Last night Obama announced limited air strikes to slow the advance of ISIL militants and help members of the Yazidi religious minority group who were forced to flee into a mountainous region in the north of Iraq to avoid slaughter.
However, the administration has failed to put pressure on several Persian Gulf states that are directly responsible for helping ISIL gain a foothold in Iraq in the first place.
As the Daily Beast’s Josh Rogin documents, “The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS or ISIL), now threatening Baghdad, was funded for years by wealthy donors in Kuwait, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia, three US allies that have dual agendas in the war on terror.”
In addition to funding itself through criminal activity and punitive taxes imposed on the local population on pain of death, ISIL relies on a steady stream of income from countries that have bankrolled extremist for years yet have faced zero backlash from successive White House administrations. Even evidence of direct Saudi involvement in 9/11 failed to generate any reconsideration of who America calls its friends.
“Everybody knows the money is going through Kuwait,” said Andrew Tabler, senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.
“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.”
State backing for ISIL, now the wealthiest terror group in the world, prompted Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki to point the finger directly at Saudi Arabia and Qatar during a France 24 television interview. “I accuse them of inciting and encouraging the terrorist movements. I accuse them of supporting them politically and in the media, of supporting them with money and by buying weapons for them,” said al-Maliki.
The White House is directly responsible for the spread of ISIL militants having backed other rebel groups in Syria which were once allied with and then taken over by ISIL, the InfoWars writes in an article.
Indeed, some evidence suggests that the US even trained some of the extremist who went on to join ISIL at a secret base in Jordan in 2012.
Aaron Klein was told by Jordanian officials that, “dozens of future ISIL members were trained at the time as part of covert aid to the insurgents targeting the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in Syria.”
Yet another US ally – Turkey – also trained ISIL militants at a location in the vicinity of Incirlik Air Base near Adana.
According to a source close to Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, the Obama administration turned a blind eye to the fact that Turkey was equipping and then sending fighters to Syria before they went on to Iraq. The source even went on to accuse the White House of being “an accomplice” in the ISIL takeover of major Iraqi cities.
Whether or not the “humanitarian” air strikes on Iraq are really aimed at stopping the terror wrought by ISIL, or are merely part of a ploy to create a justification for a long-awaited attack on Syria, the White House itself, as well as some of America’s closest supposed allies, all share some of the blame in aiding the growth of ISIL in the region.
SHI/SHI