Former US official: Iraq war helped create Daesh

The Iraq war was the main reason for the emergence of Daesh and the American military response following September 11 was not well thought-out and was based on significant misunderstandings, a former US Special Forces Commander said yesterday..

In an interview with German newspaper Der Spiegel, former US Special Forces Commander in Iraq and Afghanistan General Michael Flynn said that after the September 11 attacks, “instead of determining why the US was attacked by terrorists, the Bush administration was looking at where the terrorists came from and locations to attack.”

He added that “blinding emotion” after the attacks led the United States and its allies to take the wrong strategic decisions to counter Al-Qaeda.

In the interview, he also confirmed that if it weren’t for the fall of Baghdad, Daesh would not have emerged. “As brutal as Saddam Hussein was, it was a mistake to just eliminate him,” Flynn said. “The same is true for Muammar Gaddafi and for Libya, which is now a failed state.”

Flynn talked about how Daesh went on to implement the instructions found in documents that were discovered with later Al-Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden, who called for the fighters to disperse into small cells across the largest area possible in order to make it easy for them to move around and difficult for them to be detected.

He added that he believes that the airstrikes alone won’t succeed and troops on the ground are inevitable. He suggested benefitting from the Balkans experience to resolve the current crisis, i.e. by dividing the area into areas of influence amongst the international super powers with the supervision of the UN and in the context of an alliance with Arab countries in order for such actions not to be viewed as a new foreign occupation.