectly, if, say, dumped from the back of a moving truck, or shot while in the area.

A young Ukrainian, known only as Halexandria, posted a comment on YouTube in which she stated that she has family who live in Bucha. After the initial fighting between Russian and Ukrainian forces, Russians handed out food and water to residents--some took it, and others declined it. After the Russians pulled out on March 30th, the mayor of the town betrayed the townspeople, and told Ukrainian forces which residents took humanitarian aid. Military personnel then broke into people's homes, and shot anyone who the mayor alleged took aid, or had ration packs in their home, and anyone else who got in their way. Her family members witnessed this, as they live very close to some of the residents who were shot.

bodies with Russian packs

All of this evidence points to the Bucha Massacre being committed by the Nazi Safari unit of the Ukrainian National Police, under instructions of the state itself.

On April 4th the New York Times alleged to have satellite photos from the Pentagon which prove that the bodies had been in place since, at least, March 19th. Satellite images show bodies lay in Bucha for weeks, despite Russian claims.

Naturally the BBC and dozens of other MSM echoed this nonsense. The Pentagon denied that they had any photographic evidence confirming that Russian troops had committed the massacre. That was because an independent analysis of the satellite imagery concluded that it was taken on April 1st.  But see Russia to show UNSC 'empirical evidence' regarding Bucha deaths and Scott Ritter’s What Happened in Bucha Ukraine

Any forensic pathologist would tell you that bodies exposed for two weeks would have bloated, expanded with gas, burst, changed colour, and spilled liquidised organs onto the ground according to any basic forensic analysis. The victims were clearly killed soon after the Russian withdrawal,

Was Alleged Russian Army Massacre of Civilians at Bucha Actually a False Flag Event Staged by Ukrainian Nazis?

The Russians, when accused of this crime 3 days later, immediately demanded a special session of the UN Security Council. And you know what? Britain, which was in the Chair, refused the request. Now why would that be?

The Guardian, ever the faithful servant of the British Security State and NATO, is getting very perturbed about all this. It ran an article on April 21 Facebook posts disputing Bucha atrocities shared 208,000 times in a week. It seems, judging by comments on the Guardian’s Facebook page that more and more people are not buying the never ending, ceaseless propaganda barrage by NATO and its loyal press.

The neo-Nazi insignia of NATO's Nazis

Now if the Guardian and the rest of Britain’s yellow press were seriously concerned about this horrific massacre, then the first thing they would do would be to demand an impartial, international inquiry into who did this. Even UN Secretary General, António Guterres’s demand for an inquiry has been ignored. Yet the Guardian complains in a non-story that people aren’t buying into NATO’s lies anymore.

The real question is why, instead of a barrage of war propaganda, the Guardian and the BBC aren’t supporting Gutuerre’s demand for an inquiry.

NYT: Ukraine Responsible For Bucha War Crimes Against Russians

Perhaps the reason is because, as a Pentagon official admitted, even they can't independently confirm atrocities in Ukraine's Bucha, official says. None of this has prevented a rush to judgement by the mass media. Why? Because they want it to be the Russians. The idea that they might at last have to face up to the fact that the West is backing a Ukrainian state, whose security forces depend on 100,000 strong neo-Nazi paramilitaries might cause people to start asking questions as to why we are backing Zelensky. People might even start to ask whether Russia had a very good case for intervening in Ukraine in order to defend its Russian speaking population and Ukrainian Russians.

Woman  tortured and killed by Azov in Mariupol - swastika engraved into her

Background

The background to this is what happened in 2014. To compensate for the lack of soldiers, the Ukrainian government resorted to paramilitary militias. In 2020, they constituted about 40 percent of the Ukrainian forces and numbered about 102,000 men, according to Reuters. They were armed, financed and trained by the United States, Great Britain, Canada and France. There were more than 19 nationalities.

Disagreeing with NATO's narrative is defined by Twitter as 'harassment'

These militias have been operating in the Donbas since 2014, with Western support. These militias are violent, convey a nauseating ideology and are virulently anti-Semitic and are composed of fanatical and brutal individuals. The best known of these is the Azov Regiment, whose emblem is reminiscent of the 2nd SS Das Reich Panzer Division, which ‘liberated’ Kharkov from the Soviet Union in 1943, before carrying out the 1944 Oradour-sur-Glane massacre in France.

The characterization of the Ukrainian paramilitaries as "Nazis" or "neo-Nazis" is considered Russian propaganda. But that's not the view of the Times of Israel, or the West Point Academy's Center for Counterterrorism. In 2014, Newsweek magazine seemed to associate them more with... the Islamic State.

Russian Torture Victim

So, the West supported and continued to arm militias that have been guilty of numerous crimes against civilian populations since 2014.

The integration of these paramilitary forces into the Ukrainian National Guard was not accompanied by a "denazification," as some claim.

What happened in Bucha is part of a continuous fabrication of stories over the war in Ukraine.  It is literally impossible to believe anything you see anymore on the BBC, Sky or the major press with the exception of the Morning Star. 

Take for example the so called Russian strike on a railway station in Kramatorsk in eastern Ukraine involving a Tochka-U missile. This kind of missile is not used by Russia but it has nonetheless been blamed on Russia.

The serial number on the missile that hit the Kramatorsk train station matches exactly, bar one digit, the serial number on a missile that was shot into the Donbas in 2015. Russia decommissioned Tochka-U missiles in 2019. Also, an analysis by DNR forces on the ground found that the trajectory very likely points to the missile being fired from Ukrainian-held territory.

Patrick Lancaster and Matron at Mariupol Hospital

Or take the continuous lies that have been broadcast about Mariupol. It has taken a brave and independent journalist, Patrick Lancaster (please donate to his appeal for expenses) to broadcast the truth about the Russian bombardment on a hospital in the city. Patrick interviewed the matron in the hospital that was bombed who confirmed that all the patients had been ordered days before to leave in order that Azov thugs could establish themselves in the hospital.

Of course when Israel bombs a hospital or clinic in Gaza no one says a word when Israel says Hamas is using it. But when the neo-Nazi Azov regiment claims a hospital was bombed it is held to be true. But judge for yourself.

Dead left behind in Mariupol

There is a concerted attempt to whitewash the Azov brigade. We had one of the main Zionist organisation in the United States, the Anti-Defamation League, which can sniff out ‘anti-Semitism’ miles away, whitewashing Ukrainian neo-Nazis.

Youtube, which for some reason defines itself as a 'community' does its best to deter people from accessing material questioning NATO's Nazi narrative

As Ali Abunimah wrote on 17 March, two weeks before the ADL published an article by Andrew Srulevitch, its director of European affairs, which can only be called a whitewash of Ukrainian Nazi collaborator Stepan Bandera, who had the blood of 200,000 Jews on his hands as well as 100,00 Poles.

In an interview with David Fishman who is a professor of Jewish History at the Jewish Theological Seminary as well as a member of the academic committee of the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, Srulevitch asked

“We’ve seen torchlit marches in the middle of [Kiev] with the red and black flags of UPA … and pictures of Stepan Bandera, who allied with the Nazis during WWII” “Isn’t that evidence of Nazism in Ukraine?”

Fishman replied

“For Ukrainian nationalists, UPA and Bandera are symbols of the Ukrainian fight for Ukrainian independence. The UPA allied with Nazi Germany against the Soviet Union for tactical – not ideological – reasons.

This is a complete lie. As Daniel Lazare wrote in 2015 in a review of Grzegorz RossoliÅ„ski-Liebe’s book Stepan Bandera: The Life and Afterlife of a Ukrainian Nationalist.

“Bandera envisioned the Ukraine as a classic one-party state with himself in the role of führer, or providnyk, and expected that a new Ukraine would take its place under the Nazi umbrella.”

However Fishman then contradicted himself:

 “For Jews, however, not only is allying with the Nazis unforgivable under any circumstance, but historians have documented that Ukrainian nationalists participated together with Germans in the murder of many thousands of Jews in Ukraine,” Fishman adds.

If ‘Ukrainians’ participated in murdering thousands of Jews doesn’t that suggest some form of ideological alignment? People then wonder why I have made it a specialism to document the history of Nazi-Zionist collaboration.

Fishman asserted that “There are neo-Nazis in Ukraine, just as there are in the US, and in Russia for that matter... But they are a very marginal group with no political influence and who don’t attack Jews or Jewish institutions in Ukraine.”

Another example of this attempt to whitewash Ukraine's neo-Nazis was the sacking of Jewish journalist Konstanty Gebert from a Polish newspaper for refusing to describe Azov as 'far- right' rather than neo-Nazi.

The leader of Ukraine’s Jewish community, Eduard Dolinsky, clearly doesn’t agree. See  ‘Open anti-Semitism’: Ukrainian police request names and addresses of city’s Jews - Jewish leader says last such demand was ‘during the German occupation

And this report Ukrainian neo-Nazis torture Jewish anti-war MMA athlete suggests that ADL are doing what Zionists have always done, lying and playing down anti-Semitism when it is the genuine article. Why? Because their relationship with the US state demands that they ignore the actual anti-Semitism of the US’s allies. It is a replay of the Zionists’ behaviour in WW2.

We know from the presumed death of blogger Gonzalo Lira that the Azov Battalion and Ukrainian neo-Nazis will stop at nothing to silence independent journalists and bloggers and prevent the truth emerging from Ukraine. In this they are enormously helped by papers like the ‘liberal’ Guardian.

NATO's fascist goons joke about the murder of Gonzalo Lira who was betrayed by the Daily Beast  to the SBU

In the same way the true story of what has happened in Mariupol and the reported murder of hundreds of its Russian speaking inhabitants is being deliberately covered up by our mass media. They prefer to report on the ‘heroic’ last stand of Azov at the steel plant. Human shields only apply in Gaza not Ukraine. See Patrick Lancaster’s road of death and his interview with a Mariupol resident


Resident in Mariupol interviewed about Azov's terror

The Western press cannot even admit that the purpose of NATO is to fight to the last Ukrainian. See NATO admits it wants 'Ukrainians to keep dying' to bleed Russia, not peace

We hear a lot about Zelensky being Jewish (in fact he is an ultra-Zionist). But as The Nation wrote:

TV comedian-turned-politician Volodymyr Zelensky was elected last year as Ukraine’s first Jewish president, yet “anti-Semitism and fascist-inflected ultranationalism are rampant” in the country, reports .

A victim of CIA trained torturers in Ukraine

It has been also been confirmed that the SAS are in the Kiev region training Ukrainians. NATO has been training Ukrainian troops since at least 2014. The third floor of the SBU (Ukraine’s version of the SS) headquarters is dedicated to the CIA who are also heavily involved in such activities.

There are also reports that the Ukrainians asked the Turkish military whether their drones could administer over 20 litres of aerosol, and the Turks said no. There is now footage of jerry-rigged drones that have been captured by Russians which have tanks and aerosol administration devices attached to them. Why would this be?  Because if you want to stage a false chemical attack (& remember Azov alleged a chemical attack in Mariupol which has now been forgotten) then a drone would be an idea means of delivery.

Tony Greenstein

See also

https://scheerpost.com/2022/04/06/questions-abound-about-bucha-massacre/

“One less traitor”: Zelensky oversees campaign of assassination, kidnapping and torture of political opposition

Ukrainian neo-Nazis torture Jewish anti-war MMA athlete

Retired Swiss Military-Intelligence Officer: 'Is it Possible to Actually Know What Has Been And is Going on in Ukraine?'

The Ukrainian conflict is a U.S./NATO Proxy War, but one which Russia is poised to win decisively – Scott Ritter

Pro-war socialists


30 May 2015

Pentagon report predicted West’s support for Islamist rebels would create ISIS

Anti-ISIS coalition knowingly sponsored violent extremists to ‘isolate’ Assad, rollback ‘Shia expansion’

Intelligence document

More evidence that the rise of ISIS was a direct and conscious result of the West’s desire to overthrow the Assad regime, because it was secular, and its opposition to the Iranian regime, which derives from its support for Assad and  Hezbollah.

Tony Greenstein
by Nafeez Ahmed

This story is published by INSURGE INTELLIGENCE, a new crowd-funded investigative journalism project.
Support us to break the stories that no one else will — become a patron of independent, investigative journalism for the global commons.

A declassified secret US government document obtained by the conservative public interest law firm, Judicial Watch, shows that Western governments deliberately allied with al-Qaeda and other Islamist extremist groups to topple Syrian dictator Bashir al-Assad.
The document reveals that in coordination with the Gulf states and Turkey, the West intentionally sponsored violent Islamist groups to destabilize Assad, and that these “supporting powers” desired the emergence of a “Salafist Principality” in Syria to “isolate the Syrian regime.”
According to the newly declassified US document, the Pentagon foresaw the likely rise of the ‘Islamic State’ as a direct consequence of this strategy, and warned that it could destabilize Iraq. Despite anticipating that Western, Gulf state and Turkish support for the “Syrian opposition” — which included al-Qaeda in Iraq — could lead to the emergence of an ‘Islamic State’ in Iraq and Syria (ISIS), the document provides no indication of any decision to reverse the policy of support to the Syrian rebels. On the contrary, the emergence of an al-Qaeda affiliated “Salafist Principality” as a result is described as a strategic opportunity to isolate Assad.

Hypocrisy

The revelations contradict the official line of Western governments 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 Battalion in 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.


Dr Nafeez Ahmed is an investigative journalist, bestselling author and international security scholar. A former Guardian writer, he writes the ‘System Shift’ column for VICE’s Motherboard, and is also a columnist for Middle East Eye. He is the winner of a 2015 Project Censored Award, known as the ‘Alternative Pulitzer Prize’, for Outstanding Investigative Journalism for his Guardian work, and was selected in the Evening Standard’s ‘Power 1,000’ most globally influential Londoners.

Nafeez has also written for The Independent, Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, The Scotsman, Foreign Policy, The Atlantic, Quartz, Prospect, New Statesman, Le Monde diplomatique, New Internationalist, Counterpunch, Truthout, among others. He is the author of A User’s Guide to the Crisis of Civilization: And How to Save It (2010), and the scifi thriller novel ZERO POINT, among other books. His work on the root causes and covert operations linked to international terrorism officially contributed to the 9/11 Commission and the 7/7 Coroner’s Inquest.