“Most of ISIL terrorists recruited by US and allies”

Most of the ISIL terrorists were recruited by the United States and its allies in order to further their agenda in the Middle East, an antiwar activist and political commentator in Canada says.

Ken Stone, a member of the Hamilton Coalition to Stop the War, made the remarks on Sunday during an interview with Press TV while commenting on a report which says the US State Department sponsored the training of an ISIL militant on American soil.

Officials told CNN on Saturday that Colonel Gulmurod Khalimov, a former head of Tajikistan’s special forces, took part in counterterrorism courses as part of a program sponsored by the State Department.

“The fact that Colonel Gulmurod Khalimov, former head of Tajikistan’s special forces, turned over to ISIL is not surprising. Most of the terrorist mercenaries who are at the core of the ISIL today in Iraq and Syria have been recruited by the United States of America and its allies,” Stone said.

“They have been funded by Saudi Arabia and Qatar and armed by NATO countries,” he added.

The ISIL terrorists, who were initially trained by the CIA in Jordan in 2012 to destabilize the Syrian government, now control large parts of Iraq and Syria.

Since last year, the US and some of its allies have been carrying out airstrikes against ISIL inside Iraq and Syria.

“The people in the West who pay their taxes to fund the defense budgets of the NATO countries were lied to. They were told that these fighters were ‘moderate’ Syrian rebels, pro-democracy fighters, etc, etc,” Stone said.

“But in fact they are the part of the modus operandi of the US and its allies in their foreign policy objectives in the Middle East,” he pointed out.

“And those foreign policy objectives are focused on destabilizing the countries of the Middle East, redrawing the borders of these countries so that the states are balkanized, [since it’s] more easy to control them, and to extract the mineral resources, mainly the oil, from the ground,” the activist noted.