May 24, 2017 at 2:43 pm
Written by Darius Shahtahmasebi
(ANTIMEDIA) On condition of anonymity, a number of Israeli Defence Force (IDF) officers have reportedly made some stunning admissions about ISIS to POLITICO’s national security editor, Bryan Bender.
Bender documents the statement of one general who spoke openly:
“’I am not sure it will be easy to defeat ISIS, as you are claiming to do,’ Army Brig. Gen. Ram Yavne, the head of the IDF’s Strategic Division, told me in Tel Aviv, expressing a level of puzzlement shared by a number of other top commanders about the U.S. military obsession with a group that they do not consider a major strategic threat. [emphasis added]
According to one brigadier general, Iranian influence in neighboring Syria is significantly more worrisome to Israel than ISIS or any of the other Sunni Muslim groups. The statements come in the wake of ISIS terror attacks in Europe and most recently in Manchester, England.
“If I can be frank, the radical axis headed by Iran is more risky than the global jihad one,” the brigadier told Bender. “It is much more knowledgeable, stronger, with a bigger arsenal.”
In these IDF officers’ minds, the ideal strategy — which runs in direct contrast to the current U.S.-led strategy — would be for them to sit back and let all the groups fight each other. The only thing Israel or coalition countries should be concerned with should be containing the conflict as opposed to influencing it.
But, as Bender asks, does that mean the U.S. and its allies should allow ISIS to retain its caliphate in parts of Syria and Iraq?
“Why not?” one officer responded. “When they asked the late [Israeli] Prime Minister Menachem Begin in the Iraq-Iran war in the 80s, who does Israel stand for, Iraq or Iran, he said ‘I wish luck to both parties. They can go at it, killing each other.’ The same thing is here. You have ISIS killing Al Qaeda by the thousands, Al Qaeda killing ISIS by the thousands. And they are both killing Hezbollah and Assad.”
In actuality, these parties are all killing civilians, but no one seems remotely concerned with this fact.
Funnily enough, this policy of sitting back and allowing ISIS to wreak havoc in Syria was not contrary to U.S. foreign policy under Barack Obama. Leaked audio of then-Secretary of State John Kerry revealed the Obama administration was watching ISIS grow and hoping its expansion would bring Syria’s president to the negotiating table. This plan was completely foiled when Russia formally intervened in 2015.
It speaks volumes that one of the most radical Islamist networks in the world apparently does not pose a threat to the Jewish state, even though we are constantly told that Muslims inherently hate Israelis simply because they are Jewish. How can it be that this radical jihadist group actually does the bidding of the Israeli state by countering Assad?
This admission comes not long after it was made public that ISIS once apologized to the IDF over a gun battle.
All that being said, the IDF officials also rightly identified the fact that America’s brutal air war in Iraq and Syria will only further radicalize the population and will do nothing to defeat ISIS’ ideology in the long run.
“ISIS is much like cancer,” one intelligence officer stated.
“It is easy to cut the tumors off. But how do you prevent the small cancer cells from expanding? I think the caliphate is already thinking, ‘OK, what are we going to do next?’ What was ISIS doing the minute the Americans and Iraqis went into Mosul? It started exploding everything up in Iraq – about 1,000 suicide attacks in a number of months. Raqqa is probably going to fall. The same thing will happen. All the cancerous cells throughout Syria…are going to do the same and start blowing things up.”