Sectarian rifts US ploy to control Middle East: Analyst

The United States is creating sectarian division in Iraq as part of a scenario to expand its imperialistic dominance across the Middle East, a political analyst tells Press TV.

In a Sunday interview, Sara Flounders, a co-director with the International Action Center, pointed to the 2003 US war on Iraq and said, “The crime that was committed in Iraq was to forcibly divide a population that was multiethnic, multinational, [and] multi-religious for generations.”

“It’s their policy in the entire region to divide and create horrendous division among the people that did not exist previously,” she added.

Flounders noted that resorting to sectarian division and armed militia has been a key US tactic in different countries to destabilize them, adding, “This has always been US policy of divide and rule. It’s in the same way that the US instigated the Iran-Iraq war and funded it and fueled it.”

The Iraqi forces are pressing ahead with their fight against the Takfiri militants of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), who have taken control of large swathes of the country and threatened to take the battle to the capital, Baghdad.

The UN said on Tuesday that violence in Iraq claimed the lives of more than 2,410 Iraqis in June, making it the deadliest month so far this year.

More than one million people have been displaced in Iraq this year, according to the United Nations.