Part 9
By Abu Umair al-Afghani
If ISIS Was an American Project, What Was It Meant to Achieve?
ISIS was an American project, carried out by Ba’athist generals and the Khawarij. It was designed to achieve the following objectives:
1. To reinforce the Western claim that the caliphate, the Islamic system, and Islamic rule are forms of tyranny and coercion that cannot be applied in the modern world. God forbid.
2. To portray jihad as terrorism, the killing of innocent people, brutality, and oppression. God forbid.
3. To discredit Islamic thought and make it hated among Muslims.
4. To spread division among Muslims and encourage Muslims to kill one another in the name of Islam.
5. To suppress and weaken every Islamic movement that the West sees as a threat to its future.
6. To lure thousands of new Muslims in the West who held pro-jihad views, drawing them out of the West and trapping them in the ranks of ISIS.
7. To discredit martyrdom operations, which had become one of the few methods the West found difficult to counter.
8. To tarnish Islam in general, especially jihad as one of its central pillars, to create doubt in the minds of Muslims, and to distort the thinking of Muslim youth.
9. To strengthen the legitimacy of Western ideology while presenting democracy and capitalism as the only viable systems for the world.
These objectives could no longer be achieved through Orientalists or the well-known secular figures aligned with the West. This time, Western intelligence agencies remained behind the scenes, the Khawarij became the visible face of the project, and inexperienced, sincere Muslim youth were used as its fuel. This made ISIS the West’s most successful project because it advanced Western goals by exploiting the name, ideas, and declared objectives of its own enemies.
I will not discuss why ISIS were Khawarij, because entire books have already been written on that subject. There is hardly a recognized scholar anywhere in the Muslim world who has not described them as Khawarij. My main point is different. Alongside their Khariji ideology, I believe they also served as a hidden project of America and Israel, pursuing the objectives mentioned above. History records the damage the Khawarij inflicted on Islam, and many books have been written about it. If the Khawarij alone were harmful to Islam, then the harm would only become greater if they were used by the intelligence agencies of non-Muslim powers.
Laying the Groundwork for ISIS
The most important center in the formation of ISIS was Camp Bucca prison, which was a major CIA intelligence facility.
Among the ISIS leaders who were imprisoned there were:
– Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi
– Haji Bakr, the former Ba’athist officer
– Abu Muslim al-Turkmani
– Abu Ali al-Anbari
– Abu Ahmad al-Alwani
These men later formed the core leadership of ISIS. All of them passed through Camp Bucca, a prison located about seventy kilometers from Basra in southern Iraq. Let us pause on this point for a moment.
Iraq’s main prisons, including Abu Ghraib and the well-known Camp Cropper, were both located near Baghdad International Airport, where most political prisoners and senior figures were held. What is remarkable, however, is that all the key ISIS leaders ended up in Camp Bucca, a provincial prison instead. At the time, no one outside the CIA knew what was taking place there. Even more striking is the fact that, among the four hundred thousand Pentagon documents later leaked by WikiLeaks, one report sent to the Pentagon stated that strong pledges of allegiance among ISIS members were taking place inside Camp Bucca. Another report said that Ba’athist officers and jihadist leaders were actively planning together there.
Another secret CIA document, leaked in 2012, stated that the emergence of an extremist state in Syria and Iraq would serve as a tool for Western pressure in the Middle East. It also stated that the creation of a hardline Salafi emirate in Syria and Iraq would be useful in confronting Iran and Bashar al-Assad. It is worth noting that the American military reports leaked by WikiLeaks under the title Iraq War Logs were made public in 2010, while the CIA document was leaked in 2012. ISIS itself did not emerge until 2014. This suggests that preparations for the ISIS project had begun well before 2010.
To summarize al-Baghdadi’s story briefly, he was a little-known local imam. The Americans imprisoned him as an enemy, later released him as an innocent man, and by 2014 he had become the world’s most wanted terrorist and one of the most dangerous men on earth. Such a transformation could not have taken place naturally in just a few years.
