DID THE US GOVERNMENT CREATE ISIS? The American "jihadi university" in Iraq

“JIHADI UNIVERSITY”: Inmates in Camp Bucca, a US prison in Iraq, doing their daily Muslim prayers (Image: Dusan Vranic/AP)

What is going on in Syria? Here’s a headline from yesterday: ‘US strikes dozens of ISIS camps and operatives in Syria amid Assad’s downfall.’¹

Huh! How about that? ISIS is still going strong.

But is the US really striking ISIS camps and operatives in Syria? That’s what CENTCOM—the United States Central Command, with its forward headquarters at Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar—is saying. Well… maybe. But you can take that with a grain of salt. Because it was the US, Turkey, and Qatar, together, that helped produce ISIS.

I’ll explain that here.

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The American “jihadi university” and the emergence of ISIS

Under Saddam Hussein, Iraq was not the best place in the world but neither was it an apocalyptic cauldron of jihadist terror activity. It became the latter in the wake of the US invasion, justified publicly on the claim that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction (WMDs), which, it later turned out, he didn’t have (or so they said).

When Iraq, as a result of the US Invasion, became a terrorist nightmare (which it hadn’t been), and the Iraqi desert boomed and bloomed in red flames and black plumes, a rather large US-military prison system was established to provide accommodations for some of the culprits—and for many others. As explained in The Nation,

“One of the biggest complaints is that the vast majority of detainees have not been charged with any crime. (…) The legal basis for detentions stems from a single line of a 2004 UN Security Council resolution, which has been renewed every year since by agreement between the US and Iraqi governments. This resolution, which gives the legal justification for continued US military occupation, allows ‘internment where this is necessary for imperative reasons of security.’ ”²

In other words, US authorities had total freedom to just point to a person, arbitrarily, and say: “You there, to prison!” According to The Nation, US authorities incarcerated around 200,000 Iraqis between 2003 and 2008. This is almost unimaginable.

Now, the confused jihadists in these US prisons in Iraq obviously had never heard the Western media gospel that Islam is the religion of peace. I say that because, in August 2007, Newsweek reported that Maj. Gen. Douglas Stone, responsible for US ‘Detainee Operations’ (prisons) in Iraq, had begun trying to ‘re-educate’ his charges at Camp Cropper and Camp Bucca into this kinder, gentler Islam.³

Success was improbable, according to Newsweek, which wrote: “Even General Stone admits that the jury is out on how well the religious [re-education] classes may work on juveniles.” Sheik Jabbar, the hapless Muslim cleric in charge of the re-education program, was considerably more candid—he thought the jury was in. “If they let them out,” he said, “they would all become suicide bombers.” He meant his own students!

Why was Jabbar so pessimistic? His re-education program was small and weak. In consequence, he had noticed only a small improvement in “some” of his students. And “he’s not sure it’s going to last.” The meaning of “some” is this: just three or four kids, because “[Jabbar’s] religious education classes target a focus group of 10 young men.” To put that in context, there were “approximately 3,800 detainees at Cropper.”

The rival jihadist education program, running concurrently, was more ambitious:

“detainees are now being brought into Cropper at the rate of roughly 60 a day. As the detainees come in, the [jihadi] insurgents already in custody fan out, looking for new recruits.”

Poor Jabbar. His reeducation program was apparently nothing more than a gesture, a bit of political correctness, in display just to give the Newsweek reporter something positive to report. For Jabbar had been asked to empty a jihadi ocean, with a spoon, in the middle of a jihadi hurricane.

Was that jihadi hurricane US policy?

Nazim Al-Juburi, a prominent Al Qaeda defector, seemed to be of that opinion. In a May 2008 interview he said:

“We have spoken to the Americans more than once and told them that they make a big mistake by giving many of our detained people in Camp Bucca and other prisons a chance to be educated on this [jihadist] ideology.”⁴

A month later, General Douglas Stone, in charge of those military prisons, told the New York Times that he was now separating ‘extremist’ from ‘moderate’ inmates so as to impede that sort of thing. But his prison system, he confessed, had been a “jihadi university” (his words).⁵

That is exactly how another former detainee from Camp Bucca, Adel Jasim Mohammed, described it:

“ ‘Extremists had freedom to educate the young detainees. I saw them giving courses using classroom boards on how to use explosives, weapons and how to become suicide bombers,’ Mohammed said.

‘For the Americans we felt it was normal. They did not stop them [the radicals].’ ”⁶

Now, this “jihadi university” was running from 2003 until the US military initiated the process to dismantle their military prison system in Iraq in late 2008. Five years—a bachelor’s degree. So even if we believe that Stone really did begin a half-hearted attempt to fix the problem in mid-2008, the damage was obviously already—and utterly—done.

And when the prisons were shut down—get this—the prisoners were simply released!

As that process began in late 2008, the New York Times reported that local Iraqi sheiks, who were universally against the prisoner releases, were warning US officials that dangerous AQI (Al Qaeda in Iraq) murderers were among the freed. Iraqi government officials were also complaining, and asked for

“access to American intelligence in cases of potentially dangerous detainees so that they could issue arrest warrants and then either hold the detainees themselves or ask the Americans to continue to hold them.”⁷

The Americans refused, claiming they had to protect their sources. Yes, because in order to protect your sources, you allow the murderers they informed on to roam free. That makes perfect sense.

Those AQI murderers would soon produce ISIS.

Zero controversy on this point: US policy created ISIS

Let me be clear: nobody disputes that the US “jihadi university” in Iraq was the platform for the creation and development of ISIS.

Mother Jones, for example, published a piece with the title: “Was Iraq’s Top Terrorist Radicalized at a US-Run Prison?”⁸

The New York Times ran the following long headline/accusation:

“How America helped ISIS. 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.”⁹

And the Washington Post had an article titled “How the Islamic State evolved in an American prison,” stating that “nine members of the Islamic State’s top command did time at Camp Bucca,” including Abu Bakr Al Baghdadi, the group’s top leader. The Post quoted a report by a US soldier that explained how the extremists ran the inmates according to Sharia law, and anybody guilty of ‘Western’ behavior was “severely punished.”¹⁰

The US prisons in Iraq midwifed an important merger. At Camp Bucca, the Washington Post explained, the fascist but secular Baathists got Islamist religion, and the Islamist but disorganized jihadists acquired Baathist organizational skills. And so, “from the ashes of what former inmates called an ‘al-Qaeda school’ rose the Islamic State.”

On all this, the media imposed the usual ‘mistakes were made’ and ‘impossible choices’ interpretations. But there is one small problem: after releasing into the wild its “jihadi university” graduates, the Pentagon directly assisted their offspring, the ‘Syrian rebels.’

But did they know who these ‘Syrian rebels’ were? And where they came from? Yes they did.

The ‘jihadi university’ graduates produced the ‘Syrian opposition to Assad’—and the Pentagon always knew this

On August 2012, US military intelligence produced a secret report since obtained and published by Judicial Watch.¹¹ The report, which makes clear what the Pentagon knew, states:

“The Salafist[s], the Muslim Brotherhood, and AQI [Al Qaeda in Iraq] are the major forces driving the insurgency in Syria.”

Some definitions:

• Salafist = influential jihadist, terrorist ideology

• Muslim Brotherhood = Salafist organization

• Al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) = Salafist organization that, in August 2012, was still making public statements “through the spokesman of the Islamic State in Iraq” or ISI, later to call itself Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS).

According to this Pentagon report, the main sponsor of the “Syrian opposition” was AQI—the Pentagon’s “jihadi university” graduates! The report says:

“AQI is familiar with Syria. AQI trained in Syria and then infiltrated into Iraq. AQI supported the Syrian opposition from the beginning, both ideologically and through the media. ...AQI conducted a number of operations in several Syrian cities under the name of Jaish al Nusra (Victorious Army), one of its affiliates.” (emphasis added)

What would probably happen? According to the Pentagon,

“If the situation unravels there is the possibility of establishing a declared or undeclared Salafist principality in Eastern Syria (Hasaka and Der Zor), and this is exactly what the supporting powers to the opposition want...” (emphasis added)

Who are these “supporting powers to the opposition”? As the same document explains, “the West, Gulf countries, and Turkey support the opposition” (emphasis added). “The West” here means the US, British, and French power elites (at least).

The Pentagon perceived

“... an ideal atmosphere for AQI to return to its old pockets in Mosul and Ramadi, and will provide a renewed momentum under the presumption of unifying the jihad among Sunni Iraq and Syria, and the rest of the Sunnis in the Arab world against what it considers one enemy, the dissenters [= Shias]. ISI could also declare an Islamic State through its union with other terrorist organizations in Iraq and Syria...” (emphasis added)

What happened? It really is uncanny: exactly what the Pentagon predicted. AQI returned to Mosul and Ramadi and ISI joined with other terror groups and declared an Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS).

Is this what the Pentagon wanted?

Let us consider two hypotheses.

• The Establishment hypothesis. This one says it was all a series of mistakes (Jared Israel called this the ‘Bumbling Bear’ model). This is the hypothesis invariably trotted out by the meaning makers in Big Media and established academia—but as the obvious ‘truth’; never as a hypothesis—whenever US policy produces a dramatically undemocratic result.

• The Machiavellian hypothesis. This one says that, yes, it was all quite intentional. It is never considered in the mainstream mass media because conspiracy theory is taboo.

Here at MOR we always consider the alternative hypothesis, because considering more than one hypothesis is the only way to do science. So let us consider the evidence and see which hypothesis is better supported.

The CIA was reported to be running a program to arm the ‘Syrian opposition’ as early as June 2012. “The arms themselves,” it was said, “are coming from Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar.” Since Turkey is run by an Islamist party, and the regimes in Saudi Arabia and Qatar are both ‘Wahhabi’—a virtual synonym of ‘Salafi’—it follows that all parties sponsoring this CIA weapons program for the ‘Syrian opposition’—except for the US sponsors—were openly Islamist. And as the August 2012 report makes clear, the Pentagon knew that the weapons were going mainly to its “jihadi university” graduates.

Of course, officially, it was claimed that the weapons were for “opposition groups seen as most friendly to the U.S.”, which is code for democratic, secular moderates.¹² To be fair, we must consider this claim, and how it was given legitimacy.

It happened like this.

There was this guy Ausama (or Osama) Monajed, from something calling itself the Syrian National Council (SNC). Monajed and other senior SNC ‘spokespeople’ looked like puppies of the US bosses, shuttling between the White House, the Council on Foreign Relations, the Ford Foundation, the Bilderberg meetings, the Henry Jackson Society, and other powerful think tanks in the US and Britain chock-full of intelligence, military, and diplomatic honchos such as Brent Scowcroft (former National Security Advisor), Zbigniew Brzezinski (same), and James Woolsey (former CIA Director). Every time the US bosses made a public call for assistance to the so-called ‘Syrian opposition,’ they would trot out this Monajed—or some substitute spokesman from the SNC—to echo agreement and give legitimacy. Each time, Monajed or the substitute would complain about “ ‘the militiamen of Assad,’ ” who, according to them, had nothing better to do than terrorize Syrian villagers, and they’d “ ‘come and rape their women, slaughter their children, and kill their elderly.’ ”¹³

These accusations, which the media confessed “we cannot confirm” but repeated anyway, always came from one—and only one—source: the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR), which, though bearing an august name, was just one guy, Rami Abdulrahman, who ran a clothes shop in Coventry (UK), and his computer. This is the same doubtful source that Big Media is of course still using today to tell you who is allegedly who and what allegedly is happening in Syria.¹⁴

Now, the SNC was “generally recognized” by Big Media as “ ‘the main opposition coalition,’ ” and it was portrayed as a group of pristine, freedom-fighting, liberal Syrian democrats.¹⁵ So the claim that the US was supporting moderate democrats in Syria hinged entirely on the claim that the SNC was composed of moderate democrats. There were two problems with that.

First, it was reported at the time that “the SNC ... includes the Muslim Brotherhood.”¹⁶

And second, nobody was denying that the CIA weapons for the ‘Syrian opposition’ were being “funneled mostly across the Turkish border by way of a shadowy network of intermediaries including Syria’s Muslim Brotherhood” (emphasis mine).¹⁷

Now, from its inception, the SNC and its powerful US ‘handlers’ had acted as a lobbying front in the West for the Free Syrian Army (FSA),¹⁸ which claimed to be a group of former Syrian Army officers now fighting the Assad regime in order to stop what they alleged were Assad’s attacks against civilians. This seemed consistent with the US official line.

However, in November 2012, “under Western pressure” (underline those words), the ‘Syrian opposition’ was “reorganized..., into a new National Alliance,” or National Coalition, in meetings held in Doha, Qatar.¹⁹ One third of the seats went to the SNC; the other two-thirds to committed and proud Islamists. ²⁰

Did that make sense? Well of course it did! Qatar is the main financier of jihadi terrorism—the center of the jihadi terrorist universe. In case you didn’t know about Qatar, we have an article on it.

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Paradox: The anti-Qatar protests on US campuses

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In December, with “security officials from the United States, Britain, France, the Gulf [meaning Qatar] and Jordan” watching over, the FSA was also reorganized.

“The unified command [of the new FSA] includes many with ties to the Muslim Brotherhood and to Salafists… It excludes the most senior officers who had defected from Assad’s military.

Its composition, estimated to be two-thirds from the Muslim Brotherhood and its allies, reflects the growing strength of Islamist fighters on the ground and resembles that of the civilian opposition leadership coalition created under Western and Arab auspices in Qatar last month.”²¹ (emphasis mine)

A pithy summary goes like this: just three months after the Pentagon recognized in its August 2012 report that the ‘Syrian opposition’ movement was basically an Islamist jihad (see above), US powerbrokers purged non-Islamists from those ‘Syrian opposition’ groups they had pledged themselves to support, pushing to one side the founders of the FSA.

Was this a mistake?

And, right away, there was more money, weapons, and training for the new FSA. Just a few months later, much of the FSA, now chock-full of jihadists, did the natural thing and joined ISIS, taking of course their US-supplied weaponry and training with them.²²

“For a long time, Western and Arab states supported the Free Syrian Army not only with training but also with weapons and other materiel. The Islamic State commander, Abu Yusaf, added that members of the Free Syrian Army who had received training—from the United States, Turkey and Arab military officers at an American base in Southern Turkey—have now joined the Islamic State. ‘Now many of the FSA people who the West has trained are actually joining us,’ he said, smiling.”²³

A good many other ISIS jihadists also received US training during the ‘Arab Spring,’ when US powerbrokers claimed—as they always do—that they were training democratic ‘freedom fighters.’²⁴

In light of this evidence, I would not know how to begin defending the Establishment hypothesis. So perhaps the alternative—Machiavellian—hypothesis, which has the US power elite favoring the growth of violent Muslim radicalism—deserves a fair hearing.

1. ‘US strikes dozens of ISIS camps and operatives in Syria amid Assad's downfall’; FOX NEWS; 8 December 2024; by Greg Wehner
https://www.foxnews.com/us/us-strikes-dozens-isis-camps-operatives-syria-amid-assads-downfall

2. Enders, D. (2008, October 8). Camp Bucca: Iraq’s Guantánamo Bay. The Nation.
https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/camp-bucca-iraqs-guantaacutenamo-bay/

3. “Iraqi Prison Tries to Un-Brainwash Radical Youth”; Newsweek; 8 August 2007; By Babak Dehghanpisheh
http://www.newsweek.com/iraqi-prison-tries-un-brainwash-radical-youth-99325

4. BBC Monitoring Middle East – Political; Supplied by BBC Worldwide Monitoring; May 2, 2008 Friday; “Iraq: TV carries second part of interview with former Al-Qa’idah member”; LENGTH: 2860 words; ["Death Industry" programme, presented by Rima Salihah recorded]

5. “U.S. Remakes Jails in Iraq, but Gains Are at Risk”; The New York Times; June 2, 2008; SECTION: Section A; Column 0; Foreign Desk; Pg. 1; LENGTH: 2798 words; DATELINE: BAGHDAD; By ALISSA J. RUBIN; Thom Shanker contributed reporting from Washington.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/02/world/middleeast/02detain.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

6. “US Iraq jail an ‘al-Qaeda school’ ”; 12 December 2009; Aljazeera.net
http://www.aljazeera.com/news/middleeast/2009/12/2009121274712823455.html

7. “A Puzzle Over Prisoners as Iraqis Take Control”; The New York Times; 25 October 2008; SECTION: Section A; Column 0; Foreign Desk; Pg. 1; LENGTH: 1665 words; DATELINE: CAMP BUCCA, Iraq; By ALISSA J. RUBIN
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/25/world/middleeast/25detain.html?pagewanted=all

8. “Was Iraq’s Top Terrorist Radicalized at a US-Run Prison?: A former US military compound commander at Camp Bucca suspects ISIS chief Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi's extremism was fostered (or bolstered) at the facility”; Mother Jones; 11 July 2014; by Jenna McLaughlin
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2014/07/was-camp-bucca-pressure-cooker-extremism

9. “How America Helped ISIS”; New York Times; 1 October 2014; by ANDREW THOMPSON and JEREMI SURIOCT
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/02/opinion/how-america-helped-isis.html?_r=0

10. “How the Islamic State evolved in an American prison”; Washington Post; 4 November 2014; by Terrence McCoy
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2014/11/04/how-an-american-prison-helped-ignite-the-islamic-state/

11. https://www.judicialwatch.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/Pg.-291-Pgs.-287-293-JW-v-DOD-and-State-14-812-DOD-Release-2015-04-10-final-version11.pdf

12. “Report: US Helping Syrian Rebels Arm, Fight”; VOA News; June 21, 2012.
http://www.voanews.com/content/report_us_aiding_syrian_opposition/1216745.html

13. “The Syrian opposition: who’s doing the talking?”; The Guardian; 12 July 2012; by Charlie Skelton
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/jul/12/syrian-opposition-doing-the-talking

14. “The Syrian opposition: who’s doing the talking?”; The Guardian; 12 July 2012; by Charlie Skelton
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/jul/12/syrian-opposition-doing-the-talking

15. “The Syrian opposition: who’s doing the talking?”; The Guardian; 12 July 2012; by Charlie Skelton
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/jul/12/syrian-opposition-doing-the-talking

16. “The Syrian opposition: who’s doing the talking?”; The Guardian; 12 July 2012; by Charlie Skelton
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/jul/12/syrian-opposition-doing-the-talking

17. “C.I.A. Said to Aid in Steering Arms to Syrian Opposition”; New York Times; 21 June 2012; Page A1; by Eric Schmitt
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/21/world/middleeast/cia-said-to-aid-in-steering-arms-to-syrian-rebels.html?_r=0

18. “Syria opposition groups agree to coordinate efforts: The Free Syrian Army agrees to scale back its campaign of attacks on Syrian forces after talks with the Syrian National Council, which advocates nonviolence”; Los Angeles Times; 1 December 2011; By Alexandra Zavis and Rima Marrouch
http://articles.latimes.com/2011/dec/01/world/la-fg-syria-accord-20111202

19. “Syria Rebels Create New Unified Military Command”; The World Post; 8 December 2012; BYLINE: Bassem Mroue and Ben Hubbard, Associated Press
https://web.archive.org/web/20150713014053/http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/12/08/syria-rebels-military-council_n_2263256.html

20. “Syrian opposition groups reach unity deal”; Los Angeles Times; 12 November 2012; BYLINE: Abdullah Rebhy, Associated Press
http://www.seattletimes.com/nation-world/syrian-opposition-groups-reach-unity-deal/

21. “Syrian rebels elect head of new military command”; 8 December 2012; Reuters
http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/12/08/us-syria-crisis-rebels-idUSBRE8B70AJ20121208

22. “FREE SYRIAN ARMY REBELS DEFECT TO ISLAMIST GROUP JABHAT AL-NUSRA: The well-resourced organisation, which is linked to al-Qaida, is luring many anti-Assad fighters away, say brigade commanders”; The Guardian; 8 May 2013; by Mona Mahmood and Ian Black
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/may/08/free-syrian-army-rebels-defect-islamist-group

23. “THE TERRORISTS FIGHTING US NOW? WE JUST FINISHED TRAINING THEM: No, the enemy of our enemy is not our friend”; Washington Post; 18 August 2014; By Souad Mekhennet
https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2014/08/18/the-terrorists-fighting-us-now-we-just-finished-training-them/

24. This was reported in the Washington Post:

“...Some European and Arab intelligence officials also voiced their worries and frustration about what they call the mistakes the United States has made in handling the uprisings in Arab states. ‘We had, in the early stages, information that radical groups had used the vacuum of the Arab Spring, and that some of the people the U.S. and their allies had trained to fight for ‘democracy’ in Libya and Syria had a jihadist agenda — already or later, [when they] joined al Nusra or the Islamic State,’ a senior Arab intelligence official said in a recent interview. He said that often his U.S. counterparts would say things like, ‘We know you are right, but our president in Washington and his advisers don’t believe that.’ Those groups, say Western security officials, are threats not only in the Middle East, but also in the United States and Europe, where they have members and sympathizers.

The official’s account has been corroborated by members of the Islamic State in and outside the Middle East, including Abu Yusaf, the military commander. In several interviews conducted in the last two months, they described how the collapse of security during Arab Spring uprisings helped them recruit, regroup and use the Western strategy — to support and train groups that fight dictators — for their own benefits. ‘There had [also] been … some British and Americans who had trained us during the Arab Spring times in Libya,’ said a man who calls himself Abu Saleh and who only agreed to be interviewed if his real identity remained secret.”

SOURCE: “THE TERRORISTS FIGHTING US NOW? WE JUST FINISHED TRAINING THEM: No, the enemy of our enemy is not our friend”; Washington Post; 18 August 2014; By Souad Mekhennet
https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2014/08/18/the-terrorists-fighting-us-now-we-just-finished-training-them/