An American anti-war activist says the United States has a history of “creating phony pretexts” to go to wars for its corporate interests.
Bruce Gagnon, form the Global Network against Weapons & Nuclear Power in Space, made the remarks in an interview Press TV on Wednesday while commenting on recent reports which said that Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the leader of the ISIL terrorist group, is a CIA asset.
“Actually, I’ve seen several different sources in the last several weeks talking about the same thing, that ISIS (ISIL) is a CIA operation, that it is being funded by Saudi Arabia, trained in Jordan, Turkey is involved in it, and they are using to expand war operations in the region for the corporate interests that want to control that part of the world,” Gagnon said.
“I have no doubt that the US is heavily funding and directing this operation with the British and again the Saudis and Jordan and other clients in the region,” he added.
“Sadly, the story doesn’t get into the American media. So we are grateful that you [Press TV] are covering it, because without sources like you and some others – few others around the world — this information would not be known by anyone,” Gagnon noted.
“You know, this is part of a pattern in the US history [of] creating phony pretexts to go to wars; they did in Vietnam with the so-called Tonkin Gulf incident, they did it in 2003, with the shock and awe, in Iraq over the weapons of mass destruction that did not exist,” the peace activist stated.
The ISIL terrorists, who were initially trained by the CIA in Jordan in 2012 to destabilize the Syrian government, control large parts of Syria’s northern territory. ISIL sent its fighters into Iraq in June, quickly seizing large swaths of land straddling the border between the two countries.
According to the Pentagon, US warplanes have conducted more than 260 airstrikes against ISIL in Iraq since mid-August. Some Western states have also participated in some of the strikes in Iraq.
Since late September, the US and some of its Arab allies — Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Qatar, Jordan and the United Arab Emirates — have been carrying out airstrikes against ISIL inside Syria without any authorization from Damascus or a UN mandate.
On Tuesday, the Pentagon said that the war against ISIL is costing the US an average of $7.6 million per day.
Some analysts have long maintained that the United States and its allies have seized on the ISIL threat to target the Syrian government. The US and its allies have been accused of funding and arming the insurgency in Syria.