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ISIL growth paralleled US intervention in Middle East: Analyst

Monday, 14 December 2015 4:50 PM [ Last Update: Monday, 14 December 2015 4:50 PM ]

“The growth of Daesh has paralleled the US intervention and displacement of millions of people and the killing of millions in both Afghanistan and Iraq,” said James Petras.

The rise of the Daesh (ISIL) terrorist group in Iraq and Syria resulted from the long-running US military presence in the Middle East, an American writer and retired professor says.

“The growth of Daesh has paralleled the US intervention and displacement of millions of people and the killing of millions in both Afghanistan and Iraq,” said James Petras, a professor emeritus of sociology at Binghamton University in Binghamton, New York, and adjunct professor at Saint Mary's University in Halifax, Nova Scotia in Canada.

“The US has to end its presence in any Middle East country because its presence has been very destructive in Iraq, in Lebanon, in Syria, in Afghanistan, [and] Libya,” Petras told Press TV on Monday.

“The US idea that it can decide what the people of the Middle East want is a very negative attitude,” he added.

Petras agreed with leading American political analyst and philosopher Noam Chomsky that the United States and its Western allies are to blame for last month's terrorist attacks in Paris.

Chomsky has said that the US-led invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan has been the root cause of recent wave of terrorist attacks across the world.

“Do they want to encourage further terrorism, or do they want to end that kind of terrorism? That’s the choice,” he said of European and US politicians. “If you want to end it, the first question you ask is: why did it take place? What were the immediate causes and what were the deeper roots? And then you try to address those.”

Chomsky said even if the US and its allies did manage to destroy Daesh, a more horrible militant group would emerge, unless the root causes are properly addressed.

ISIL terrorists, who were initially trained by the CIA in Jordan in 2012 to destabilize the Syrian government, have claimed responsibility for the deadly attacks in France.

However, some independent American analysts, like former US Treasury official Paul Craig Roberts, say Western intelligence services helped orchestrate the Paris attacks as a “false flag” to escalate the Syrian war in order to counter Russia, which has been conducting air strikes in Syria against ISIL terrorists since September 30.

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