‘Baghdadi arrested, interviewed, freed’

The United States has a history of creating terrorist organizations, such as the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), to further its foreign policy agenda, an American political commentator says.

“The ISIS/ISIL situation is nothing but a US creation, much like the Taliban was,” said Rodney Martin, who is the director of the World View Foundations, a website, and a host at the American Nationalist Network, an internet radio station.

“The United Sates had [ISIL leader Abu Bakr] al-Baghdadi. They had him, and then released him,” he told Press TV on Wednesday.

“And it’s not unreasonable to assume that the CIA interviewed him and then made a deal with him, and then released him,” Martin added.

“And he has now created this horrible genocidal and ethnic cleansing machine, that has started in Syria, which’s the target for regime change by the American government, and then moved into Iraq to destabilize the government of Prime Minister al-Maliki, and to ultimately reintroduce the American hegemony into Iraq,” he stated.

“The United States has a history of creating these types of organizations to further their foreign policy objectives. They did it with the Taliban, and they’d done this in the past before creating these little straw man organizations to further their objectives,” said Martin, who also served for a time on the staff of a US congressman assigned to Military and Veteran Issues.

Baghdadi was captured by US troops in 2005 and held at the US-operated Camp Bucca detention center in Umm Qasr, a port city in southern Iraq.

However, he was released in 2010 from prison after Washington turned over all detainees to Iraqi authorities under a troop drawdown agreement that the US government signed with the Iraqi government in 2008.

The same year, Baghdadi assumed leadership of the ISIL which has captured large swaths of territory across northern Iraq after seizing the city of Mosul on June 10.

The US government has since placed a $10-million bounty on his head.

Baghdadi is said to have been born in the Iraqi city of Samarra, north of the capital Baghdad, in 1971, with the name Awwad Ibrahim Ali al-Badri al-Samarrai.

He obtained a PhD in Islamic studies and history from the Islamic University of Baghdad.

A recent report shows that the ISIL terrorists were trained by the CIA in Jordan in 2012. The report said that the militants were initially trained at the time as part of covert aid to the militants operating inside Syria.