CIA's Alleged Arming of Extremists Supports Broader Plan to Control Middle East

The flow of US-supplied weapons from supposedly secular Syrian rebels to the Daesh terror group was no accident but was probably masterminded by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), leading antiwar activist Cindy Sheehan told Sputnik.

WASHINGTON (Sputnik) — Conflict Armament Research (CAR), an international arms monitor, has reported that US military weapons that were covertly provided to Syrian rebel groups were in the hands of the Daesh within two months of their delivery.

"To me, it appears that the CIA wanted the weapons to get into the hands of the extremists," Sheehan, whose son was killed while serving with US forces in Iraq in 2004, said on Wednesday.

CAR studied 40,000 weapons recovered from the Daesh since 2014 and found that a large amount of them were US arms given or sold to Syrian rebel groups. CAR’s research and subsequent report was funded by the European Union and the German government.

However, Sheehan expressed skepticism that the Daesh had somehow outwitted the United States and secretly gained control of the weapons without the knowledge of the covert US intelligence agencies supplying them.

"I think it is incorrect to assume that the CIA/US is losing control of its weapons," Sheehan said.

On the contrary, Washington and the CIA wanted the Daesh forces in Syria to have control of many US-supplied heavy weapons, including missiles as part of its master plan to weaken or overthrow the Syrian government and others in the region, Sheehan said.

"I think the plan in the Middle East is to destabilize every country to make it easier for the imperialists to control resources," she said.

The decision by the Trump administration to end heavy weapons supplies to the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) should not be seen as abandoning that master plan, but just as a temporary pause in it, Sheehan explained.

"I think this is going exactly according to the plan," she said.

Continuing US arms supplies to groups fighting governments in the region and US military presence in Syria therefore continued to pose very dangerous longer term risks of setting off a wider war, Sheehan warned.

"Of course, it is a very dangerous program that could have terrible consequences to the region and to those fighting against extremism in places like Iraq and Syria," she said.

Sheehan recalled that the CIA had carried out similar massive secret arms flows into Central America in the 1980s to support the anti-communist Contra forces in Nicaragua.

"Back in the 1980's the US Congress made it illegal for the United States to fund the Contras in Nicaragua, but the CIA got around that by selling weapons to Iran and using the money to fund the Contras," she said.

On Monday, a senior US administration official told reporters the United States would reduce the amount of heavy weapons supplies to the SDF as a result of the progress made in the fight against the Daesh.