Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum has blamed the United States for the creation of Daesh (ISIL), after the terrorist group claimed responsibility for the Paris attacks.
At least 129 people were killed in multiple coordinated attacks on Friday night in one of the deadliest assaults to hit the French capital since the World War II. Some 352 were also injured -- including 99 who are in critical condition -- in the attacks.
On Saturday, ISIL claimed responsibility for the attacks, calling them “the first of the storm” and denounced France as a “capital of prostitution and obscenity.”
Speaking at a GOP meeting in Orlando, Florida, on Saturday, Santorum said US President Barack Obama and former Foreign Secretary Hillary Clinton are responsible for creating Daesh.
He said that the terrorist group “is a creation of a political decision by Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama to abandon Iraq — against all of our generals’ recommendations, against all of the policy recommendations.”
“Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, under her watch, decided politics above the security of our country and the stability and security of the world,” said Santorum, who served as a senator representing Pennsylvania from 1995 to 2007.
ISIL terrorists, who were initially trained by the CIA in Jordan in 2012 to destabilize the Syrian government, now control parts of Syria and Iraq. They have been engaged in crimes against humanity in the areas under their control.
The United States and its allies have been conducting airstrikes against ISIL in Iraq and Syria since last year.
Observers say while the US and its allies claim they are fighting against terrorist groups like ISIL, they in fact helped create and train those organizations to affect their policies in the Middle East.
According to US geopolitical commentator Dean Henderson, the United States and its allies have encouraged the spread of the ISIL terrorist group in the Middle East to create a “perpetual war” in the region and advance the American military-industrial complex.
“This is what ISIS is all about, this is the reason that ISIS exists, because we’re going to be able to make a lot more arms sales to a lot more actors in the Middle East,” said Dean Henderson, an author and columnist at Veterans Today, using another acronym for the terror network.