Where America goes in the Middle East, extremist groups tend to follow.

By Bradley DEVLIN

With the United States out of Afghanistan, former members of the Afghan Security Forces who were once trained by the United States are joining Islamic State-Khorasan Province, better known as ISIS-K, the Islamic State’s regional affiliate. The result is all too predictable given America’s track record of inadvertently aiding the creation of extremist groups in the Middle East.

As it stands now, the number of former members of the Afghan Security Forces joining up with ISIS-K remains small, but it is growing, according to both Taliban fighters and other former members of the Afghan Security Forces.

One former Afghan official told the Wall Street Journal that an officer who commanded the Afghan National Army’s weapons and ammunition depot in Gardez joined ISIS-K after the Afghan army became defunct, and was killed last month in a firefight with the Taliban. The official also said he knows several other members of the Afghan Security Forces who joined ISIS-K after the Taliban searched their homes and ordered them to present themselves to Taliban authorities once the Taliban took control of the country.

The Wall Street Journal also spoke to a resident of Qarabagh in the Ghazni province who said his cousin, previously a member of the Afghan army’s special forces, disappeared in September shortly after the U.S. withdrawal and has joined an ISIS-K cell. The Qarabagh man also said he knows four other former Afghan National Army soldiers who enlisted in ISIS-K in the past few weeks.

ISIS-K became known throughout the world when a suicide bomber killed 13 U.S. service members and approximately 200 Afghans in an attack near the Kabul airport as the United States was completing its withdrawal in August.

Created in 2014 by former Taliban militants who were dissatisfied with potential peace talks and sought to take more drastic measures to fight the United States, ISIS-K has thus far played relatively a minor role in the network of extremist organizations operating in Afghanistan. Their relegation was a result of choosing both the Taliban and the United States as their enemies, as the nascent extremist outfit was ill-equipped to defend its territorial holdings in eastern Afghanistan, which the Taliban took from them in 2015.

Even though its footprint is limited, ISIS-K has made a name for itself for its incredible brutality. Beyond the suicide bombing in August, ISIS-K claimed responsibility for bombings at Shiite mosques in Kunduz and Kandahar that killed more than 100. Beyond military, political, and religious targets, ISIS-K has perpetrated attacks at schools and hospitals. In one attack, the group allegedly went through a maternity ward and shot nurses and pregnant women to death.

However, the challenge ISIS-K poses to the Taliban, much less the United States, should not be overstated. For the time being, ISIS-K does not have the fighting force or capability to mount a real challenge to the Taliban’s control of Afghanistan. The Taliban seems to recognize this and, although they likely still view the group as a security concern, has rebuffed claims that suggested ISIS-K could be a threat to their regained power. While the United States should continue to monitor the actions of ISIS-K in Afghanistan and Pakistan for potential security concerns, the threat it poses to the American homeland should not be exaggerated just because it bears the Islamic State’s name.

For two decades, America’s foreign policy elites pushed the narrative that members of the Afghan Security Forces were liberal idealists that would put their training from the U.S. military to good use in fighting extremism of all stripes. Those who questioned the prevailing narrative about the United States’ presence in Afghanistan were charged with betraying the troops and abandoning the Afghans. But no amount of emotionally-charged propaganda from the foreign policy establishment could cover up what Afghan war skeptics knew all along: reality, not ideals, govern the sands of Afghanistan.

Now that the U.S. is mostly out of the picture, “In some areas, ISIS has become very attractive” to former members of the Afghan Security Forces, Rahmatullah Nabil, the former acting director of Afghanistan’s National Directorate of Security, told the Wall Street Journal.

The fact that former members of the Afghan government “are willing to join groups like ISIS-K shows you how weak their commitments were to the ostensible values that the government was meant to be promoting,” Will Ruger, vice president of foreign policy at the Charles Koch Institute and a TAC board member, told The American Conservative. “Either they didn’t believe these things that deeply in the first place, or, even if they came to accept some of those things, they’re willing to throw them overboard for the right vehicle for power and influence and other pragmatic ends.”

The reality is, above all else, the Afghan Security Forces were held together by rubber bands of cash. Young Afghan men did not enlist in the Afghan Security Forces because their hearts yearned for liberal democracy. Maybe some of them did in part, but the prospect of a steady job and income was the main draw to join the Afghan Security Forces.

Which is why Adam Korzeniewski, a U.S. Marine Corps veteran who was deployed to Afghanistan twice and was an appointee in the Treasury Department and Commerce Department under the Trump administration, told TAC via email that “the rhetoric of these Afghan Security Forces being noble warfighters is actually dangerous, and a legacy of the endless propaganda machine of the warmongering Neoliberal right of the Bush years.”

“While there were motivated Afghan security forces, the average person was there for income stability and sustenance,” Korzeniewski went on to say. “Remember that Afghanistan is a very poor country with difficulties feeding its population. Complicating this with widespread drug use, the Afghan military wasn’t at the point where it was going to be capable of independently closing with and destroying Taliban. Many Afghan soldiers and police officers in my experience were constantly high.”

Beyond substance abuse and addiction among the Afghan army’s rank-and-file, crooked schemes, such as enlistment fraud orchestrated by Afghan officers and soldiers that sought to collect the U.S.-backed paychecks of ghost soldiers, threw gasoline on greed and corruption that was already spreading like wildfire. This chicanery created a prisoner’s dilemma in which the profit motives for members of the Afghan Security Forces propelled them to take actions that ensured hardly anyone was getting paid—much less in a timely manner.

When money dried up, so too did the allegiance of the Afghan soldiers.

“Next month, if the government doesn’t pay me, maybe I should just sell this to the Taliban,” Noor Ahmad Zhargi, a member of the Afghan police force, told the Washington Post in an interview from this past spring. While he assured his interviewers he would never join the Taliban, he told them that he could sell his rifle to the extremist group for about $2,000—a pretty penny for Zhargi and his family.

Zhargi was far from the first member of Afghanistan’s security forces to consider offering up his equipment to the Taliban in exchange for cash. As the Afghanistan Papers published by the Washington Post in 2019 made clear, it was rather common for U.S. military equipment to go missing, and for U.S. operators to later discover it had been sold or turned over to the Taliban to be used against the U.S. and Afghan Security Forces in combat.

The double-dealing within the Afghan Security Forces that the American foreign policy establishment tried to paper over was on full display once the United States finally withdrew from Afghanistan. The Taliban brokered deals with members of the Afghan Security Forces to surrender and turn over the equipment given to them by the U.S. military even before the U.S. withdrawal was complete.

When the Afghan Security Forces crumbled, effectively paving the way for the Taliban to retake Kabul and become the de facto government of Afghanistan, hundreds of thousands of people who worked under the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan were left without jobs and in fear of retaliation from the Taliban forces they helped the United States and its allies fight. Nearly three months removed from the fall of Kabul, the Taliban has reemployed a few former Afghan government workers, specifically from the National Directorate of Security. However, those of whom have been reinstated under the Taliban are heavily supervised and have gone without pay for months.

With the Taliban in control of Afghanistan, the same incentives that once drew young men into the Afghan Security Forces are driving them into ISIS-K. ISIS-K has offered relatively large sums of money to their new recruits, and offers strength in numbers that can help protect these former soldiers if the Taliban were to come looking for them.

Another factor pushing some former members of the Afghan Security Forces towards ISIS-K are tribal and ethnic loyalties. The Taliban is mostly comprised of Pashtuns that make up the country’s ethnic majority. However, in eastern Afghanistan, some regions are majority Tajik or other national ethnic minorities.

“The Taliban was not that unified to begin with, but the other ethnic groups of Afghanistan, who made up a lot of the Afghan Army, have no loyalty to Pashtun leadership regardless if it’s our government or the Taliban,” Korzeniewski said. “If you’re a Tajik and are obligated and motivated to fight for your tribe, ISIS-K gives the opportunity to do so. I’m not surprised many are joining ISIS-K, or some Afghan soldiers joined the Taliban.”

“If there were a resistance, they would have joined the resistance,” Nabil told the Wall Street Journal. “For the time being, ISIS is the only other armed group.” Though the foreign policy establishment has done its best to try and ignore it, this is the political reality of Afghanistan and the surrounding region, where the most brutish and shrewd aspects of human nature are regularly on display.

“Ultimately what matters most to a lot of people aren’t values but considerations of power and influence,” Ruger told TAC. “So, individuals are willing to affiliate with groups that are their best path towards securing more pragmatic gains than a set of beliefs.”

This, Ruger added, should directly “impugn the values promotion agenda pursued by the U.S.” that Middle Eastern countries have used to take advantage of the United States, and, in turn, the American people. “The warning for us is to not fall for this ever again.”

Certainly, the American foreign policy establishment would do well to heed Ruger’s warning, but there isn’t much cause for optimism, given the United States’ track record of interventionist actions creating power vacuums ultimately filled by extremist organizations the U.S. inadvertently played a role in creating.

When the United States and its allies invaded Iraq and deposed Saddam Hussein, it refused to institute martial law. With no police authority in place, mass looting and destruction overwhelmed Baghdad and other major population centers. At the time, the Office for Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance (ORHA) that was tasked with rebuilding Iraq, and CENTCOM had agreed that recalling the Iraqi army would help provide the security personnel to assist with reconstruction, such as sealing the nation’s borders. When Paul Bremer replaced retired Lt. Gen. Jay Garner as director of ORHA, however, he pursued a policy of de-Ba’athification, and disbanded the Iraqi army and intelligence services. With a stroke of a pen, Garner kicked more than half a million people out of their jobs, and prevented them from future employment in the new Iraqi government.

“After the original decision to invade Iraq, disbanding the Iraqi army was probably the most disastrous decision made by the Bush administration,” Dan Caldwell, an Iraq War veteran and senior adviser to Concerned Veterans for America, told TAC.

Once cut out of the project to rebuild Iraq, members of Saddam’s Ba’athist party in the military were well-armed and well-trained potential recruits for extremist groups, or created their own groups to mount an insurgency against U.S. forces. Some of these former Ba’athist military officers became instrumental in the rise of the Islamic State.

“The leadership for what eventually became Isis met in an American prison—Camp Bucca,” Caldwell said in an email. “We swept up al-Baghdadi, and put him in a prison where he met more radical Islamic fundamentalists, and more importantly, he met former Iraqi army officers who would later be his military commanders when he took over large parts of Syria and northern Iraq. It is not unfair or inaccurate to say that the core of Isis was formed in an American prison in Iraq,” and when these prisoners were released, they came out “more radical, better trained, and with better connections to other organizations.”

The Ba’athists were not drawn to the Islamic State because of its ideals or vision of a global caliphate. Although some were radicalized by conflict with U.S. forces, or their subsequent imprisonment, like Saddam, most Ba’athists were secularists that promoted Arab nationalism. Rather, Ba’athists were being brought into the Islamic State by the same forces currently driving former members of the Afghan Security Forces into ISIS-K. Ba’athists and the Islamic State were united in their own self preservation, as well as a mutual hatred of Iraq’s Shi’ite-led government. Just as important was that the Islamic State also offered the former Ba’athist officers an income, which was hard to come by for members of Iraq’s former military after it was disbanded.

As members of the Islamic State, the former Ba’athists helped create and expand the Islamic States’ spy network. Their military experience improved the Islamic States’ combat tactics, enabling the caliphate to capture large amounts of territory throughout the region.

And so, the United States fueled ISIS’s rise, then fought and defeated it, only to accidentally provide one of its affiliates with trained fighters. Whether it’s ISIS, or the Mujahideen that splintered into a number of extremist groups, including Al Qaeda, or the Taliban itself, wherever the American military decides to intervene in the Middle East, terrorists who once received U.S. backed training or salaries seem to follow.

theamericanconservative.com

The slaughter of at least 79 Afghan civilians and 13 American servicemen at Kabul airport has propelled the Afghan offshoot of Isis to the top of the news agenda, as it was intended to do. The movement showed with one ferocious assault, at a time and place guaranteeing maximum publicity, that it intends to be a player in Afghanistan under the new Taliban rulers.

President Joe Biden, echoing President George W Bush after 9/11, said: “We will not forgive. We will not forget. We will hunt you down and make you pay.”

But the self-destructive US response to 9/11 should serve as a warning about the perils of ill-directed over-reaction. Reducing complex developments in Afghanistan to another episode in “the war on terror” is misleading, counter-productive and one of the root causes of the present mess.

In the wake of the most blatantly corrupt election process in living American history, Biden’s pro-terrorism policy in the Middle-East leaves the military’s rank-and-file and American society more strained than during the Obama era.

This is dangerously being carried out in combination with the new initiative of ideologically purging the military of so-called white supremacists, by which they mean pro-constitution conservatives. As Vanity Fair covered just two weeks after Biden’s inauguration:

“Lloyd Austin ordered a stand down across all branches of the armed forces to have a “deeper conversation” about the problem. But actually solving it will likely require more direct action.”

After four years of relative peace in the Middle-East region under Trump, the U.S.-DS (U.S. Deep State) support for war and terrorism is back on the agenda, thanks to the handing of the election result to Biden. This region has been a long-time favorite theatre of war for neocons and neoliberals alike.

The real problem is that the lack of public support for military imperialism mirrors the public’s aversion to the new cultural revolution underway in the U.S.

We are forced to return our focus to the Syria theatre, for it is here that we are seeing the ugliest and most contemptible return to Obama-era policies, where ISIS terrorism and YPG separatist terrorism were both supported.

But rather than reverse a truly Anti-American and misanthropic policy, the American oligarchy has cynically decided to simply change the ideology of the military so as to redefine the rationale for America’s disastrous adventurism without reversing the policy of adventurism itself. This also happens to be a reflection of a deeply problematic problem inside the U.S. as well: rather than confront the role of the financial institutions and the billionaire oligarchs running the U.S., there has been a decision to ‘punch downward’ and lay the blame for America’s problems at the feet of the American people themselves. ‘Racism’, we are told, is not an institutional phenomenon shaping public and corporate policy. which historically benefited the oligarchy’s divide-and-conquer motifs, but rather an ‘attitude problem’ at the level of the average private individual.

YPG Terrorism and ISIS – Obama is back with Biden

Obama once opined that he’d love to serve a third term in a Cyrano de Bergerac way, giving directives to some mind-control asset, we assume, through what he described as ‘an earpiece’.

It appears he’s gotten his way.

In the middle of February, the Daily Sabah notes that “coinciding with a new U.S. administration taking office in Washington, attacks of the YPG terrorist organization in northern Syria have visibly increased, further undermining the country’s chances for peace and the Syrian people’s hopes for stability”.

Under Biden’s apparent directives, the Sabah notes that on the 16^th of February, a car bomb killed more than 20 people in several attacks.

The calculated evil of this policy is clear-cut. As the Sabah states, Biden has brought former Obama-era U.S. envoy to the Syria coalition, Brett McGurk, back from retirement.

But what often goes unnoticed is what McGurk’s real talent is. His job is to make it look like the U.S. is using the YPG to fight ISIS, when in fact the game went very differently. As the U.S. was also backing ISIS, and as Syria is a sovereign state, Obama’s strategy operating in Syria was an insidious game.

ISIS would take land from Syrian people after fighting Syrian forces, claiming it as part of the Islamic Caliphate. U.S. air forces would defend the ISIS occupation from Syrian counter-attacks, under the auspices of defending YPG supply lines and forces. Then the U.S. would have the YPG come in and ‘fight’ (in the professional wrestling sense) ISIS for it, thereby making it ‘Kurdish’. This was called the ‘Anti-ISIS Coalition’, but the real goal was to divide the Syrian state and create a failed state of perpetual war and conflict, through which resources could be smuggled out and regional development could be thrown into limbo. If you can’t grow your own economy, you can at least use the military to set others back.

Supporting terrorism is not just evil, it doesn’t even serve a state in purely Machiavellian terms. Not so in an environment of information and awareness at all-time highs. We’ve entered into a major civilization crisis in the West, where salesmen and book-talkers are able to confuse the traditional meanings of what ‘public support’ used to mean.

Things have changed significantly in the past five years. Americans have been largely red-pilled on the above described madness, and many Americans are perfectly cognizant of the fact that Obama and McCain worked to build both the ISIS and YPG terrorist organizations. By the way, this mayhem in turn largely caused the refugee crisis in Europe.

What that means is that business as usual can’t go on. That these games continue in the face of public awareness is undermining American institutions and the public’s support for the entire mythos.

The Biden Team’s Pump-and-Dump Politics

The new Biden regime is based on the idea that doing pump-and-dump politics is the winning solution. These are fine ‘games’ in the stock-market, where costs can be externalized and margins can recover. This is the opposite of fine in the world of national security and legitimacy, where things are hard-earned, easily lost, and costs cannot be externalized.

What do we mean? It’s one thing to hold stock-holders meeting and show inflated numbers, skewed statistics, and flawed studies. The belief that these represent something real (though they don’t) can be enough to inflate the value of the stock. Those in-the-know would make a small fortune, before reality and the law of gravity kicked in.

But America’s corrupt deep state political hacks and grifters have decided that this pump-and-dump method is also fine for politics. This is dangerous in its hyper-realism. It will have broad and far-reaching effects in terms of national security, social cohesion and stability, and participation and support from the broad masses. The military under Obama was considered broken, as the Brooking’s Institute noted in at least one of a number of pieces:

“In April 2015, USA Today reported a disconcerting, if somewhat incongruous, finding about the Army’s morale. Despite a six-year, $287 million effort to make troops more optimistic and resilient, an Army survey found that 52 percent of soldiers scored badly on questions that measured optimism, while 48 percent reported having little satisfaction or commitment to their job.

This study is only the latest of several such studies. A 2011 Center for Army Leadership study found that only 26 percent of active soldiers thought that the Army was headed in the right direction, while the Military Times in 2014 published a study ominously titled “America’s Military: A Force Adrift.”

Playing the types of games that Biden and the deep-state played to get themselves into power, ‘by hook or by crook’, as the saying goes, was a short-sighted and foolish gambit from which the fabric of American society may never fully recover, unless the military does something soon, and publicly so. Have they started to already?

When the election was handed to Biden, the military – it is widely believed – was apparently not present to play ‘Hail to the Chief’ at the inauguration, and a 21-Gun salute was not given. If true, these were strange, if not striking signals from the military that they view the Biden administration as something bordering on a usurpation of power, and a warning to any pretender to the role of Commander-in-Chief that a return to the ‘forever wars’ status quo would not be accepted.

At the same time, we have seen a parallel move to ideologically cleanse the U.S. military of patriots, and make more profound changes in new officer changing. A new form of indoctrination is afoot, where the founding fathers must be ritualistically introduced first as being ‘flawed people’, before the actual reference to those leaders’ relevant ideas can then be discussed.

And yet the Pentagon itself has continually pushed back against Biden’s proposed appointments. While mainstream news media openly reported this phenomenon in January, blaming Trump, this has in fact carried on. Defense News, at the close of February noted that:

“Across the entire Biden administration, 58 individuals have been nominated for the roughly 1,250 Senate-confirmed spots […] So far, only 10 nominees across the government are confirmed — two of whom were confirmed on Tuesday [Feb 23] — which lags significantly behind the previous four administrations, something Schulman attributes to the unique circumstances facing the start of the administration.”

Lessons Learned

The military is a microcosm of society itself. A society that believes in itself, has a military that believes in society’s mission. A people with high morale, has a military with high morale. A society that is openly corrupt and lacks legitimacy, has a military that is openly corrupt and lacks legitimacy. That military begins to operate more and more like a large mercenary outfit, and a dysfunctional class-system within it between reluctant potato peelers and misanthropic paid killer specialists. That type of military can work to an extent so long as the conflicts do not require a full mobilization of society, and do not strain the military itself. Those may be low to medium intensity conflicts with only several hundred actually involved in live-fire operations.

Every society has a legitimating ideology. There has to be some degree of tangible reality that connects the legitimating ideology to the actual facts on the ground. One of the reasons the USSR collapsed is that the ideology of socialism became increasingly and publicly at odds with the very real and actual role that Communist Party chiefs had as privately interested oligarchs who were in it for themselves and themselves alone. When that reality sank in, the society collapsed. It only required a few extra bribes and nudges from its great geopolitical rival, the U.S., to pull the final thread out for the whole sweater to come undone.

A similar situation is happening today in the U.S., and its rival China may indeed have its own fingers similarly on that thread. The rise of Biden and the games and tricks played by corrupt state legislators and a fake-news legacy media complex to force that result on the American people, could very well be the final straw.

While some minority of Biden voters might be fooled by the ongoing events, the rest of the world’s leaders and their military chiefs are not. They can see clearly a division between the military and its civilian government. They can see that America’s volunteer army is in a period of prolonged collapse. Who would volunteer for more pointless forever wars, in countries no one’s heard of, that have no national security aim, and hoisted upon the military and the people by an illegitimate Biden administration?

America’s deep state and oligarchy have landed upon a type of civilizational about-face, where the legitimating social ideology which fuelled the Chicago Doctrine, Human Rights Imperialism, and Responsibility to Protect, is increasingly being made into the legitimating ideology of the military itself.

This has required coordination between the public education system, social media and celebrity public service announcements, the university system, and officer training academies for the military.

While any number of these newly introduced ideas, in the abstract, may have some foundation in truth from a critical perspective, it is doubtful that this cultural revolution in society and the military will find a real foothold.

For America’s ruling oligarchy, they are fine with introducing new ideas in the military which are critical of America’s history, so long as the truly destructive reality of the robber baron industrialists and financiers – yesterday and today – are left out of the equation. This truth, if left untouched and unchallenged, will create precisely that rift between ideology and reality which has historically rendered all such social experiments a failure.

Ben NORTON

The top US newspaper has been exposed for overseeing another large-scale fake news operation.

The main source for the New York Times’ award-winning podcast, Caliphate, has been arrested and charged with lying about joining ISIS. The major media outlet had relied on this man’s fabricated story as the core of its reporting, and said two US government officials had independently confirmed his identity.

So far, the Times has not issued any retractions or corrections. But the fake news spread by the American “newspaper of record” has touched off a political scandal in Canada.

Hosted by Times reporter Rukmini Callimachi, the Caliphate podcast claims to tell the story of the rise and fall of the so-called Islamic State in Syria and Iraq. The show has attracted millions of listeners, and is one of the most popular podcasts on the globe. The New York Times’ PR team actively boasts of its work on the “chart-topping show” in marketing materials.

The podcast has aggressively pushed the propaganda line of Syria’s Western government-backed opposition. While the Times was publicly praised for its “nuance” in “humanizing” Salafi-jihadist foreign fighters who joined ISIS, massacred civilians, ethnically cleansed religious minorities, and turned women into sex slaves, Caliphate simultaneously portrayed the Syrian government that defeated ISIS as the epitome of evil.

The host of the podcast, Callimachi, euphemistically described genocidal ISIS extremists as “rebels fighting Assad’s soldiers, standing up for the Muslim people,” while blaming the rise of the Islamic State on the “crimes of President Bashar al-Assad” and depicting the “Assad regime” as a collection of sadists who kill civilians for fun.

The star of Caliphate was a young man using the pseudonym Abu Huzayfah al-Kanadi (“the Canadian” in Arabic). Abu Huzayfah concocted an elaborate tale, claiming to the Times that he traveled to Syria in 2014 to join ISIS, where he claimed to have killed people in public executions. Then Huzayfah said he went to Turkey and Pakistan before returning to Canada.

Abu Huzayfah created prominent social media platforms where he spread pro-ISIS propaganda and sought to recruit new Salafi-jihadist extremists.

There was just one problem: the wildly popular podcast was based on a hoax.

Key New York Times “ISIS” source arrested in Canada under terrorism hoax laws

The real Abu Huzayfah al-Kanadi has been identified as a 25-year-old man living in Toronto named Shehroze Chaudhry. He was arrested by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) on September 25, and faces up to five years in prison under Canada’s terrorism hoax laws.

Chaudhry was not a mere guest of the Times’ Caliphate podcast; he was the key source that Rukmini Callimachi and her employer relied on. “Abu Huzayfah” was personally featured or mentioned in the prologue and nine of the 10 episodes.

Callimachi has earned fame by marketing herself as a journalistic expert on ISIS and violent Islamist extremism. The Guardian described her in a fawning profile as the “the podcasting terror expert getting into the minds of Isis.”

After winning the prestigious Peabody Award in 2018, Callimachi was named as a finalist for the renowned Pulitzer Prize the following year thanks to her work on the podcast. This year, she earned the vaunted assignment of lead reporter on the police killing of Breonna Taylor in Louisville, Kentucky.

When news broke that Abu Huzayfah was a fraud named Chaudry, Callimachi tried to distract from the scandal by claiming on Twitter that her podcast raised concerns about Chaudhry’s narrative in episode six. She did not mention, however, that she continued to use “Abu Huzayfah” as a source in episodes seven, eight, and 10.

1. Big news out of Canada: Abu Huzayfah has been arrested on a terrorist “hoax” charge. The narrative tension of our podcast “Caliphate” is the question of whether his account is true. In Chapter 6 we explain the conflicting strands of his story, and what we can and can’t confirm https://t.co/w0CbPGvzeA

— Rukmini Callimachi (@rcallimachi) September 25, 2020

In its own report on Chaudhry’s arrest, the New York Times said it “declined to discuss its sourcing” and downplayed the severity of the controversy.

Times correspondents geolocate non-existent ISIS member, push bogus US intelligence on his background

According to the paper, “The Times had used geolocation to place Mr. Huzayfah on the banks of the Euphrates river in Syria.” That geolocation was performed by Malachy Browne, director of New York Times visual investigations, during episode six of Caliphate.

Abu Huzayfah had provided a video of himself supposedly shooting a pistol into the Euphrates river to prove to Rukmini Callimachi that he traveled to Syria on his way back to Canada from Pakistan. Browne used Google Earth Pro to locate the video on the river, prompting Callimachi and her producer, Andy Mills, to praise his work as “brilliant” and “incredible.”

Because Callimachi probed holes in Abu Huzayfah’s story, a New York Times spokesperson has misleadingly claimed, “The uncertainty about Abu Huzayfah’s story is central to every episode of Caliphate that featured him.”

But in episode six – the one episode where the podcast hosts investigated inconsistencies in Abu Huzayfah’s narrative – Callimachi pushed back when her producer suggested that their source might be a phony:

“Look, it makes sense to me that somebody that has been in the caliphate, that if he’s trying to exaggerate a little, you know, that if he’s trying to — ‘Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, I was there when Baghdadi, you know, announced it, oh, my God!’ Whatever. That makes sense to me. But not going there at all and making up all of those details about the Albu Nimr tribesmen, about this execution, about what it’s like to hold the gun, about what it’s like to actually whip somebody, about the fact that the blood splashes back up on you, that would — I mean, that’s a level of invention? It’s too much! I mean, it’s — he’s providing details that nobody knows, you know?”

Later in that episode, Callimachi was informed by New York Times national security correspondent Eric Schmitt that “two different officials in the U.S. government at different agencies have told me is that this individual, this Canadian, was a member of ISIS.”

Schmitt again confidently assured Callimachi, “Two different sources in the American government have confirmed that he was active in some type of ISIS activities in Syria.”

This ultimately led the Caliphate host to conclude that “something will emerge” verifying Abu Huzayfah’s narrative of his time in ISIS.

Instead, he was exposed as a fraudster. And Schmitt’s two anonymous US intelligence sources were completely wrong, as was Browne’s geolocation seeking out the hoaxer on the banks of the Euphrates.

Canadian media outlets had raised concerns about Caliphate back in 2018. A CBC correspondent asked, “Did former Canadian ISIS member lie to the New York Times or to CBC News?” But their criticisms were ignored by the Gray Lady.

The fake news scandal has reverberated through Canada’s halls of power, with reports that Chaudhry’s claims to the Times had “fueled public outrage and debate in the House of Commons.”

The House leader from the Conservative Party, MP Candice Bergen, grilled the government of Canada’s Liberal Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, declaring in a fiery speech that went viral: “This guy is apparently in Toronto. Canadians deserve more answers from this government… Why aren’t they doing something about this despicable animal that’s walking around the country? This individual is speaking freely to the media.”

The New York Times’ long history of pro-war fake news

This is far from the only time the New York Times has been exposed for spreading false stories. The “newspaper of record” has a long history of printing fake news when it serves the interest of the US national security state.

In 1945, after the United States dropped nuclear bombs on Japan, the Times published a story titled “No Radioactivity in Hiroshima Ruin.” The newspaper’s impartial source was the chief of the US War Department, Major General T. F. Farrell, who “denied categorically that [the atom bombing] produced a dangerous, lingering radioactivity.”

Next, in 1964, the Times spread lies to help justify Washington’s exterminationist war on Vietnam. “REDS DRIVEN OFF; Two Torpedo Vessels Believed Sunk in Gulf of Tonkin,” the newspaper trumpeted. It uncritically echoed the US Defense Department to falsely portray North Vietnamese boats as aggressors carrying out “deliberate attacks” on American forces.

To help sell the first US war on Iraq, the New York Times widely circulated and defended the fabricated claims of “Nayirah,” the teenage daughter of Kuwait’s US ambassador, who falsely claimed Iraqi soldiers were removing babies from incubators in Kuwaiti hospitals and leaving them on the ground to die.

As is public knowledge, the Times was instrumental in spreading the George W. Bush administration’s lies during the lead-up to the second US war on Iraq, falsely reporting that the government of Saddam Hussein had “weapons of mass destruction.” The only reporter who faced serious consequences for the scandal was Judith Miller, who later fell comfortably on her feet at Fox News. Still today, the Times boasts a collection of Iraq War boosters as top correspondents and columnists.

The Times printed transparently absurd claims to help justify NATO’s regime-change war on Libya in 2011. Among the fake news spread by the newspaper was the lie that leader Muammar Gaddafi had been giving his soldiers Viagra and encouraging them to rape women.

The fictitious story and persona behind the Caliphate podcast controversy is just one example in a string of fake stories the Times has printed in its information war on the Syrian government.

One of the most notorious Times blunders on Syria was produced by Malachy Browne, the visual investigations director who appeared in Caliphate to geolocate the non-existent Abu Huzayfah. That report relied on glorified cartoon illustrations to “prove” that the Syrian government “gassed its own people” in the Damascus suburb of Syria in April, 2018, thereby justifying the US bombing of Syria that followed.

But as demonstrated by several whistleblowers from the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), including a member of the fact-finding mission that visited the site of the supposed bombing, the incident in Douma was a staged event – a hoax put on by the Syrian opposition to trigger US military action.

Since the election of US President Donald Trump, the New York Times has been crucial in fueling hysteria around supposed Russian meddling in American politics.

Volunteering its pages as a dumping site for intelligence agencies, the paper has laundered CIA disinformation in the guise of reporting on Russiagate, spreading laughably absurd claims that Moscow is paying Taliban militants in Afghanistan bounties to kill US soldiers – comically thin stories that fall apart with the slightest bit of scrutiny.

Despite its long history of spreading dubious propaganda that benefits the US national security state, or rather because of it, the Times has forged cozy relations with top government officials and powerful but faceless figures nestled in the permanent bureaucracy of the national security state. As The Grayzone reported, the New York Times has sent national security-related stories to the US government for approval before publication.

If history is any indication, the Caliphate fake news scandal will be tossed down the memory hole, and Rukmini Callimachi will be rewarded with important new assignments. And before long, new national security stories will find their way onto the pages of the Times that go uncorrected even after they are exposed as bogus plants.

thegrayzone.com

If we are to take the limited definition of terrorist as being a bearded Sunni extremist with an AK47 who is battling to create an Islamic State for himself, from the failed states of Syria, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, Yemen, Iraq and Afghanistan, then we have to assume that Trump’s interventions have achieved very little. Soon after taking office, he quickly took the helm of a military campaign in Iraq and Syria, which was aimed at hitting ISIL head on, which started in Iraq and progressed west until it arrived at the terror group’s epicentre of Raqqa in Northeast Syria. But the disinformation and plain outright lies by journalists who refused stoically to report the nuances of both the policy and the reality on the ground is shocking and has paid its toll to the situation today – which might have contributed to Trump being nominated for an award which recognises efforts made to bring about peace.

The U.S. military campaign in Iraq under Obama, was surreptitiously led by an Iranian commander, Qasem Soleimani, the same one that the U.S. assassinated just a few months back in Baghdad, following Trump’s orders. There are even photographs of Soleimani and U.S. top brass in Baghdad talking amicably among themselves during the peak of the Iranian-led battle against ISIL which preceded the U.S. one.

Makes sense. Both Iran and the U.S. wanted to destroy ISIL. Much of the work in previous years in Syria, in fact, had been carried out by Iran and its proxy Hezbollah. As a courtesy to Obama, in fact, the Iranians pulled back their own hardcore militias in Iraq to allow the U.S. campaign to begin, as a gesture of goodwill, such was the relationship at the time between Tehran and the U.S. in 2015. But nothing Trump did, once he took over, made any sense. And it still doesn’t. So, after taking heavy defeats in Mosul and other Iraqi strongholds, many ISIL operatives moved to Syria, where, eventually they escaped U.S. forces by relocating to the south of Syria, with the aid of Iranian soldiers there who assisted them. There’s just too much irony. Trump begins anti-Iran campaign within months of taking office. He takes all the credit for “destroying” ISIL. And yet, as early as 2019, we see that in fact, the reality is that he has merely moved ISIL around and made it more of an underground movement. It’s regrouping in Iraq and Syria and also taking its campaign against American soldiers where it can in other places, like Somalia and Afghanistan.

And to top all the irony, you have Trump’s anti-Iran policies which not only directly impact the growth of ISIL and other extremist groups, but now we are seeing more and more the emergence of a new campaign against American forces – which didn’t exist in 2017 when Trump kicked off his Middle East campaign by launching missiles into Syria from a U.S. battleship.

One of the reasons why Trump always wanted to get out of Syria is that his policies there against ISIL make him look a buffoon, given that Iranian ally Assad benefits from those extremists being wiped out (as they are also fighting Assad, Hezbollah and Iran in Syria). If any U.S. journalist pointed this out at a press briefing, he would look very, very silly indeed.

U.S. journalists in DC aren’t capable of asking the President even how he can claim credit for a so-called ‘peace deal’ with Palestine (brokered between the UAE and Israel) when the Palestinians weren’t even consulted on it, let alone signed anything.

But the notion that Trump is hitting ISIL is and always was folly. With U.S. sanctions in full swing against Iran and a real groundswell of opinion in Tehran aligning itself with the hardliners’ view (‘no choice but to hit back’), many worry about a new war with the U.S. and its allies which kicks off if Trump wins a second term. A number of analysts have pointed out that Tehran is already preparing for this.

I would argue that this is already happening on a smaller, but effective scale, in Somalia and Afghanistan. The scandal recently that U.S. forces were allegedly a target of Russian incentives via the Taliban might have hurt Trump. But it dwarfed the real story in Afghanistan which is that U.S. forces there are more vulnerable than ever as they might well be facing the wrath of both the Taliban and ISIL-affiliated groups supported by Iran.

This is already happening in Somalia where Iran is directly funding, through its operatives on the ground, Al Shabab terrorist group which is able and willing to go for ‘clean shot’ kills of U.S. soldiers and their Gulf Arab allies. This is as a direct result of U.S. sanctions on Iran, which in itself is an act of war we should not forget. Iran is, in fact, sourcing a number of countries in Africa who have such groups even if their ideology is not aligned to their own. The focus is the U.S.

China, rapidly becoming an enemy of the U.S. under Trump, is also looking to set up a number of military bases in Africa as it is looking for states now to accept their offers of building them.

For the meantime, Afghanistan and Somalia are the new battlegrounds though which have come about because of the ineptitude of a U.S. president who doesn’t really understand the region at all, doesn’t read reports and is really only obsessed with Obama’s legacy – and of course his own re-election.

And this erroneous policy, which the American people simply cannot understand or care to, is spreading its tentacles into sub-Saharan Africa, with more and more ISIL-affiliated groups now springing up in the Sahel and starting to get the media limelight. Just recently a number of arrests of terror cells were made in Morocco where attacks were planned against civilians and top government officials. Although the culprits were Moroccans, a police chief in Rabat points the finger at Libya and Mali for the source of brainwashing and supply calling the Sahel a “ticking time bomb of terrorism”.

And so to nominate Trump for a Nobel peace prize is a febrile triumph of nonsense, which leaves many of U.S. wondering how satirical magazines like The Onion make a living anymore. Trump has done more to expand ISIL’s reach and capability than anyone else as his Iran policy is literally like pouring gasoline on a fire. His policies, erratic as they may be, have brought together factions which were previously divided by their different interpretations of Islam – Iran and Al Shabab, for example or Hezbollah and Hamas in Palestine – all focused on a common enemy of America and its allies. As Trump prepares to pull out a number – but not all – of U.S. troops in Afghanistan and continue his baptism of lies directed at a very gullible public and a servile press corps along the lines of “see! I told you I would get our boys out of Middle East wars” it’s going to be hard to explain the rise in deaths of U.S. soldiers there. And new numbers of deaths in places like Somalia which a certain generation of Americans associate with a 1993 TIME magazine cover of a body of a dead U.S. soldier being dragged by a vehicle through the streets of Mogadishu.

Presumably this will all happen a few weeks after the election. Not very nobel. Or Noble. Whatever.

Steven CHOVANEC

Near the end of July, one of the most important recent developments in U.S. foreign policy was quietly disclosed during a U.S. Senate hearing. Not surprisingly, hardly anybody talked about it and most are still completely unaware that it happened.

Answering questions from Senator Lindsey Graham, Secretary of State Pompeo confirmed that the State Department had awarded an American company, Delta Crescent Energy, with a contract to begin extracting oil in northeast Syria. The area is nominally controlled by the Kurds, yet their military force, the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), was formed under U.S. auspices and relies on an American military presence to secure its territory. That military presence will now be charged with protecting an American firm from the government of the country that it is operating within.

Indeed, the history of how the U.S. came to be in a position to “capture and subdue” these resources is a sordid, yet informative tale that by itself arguably even rivals other such colonial adventures.

To capture and subdue

When a legitimate protest movement developed organically in Syria in early 2011, the U.S. saw an opportunity to destabilize, and potentially overthrow, the government of a country that had long pushed back against its efforts for greater control in the region.

Syria had maintained itself outside of the orbit of U.S. influence and had frustratingly prevented American corporations from penetrating its economy to access its markets and resources.

As the foremost academic expert on Middle East affairs, Christopher Davidson, wrote in his seminal work, “Shadow Wars, The Secret Struggle for the Middle East,” discussing both Syria and Libya’s strategic importance, “the fact remained that these two regimes, sitting astride vast natural resources and in command of key ports, rivers, and borders, were still significant obstacles that had long frustrated the ambitions of Western governments and their constituent corporations to gain greater access.”

“With Syria,” Davidson wrote, “having long proven antagonistic to Western interests… a golden opportunity had presented itself in 2011 to oust [this] administration once and for all under the pretext of humanitarian and even democratic causes.”

US Senators John McCain and Joseph Lieberman meet with Syrians at the Yayladagi camp on the Turkish-Syrian border. April 10, 2012. Umit Bektas | Reuters

The U.S., therefore, began organizing and overseeing a militarization of the uprising early on, and soon co-opted the movement along with allied states Turkey, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Qatar. Writing at the end of 2011, Columbia University’s Joseph Massad explained how there was no longer any doubt that “the Syrian popular struggle for democracy [has] already been hijacked,” given that “the Arab League and imperial powers have taken over and assumed the leadership of their struggle.”

Soon, through the sponsoring of extremist elements, the insurgency was dominated by Salafists of the al-Qaeda variety.

According to the DIA and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, by 2013 “there was no viable ‘moderate’ opposition to Assad” and “the U.S. was arming extremists.” Investigative journalist Seymour Hersh revealed that “although many in the American intelligence community were aware that the Syrian opposition was dominated by extremists,” still “the CIA-sponsored weapons kept coming.”

When ISIS split off from al-Qaeda and formed its own Caliphate, the U.S. continued pumping money and weapons into the insurgency, even though it was known that this aid was going into the hands of ISIS and other jihadists. U.S. allies directly supported ISIS.

U.S. officials admitted that they saw the rise of ISIS as a beneficial development that could help pressure Syrian President Bashar al-Assad to give in to America’s demands.

Leaked audio of then-Secretary of State John Kerry revealed that “we were watching… and we know that this [ISIS] was growing… We saw that Daesh was growing in strength, and we thought Assad was threatened. We thought, however, we could probably manage — that Assad would then negotiate.” As ISIS was bearing down on the capital city of Damascus, the U.S. was pressing Assad to step down to a U.S.-approved government.

Then, however, Russia intervened with its air force to prevent an ISIS takeover of the country and shifted the balance of forces against the jihadist group. ISIS’ viability as a tool to pressure the government was spent.

The arsonist and the firefighter

So, a new strategy was implemented: instead of allowing Russia and Syria to take back the territories that ISIS captured throughout the war, the U.S. would use the ISIS threat as an excuse to take those territories before they were able to. Like an arsonist who comes to put out the fire, the U.S. would now charge itself with the task of stamping out the Islamist scourge and thereby legitimize its own seizure of Syrian land. The U.S. partnered with the Kurdish militias who acted as their “boots on the ground” in this endeavor and supported them with airstrikes.

The strategy of how these areas were taken was very specific. It was designed primarily to allow ISIS to escape and redirect itself back into the fight against Syria and Russia. This was done through leaving “an escape route for militants” or through deals that were made where ISIS voluntarily agreed to cede its territory. The militants were then able to escape and go wreak havoc against America’s enemies in Syria.

Interestingly, in terms of the oil fields now being handed off to an American corporation, the U.S. barely even fought ISIS to gain control over them; ISIS simply handed them over.

Syria and Russia were quickly closing in on the then-ISIS controlled oilfields, so the U.S. oversaw a deal between the Kurds and ISIS to give up control of the city. According to veteran Middle East war correspondent Elijah Magnier, “U.S.-backed forces advanced in north-eastern areas under ISIS control, with little or no military engagement: ISIS pulled out from more than 28 villages and oil and gas fields east of the Euphrates River, surrendering these to the Kurdish-U.S. forces following an understanding these reached with the terrorist group.”

A man works a primitive refinery making crude oil into diesel in a U.S-backed Kurdish village in Rmeilan, Syria, April 6, 2018. Hussein Malla | AP

Sources quoted by the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights claimed that ISIS preferred seeing the fields in the hands of the U.S. and the Kurds rather than the Syrian government.

The rationale behind this occupation was best described by Syria expert Joshua Landis, who wrote that the areas of northern Syria under control of the Kurds are the U.S.’ “main instrument in gaining leverage” over the government. By “denying Damascus access to North Syria” and “controlling half of Syria’s energy resources” “the U.S. will be able to keep Syria poor and under-resources.” So, by “promoting Kurdish nationalism in Syria” the U.S. “hopes to deny Iran and Russia the fruits of their victory,” while “keeping Damascus weak and divided,” this serving “no purpose other than to stop trade” and to “beggar Assad and keep Syria divided, weak and poor.”

Or, in the words of Jim Jeffrey, the Trump administrations special representative for Syria who is charged with overseeing U.S. policy, the intent is to “make life as miserable as possible for that flopping cadaver of a regime and let the Russians and Iranians, who made this mess, get out of it.”

Anchoring American troops in Syria

This is the history by which an American firm was able to secure a contract to extract oil in Syria. And while the actual resources gained will not be of much value (Syria has only 0.1% of the world’s oil reserves), the presence of an American company will likely serve as a justification to maintain a U.S. military presence in the region. “It is a fiendishly clever maneuver aimed at anchoring American troops in Syria for a long time,” Stephen Kinzer explains, one that will aid the policymakers who hold “the view that the United States must remain militarily dominant in the Middle East.”

In essence, by protecting this “global ‘sprawl’ of extractive companies” the U.S. Department of Defense “provides a giant subsidy to companies operating overseas,” one that is paid for by the taxpayer, not the corporate beneficiaries. It is hard to estimate the exact amount of money the U.S. has invested into the Syria effort, though it likely is near the trillion dollar figure. The U.S. taxpayer doesn’t get anything out of that, but companies that are awarded oil contracts do.

What is perhaps most important about this lesson however is that this is just a singular example of a common occurrence that happens all over the world. A primary function of U.S. foreign policy is to “make the world safe for American businesses,” and the upwards of a thousand military bases the U.S. has stationed across the globe are set up to help protect those corporate investments. While this history is unique to Syria, similar kinds of histories are responsible for U.S. corporation’s extractive activities in other global arenas.

So, next time you see headlines about Exxon being in some kind of legal dispute with, say, Venezuela, ask yourself how was it that those companies became involved with the resources of that part of the world? More often than not, the answer will be similar to how this U.S. company got involved in Syria.

Given all of this, it perhaps might seem to be too mild of a critique to simply say that this Syria enterprise harkens back to older imperial eras where conquerors simply took what they wished: the sophistication of colonialism has indeed improved by leaps and bounds since then.

mintpressnews.com

For all his bluster, threats and unfortunate tweeting habits and boasting, up to this point U.S. President Donald Trump has proved himself up to this point to be the least bloody-minded and most war resistant leader in modern U.S. history in the 43 years since Gerald Ford left office.

Every U.S. president since then has either drastically expanded wars he inherited, launched new ones or encouraged other nations to start them: Jimmy Carter and his national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski started the process when they urged Saddam Hussein to invade Iran in 1979, unleashing a bloodbath that killed one and half million people.

Until January 2020, Trump had proved remarkably resilient in resisting one trap, manipulation and pressure from the U.S. Deep State after another. His decision to order the assassination of al-Bakr, who personally repeatedly raped and beheaded female hostages, did not cross any red line. Bakr was an outcast on the world stage and previous President Barack Obama had personally authorized the killing of Osama bin Laden, founder and head of al-Qaeda.

The killing of Abu Bakr exposed the fraudulence of hundreds of liberal pundits and think tank “experts” in the United States who all pronounced that Abu Bakr would be easily and quickly replaced.

They forgot, however, first, that Bin Laden was not replaced when he died: The franchises of Al-Qaeda around the world obviously still exist but they are now isolated orphans without a master.

Second, Al-Qaeda did not enjoy a smooth succession of leadership. His supposed successor Abu Ibrahim al-Hashimi al-Qurashi has so far been a nonentity. Some analysts have expressed skepticism whether he even exists at all. ISIS, like al-Qaeda before it appears to have been a franchise based on extremely specific charismatic leadership with the founding group rapidly losing cohesion and credibility even before its founder was eliminated.

Contrary to the mouthing of America’s endless armies of chattering pundit grasshoppers, decapitation theory works in hunting down and eliminating the leaders of terrorist groups. Russia’s security services proved this in the long, hard fighting to eliminate such murderous groups in Chechnya and the Syrian armed forces have proved it again. It turns out that you can fight successful against extremist ideas when you know how to do so.

The Saudis applied decapitation theory repeatedly against Al-Qaeda in Arabia (AQIA). To be “honored” with the leadership of AQIA in the first decade of this century was a death sentence.

Thus, we have repeatedly seen over the past 20 years that non-state radical Sunni Muslim revolutionary Islamist movements, while capable of flaring up very fast, have no stability and staying power if resolutely confronted and isolated on the international scene.

The United States and its allies predictably boast arrogantly about how they destroyed ISIS. However, real credit for the destruction of its genocidal reign of terror across half the territories of Iraq and Syria goes to the Syrian Army, its Hezbollah allies, the armed forces and intelligence services of Iran and the Russian air force.

Russian tactical air support for Syrian ground troops operated skillfully and effectively to smash al-Baghdadi’s vicious and passionate but poorly coordinated forces.

General Soleimani was a vital figure in ensuring the smooth running of this coalition. Far from being the arch terrorist of the world as Trump proclaimed, he was therefore the arch enemy and most successful opponent of the worst and most dangerous terrorist organization on the planet.

It is therefore no wonder that ISIS surviving groups rejoiced when he was killed in a U.S. drone strike at Baghdad International Airport last month.

Soleimani was certainly a dedicated opponent of U.S. and Israeli influence across the Middle East. But his death will not benefit Washington and Jerusalem. On the contrary, it is certain to backfire catastrophically on them.

In Iranian terms, Soleimani was a pragmatic moderate who acted as an ally of the United States when it was in his country’s interests to do so in two major wars.

Iranian intelligence and cooperation played a major role in so quickly and smoothly toppling the Taliban regime in Afghanistan in November 2001.

In 2014, ISIS might well have swept to Baghdad and occupied all of Iraq despite the desperate use of U.S. air power if Soleimani had not committed Iranian forces, assets and allies in such determination to destroy it.

Finally, Soleimani’s tremendous prestige as his country’s preeminent general, strategist and military hero has now been eliminated. This will not aid “moderates” in Iran. Instead, it is already strengthen the passionate religious and eschatological Twelver elements in the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps.

In killing Soleimani, Trump destroyed a responsible Iranian leader who fought Islamist extremism and genocide in Syria and pursued cautious pragmatic policies at home. Now Iran’s revolutionary End of Days extremists will likely take advantage of his elimination to seize power and take over: What follows will not be pretty.

In a series of tweets from the BBC’s jihadism-expert, Mina al-Lami, she explains why ISIS is ecstatic that Soleimani is dead — they say that it’s because the killing of Soleimani is a strong display from God that God is wreaking revenge against the opponents of jihad. Her tweets show photos of some of these ISIS publications, paraphrase from them, and place their statements into a broader context of Islamic history and of the ancient split between fundamentalist Sunni Islam, on the one hand, and all of Shiite Islam (including especially Iran’s), on the other.

Here are highlights from this string of tweets, by Mina al-Lami, the BBC’s expert on jihadist movements. She makes clear, “Views are mine.” These statements do not come from BBC, but from herself, to explain why ISIS is so happy that Solomeini is dead:

BBC ISIS Specialist Mina al-Lami
Jihadism specialist; Editorial Lead/team manager @BBC Monitoring (http://monitoring.bbc.co.uk) Views are mine.
https://twitter.com/Minalami/status/1215640123234226176
@Minalami
Jan 10
More

This is the typical position of jihadists in such situations: they gloat and pray that God weakens their enemies’ at the hands of one another, for the benefit of jihadists[:]

IS gloats at death of Soleimani in first comment on US-Iran crisis
Islamic State group (ISIS) has welcomed the death of Iranian commander Qasem Soleimani, portraying his demise in a U.S. drone strike on 3 Janua…
6:22 AM – 10 Jan 2020
https://twitter.com/Minalami/status/1215558265272197122

Thread: In the editorial of its weekly paper #AlNaba, #ISIS welcomes the death of #Soleimani in a U.S. drone strike, but is careful not to openly credit the U.S. for his demise but portrays it as an act of God to support IS and Muslims more broadly.
12:57 AM – 10 Jan 2020
https://twitter.com/Minalami/status/1215558269588201472

It welcomes IS enemies being busy fighting each other, saying it distracts them away from “Muslims” and drains their energy which, it adds, benefits jihadists.
12:57 AM – 10 Jan 2020
https://twitter.com/Minalami/status/1215558272272478210

It says, thanking God, U.S. and Iran are today busy targeting each other “indifferent to the impact it has on their mutual fight against the Islamic State”.
12:57 AM – 10 Jan 2020
https://twitter.com/Minalami/status/1215558273581166598

Elsewhere in al-Naba, IS factually reports on U.S. suspension of its operations against IS in Iraq, and notes “European” concern about the impact it may have on empowering IS
12:57 AM – 10 Jan 2020
https://twitter.com/Minalami/status/1215558274952593408

This is the typical position of jihadists in such situations: they gloat and pray that God weakens their enemies’ at the hands of one another, for the benefit of jihadists
12:57 AM – 10 Jan 2020

—

MY COMMENTARY ON THIS:

Though, generally in the press, jihadism is treated as being just a movement of some crazed Muslims, that common portrayal is a serious distortion of the reality, which goes back to 1744, when the fundamentalist Islamic cleric Muhammad ibn Abd al Wahhab signed a blood oath with the aspiring political leader and conqueror Muhammad ibn Saud, to form a new Islamic nation, starting in the desert of what now is Saudi Arabia. It was to be a fusion in which the laws come from God as based upon the Quran, and the government applies those laws, so that, in effect, the Quran is to become the constitution for Muslim countries. That’s Sharia Law — law derived from the Quran and from its expert interpreters as determined by the Wahhabist clergy. Wahhab hated Shiites and considered them to be the worst and most hypocritical fake Muslims, followers of distorters of the will of God as it had been expressed by God’s Prophet Mohammed in the Quran. Whereas in this new nation, the government would be ruled by descendants from Muhammad ibn Saud, the clergy would be followers of Muhammad ibn Wahhab. Part of their shared oath was to convert or kill all Shiites. This is the most extreme exclusionist version of Islam. In other countries than Saudi Arabia, it is known not as Wahhabism, but as Salafism, or ancestral Islam, because it is claimed to represent the purest interpretation of God’s laws. The greatest threat to it, in that view, is Shia Islam, which must be wiped out in order to then become enabled to take over the world for God by going after all other infidels.

On 9 June 2017, I headlined “All Islamic Terrorism Is Perpetrated by Fundamentalist Sunnis, Except Terrorism Against Israel” and listed there the 54 most prominently reported instances of Islamic terrorism, from 11 September 2001 to then — a 16-year period — and all of them except for the ones that were directed against Israel, were by fundamentalist-Sunni groups. (Israel also was hit by some Sunni groups, but all other countries only by Sunni groups.) Not all of those terrorist groups were Wahhabist, but all were either Wahhabist or Salafist.

ISIS is the most extreme of all fundamentalist Sunni groups. One of its main differences from Al Qaeda is that whereas Al Qaeda leadership try to restrain their members from attacking Shiites, and aim to achieve as wide support from the world’s Muslims as they possibly can while still advancing the jihadist cause, there are no such restraints placed upon the followers of ISIS regarding Shiites, all of whom are instead to be treated as infidels, and either killed or else converted.

Iranian General Soleimani was among the leading, if not the very top, of all generals worldwide, leading the fight against ISIS, not only in Iraq, but as far away as in India. This is the reason why ISIS lauds what Trump did.

US President Donald Trump boasted last Sunday that American Special Forces raided a base in Idlib Province, which purportedly led to al-Baghdadi’s death from a suicide explosion. The Pentagon said six other people were killed in the operation. In addition, two of al-Baghdadi’s children were killed when the IS leader blew himself up as American troops were closing in, according to Trump’s own dramatic telling of the event.

Curiously, Trump gave prominent thanks to Russia for its help in the logistics of carrying out the attack.

However, Russian MOD spokesman Major General Igor Konashenkov has subsequently stated that Russia was not involved in the raid, as Trump had claimed. He said that Russian flight data indicated that there were no US air strikes in the vicinity of the declared raid. The spokesman went further and remarked that there were doubts as to whether the assassination mission even took place in the way that Washington is publicly claiming.

Another anomaly in the official US account is that the base where al-Baghdadi was purportedly hiding out is in a location known to be a stronghold for another al-Qaeda affiliate that is a sworn enemy of their perceived rival jihadists belonging to IS. Why and how then was the IS leader able to maintain a base surrounded by enemy jihadists?

According to the New York Times, it is claimed that al-Baghdadi paid $67,000 to the rival terror group, Hurras al-Din, for protection. Somehow that sounds a dubious explanation.

A glaring omission in US media coverage of the alleged killing of al-Baghdadi is the historical background as to who he was and how his former so-called caliphate came into being straddling Iraq and Syria.

There is copious evidence that Iraqi-born al-Baghdadi was recruited by American intelligence while imprisoned during the US war on Iraq in the mid- to late-2000s. He was held in the notorious Abu Ghraib US-run torture prison, but subsequently was released by the Americans despite his known jihadist past. It was around 2012 that the Obama administration was covertly mobilizing and weaponizing jihadi assets to carry out its clandestine war for regime change against the Syrian government. It is believed that al-Baghdadi was a key CIA asset for the US dirty war in Syria, even though Washington was proclaiming its involvement in Syria was to “defeat IS” and other terror groups.

It is entirely plausible that US intelligence assets are “terminated” whenever it is politically convenient and when it is calculated that their usefulness has expired.

Trump and the mainstream US media depiction of a spectacular success in exterminating a feared terror chief is almost certainly a distortion of reality and events.

The way Trump in particular has crowed about the purported operation suggests he is seeking a boost to his re-election chances next year. The thuggish rhetoric of killing the IS leader “like a dog” smacks of Trump trying to project an image of a tough president.

More generally, the event has afforded US media to proclaim the virtue of American military power in apparently bringing a notorious renegade “to justice”.

The timing could not be more important. The nearly eight-year war in Syria has exposed the criminality of Washington and its NATO partners for fueling carnage. By contrast, the Syrian government and its Russian and Iranian allies have been vindicated in their long-held claims that a criminal US-backed aggression using terrorist proxies has been thwarted.

When Trump abandoned the Kurdish militants last month, the move was condemned for throwing Syria into further turmoil. It was Russia’s deft diplomacy which managed to contain the situation. At that point, Washington’s international credibility was scraping the barrel of duplicity and malign responsibility for conflict and chaos in Syria.

Hence, a sensational operation resembling “a movie” – as Trump put it – was a timely public relations remedy for Washington’s badly tarnished image. Ostensibly, “taking out” a terrorist leader gives the US the means to renew its propaganda narrative that it is “fighting against terrorism” rather than the reality of using terrorism for its regime-change wars and other imperialist objectives.

Was Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi killed last weekend? It is not the first time his “death” has been reported by US forces who have made similar claims in past years. There are too many questions and discrepancies to take Washington’s version of events as accurate. More plausibly, it was a carefully contrived propaganda stunt to burnish Washington’s disgraced image.

One thing for sure, however, is that the US will continue to use terror proxies and assets into the future in order to achieve its pernicious geopolitical aims. There are plenty more “al-Baghdadis” to be cultivated and orchestrated by Washington as it sows chaos and destruction in the Middle East and beyond for its selfish interests.