Published on Aug 31, 2014
PROVIDED BY CNNNEXT.COM
An award-winning American investigative journalist says the ISIL terrorist group is using weapons supplied by the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).
Dave Lindorff made the remarks in a phone interview with Press TV on Saturday while commenting on US Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel’s upcoming visit to Turkey in an effort to build a “coalition of the willing” take on ISIL militants.
“We know that the government in the US wants to go in and attack ISIS, which is in itself kind of remarkable when you consider that a lot of the weapons they are using were provided by the CIA, or indirectly by the CIA through Saudi Arabia to the ISIS to fight [Bashar] Assad”, Lindorff said, using an alternate acronym for the terrorist group.
“Now we are turning around and saying we have to attack them,” he added.
ISIL controls large parts of Syria's northern territory.
The group sent its fighters into neighboring Iraq in June, quickly seizing large swaths of land straddling the border between the two countries.
The US military has begun planning for airstrikes against ISIL targets in Syria after the recent beheading of American journalist James Foley.
The US has launched a limited air campaign against the terrorist group in Iraq since August 8.
“I guess it’s an old game of the US of providing arms to the both sides…So we go back and forth and people keep getting killed all the time,” Lindorff stated.
“But the government needs some kind of cover to explain to the American people why the people they said were on our side -- the supposed moderate rebels in Syria -- are now our deadly enemy,” he noted.
“So they are trying to create this coalition; but nobody really wants to really participate.
So they have to bludgeon them, probably with economic pressure, to create this coalition of the so-called willing.
I doubt that if they get a coalition of more than two countries, that it would be actually a willing participation.
It’ll be a grudging participation under the economic pressure,” the veteran journalist concluded
