Flynn said that, despite warnings from top officials, President Barack Obama’s decision to arm and train what were said to be moderates battling Syrian President Bashar Assad eventually helped create, arm, and fund ISIL.
“I think it was a decision. I think it was a willful decision,” Flynn said during an interview with Al Jazeera.
A classified DIA report in August 2012 stated that “the Salafist, the Muslim Brotherhood, and AQI [Al-Qaida in Iraq] are the major forces driving the insurgency in Syria,” being supported by “the West, Gulf countries and Turkey.”
The report warned of “dire consequences” of allowing Al-Qaida to regain its positions in Iraq and unify the jihadist Sunni forces in Iraq, Syria and the rest of the Sunnis in the Arab world against all other Muslim minorities they consider dissenters.
“ISI (the Islamic State of Iraq) could also declare an Islamic State through its union with other terrorist organizations in Iraq and Syria, which will create grave danger in regards of unifying Iraq and the protection of its territory,” the DIA report predicted.
The groups eventually emerged as ISIL and Al-Qaida affiliate Nusra Front.
When asked why he didn’t attempt to stop the U.S. coordinating arms transfers to jihadists, Flynn told Al Jazeera that “I hate to say it’s not my job, but my job was to ensure the accuracy of our intelligence.”
U.S. Vice President Joe Biden previously admitted that “there was no ‘moderate middle’ ” among the Syrian rebels.
“What my constant cry was that our biggest problem was our allies…. What were they doing? They were so determined to take down Assad and have a proxy Sunni-Shia war, what did they do? They poured hundreds of millions of dollars and tens, thousands, of tons of weapons into anyone who would fight,” Biden said. “Except that the people who were being supplied were Nusra and Al-Qaida and extremist elements of jihadis coming from other parts of the world.”
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