ISIL operating with help of foreign military power: Gordon Duff

Duff, a senior editor at VT, made the remarks in a phone interview with Press TV on Tuesday while commenting on Washington’s unwillingness to coordinate its planned attacks on ISIL in Syria with the Syrian government, or share intelligence with Damascus.
“The idea that the US is sharing intelligence with Syria on ISIS is — I have to admit — a little bit absurd. The US doesn’t share intelligence with its own president. It absolutely doesn’t share intelligence with its own people,” Duff said.
“Go a step further, what the US government typically uses for intelligence, the information that originates from the NSA, primarily and to a lesser extent through the CIA, is generally based since the Bush administration on information that comes from private contracting companies — all with the political agenda typically tied to ISIS,” he said, using an alternative acronym for the terrorist group.
The ISIL militants, who were initially trained by the CIA in Jordan in 2012 to destabilize the Syrian government, control large parts of Syria’s northern territory. ISIL sent its fighters into Iraq in June, quickly seizing large swaths of land straddling the border between the two countries.
“If anything is clear right now to anyone that’s watching things, even watching what’s called the mainstream media, which has become rather sad over last few years, is that ISIS is not an Islamic organization. We don’t believe who their leaders are. Their activities make no sense at all,” Duff noted.
“They are sitting very much in the middle of nowhere where they shouldn’t be able to get any supplies or operate militarily, with no caves to be hiding in, no trees to be hiding under like in Vietnam, no defoliation, anyone with an air force or a few planes or a sky ship or an aerostat or anything can find them rather easily,” he stated.
“They could be destroyed with artillery other than where they are sitting in cities and that’s going to be a difficult issue dispelling them. But they aren’t just in cities; they are out where they can be seen; they are out where their communications could be jammed. All of those things could have been done initially,” the former US marine noted.
“The real intelligence that needs to be gotten to Syria and not to the White House is why their supplies keep being shipped in, and they are shipped in by planes by somebody and ISIS doesn’t have any planes,” he wondered. “It’s the same story with Afghanistan. Why hundreds of tons of heroin leaves American bases in Afghanistan.”
“Why are they carrying American weapons? They are carrying and using American weapons. And not the American weapons that they say they captured from the Iraqis. The US gave Iraqis AK-47s. They are carrying American M4 carbines. [It is] very difficult to get those things unless they are delivered directly from the United States by planes,” Duff revealed.
“I think that’s intelligence that Syria needs to have, and there is just too many irregular things here, too many things none of us believe. We have had too many things happen over the last few years,” he stated.
“We don’t believe what we were told and we are not likely to [believe] that someone wants to put the other 40 or 50-nation coalition and fight a war somewhere that they say is going to go on for years and years and they want people to believe in this, believe there is an enemy, like there used to be an al-Qaeda and there isn’t,” Duff said.
“And now there is an ISIS and we are not sure there really is. I think the point is we are not so sure that any intelligence is intelligent at all,” he concluded.
According to reports, ISIL is currently in control of seven oil fields in Iraq and large amounts of the country’s wheat supplies.
Iraqi officials said on August 13 that the militants were holding government silos in five of Iraq’s most fertile provinces, where the United Nations World Food Program (WFP) says 40 percent of the country’s wheat is grown.
The output capacity of the ISIL-held oil fields amounts to 80,000 barrels a day, said the International Energy Agency (IEA) in a monthly oil market report last month.
The potential oil flow from Iraq’s ISIL-held deposits is commensurate to about $8.4 million a day on international markets.
AN/GJH