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<h1>The Powers Behind The Islamic State</h1>
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<span class="cat-date-line3"> <a
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<span class="cat-date-line4">By The Real News, <a
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August 25th, 2014</span><br>
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<p><span style="font-size: 130%; line-height: 130%;">JESSICA
DESVARIEUX, TRNN PRODUCER: Welcome to The Real News Network.
I’m Jessica Desvarieux in Baltimore. We’re continuing our
coverage of the ongoing turmoil in Iraq. Now with the rise of
the extremist group the Islamic State, the drums of war in
Iraq are beating louder and louder in the mainstream press. </span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 130%; line-height: 130%;">I’m pleased
to welcome our guest, Nafeez Ahmed, to help us put things in
perspective. Nafeez is a best-selling author, investigative
journalist, and international security scholar who writes
regularly for <i>The Guardian</i>. He has a new novel out
called <i>Zero Point</i>, which he says anticipated the Iraq
crisis that’s going on right now. Thanks for joining us,
Nafeez.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 130%; line-height: 130%;">NAFEEZ AHMED,
JOURNALIST, THE GUARDIAN: Thanks, Jessica.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 130%; line-height: 130%;">DESVARIEUX:
So, Nafeez, there’s ISIL, there’s ISIS, there’s the Islamic
State–IS some people are calling it. But they’re all the same
group, right? Can you sort of give us a sense of the evolution
of this extremist group and how they get started?</span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 130%; line-height: 130%;">AHMED: Well,
the origins of the group come from militant groups affiliated
to al-Qaeda that are operating in Iraq and Syria. And that’s
where it gets murky, because, as we know, these groups were
kind of engaged in all kinds of militant activity fighting the
Assad regime. They were also active in responding to U.S.
occupation after the 2003 invasion. So there’s a mix of
different actors involved. </span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 130%; line-height: 130%;">So in Iraq we
had elements of even the Ba’ath party and ex-Saddam supporters
who were actually–according to many reports, they were being
recruited by these al-Qaeda militants. And in Syria we had
this increasing kind of–the borders of separation between the
Iraqi troops and the Syria groups, it became increasingly much
more porous, because they were fighting back and forth, they
were crossing borders. </span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 130%; line-height: 130%;">And what
makes it more murky is how these groups really became as kind
of virulent and kind of influential as they have, which is
really the kind of–you know, you follow the money. And you
follow the money, we’re looking at the involvement of the Gulf
states, which have really empowered these groups over time and
increased their ability to operate. They’ve increased their
arms, logistical trading. So we’ve had the Saudis engaged in
funding these groups in Syria.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 130%; line-height: 130%;">DESVARIEUX:
Do we have proof of this?</span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 130%; line-height: 130%;">AHMED: We
have absolute proof. I mean, it’s really a matter of public
record. It’s come out from–you’ve got a range of different
forms of evidence, from documents produced by Westpoint
military analysts to investigative reports by journalists on
the ground writing for publications like <i>The New York
Times</i>, <i>Washington Post</i>. So it’s very clear. And
we’ve had semiofficial and official confirmations from the
CIA, from people in the State Department, other people in the
Pentagon, even from British officials that have been involved
in coordinating the Gulf states and supplying these kinds of
virulent groups that we know are affiliated to al-Qaeda to
basically topple Assad. </span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 130%; line-height: 130%;">And that’s
obviously had a direct blowback effect in Iraq, because these
very same groups that were being supported are now streaming
across the border, and they’ve now formed this kind of
breakaway group, which is styled off as ISIS or ISIL or
whatever and now have called themselves the Islamic State. And
what makes it really more disturbing is, going deeper into
that evidence of the role of the Saudis and the Qataris and
Kuwait, which has been confirmed by various different sources,
is really the way in which the U.S. and the U.K. have overseen
that process. And that’s something which isn’t so much
acknowledged in the mainstream, that actually Britain and the
United States were involved in knowingly kind of facilitating
the support to these groups, despite knowing their links to
al-Qaeda calling back as early as 2009.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 130%; line-height: 130%;">DESVARIEUX:
Wow. How did they support these groups?</span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 130%; line-height: 130%;">AHMED: So we
had–you must remember the big batch of files that was obtained
by WikiLeaks from the private intelligence company Strategic
Forecasting, Stratfor.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 130%; line-height: 130%;">DESVARIEUX:
Yes.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 130%; line-height: 130%;">AHMED: So
that batch of files contains some really interesting
correspondence, including correspondence where some senior
executives at Stratfor were describing meetings that they had
had with senior Pentagon officials and senior U.S. army
officials where those officials openly described how U.S.
special forces and British special forces had been operating
in Syria long before the kind of major, major civil unrest
that kind of really broke out, and they had been operating in
kind of supporting these groups. And it was very clearly
stated by these officers at the time–and the emails are there,
people can check them out, and I’ve written about them in some
of my <i>Guardian</i> articles and some of my other articles
elsewhere–that they quite explicitly said that this is about
destabilizing the Assad regime from within. They had even
explored the possibility of airstrikes on targets. But the
favored policy was using these groups as a proxy force to
destabilize Assad’s regime.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 130%; line-height: 130%;">DESVARIEUX:
Remind us again: why do they want to destabilize Assad so
badly?</span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 130%; line-height: 130%;">AHMED: So
there’s a lot of different kind of ways of looking at this,
and I think it’s difficult to kind of pinpoint which one is
necessarily the most important one. But one of the ones that I
focused on is the role that Assad has played in kind of
cozying up to Russia, allowing Russia to kind of develop a
foothold in the region. And that’s kind of tied to this
increasing pipeline geopolitics in the region. So you’ve got
this interesting kind of geopolitical jockeying over pipelines
running across Syria from this field that is a kind of
disputed field that Iran has access to and also Qatar has
access to. Now, the exact border of that field is a little bit
disputed, and both Iran and Qatar have been trying to
kickstart ways to get that field into production. The
pipelines would cross Syria and they would basically, ideally,
supply Europe. It’s a very ambitious project. </span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 130%; line-height: 130%;">Some people
have raised lots of questions about whether these projects are
really just pipedreams, in a sense. You know, are they viable,
really, given the politics of the region? And this kind of
stuff has been going on for years. They’ve been discussing
these kind of ideas. But there was definitely real efforts to
get these projects kind of off the table. So Iran signed a
memorandum with Syria. Qatar had been having real negotiations
with Saudi and Turkey and other countries. So these were kind
of two competing pipeline routes. And, obviously, the U.S.
favored the one which would involve Qatar and it wasn’t very
happy with the one that involved Iran and kind of would favor
Russia. The United States has for long time wanted to ensure
that it kind of sidelines Russia and Iran in all of these
various pipeline projects. So when Iran signed this kind of
memorandum with Assad, that was kind of considered like a
major kind of strategic setback, and something kind of needed
to be done. </span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 130%; line-height: 130%;">And apart
from that, there were also many other–there was generally
other kind of geopolitical issues apart from the fact that
Russia has a military base there. There’s also issues such as
the role that Assad has played in relation to the Middle East
conflict, the support that they’ve provided to Hamas, their
relationship with the Iranians, and that whole general thing.
So there’s this general perception of Syria being this part of
the so-called axis of evil in a way. You know. So the whole
pipeline thing kind of accelerated that fear, I think, and
made them want to do something. And they had a lot of
indications that with different crises that Syria is going
through domestically–economic crisis, there was a widespread
drought due to climate change that was accelerating–and we
even have State Department cables, also leaked by WikiLeaks,
where literally we have State Department officials talking
about how there is going to be civil unrest in Syria very
soon, very likely, because of food prices and the strain on
food due to these droughts and due to the effect on farmers.
So they knew something was going to kick off in Syria. They
knew that there was going to be popular–kind of popular
uprising of some kind. And it seems that they planned to kind
of exploit that, to get some of these jihadist guys in there,
hijack that movement, direct it in a way that they felt that
they could control. But, of course, as we’ve seen, it’s kind
of gone out of control.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 130%; line-height: 130%;">DESVARIEUX:
It is out of control. And, I mean, I actually have been
personally affected by some of this, because I shared on the
program earlier than I lost my friend, Jim Foley. He was a
journalist who was covering the Syrian conflict. And these men
who beheaded him–let’s not mince words here–they’re not good
guys. I mean, these are extremists, fanatics that are
distorting Islam to rise to power. And there are going to be
folks out there who are going to say, you know what, Nafeez,
we need to figure out a way to stop these guys. You know,
we’re hearing more aggressive language by politicians saying
that we–possibly even boots on the ground, things of that
nature. So there’s sort of this impulse to use aggression in
order to combat some of this. What would you say to folks like
that based on the context?</span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 130%; line-height: 130%;">AHMED: Well,
the first thing, I think that is very important to grasp: the
role that our governments have played in fomenting the crisis
that we see. The rise of ISIS was kind of predictable, and
it’s something that some analysts–analysts have warned about
civil war in Iraq for years. I guess the accelerated nature of
what we’re seeing, most people haven’t anticipated that, but
it was predictable. And when we look at the way in which we’ve
been funding some of these groups, it’s kind of ironic that we
have the very same people now calling for boots on the ground,
calling for a response, are the same people that have been
very loud in their support for arming some of the most
virulent of elements of these rebel groups. And even though
the Obama administration, for instance, has given a lot of lip
service, saying that we only want to fund, you know, the kind
of moderate rebels and so on and so forth–but the Obama
administration has actively coordinated the financing that has
come from the Gulf states to the very types of groups that
they historically have always favored, which is the most
virulent jihadist al-Qaeda affiliated organizations. So there
is a contradiction here in what we’re being told now and the
way in which policymakers have kind of created this crisis and
now not taken responsibility for this crisis. </span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 130%; line-height: 130%;">And there is
an argument to be made, I think–and it’s unclear to–you know,
I wouldn’t put this forward as a kind of a firm interpretation
of what’s happening, ’cause I think there are many different
actors and many different interests at play, but if we look at
some of the reports that we’ve had over the last few years of
the plans for the region, there are certainly elements in the
Pentagon of a neoconservative persuasion who have seen the
rise of this kind of group in a way as a boon to reconfigure
the Middle East. Now, the evidence for that comes from a range
of quite credible sources. So one of the sources I looked at
was a publicly available RAND report that was published a
couple of years. It was commissioned by the U.S. army. And it
was a kind of a thought piece. It was a policy briefing. It
was looking at policy options for the United States in
essentially reconfiguring the Middle East and exploring how to
counter terrorism. But those policy options were pretty
Machiavellian in some ways, very, very–I mean, obviously there
were strategic calculations and the overarching objective,
ostensibly, was countering terrorism. But what they proposed
to do was very worrying. There were various there was a range
of scenarios that were explored. One of them was
divide-and-rule, openly talking about empowering Salafi
jihadists to some extent in order to kind of weaken Iranian
influence, openly talking about empowering, using the Gulf
states, because they have access to the petroleum resources,
so using them to kind of funnel support to these groups that
would eventually create kind of like a vortex of intra-Muslim
conflict that would get terrorists and extremists on different
sides fighting each other, that would weaken all of them and
allow U.S. interests and Israeli interests to kind of
consolidate their own kind of security while these guys are
fighting amongst themselves. </span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 130%; line-height: 130%;">So here we
see, you know, when you have these kind of very shortsighted
geopolitical kind of concepts about how to obtain a victory
against counterterrorism, you can kind of see where it leads
you up this really dangerous garden path, thinking that we’re
going to solve this problem by funding these groups. So if we
look at what’s happening now, look at how this funding has
happened, and we look at the RAND reports, for example, you
get a pretty clear indication that some of that policy seems
to have been at play to some extent. How far it’s gone and to
what extent no one can know. It’s speculation. But that’s what
worries me, that you’ve got this kind of hubris that we can do
this, we know what we’re doing. It’s the same hubris that we
saw with the neocons after 9/11, pre-Iraq War, post-Iraq War,
the same hubris of running in to the Middle East,
reconfiguring the region. </span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 130%; line-height: 130%;">You know,
another piece of evidence that I thought was quite disturbing
that I’ve written about the past was the 2005–these maps from
2005 in the arms <i>Armed Forces Journal</i>, where a senior
adviser to the Pentagon responsible at that time for kind of
future planning in kind of warfare was proposing that the
Middle East be broken up along ethnic and religious lines to
create a more peaceful Middle East. So again you see this
thread of thinking which–again, it’s imperial hubris, really,
to think that–you know, whether it’s kind of motivated by good
reasons or not, it’s the same kind of colonial mentality we
saw with the British, that we’ll go in, we’ll redraw the
borders, we’ll kind of tame the savages. So I’m concerned that
that’s the kind of mentality that we’ve seen. So talking about
military intervention and boots on the ground now in that
context is very worrying, because are we seeing that our
interests are actually being kind of merged with that kind of
imperial hubris?</span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 130%; line-height: 130%;">DESVARIEUX:
Yeah. But, Nafeez, then what do we do? Because some people are
saying, these groups are out of control, you’re just going to
get more chaos, more people are going to die. What do you do?
In this situation, how do we handle this?</span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 130%; line-height: 130%;">AHMED: This
is a difficult question, because when you’re faced with that
juggernaut of a military-industrial complex that we don’t
quite understand, it’s very opaque, and we don’t know where
they’re going, we don’t know how they’re fomenting things,
it’s difficult to say what the answer is. The answer is
certainly not to very simply just put boots on the ground and
start blowing people up, because we’ve done that. We did that
in Falluja. We do not have our militaries–and I’m talking
about the British military, the U.S. military–we do not have a
great track record of doing counterinsurgency war. When we do
counterinsurgency war, we tend to demonize the entire civilian
population. And what’s happening now in Iraq is the Islamic
State has gone into Iraq, the so-called Islamic State has gone
into Iraq in the context of a repressive U.S.-backed regime,
which was presided over by Maliki, which basically has pursued
very ethnic sectarian policies. It’s overseen mismanagement,
economic mismanagement, mismanagement of oil production and
all kinds of stuff. And that’s really created this groundswell
of opposition to, obviously, the U.S., obviously to the
existing government. It’s created disillusionment with the
existing political process. And that’s given, you know, that’s
created the recruiting sergeant, really, for these guys to
come in. So you go to somewhere like Falluja, and they’ve been
[incompr.] we’ve not seen it in the mainstream press, but
they’ve been–long before ISIS came in or the Islamic State
came in, we had uprisings in Falluja.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 130%; line-height: 130%;">DESVARIEUX:
Yeah, definitely, definitely. We covered that here. But then
what do we do, Nafeez? I mean, I’m going to push you on this a
little bit.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 130%; line-height: 130%;">AHMED: So
what to do? </span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 130%; line-height: 130%;">DESVARIEUX:
Yeah.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 130%; line-height: 130%;">AHMED: On the
one hand, I think the first thing is, do we–in terms of–like,
we need to cut off the source. So there’s been a lot of press
reports about the Islamic State have basically got in and
they’ve looted cities and they’ve got loads of money and
they’re kind of self funding, and I’ve got no doubt that they
were looting cities and they’ve boosted their economic power.
But the fact is is that what’s been kind of suppressed by that
kind of what–I would say kind of somewhat banal reporting,
which actually has relied on some questionable anonymous
sources, what they’ve not looked at is that money trail which
is coming from the Gulf states. </span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 130%; line-height: 130%;">We have
abundant evidence, the U.S. military has abundant evidence–the
State Department’s been tracking this for years, so has the
FBI–we know very well where the funding is coming from. That
funding is coming from the Gulf states. We have not moved to
stop that funding. Since 9/11, there have been political
obstacles, bureaucratic obstacles, and intelligence officials,
very sincere guys who’ve been tracking this have been
complaining that we’ve been blocking that for political
reasons, blocking real action to cut that down. So the
regulatory mechanisms to sort that out have been–they’re not
being pursued. And that’s on the British scene, on the
American scene, on the European scene. So that needs to be
done. Where’s the will to stop that? And why has it not being
stopped? If wedon’t stop these guys, why are we not doing
that? So that raises a fundamental question: if we’re not
willing to cut off the source of funding for these kind of
movements, that raises questions about what we’re doing. So
that would be the first step, I would say. </span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 130%; line-height: 130%;">Second step,
I would say we need to be looking at how to make Iraqi
democracy genuinely robust. At the moment, our interests are
in focusing on accessing the oil. I mean, that’s literally
what our reconstruction has been all about. It’s been about
folks protecting the oil industry, getting that oil production
going, playing off the Kurds against the Maliki government,
and so on and so forth, trying to facilitate American
contracts, getting production to kind of kickstart overall to
many different oil companies, whether they’re American or not,
so that we can get oil prices down. That’s been the focus.
It’s not been about the Iraqi people. It’s not been about
democracy and participation. If we can enfranchise the
existing population and play that slightly long-term game,
then we can cut off ISIS’s support, and they won’t be able to
have that juggernaut of power and support, ’cause it’s
that–guerrilla warfare needs the civilian population to kind
of begin to start supporting them. If we can cut that off, I
think we can really sort things out in Iraq. But, again, the
will to do that isn’t there. It’s very shortsighted. </span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 130%; line-height: 130%;">The
airstrikes, a lot of analysts point have pointed out that the
airstrikes we’ve had have not really been about even dealing
with the humanitarian crisis in Iraq. It’s been about–very
narrowly focused on protecting our interests in the Kurdish
oil region. So, again, if that intervention’s going to be on
the table, we need to be looking at how that intervention is
couched and what are the interests of that intervention. Is
this really going to be about sorting out the population of
Iraq and taking responsibility for the mess that we’ve created
and doing something about it? Or is this another shortsighted,
narrow-interested kind of operation? So if we want to talk
about that debate and people are going to talk about it,
that’s what it should be about, really.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 130%; line-height: 130%;">DESVARIEUX:
Yeah, and that’s a debate we want to keep here at The Real
News. Nafeez Ahmed, thank you so much for joining us in the
studio.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 130%; line-height: 130%;">AHMED:
Thanks.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 130%; line-height: 130%;">DESVARIEUX:
And thank you for joining us on The Real News Network. </span></p>
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