By Pete Papaherakles —

General Wesley Kanne Clark, Sr., former Supreme Allied commander of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) during the war against Yugoslavia and presidential candidate, revealed recently on CNN that the Islamic State (ISIS) was “funded by our friends and allies in order to fight Hezbollah.” Although hailed by many as a whistleblower for this revelation, is it really possible that a man of his stature, who led NATO in slaughtering tens of thousands of innocent Serbs under the completely fabricated charges that they were genociding Muslims, really be telling the American people the truth now, or was this “leak” a half-truth designed to mislead?

Clark stated in a recent CNN interview: “ISIS got started through funding from our friends and allies. Because as people will tell you in the region that if you want somebody who will fight to the death against Hezbollah, you don’t put out a recruiting poster saying, ‘sign up for us. We’re gonna make a better world.’ You go after zealots and you go after these religious fundamentalists. That’s who fights Hezbollah. It’s like a Frankenstein.”

This is not the first time Clark has revealed inside information about the wars in the Middle East. In a 2007 interview with “Democracy Now” radio talk show host Amy Goodman, Clark made big news by revealing that only days after the 9-11 attacks one of the top generals in the Pentagon had showed him a memo from then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld outlining long-term U.S. war plans even before the invasion of Afghanistan had commenced.

According to Clark, the general had told him, “We’re going to take out seven countries in five years, starting with Iraq, and then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and, finishing off, Iran.” For many, this was proof that the wars were planned ahead of time earning Clark credibility in the antiwar movement.

So Clark is once again revealing inside information that ISIS is not simply a homegrown terrorist organization but that it “got started through funding from our friends and allies” and its purpose is to fight Hezbollah.

He doesn’t tell us which friends funded it and we are left to guess that he probably means Israel, Saudi Arabia and other countries in the area hostile to Hezbollah and Syrian President Bashar al Assad such as Qatar and Turkey. But although the general is telling us part of the truth, he is being somewhat misleading by obscuring both the real source of the funding and the true purpose of ISIS.

These Islamic “zealots” Clark is referring to go back to the creation of Osama bin Laden’s al Qaeda in Afghanistan in the early 1980s, funded by the United States in order to fight the Soviet Union.

While the U.S. officially condemns ISIS, it has routinely been caught funding them. The Express Tribune, an affiliate of The New York Times, reported in late January, in an article titled, “Startling revelations: IS operative confesses to getting funds via U.S.,” that Pakistani security forces captured an ISIS fighter who has revealed that he and many fighters alongside him received funds that were routed through the U.S.

AMERICAN FREE PRESS published an article in August 2014—“ISIS a CIA-Mossad Creation?”—stating that it was revealed through 1.7 million pages of leaked documents by National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden that ISIS is a Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)-Mossad-MI6 [Military Intelligence, Section 6, part of the UK’s Secret Intelligence Service (SIS)] operation and its leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, has been reputed to be a Mossad-trained operative whose real name is Elliot Shimon, the son of Jewish parents.

Neocon Senator John McCain (R-Ariz.) had repeatedly been photographed in Syria with al-Baghdadi and other terrorists in June 2013, several months before ISIS was officially launched, though this claim has been disputed by mainstream media outlets. It has also been reported that the CIA was involved in training ISIS in Jordan in 2012 to destabilize the Syrian government.







Clark’s claim that ISIS was created simply to fight Hezbollah is also misleading.

The Snowden documents contend that British, American and Israeli intelligence created ISIS as “a terrorist organization capable of centralizing all extremist actions across the world,” using a strategy called Hornet’s Nest, designed to “protect Israel.” According to the documents, “the only solution for the protection of the Jewish state is to create an enemy near its borders.”

Yet even this is misleading, as Israel is not exactly a shrinking violet.

It is Israel’s neighbors who need protection from the Jewish state. The real purpose of ISIS may not be completely understood yet, but it seems to play several roles both locally and globally. Surely it is being used as a backdoor entry into Syria to take down Assad, but its activities are not confined to Iraq and Syria. We recently saw the 21 beheadings in Libya, whether real or staged, and ISIS is urging new attacks on the “infidel West” following the Charlie Hebdo massacre.

It is reputed that ISIS has terrorist cells in many European countries as well as in the U.S. ISIS is also used to cause problems for Russian leader Vladimir Putin in Chechnya with its terrorist “Chechen Legion” as well as supporting Ukrainian-Israeli oligarch Ihor Kolomoisky’s Dzhokhar’s Dudayev Battalion in Eastern Ukraine against the pro-Russian rebels.

ISIS is poised to become a global political-terrorist force used by the intelligence agencies to destabilize countries, escalate Islamophobia and justify intervention by the Western military-industrial complex. Locally, it will help facilitate the Zionist dream of “Greater Israel” from the Nile to the Euphrates.

Pete Papaherakles is a writer and political cartoonist for AFP.