Iraq

Basij Commander: Ex-Guantanamo Inmates Hired by US to Fight alongside ISIL Terrorists in Iraq

13921214000211_PhotoICommander of Iran’s Basij (volunteer) Force Brigadier General Mohammad Reza Naqdi said the US has sent a number of former Guantanamo inmates to Iraq to fight alongside the terrorists of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL).
“Those who have given up their belief in the US Guantanamo prison under hard torture and extreme psychological pressures today are committing crimes in Iraq alongside the ISIL members, operating as US mercenaries without being paid,” Naqdi said, addressing Sunni clerics and scholars in Iran’s Western province of Kermanshah on Monday.

His remarks came after Spanish police arrested eight people in pre-dawn raids in Madrid in June against a jihadist recruitment network led by a former Guantanamo Bay inmate, Lahcen Ikassrien, a 46-year-old Moroccan, the government said.

The cell found and dispatched recruits for the ISIL militants based in Syria and Iraq, the ministry said.

Elsewhere, Naqdi referred to the remarks made by a number of Iraqi Kurdistan region’s officials about holding an independence referendum to secede from Iraq, and reminded them of the crimes that the Baathists (some of them now fighting alongside the terrorists in Iraq) committed against Kurdish people in Iraq during the Iran-Iraq war (1980-1988).

“If those people who have overlooked this situation don’t wake up, they will come to regret. Have they forgotten the crimes that this group of people (the former Baathists) have committed against Halabcheh people.”

The Islamic State has formed a loose alliance of sorts with other Sunni radicals in Iraq as well as former members of Saddam’s Baath Party, which has provided extra muscle to their assault.
Yet, recent reports by the western media, including Reuters, said cracks are already showing in the loose alliance of ISIL and fellow Sunni forces, suggesting the natural frictions that exist between the jihadists and other factions will inevitably grow.

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