The West's Long History Of Collaboration With Al-Qaeda and ISIS.

Inside Western Foreign Policy's Dirty Secret.

I recently covered Israel’s arming and backing of a small ISIS-linked criminal gang in Gaza to loot aid and facilitate ethnic cleansing.

The collaboration between the West, Israel, and Jihadist groups, however, is nothing new.

One of the least discussed secrets of Western foreign policy is that the West and Israel have often collaborated and backed groups affiliated with Al-Qaeda and ISIS to carry out their geopolitical goals.

In this article, I will go over the West’s long history of collaborating with the very groups they have claimed to be fighting.

The Afghan Trap

The United States and Western governments have collaborated with Al-Qaeda and groups tied to it since 1979.

In an infamous interview, the U.S diplomat Zbigniew Brzezinski boasted that the United States “signed the first directive for secret aid to the opponents of the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul” (the mujahideen, later Al-Qaeda) on July 3rd of 1979, because “this aid was going to induce a Soviet military intervention”.

The point of this, according to Brzezinski, was that arming the mujahideen would “knowingly increase the probability” that the Soviet Union would invade Afghanistan.

Brzezinski boasted in the interview that the “secret operation was an excellent idea” because “It had the effect of drawing the Russians into the Afghan trap”.

He bragged that this policy gave “the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam war,” and as a result, “for almost 10 years, Moscow had to carry on a war unsupportable by the government, a conflict that brought about the demoralization and finally the breakup of the Soviet empire”.

The 10-year operation, co-named “Operation Cyclone,” is listed in the Guinness Book of World Records as the “most expensive covert action” in History.

The New York Times in 1988 dubbed it “one of the biggest operations ever mounted by the Central Intelligence Agency,” coming at a total cost of $2 billion.

The Times reported at the time that “Saudi Arabia has generally matched the United States' financial contributions, providing money in a joint fund with Washington to buy hundreds of Stingers for the Islamic guerrillas” .

Originally, according to the New York Times, “For five years, American officials provided the guerrillas with weapons designed and manufactured by the Soviet Union or other East Bloc countries so they could deny that the United States was supplying such assistance” a policy that later changed “In the fall of 1982” when Ronald Regan “decided to increase the quality and quantity of arms supplied to the insurgents”.

Ronald Regan ordered the CIA to provide the Afghan Mujahideen with “bazookas, mortars, grenade launchers, mines and recoilless rifles”that year.

By 1985, after pressure from the Democratic representative Charles Wilson, “The budget for the covert operation more than doubled, to $280 million in the fiscal year 1985 from $122 million in 1984,” and “the guerrillas got their first effective surface-to-surface weapons, 107-millimeter multiple rocket launchers made in China”.

The operation certainly fulfilled Zbigniew Brzezinski’s goal of weakening the Soviet Union, but it also created untold blowback to the United States.

A 2004 article about Al-Qaeda from the BBC wrote that :

The organisation grew out of the network of Arab volunteers who had gone to Afghanistan in the 1980s to fight under the banner of Islam against Soviet Communism.

During the anti-Soviet jihad, Bin Laden and his fighters received American and Saudi funding. Some analysts believe Bin Laden himself had security training from the CIA

The journalist Brian P. McGlinchey wrote that “the Carter and Reagan administrations, along with Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, funded, organized, transported, armed and trained Salafist extremists to fight the Red Army in a holy war on behalf of Islam. Among those who joined the cause were future al-Qaeda leaders Osama bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri, and Khalid Sheikh Mohammad.”

In an article for the Guardian, Robin Cook, the former UK Foreign Secretary, wrote:

Bin Laden was, though, a product of a monumental miscalculation by western security agencies. Throughout the 80s he was armed by the CIA and funded by the Saudis to wage jihad against the Russian occupation of Afghanistan. Al-Qaida, literally ‘the database’, was originally the computer file of the thousands of mujahideen who were recruited and trained with help from the CIA to defeat the Russians. Inexplicably, and with disastrous consequences, it never appears to have occurred to Washington that once Russia was out of the way, Bin Laden's organisation would turn its attention to the west.

The journalist Michael Moran wrote in NBC News that in 1984, Bin Laden “was running a front organization known as Maktab al-Khidamat - the MAK - which funneled money, arms and fighters from the outside world into the Afghan war”.

He noted that “the MAK was nurtured by Pakistan’s state security services, the Inter-Services Intelligence agency, or ISI, the CIA’s primary conduit for conducting the covert war against Moscow’s occupation”.

Moran went on to write, “while he returned to his family’s construction business (in Saudi Arabia), bin Laden had split from the relatively conventional MAK in 1988 and established a new group, al-Qaida, that included many of the more extreme MAK members he had met in Afghanistan”.

The news site “Newsone” reported that “The CIA trained the mujahideen in many of the tactics Al Qaeda is known for today, such as car bombs, assassinations and other acts that would be considered terrorism today”.

Israel also played a role in financing and arming the mujahideen in Afghanistan. Analyst Noor Dahri in the Times of Israel wrote that “Pakistan worked closely with Israel in Afghanistan during the Soviet intervention in the 1980s”.

He wrote that “In the Afghan war, Israel was one of the most important countries that assisted Pakistan in weapons and training to the Afghan Mujahideen. Israel’s intelligence agency, MOSSAD, assisted Pakistan in training Afghans near the Pak-Afghan border.”

He went on to write that “The Russian weapons which were captured from PLO in Lebanon by the Israel Defence Force (IDF) were given to Pakistan and the ISI supplied all weapons to the Mujahideen against the USSR.”

Remember that Bin Laden’s MAK group was “nurtured by Pakistan’s state security services, the Inter-Services Intelligence agency, or ISI,” which not only worked with the CIA, but also closely with the Israeli Mossad.

NATO’s Collaboration With Al-Qaeda in Kosovo.

Afghanistan was not the only time, pre-9/11, that the West collaborated with Al-Qaeda.

A 1996 Republican Party Committee opposition document on Bill Clinton found that Clinton helped “turn Bosnia into a militant Islamic base” by approving arms shipments to Bosnia that helped go to “thousands of mujahideen (fighters) from across the Muslim world”.

The document found that the Clinton administration supported the “Third World Relief Agency” in Bosnia, which the document described as a “Sudan based, phoney humanitarian organization which has been a major link in the arms pipeline to Bosnia” and “is believed to be connected with such fixtures of the Islamic terror network as Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman (the convicted mastermind behind the 1993 World Trade Center bombing) and Osama Bin Laden”.

Furthermore, prior to NATO’s bombing of Serbia and Kosovo in 1999, the CIA and the UK supported the KLA (Kosovo Liberation Army), a militant group with ties to Al-Qaeda.

The NATO bombing was officially done in the name of saving Albanians in Kosovo from the Yugoslavian Serbian-based government led by Slobodan Milosevic, but prior to the intervention, NATO backed the KLA militia to try to incite a brutal Serbian response to justify the bombing.

As Noam Chomsky has noted, “up until January 1999, a majority of killings came from the KLA guerrillas who were coming in as they said, to try to incite a harsh Serbian response, which they got, in order to appeal to Western humanitarians to bomb”.

Chomsky also noted that the KLA “were being supported by the CIA in those months”.

The former Canadian ambassador to Yugoslavia, Albania, and Bulgaria, James Bissett, wrote that “Media reports have revealed that as early as 1998, the central intelligence agency assisted by the British Special Armed Services were arming and training Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) members in Albania to foment armed rebellion in Kosovo.”

He argued that “The KLA terrorists were sent back into Kosovo to assassinate Serbian mayors, ambush Serbian policemen, and do everything possible to incite murder and chaos. The hope was that with Kosovo in flames, NATO could intervene and in so doing, not only overthrow Slobodan Milosevic, the Serbian strong man, but more importantly, provide the aging and increasingly irrelevant military organization with a reason for its continued existence”.

The British journalist Mark Cutis reported that “At some point in late 1998, the US Defence Intelligence Agency approached MI6 with the task of arming and training the KLA”.

Curtis reported that:

The KLA had also developed connections to al-Qaida. Osama Bin Laden reportedly visited Albania and established an operation there in 1994.

In the years preceding the NATO bombing campaign, more Al-Qaeda militants moved into Kosovo to support the KLA, financed by sources in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.

He went on to report that:

By late 1998, the head of Albanian intelligence was saying that Bin Laden had sent units to fight in Kosovo. Al-Qaeda was said to be helping hundreds of foreign fighters to cross from Albania into Kosovo, including veterans of the militant group Islamic Jihad from Bosnia, Chechnya and Afghanistan, carrying forged passports.

Numerous KLA fighters had trained in Al-Qaida camps in Afghanistan and Albania. One of the ‘links’ between Bin Laden and the KLA said to have been identified by US intelligence was ‘a common staging area in Tropoje, Albania, a centre for Islamic terrorists’.

One KLA unit was led by the brother of Ayman al-Zawahiri, then Bin Laden’s right-hand man, according to a senior Interpol official who later gave evidence to the US Congress.

In 2001, the Wall Street Journal reported that “Islamist infiltration of the Kosovo Liberation Army advanced. Bin Laden is said to have visited Albania in 1996 and 1997, according to the murder-trial testimony of an Algerian-born French national, Claude Kader, himself an Afghanistan-trained mujahideen fronting at the Albanian-Arab Islamic Bank. He recruited some Albanians to fight with the KLA in Kosovo, according to the Paris-based Observatoire Géopolitique des Drogues.”

The paper noted that “Albanian separatism in Kosovo and Metohija was formally characterized as a ‘jihad’ in October 1998 at an annual international Islamic conference in Pakistan”.

The paper went on to write:

Nonetheless, the 25,000 strong KLA continued to receive official NATO/U.S. arms and training support and, at the talks in Rambouillet, France, then Secretary of State Madeleine Albright shook hands with ‘freedom fighter’ Hashim Thaci, a KLA leader. As this was taking place, Europol (the European Police Organization based in The Hague) was preparing a scathing report on the connection between the KLA and international drug gangs. Even Robert Gelbard, America's special envoy to Bosnia, officially described the KLA as Islamic terrorists.

The British journalist Kit Klarenberg reported that the West continued to support the KLA even after the bombing of Serbia and Kosovo in 1999, writing:

Covert US and British support for the KLA endured long-after NATO’s bombing ended in June 1999. Once Milosevic was displaced in 2000 and the death of Yugoslavia complete, the Army’s brutal struggle for Greater Albania extended to Macedonia and southern Serbia. Washington supported this, at least initially. NATO ground forces stood idly by while KLA insurgents pushed past a five-kilometre-wide ‘exclusion zone’ armed with mortars, and other lethal weapons.

NATO’s Collaboration with ISIS In Libya

In 2011, NATO states’ military intervened in Libya to overthrow the country’s dictator, Muammar Gaddafi.

This regime change operation was done in the name of saving Libyan civilians from a supposed massacre Gaddafi was about to commit against his own people.

A 2015 UK parliament inquiry, however, found that the justification for the invasion was fabricated.

The report noted that “the proposition that Muammar Gaddafi would have ordered the massacre of civilians in Benghazi was not supported by the available evidence”.

The report found that “The Gaddafi regime had retaken towns from the rebels without attacking civilians in early February 2011”, and that “The disparity between male and female casualties suggested that Gaddafi regime forces targeted male combatants in a civil war and did not indiscriminately attack civilians.”

The report also found that “émigrés opposed to Muammar Gaddafi exploited unrest in Libya by overstating the threat to civilians and encouraging Western powers to intervene” and that “rebels in Benghazi made false claims and manufactured evidence” of “allegations of mass human rights violations by Gaddafi regime troops”.

The question is, who were these so-called “rebels” whose false claims NATO used to intervene in Libya?

The Canadian newspaper National Post reported that:

Some officers in the Canadian Forces tried to raise concerns early on in the war that removing Gaddafi would play into the hands of Islamic extremists, but military sources say those warnings went unheeded. Later, military members would privately joke about Canada’s CF-18s being part of ‘Al-Qaeda’s air force,’ since their bombing runs helped to pave the way for rebel groups aligned with the terrorist group.

The aforementioned UK parliament report wrote, “It is now clear that militant Islamist militias played a critical role in the rebellion from February 2011 onwards. They separated themselves from the rebel army, refused to take orders from non-Islamist commanders, and assassinated the then-leader of the rebel army, Abdel Fattah Younes”.

The leading force in the rebellion was a group called the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, which the UN Security Council has called “an Al-Qaeda affiliate”.

Furthermore, the Al-Qaeda-led NATO intervention led to the rise of ISIS in Libya.

The UK parliament report on Libya noted that “Muammar Gaddafi spent 40 years building an authoritarian regime in Libya. When his Administration collapsed in October 2011, security, basic governmental services, and the rule of law collapsed with it”.

The report noted that “various tribes, independent militias and ISIL took advantage of the absence of a central government to seize control of portions of Libyan territory”.

The report also noted that “ISIL has used its presence in Libya to train terrorists. For example, Sefeddine Rezgui, the gunman who killed Western holidaymakers in Tunisia in June 2015, was trained by ISIL at its base in Sabratha along with the two gunmen who killed 22 tourists at the Bardo museum in Tunis”.

The blowback from NATO’s collaboration with Al Qaeda and ISIS in Libya came close to home.

In 2017, a terrorist bombing took place at an Ariana Grande concert in Manchester by a British Libyan jihadist named Salman Abedi.

It turned out that Abedi joined the Libyan militia's Martyrs Brigade and the Tripoli Brigade in 2011, which were both “trained by NATO during the war”.

Journalist Mark Curtis noted that “MI5 and MI6 encouraged radicals such as the Abedis, and other British-Libyans based in Manchester, to fight in Libya, and allowed them to travel to the country, a hotbed of terrorism, for years afterwards”.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu also heavily pushed for intervention in Libya, hoping it would lead to regime change in Iran.

The Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported that Netanyahu “said the world needs to send a message to the people of Libya that they have support in their struggle against ruler Muammar Gadhafi - a message that would be heard in Iran.”

The paper reported that “Netanyahu said an aggressive response against Gadhafi will send a clear message of encouragement and hope to the Iranian people that nobody has forgotten them, adding that those same steps must be directed at Iran”.

Timber Sycamore

Another long-time Israeli desire for regime change was the push for intervention in Syria.

When protests sparked in Syria against the human rights abuses and neo-liberal economic policies of the Assad regime in 2011, the U.S. and Israel saw this as a chance to carry out their regime change goal.

The biggest problem with this was that the most hardcore elements of the uprising were Al-Qaeda-aligned sectarian extremists, who took issue with Bashar al-Assad more around the fact that he was an Alawite than over his human rights abuses or economic policies.

The former U.S. ambassador to Syria, Robert Ford, said to Harper’s magazine journalist Charles Glass, “The first really serious violence on the opposition side was up on the coast around Baniyas, where a bus was stopped and soldiers were hauled off the bus. If you were an Alawite, you were shot. If you were Sunni, they would let you go.”

Charles Glass noted, “At demonstrations, some activists chanted the slogan, ‘Alawites to the grave, and Christians to Beirut.’ A sectarian element wanted to remove Assad, not because he was a dictator but because he belonged to the Alawite minority sect that Sunni fundamentalists regard as heretical.”

By 2012, when the protests evolved into a full-scale civil war, the United States knew full well that the rebellion was led by these sectarian, Al-Qaeda-aligned elements.

A director of national intelligence report from 2012 stated, “Internally, events are taking a clear sectarian direction; the Salafists, the Muslim Brotherhood, and Al Qaeda are the major forces driving the insurgency in Syria”.

Still, the United States and Israel continued to support their regime change goal in Syria, even if it meant aligning with Al Qaeda.

Jake Sullivan, who then served as an advisor to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, sent her an email saying, “Al Qaeda is on our side in Syria”.

In another email, Sullivan said that just like in Libya, Israel was pushing for regime change in Syria, hoping it would spill over to Iran. The email said:

One particular source states that the British and French Intelligence services believe that their Israeli counterparts are convinced that there is a positive side to the civil war in Syria; if the Assad regime topples, Iran would lose its only ally in the Middle East and would be isolated. At the same time, the fall of the House of Assad could well ignite a sectarian war between the Shiites and the majority Sunnis of the region drawing in Iran, which, in the view of Israeli commanders would not be a bad thing for Israel and its Western allies. In the opinion of this individual, such a scenario would distract and might obstruct Iran from its nuclear activities for a good deal of time. In addition, certain senior Israeli intelligence analysts believe that this turn of events may even prove to be a factor in the eventual fall of the current government of Iran.

The Economist, Jeffrey Sachs, recently revealed that when he was working for the UN, the United States blocked a peace agreement in Syria in 2012 at the behest of Israel because they wanted to continue the regime change plan.

That same year, journalist Seymour Hersh reported that the CIA created a “rat line” to “funnel weapons and ammunition from Libya via southern Turkey and across the Syrian border to the opposition.”. Hersh reported that “Many of those in Syria who ultimately received the weapons were jihadists, some of them affiliated with al-Qaida”.

By 2013, the CIA launched a more direct program of arming and training rebels in Syria, code-named “Timber Sycamore”.

The New York Times described the program as “one of the costliest covert action programs in the history of the C.I.A” and “one of the most expensive efforts to arm and train rebels since the agency’s program arming the mujahideen in Afghanistan during the 1980s”.

The Washington Post reported that “At $1 billion, Syria-related operations account for about $1 of every $15 in the CIA’s overall budget” going on to write “U.S. officials said the CIA has trained and equipped nearly 10,000 fighters sent into Syria over the past several years — meaning that the agency is spending roughly $100,000 per year for every anti-Assad rebel who has gone through the program.”

In a separate article, the Washington Post reported that “One knowledgeable official estimates that the CIA-backed fighters may have killed or wounded 100,000 Syrian soldiers and their allies over the past four years”.

Yet again, these arms and training went largely to Al Qaeda affiliates and ISIS.

The Think Tank “Century Foundation” wrote that “Timber Sycamore” has “functioned as battlefield auxiliaries and weapons farms for larger Islamist and jihadist factions, including Syria’s al-Qaeda affiliate”.

As journalist Charles Glass noted, “The most extreme elements, the Al Qaeda offshoots Jabhat al-­Nusra and the Islamic State, not only used the (CIA provided) weapons but also advertised them in videos that included beheadings, the hurling of gay men off towers to their deaths, the murder of American journalists and British aid workers, and the rape of Yezidi women”.

The New York Times noted that “the Qaeda-affiliated Nusra Front often fought alongside the C.I.A.-backed rebels” and “some of their C.I.A. weapons ended up with Nusra Front (Al Qaeda’s Syria branch) fighters — and some of the rebels joined the group”.

Furthermore, Israel and the United States gave their support to ISIS in Syria in more covert ways.

As Journalist Max Blumenthal wrote in his book “The Management of Savagery”:

At the Likud Party-linked Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies, its director, Efraim Inbar, promoted the Islamic State in Syria as a boon to Israel’s strategic deterrence. In an op-ed entitled ‘The Destruction of Islamic State Is a Strategic Mistake,’ Inbar argued, “The West should seek the further weakening of Islamic State, but not its destruction.” Instead, he insisted, it should exploit ISIS as a ‘useful tool’ in the fight against Israel’s true enemy, Iran and its proxy, Hezbollah, which operates on Israeli frontiers from southern Lebanon. ‘A weak IS is, counterintuitively, preferable to a destroyed IS,’ Inbar concluded. Inbar went on to argue for prolonging the conflict in Syria for as long as possible on the grounds that extended sectarian bloodshed would produce ‘positive change.’

Blumenthal noted that ISIS in Syria even apologized to Israel when accidentally striking them, writing:

While Israeli military honchos took satisfaction from the bloodshed of Syria’s civil war, ISIS commanders tiptoed around the Israeli military. During a public forum in Israel, the ever-candid former minister of defense, Ya’alon, revealed that an ISIS cell operating alongside the rebels in southern Syria had accidentally launched a mortar into Israeli-controlled territory. ‘On most occasions, firing comes from regions under the control of the regime,’ Ya’alon commented. ‘But once the firing came from ISIS positions—and it immediately apologized.’ Pushed by Israeli media to clarify his statement about ISIS formally apologizing to Israel—an open admission of an Israeli backchannel to the jihadists—Ya’alon refused further comment.

Blumenthal also noted that in 2016, the United States conducted a strike on Syrian army positions that made way for ISIS to gain ground. As he wrote, “the United States inexplicably attacked a Syrian army unit holding a strategic mountaintop in Deir Ezzor, killing over 100. In the moments after the attack, ISIS seized key points around Deir Ezzor’s airport and threatened to overrun the city entirely.”

Secretary of State for Obama’s second term, John Kerry, admitted that “We knew (ISIS) was growing, we were watching, we saw that Daesh (ISIS) was growing in strength, and we thought Assad was threatened, we thought, however, we could probably manage that Assad might then negotiate”.

Thanks to this program, Syria is now run by a “former” leader of ISIS, Al Nusra, and the Al Nusra offshoot HTS (Hayat Tahrir al-Sham), Ahmad al-Shara.

His forces have gone around committing genocidal massacres against Alawite civilians and other minority groups.

Trump recently met with al-Shara and praised his “very strong past” and his “tough” leadership.

The U.S. Working With Al Qaeda in Yemen

In 2015, Obama decided to back Saudi Arabia’s genocidal war in Yemen, a policy that was continued by the Trump administration.

85,000 children in Yemen under 5 died from severe acute malnutrition or disease due to the brutal Saudi blockade on Yemen.

By the end of the war, 377,000 people had been killed, the majority of whom were civilians.

Along with this, the U.S.-backed Saudi war against the Ansar Allah (Houthi) movement, a part of the “axis of resistance” and a main enemy of Israel, helped empower Al Qaeda.

As Reuters reported in 2016. “Once driven to near irrelevance by the rise of Islamic State abroad and security crackdowns at home, al Qaeda in Yemen now openly rules a mini-state with a war chest swollen by an estimated $100 million in looted bank deposits and revenue from running the country’s third largest port.”

Reuters noted that “The (Saudi) campaign, backed by the United States, has helped Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) to become stronger than at any time since it first emerged almost 20 years ago.”

The outlet reported that:

A senior Yemeni government official said the war against the Houthis “provided a suitable environment for the … expansion of al Qaeda.” The withdrawal of government army units from their bases in the south, allowed al Qaeda to acquire “very large quantities of sophisticated and advanced weapons, including shoulder-fired missiles and armed vehicles.”

As well, the coalition’s preoccupation with fighting the Houthis ‘made it easier for al Qaeda elements to expand in more than one area’” he said. ‘And this is why al Qaeda has today become stronger and more dangerous and we are working with the coalition now to go after elements of the group … and will continue until they are destroyed.’

As the Associated Press reported in 2018, the U.S./Saudi goal in Yemen was to “win the civil war against the Houthis, Iranian-backed Shiite rebels. And in that fight, al-Qaeda militants are effectively on the same side as the Saudi-led coalition — and, by extension, the United States”.

Even Michael Horton, an analyst with the Jamestown Foundation, said, “Elements of the U.S. military are clearly aware that much of what the U.S. is doing in Yemen is aiding AQAP (al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula), and there is much angst about that, However, supporting the UAE and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia against what the U.S. views as Iranian expansionism takes priority over battling AQAP and even stabilizing Yemen”.

The U.S. weapons to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates even ended up going to al-Qaeda in Yemen. CNN reported that “Saudi Arabia and its coalition partners have transferred American-made weapons to al Qaeda-linked fighters, hardline Salafi militias, and other factions waging war in Yemen”.

CNn reported that:

al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) made its way to the frontlines in Taiz in 2015, forging advantageous alliances with the pro-Saudi militias they fought alongside.

One of those militias linked to AQAP, the Abu Abbas brigade, now possesses US-made Oshkosh armored vehicles, paraded in a 2015 show of force through the city.

Abu Abbas, the founder, was declared a terrorist by the US in 2017, but the group still enjoys support from the Saudi coalition and was absorbed into the coalition-supported 35th Brigade of the Yemeni army.

Israel Backing ISIS In Gaza.

All of this history brings us to today, where Israel is openly backing ISIS.

Netanyahu has admitted that Israel is arming a small ISIS-linked band of formerly imprisoned criminals, led by Yasser Abu Shabab, who was in prison prior to October 7th for drug trafficking.

Investigations from the Financial Times and the Washington Post have previously reported that Yasser Abu Shabab’s gang has been looting food aid delivered into Gaza, with the backing of Israel.

Israel falsely blamed the looting by this gang, which they backed, on Hamas to justify the genocidal blockade on Gaza.

Quietly, however, the IDF has admitted that “There were 110 looting incidents, and none of them were carried out by Hamas, but by three different groups: Gazan civilians, armed gangs, and organized clans”, the armed gangs and organized clans being backed and supported by Israel.

This Israeli-backed ISIS-linked gang has reemerged since Israel’s ethnic cleansing plan began, posting videos with looted aid from the UN at a concentration camp near the Rafah border crossing into Egypt.

The Palestinian analyst Muhammad Shehada has noted that this “means Israel has been letting him (Abu Shabab) loot & horde aid systematically to use now to lure Gazans into moving to this concentration camp at Egypt's borders”.

Shehada has noted, “Israel is using those gangs to establish concentration camps with a ‘Palestinian face’ to bait & lure starving Gazans to move to Eastern Rafah (Egypt's borders) with a promise of safety & food. Gazans wouldn't trust to live in such a camp surrounded by IDF soldiers, so Israel created this new puppet ‘security force’ out of the criminal gangs to run those camps instead”.

Indeed, Israel is using this ISIS-linked criminal gang to lure starving Palestinians in Gaza into a concentrated area near the Rafah border crossing to aid their ethnic cleansing plan.

The Israeli paper Israel Hayom reported that “in an audio recording, Abu Shabab urged families in eastern Rafah to return home safely,” saying "Medicine, food, adequate housing, and security have been provided.”

Yasser Abu Shabab’s gang has set up a Facebook page with posts in English and Arabic claiming to be the “Popular Forces” of Gaza and promising aid to the people of Gaza if they enter the concentration camp set up in Eastern Rafah.

As Muhammad Shehada has noted, Yasser Abu Shabab’s gang “carries out recon missions on behalf of the IDF & set up a concentration camp in Eastern Rafah. They are now trying to lure starved Gazans to that area by using the looted WFP aid & a promise of safety, thus advancing Israel's final phase of the genocide; concentrating Gazans on Egypt's borders for mass expulsion”.

Imperial Goals Over National Security.

These examples go to show that the United States and Israel care far more about imperial foreign policy goals than any actual national security.

The U.S. backed Al Qaeda-aligned groups in Afghanistan and Kosovo because they wanted to weaken Russia, not caring about what the backlash to arming these groups would be.

Even after 9/11, the United States allied with Al Qaeda and ISIS in Yemen, Libya, and Syria because they were opposed to Iran and axis of resistance groups like Hezbollah and the Houthis: the United States prioritized fighting Israel’s enemies even if it meant backing the group that actually attacked the United States.

Now the Israel and, de facto, the United States are arming ISIS-linked gangs to help carry out the final ethnic cleansing solution to a barbaric genocide in Gaza.

As FDR famously said, referring to the U.S.-backed Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza. “he may be a son of a bitch, but he’s our son of a bitch.”

In many instances, the same thing could be said about America’s supposed enemies in the Middle East, Al Qaeda and ISIS.

---

Note to readers: The Dissident is a reader-supported outlet. If you liked this article, consider becoming a paid subscriber.