US seeks to re-impose itself on Mideast: Analyst

A British political analyst says the United States is using the pretext of fight against ISIL terrorists in order to re-impose itself on the Middle East region.

In a phone interview with Press TV on Sunday, Kevin Ovenden, a journalist and political activist, criticized Washington’s “conflictory” and “duplicitous” strategy in dealing with the issue of the ISIL terrorist network in Syria and Iraq.

He stated that “the United States and Britain and France encourage the formation of forces inside the Syrian civil war and crisis based upon the most extremist Takfiri and Wahhabi ideology… to overthrow the government in Damascus.”

He said that the ISIL policy is supported and implemented strongly by Saudi Arabia and some of the Persian Gulf states.

Ovenden added that ISIL has now its own funds because it is “taking money from banks, and extorting money from the people and it is selling off the oil which it captured in the oil fields of eastern Syria.”

“In the name of fighting ISIS, they are trying to re-impose themselves in the region, re-imposed themselves inside Iraq and re-imposed inside Syria,” he noted.

“The United States is dependant now disproportionately upon its historic allies inside the region, the ally of Israel and the ally of Saudi Arabia, which is the long-standing Arab ally of the United States. There’s been a close relationship between the House of Saud and the American state since 1976,” he stated.

The US and its regional allies — especially Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Turkey – have been supporting the militants operating inside Syria since the beginning of the crisis more than three years ago.

More than 191,000 people have been killed in over three years of fighting in the war-ravaged country, says the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), calling the figure a probable “underestimate of the real total number of people killed.

The US, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Qatar, Jordan and the United Arab Emirates have been conducting airstrikes against ISIL militants inside Syria since last month without any authorization from Damascus or a UN mandate.