Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi allegedly headed ISIS, the jihadist group created and supported by the US and its imperial allies.
Years earlier, he was held in Camp Bucca, a US military prison in Iraq, later released, after which the ISIS terrorist group emerged.
Their fighters captured and controlled large parts of Iraq and Syria — heavily armed with US, other Western, Israeli and Turkish weapons, trained by US special forces and CIA operatives at regional Pentagon bases.
Whether Baghdadi or others headed ISIS leaves unexplained that the terror group was created, supported and controlled by the US, their fighters used as proxy troops, deployed to Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, Yemen and elsewhere, aided by Pentagon terror-bombing.
Trump’s Sunday announcement about the alleged elimination of Baghdadi was a political stunt, diverting attention momentarily from Dem efforts to remove him by impeachment, along with aiming to boost his reelection campaign — by falsely claiming he’s combatting terrorism, the scourge created and supported by the US.
His announcement was reminiscent of Obama’s fake news about Osama bin Laden’s alleged May 2011 death.
Post-9/11, he became “Enemy Number One,” the nation’s top “security threat.” If he hadn’t existed, he’d have been invented.
He had nothing to do with 9/11. Obama didn’t kill him. Gravely ill with kidney disease and other ailments, he died of natural causes in December 2001 — reported by the NYT, the BBC, Fox News and other Western media at the time.
Influential people reported his death, including then-Pakistani President Musharraf, FBI counterterrorism head Dale Watson, Pakistani intelligence, and Israel’s Mossad, saying supposed messages from him were fake.
Is Baghdadi dead or alive? Does it matter either way? Can anything Trump says be believed? His credibility was long ago lost.
Trump saying Baghdadi was “killed…in a daring nighttime raid” sounded like Obama’s earlier falsely claiming “the United States has conducted an operation that killed Osama bin Laden (by) a targeted operation…carried out…with extraordinary courage and capability (sic).”
Bin Laden was an unwitting CIA asset, later demonized post-mortem for political purposes — Baghdadi serving in a similar capacity.
Whether alive or dead doesn’t matter. ISIS, al-Qaeda and other terrorists ground continue to be used by the Pentagon and CIA as proxy troops.
In response to Trump’s Sunday announcement, Russian Defense Ministry spokesman General Igor Konashenkov said the following:
The ministry “has no reliable information about (involvement of) US servicemen (in) an operation to ‘yet another’ elimination of the former Daesh leader Abu Bark al-Baghdadi in the Turkish-controlled part of the Idlib deescalation zone,” adding:
“No airstrikes performed by US aircraft or aircraft belonging to the so called ‘international coalition’ were detected on Saturday or during the following days.”
No Russian cooperation was provided to the US for the alleged operation, no permission to use deescalation zone airspace, as Trump claimed.
“Since the moment of the final Daesh’s defeat at the hands of the Syrian government army supported by Russian Aerospace Forces in early 2018, yet another ‘death’ of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi does not have any strategic importance regarding the situation in Syria or the actions of the remaining terrorists in Idlib,” Konashenkov stressed.
Reports of his death proved greatly exaggerated a number of times before. If Washington wanted him killed, he’d have been eliminated long ago.
Trump’s Sunday announcement is another example of things allegedly changing but staying the same.
Endless US wars rage in Syria and elsewhere, no near-term prospect for resolving them because bipartisan US hardliners and the nation’s military, industrial, security, media complex oppose restoration of peace and stability to war-torn countries.
A Final Comment
On June 16, 2017, Tass reported that “Baghdadi may have been killed by a Russian airstrike on the southern outskirts of Raqqa in late May, according to the Defense Ministry,” adding:
“The airstrike was carried out overnight to May 28 against a command post, where the IS group’s leaders were meeting to discuss the routes for the terrorists’ exit from Raqqa through the so-called southern corridor, the ministry said in a statement.”
“According to information…the meeting was also attended by the IS leader Ibrahim Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, who was eliminated in the strike,” the ministry said.
“Russia’s Aerospace Forces killed a number of high-ranking commanders of the Islamic State terrorist group, including 330 field commanders and militants, in the southern suburb of Syria’s Raqqa in late May,” according to its Defense Ministry.
Russian and Syrian forces successfully combated ISIS and other terrorist groups.
The US and its imperial allies pretend to be combating the scourge of ISIS they support — along with al-Qaeda, its al-Nusra offshoot, and likeminded jihadists.
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Award-winning author Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago. He can be reached at [email protected]. He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG)
His new book as editor and contributor is titled “Flashpoint in Ukraine: US Drive for Hegemony Risks WW III.”
http://www.claritypress.com/LendmanIII.html
Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com.
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