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
The world is a very complicated place, and the Middle East is a particularly difficult region to try to get your head around. Between decades of colonialism, gigantic oil reserves, governments that are essentially feudal kingdoms, and the never-ending and always shifting Western government propaganda that often changes the targets of demonization on a whim, it’s no wonder people are so confused.I’m not writing this post proclaiming to be an expert on the region, nor am I saying I have all of the answers. What I am trying to do is give my perspective based on what I have seen so far, and more importantly, ask readers to ask their own set of questions.
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.
Washington is considering direct talks with Iran on the security situation in Iraq, a US official has told the BBC.
The move comes as US President Barack Obama weighs up options on action to take in Iraq.
While the US and Iran are old adversaries, both have an interest in curbing the growing threat posed by ISIS and both are considering military support to the Iraqi government, says the BBC’s Rajini Vaidyanathan in Washington.
The US is said to be considering direct discussions with Tehran which could even take place as early as this week.
The USS George HW Bush aircraft carrier is already being deployed to the Gulf, accompanied by two more warships. But Washington says no US troops will be deployed on the ground.
Well, it appears Iran is already one step ahead of the U.S. For example, the Guardian reported that:
Iran has sent 2,000 advance troops to Iraq in the past 48 hours to help tackle a jihadist insurgency, a senior Iraqi official has told the Guardian.
The confirmation comes as the Iranian president, Hassan Rouhani, said Iran was ready to support Iraq from the mortal threat fast spreading through the country, while the Iraqi prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki, called on citizens to take up arms in their country’s defense.
The Iraqi official said 1,500 basiji forces had crossed the border into the town of Khanaqin, in Diyala province, in central Iraq on Friday, while another 500 had entered the Badra Jassan area in Wasat province overnight.
The Guardian confirmed on Friday that Major General Qassem Suleimani, the head of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards’ elite Quds Force, had arrived in Baghdad to oversee the defence of the capital.
The volunteers signing up were responding to a call by Iraq’s most revered Shia cleric, the Iranian-born grand ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, to defend their country after Isis seized Mosul and Saddam Hussein’s hometown of Tikrit in a lightning advance this week. Samarra is now the next town in the Islamists’ path to Baghdad.
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.
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Nice piece. Be sure to check out the work of Michel Chossudovsky at Global Research:
http://www.globalresearch.ca/the-destruction-and-political-fragmentation-of-iraq-towards-the-creation-of-a-us-sponsored-islamist-caliphate/5386998
The uA Military is nothing more than than an arm of the Saudis…… its esay math……
The problem is not the stupidity of Washington’s officials but the attempt to force western concepts (national state, secular state etc…) on eastern views. It wont work. People join together when they have the same view of life of muslims group from Syria share ideology with muslims from Iraq they will join together and will create a new territory the state’s border are just fiction they have no meaning to this people. If you want to understand the dynamics of the middle east you have to understand religion and tribal history of the past 1500 years. Just to remind you the national states in the middle east are no older then 100 years and in most cases they mean nothing to the population living in them.
Hi Michael, I check in to your blog regularly and I liked your analysis on Iraq (although it’s conclusions sadden me very much).
Gregory Mannarino also gave his take on the Iraq situation on USAWathdog with Greg Hunter (June 16, 2014), and I found that a great analysis as well. In effect he says: The party over moment was in the 2008 meltdown. Now they have to do whatever it takes to prop up the petrodollar. They have to go to war for that. He says Iraq is an OPEC member, and in the petrodollar agreement it says that the USA has to defend OPEC nations (but isn’t Iran an OPEC nation as well?) as part of their agreement, otherwise OPEC will stop pricing their oil in dollars, and the USA can’t have that. So they have to go to war. But first they have to sell it to the public. As is happening now in the MSM. But they have to sell it some more, so they are currently waiting and letting the atrocities continue so to pummel the public into a fear-like state (again!). So, what do you think of that analysis?
Anyway, if you want to check it out, the link is:
http://usawatchdog.com/dastardly-war-will-prop-up-failing-system-gregory-mannarino/
Furthermore, I posted the link of your analysis on Iraq + a short summary in the Comments-section on the interview with Gregory Mannarino, so Greg Hunter (and his viewers) can read your analysis (however, he moderates the Comment section so it can take up to 24 hours before my comment is published. BTW: you can find it under the name Mason.
You should be interviewed by him sometime. I think that would be great.
Kind regards
Hi, thank you very much for your kind words and comment.
Yes, I think it’s fairly clear that oil interests are the main reason we are so aggressive in the Middle East. My bigger point was that this panic over oil has created what is now a foreign policy with no grounding. One that has zero direction and is completely insane and dangerous.
Appreciate you sharing the article and I’m glad you liked it.
Best,
Michael Krieger
Love yr articles Mike but a question: Where do Saudia and Iran get the money to fund jihadis?
They sell oil to the West, China and Japan; the money comes from Wall Street, City of London and Tokyo. What is the oil used for? Entertainment.
War/saber rattling is the means to support crude prices and allow drillers to meet their own costs. At the same time, the current high crude prices are bankrupting the entire world. This bankruptcy => unemployment => militancy.
The problem is at the end of yr driveway, nothing will ‘get fixed’ until folks disconnect from the wheels. ISIS and their ilk represent nothing other than ‘conservation by other means’.
BTW: ISIS funds itself by selling Syrian crude back to Assad: a clever strategy on his part to divide the opposition into factions that defeat each other.
You are absolutely right that Saudi Arabia is the main supporter of Al Qaeda, and this is what is behind US foreign policy tying itself in knots. The US Government is NOT stupid, but their public words sound stupid because they are lying about what is going on.
The trouble is, the US needs Saudi – the world’s largest oil producer, who is prepared to act as the swing producer to keep oil prices stable, and to keep pricing oil in Dollars and to keep on investing those Dollars in NY. Saudi also exerts influence on the other Gulf states, And Saudi needs the US to sell it arms, and to police the Persian Gulf and the Red Sea for them.
So they both keep up the pretence that they are good friends and loyal allies, while the US fights the Saudi-supported Taliban in Afghanistan, and so on.
So what does Saudi want in the long term? They want the Caliphate.
The Caliphate has been vacant since 1924, when Attaturk ( a secular Turk) abolished it. Al-Husein of Jordan (great-grandfather of the current King) made a bid for it, which Al-Saud rejected. Since then the Saudis have been overtly anti-Caliphate, while covertly building the strength to claim it for themselves. Hence the fortunes being spent on Madrassas around the Muslim world, and Al Qaeda off-shoots popping up everywhere, taking advantage of the chaos US military interventions cause.
Without understanding the Caliphate, and the antagonism between Saudi and US, you will never make sense of it all.
If I could just add, the Caliphate has its first allegiance to Allah, not to the sovereign state, and hence the separation of church and state, which is the hallmark of western democracies, is heretical to the Caliphate.
To destroy the power of the Ottoman Empire, the British fought them in WW1, and Sikes-Picot redrew the map, cutting the Caliphate into many pieces – the old imperial ‘divide and rule’ strategy. Soon after, the Balfour declaration laid the groundwork for the Zionist state of Israel. We are still living with the consequence of those decisions.
Always suspicious whenever someone claims that Saudi Arabia was involved because most of the {alleged} hijackers, the ones who didn’t turn up alive later, were from Saudi Arabia – and they leave out all the connections to Israel – from odigo and urban moving systems to lucky larry’s friendship with Bibi, his absence and his 2 children’s absence from work that day, the early moveout of an Israeli company at a loss, the sheer amount of Zionist Jews involved in the criminal and administrative investigations of 9/11 and of the 9/11 site itself….the dancing israelis, the Israelis in the van talking wildly about “Palestinians…”
Indeed, the connections to Zionist Jews and Israel are so substantial, that o mention S.A. while leaving out Israel’s likely role smacks of gatekeeping.
I was going to offer a serious and well-thought out reply to your comment until I read “likely smacks of gatekeeping.” That statement in itself proves several things. 1) You are irrational. 2) You have a habit of making false claims with zero proof based on nothing whatsoever.
Therefore, your “analysis” on 9/11 is likely as idiotic and poorly thought out as your false claim at the end. I can say with complete and total truth that I am not dependent on any corporation, government, intelligence agency or anything similar. I am not beholden to anything or any special interest. I am fortunate in that sense, and can call things how I see them. The really interesting question is who are you beholden to?
Someone such as yourself should do a little more research before falsely accusing someone you don’t know of being a “gatekeeper.” If you’d like to continue to say such things, I’ve love you to offer proof of my “gatekeeper” status. But you won’t, because you have nothing better to do than make stuff up and post it on other people’s websites who actual attempt to think logically. Unlike yourself.
Thanks,
Michael Krieger
Dear Michael, Yes, you got it right. Ground zero for Global WAHHABI (“muslim”) mass murder and mayhem is “Saudi” (it won’t be “Saudi” much longer) Arabia, Kuwait and the Gulf “States” (Bedouin Tribal Crime Family Fiefdoms), which finance this horror with recycled petro-dollars and the cooperation of their business partners in the U.S. Oil and Banking Establishment – murder and chaos and madness are good for CERTAIN kinds of businesses and CERTAIN kinds of people. Shalom from Jerusalem, ISRAEL, Lowell – please see section two chapter two of my book, about this subject: http://www.academia.edu/652627/Cracking_the_Quran_Code_Gods_Land_Torah_and_People_Covenants_with_Israel_in_the_Quran_and_Islamic_Tradition_-_2011_Second_Edition My book, this is the second edition, available for free download, i’m working on the third edition now, chronicles the growing global movement of pro-israel and pro-jewish arabs and muslims worldwide.
Hi Michael,
I appreciate your analysis. With things going from bad to worse, a reasoned look at the situation is what is called for. I see disinformation and fear-mongering prevalent in my particular subculture (Christianity) like nowhere else. I wrote a book attempting to do what I can to fix this problem, and published on Amazon a month ago before leaving for the mission field. (I’m now in India.) What I have yet to receive is a professional opinion. If you could possibly find the time to take a look at it, I would be most appreciative. This links to a free download:
http://bit.ly/1vDHDzy
Hard copy available here:
http://goo.gl/shxyTm