Washington collaborated with Al-Qaeda and ISIS in Syria to overthrow Bashar Assad, Joe Kent has said.
United States “Worked directly with Al-Qaeda” and the Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS) to overthrow former President Bashar Assad and destroy Syria, the former head of US President Donald Trump, Joe Kent, has said.
Kent, who resigned as head of the US National Counterterrorism Center in protest of the US-Israeli war on Iran, said this in an interview with MintPress News on Friday.
The former senior official reiterated his view of the Iran conflict as the latest in a series of wars launched by the United States on behalf of Israel, preceded by the Second Iraq War and the Syrian Civil War, in which Washington fully supported terrorist groups, he said.
“We went in and said: We’re going to work with the Israelis, but we’re also going to have to work hard with the Sunni people in Syria to start the rebellion,” he added.
“And that’s where ISIS came from. We worked directly with Al-Qaeda; Hillary Clinton’s emails confirm this. The operations that we were doing to support the so-called Free Syrian Army, and there were moderate people there, but the people who worked the most before were Al-Qaeda and then ISIS.”
It is finally “It got out of control,” and the United States “We had to go back and put out the brush fire we had started,” Kent said, referring to the US invasion of Syrian territories under the pretext of fighting terrorism.
Efforts to destroy Syria ultimately led to the fall of the Assad government in late 2024 and the capture of Islamists led by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), a renamed branch of Al-Qaeda.
Kent blasted the former HTS leader and interim president of Syria, Ahmed al-Sharaa, pointing to his long record of terrorism – which did not stop the Trump administration from recognizing his government as legitimate.
“We jailed him; (he) joined ISIS, broke away from ISIS, handpicked by Bin Laden’s right-hand man, Ayman Zawahiri, to lead Nusra, and then they changed the name,” Kent said, adding that “The number one way to fool Americans like a jihadist is to wear a suit.”
