US policy on Iraq led to creation of ISIL: Chomsky

The United States’ policy of war and sanctions against Iraq destabilized its civil society and provoked the sectarian divisions which led to the creation of the ISIL terrorist group, according to famed American linguist and philosopher Noam Chomsky.

Chomsky, who is also a cognitive scientist and political commentator, made the comments in an interview with journalist David Barsamian published by the New York-based Jacobin (magazine) on Monday. The complete interview will be broadcast by Alternative Radio.

Chomsky said that he agrees with Graham Fuller, a former CIA officer, who said, “the US created the background out of which ISIS (ISIL) grew and developed.”

The American scholar said the 2003 US invasion was “devastating” to Iraq, which had “already been virtually destroyed, first of all by the decade-long war with Iran in which, incidentally, Iraq was backed by the US, and then the decade of sanctions.”

He went on to say that the “genocidal sanctions… devastated the civilian society, they strengthened the dictator, compelled the population to rely on him for survival.”

Chomsky said the “very destructive… attack is compared by many Iraqis to the Mongol invasion of a thousand years earlier.”

He said after the offensive US policy makers separated “the sects, Sunni, Shi’a, Kurd, from one another, set them at each other’s throats. Within a couple of years, there was a major, brutal sectarian conflict incited by the invasion.”

Elsewhere in his remarks, Chomsky said the roots of the Takfiri ideology of ISIL “are in the major US ally, Saudi Arabia. That’s been the major US ally in the region as long as the US has been seriously involved there, in fact, since the foundation of the Saudi state.”

He further said that Saudi Arabia has “kind of a family dictatorship” which “uses its huge oil resources to promulgate these doctrines throughout the region. It establishes schools, mosques, clerics, all over the place, from Pakistan to North Africa.”

The ISIL terrorists, many of whom were initially trained by the CIA in Jordan in 2012 to destabilize the Syrian government, now control large parts Iraq and Syria. They are engaged in crimes against humanity in the areas under their control.

They have been carrying out horrific acts of violence such as public decapitations and crucifixions against all communities, including Shias, Sunnis, Kurds, and Christians.

ISIL has beheaded three American, two British and two Japanese hostages in recent months. The graphic videos of their beheadings were posted online.

Last week, the terrorist group said in a statement that female American hostage Kayla Jean Mueller, whom it was holding near the city of Raqqa, was killed when US-led coalition aircraft bombed a building where she was being held.

Earlier this month, an ISIL video surfaced showing the terrorists purportedly torching a captured Jordanian pilot, 26-year-old Moaz al-Kassasbeh, to death.

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