The US “worked directly with Al-Qaeda” and Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS) to topple former President Bashar Assad and destroy Syria, US President Donald Trump’s former counterterrorism chief, Joe Kent, has said.
Kent, who resigned as head of the US National Counterterrorism Center in protest of the US-Israeli war against Iran, made the remarks in an interview with MintPress News on Friday.
The former senior official reiterated his take on the Iran conflict as the latest in a series of wars waged by the US on behalf of Israel, preceded by the Second Iraq War and the Syrian Civil War, in which Washington actively backed terrorist groups, he said.
“We came in and we said: We’re going to work with the Israelis, but we’re also going to have to work heavily with the Sunni population on the ground in Syria to create an uprising,” he added.
“And that’s where ISIS came from. We worked directly with Al-Qaeda; Hillary Clinton’s emails confirm this. The operations that we were doing to support the so-called Free Syrian Army, and there were some moderates there, but the most effective guys initially were Al-Qaeda and then eventually ISIS.”
IS ultimately “got out of control,” and the US “had to go back and put out once again the brush fire that we had started,” Kent said, referring to the US occupation of parts of Syria on the pretext of fighting terrorism.
The efforts to destroy Syria ultimately resulted in the fall of the Assad government in late 2024 and the Islamist takeover led by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), a rebranded Al-Qaeda offshoot.
Kent lashed out at the former leader of the HTS and Syrian interim president, Ahmed al-Sharaa, pointing to his long record of terrorism – which did not prevent the Trump administration from recognizing his government as legitimate.
“We had him in jail; [he] joined ISIS, broke off from ISIS, hand-selected by Bin Laden’s right-hand man, Ayman Zawahiri, to lead Nusra, and then they rebranded,” Kent said, adding that the “number one way to fool Americans as a jihadist is just put on a suit.”
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