Both the Spanish Publico and the American Financial Times note that, in spite of Washington’s official rhetoric about the fight against terrorism, radical militants continue receiving new weapons, money and supplies, which has already resulted in a considerable boost in their morale that allowed ISIS to launch a counter-offensive. Weapons and funds keep flowing from states like Saudi Arabia and Qatar, which incriminates the United States big time. The Pentagon and the CIA in recent years have sent truckloads of weapons to Syria, while saying that they were designated to the members of the so-called “moderate opposition”, yet time and time again those weapons end up in the hands of radical militants, affiliated with the Al-Nusra Front, Al-Qaeda and ISIS. And Washington has been fully aware of this fact, Western observers say.
At the beginning of this year, journalists of the French Le Monde published the results of their own investigation of the US inaction in Syria, which allegedly remains one of the main fronts of Western fight against ISIS. They, in particular, say that sources in the so-called “Syrian opposition” say that back in 2014 Americans were warned about the rapid rise of ISIS and the Al-Nusra Front, however Washington was in no hurry to act. Therefore, it is not surprising that various media source across the globe say that the US created “perfect preconditions” for the rise and consequent strengthening of those fanatical and bloodthirsty jihadi movements in the Middle East that slaughtered thousands of civilians.
The prominent alternative media site CounterPunch would note:
The Obama Administration was fully aware of the consequences of its actions in Syria but it kept pursuing the policy of funding, training, arming and internationally legitimizing the so-called “Syrian Opposition”. A small fraction of it was comprised of defected Syrian soldiers, which goes by the name of free Syria army, but a vast majority has been Sunni jihadists who were generously funded, trained and armed by the alliance of Western powers , Turkey, Jordan and the Gulf States.
Further still, Republican Michael McCaul, the chairman of the Homeland Security Committee, accused the US administration of the failed policies in the Middle East policy. In an interview with ABC he underlined the fact that the architect of this foreign policy, Hillary Clinton, was responsible for the rise and formation of ISIS in Iraq and Syria.
Speaking for the Fox News, the former New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani announced that the former secretary of state is responsible for the rise of ISIS. Moreover, he underlined that Hillary Clinton could be considered a founding member of ISIS, since Clinton was part of the Obama administration when she forced the Shiites to make a choice by not intervening in Syria at the proper time.
The fact that the cancer of terrorism keeps spreading due to the Obama administration actions has been noted by The Washington Post:
If he had attacked the Islamic State cancer early, Obama could have stopped it from spreading in the first place. He did nothing, while the cancer grew in Syria and then spread in Iraq.
Now the cancer has spread and metastasized across the world. According to a recent CNN analysis, since declaring its caliphate in 2014, the Islamic State has carried out 90 attacks in 21 countries outside of Iraq and Syria that have killed 1,390 people and injured more than 2,000 others. The Islamic State has a presence in more than a dozen countries.
Al-Qaeda has also regained lost ground in Yemen, the Syrian al Qaeda affiliate Jabhat al Nusra poses one of the most significant long-term threats of any Salafi-jihadi group and is much more dangerous than the ISIS model in the long run. Overall, Gen. Jack Keane recently testified that al-Qaeda has “grown fourfold in the last five years.”
So it looks like an appropriate time to demand the Obama administration to confess where did the billions allocated on the so-called “War on Terror” went?
Jean Périer is an independent researcher and analyst and a renowned expert on the Near and Middle East, exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”
