White House ignored repeated warnings on ISIL: Report

White House ignored repeated warnings on ISIL: Report

ISIL militants

Mon Jul 7, 2014 3:47PM GMT

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The White House for months ignored repeated warnings by both the Iraqi government and US intelligence agencies and officials about the rising threat from ISIL, a terrorist group now controlling vast swaths of territory across northern and western Iraq, says a report.

On November 1, 2013, Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki visited the White House and asked President Barack Obama to authorize the US military to help his beleaguered Air Force develop targets for air strikes against militants from the so-called Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), according to The Daily Beast.

Twelve days later, Brett McGurk, a deputy assistant secretary of state, issued a stern warning to Congress about the deteriorating security situation in Iraq.

McGurk, who is now the Obama administration’s senior US official in Baghdad since the crisis began last month, warned that ISIL was in part emboldened by the weakness of the Iraqi military.

He said at the time that ISIL had “benefited from a permissive operating environment due to inherent weaknesses of Iraqi security forces, poor operational tactics, and popular grievances, which remain unaddressed, among the population in Anbar and Nineveh provinces.”

Two months later, ISIL seized the strategically important city of Fallujah in Anbar province, and last month, Iraq’s second largest city—Mosul, in Nineveh province—fell to the hands of terrorists.

While, Obama administration officials were adamant that the collapse of Mosul was impossible to predict, a dozen US and Iraqi intelligence officials and diplomats told The Daily Beast that they had warned the White House of an imminent danger.

“It’s simply not true that nobody saw a disaster like the fall of Mosul coming,” Ali Khedery, who served as a senior adviser at the US embassy in Baghdad, told The Daily Beast. “I can’t speak for anyone else, but I literally predicted this in verbal warnings and in writing in 2010 that Iraq would fall apart.”

Similarly, James Jeffrey, a former US ambassador to Iraq, had warned of the fall of Mosul. 

“I and a zillion other people said in 2014 that we needed to do more than the very slow and inadequate reaction,” Jeffrey said. “If [ISIL] could move in and seize Fallujah and they were on the offensive, and they were active in Mosul and Nineveh too, the army was lethargic and not doing very well, at that point there was a possibility for us to provide air strikes and advisers.”

American intelligence agencies had been delivering the same warning privately for months, but it went largely unheeded in Washington.

The CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency have issued reported analysis for nearly a year that Iraq’s military would not be able to combat ISIL.

HRJ/HRJ

http://www.presstv.ir/detail/2014/07/07/370286/us-ignored-repeated-warnings-on-isil/