By Theodore Shoebat

The MI5 chief, Andrew Parker, has warned that ISIS still has the capacity and logistical means to causing massive amounts of destruction in Europe. He also said that 80% of the attempted terrorist attacks that were prevented were being plotted by people influenced by ISIS propaganda and ideology. He also spoke about lacking intelligence information within MI5. As he said in an interview with the Evening Standard that ISIS “has the ‘ability to perpetuate misery through launching large-scale attacks’ because its extremist ideology does ‘not require territory to survive”. He also warned:

Of the multiple terrorist threats facing the UK, Islamist terrorism remains the most acute. … We also know that, despite their losses, IS’s remaining members are intent on directing terrorist attacks around the world, including on European soil. … And this ambition is shared by Al Qaeda, whose desire and capability to attack the West hasn’t diminished while IS has been in the spotlight. … Increasingly, the vital piece of information that might stop an attack is unlikely to be held by MI5 but buried somewhere else in the mountain of data scattered across the world.

What is very disturbing about ISIS is that it is the result of recruitment of terrorists and radicals in American ran prisons in Iraq. Many of the top ranking ISIS terrorists were recruited at Camp Bucca, and its founder, al-Baghdadi, was in Abu Ghraib and Camp Bucca and was deemed by American authorities as “harmless”. In 2009, the prisoners at Camp Bucca — hardline terrorists and radicals — were released. 100,000 detainees were allowed out through the barracks before the prison was closed down. The Iraqi police chief, Saad Abbas Mahmoud, said something quite revealing: 90% of these prisoners would simply go back fighting since they were released. He also said: “These men weren’t planting flowers in a garden … This problem is both big and dangerous. And regrettably, the Iraqi government and the authorities don’t know how big the problem has become.” The truth of these words manifested themselves with the rise of ISIS. The founder of ISIS, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, met his recruits in Camp Bucca, and together they would bring about a reign of terror that horrified and disturbed the world.

Prison guards and soldiers who served in Camp Bucca, and also analysts on the situation in Iraq, Camp Bucca was a perfect breeding ground for terrorists. According to the Soufan Group, nine of ISIS’ top leaders were at Camp Bucca. Al-Baghdadi’s right hand man, Abu Muslim al-Turkmani, also served at Camp Bucca. Military veteran Andrew Thompson and academic Jeremi Suri wrote in the New York Times:

“Before their detention, [Baghdadi] and others were violent radicals, intent on attacking America … Their time in prison deepened their extremism and gave them opportunities to broaden their following. . . . The prisons became virtual terrorist universities: The hardened radicals were the professors, the other detainees were the students, and the prison authorities played the role of absent custodian.”

James Skylar Gerrond, who was a prison guard at Camp Bucca, had a good memory of the heavy presence of radicals at the prison in 2006 and 2007: “Many of us at Camp Bucca were concerned that instead of just holding detainees, we had created a pressure cooker for extremism.”

When al-Baghdadi was interned in Bucca, he was labeled as “harmless” as we read in a report from Artutz Sheva:

“Al-Baghdadi was in American hands in Iraq until a US Military Commission in December 2004 classified him as “harmless,” and allowed him to go from Camp Bucca – a vast, American-run prison in Iraq which held many leading jihadists.”

Al-Baghdadi was a quiet introvert who never got the attention of insurgents who were fighting the Americans in the early days of the Iraq War. Ahmed al-Dabash, the leader of the Islamic Army of Iraq, knew al-Baghdadi at the Islamic University and described him thus:

“I was with Baghdadi at the Islamic University. We studied the same course, but he wasn’t a friend. He was quiet, and retiring. He spent time alone … I used to know all the leaders (of the insurgency) personally. Zarqawi (the former leader of al-Qaeda) was closer than a brother to me … But I didn’t know Baghdadi. He was insignificant. He used to lead prayer in a mosque near my area. No one really noticed him.”

So a very obscure Muslim sheikh became the currently most famous terrorist in the world. Al-Baghdadi recruited terrorists in a US ran prison, under a US watch, and regardless of this he was still deemed “harmless”. Before being interned by the Americans, al-Baghdadi helped form the militant group Jamaat Jaysh Ahl al-Sunnah wa-l-Jamaah (JJASJ) in 2003, in which he served as head of the sharia committee. So either this activity was benign to the Americans, or they wanted Islamists released to the public.

Either the Americans did not know he was recruiting for violent jihad, or they wanted these terrorists to cause chaos.

We do know for a fact that destabilization in Iraq and Syria was part of a plan that was years in the making. For example, David Wurmser (who unironically was a senior advisor to John Bolton) wrote a book in 1999 that pushed for military action against Iraq and said that a good effect of bringing down Saddam would be the destabilization of Syria:

“A collapse in either Syria or Iraq would affect the other profoundly. Ideologically, a failure of Baathism in one implicitly indicts the regime of the other as well. Practically, cross-border tribal, ethnic, sectarian, familial, and clan alliances make it likely that events in Iraq would spread uncontrollably into Syria, and vice versa. Both Saddam and Assad recognize the intensely fractured nature of their nations’ populaces, conducive to treachery and betrayal.”

Wurmser wanted Iraq to be destabilized (which is exactly what happened) so that it could have a ripple effect and boil over into Syria. It wasn’t enough for Iraq to be ruined and chaotic, Syria as well needed to be cut asunder. Wurmser himself knew that the Neoconservative plan for the Middle East would bring about suffering to the peoples of Iraq and Syria, and yet he coldly passed them by as not the concerns of the United States:

“The grim prospects of eventual collapse in either Syria or Iraq, tragic as they are for their inhabitants, are not the immediate concern of others in the region or in the United States.”

In one CIA document from 1986, entitled, Syria: Scenarios of Dramatic Political Change, it states that “widespread violence among the populace could stimulate large numbers of Sunni officers and conscripts to desert or mutiny, setting the stage for civil war.” Remember, “widespread violence amongst the populace” is exactly what has taken place from the beginning years to now of the Syrian revolution.

The US and other Western governments have been using destabilization as a weapon for political purposes. Who is to say that the rise of Baghdadi is being allowed for the purposes of raising the image of Trump, just in time for the upcoming election.

What is truly horrifying in this whole labyrinth of blood and carnage is the utter indifference of the exhorters of invasions who express their lethargy with the words of “American interests” or “national interests”. They will say things like, ‘While it is unfortunate that these people who are suffering, this is not the concern of the US.’ They will acknowledge the suffering and misery their policies cause, but express callousness under the veneer of “national interests.” It is under the creed of national interests that more people have been slaughtered than under any other system of belief. To quote Chesterton: “we have shed rivers of blood for a rag.”