US creating, backing terror groups for past 30 years

The United States has been creating, fostering and supporting extremist groups throughout the world for at least three decades, says an American anti-war activist.

The US, for more than 30 years, has been “arming, training and supporting terrorist groups around the world,” Rick Rozoff, manager of the Stop NATO International Network, said in an interview with Press TV on Wednesday.

He added that the most notable case was “in northwest Pakistan in the late 1970s when they trained extremist forces from around the world, including Osama Ben Laden.”

Rozoff made the remarks a day after Democratic Congressman Eliot Engel of New York claimed the Takfiri terrorist group known as ISIL would create “many more 9/11s in the United States, in Europe, in the Middle East” if Congress does not act against it.

“I understand that my colleagues are war weary. I’m war weary. I understand the American people are war weary,” Engel said.”But I think doing nothing would invite something very similar that happened to my city, New York City, on that fateful day of Sept. 11, 2001.”

“The provocative, ridiculous and really criminally irresponsible comments by Congressman Eliot Engel of the New York State hardly even worth responding to, except that it provides us an opportunity to discussing the truth about the case of who has fostered, who has created, who has encouraged and who has supported international terrorism,” Rozoff noted.

The anti-war activist added that Engel’s remarks are aimed at inciting “more fear and panic” among the American people in order to persuade them to back the US government’s efforts to intervene militarily in the affairs of other countries like Syria and Iraq.