Dear friends,

Al-Qaeda CIAHere is my 8th podcast.  This one is short and deal with one topic only: the origins of the group known today as ISIS/IS/Daesh/etc.  Please let me know if you find some short(er) single-topic podcasts useful or not, or if you prefer to previous Q&A format.

Note about the music:

The music for this show are two compositions of the wonderful Florida guitarist Walter Parks.  The tunes are “Epiphany” and “Requiem” both of which are on the same album which you can buy here and here.

Parks is a great guy and a fantastic musician whom the big corporations are ignoring but who deserves much more recognition than he got so far.  So allow me to shamelessly plug him and his music here, especially his solo album “Walter Parks” – get something *truly* Floridian, beautiful and not very well-known :-)

To stream or download the podcast please click here: https://sites.google.com/site/sakerpodcast/home and go to the bottom of the page to Podcast #8.

Cheers and kind regards to all,

The Saker

TRANSCRIPT:

Dear Friends,

Welcome to my podcast, this is the Saker speaking. I think this is July 20th, and I have to tell you I’m recording it at my home here in, officially, ‘sunny’ Florida. Well, in reality, today we’re having a big thunder storm going around, so first of all, you might hear thunder claps. If you hear ‘boom boom’ its not artillery shells, its just the weather. And secondly my dogs usually go crazy when they hear thunder claps, so if you hear alot of barking that’s again the weather. There’s nothing I can do about it and I hope that you won’t mind if that happens during this podcast.

Its been a long time since I made a podcast, I apologize for that. I was simply extraordinarily busy doing many many things. Organizing things. I hope you see progress and more interesting documents and articles on the blog and the latest one being 25,000 + words; Special Srebrenica Report, which I hope you’ll find interesting. But today is a good day for me to record, because as a result of all this time spent behind my keyboard, I have a minor case of repetitive motion injury. Basically my arm hurts from having spent too much time with the mouse and the keyboard and I’m trying to stay away from that today. So I decided to go and make a podcast which many of you have asked, for a long while. And I apologize for all the time it took me to finally sit down and do it.

I’m going to keep this one, I’ll try at least, to keep it shorter than the other ones and specifically I want to address one question, which a good supporter and friend of the blog asked me to touch upon. This is the origins of ISIS. And I’ll do that with the following disclaimer. I do not, and have not had access to any kind of privileged information for a long long while. Lets see, about 15 years now, so I will do the best I can out of memory, out of my recollections of what I’ve heard in the past, and I hope this will be useful and interesting for those of you who are maybe not fully informed about this topic.

There are you know, different names for that, shall we call it ‘movement’, ISIS, ISIL, IS Daeash. And before that there was Al Qaeda. Al Qaeda in Iraq, Al Qaeda here and there. There were before that, talks of Mujahideens, which originally, not the word, but the concept, in Western media appeared during the war in Afghanistan. Then they were the good Mujahideens. Then, there were again Mujahideens showing up in the war in Bosnia which then, were still mostly considered good Mujahideens, but kind of, how shall I put it, ‘rough’.

Basically I believe we’re talking about one phenomenon. And that phenomenon, even though there are sub… ok, first of all I do not believe that there is ONE organization structured singularly, controlled by ONE person, called any of the names – for all practical purposes I’ll speak of Al Qaeda.

I don’t believe that exists. Here is my understanding of what happened, if anybody knows better I would welcome comments and corrections and criticisms.

The idea was the following. The United States was aiming at the quote ‘soft underbelly of the Soviet Union’ for very many years and the weak spot obviously, the perfect spot to attack was Afghanistan, where indeed the Soviets committed a fantastic blunder, when they entered that country. And they did it, their mistake was basically they did not have a clear exit strategy. They clearly underestimated the capability of the Afghan people, all ethnicity combined, for warfare. And they didn’t…sorry, that’s my cellphone, I need to keep it on, there might be something important. So if you hear the electronic bleeps, I apologize for that. I’m waiting for an important message. So even if I record the podcasts, my life doesn’t stop, so I apologize for that too.

So I was saying that the last big mistake was that they failed to fully understand the implications of having, a basically artificial border between Afghanistan and Pakistan, sitting smack in the middle of what some have called “Pashtunistan”. That is the people, the Pashto people on both sides of the border. As do other ethnicities as a matter of fact. That border is porous and artificial. So basically when the Soviets entered Afghanistan, the Americans did find that this was the perfect place to organize an insurrection against them. The big problem was that basically the Soviet military, even though we’re talking about you know the late ’70s, early ’80s was definitely under financed. Not under financed but poorly financed, wastefully financed. The training was not what it could have been and certainly the sanitary conditions were pretty bad, so there was a pretty good hope that the Soviet’s military would have, and face, major problems in Afghanistan. But what the Americans failed to take into account is the fact that for all its flaws, the Soviet military was still a formidable military force, commanded with some pretty competent people and a very very very tough soldier. I mean the Soviet soldier was, his training was brutal indeed, but it also made him tough, very resistant. So the Soviets actually adapted, I would say, for a large bureaucratic army like the Soviet one and the Soviet system, which was very bureaucratic, fairly rapidly to new conditions. And they fought pretty well, very well I would even say.

So the point was to make the struggle for the Soviets harder. And here came the brilliant, quote unquote ‘brilliant’ concept. The idea is this. First of all, take all those who volunteer to ‘die for a cause’ and send them to Afghanistan, if you can motivate them. Now clearly Afghanistan was not a case of ‘all the Proletariats of the world unite’, but it was a potential case of ‘all the Muslims of the world unite’, if you package it as the invasion of a country of the Islamic Ummah, by infidels and atheists. And secondly, Islam always had within itself a large diversity of groups, but one of which was particularly susceptible to that kind of fanatization, which was the Wahhabis. And I would say Wahhabis and what in the future will be called Takfiris. So some groups, it doesn’t matter what the name is, some Muslims, particularly if you combine that with a good organization and money, who were willing to travel to Afghanistan and fight. The Saudis played a key role in actually implementing this plan and financing it.

So basically what happened is that USCIA federated Islamic Extremists for pretty much the entire planet. Gave them limitless political support and lots of weapons and the Saudis gave them lots of money. And all of this good folk was moved into Afghanistan through Pakistan, typically, and engaged into the fight. These were the ‘Freedom Fighters’ that Reagan loved so much that he received them in the White House. Essentially you could say, that Reagan received the early version of Al Qaeda People, in the White House. This is actually what it is. Because what happened after that is, that while the war was going on there, they were useful and eventually when the Soviets got out, Afghanistan was more or less forgotten. But what you had is a large group of people that was good at only one thing, fighting. Fanatized and under the mistaken impression that they had just defeated a major Western infidel power and that they had the potential to be struggling for the Islamic Ummah elsewhere.

And we saw the first re-appearance of these people in Bosnia as I mentioned. Those small groups should not be exaggerated, its not true that most fighting forces in Bosnia were so called Mujahideen. But they were there, they existed, and for them it was important politically to show the flag. But already at that point, already the Americans began by being favorable to their presence. They were actually flown in, by the Turks and Americans. But pretty soon the Americans got fed up with them and they were back-flown out. So there were cases actually of them being arrested, as far as I know sometimes with the use of force, and deported out of Bosnia. So that was the first sign that things were getting tense between, I would say the spiritual father of Al Qaeda, which is the USCIA, and the actual people.

Now after the war in Bosnia, the other place where the same people could also show their flag, and did show their flag, was Chechnya. However in Chechnya they were defeated by a combination of Chechens who did not want to be ruled by outsiders, imposing a totally different form of Islam upon the Chechen people, and by a rather ruthless, determined and very effective Russian attack against these insurgent forces. So they were defeated in Chechnya also.

There were other locations on the planet where these people were active. Indonesia is one, Far East Asia generally, Africa, but basically all of that happened under the horizon of the Western Corporate Media. The big, well you heard certainly, Bin Laden was already you know, an issue, ‘a problem’ the Clinton administration had to tackle, but of course the big sexy event that gave the US a long term enemy was 9/11. Now I’m not going to go into all my different views of 9/11, I will just summarize them, saying here that I am convinced that there were Saudis aboard these planes. I don’t think these planes were flown by them, I think they were remotely controlled, and I think this was an inside job as you all know. I hesitate to say, my impression, but I’m willing to be convinced otherwise, is that the architects of 9/11 were inside the United States. And that Israelis were used simply to implement it, specifically to rig the Twin Towers. But I’m reading right now the book by Christopher Bollyn, about 9/11 and he claims that 9/11 was actually planned by the Israelis. I am willing to be convinced, [although] I’m not convinced by his arguments yet. But hopefully I will one day maybe make an interview with him about that. But it doesn’t matter. Basically it was Neo-Con / Israeli joint venture to justify, to get support for Israel and justify a complete re-shaping of the war, I mean the Middle East.

Still Al Qaeda did play a role. Its not true to say that this is, you know, only an American job. Only ‘we did it’. No no no, Al Qaeda was definitely involved. But why ? Because Al Qaeda all these years had been basically ‘a list’, a data base, of all these people that USCIA could, and other agencies, could use, if and when needed, to their, for their political goals. Its like a Pit-Bull that you unleash on somebody that you want to have bitten. I mean that’s the function of these Islamist extremists. And in that case they also serve the other function of Lee Harvey Oswald. They were the obvious, you know, clear consensus culprit that prevented of asking any other further question about how it was actually organized.

Now at that point I believe that most of the American political system, I think basically there was a reduction in the intensity of contacts [between] and a loss of control by the US over, lets say this ‘movement’. And the reason to explain this is pretty simple. The larger a movement is, the more de-centralized it is, the more people that are part of it, the more it sort of acquires its own autonomy, and capacity to function. Now even if some of the people are either contacts or agents for any western intelligence agency, it doesn’t mean that the movement doesn’t have its own power or its own purges, its own dynamic. I mean its the famous Frankenstein monster or Gollum that you lose control over and turns against its master. I think this is exactly what we are observing here.

This is also what happened with Al Qaeda. Al Qaeda in Iraq specifically, which would never have happened had it not been for the US invasion of that country. And it all got ritually ridiculous with the war in Libya where it was absolutely clear what [where] these people had come from. Qaddafi kept them under check. As soon as the Qaddafi regime fell they massively flooded the country from all over the world, particularly from other parts of Africa, where they were semi-retired. From Africa, the next point where they were clearly in huge amounts was Syria. And again the notion here was to unleash them to reek havoc over the Syrians, overthrow Assad, which was the number one priority and “ Well, we’ll see what happens”. Well it didn’t work that way. Yet again they [the US] lost control over it. So this is nothing new, its been going on over and over and over and over again. The United States has been sponsoring, pushing these kind of units and then losing control over them.

I also think its important to repeat here that the Muslim world at large, does not have sympathies or connections with these extremists. I don’t like to call them extremists actually. I don’t know what the proper label really should be for them. I honestly don’t like using the word ‘Islamic terrorists’ because it somewhere implies a link to Islam. My point is exactly this, that the first victim of these groups is always Muslims. So its hard for me to call them Islamic extremists. To me an Islamic extremist is someone who takes Islam very seriously and actually makes a change in his or her daily life, under that inspiration, of the rules and traditions of Islam. I mean if you want, I would consider myself an Orthodox extremist because I take that seriously. But if some crazy Orthodoxist goes, you know throwing bombs left and right, I wouldn’t like him to be called an Orthodox extremist. So I really don’t have a good word for these people so I guess I’ll call them Al Qaeda types. Its neutral.

So these Al Qaeda types usually have, most, a wrath hatred and terror directed at other Muslims, who are their first victims. Its really really important to state that, and particularly in context of what is happening now in Southern Russia. I read an article about that, I don’t have the title here, but you can look it up, about the myth of the soft under belly. I would add that the recent conference in Ufa of the BRICS, the SCO, the Eurasian Economic Cooperation Countries, actually in a large part, particularly with the inclusion now into the SCO of India and Afghanistan, what you’re seeing is basically the regional powers preparing for an ISIS like attempt by the United States, to create an ISIS like situation in Central Asia and China. Because this is the time honored American policy. You try to control a place, if you can’t, you, you destroy it so nobody else can control it. And you make the people who oppose the United States, pay. Clearly now the United States has lost control over Russia and China. I would even argue that it has lost control over most countries of the Caucasus and Central Asia. And basically the way to make itself still relevant is to support and create yet another Al Qaeda type of insurgencies, in a region which has a large Muslim population. Kazakhstan being one example. But also certain provinces of China, and even Iran. Not all of Iran is completely Shia. There is Arabistan which is mainly Sunni or largely Sunni. So there is a potential of ‘inject that, kind of, the same virus’ into that region.

So its interesting, the very, from the very onset, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization – SCO, was very heavily geared towards anti-terrorism. Now make no mistake, we’re not talking about a terrorism like the Baader Meinhof in Germany, the Brigade Rosse in Italy or even like the IRA or the Ulster Unionist in Ireland. We’re talking about terrorism in a form of insurgency which, to me, the big difference is an insurgency which actually tries to control territory. That’s to me the conceptual difference between ‘insurgency’ and ‘terrorist’ movements. So the FARC for instance could be considered insurgency. I wouldn’t call them a terrorist group regardless of their methods. Same thing for the Sendero Luminoso in Peru. I would call that an insurgency and that’s why I speak of a Chechnya insurgency. There is, probably is, still a little bit of something called a Chechen terrorist underground, but there is no more insurgency. Not that I’m putting the FARC and Sendaristas and the Chechens in one group, I’m just speaking about different kinds of insurgences, whether legitimate or not, this is a different issue.

So I think what they’re (SCO) preparing for is the risk of a real insurgency, bleeding into the central part of the Eurasian continent, for instance through Afghanistan. That’s why the presence of the Afghan Premier in Ufa was also an important thing. Because basically the risk is too big, and the countries need to, not only cooperate with each other, but they need to do something even more basic, which is not try to use an insurgency, against each other. Because there is objective economic competition, even between Russia and China. There are parts of their relationship which is competitive. And certainly the Russians and the Chinese could be seen as fighting each other over Kazakhstan.

Well, the big deal here is that all these countries have agreed that the economic and political competition between members of the SCO will be played by a specific set of rules. One of which is zero tolerance of terrorism by any side, and complete cooperation for it, because this is too big a danger for everybody. That is not to say that the SCO is anti-Muslim, not at all. Again, the Muslim countries will be part of that. I mean a major aspect of of their [SCO’s] existence and collaboration is the preparation for a breakdown of Afghanistan, and a bleeding out of the ISIS Daeash phenomenon into possibly Iran, possibly the Caucasuses, possibly Central Asia and possibly through Georgia, actually, is another channel, that country being fairly under the US control.

So that’s what I wanted to just shortly summarize about what, where, lets put it in this way, Al Qaeda types come from and, I think, what’s happening today. I mean the lose of control by the US, over their own creature, which creates a number of problems. There is also in-fighting inside the United States, I think, inside the Deep State. Some of them want to use them, others don’t. And finally, I want to say that whatever happens in Syria, I think that countries like Iran, Pakistan, Russia, China and all these other countries that are members or future members of SCO are definitely aware of that risk. And I think they will challenge it too, very effectively. Syria was exceptionally weak and did exceptionally well in its resistance, in facing horrible odds really. If the folks at the Al Qaeda, and Iraq, and the rest of them, think that their experience in Syria or in Iraq prepares them to take on the SCO…good luck.

Ok, that’s it for today, as I said I was going to make it a short one. Let me know if you find it useful or whatever, or that those short podcasts are not very interesting for you ? As always, as with agreement with what you yourselves suggested, that I remind you at the end of this podcast, that your donations really do help. See if you can spare anything. Please send me your donations. They’re always needed. And I’m very grateful to those that do that. And I hope to resume these podcasts in a halfway regular manner again. Until then, all the best. Cheers and hugs ! And thank you for your time and attention. Bye bye.