US-Funded Iraqi Counterterrorism Service Consists of Terrorists

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If we don’t want terrorism, we should really stop funding it.

And that means…

1 .Stop sending money to Muslim countries under whatever pretext and whatever we do…

2. Stop building up their militaries, intelligence services or police forces

We’ve pumped endless fortunes into Iraq despite the fact that it’s long since become an Iranian puppet state. And we continue to fund an Iraqi Shiite government, its military, and its various forces despite the fact that, like Lebanon, we’re not only funding enemy terrorists, but the ones trying to kill us right now.

The 2025 budget request dispatched over $250 million to aid and supply to various Iraqi forces, some better, e.g. the Kurds, but most of the rest of it to the Iraqi government, its Ministry of Defense, which is simply Iran, and another $9 million to its ‘Counter Terrorism Service’.

We’re supplying CTS with small arms, explosives, vehicles, body armor, and assorted equipment.

As the Washington Institute, a supporter of CTS, notes, it has a major terrorism problem.

The 2024 force generation intake of over 3,000 new CTS recruits was meant to be chosen by lottery as normal; anonymous online applicants are typically selected at random and then asked to bring their unique ticket numbers when they arrive for training. This year, however, as few as 750 arrivals had tickets, while 2,250 had been preselected by Shia militias, terrorist groups, and associated factions.

Those are some of the same folks who have been shooting at Americans for years and killing some of our people.

These 2,250 names were previously provided to Abdul Karim al-Sudani, the secretary of the Prime Minister’s Office, who passed them on to CTS commander Karim al-Tamimi. Sudani’s list apparently included around 2,000 spots for recruits from three U.S.-designated terrorist groups: Asaib Ahl al-Haq (1,000 spots), Kataib Hezbollah (500), and Kataib Sayyid al-Shuhada (500). The remainder were split between pro-Iran groups such as the Badr Organization and the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq (180), along with other players associated with the Coordination Framework umbrella group (70 spots, many of which were sold off as part of a corruption racket). Unless this broken lottery process is repaired, members of terrorist groups will receive U.S.-funded and U.S.-delivered training in sensitive Special Forces tactics.

Kataib Hezbollah has been attacking American soldiers and we’ve carried out a few recent retaliatory airstrikes against it. If these numbers are correct and there’s no real reason to question them, we’re fighting Kataib Hezbollah and arming, training, and equipping its members. This really needs to stop.

This isn’t just on the Biden administration. Every U.S. administration (yes, I mean every one) has backed Shiite Islamic terrorists to fight ISIS and Al Qaeda. And then we do the same for some of the Sunni Islamic terrorists.

This isn’t some brilliant master plan to pit them against each other (they end up attacking us anyway), it’s a combination of idiotic realpolitik, cluelessness about the region and trying to handle individual problems, like ISIS, piecemeal, instead of having a broader strategy to deal with Islamic terrorism.

And it needs to stop.

A counterterrorism group made up of terrorists is the ultimate absurd outcome of a foreign policy that refuses to face the truth about the Islamic roots of the violence.

December 4, 2024 | Comments »

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