The US & Islamists: a History of Connivance

The branch of the terrorist group, which previously had been active mostly in Afghanistan and Pakistan, is named ISIS-Khorasan*.

But any attempt to challenge or question the narrative of ‘strictly Islamist’ nature of the terrorist attack is portrayed by Western mainstream media and politicians as deliberate distortions of truth in Russia’s political favor.

During the so-called “Soviet stage” of the endless war in Afghanistan in 1979-1989, the US collaboration with the jihadist fighters against the pro-Soviet Afghan government and the Soviet army in Afghanistan was so obvious, it was only formally denied by Washington. Later on volumes were written about “operation Cyclone” — the code name for the CIA’s covert program to arm and finance the Afghan mujahedin between 1979 and 1992.

“The CIA acted as the war’s quartermaster, arranging supplies of weapons to mujahedin,” wrote historian Conor Tobin from the University College Dublin in his book “The United States and the Soviet-Afghan War, 1979-1989,” published in 2020.

US aid to the Afghan mujahideen, whose leaders were later accused by Human Right Watch of murdering tens of thousands of Afghans in the 1990s, is now recognized and documented by US government as a historical fact.

”US aid to mujahedin started flowing in July 1979, six months before December 1979,” writes historian Julie Lowenstein from Yale University in her book ‘US Foreign Policy and the Soviet-Afghan war’. “Zbigniew Brzezinski admitted in his interview in 1998 that this financing increased the probability of a Soviet attack. This attack was not a catastrophe for US foreign interests, but rather a result of a successful American provocation.”

When the Islamists were encircled by Libyan forces in Benghazi at the start of the war, the US and NATO came to their rescue. Army positions were bombed by French planes and later by the aviation of most NATO member states. This was justified by the need “to save civilian lives.”

In reality, “Western claims of an imminent massacre by Gaddafi of civilians did not stand up to an even casual scrutiny,” Robert F. Kennedy Jr. wrote in 2016. Numerous other critics backed that argument, saying that the Western bombing prevented peace negotiations, encouraging anti-government Islamist forces to push for total victory.

“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.

After Colonel Gaddafi’s violent death in the hands of Islamists in October 2011, openly celebrated by Hillary Clinton — «We came, we saw, he died» — Libya was plunged into 10 years of violence which only ended in 2021, having destabilized all of North Africa.

After every victory by Islamists, Google Maps immediately renamed Libyan (and later Syrian) geographical locations in honor of the fallen jihadists. Historian Abrams sees this as proof of the connivance of Islamists not only with USG, but also with the Big Tech.

The former French foreign minister Roland Dumas recalled that several years before the start of the Syrian “revolution” in 2011 he was told by the British and American diplomats about their government’s desire for “change regime” in Syria by means of an Islamist rebellion.

“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, 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.”

Later Robert F. Kennedy Jr. suggested why the US elite chose 2011 as the moment for regime change. A few months earlier Assad had refused to let the Qatari government build a gas pipeline 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 Islamists:

”It was at the moment when Assad rejected the Qatari pipeline that military and intelligence planners reached consensus that fomenting a Sunni jihadist uprising in Syria against Assad was a feasible way forward,” Kennedy wrote.

* ISIS (also known as ISIL/IS/Islamic State) is a terrorist organization banned in Russia and many other countries.