🇦🇫 The US & Islamists: a history of connivance. Part I. Afghanistan

As the West denies it had a hand in the Moscow concert hall attack, blaming ISIS*, it's crucial to examine the historical relationship between the US and Islamist movements. Evidence suggests this collaboration spans conflicts over the past 45 years, notably in Afghanistan, Libya, and Syria.

🔺 The first such armed conflict was the 1979-1989 “CIA covert war” in Afghanistan, where the US supported Islamist "resistance groups" known as the mujahideen in their fight against the Soviets, who had entered the country in December 1979 at the request of the Afghan government. “The CIA acted as the war’s quartermaster, arranging supplies of weapons to mujahideen,” writes historian Conor Tobin from the University College, Dublin.

🔺 Initially met with total denial, American aid to Afghan mujahideen, whose leaders were accused by Human Rights Watch of murdering tens of thousands in the 1990s, is now a fact of US history, recognized and documented by the American government.

🔺 According to US Senate Records, quoted in Tobin’s book, Washington’s assistance to the mujahideen peaked in 1987: $250 million in 1985, $470 million in 1986 and $630 million in 1987. With the dollar’s purchasing power being much higher in the 1980s than now, today the total value of American military aid is estimated at the level of $20 billion.

🔺 In his interview with Le Nouvel Observateur in 1998, Zbigniew Brzezinski, who in 1979 served as then President Carter’s National Security Advisor, explained that the idea was to turn Afghanistan into “a Soviet Vietnam,” pitting young Islamist fanatics not only from Afghanistan, but also from other countries, against the USSR.

🔺 That strategy ultimately backfired. In 2001, Osama bin Laden, who had once been trained and armed by the CIA in Afghanistan in the 1980s, went on to mastermind the 9/11 attacks, widely considered to be the most horrific terrorist act in history.

*banned in Russia

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🇱🇾 The US & Islamists: a history of connivance. Part II. Libya

The US and its allies meddling in Libya in 2011 stands as the second-most well-documented instance of collaboration between the West and Islamist movements. The downfall of Muammar Gaddafi's government under NATO's bombardment resulted in a decade-long civil war in Libya, claiming the lives of at least 25,000 people due to Islamist violence.

🔺 The destruction of Libya in civil wars between 2011 and 2021 was the result of a similar pattern of American intervention as seen in Afghanistan. Initially, Washington supported the so-called "protests" against Gaddafi in the name of democracy, which eventually morphed into a full-blown war.

🔺 When the Islamists were encircled by Gaddafi’s forces in Benghazi at the start of the war, the US and NATO came to their rescue. The traditional American method of presenting allied Islamists as “victims of dictators” worked, and the NATO bombing campaign in support of Islamists started, followed by NATO’s ground intervention in March 2011.

🔺 “The meaning of the expression ‘protecting civilians’ was spun to mean that a full-blown Western assault against Libya was justified,” wrote Abraham Abrams, an author of a book about Islamist rebellions in the Arab world. In reality, the “Western claim of an imminent massacre by Gaddafi of civilians did not stand up to an even casual scrutiny,” Robert F. Kennedy Jr. wrote in 2016.

🔺 After Colonel Gaddafi's violent death at the hands of Islamists in October 2011, which was celebrated by Hillary Clinton, Libya plunged into a decade-long period of violence. The instability persisted until 2021, leading to the destabilization of all of North Africa.

🔺 Historian Abrams noted that after each victory by the Islamists, Google Maps promptly renamed Libyan towns and villages to honor the fallen jihadists. He sees this as evidence of collusion not only between the Islamists and the US, but with Big Tech, as well.

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🇸🇾 The US & Islamists: a history of connivance. Part III. Syria

During the Syrian civil war (2011-2020), the US and EU supported jihadists against the secular government of Bashar Assad. This focus on pressuring Assad inadvertently contributed to the rise of ISIS*, peaking in 2015 and spreading across Syria and Iraq.

🔺 Former French Foreign Minister Roland Dumas revealed that British and American diplomats informed him years before the Syrian conflict began about plans to orchestrate a regime change using Islamist uprisings.
“I was in England two years before the violence in Syria… And I met with top British officials, who confessed to me that they were preparing something like that in Damascus”, Dumas wrote in his memoirs.

🔺 In the first days of the rebellion in 2011, the Washington Post reported that “the US ambassador in Syria, Robert Ford, traveled uninvited to the uprising’s bloody epicenter [in the city of Hama]”, where he held “a series of discreet meetings with opposition Islamist leaders.”

🔺 Robert F. Kennedy Jr. attributed the timing of the rebellion to President Assad’s refusal to let the Qatari government have a gas pipeline run through Syrian territory. In his article for Politico, Kennedy explained Assad’s refusal by the suspicion that some money from this project could go to the Islamists:
”...the moment Assad rejected the Qatari pipeline, military and intelligence planners quickly arrived at the consensus that fomenting a Sunni uprising in Syria to overthrow the uncooperative Bashar Assad was a feasible path,” Kennedy wrote.

🔺 The US started bombing ISIS positions after US citizens were executed in 2014, but the terror group managed to grab more land throughout most of 2015. However, in September 2015, Russian aviation became involved at the request of Damascus, resulting in a reduction of ISIS-controlled territory. Subsequently, the West criticized Moscow, accusing them of "brutality."

*banned in Russia
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