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What happens to seawater which gets subducted into the Earth's mantle?Water is subducted in large quantities, because the sea-floor sediments which are subducted are saturated with sea water.It seems there is also ancient water trapped deeper down in the Earth’s crust.Earth may have underground 'ocean' three times that on surfaceScientists say rock layer hundreds of miles down holds vast amount of water, opening up new theories on how planet formed.The water is locked up in a mineral called ringwoodite about 660km (400 miles) beneath the crust of the Earth, researchers say. Geophysicist Steve Jacobsen from Northwestern University in the US co-authored the study published in the journal Science and said the discovery suggested Earth’s water may have come from within, driven to the surface by geological activity, rather than being deposited by icy comets hitting the forming planet as held by the prevailing theories.“I think we are finally seeing evidence for a whole-Earth water cycle, which may help explain the vast amount of liquid water on the surface of our habitable planet. Scientists have been looking for this missing deep water for decades.”Jacobsen and his colleagues are the first to provide direct evidence that there may be water in an area of the Earth’s mantle known as the transition zone.☺ ○ ☼ ○ ☺ ☺ ○ ☼ ○ ☺ ☺ ○ ☼ ○ ☺ ☺ ○ ☼ ○ ☺ ☺ ○ ☼ ○ ☺ ☺ ○ ☼ ○ ☺ ☺ ○ ☼ ○ ☺Meanwhile, back at the subduction zones there is more water going underground than previously thought.Earth is Eating Its Oceans Way Faster Than Originally Thought, Study Finds | The Weather ChannelThree times more ocean water than originally thought is being swallowed by the Earth as the planet's tectonic plates sink below one another, a new study discovered.Published in the journal Nature, a team of researchers took an estimate of how much water is being sucked into the Earth's interior through subduction zones — where two continental plates meet and one is being drawn downward.Researchers used data recorded by seismographs along the Mariana Trench — a subduction zone where the Pacific Plate is subducted beneath the Philippine Plate — to analyze a year's worth of measurements that enabled them to draw a better picture of just how much water the rocks inside the plates could hold. The determination was made by recording the speed at which seismic waves travel through the rocks.Near the Mariana Trench, at least 4.3 times more ocean water is subducted than previously thought.This discovery bodes large in understanding the Earth's deep water cycle, said Columbia University's Donna Shillington. A marine geology and geophysics researcher, Shillington said the water beneath the Earth's surface can aid in the development of magma and could lubricate faults, making earthquakes more likely.Using velocity measurements stretching down to 18 miles below the surface in a combination of known temperatures and pressures, researchers were able to calculate that subduction zones swallow 3 billion teragrams of water into the crust every million years. A teragram is one trillion grams.Unlike the old adage "what goes up must come down," the opposite applies here. Most of the water being subducted into the Earth is believed to be emitted back into the atmosphere as water vapor in volcanic eruptions, according to a Washington University release.The amount of ocean water ingested by the Earth and the amount emitted isn't equal. In fact, the amount going in wildly exceeds the amount coming out.◙ ☻ ◙ ☻ ◙ ◙ ☻ ◙ ☻ ◙ ◙ ☻ ◙ ☻ ◙ ◙ ☻ ◙ ☻ ◙ ◙ ☻ ◙ ☻ ◙ ◙ ☻ ◙ ☻ ◙ ◙ ☻ ◙ ☻ ◙Water content, silica content, viscosity, and temperature, are key issues in volcanic eruptions. Lava with a low contained water content merely spouts up like fountains and flows in hot streams, as in the image below.Volcanoes and WaterHawaii's Puu Oo, the easternmost of Kilauea's craters, spews molten lava in a non-explosive eruption in 1985. Episodic lava fountains in the mid-1980s built a massive cone which partially collapsed in the late 1990s.Gases dissolved in magma behave in the same way as gas dissolved in a bottle of soda pop: when a bottle of pop is opened the pressure on its contents is released, causing gases to come out of solution and froth towards the surface. In the same way, when magma moves towards the surface, water vapor and carbon dioxide come out of solution and form bubbles.The rate at which these bubbles form and rise to the surface is a function of the water content of the magma and its viscosity.Examples of non-explosive eruptions can be seen on the island of Hawaii. The volcanoes on the Big Island spew lava of low silica content, called basalt.As this low-viscosity magma rises within a volcano to near the surface, water vapor in the form of gas bubbles will quickly come out of solution and cause a brief fountaining effect where bits of lava are spattered around the vent, causing a "spatter cone."When most of the water vapor has come out of solution, the eruption becomes less dramatic and the lava flows rapidly downslopeIn magmas with a high dissolved gas content, the rapid decompression associated with a quickly rising magma body can cause the gases to expand in a violent upthrust of a dense mixture of hot gas, lava, and rocks. (This phenomenon was seen at the eruption of Washington state's Mount Saint Helens on May 18, 1980.)The explosive eruption of Mount Saint Helens in the Cascades Range of western Washington blew off 375 meters (1,235 feet) of the mountaintop and rained ash as far as 800 kilometers (500 miles) to the east.The mixture of gas and rocks rises quickly in the cool air, forming an eruption column that can rise up to 45 kilometers (28 miles) in height. Sometimes, eruption columns can collapse, producing a pyroclastic flow. Pyroclastic flows have proven to be one of the deadliest features of highly explosive eruptions due to the high speed at which they travel, riding on a cushion of air trapped below the collapsing column. They can engulf surrounding villages in hot, poisonous gases, rock, and ash.So in explosive type eruptions, the steam and gasses dissolved in the magma/lava, boils so violently when the pressure is released, that the rock explodes into fine ash, and can be carried for many mile in the atmosphere.High pressure has a considerable effect on keeping hot water liquid.In some deep ocean hydrothermal vents, the pressure of the water st depth is so high that the water is still liquid at over 300°c, so it is no surprise, that a sudden release of even higher pressures results in a steam explosion within the rock.

Now I will not claim to know a lot on the current HK protestors but its clear they are not angels for example:Hong Kong Terrorists Rally in Support of Islamic Terrorists.DW: Hong Kong riot police on Sunday forcefully broke up a rally of pro-democracy protesters showing solidarity with China’s oppressed Uighur minority.Around 1,000 people gathered peacefully near Hong Kong’s Harbourfront, waving Uighur flags and posters in the latest in nearly seven months of protests against China in the semi-autonomous city.‘We shall not forget those who share a common goal with us, our struggle for freedom and democracy and the rage against the Chinese Communist Party,’ one speaker shouted through the loudspeaker to the crowd.Police later swooped in using pepper spray to disperse protesters, who countered by throwing glass bottles and rocks.United Nations experts and human rights organizations have documented that China has imprisoned at least 1 million Uighurs and members of other largely Muslim minority groups in internment camps in the northwestern region of Xinjiang.China claims the prison camps are ‘vocational training centers’ necessary to combat terrorism in the restive province. Beijing has denied mistreating Uighurs and acted in defiance of a chorus of international criticism over the harsh crackdown.The US invaded a whole bunch of Muslim countries and killed millions of people. We give billions of dollars to Israel to kill Muslims.How is the US, the most brutal regime that ever existed in history, capable of morally grandstanding about anything at all?Whining Hong Kong Traitors Demand Entire World Endorse Their Terrorist Agenda.It is so difficult for me to grasp the concept of desiring to be ruled over by foreigners instead of your own people.Reuters: Hong Kong protesters rallied outside diplomatic missions on Thursday to urge foreign governments to follow the United States and pass human rights bills to raise pressure on Beijing and support their pro-democracy campaign.U.S. President Donald Trump signed legislation last month requiring the State Department to certify, at least once a year, that Hong Kong retains enough autonomy from Beijing to justify favorable U.S. trading terms.About 1,000 people, most of them dressed in black and wearing face masks, marched on a route that took them by the consulates of Australia, Britain, the European Union, the United States, Japan and Canada, to drop off a petition.British, EU and U.S. diplomats came out to receive it and took photographs with the protesters.‘What happens in Hong Kong is not just a local issue, it is about human rights and democracy. Foreign governments should understand how this city is being suppressed,’ said Suki Chan, who participated in the protest.No one knows what that means.Do they really think the cops should stop preventing them from burning the entire city to the ground?What is the suppression?‘We need to continue to seek international attention and let them know this movement is not losing momentum.’Hong Kong has been rattled for more than six months by anti-government protests amid growing anger over what many see as Chinese meddling in the freedoms promised to the former British colony when it returned to Chinese rule in 1997.Beijing has denied such meddling, blaming the unrest on ‘foreign forces’ and saying attempts to interfere in the city are doomed to fail.The U.S. legislation, which also threatens sanctions for human rights violations, followed similar ‘citizen diplomacy’ petitions in Hong Kong this year and has been cheered by protesters.Beijing denounced the U.S. legislation and Hong Kong’s government said it sent the wrong signal to the demonstrators and increased economic uncertainty in Hong Kong, a major financial hub.The marchers’ petition condemned what it called police brutality and urged governments to pass legislation to punish Chinese and Hong Kong officials by denying them visas and freezing their assets.The police say they have acted with restraint.Police said separately on Thursday they had arrested four people suspected of money laundering in relation to the protests and had frozen HK$70 million ($9 million) in bank deposits.Chan Wai Kei, from the police’s financial investigation and narcotics bureau, told reporters the four were part of a group that had asked for donations for arrested and injured protesters but used some of the money for personal investments.For some reason I’m just thinking of Laura Loomer saying “if you won’t stand with me and my tires, I won’t stand with you.”If no one else will stand with Hong Kong, then Donald Trump will just have to up his game.Maybe he can write an executive order that says it’s illegal to say that Hong Kong democracy protesters shouldn’t burn people alive.Media Silent on French Protests Even Whilst We Hear Nonstop About Hong Kong Democracy RiotsIn case you were wondering, yes, the French are still protesting. And yes, the police are still tear-gassing them.It is only the Russian media that is reporting it in English.RT: French police in Nantes have fired tear gas at protesters taking part in continuing demonstrations against President Emmanuel Macron’s proposed pension reforms.Unions have refused to back down in their opposition to the reforms, which were unveiled by Prime Minister Édouard Philippe last week. The crippling protests and workers’ strikes have brought transport chaos to French cities since they kicked off on December 5.Footage from Nantes, shared on social media, shows tear gas and water cannons being deployed against protesters, while some protesters managed to kick the gas canisters back towards riot cops.Le deuxième tour est plus mouvementé que le premier #Nantes #17Décembre pic.twitter.com/FDTzEidydV— Nicolas Mollé (@N_Molle) December 17, 2019Jets de projectiles contre canon à eaux et lacrymogenes au niveau de la préfecture #17decembre2019 #greve17decembre #Nantes pic.twitter.com/Wex71Od3vB— TheoPrn (@Theop_rn) December 17, 2019La tension ne redescend plus à Nantes #17Décembre pic.twitter.com/IIJ1yIS0xH— Nicolas Mollé (@N_Molle) December 17, 2019On Monday, the French official overseeing the pension reform project resigned amid the ongoing disruption and in the wake of media reports that he had failed to disclose outside earnings while serving in Macron’s cabinet.It’s really hard to look at these protests in France and not compare and contrast them with the protests in Hong Kong.The comparison is that large numbers of people are rioting and being tear gassed. The protests look very similar.The first major contrast would be the fact that the French have actual demands that could be negotiated, but the government simply refuses to engage them, whereas the Hong Kong protesters do not have any clear demands, and are simply planning to kill cops in a vague plan to overthrow the government.Further, the French are pointing to actual, visible corruption and graft in the government, which the Hong Kong rioters have not done.The second major contrast is that the entire global media is silent on the French protests, while the Hong Kong protests, we are told, are the most important thing on earth, and something that Americans and others should be extremely concerned about.Another difference is that Hong Kong protesters are attacking civilians who disagree with their revolutionary agenda, and in some cases, burning older, nationalistic Hong Kong citizens alive. This is designed to create fear among the public so as to prevent counter demonstrations.The French are only protesting against the government. And there is no one in the country that would ever protest in support of the French government, while most in Hong Kong support the government.The US government is heavily involved in the riots in Hong Kong, with Donald Trump going so far as to sign a declaration in support of terrorism in Hong Kong. The US government has said nothing about the riots in France, and has tacitly endorsed them by repeatedly meeting on friendly terms with French officials without bringing up the issue.It really makes you think.Hong Kong Terrorists Tell American Media They’re Planning Bombings.The terrorist revolutionaries in Hong Kong have been severely emboldened by the US government’s publicly proclaimed support for their violent, unclear agenda.A recent long piece from Reuters entitled “For hardened teens of the Hong Kong protests, violence is a way forward,”features revolutionaries casually talking about planning bombings and shipping in rifles, while fantasizing about the US military invading Hong Kong to aid them in their vicious quest for whatever it is they’re after.The piece includes interviews with several teenagers who are involved in fighting the cops, but focuses on one called “Fiona,” who is 16, and only became interested in revolutionary terrorism after watching a YouTube video.On weekends, Fiona, who has a cartoon sticker of Cinderella on the back of her iPhone, usually went shopping with girlfriends from high school. They looked for new outfits. They chatted and had tea together.But when Fiona saw the news that more than 3,000 Hong Kong lawyers dressed in black had marched against the proposed extradition bill on June 6, she wondered what was going on.She clicked through YouTube on her cell phone. She stopped on a Cantonese-language video uploaded about a week before by a young, handsome guy – hair cropped close on the sides and in a sort of thick flop on top – sitting on the edge of a bed. The video was speeded up so the presenter spoke in a fast blur, delivering on what he billed as, “Extradition bill 6 minute summary for dummies.”The idea of the bill, on its face, wasn’t a problem, the young man said – public safety and rules are important. The issue was that the judiciary in the mainland and the judiciary in Hong Kong are two totally different things.The Chinese Communist Party, he said, might use this new linkage between the court systems to come after ordinary people who were exercising their freedom of speech, something protected in Hong Kong but not Beijing: “You may be extradited to China because of telling a joke.”Fiona was alarmed.She then decided to go out and start rioting in the streets and throwing firebombs at the cops.If you think that a YouTube video saying that “maybe they’ll extradite us for speech” is a relatively vague reason for deciding to become a terrorist, you’re not wrong.You might also think that before becoming a terrorist, she would maybe look into the law further, and see that it only applied to crimes committed in mainland China or Taiwan. Meaning that it would be illegal for the Mainland to extradite someone for speech in Hong Kong, in the same way that it was illegal to do that before. (Note: The extradition law was completely withdrawn in September, but they’re still rioting and actually escalating the violence.)The reason that the law was introduced was that a Hong Kongese man killed his pregnant girlfriend in Taiwan and stuffed her in a suitcase, and then fled to Hong Kong, and they said he couldn’t be extradited. They were trying to close the “murder your girlfriend” loophole.Hopped up on Kool-Aid from a handsome fast-talking YouTuber – who was no doubt somehow connected to one of the US State Department’s institutions – Fiona joined the protests, and got an adrenaline rush.Just a few days after her YouTube awakening, on June 9, she took the subway with a group of friends from high school over to Hong Kong island. The crowd filled the march’s meeting point, Victoria Park, and soon flooded outside its boundaries. Between the glimmering towers of commerce, they yelled: “Fight for freedom! Stand with Hong Kong!” They yelled: “No China extradition! No evil law!” Fiona was astonished. She couldn’t believe so many people had shown up.The swell of the crowd, the boom and crash of its noise, was adrenaline and inspiration – “all of us were having the same aim,” Fiona said.And that really speaks to the heart of what is propelling this: teenagers are getting an adrenaline rush after being given an excuse to riot by CIA-funded propaganda.Fiona explains that she is ready to die for the cause of… is it free speech? We don’t really know.The article attempts to explain what exactly it is that is driving the protests. The authors do the best they can, but there really isn’t anything to explain.Vaguely, it appears that they want to return to being a colony of Britain. Which is really confusing to me, because I was taught in school that the British Empire was the third most evil thing in history, just after the Holocaust and slavery.The stakes for the kids of Hong Kong go well beyond a moment of geopolitical standoff. When Britain passed the city to China, like a pearl slipping from the hand of one merchant to another, there was a written understanding that for 50 years Hong Kong would enjoy a great deal of autonomy. Known as “one country, two systems,” the agreement suspended some of the blow of a global finance center coming under the rule of the Chinese Communist Party. The deal expires in 2047. For Fiona, this means that in her lifetime she will live not in the freewheeling city to which she was born, but, quite possibly, in a place that’s just another dot on the map of China.Chants at marches revolve around five protester demands, such as universal suffrage, with “Not one less!” the automatic refrain. But conversations soon turn to a larger, more difficult topic at the root of their complaints. China.During interviews with more than a dozen protesters at Polytechnic and another university besieged at the same time, and continued contact with many of them in the weeks that followed, the subject sprang up repeatedly. It’s never far, they said, the shadow of Beijing over the Hong Kong government’s policies.“They’re all involved with this shit,” said Lee, who gave only her last name. The 20-year-old nursing student covered her mouth after the obscenity, embarrassed to have said it out loud in the middle of a cafe, and quickly continued. ‘Of course China is the big boss behind this.’Note that the “this” in that sentence is never explained.I guess she means that the Mainland is behind sending police to stop them from breaking the windows of shops.Burning Christmas trees in malls.And setting old nationalists on fire.Of course, this has been going on for months, and it has only been local Hong Kong police following these children around and cleaning up after their little tantrums.‘If China is going to take over Hong Kong, we will lose our freedoms, we will lose our rights as humans,’ she said. Police had taken down her information when she surrendered outside Polytechnic University. She didn’t yet know whether that would lead to an arrest on rioting charges, which could bring up to 10 years of prison.It is just impossible not to recognize this as standard CIA propaganda, marketed to peasants in enemy countries to cause these sorts of revolts.What are these “freedoms” and “human rights”?China has a very developed justice system. It doesn’t suffer from the endemic corruption that white Western justice systems suffer from. It is more strict on some things, but it is much more lenient on other things.But these people are talking about freedom of speech – while literally flying American flags!Excluding Germany, there is not a single country on earth where speech is more restricted than in the United States of America.In America, you are very likely to be completely silenced for:Opposing feminismOpposing homosexualityOpposing transsexualismOpposing abortionOpposing mass immigrationSupporting the Chinese government against the Hong Kong riotersThat last one is very funny, no? It is absolute absurdism, in fact. Facebook, Twitter and YouTube have completely banned any support for mainland China, or any opposition to these terrorist rioters.Because it is against American speech regulations to question rioters demanding that American-style speech freedoms remain in place in Hong Kong – 28 years from now.It should also be noted that while being systematically silenced on the internet and attacked on the streets by Antifa (who are defended by cops who then refuse to prosecute them under any circumstances) are the most common forms of silencing views unpopular with the government in America, you also may be sued for millions of dollars for your speech or railroaded into jail or prison on trumped-up charges by corrupt courts. The illusion of “free speech” in America is as thin as tissue paper.China doesn’t have the tissue-thin veneer of freedom of speech, and states the honest fact that they don’t allow all forms of speech. But they allow orders of magnitude more speech than the United States allows.While the above list of forms of speech that are de facto banned in the United States is far from exhaustive, in China, you are restricted from:Criticizing the governmentAnd, once again, citizens of Hong Kong will have the right to do that for another 28 years.The article goes on to show that the rioters are considering bombings.‘In my view, violence is the thing that protects us,’ Lee said. ‘It is a warning to those, like the police, who think they can do anything to us.’The acceptance of violence isn’t limited to the barricades. Joshua Wong, the global face of the movement’s lobbying efforts, said he understood the need for protesters ‘to defend themselves with force.’As Wong spoke during an interview in Hong Kong on Wednesday, the headline on the front page of the South China Morning Post on the table next to his elbow read: ‘BOMB PLOTTERS ‘INTENDED TO TARGET POLICE AT MASS RALLY’’If a group of protesters had indeed planned to bomb police, would that have been a step too far?‘I think the fundamental issue,’ he said, ‘is we never can prove which strategy is the most effective or not-effective way to put pressure on Beijing.’Joshua Wong is the leader of the protests. He regularly travels to the US to meet with high level federal government officials.He goes to the US embassy in Hong Kong to coordinate riot strategy.He even met with the White Helmets, a US-backed terrorist group that operates in Syria, and Vitali Klitchko, a leader of the US-backed Maidan terrorist revolution in the Ukraine who is now the mayor of Kiev under the revolutionary government.(Also of note is that State Department backed neo-Nazi terrorists from the Ukraine, who helped install a completely Jewish government there, flew to Hong Kong to help those terrorists. It’s just a big friendly club.)Wong is publicly saying he is considering bombings.And he is allowed to walk around free in Hong Kong, as an open agent of a foreign government, leading a terrorist movement that flies the flag of a foreign government, as he and his rioters claim that the Mainland is oppressing them and taking their freedoms.Another terrorist interviewed by Reuters had recently been arrested for rioting, but the allegedly oppressive cops released him almost immediately and allowed him to return to the streets to riot.He is now giving interviews telling the Western media that he is planning bombings and to attack cops to steal their guns and use them to overthrow the government.Two weeks after his arrest, Pak had shown up ready to protest again. A march was slated to start in a couple hours. He’d taken a bus down from one of Hong Kong’s poorest districts, with a black backpack that held his dark clothes and mask.The lesson of the elections, he said, was that most Hong Kong citizens not only back the protests but “accept the violence level.” Otherwise, he said, they would have rebuked the reform ticket and cast their lot with pro-government candidates.‘I think,’ he said, ‘the violence of the protesters needs to upgrade to setting off bombs.’He’d been reading about the Russian Revolution and Vladimir Lenin. If he saw irony in studying the architect of the Soviet communist dictatorship while contemplating his own fight against the world’s preeminent Communist Party, he didn’t say so.‘The protesters, I think, will need some weapons, like rifles,’ he said.If it wasn’t possible to buy them, he said, it seemed easy enough to ransack police cars or even stations to steal them. He described how that could be done.This individual, Pak, also said that he believes that the US or the British (who had formerly colonized him as part of the third most evil event in all of human history) might invade China in order to protect Hong Kong rioters who are fighting for the freedoms and human rights they believe they may lose in 28 years from now.He said this when talking about his plan to use rifles he steals from cops to shoot at the Chinese military.‘I think they are testing us. If we attack the PLA, the PLA can shoot us and say, ‘OK, we were defending ourselves,’’ Pak said. ‘If we don’t attack the PLA, they will cross the line, again and again.’But, he said, if the protesters continued ramping up violence against the cops, maybe the PLA would be called in. And that, he said, would hand the protest movement victory.‘Other countries like [the] British and America can protect human rights in Hong Kong by sending troops to protect us,’ he said.Again with the human rights.Which, as far as I can tell, are these theoretical human rights losses in 28 years.This is All Insanell of this is simply a completely astroturfed hoax revolution. It is 100% incited by agents of the US State Department and the CIA who are educated and trained in revolutionary tactics at American-run universities. It is backed up by money being poured in through the State Department’s National Endowment for Democracy.They are using emotional propaganda on the internet to incite teenagers into getting an adrenaline rush by fighting the cops, and feeling that they are doing something meaningful, for democracy, or something.This is how the US government operates. They manipulate the entire world in the most ridiculous ways in order to push for a globalist, one world government agenda, under their system of democracy.You are really able to understand the depth of this hoax when you realize that the old people in Hong Kong are all against it. The people who actually lived under the British are not interested in going back to that, they are proud of their race and they are happy to be reunited with their nation.There were huge celebrations when the reunification happened in 1997.The riots are not a real thing. There is no real sentiment there. There is not even a seed of truth to any of it. It is pure meddling by the West, for the purpose of destabilizing China and ultimately forcing them to become a part of the global empire.That’s all.Never Forget That Paul Joseph Watson Aggressively Promoted This CIA OperationEveryone needs to remember, forever, that Paul Joseph Watson, a British homosexual and a former employee of Alex Jones, aggressively promoted this CIA terrorist operation in China.This is a person who claims to be anti-interventionist and anti-globalist, yet he told his hundreds of thousands of followers to support what might be the most pivotal globalist operation of the decade.Paul Joseph Watson is not stupid.Watson literally traveled to Hong Kong to support the violence there.He knew this was a CIA operation – everyone who even glances at it and has any idea how any of this stuff works knows that – but aggressively shilled it into the online right-wing on purpose anyway.Largely due to his influence – apparently – low information and/or low IQ people throughout the right-wing began shilling for the CIA. It was utterly bizarre and I flipped my desk over.I don’t know why Watson did this. As a homosexual, he may simply want to open up China to homosexuality (it is illegal there now). Or he may have some other agenda. Whatever the agenda is, it is evil.People need to be careful with this guy. Nick Fuentes, I’m looking in your direction, buddy. It’s okay to retweet him and get some support, or whatever – I guess – but understand that he has an evil agenda, whatever that agenda may be. And remember the thing about deals with the devil.We know too well where the Faustian spirit leads.

Yes, but the sources are hard to find.Here is a source showing that ISIS was created by the West:HOW THE WEST CREATED ISISThe following is a repost of an article that appeared at the Italian site Nena News in 2014. This article puts context to the Russian report, which in turn puts context to the amazing confession “we’re going to keep the oil.” As this Nena News report makes clear, the idea of keeping other people’s oil goes back over a decade and fits in neatly with the cooperation with both ISIS (and other terrorist groups) and the Kurds. It shows that the Kurds have long been part of the West’s oil theft scheme. It also shows that the idea of partitioning Iraq and Syria was an Israeli idea that was wholeheartedly endorsed by the Western powers.Many Westerners have complained bitterly of the uncontrolled migration to Europe and many have alleged high crime among immigrants, while others insist immigration is good for us no matter what. The upshot of this controversy is a split between the rank and file on the one hand and the elites on the other, and between the EU and individual states. And, let us recall, between US and European conservatives on the one hand and Western liberals on the other. And if we can rely on the information provided below, the answer is neither to hate, nor to pander to, people of any religion or lack thereof, or any ethnicity. And not to claim that Westerners are exempt of all blame and it is all the fault of the Arabs who lost their homes and families to Western bombs.Yet very few are willing to admit that the root of the problem is the West’s support for the Arab Spring, starting in the early 2000s, and the fact that the West was in fact, wittingly or not, supporting terrorists who were ripping apart individual Middle Eastern countries, especially Syria, Iraq and Libya. Wahhabist terrorists in territories that had never known Wahhabists. The report below clearly shows that this Western support, military training, materiel (guns, ammo, ordnance, missiles, etc), money – in exchange for the same oil as today, notably from Deir Ez-Zor – and moral support via the msm and the political class on both the left and the right, in the supposedly disparate administrations of mostly Bush Jr., Obama and Trump, is the main driver of the conflicts, without which the immigration to Europe would have been but a manageable trickle. If the Westerners suffering from the fallout of these Middle Eastern conflicts could bring themselves to admit that it was their own nations that generated the massive waves of migration, perhaps they could find reconciliation and redemption, tone down the internecine Western conflicts and start to solve them peacefully and in a civilized and brotherly way. But today, the West is far from achieving anything resembling reconciliation or brotherhood, either amongst each other or between them and their international guests.The contribution appearing below is intended as a possible first step toward understanding why the West is in this crisis and how the next one can be averted. The answer is simple: The West – starting with the US – needs to start tending to its own business and stop pretending to know what is best for others. I am reminded of the last sentence in Voltaire’s novel Candide: Il faut cultiver notre jardin.Yes, indeed. It is way past time to tend our own garden.This commentary and notes [in brackets] are by Vince Dhimos.HOW THE WEST CREATED ISISHow the West created the Islamic StateSept 13, 2014A deep analysis of the roots of Islamic State, created and founded by Us, Arab regimes and Israel to counter the Iranian influence in the region and the tools that today it can use to grow, writes Nafeez Ahmed.by Nafeez Ahmed – CountepunchPart 1 – OUR TERRORISTS“This is an organisation that has an apocalyptic, end-of-days strategic vision which will eventually have to be defeated,” Gen Martin Dempsey, chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, told a Pentagon press conference in August.Military action is necessary to halt the spread of the ISIS “cancer,” said President Obama. Yesterday he called for expanded airstrikes across Iraq and Syria, and new measures to arm and train Iraqi and Kurdish ground forces.“The only way to defeat [IS] is to stand firm and to send a very straightforward message,” declared Prime Minister Cameron. “A country like ours will not be cowed by these barbaric killers.”Missing from the chorus of outrage, however, has been any acknowledgement of the integral role of covert US and British regional military intelligence strategy in empowering and even directly sponsoring the very same virulent Islamist militants in Iraq, Syria and beyond, that went on to break away from al-Qaeda and form ‘ISIS’, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, or now simply, the Islamic State (IS).Since 2003, Anglo-American power has secretly and openly coordinated direct and indirect support for Islamist terrorist groups linked to al-Qaeda across the Middle East and North Africa. This ill-conceived patchwork geostrategy is a legacy of the persistent influence of neoconservative ideology, motivated by longstanding but often contradictory ambitions to dominate regional oil resources, defend an expansionist Israel, and in pursuit of these, re-draw the map of the Middle East.Now despite Pentagon denials that there will be boots on the ground – and Obama’s insistence that this would not be another “Iraq war” – local Kurdish military and intelligence sources confirm that US and German special operations forces are already “on the ground here. They are helping to support us in the attack.” US airstrikes on ISIS positions and arms supplies to the Kurds have also been accompanied by British RAF reconnaissance flights over the region and UK weapons shipments to Kurdish Peshmerga forces.Divide and Rule in Iraq“It’s not that we don’t want the Salafis to throw bombs,” said one US government defense consultant in 2007. “It’s who they throw them at – Hezbollah, Moqtada al-Sadr [a Shiite cleric leader in Iraq, who opposes Sunni terror], Iran, and at the Syrians, if they continue to work with Hezbollah [Hezbollah saved Lebanon from a deadly Israeli attack in 2006. This is probably the main reason they are hated in the West. Lebanon – where the Sunnis, the West’s, and Israel’s, darlings –are outnumbered by Christians plus Shiites, was supposed to be destroyed] and Iran.”Early during the 2003 invasion and occupation of Iraq, the US covertly supplied arms to al-Qaeda affiliated insurgents even while ostensibly supporting an emerging Shi’a-dominated administration.Pakistani defense sources interviewed by Asia Times in February 2005 confirmed that insurgents described as “former Ba’ath party” loyalists – who were being recruited and trained by “al-Qaeda in Iraq” under the leadership of the late Abu Musab Zarqawi – were being supplied Pakistan-manufactured weapons by the US. The arms shipments included rifles, rocket-propelled grenade launchers, ammunition, rockets and other light weaponry. These arms “could not be destined for the Iraqi security forces because US arms would be given to them”, a source told Syed Saleem Shahzad – the Times’ Pakistan bureau chief who, “known for his exposes of the Pakistani military” according to the New Yorker, was murdered in 2011. Rather, the US is playing a double-game to “head off” the threat of a “Shi’ite clergy-driven religious movement,” said the Pakistani defense source.This was not the only way US strategy aided the rise of Zarqawi, a bin Laden mentee and brainchild of the extremist ideology that would later spawn ‘ISIS.’According to a little-known November report for the US Joint Special Operations University (JSOU) and Strategic Studies Department, Dividing Our Enemies, post-invasion Iraq was “an interesting case study of fanning discontent among enemies, leading to ‘red-against-red’ [enemy-against-enemy] firefights.”While counterinsurgency on the one hand requires US forces to “ameliorate harsh or deprived living conditions of the indigenous populations” to publicly win local hearts and minds,” the reverse side of this coin is one less discussed. It involves no effort to win over those caught in the crossfire of insurgent and counterinsurgent warfare, whether by bullet or broadcast. On the contrary, this underside of the counterinsurgency coin is calculated to exploit or create divisions among adversaries for the purpose of fomenting enemy-on-enemy deadly encounters.”In other words, US forces will pursue public legitimacy through conventional social welfare while simultaneously delegitimising local enemies by escalating intra-insurgent violence, knowing full-well that doing so will in turn escalate the number of innocent civilians “caught in the crossfire.” The idea is that violence covertly calibrated by US special operations [think Hong Kong, Kiev, Bolivia] will not only weaken enemies through in-fighting but turn the population against them.In this case, the ‘enemy’ consisted of jihadists, Ba’athists, and peaceful Sufis, who were in a majority but, like the militants, also opposed the US military presence and therefore needed to be influenced. The JSOU report referred to events in late 2004 in Fallujah where “US psychological warfare (PSYOP) specialists” undertook to “set insurgents battling insurgents.” This involved actually promoting Zarqawi’s ideology, ironically, to defeat it: “The PSYOP warriors crafted programs to exploit Zarqawi’s murderous activities – and to disseminate them through meetings, radio and television broadcasts, handouts, newspaper stories, political cartoons, and posters – thereby diminishing his folk-hero image,” and encouraging the different factions to pick each other off. “By tapping into the Fallujans’ revulsion and antagonism to the Zarqawi jihadis the Joint PSYOP Task Force did its ‘best to foster a rift between Sunni groups.’”Yet as noted by Dahr Jamail, one of the few unembedded investigative reporters in Iraq after the war, the proliferation of propaganda linking the acceleration of suicide bombings to the persona of Zarqawi was not matched by meaningful evidence. His own search to substantiate the myriad claims attributing the insurgency to Zarqawi beyond anonymous US intelligence sources encountered only an “eerie blankness.”The US military operation in Fallujah, largely justified on the claim that Zarqawi’s militant forces had occupied the city, used white phosphorus, cluster bombs, and indiscriminate air strikes to pulverise 36,000 of Fallujah’s 50,000 homes, killing nearly a thousand civilians, terrorising 300,000 inhabitants to flee, and culminating in a disproportionate increase in birth defects, cancer and infant mortality due to the devastating environmental consequences of the war.To this day, Fallujah has suffered from being largely cut off from wider Iraq, its infrastructure largely unworkable with water and sewage systems still in disrepair, and its citizens subject to sectarian discrimination and persecution by Iraqi government backed Shi’a militia and police. “Thousands of bereaved and homeless Falluja families have a new reason to hate the US and its allies,” observed The Guardian in 2005. Thus, did the US occupation plant the seeds from which Zarqawi’s legacy would coalesce into the Frankenstein monster that calls itself “the Islamic State.”Bankrolling al-Qaeda in SyriaAccording to former French foreign minister Roland Dumas, Britain had planned covert action in Syria as early as 2009: “I was in England two years before the violence in Syria on other business,” he told French television: “I met with top British officials, who confessed to me that they were preparing something in Syria. This was in Britain not in America. Britain was preparing gunmen to invade Syria.”Leaked emails from the private intelligence firm Stratfor, including notes from a meeting with Pentagon officials, confirmed that as of 2011, US and UK special forces training of Syrian opposition forces was well underway. The goal was to elicit the “collapse” of Assad’s regime “from within.”Since then, the role of the Gulf states – namely Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, and Jordan (as well as NATO member Turkey) – in officially and unofficially financing and coordinating the most virulent elements amongst Syria’s rebels under the tutelage of US military intelligence is no secret. Yet the conventional wisdom is that the funnelling of support to Islamist extremists in the rebel movement affiliated to al-Qaeda has been a colossal and regrettable error.The reality is very different. The empowerment of the Islamist factions within the ‘Free Syrian Army’ (FSA) was a foregone conclusion of the strategy.In its drive to depose Col. Qaddafi in Libya, NATO had previously allied itself with rebels affiliated to the al-Qaeda faction, the Islamic Fighting Group. The resulting Libyan regime backed by the US was in turn liaising with FSA leaders in Istanbul to provide money and heavy weapons for the anti-Assad insurgency. The State Department even hired an al-Qaeda affiliated Libyan militia group to provide security for the US embassy in Benghazi – although they had links with the very people that attacked the embassy.Last year, CNN confirmed that CIA officials operating secretly out of the Benghazi embassy were being forced to take extra polygraph tests to keep under wraps what US Congressman suspect was a covert operation “to move surface-to-air missiles out of Libya, through Turkey, and into the hands of Syrian rebels.”With their command and control centre based in Istanbul, Turkey, military supplies from Saudi Arabia and Qatar in particular were transported by Turkish intelligence to the border for rebel acquisition. CIA operatives along with Israeli and Jordanian commandos were also training FSA rebels on the Jordanian-Syrian border with anti-tank and anti-aircraft weapons. In addition, other reports show that British and French military were also involved in these secret training programmes. It appears that the same FSA rebels receiving this elite training went straight into ISIS – last month one ISIS commander, Abu Yusaf, said, “Many of the FSA people who the west has trained are actually joining us.”The National thus confirmed the existence of another command and control centre in Amman, Jordan, “staffed by western and Arab military officials,” which “channels vehicles, sniper rifles, mortars, heavy machine guns, small arms and ammunition to Free Syrian Army units.” Rebel and opposition sources described the weapons bridge as “a well-run operation staffed by high-ranking military officials from 14 countries, including the US, European nations [My highlighting. See? The same countries that are now overrun with migrants and complain of their bad behaviour were the ones who sponsored the terror in the first place!] and Arabian Gulf states, the latter providing the bulk of materiel and financial support to rebel factions.”The FSA sources interviewed by The National went to pains to deny that any al-Qaeda affiliated factions were involved in the control centre, or would receive any weapons support. But this is difficult to believe given that “Saudi and Qatari-supplied weapons” were being funnelled through to the rebels via Amman, to their favoured factions.Classified assessments of the military assistance supplied by US allies Saudi Arabia and Qatar obtained by the New York Times showed that “most of the arms shipped at the behest of Saudi Arabia and Qatar to supply Syrian rebel groups… are going to hardline Islamic jihadists, and not the more secular opposition groups that the West wants to bolster.”Lest there be any doubt as to the extent to which all this covert military assistance coordinated by the US has gone to support al-Qaeda affiliated factions in the FSA, it is worth noting that earlier this year, the Israeli military intelligence website Debkafile – run by two veteran correspondents who covered the Middle East for 23 years for The Economist – reported that: “Turkey is giving Syrian rebel forces, including the al-Qaeda-affiliated Nusra Front, passage through its territory to attack the northwestern Syrian coastal area around Latakia.”In August, Debkafile reported that “The US, Jordan and Israel are quietly backing the mixed bag of some 30 Syrian rebel factions”, some of which had just “seized control of the Syrian side of the Quneitra crossing, the only transit point between Israeli and Syrian Golan.” However, Debkafile noted, “al-Qaeda elements have permeated all those factions.” Israel has provided limited support to these rebels in the form of “medical care,” as well as “arms, intelligence and food…“Israel [my highlighting] acted as a member, along with the US and Jordan, of a support system for rebel groups fighting in southern Syria. Their efforts are coordinated through a war-room which the Pentagon established last year near Amman. The US, Jordanian and Israeli officers manning the facility determine in consultation which rebel factions are provided with reinforcements from the special training camps run for Syrian rebels in Jordan, and which will receive arms. All three governments understand perfectly that, notwithstanding all their precautions, some of their military assistance is bound to percolate to al-Qaeda’s Syrian arm, Jabhat Al-Nusra, which is fighting in rebel ranks. Neither Washington or Jerusalem or Amman would be comfortable in admitting they are arming al-Qaeda’s Nusra Front in southern Syria.” [Yes, publicly, the US, Israel and Jordan would not want to admit this but in reality, they obviously were totally unconcerned that terrorists might soon seize all of Syria. Otherwise, ISIS would not have been able to take over the lion’s share of the nation’s territory by September 2015 when the Russians came and turned around the nation’s fate. This isn’t hard. The nation with the biggest armed forces in the world had claimed to be waging a “war on terror.” Yet a less powerful country with a much smaller air force was able to immediately turn around the war. It is painfully clear then that the goal of the united West was to enable the terrorists to establish a caliphate in Syria. Later in this report we read that the terrorists were stealing Syrian oil and selling it cheap to Western countries. This oil seized from the war-weary and impoverished Syrian people by Western-backed terrorists, became the genuine motive for persecuting the war.]This support also went to ISIS. Although the latter was originally founded in Iraq in October 2006, by 2013 the group had significantly expanded its operations in Syria working alongside al-Qaeda’s al-Nusra until February 2014, when ISIS was formally denounced by al-Qaeda. Even so, experts on the region’s Islamist groups point out that the alleged rift between al-Nusra and ISIS, while real, is not as fraught as one might hope, constituting a mere difference in tactics rather than fundamental ideology.Officially, the US government’s financial support for the FSA goes through the Washington DC entity, the Syrian Support Group (SSG), which was incorporated in April 2012. The SSG is licensed via the US Treasury Department to “export, re-export, sell, or supply to the Free Syrian Army (‘FSA’) financial, communications, logistical, and other services otherwise prohibited by Executive Order 13582 in order to support the FSA.”In mid-2013, the Obama administration intensified its support to the rebels with a new classified executive order reversing its previous policy limiting US direct support to only nonlethal equipment. As before, the order would aim to supply weapons strictly to “moderate” forces in the FSA.Except the government’s vetting procedures to block Islamist extremists from receiving US weapons have never worked.A year later, Mother Jones found that the US government has “little oversight over whether US supplies are falling prey to corruption – or into the hands of extremists,” and relies “on too much good faith.” The US government keeps track of rebels receiving assistance purely through “handwritten receipts provided by rebel commanders in the field,” and the judgement of its allies. Countries supporting the rebels – the very same which have empowered al-Qaeda affiliated Islamists – “are doing audits of the delivery of lethal and nonlethal supplies.”Thus, with the Gulf states still calling the shots on the ground, it is no surprise that by September last year, eleven prominent rebel groups distanced themselves from the ‘moderate’ opposition leadership and allied themselves with al-Qaeda.By the SSG’s own conservative estimate, as much as 15% of rebel fighters are Islamists affiliated to al-Qaeda, either through the Jabat al-Nusra faction, or its breakaway group ISIS. But privately, Pentagon officials estimate that “more than 50%” of the FSA is comprised of Islamist extremists, and according to rebel sources neither FSA chief Gen. Salim Idris nor his senior aides engage in much vetting, decisions about which are made typically by local commanders.Part 2 – THE LONG WARFollow the MoneyMedia reports following ISIS’ conquest of much of northern and central Iraq this summer have painted the group as the world’s most super-efficient, self-financed, terrorist organisation that has been able to consolidate itself exclusively through extensive looting of Iraq’s banks and funds from black market oil sales. Much of this narrative, however, has derived from dubious sources, and overlooked disturbing details.One senior anonymous intelligence source told Guardian correspondent Martin Chulov, for instance, that over 160 computer flash sticks obtained from an ISIS hideout revealed information on ISIS’ finances that was completely new to the intelligence community.“Before Mosul, their total cash and assets were $875 m [£515 m],” said the official on the funds obtained largely via “massive cashflows from the oilfields of eastern Syria, which it had commandeered in late 2012.” Afterwards, “with the money they robbed from banks and the value of the military supplies they looted, they could add another $1.5 bn to that.” The thrust of the narrative coming from intelligence sources was simple: “They had done this all themselves. There was no state actor at all behind them, which we had long known. They don’t need one.”“ISIS’ half-a-billion-dollar bank heist makes it world’s richest terror group,” claimed the Telegraph, adding that the figure did not include additional stolen gold bullion, and millions more grabbed from banks “across the region.”This story of ISIS’ stupendous bank looting spree across Iraq made global headlines but turned out to be disinformation. Senior Iraqi officials and bankers confirmed that banks in Iraq, including Mosul where ISIS supposedly stole $430 million, had faced no assault, remain open, and are guarded by their own private security forces.How did the story come about? One of its prime sources was Iraqi parliamentarian Ahmed Chalabi – the same man who under the wing of his ‘Iraqi National Congress’ peddled false intelligence about Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction and ties to al-Qaeda.In June, Chalabi met with the US ambassador to Iraq, Robert Beecroft, and Brett McGurk, the State Department’s deputy assistant secretary of state for Iraq and Iran. According to sources cited by Buzzfeed in June, Beecroft “has been meeting Chalabi for months and has dined at his mansion in Baghdad.”Follow the OilBut while ISIS has clearly obtained funding from donors in the Gulf states, many of its fighters having broken away from the more traditional al-Qaeda affiliated groups like Jabhat al-Nusra, it has also successfully leveraged its control over Syrian and Iraqi oil fields.In January, the New York Times reported that “Islamist rebels and extremist groups have seized control of most of Syria’s oil and gas resources”, bolstering “the fortunes of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, or ISIS, and the Nusra Front, both of which are offshoots of al-Qaeda.” Al-Qaeda affiliated rebels had “seized control of the oil and gas fields scattered across the country’s north and east,” while more moderate “Western-backed rebel groups do not appear to be involved in the oil trade, in large part because they have not taken over any oil fields.”Yet the west had directly aided these Islamist groups in their efforts to operationalise Syria’s oil fields. In April 2013, for instance, the Times noted that al-Qaeda rebels had taken over key regions of Syria: “Nusra’s hand is felt most strongly in Aleppo”, where the al-Qaeda affiliate had established in coordination with other rebel groups including ISIS “a Shariah Commission” running “a police force and an Islamic court that hands down sentences that have included lashings.” Al-Qaeda fighters also “control the power plant and distribute flour to keep the city’s bakeries running.” Additionally, they “have seized government oil fields” in provinces of Deir al-Zour [alternately spelled Deir Ez-Zor] and Hasaka, and now make a “profit from the crude they produce.”Lost in the fog of media hype was the disconcerting fact that these al-Qaeda rebel bread and oil operations in Aleppo, Deir al-Zour and Hasaka were directly and indirectly supported by the US and the European Union (EU). One account by the Washington Post for instance refers to a stealth mission in Aleppo “to deliver food and other aid to needy Syrians – all of it paid for by the US government,” including the supply of flour. “The bakery is fully supplied with flour paid for by the United States,” the Post continues, noting that local consumers, however, “credited Jabhat al-Nusra – a rebel group the United States has designated a terrorist organisation because of its ties to al-Qaeda – with providing flour to the region, though he admitted he wasn’t sure where it comes from.”And in the same month that al-Qaeda’s control of Syria’s main oil regions in Deir al-Zour and Hasaka was confirmed, the EU voted to ease an oil embargo on Syria to allow oil to be sold on international markets from these very al-Qaeda controlled oil fields. European companies would be permitted to buy crude oil and petroleum products from these areas, although transactions would be approved by the Syrian National Coalition. Due to damaged infrastructure, oil would be trucked by road to Turkey where the nearest refineries are located.“The logical conclusion from this craziness is that Europe will be funding al-Qaeda,” said Joshua Landis, a Syria expert at the University of Oklahoma.Just two months later, a former senior staffer at the Syria Support Group in DC, David Falt, leaked internal SSG emails confirming that the group was “obsessed” with brokering “jackpot” oil deals on behalf of the FSA for Syria’s rebel-run oil regions. “The idea they could raise hundreds of millions from the sale of the oil came to dominate the work of the SSG to the point no real attention was paid to the nature of the conflict,” said Falt, referring in particular to SSG’s director Brian Neill Sayers, who before his SSG role worked with NATO’s Operations Division. Their aim was to raise money for the rebels by selling the rights to Syrian oil.Tacit Complicity in IS Oil SmugglingEven as al-Qaeda fighters increasingly decide to join up with IS, the ad hoc black market oil production and export infrastructure established by the Islamist groups in Syria has continued to function with, it seems, the tacit support of regional and western powers.According to Ali Ediboglu, a Turkish MP for the border province of Hatay, IS is selling the bulk of its oil from regions in Syria and Mosul in Iraq through Turkey, with the tacit consent of Turkish authorities: “They have laid pipes from villages near the Turkish border at Hatay. Similar pipes exist also at [the Turkish border regions of] Kilis, Urfa and Gaziantep. They transfer the oil to Turkey and parlay it into cash. They take the oil from the refineries at zero cost. Using primitive means, they refine the oil in areas close to the Turkish border and then sell it via Turkey. This is worth $800 million.” He also noted that the extent of this and related operations indicates official Turkish complicity. “Fighters from Europe, Russia, Asian countries and Chechnya are going in large numbers both to Syria and Iraq, crossing from Turkish territory. There is information that at least 1,000 Turkish nationals are helping those foreign fighters sneak into Syria and Iraq to join ISIS. The National Intelligence Organization (MIT) is allegedly involved. None of this can be happening without MIT’s knowledge.”Similarly, there is evidence that authorities in the Kurdish region of Iraq are also turning a blind eye to IS oil smuggling. In July, Iraqi officials said that IS had begun selling oil extracted in the northern province of Salahuddin [possible alternate form of Saladin or Salah ad Din]. One official pointed out that “the Kurdish Peshmerga forces stopped the sale of oil at first, but later allowed tankers to transfer and sell oil.”State of Law coalition MP Alia Nasseef also accused the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) of secretly trading oil with IS: “What is happening shows the extent of the massive conspiracy against Iraq by Kurdish politicians… The [illegal] sale of Iraqi oil to ISIS or anyone else is something that would not surprise us.” Although Kurdish officials have roundly rejected these accusations, informed sources told the Arabic daily Asharq Al-Awsat that Iraqi crude captured by ISIS was “being sold to Kurdish traders in the border regions straddling Iraq, Iran and Syria, and was being shipped to Pakistan where it was being sold ‘for less than half its original price.’” [Today, the Kurds are still an ally of the US, and now they are guarding the oil deposits in Deir Ez-Zor, with the only difference that Trump now proudly admits “we are keeping the oil,” in the full knowledge that by now the brainwashed masses would accept the message]An official statement in August from Iraq’s Oil Ministry warned that any oil not sanctioned by Baghdad could include crude smuggled illegally from IS: “International purchasers [of crude oil] and other market participants should be aware that any oil exports made without the authorisation of the Ministry of Oil may contain crude oil originating from fields under the control of [ISIS].”“Countries like Turkey have turned a blind eye to the practice” of IS oil smuggling, said Luay al-Khateeb, a fellow at the Brookings Doha Center,” and international pressure should be mounted to close down black markets in its southern region.” So far there has been no such pressure. Meanwhile, IS oil smuggling continues, with observers inside and outside Turkey noting that the Turkish government is tacitly allowing IS to flourish as it prefers the rebels to the Assad regime.According to former Iraqi oil minister Isam al-Jalabi,“ Turkey is the biggest winner from the Islamic State’s oil smuggling trade.” Both traders and oil firms are involved, he said, with the low prices allowing for “massive” profits for the countries facilitating the smuggling.Buying ISIS Oil?Early last month, a tanker carrying over a million barrels in crude oil from northern Iraq’s Kurdish region arrived at the Texas Gulf of Mexico. The oil had been refined in the Iraqi Kurdish region before being pumped through a new pipeline from the KRG area ending up at Ceyhan, Turkey, where it was then loaded onto the tanker for shipping to the US. Baghdad’s efforts to stop the oil sale on the basis of its having national jurisdiction were rebuffed by American courts.In early September, the European Union’s ambassador to Iraq, Jana Hybášková, told the EU Foreign Affairs Committee that “several EU member states have bought oil from the Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS) terrorist organisation that has been brutally conquering large portions of Iraq and Syria,” according to Israel National News. She however “refused to divulge the names of the countries despite being asked numerous times.”A third end-point for the KRG’s crude this summer, once again shipped via Turkey’s port of Ceyhan, was Israel’s southwestern port of Ashkelon. This is hardly news though. In May, Reuters revealed that Israeli and US oil refineries had been regularly purchasing and importing KRG’s disputed oil.Meanwhile, as this triangle of covert oil shipments in which ISIS crude appears to be hopelessly entangled becomes more established, Turkey has increasingly demanded that the US pursue formal measures to lift obstacles to Kurdish oil sales to global markets. The KRG plans to export as much as 1 million barrels of oil a day by next year through its pipeline to Turkey.Among the many oil and gas firms active in the KRG capital, Erbil, are ExxonMobil and Chevron. They are drilling in the region for oil under KRG contracts, though operations have been halted due to the crisis. No wonder Steve Coll writes in the New Yorker that Obama’s air strikes and arms supplies to the Kurds – notably not to Baghdad – effectively amount to “the defense of an undeclared Kurdish oil state whose sources of geopolitical appeal – as a long-term, non-Russian supplier of oil and gas to Europe, for example – are best not spoken of in polite or naïve company.” The Kurds are now busy working to “quadruple” their export capacity, while US policy has increasingly shifted toward permitting Kurdish exports – a development that would have major ramifications for Iraq’s national territorial integrity. [The ultimate unspoken goal of Western powers, bowing to Israel, is to break up Syria and Iraq into sectors along sectarian and ethnic lines, as we see further on. This is one of the main motives for the Iraqi and Syrian wars. Russia was the unforeseen saviour of these sovereign countries]To be sure, as the offensive against IS ramps up, the Kurds are now selectively cracking down on IS smuggling efforts – but the measures are too little, too late.A New MapThe Third Iraq War has begun. With it, longstanding neocon dreams to partition Iraq into three along ethnic and religious lines have been resurrected.White House officials now estimate that the fight against the region’s ‘Islamic State’ will last years, and may outlive the Obama administration. But this ‘long war’ vision goes back to nebulous ideas formally presented by late RAND Corp analyst Laurent Muraweic before the Pentagon’s Defense Policy Board at the invitation of then chairman Richard Perle. That presentation described Iraq as a “tactical pivot” by which to transform the wider Middle East. [to better understand this, read about the Israeli Yinon plan to break up the Middle East and sow chaos. Supposedly, if the Middle Eastern ethnicities and tribes can be made to hate and mistrust each other, Israel will be more secure. Seriously?]Brian Whitaker, former Guardian Middle East editor, rightly noted that the Perle-RAND strategy drew inspiration from a 1996 paper published by the Israeli Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies, co-authored by Perle and other neocons who held top positions in the post-9/11 Bush administration.The policy paper advocated a strategy that bears startling resemblance to the chaos unfolding in the wake of the expansion of the ‘Islamic State’ – Israel would “shape its strategic environment” by first securing the removal of Saddam Hussein. “Jordan and Turkey would form an axis along with Israel to weaken and ‘roll back’ Syria.” This axis would attempt to weaken the influence of Lebanon, Syria and Iran by “weaning” off their Shi’ite populations. To succeed, Israel would need to engender US support, which would be obtained by Benjamin Netanyahu formulating the strategy “in language familiar to the Americans by tapping into themes of American administrations during the cold war.” [Russia spoiled this plan for good]The 2002 Perle-RAND plan was active in the Bush administration’s strategic thinking on Iraq shortly before the 2003 war. According to US private intelligence firm Stratfor, in late 2002, then vice-president Dick Cheney and deputy defense secretary Paul Wolfowitz had co-authored a scheme under which central Sunni-majority Iraq would join with Jordan; the northern Kurdish regions would become an autonomous state; all becoming separate from the southern Shi’ite region. [To set the record straight, on average, Iraq is majority Shiite, and that is the problem for the West and Israel, which favour Sunnis. Iraq is 70% Shiite]The strategic advantages of an Iraq partition, Stratfor argued, focused on US control of oil:“After eliminating Iraq as a sovereign state, there would be no fear that one day an anti-American government would come to power in Baghdad, as the capital would be in Amman [Jordan]. Current and potential US geopolitical foes Iran, Saudi Arabia and Syria would be isolated from each other, with big chunks of land between them under control of the pro-US forces.“Equally important, Washington would be able to justify its long-term and heavy military presence in the region as necessary for the defense of a young new state asking for US protection – and to secure the stability of oil markets and supplies. That in turn would help the United States gain direct control of Iraqi oil and replace Saudi oil in case of conflict with Riyadh.”The expansion of the ‘Islamic State’ has provided a pretext for the fundamental contours of this scenario to unfold, with the US and British looking to re-establish a long-term military presence in Iraq.In 2006, Cheney’s successor, Joe Biden, also indicated his support for the ‘soft partition’ of Iraq along ethno-religious lines – a position which the co-author of the Biden-Iraq plan, Leslie Gelb of the Council on Foreign Relations, now argues is “the only solution” to the current crisis.In 2008, the strategy re-surfaced – once again via RAND Corp – through a report funded by the US Army Training and Doctrine Command on how to prosecute the ‘long war.’ Among its strategies, one scenario advocated by the report was ‘Divide and Rule’ which would involve “exploiting fault lines between the various Salafi-jihadist groups to turn them against each other and dissipate their energy on internal conflicts.”Simultaneously, the report suggested that the US could foster conflict between Salafi-jihadists and Shi’ite militants by “shoring up the traditional Sunni regimes… as a way of containing Iranian power and influence in the Middle East and Persian Gulf.”One way or another, the plan is in motion. Last week, Israeli foreign minister Avigdor Leiberman told US secretary of state John Kerry: “Iraq is breaking up before our eyes and it would appear that the creation of an independent Kurdish state is a foregone conclusion.” [the only thing preventing this is Russia.]The rise of the ‘Islamic State’ is not just a direct consequence of this neocon vision, tied as it is to a dangerous covert operations strategy that has seen al-Qaeda linked terrorists as a tool to influence local populations – it has in turn offered a pretext for the launch of a new era of endless war, the spectre of a prolonged US-led military presence in the energy-rich Persian Gulf region, and a return to the dangerous imperial temptation to re-configure the wider regional order.Dr. Nafeez Ahmed is a bestselling author, investigative journalist and international security scholar. He has contributed to two major terrorism investigations in the US and UK, the 9/11 Commission and the 7/7 Coroner’s Inquest, and has advised the Royal Military Academy Sandhust, British Foreign Office and US State Department. He is a regular contributor to The Guardian where he writes about the geopolitics of interconnected environmental, energy and economic crises. He has also written for The Independent, Sydney Morning Herald, CounterPunch, The Age, The Scotsman, Foreign Policy, Prospect, New Statesman, Le Monde diplomatique, among many others.