WarSclerotic

One of the Islamic State’s top military commanders was actually trained by U.S. Special Forces in the nation of Georgia before taking up arms for ISIS in Syria, according to a variety of sources quoted in an explosive new report by the McClatchy news agency. Another member of the Obama administration’s supposed “anti-ISIS” coalition, the Wahhabi-Islamic dictatorship in Saudi Arabia, played a key role radicalizing the jihadist leader through a hard-core Islamist mosque it funded near his village. In other words, without the direct assistance of key “anti-ISIS” governments — including Washington, D.C. — the man said to be ISIS’ most fearsome and skilled military leader would almost certainly never have arrived in Syria to wage ruthless war on infidels in the first place. But ISIS commander Tarkhan Batirashvili (shown), who now calls himself Abu Omar al Shishani, is hardly the only one.

As explosive evidence and news reports continue to emerge highlighting the trend, it is becoming increasingly difficult to tell where ISIS begins and the globalist establishment ends. Among other revelations, Vice President Joe Biden, speaking at Harvard, admitted that Obama’s “anti-ISIS” coalition had funded and armed various terrorist groups in Syria that went on to become ISIS. Later, U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Martin Dempsey revealed in Senate testimony that Sunni Arab dictators in Obama’s “anti-ISIS” coalition were not just supporting ISIS — they were funding it. Next, a 2012 U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency report released under the Freedom of Information Act exposed the fact that Western powers and their Islamic dictator allies were supporting Islamic terrorists and wanted to see a fundamentalist Islamic State created in Eastern Syria. And finally, the former chief of DIA went on TV and spilled the beans on Obama’s “willful” support to Islamic terrorists while distancing himself from the deadly policies.

The McClatchy report, then, is only the latest shoe to drop in a long train of revelations directly linking the U.S. government and its allies to ISIS and jihad more broadly. Headlined “U.S. training helped mold top Islamic State military commander,” the September 15 article by special correspondent Mitchell Prothero contains a treasure trove of information about the U.S.-trained terrorist gathered from interviews with a wide range of sources, including many close to the ongoing Syrian war. In essence, the report paints a troubling picture of Batirashvili’s background, and offers much insight into how he became a leading ISIS commander responsible for a number of critical victories secured by the terrorist group. From his U.S. military training in Georgia to his radicalization in a Saudi-funded mosque, the piece provides still more evidence about the utter failure — or outright insanity, perhaps even criminality — surrounding what Washington, D.C., likes to characterize as “foreign policy.”

According to the McClatchy report, the 30-year-old Batirashvili (a.k.a. Abu Omar) is a “key figure” in ISIS, reportedly serving on the ISIS “governing council” in addition to being the terror group’s “supreme military leader in northern Syria and Aleppo.” The report, citing his military prowess obtained from U.S. training and a number of critical military victories he led over Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad’s forces, also refers to him as “perhaps the group’s most fearsome ground commander.” And there is a good reason for that: your tax dollars. “We trained him well, and we had lots of help from America,” an unidentified former Georgian defense official told the news agency, asking not to be named because of the sensitivity of the terrorist’s role in ISIS. “In fact, the only reason he didn’t go to Iraq to fight alongside America was that we needed his skills here in Georgia.”

Batirashvili’s former comrades in the Georgian military echoed the praise for the terrorist’s military abilities and told McClatchy that he was “immediately” recruited into Georgia’s U.S.-trained special forces upon enlistment. Again, your tax dollars — and your sons serving in the U.S. military — played a crucial role in transforming Batirashvili from an impoverished Muslim Chechen villager into a brutal and well-trained commander whose forces are now busily decapitating Christians and selling children into sex slavery to fund jihad. “He was a perfect soldier from his first days, and everyone knew he was a star,” explained a former military comrade of Batirashvili, who also requested anonymity because he was violating orders by speaking to the press about the issue. “We were well trained by American special forces units, and he was the star pupil.”

Of course, the U.S. government training for Batirashvili and other soldiers in Georgia did not take place with the explicit goal of producing future military leaders for a group of savages styling themselves the Islamic State. Instead, similar in many ways to what happened with Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda in Afghanistan, the U.S. government plan, supposedly at least, was to help the government of Georgia defend itself against potential aggression from the Kremlin. And indeed, according to sources interviewed for the McClatchy report, Batirashvili fought well against Russian strongman Vladimir Putin’s forces, first as a Chechen rebel, and later as a U.S.-trained Georgian Special Forces officer.

While Batirashvili came from an isolated Islamic enclave in the largely Christian nation, Batirashvili and others from his region had traditionally followed a moderate strain of Islam, so-called Sufi Islam. But Sufi Muslims are often considered heretics by their more radical coreligionists in places such as Saudi Arabia and Afghanistan. Eventually, thanks to generous funding from the U.S.-allied Saudi dictatorship, hardcore Wahhabi Islam would soon make its mark on the Chechen enclave in Georgia — and on Batirashvili in particular. The same phenomenon has happened around the world.

According to McClatchy, the moderate version of Islam followed by locals from Batirashvili’s region came under pressure in the year 2000, when the Saudi regime financed the construction of a new mosque for the handful of ethnic Chechen villages in the Georgian valley. A local community leader quoted in the article explained that this new mosque “preached a kind of alien Wahhabi-style Islam” — the same radical Islam that the Saudi monarchy, a key member of Obama’s “anti-ISIS” coalition, has for generations been trying to propagate around the world with lavish funding from its oil revenues. “It told our people that it was wrong to pray at graves of saints and ancestors, as our people have done for hundreds of years, and even to share our religious rites with our Christian brothers,” the community leader said. Other residents told the news agency that by the mid-2000s, the new Saudi-backed mosque had split the local Muslim community in two, with older Muslims sticking to their traditional faith while younger villagers became radicalized in the new mosque.

Then, the globalist-engineered civil war broke out in Syria after years of U.S. taxpayer funding for Syrian opposition groups exposed in official U.S. diplomatic cables. At that point, the radicalized young Muslim villagers in Georgia affiliated with the Saudi mosque — prepared for violent jihad through years of Saudi-funded radical teachings — began an exodus to go wage holy war in Syria. “They all started leaving for Syria,” the community elder told McClatchy. “Things are safer here now because all the radicals — our children — have gone to Syria.” The report also notes that the radicalized Batirashvili served as an excellent recruiting tool for ISIS, attracting jihadists from across central Asia to join the jihad on the “apostate” dictator of Syria.

It is impossible to know how many other ISIS fighters from around the world were also radicalized in mosques funded by members of the “anti-ISIS” coalition, or how many of those fighters received training from the U.S. military under various guises. But without a doubt, there are many. In fact, Obama’s alleged plan to fight ISIS — training and equipping so-called moderate jihadists to fight more radical jihadists — was exposed as a monumental failure this week. Testifying before the U.S. Senate Armed Services Committee on September 16, General Lloyd Austin, the top U.S. military commander for the Middle East, admitted that just “four or five” of Obama’s U.S.-trained jihadists were actually fighting against ISIS in Syria. On the other hand, as The New American and others have documented extensively, far more than that are currently fighting with ISIS, al-Qaeda, and other terrorist groups across Syria — often with heavy U.S. weapons. Indeed, entire brigades of U.S.-trained rebels have joined terror groups or signed agreements with them to fight Assad.

As a direct consequence of the Obama administration’s lawless so-called “foreign policy” machinations, hundreds of thousands are dying, millions are fleeing their homes, refugees are swamping Europe, Middle Eastern Christians are facing genocide, and the national security threat to the United States is growing stronger by the day. Now, all those crises are being exploited by the same globalists who created them to push more of the same insanity.

It is time for Congress to shut down this farce and hold everyone responsible for it accountable.

Photo of  Abu Omar al Shishani, taken from a video: AP Images

Alex Newman, a foreign correspondent for The New American, is normally based in Europe. Follow him on Twitter @ALEXNEWMAN_JOU. He can be reached at anewman@thenewamerican.com.

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