By Michael Krieger at Liberty Blitzkrieg
But in the years they were getting started, a key component of ISIS’s support came from wealthy individuals in the Arab Gulf States of Kuwait, Qatar and Saudi Arabia. Sometimes the support came with the tacit nod of approval from those regimes; often, it took advantage of poor money laundering protections in those states, according to officials, experts, and leaders of the Syrian opposition, which is fighting ISIS as well as the regime.
“Everybody knows the money is going through Kuwait and that it’s coming from the Arab Gulf,” said Andrew Tabler, senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Studies. “Kuwait’s banking system and its money changers have long been a huge problem because they are a major conduit for money to extremist groups in Syria and now Iraq.”
Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has been publicly accusing Saudi Arabia and Qatar of funding ISIS for months. Several reports have detailed how private Gulf funding to various Syrian rebel groups has splintered the Syrian opposition and paved the way for the rise of groups like ISIS and others.
– From the excellent Daily Beast article, America’s Allies Are Funding ISIS
What is happening is very bad, and it is the direct result of the idiotic children calling the foreign policy shots in Washington D.C. Ever since 9/11, everything about the status quo’s decision making has been irrational and dangerous. From the haphazard and ill-conceived wars abroad, to the decimation of the Bill of Rights at home. We need to reign these sociopaths in and change direction immediately. What is happening in Iraq is just further proof that the current Republican/Democrat crony power structure running things needs to swept away for good, never to return.
I could go all the way back to George W. Bush’s completely irresponsible, insane and inhumane invasion of Iraq in 2003 to set the stage, but in the interest of brevity, I’ll start with the recent call to war in Syria. It was that conflict, and Saudi Arabia’s aggressive push to get us involved on the side of al-Qaeda, that really made see the geopolitical dynamics in the Middle East in a different light.
In case you forgot, the Obama Administration seemed bizarrely eager to intervene in Syria on the side of al-Qaeda (yes, the same group we have destroyed the Constitution to defeat) right off the bat. Of course, the Democrat war hawks would never admit that our allies in this conflict were al-Qaeda, but due to the alternative media, this reality was quickly exposed. I wrote several articles on the subject, the first all the way back in December 2012, almost a year before the war drums really started beating, titled: Why is the U.S. Allied with Al Qaeda in Syria? I wrote:
I have made comments about this on many occasions over the past several months, as even mainstream media outlets have covered the fact that our allies, the “Syrian rebels,” actually have a large “Al Qaeda” element to them (whatever the hell that means).
To me this is just further proof that our foreign policy is a complete joke, run by a bunch of insane chicken hawks in Washington D.C.
Then at the height of government propaganda in September 2013, I published a piece titled: Meet the Rebels. In it I wrote:
This Syrian civil war is extremely sad and tragic, but it has become abundantly clear that there are no “good guys” when it comes to the main factions fighting. The idea that we would provide aid to a side that is allied with al-Qaeda, the terrorist group used to justify the destruction of civil liberties domestically, is beyond absurd.
As we see from today’s New York Times article, these rebel factions are not fighting for peace or democracy, but more often than not for simple bloodthirsty revenge. Some of the factions are actively trying to form an Islamist state, while others are calling for the extermination of an entire group of people based solely on the fact they are part of a particular religious group, the Alawites.
Ultimately, alternative media was able to spread the truth about our “terrorist” allies in Syria, and we were able to prevent another war. However, this is where it got really strange for me. I noticed that the Saudis were infuriated with the U.S. for not getting involved on the side of al-Qaeda. A little to furious in fact. This is when I started to speculate that al-Qaeda is quite likely a state-sponsored terrorist group, potentially run by Saudi Arabia itself. So in other words, could al-Qaeda have a similar relationship to the Saudi royal family that Hezbollah has to Iran? Certainly seems possible. In December of 2013 I wrote an article titled: Two Congressmen Push for Release of 28-Page Document Showing Saudi Involvement in 9/11. I wrote:
I have publicly questioned the official story of 9/11 for many years. Of course, I’ve never claimed to know exactly what happened on that fateful day, but I’ve maintained that the official story stinks to high heaven. I always found it beyond bizarre that the U.S. launched a war against Iraq following the terrorist attacks, yet never really questioned the potential (and obvious) Saudi involvement, despite the glaring fact that 15 of the 19 hijackers were Saudi citizens.
Saudi suspicion crept even further into my mind following their anger at the U.S. for not going to war in Syria, in what now seems likely to have been a Saudi provocation to begin with.
Disturbingly, it appears the highest levels of the Bush Administration knew all too well about such a link and intentionally covered it up. The Obama Administration continues the coverup. The Saudi link is made clear in a 28-page, redacted classified document from 2002, which has now been seen by two Congressmen who were “absolutely shocked” by what they read. They are now leading a campaign to have these documents released and we must all support their efforts.
So with that already in my mind, now we see that al-Qaeda is making moves in Iraq. If you think that this is some ragtag bunch of extremists that suddenly emerged from caves, you might be a moron. These groups clearly have state(s) backing. So which states are backing them? The UK Independent came out with an article on June 12 titled, Iraq crisis: Sunni caliphate has been bankrolled by Saudi Arabia. In it we learn that:
So after the grotesquerie of the Taliban and Osama bin Laden and 15 of the 19 suicide killers of 9/11, meet Saudi Arabia’s latest monstrous contribution to world history: the Islamist Sunni caliphate of Iraq and the Levant, conquerors of Mosul and Tikrit – and Raqqa in Syria – and possibly Baghdad, and the ultimate humiliators of Bush and Obama.
From Aleppo in northern Syria almost to the Iraqi-Iranian border, the jihadists of Isis and sundry other groupuscules paid by the Saudi Wahhabis – and by Kuwaiti oligarchs – now rule thousands of square miles.
Apart from Saudi Arabia’s role in this catastrophe, what other stories are to be hidden from us in the coming days and weeks? The story of Iraq and the story of Syria are the same – politically, militarily and journalistically: two leaders, one Shia, the other Alawite, fighting for the existence of their regimes against the power of a growing Sunni Muslim international army.
While the Americans support the wretched Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and his elected Shia government in Iraq, the same Americans still demand the overthrow of Bashar al-Assad of Syria and his regime, even though both leaders are now brothers-in-arms against the victors of Mosul and Tikrit.
No one will care now how many hundreds of thousands of Iraqis have been slaughtered since 2003 because of the fantasies of Bush and Blair. These two men destroyed Saddam’s regime to make the world safe and declared that Iraq was part of a titanic battle against “Islamofascism”. Well, they lost. Remember that the Americans captured and recaptured Mosul to crush the power of Islamist fighters. They fought for Fallujah twice. And both cities have now been lost again to the Islamists. The armies of Bush and Blair have long gone home, declaring victory.
Under Obama, Saudi Arabia will continue to be treated as a friendly “moderate” in the Arab world, even though its royal family is founded upon the Wahhabist convictions of the Sunni Islamists in Syria and Iraq – and even though millions of its dollars are arming those same fighters. Thus does Saudi power both feed the monster in the deserts of Syria and Iraq and cosy up to the Western powers that protect it.
The Daily Beast followed this article up two days later with the piece, America’s Allies Are Funding ISIS. In that article we learn that:
The extremist group that is threatening the existence of the Iraqi state was built and grown for years with the help of elite donors from American supposed allies in the Persian Gulf region. There, the threat of Iran, Assad, and the Sunni-Shiite sectarian war trumps the U.S. goal of stability and moderation in the region.
It’s an ironic twist, especially for donors in Kuwait (who, to be fair, back a wide variety of militias). ISIS has aligned itself with remnants of the Baathist regime once led by Saddam Hussein. Back in 1990, the U.S. attacked Iraq in order to liberate Kuwait from Hussein’s clutches. Now Kuwait is helping the rise of his successors.
As ISIS takes over town after town in Iraq, they are acquiring money and supplies including American made vehicles, arms, and ammunition. The group reportedly scored $430 million this week when they looted the main bank in Mosul. They reportedly now have a stream of steady income sources, including from selling oil in the Northern Syrian regions they control, sometimes directly to the Assad regime.
But in the years they were getting started, a key component of ISIS’s support came from wealthy individuals in the Arab Gulf States of Kuwait, Qatar and Saudi Arabia. Sometimes the support came with the tacit nod of approval from those regimes; often, it took advantage of poor money laundering protections in those states, according to officials, experts, and leaders of the Syrian opposition, which is fighting ISIS as well as the regime.
“Everybody knows the money is going through Kuwait and that it’s coming from the Arab Gulf,” said Andrew Tabler, senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Studies. “Kuwait’s banking system and its money changers have long been a huge problem because they are a major conduit for money to extremist groups in Syria and now Iraq.”
Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has been publicly accusing Saudi Arabia and Qatar of funding ISIS for months. Several reports have detailed how private Gulf funding to various Syrian rebel groups has splintered the Syrian opposition and paved the way for the rise of groups like ISIS and others.
Gulf donors support ISIS, the Syrian branch of al Qaeda called the al Nusrah Front, and other Islamic groups fighting on the ground in Syria because they feel an obligation to protect Sunnis suffering under the atrocities of the Assad regime. Many of these backers don’t trust or like the American backed moderate opposition, which the West has refused to provide significant arms to.
When confronted with the problem, Gulf leaders often justify allowing their Salafi constituents to fund Syrian extremist groups by pointing back to what they see as a failed U.S. policy in Syria and a loss of credibility after President Obama reneged on his pledge to strike Assad after the regime used chemical weapons.
There we go. More evidence the Saudis were probably behind the chemical attacks in Syria, and now they are making a more aggressive play in Iraq.
That’s what Prince Bandar bin Sultan, head of Saudi intelligence since 2012 and former Saudi ambassador in Washington, reportedly told Secretary of State John Kerry when Kerry pressed him on Saudi financing of extremist groups earlier this year. Saudi Arabia has retaken a leadership role in past months guiding help to the Syrian armed rebels, displacing Qatar, which was seen as supporting some of the worst of the worst organizations on the ground.
So think about all of this. We face an almost impossible foreign policy choice in Iraq at the moment, particularly from a U.S. government propaganda standpoint. We can do nothing and allow insane, barbaric Sunni religious radicals take over huge sections of Syria and Iraq, or we can form an alliance with the nation government propagandists have spent decades demonizing to several generations.So in the course of less than a year, the Obama Administration has proposed an alliance with al-Qaeda in Syria and now an alliance with Iran to fight those very same forces.As the always excellent Martin Armstrong put it:ISIS is becoming a proto-state that is its own sovereign entity in the mind of its forces. The brutal brand of Shariah law enforced by ISIS includes beheadings and amputations. It appears that they are turning away from trying to overthrow Syria and instead are just carving out a new country from both Iraq and Syria.While the official story has been attributing their funding to the seizure of banks, this does not explain their arms to seize the banks. That funding came from the USA and Saudi Arabia. This is the bread-dead foreign policy that is coming back in spades. The more people play demigod with power grabs and manipulations, the greater the chaos they are creating that will only set up forces that will confront the very people who have funded such groups.Indeed, based on this map, it does seem that al-Qaeda (Saudi) is forming a new state that spans Syria and Iraq:
This is what happens when you have inept, sociopathic children running a global empire.
http://libertyblitzkrieg.com/2014/06/16/americas-disastrous-foreign-policy-my-thoughts-on-iraq/
