ISRAELI COLONEL AMONG ISIS FORCES IN IRAQ
By F. William Engdahl
This
was definitely not supposed to happen. It seems that an Israeli
military man with the rank of colonel was “caught with IS pants down.”
By that I mean he was captured amid a gaggle of so-called IS – or
Islamic State or ISIS or DAESH depending on your preference –
terrorists, by soldiers of the Iraqi army. Under interrogation by the
Iraqi intelligence he apparently said a lot regarding the role of
Netanyahu’s IDF in supporting IS.
In late October an Iranian news
agency, quoting a senior Iraqi intelligence officer, reported the
capture of an Israeli army colonel, named Yusi Oulen Shahak, reportedly
related to the ISIS Golani Battalion operating in Iraq in the Salahuddin
front. In a statement to Iran’s semi-official Fars News Agency a
Commander of the Iraqi Army stated, “The security and popular forces
have held captive an Israeli colonel.” He added that the IDF colonel
“had participated in the Takfiri ISIL group’s terrorist operations.” He
said the colonel was arrested together with a number of ISIL or IS
terrorists, giving the details: “The Israeli colonel’s name is Yusi
Oulen Shahak and is ranked colonel in Golani Brigade… with the security
and military code of Re34356578765az231434.”
Comment: The news of this capture went further:
…
that the relevant bodies are now interrogating the Israeli colonel to
understand the reasons behind his fighting alongside the ISIL forces and
the presence of other Zionist officers among ISIL terrorists.
The Iraqi security forces said the captured colonel has already made shocking confessions.
Several
ISIL militants arrested in the last one year had already confessed that
Israeli agents from Mossad and other Israeli espionage and intelligence
bodies were present in the first wave of ISIL attacks on Iraq and
capture of Mosul in Summer 2014, but no ranking Israeli agent had been
arrested.
Political and military experts told FNA that the capture
of the Israeli colonel will leave a grave impact on Iraq’s war
strategy, including partnership with Israeli allies.
Why Israel?
Ever since the beginning of Russia’s very effective IS bombing of
select targets in Syria on September 30, details of the very dirty role
of not only Washington, but also NATO member Turkey under President
Erdogan, Qatar and other states has come into the sunlight for the first
time.
It’s becoming increasingly clear that at least a faction in
the Obama Administration has played a very dirty behind-the-scenes role
in supporting IS in order to advance the removal of Syrian President
Bashar al Assad and pave the way for what inevitably would be a
Libya-style chaos and destruction which would make the present Syrian
refugee crisis in Europe a mere warmup by comparison.
The “pro-IS
faction” in Washington includes the so-called neo-conservatives centered
around disgraced former CIA head and executioner of the Iraqi “surge”
General David Petraeus. It also includes US General John R. Allen, who
since September 2014 had served as President Obama’s Special
Presidential Envoy for the Global Coalition to Counter ISIL (Islamic
State of Iraq and the Levant) and, until she resigned in February 2013,
it included Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
Significantly,
General John Allen, an unceasing advocate of a US-led “No Fly Zone”
inside Syria along the border to Turkey, something President Obama
refused, was relieved of his post on 23 October, 2015. That was shortly
after launch of the highly-effective Russian strikes on Syrian IS and Al
Qaeda’s Al Nusra Front terrorist sites changed the entire situation in
the geopolitical picture of Syria and the entire Middle East.
UN Reports cites Israel
That Netanyahu’s Likud and the Israeli military work closely with
Washington’s neo-conservative war-hawks is well-established, as is the
vehement opposition of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to Obama’s
nuclear deal with Iran. Israel regards the Iranian-backed Shi’a Islamist
militant group, Hezbollah, based in Lebanon, as arch foe. Hezbollah has
been actively fighting alongside the Syrian Army against ISIS in Syria.
General Allen’s strategy of “bombings of ISIS” since he was placed in
charge of the operation in September 2014, as Russia’s Putin and Foreign
Minister Lavrov have repeatedly pointed out, far from destroying ISIS
in Syria, had vastly expanded their territorial control of the country.
Now it becomes clear that that was precisely the intent of Allen and the
Washington war faction.
Since at least 2013 Israeli military have
also openly bombed what they claim were Hezbollah targets inside Syria.
Investigation revealed that in fact Israel was hitting Syrian military
and Hezbollah targets who are valiantly fighting against ISIS and other
terrorists. De facto thereby Israel was actually helping ISIS, like
General John Allen’s year-long “anti-ISIS” bombings.
That a
faction in the Pentagon has secretly worked behind-the-scenes to train,
arm and finance what today is called ISIS or IS in Syria is now a matter
of open record. In August 2012, a Pentagon document classified
“Secret,” later declassified under pressure of the US NGO Judicial
Watch, detailed precisely the emergence of what became the Islamic State
or ISIS emerging from the Islamic State in Iraq, then an Al Qaeda
affiliate.
The Pentagon document stated:
“…there is the
possibility of establishing a declared or undeclared Salafist
Principality in eastern Syria (Hasaka and Der Zor), and this is exactly
what the supporting powers to the opposition [to Assad-w.e.] want, in
order to isolate the Syrian regime, which is considered the strategic
depth of the Shia expansion (Iraq and Iran).”
The supporting
powers to the opposition in 2012 then included Qatar, Turkey, Saudi
Arabia, the USA and behind-the-scenes, Netanyahu’s Israel.
Precisely
this creation of a “Salafist Principality in eastern Syria,” today’s
territory of ISIL or IS, was the agenda of Petraeus, General Allen and
others in Washington to destroy Assad. It’s what put the Obama
Administration at loggerhead with Russia, China and Iran over the
bizarre US demand Assad must first go before ISIS can be destroyed. Now
the game is in the open for the world to see Washington’s duplicity in
backing what the Russian’s accurately call “moderate terrorists” against
a duly-elected Assad. That Israel is also in the midst of this rats’
nest of opposition terrorist forces in Syria was confirmed in a recent
UN report.
What the report did not mention was why Israeli IDF
military would have such a passionate interest in Syria, especially
Syria’s Golan Heights.
Why Israel wants Assad Out
In December,
2014 the Jerusalem Post in Israel reported the findings of a largely
ignored, and politically explosive report detailing UN sightings of
Israeli military together with ISIS terrorist combatants. The UN
peacekeeping force, UN Disengagement Observer Force (UNDOF), stationed
since 1974 along the Golan Heights border between Syria and Israel,
revealed that Israel had been working closely with Syrian opposition
terrorists, including Al Qaeda’s Al Nusra Front and IS in the Golan
Heights, and “kept close contact over the past 18 months.” The report
was submitted to the UN Security Council. Mainstream media in the US and
West buried the explosive findings.
The UN documents showed that
the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) were maintaining regular contact with
members of the so-called Islamic State since May of 2013. The IDF stated
that this was only for medical care for civilians, but the deception
was broken when the UNDOF observers identified direct contact between
IDF forces and ISIS soldiers, including giving medical care to ISIS
fighters. Observations even included the transfer of two crates from the
IDF to ISIS forces, the contents of which have not been confirmed.
Further the UN report identified what the Syrians label a “crossing
point of forces between Israel and ISIS,” a point of concern UNDOF
brought before the UN Security Council.
The UNDOF was created by a
May, 1974 UN Security Council Resolution No. 350 in the wake of
tensions from the October 1973 Yom Kippur War between Syria and Israel.
It established a buffer zone between Israel and Syria’s Golan Heights
according to the 1974 Disengagement of Forces Agreement, to be governed
and policed by the Syrian authorities. No military forces other than
UNDOF are permitted within it. Today it has 1,200 observers.
Since
2013 and the escalation of Israeli attacks on Syria along the Golan
Heights, claiming pursuit of “Hezbollah terrorists,” the UNDOF itself
has been subject to massive attacks by ISIS or Al Qaeda’s Al Nusra Front
terrorists in the Golan Heights for the first time since 1974, of
kidnappings, of killings, of theft of UN weapons and ammunition,
vehicles and other assets, and the looting and destruction of
facilities. Someone obviously does not want UNDOF to remain policing the
Golan Heights.
Israel and Golan Heights Oil
In his November 9
White House meeting with US President Obama, Israeli Prime Minister
Netanyahu asked Washington to reconsider the fact that since the 1967
Six-Days’ War between Israel and the Arab countries, Israel has
illegally occupied a significant part of the Golan Heights. In their
meeting, Netanyahu, apparently without success, called on Obama to back
formal Israeli annexation of the illegally-occupied Golan Heights,
claiming that the absence of a functioning Syrian government “allows for
different thinking” concerning the future status of the strategically
important area.
Of course Netanyahu did not address in any honest
way how Israeli IDF and other forces had been responsible for the
absence of a functioning Syrian government by their support for ISIS and
Al Nusra Front of Al Qaeda.
In 2013, when UNDOF began to document
increasing contact between Israeli military and IS and Al Qaeda along
the Golan Heights, a little-known Newark, New Jersey oil company, Genie
Energy, with an Israeli daughter company, Afek Oil & Gas, began also
moving into Golan Heights with permission of the Netanyahu government
to explore for oil. That same year Israeli military engineers overhauled
the forty-five mile border fence with Syria, replacing it with a steel
barricade that included barbed wire, touch sensors, motion detectors,
infrared cameras, and ground radar, putting it on par with the Wall
Israel has constructed in the West Bank.
Interestingly enough, on
October 8, Yuval Bartov, chief geologist from Genie Energy’s Israeli
subsidiary, Afek Oil & Gas, told Israel’s Channel 2 TV that his
company had found a major oil reservoir on the Golan Heights: “We’ve
found an oil stratum 350 meters thick in the southern Golan Heights. On
average worldwide, strata are 20 to 30 meters thick, and this is 10
times as large as that, so we are talking about significant quantities.”
As I noted in an earlier article, the International Advisory Board of
Genie Energy includes such notorious names as Dick Cheney, former CIA
head and infamous neo-con James Woolsey, Jacob Lord Rothschild and
others.
Of course no reasonable person in their right mind would
suggest there might be a link between Israeli military dealings with the
ISIS and other anti-Assad terrorists in Syria, especially in the Golan
Heights, and the oil find of Genie Energy in the same place, and with
Netanyahu’s latest Golan Heights “rethink” appeal to Obama. That would
smell too much like “conspiracy theory” and all reasonable people know
conspiracies don’t exist, only coincidences. Or? In fact, to paraphrase
the immortal words of Brad Pitt in the role of West Virginia First
Lieutenant Aldo Raine in the final scene of Tarantino’s brilliant film,
Inglorious Basterds, it seems that ‘Ol Netanyahu and his pecker-suckin
pals in the IDF and Mossad just got caught with their hands in a very
dirty cookie jar in Syria.
Comment: Israel and Western powers have
been creating, funding, directing, and fighting among terrorists for a
long time. Its nothing new, but is a fact that rarely seems to make it
into the Western media and to the awareness of most people. Or if it
does, the implications are never explored. No surprise there. Perhaps
that will now begin to change since these types of ‘smoking guns’ have
never been better documented and more apparent.
F. William Engdahl
is strategic risk consultant and lecturer, he holds a degree in
politics from Princeton University and is a best-selling author on oil
and geopolitics, exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern
Outlook”. (NEO)
Additional comment by Sott.net: Israel and Western
powers have been creating, funding, directing, and fighting among
terrorists for a long time. Its nothing new, but is a fact that rarely
seems to make it into the Western media and to the awareness of most
people. Or if it does, the implications are never explored. No surprise
there. Perhaps that will now begin to change since these types of
‘smoking guns’ have never been better documented and more apparent.
Remember
these British SAS guys – who were caught dressed as Arabs red-handedly
inflicting violent chaos among the Iraqi population several years ago?
by 
