Lo que sigue es espantoso, claro; tanto, que no va a ser noticia global. Dos notas de William Engdahl
para el New Eastern Outlook cuentan la influencia determinante del Imperio y sus aliados en la fabricación del "terrorismo" "islámico" de los últimos años. Acá van (los subrayados son nuestros):
Título: Secret
Pentagon Report Reveals US "Created" ISIS As A "Tool" To
Overthrow Syria's President Assad
Texto: From the
first sudden, and quite dramatic, appearance of the fanatical Islamic group
known as ISIS which was largely unheard of until a year ago, on the world's
stage and which promptly replaced the worn out and tired al Qaeda as the
world's terrorist bogeyman, we suggested that the "straight to beheading
YouTube clip" purpose behind the Saudi Arabia-funded Islamic State was a
simple one: use the Jihadists as the vehicle of choice to achieve a political
goal: depose of Syria's president Assad, who for years has stood in the way of
a critical Qatari natural gas pipeline, one which could dethrone Russia as
Europe's dominant - and belligerent - source of energy, reaching an interim
climax with the unsuccessful Mediterranean Sea military build up of 2013, which
nearly resulted in quasi-world war.
The narrative and
the plotline were so transparent, even Russia saw right through them. Recall
from September of last year:
If the West bombs
Islamic State militants in Syria without consulting Damascus, LiveLeak reports
that the anti-ISIS alliance may use the occasion to launch airstrikes against
President Bashar Assad’s forces, according to Russian Foreign Minister Sergey
Lavrov. Clearly comprehending that Obama's new strategy against ISIS in Syria
is all about pushing the Qatar pipeline through (as was the impetus behind the
2013 intervention push), Russia is pushing back noting that the it is using
ISIS as a pretext for bombing Syrian government forces and warning that
"such a development would lead to a huge escalation of conflict in the
Middle East and North Africa."
But it's one
thing to speculate; it's something entirely different to have hard proof.
And while
speculation was rife that just like the CIA-funded al Qaeda had been used as a
facade by the US to achieve its own geopolitical and national interests over
the past two decades, so ISIS was nothing more than al Qaeda 2.0, there was no
actual evidence of just this.
That may all have
changed now when a declassified secret US government document obtained by the
public interest law firm, Judicial Watch, shows that Western governments
deliberately allied with al-Qaeda and other Islamist extremist groups to topple
Syrian dictator Bashir al-Assad.
According to
investigative reporter Nafeez Ahmed in Medium, the "leaked document
reveals that in coordination with the Gulf states and Turkey, the West
intentionally sponsored violent Islamist groups to destabilize Assad, despite
anticipating that doing so could lead to the emergence of an ‘Islamic State’ in
Iraq and Syria (ISIS).
"According to the
newly declassified US document, the Pentagon foresaw the likely rise of the
‘Islamic State’ as a direct consequence of the strategy, but described this
outcome as a strategic opportunity to “isolate the Syrian regime.”"
And not just
that: as we reported last week, now that ISIS is running around the middle east,
cutting people's heads of in 1080p quality and Hollywood-quality (perhaps
literally) video, the US has a credible justification to sell billions worth of
modern, sophisticated weapons in the region in order to "modernize"
and "replenish" the weapons of such US allies as Saudi Arabia, Israel
and Iraq.
But that the US
military-industrial complex is a winner every time war breaks out anywhere in
the world (usually with the assistance of the CIA) is clear to everyone by now.
What wasn't clear is just how the US predetermined the current course of events
in the middle east.
Now, thanks to
the following declassified report, we have a far better understanding of not
only how current events in the middle east came to be, but what America's
puppermaster role leading up to it all, was.
From Nafeez Ahmed: Secret Pentagon report reveals West saw ISIS as strategic asset Anti-ISIS coalition knowingly sponsored violent extremists to ‘isolate’ Assad, rollback ‘Shia expansion', originally posted in Medium.
Hypocrisy
The revelations contradict the official line
of Western government on their policies in Syria, and raise disturbing
questions about secret Western support for violent extremists abroad, while
using the burgeoning threat of terror to justify excessive mass surveillance
and crackdowns on civil liberties at home.
Among the batch
of documents obtained by Judicial Watch through a federal lawsuit, released
earlier this week, is a US Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) document then
classified as “secret,” dated 12th August 2012.
The DIA provides
military intelligence in support of planners, policymakers and operations for
the US Department of Defense and intelligence community.
So far, media
reporting has focused on the evidence that the Obama administration knew of
arms supplies from a Libyan terrorist stronghold to rebels in Syria.
Some outlets have
reported the US intelligence community’s internal prediction of the rise of
ISIS. Yet none have accurately acknowledged the disturbing details exposing how
the West knowingly fostered a sectarian, al-Qaeda-driven rebellion in Syria.
Charles
Shoebridge, a former British Army and Metropolitan Police counter-terrorism
intelligence officer, said:
“Given the
political leanings of the organisation that obtained these documents, it’s
unsurprising that the main emphasis given to them thus far has been an attempt
to embarrass Hilary Clinton regarding what was known about the attack on the US
consulate in Benghazi in 2012. However, the documents also contain far less
publicized revelations that raise vitally important questions of the West’s
governments and media in their support of Syria’s rebellion.”
The West’s
Islamists
The newly
declassified DIA document from 2012 confirms that the main component of the
anti-Assad rebel forces by this time comprised Islamist insurgents affiliated
to groups that would lead to the emergence of ISIS. Despite this, these groups
were to continue receiving support from Western militaries and their regional
allies.
Noting that “the
Salafist [sic], the Muslim Brotherhood, and AQI [al-Qaeda in Iraq] are the
major forces driving the insurgency in Syria,” the document states that “the
West, Gulf countries, and Turkey support the opposition,” while Russia, China
and Iran “support the [Assad] regime.”
The 7-page DIA
document states that al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI), the precursor to the ‘Islamic
State in Iraq,’ (ISI) which became the ‘Islamic State in Iraq and Syria,’
“supported the Syrian opposition from the beginning, both ideologically and
through the media.”
The formerly
secret Pentagon report notes that the “rise of the insurgency in Syria” has
increasingly taken a “sectarian direction,” attracting diverse support from
Sunni “religious and tribal powers” across the region.
In a section
titled ‘The Future Assumptions of the Crisis,’ the DIA report predicts that
while Assad’s regime will survive, retaining control over Syrian territory, the
crisis will continue to escalate “into proxy war.”
The document also
recommends the creation of “safe havens under international sheltering, similar
to what transpired in Libya when Benghazi was chosen as the command centre for
the temporary government.”
In Libya,
anti-Gaddafi rebels, most of whom were al-Qaeda affiliated militias, were
protected by NATO ‘safe havens’ (aka ‘no fly zones’).
‘Supporting
powers want’ ISIS entity
In a strikingly
prescient prediction, the Pentagon document explicitly forecasts the probable
declaration of “an Islamic State through its union with other terrorist
organizations in Iraq and Syria.”
Nevertheless,
“Western countries, the Gulf states and Turkey are supporting these efforts” by
Syrian “opposition forces” fighting to “control the eastern areas (Hasaka and
Der Zor), adjacent to Western Iraqi provinces (Mosul and Anbar)”:
“… there is the
possibility of establishing a declared or undeclared Salafist Principality in
eastern Syria (Hasaka and Der Zor), and this is exactly what the supporting
powers to the opposition want, in order to isolate the Syrian regime, which is
considered the strategic depth of the Shia expansion (Iraq and Iran).”
The secret
Pentagon document thus provides extraordinary confirmation that the US-led
coalition currently fighting ISIS, had three years ago welcomed the emergence
of an extremist “Salafist Principality” in the region as a way to undermine
Assad, and block off the strategic expansion of Iran. Crucially, Iraq is
labeled as an integral part of this “Shia expansion.”
The establishment
of such a “Salafist Principality” in eastern Syria, the DIA document asserts,
is “exactly” what the “supporting powers to the [Syrian] opposition want.”
Earlier on, the document repeatedly describes those “supporting powers” as “the
West, Gulf countries, and Turkey.”
Further on, the
document reveals that Pentagon analysts were acutely aware of the dire risks of
this strategy, yet ploughed ahead anyway.
The establishment
of such a “Salafist Principality” in eastern Syria, it says, would create “the
ideal atmosphere for AQI to return to its old pockets in Mosul and Ramadi.”
Last summer, ISIS conquered Mosul in Iraq, and just this month has also taken
control of Ramadi.
Such a
quasi-state entity will provide:
“… a renewed
momentum under the presumption of unifying the jihad among Sunni Iraq and
Syria, and the rest of the Sunnis in the Arab world against what it considers
one enemy. ISI could also declare an Islamic State through its union with other
terrorist organizations in Iraq and Syria, which will create grave danger in
regards to unifying Iraq and the protection of territory.”
The 2012 DIA
document is an Intelligence Information Report (IIR), not a “finally evaluated
intelligence” assessment, but its contents are vetted before distribution. The
report was circulated throughout the US intelligence community, including to
the State Department, Central Command, the Department of Homeland Security, the
CIA, FBI, among other agencies.
In response to my
questions about the strategy, the British government simply denied the Pentagon
report’s startling revelations of deliberate Western sponsorship of violent
extremists in Syria. A British Foreign Office spokesperson said:
“AQ and ISIL are
proscribed terrorist organisations. The UK opposes all forms of terrorism. AQ,
ISIL, and their affiliates pose a direct threat to the UK’s national security.
We are part of a military and political coalition to defeat ISIL in Iraq and
Syria, and are working with international partners to counter the threat from
AQ and other terrorist groups in that region. In Syria we have always supported
those moderate opposition groups who oppose the tyranny of Assad and the
brutality of the extremists.”
The DIA did not
respond to request for comment.
Strategic asset
for regime-change
Security analyst
Shoebridge, however, who has tracked Western support for Islamist terrorists in
Syria since the beginning of the war, pointed out that the secret Pentagon
intelligence report exposes fatal contradictions at the heart of official pronunciations:
“Throughout the
early years of the Syria crisis, the US and UK governments, and almost
universally the West’s mainstream media, promoted Syria’s rebels as moderate,
liberal, secular, democratic, and therefore deserving of the West’s support.
Given that these documents wholly undermine this assessment, it’s significant
that the West’s media has now, despite their immense significance, almost
entirely ignored them.”
According to Brad
Hoff, a former US Marine who served during the early years of the Iraq War and
as a 9/11 first responder at the Marine Corps Headquarters in Battalion
Quantico from 2000 to 2004, the just released Pentagon report for the first
time provides stunning affirmation that:
“US intelligence
predicted the rise of the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL or ISIS),
but instead of clearly delineating the group as an enemy, the report envisions
the terror group as a US strategic asset.”
Hoff, who is
managing editor of Levant Report — ?an online publication run by Texas-based
educators who have direct experience of the Middle East?—?points out that the
DIA document “matter-of-factly” states that the rise of such an extremist
Salafist political entity in the region offers a “tool for regime change in
Syria.”
The DIA
intelligence report shows, he said, that the rise of ISIS only became possible
in the context of the Syrian insurgency?—?“there is no mention of US troop
withdrawal from Iraq as a catalyst for Islamic State’s rise, which is the
contention of innumerable politicians and pundits.” The report demonstrates
that:
“The
establishment of a ‘Salafist Principality’ in Eastern Syria is ‘exactly’ what
the external powers supporting the opposition want (identified as ‘the West,
Gulf Countries, and Turkey’) in order to weaken the Assad government.”
The rise of a
Salafist quasi-state entity that might expand into Iraq, and fracture that
country, was therefore clearly foreseen by US intelligence as likely?—?but
nevertheless strategically useful?—?blowback from the West’s commitment to
“isolating Syria.”
Complicity
Critics of the
US-led strategy in the region have repeatedly raised questions about the role
of coalition allies in intentionally providing extensive support to Islamist
terrorist groups in the drive to destabilize the Assad regime in Syria.
The conventional
wisdom is that the US government did not retain sufficient oversight on the
funding to anti-Assad rebel groups, which was supposed to be monitored and
vetted to ensure that only ‘moderate’ groups were supported.
However, the
newly declassified Pentagon report proves unambiguously that years before ISIS
launched its concerted offensive against Iraq, the US intelligence community
was fully aware that Islamist militants constituted the core of Syria’s
sectarian insurgency.
Despite that, the
Pentagon continued to support the Islamist insurgency, even while anticipating
the probability that doing so would establish an extremist Salafi stronghold in
Syria and Iraq.
As Shoebridge
told me, “The documents show that not only did the US government at the latest
by August 2012 know the true extremist nature and likely outcome of Syria’s
rebellion”—namely, the emergence of ISIS—“but that this was considered an
advantage for US foreign policy. This also suggests a decision to spend years
in an effort to deliberately mislead the West’s public, via a compliant media,
into believing that Syria’s rebellion was overwhelmingly ‘moderate.’”
Annie Machon, a
former MI5 intelligence officer who blew the whistle in the 1990s on MI6
funding of al-Qaeda to assassinate Libya’s former leader Colonel Gaddafi,
similarly said of the revelations:
“This is no
surprise to me. Within individual countries there are always multiple
intelligence agencies with competing agendas.”
She explained
that MI6’s Libya operation in 1996, which resulted in the deaths of innocent
people, “happened at precisely the time when MI5 was setting up a new section
to investigate al-Qaeda.”
This strategy was
repeated on a grand scale in the 2011 NATO intervention in Libya, said Machon,
where the CIA and MI6 were:
“… supporting the
very same Libyan groups, resulting in a failed state, mass murder, displacement
and anarchy. So the idea that elements of the American military-security complex
have enabled the development of ISIS after their failed attempt to get NATO to
once again ‘intervene’ is part of an established pattern. And they remain
indifferent to the sheer scale of human suffering that is unleashed as a result
of such game-playing.”
Divide and rule
Several US
government officials have conceded that their closest allies in the anti-ISIS
coalition were funding violent extremist Islamist groups that became integral
to ISIS.
US Vice President
Joe Biden, for instance, admitted last year that Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Qatar
and Turkey had funneled hundreds of millions of dollars to Islamist rebels in
Syria that metamorphosed into ISIS.
But he did not
admit what this internal Pentagon document demonstrates?—?that the entire covert
strategy was sanctioned and supervised by the US, Britain, France, Israel and
other Western powers.
The strategy
appears to fit a policy scenario identified by a recent US Army-commissioned
RAND Corp report.
The report,
published four years before the DIA document, called for the US “to capitalise
on the Shia-Sunni conflict by taking the side of the conservative Sunni regimes
in a decisive fashion and working with them against all Shiite empowerment
movements in the Muslim world.”
The US would need
to contain “Iranian power and influence” in the Gulf by “shoring up the
traditional Sunni regimes in Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Pakistan.”
Simultaneously, the US must maintain “a strong strategic relationship with the
Iraqi Shiite government” despite its Iran alliance.
The RAND report
confirmed that the “divide and rule” strategy was already being deployed “to
create divisions in the jihadist camp. Today in Iraq such a strategy is being
used at the tactical level.”
The report
observed that the US was forming “temporary alliances” with al-Qaeda affiliated
“nationalist insurgent groups” that have fought the US for four years in the
form of “weapons and cash.” Although these nationalists “have cooperated with
al-Qaeda against US forces,” they are now being supported to exploit “the
common threat that al-Qaeda now poses to both parties.”
The 2012 DIA
document, however, further shows that while sponsoring purportedly former
al-Qaeda insurgents in Iraq to counter al-Qaeda, Western governments were simultaneously
arming al-Qaeda insurgents in Syria.
The revelation
from an internal US intelligence document that the very US-led coalition
supposedly fighting ‘Islamic State’ today, knowingly created ISIS in the first
place, raises troubling questions about recent government efforts to justify
the expansion of state anti-terror powers.
In the wake of
the rise of ISIS, intrusive new measures to combat extremism including mass
surveillance, the Orwellian ‘prevent duty’ and even plans to enable government
censorship of broadcasters, are being pursued on both sides of the Atlantic,
much of which disproportionately targets activists, journalists and ethnic
minorities, especially Muslims.
Yet the new
Pentagon report reveals that, contrary to Western government claims, the
primary cause of the threat comes from their own deeply misguided policies of
secretly sponsoring Islamist terrorism for dubious geopolitical purposes.
Título: The
Original Chechnya Bombers - The CIA, The Saudis And Bin Laden
Texto: What if
Putin is Telling The Truth?
On April 26
Russia’s main national TV station, Rossiya 1, featured President Vladimir Putin
in a documentary to the Russian people on the events of the recent period
including the annexation of Crimea, the US coup d’etat in Ukraine, and the
general state of relations with the United States and the EU. His words were
frank. And in the middle of his remarks the Russian former KGB chief dropped a
political bombshell that was known by Russian intelligence two decades ago.
Putin stated
bluntly that in his view the West would only be content in having a Russia
weak, suffering and begging from the West, something clearly the Russian
character is not disposed to. Then a short way into his remarks, the Russian
President stated for the first time publicly something that Russian
intelligence has known for almost two decades but kept silent until now, most
probably in hopes of an era of better normalized Russia-US relations.
Putin stated that
the terror in Chechnya and in the Russian Caucasus in the early 1990’s was
actively backed by the CIA and western Intelligence services to deliberately
weaken Russia. He noted that the Russian FSB foreign intelligence had
documentation of the US covert role without giving details.
What Putin, an
intelligence professional of the highest order, only hinted at in his remarks,
I have documented in detail from non-Russian sources. The report has enormous
implications to reveal to the world the long-standing hidden agenda of
influential circles in Washington to destroy Russia as a functioning sovereign
state, an agenda which includes the neo-nazi coup d’etat in Ukraine and severe
financial sanction warfare against Moscow. The following is drawn on my book,
“The Lost Hegemon” to be published soon…
CIA’s Chechen
Wars
Not long after
the CIA and Saudi Intelligence-financed Mujahideen had devastated Afghanistan
at the end of the 1980’s, forcing the exit of the Soviet Army in 1989, and the
dissolution of the Soviet Union itself some months later, the CIA began to look
at possible places in the collapsing Soviet Union where their trained “Afghan
Arabs” could be redeployed to further destabilize Russian influence over the
post-Soviet Eurasian space.
They were called
Afghan Arabs because they had been recruited from ultraconservative Wahhabite
Sunni Muslims from Saudi Arabia, the Arab Emirates, Kuwait, and elsewhere in
the Arab world where the ultra-strict Wahhabite Islam was practiced. They were
brought to Afghanistan in the early 1980’s by a Saudi CIA recruit who had been
sent to Afghanistan named Osama bin Laden.
With the former
Soviet Union in total chaos and disarray, George H.W. Bush’s Administration
decided to “kick ‘em when they’re down,” a sad error. Washington redeployed
their Afghan veteran terrorists to bring chaos and destabilize all of Central
Asia, even into the Russian Federation itself, then in a deep and traumatic
crisis during the economic collapse of the Yeltsin era.
In the early
1990s, Dick Cheney’s company, Halliburton, had surveyed the offshore oil
potentials of Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, and the entire Caspian Sea Basin. They
estimated the region to be “another Saudi Arabia” worth several trillion
dollars on today’s market. The US and UK were determined to keep that oil
bonanza from Russian control by all means. The first target of Washington was
to stage a coup in Azerbaijan against elected president Abulfaz Elchibey to
install a President more friendly to a US-controlled Baku–Tbilisi–Ceyhan (BTC)
oil pipeline, “the world’s most political pipeline,” bringing Baku oil from
Azerbaijan through Georgia to Turkey and the Mediterranean.
At that time, the
only existing oil pipeline from Baku was a Soviet era Russian pipeline that ran
through the Chechen capital, Grozny, taking Baku oil north via Russia’s
Dagestan province, and across Chechenya to the Black Sea Russian port of
Novorossiysk. The pipeline was the only competition and major obstacle to the
very costly alternative route of Washington and the British and US oil majors.
President Bush
Sr. gave his old friends at CIA the mandate to destroy that Russian Chechen
pipeline and create such chaos in the Caucasus that no Western or Russian
company would consider using the Grozny Russian oil pipeline.
Graham E. Fuller,
an old colleague of Bush and former Deputy Director of the CIA National Council
on Intelligence had been a key architect of the CIA Mujahideen strategy. Fuller
described the CIA strategy in the Caucasus in the early 1990s: “The policy of
guiding the evolution of Islam and of helping them against our adversaries
worked marvelously well in Afghanistan against the Red Army. The same doctrines
can still be used to destabilize what remains of Russian power.”6
The CIA used a
dirty tricks veteran, General Richard Secord, for the operation. Secord created
a CIA front company, MEGA Oil. Secord had been convicted in the 1980s for his
central role in the CIA’s Iran-Contra illegal arms and drugs operations.
In 1991 Secord,
former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense, landed in Baku and set up the CIA
front company, MEGA Oil. He was a veteran of the CIA covert opium operations in
Laos during the Vietnam War. In Azerbaijan, he setup an airline to secretly fly
hundreds of bin Laden’s al-Qaeda Mujahideen from Afghanistan into Azerbaijan.
By 1993, MEGA Oil had recruited and armed 2,000 Mujahideen, converting Baku
into a base for Caucasus-wide Mujahideen terrorist operations.
General Secord’s
covert Mujahideen operation in the Caucasus initiated the military coup that
toppled elected president Abulfaz Elchibey that year and installed Heydar
Aliyev, a more pliable US puppet. A secret Turkish intelligence report leaked
to the Sunday Times of London confirmed that “two petrol giants, BP and Amoco,
British and American respectively, which together form the AIOC (Azerbaijan
International Oil Consortium), are behind the coup d’état.”
Saudi
Intelligence head, Turki al-Faisal, arranged that his agent, Osama bin Laden,
whom he had sent to Afghanistan at the start of the Afghan war in the early
1980s, would use his Afghan organization Maktab al-Khidamat (MAK) to recruit
“Afghan Arabs” for what was rapidly becoming a global Jihad. Bin Laden’s
mercenaries were used as shock troops by the Pentagon and CIA to coordinate and
support Muslim offensives not only Azerbaijan but also in Chechnya and, later,
Bosnia.
Bin Laden brought
in another Saudi, Ibn al-Khattab, to become Commander, or Emir of Jihadist
Mujahideen in Chechnya (sic!) together with Chechen warlord Shamil Basayev. No
matter that Ibn al-Khattab was a Saudi Arab who spoke barely a word of Chechen,
let alone, Russian. He knew what Russian soldiers looked like and how to kill
them.
Chechnya then was
traditionally a predominantly Sufi society, a mild apolitical branch of Islam.
Yet the increasing infiltration of the well-financed and well-trained
US-sponsored Mujahideen terrorists preaching Jihad or Holy War against Russians
transformed the initially reformist Chechen resistance movement. They spread
al-Qaeda’s hardline Islamist ideology across the Caucasus. Under Secord’s
guidance, Mujahideen terrorist operations had also quickly extended into
neighboring Dagestan and Chechnya, turning Baku into a shipping point for
Afghan heroin to the Chechen mafia.
From the mid-1990s,
bin Laden paid Chechen guerrilla leaders Shamil Basayev and Omar ibn al-Khattab
the handsome sum of several million dollars per month, a King’s fortune in
economically desolate Chechnya in the 1990s, enabling them to sideline the
moderate Chechen majority.21 US intelligence remained deeply involved in the
Chechen conflict until the end of the 1990s. According to Yossef Bodansky, then
Director of the US Congressional Task Force on Terrorism and Unconventional
Warfare, Washington was actively involved in “yet another anti-Russian jihad,
seeking to support and empower the most virulent anti-Western Islamist forces.”
Bodansky revealed
the entire CIA Caucasus strategy in detail in his report, stating that US
Government officials participated in,
“a formal meeting
in Azerbaijan in December 1999 in which specific programs for the training and
equipping of Mujahideen from the Caucasus, Central/South Asia and the Arab
world were discussed and agreed upon, culminating in Washington’s tacit
encouragement of both Muslim allies (mainly Turkey, Jordan and Saudi Arabia)
and US ‘private security companies’. . . to assist the Chechens and their
Islamist allies to surge in the spring of 2000 and sustain the ensuing Jihad
for a long time…Islamist Jihad in the Caucasus as a way to deprive Russia of a
viable pipeline route through spiraling violence and terrorism.”
The most intense
phase of the Chechen wars wound down in 2000 only after heavy Russian military
action defeated the Islamists. It was a pyrrhic victory, costing a massive toll
in human life and destruction of entire cities. The exact death toll from the
CIA-instigated Chechen conflict is unknown. Unofficial estimates ranged from
25,000 to 50,000 dead or missing, mostly civilians. Russian casualties were near
11,000 according to the Committee of Soldiers’ Mothers.
The
Anglo-American oil majors and the CIA’s operatives were happy. They had what
they wanted: their Baku–Tbilisi–Ceyhan oil pipeline, bypassing Russia’s Grozny
pipeline.
The Chechen
Jihadists, under the Islamic command of Shamil Basayev, continued guerrilla
attacks in and outside Chechnya. The CIA had refocused into the Caucasus.
Basayev’s Saudi
Connection
Basayev was a key
part of the CIA’s Global Jihad. In 1992, he met Saudi terrorist Ibn al-Khattag
in Azerbaijan. From Azerbaijan, Ibn al-Khattab brought Basayev to Afghanistan
to meet al-Khattab’s ally, fellow-Saudi Osama bin Laden. Ibn al-Khattab’s role
was to recruit Chechen Muslims willing to wage Jihad against Russian forces in
Chechnya on behalf of the covert CIA strategy of destabilizing post-Soviet
Russia and securing British-US control over Caspian energy.
Once back in
Chechnya, Basayev and al-Khattab created the International Islamic Brigade
(IIB) with Saudi Intelligence money, approved by the CIA and coordinated
through the liaison of Saudi Washington Ambassador and Bush family intimate
Prince Bandar bin Sultan. Bandar, Saudi Washington Ambassador for more than two
decades, was so intimate with the Bush family that George W. Bush referred to
the playboy Saudi Ambassador as “Bandar Bush,” a kind of honorary family
member.
Basayev and
al-Khattab imported fighters from the Saudi fanatical Wahhabite strain of Sunni
Islam into Chechnya. Ibn al-Khattab commanded what were called the “Arab
Mujahideen in Chechnya,” his own private army of Arabs, Turks, and other
foreign fighters. He was also commissioned to set up paramilitary training
camps in the Caucasus Mountains of Chechnya that trained Chechens and Muslims
from the North Caucasian Russian republics and from Central Asia.
The Saudi and
CIA-financed Islamic International Brigade was responsible not only for terror
in Chechnya. They carried out the October 2002 Moscow Dubrovka Theatre hostage
seizure and the gruesome September 2004 Beslan school massacre. In 2010, the UN
Security Council published the following report on al-Khattab and Basayev’s
International Islamic Brigade:
Islamic
International Brigade (IIB) was listed on 4 March 2003. . . as being associated
with Al-Qaida, Usama bin Laden or the Taliban for “participating in the
financing, planning, facilitating, preparing or perpetrating of acts or
activities by, in conjunction with, under the name of, on behalf or in support
of” Al-Qaida. . . The Islamic International Brigade (IIB) was founded and led
by Shamil Salmanovich Basayev (deceased) and is linked to the Riyadus-Salikhin
Reconnaissance and Sabotage Battalion of Chechen Martyrs (RSRSBCM). . . and the
Special Purpose Islamic Regiment (SPIR). . .
On the evening of
23 October 2002, members of IIB, RSRSBCM and SPIR operated jointly to seize
over 800 hostages at Moscow’s Podshipnikov Zavod (Dubrovka) Theater.
In October 1999,
emissaries of Basayev and Al-Khattab traveled to Usama bin Laden’s home base in
the Afghan province of Kandahar, where Bin Laden agreed to provide substantial
military assistance and financial aid, including by making arrangements to send
to Chechnya several hundred fighters to fight against Russian troops and
perpetrate acts of terrorism. Later that year, Bin Laden sent substantial
amounts of money to Basayev, Movsar Barayev (leader of SPIR) and Al-Khattab,
which was to be used exclusively for training gunmen, recruiting mercenaries
and buying ammunition.
The
Afghan-Caucasus Al Qaeda “terrorist railway,” financed by Saudi intelligence,
had two goals. One was a Saudi goal to spread fanatical Wahhabite Jihad into
the Central Asian region of the former Soviet Union. The second was the CIA’s
agenda of destabilizing a then-collapsing post-Soviet Russian Federation.
Beslan
On September 1,
2004, armed terrorists from Basayev and al-Khattab’s IIB took more than 1,100
people as hostages in a siege that included 777 children, and forced them into
School Number One (SNO) in Beslan in North Ossetia, the autonomous republic in
the North Caucasus of the Russian Federation near to the Georgia border.
On the third day
of the hostage crisis, as explosions were heard inside the school, FSB and
other elite Russian troops stormed the building. In the end, at least 334
hostages were killed, including 186 children, with a significant number of
people injured and reported missing. It became clear afterward that the Russian
forces had handled the intervention poorly.
The Washington
propaganda machine, from Radio Free Europe to The New York Times and CNN,
wasted no time demonizing Putin and Russia for their bad handling of the Beslan
crisis rather than focus on the links of Basayev to Al Qaeda and Saudi
intelligence. That would have brought the world’s attention to the intimate
relations between the family of then US President George W. Bush and the Saudi
billionaire bin Laden family.
On September 1,
2001, just ten days before the day of the World Trade Center and Pentagon
attacks, Saudi Intelligence head US-educated Prince Turki bin Faisal Al Saud,
who had directed Saudi Intelligence since 1977, including through the entire
Osama bin Laden Mujahideen operation in Afghanistan and into the Caucasus,
abruptly and inexplicably resigned, just days after having accepted a new term
as intelligence head from his King. He gave no explanation. He was quickly
reposted to London, away from Washington.
The record of the
bin Laden-Bush family intimate ties was buried, in fact entirely deleted on
“national security” (sic!) grounds in the official US Commission Report on 911.
The Saudi background of fourteen of the nineteen alleged 911 terrorists in New
York and Washington was also deleted from the US Government’s final 911
Commission report, released only in July 2004 by the Bush Administration,
almost three years after the events.
Basayev claimed
credit for having sent the terrorists to Beslan. His demands had included the
complete independence of Chechnya from Russia, something that would have given
Washington and the Pentagon an enormous strategic dagger in the southern
underbelly of the Russian Federation.
By late 2004, in
the aftermath of the tragic Beslan drama, President Vladimir Putin reportedly
ordered a secret search and destroy mission by Russian intelligence to hunt and
kill key leaders of the Caucasus Mujahideen of Basayev. Al-Khattab had been
killed in 2002. The Russian security forces soon discovered that most of the
Chechen Afghan Arab terrorists had fled. They had gotten safe haven in Turkey,
a NATO member; in Azerbaijan, by then almost a NATO Member; or in Germany, a
NATO Member; or in Dubai–one of the closest US Allies in the Arab States, and
Qatar-another very close US ally. In other words, the Chechen terrorists were
given NATO safe haven.
