CIA’s estimate on ISIL terrorists, political game: Analyst

The US Central Intelligence Agency has fabricated figures on the number of militants fighting for the ISIL terrorist group in Iraq and Syria as part of its political game, an analyst tells Press TV.

“The CIA is just simply making this up and there are other reasons behind it. This is a political game here. The US is taking a strong position politically in really controlling Iraq,” Gordon Duff, a senior editor of Veteran’s Today, told Press TV in an interview.

The CIA had initially estimated that ISIL has as many as 10,000 fighters, but recently revised it upward to anywhere between 20,000 and 31,500 militants.

Noting that there are “self-serving reasons” for making up such a big number, Duff said, “From a military standpoint where there are 30,000 troops within this region, a region that could easily be cut off; a region that could receive no supplies; no reinforcements, that’s a virtual prison camp.”

“They didn’t say there were 12,000 Iraqis that joined last month or that 15,000 men came through Turkey or travelled through Israel or Jordan or that the makeup is so many of this or that, or how they’re supplied – that’s intelligence,” said the analyst.

The ISIL terrorists, who were initially trained by the CIA in Jordan in 2012 to destabilize the Syrian government, control large parts of Syria’s northern territory. ISIL also sent its Takfiri militants into Iraq in June, quickly seizing large swathes of land straddling the border between the two countries.