Joe Kent, who resigned in March as head of the U.S. National Counterterrorism Center in protest of the U.S.-Israeli war against Iran, in an interview with MintPress News on Friday March 28, said that the United States “worked directly with Al-Qaeda” and Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS) to topple former President Bashar Assad and destroy Syria.
It should be recalled that Gen. Michael Flynn, who was appointed to serve as National Security Advisor to Trump in his first term, had revealed the U.S. funding of ISIS and Al-Qaeda in Syria, but was indicted and prosecuted by the “Russiagate” FBI over charges against his diplomatic relations with Russia, without mention of his exposure of the intelligence community. The case was dropped by the Department of Justice, possibly because they did not want that fact to come out. Flynn just last week settled his $50 million lawsuit with the government, accepting a $1.25 million settlement over the false accusations and persecution.
In the MintPress interview, Kent reiterated his take on the Iran conflict as the latest in a series of wars waged by the United States on behalf of Israel, preceded by the Second Iraq War and the Syrian Civil War, in which Washington actively backed terrorist groups, he said. “We came in and we said: We’re going to work with the Israelis, but we’re also going to have to work heavily with the Sunni population on the ground in Syria to create an uprising,” he added.
“And that’s where ISIS came from. We worked directly with Al-Qaeda; Hillary Clinton’s emails confirm this. The operations that we were doing to support the so-called Free Syrian Army, and there were some moderates there, but the most effective guys initially were Al-Qaeda and then eventually ISIS.”
IS ultimately “got out of control,” and the United States “had to go back and put out once again the brush fire that we had started,” Kent said, referring to the U.S. occupation of parts of Syria on the pretext of fighting terrorism.
Kent added that the current mess in Syria is a direct result of the U.S. subversion. He lashed out at the former leader of the HTS and Syrian interim president, Ahmed al-Sharaa, pointing to his long record of terrorism—which did not prevent the Trump administration from recognizing his government as legitimate.
“We had him in jail; [he] joined ISIS, broke off from ISIS, hand-selected by Bin Laden’s right-hand man, Ayman Zawahiri, to lead Nusra, and then they rebranded,” Kent said, adding that the “number one way to fool Americans as a jihadist is just put on a suit.”
