Harvard University has revealed a set of confidential documents proving the involvement of Bashar al-Assad and Iran in the making of ISIS.
The revelation came in a report titled “Germany and Saudi Arabia: Alliance in Counter-Terrorism,” which Harvard University published last week.
The confidential documents, which were obtained by the German journalist Christoph Reuter and published by the site Der Spiegel on April 19, 2015, indicated that in 2013 the Assad regime recruited a former officer in Saddam Hussein’s Baath Air intelligence, Samir Abd Mohammed Alkhalafawi to establish the terrorist organization ISIS with the aim of destabilizing Iraq and stoking sectarian wars in the Middle East.
After the murder of Alkhalafawi at the hands of Syrian rebels in the town of Tell-Rifaat north of Aleppo in January 2014, the documents that outlined the founding of ISIS were discovered at his residence.
The documents revealed that the Syrian Ministry of Defense sent fake religious clerics to cities and villages of Syria to open fraudulent religious offices, which were used to teach Sharia law and religion. Over time, these offices were used to draw in young people who were eventually manipulated into submitting to the bidding of the clerics.
When the Assad regime began to ramp up violence against the revolution, the heads of ISIS’s offices around the country started to deliberately promote religious Sunni intolerance and raise the banner of “jihad,” according to the documents.
The Syrians were taken by surprise as the organization’s numbers skyrocketed overnight. ISIS went on to operate freely in various areas, which explains why Assad’s forces were never subjected to any of ISIS’s terrorist operations while a multitude of airstrikes were launched against the opposition’s sites in the midst of their battle against the terrorist organization, the report added.
The report pointed out that many of the foreign fighters who have flocked to Syria to fight against the Assad regime were surprised that ISIS was only fighting the Free Syrian Army and the moderate opposition. Many of these fighters were eliminated when they tried to escape or revolt against the organization after discovering the truth.
The documents also included a plan by ISIS to target wealthy Syrian families in order to be infiltrated by ISIS youths, who donned the appearance of politeness and civility. Teams of spies would then pursue the head of the family and its members in order to uncover the most private details about every person’s life, including obtaining intimate pictures of them to threaten them with extortion and blackmail.
This is how, according to the report, the organization grew in power and expanded the scope of its influence, in addition to swiftly collecting large sums of money.
Alkhalafawi, as well as other leaders in the organization, decided to declare Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi as the Caliph because he has the required charisma, which would draw the unsuspecting public into his influence. He also gave the members of the organization the impression that he is committed to a religious ideal.
Since the death of Alkhalafawi, some members of his teams, especially the ones deployed in Iraq and Raqa, began to rebel against the Assad regime. In fact, after gaining control of Mosul, the organization sensed that it did not need Assad and his regime. One of the teams engaged in a brutal bloodshed of Division No. 17 of Assad’s army, despite the fact that the regime protected the terrorist organization from an earlier siege by the Free Syrian Army in an air base near Raqa. (Source: Alaan TV Channel)
