DISINFO: The US generated and backed Al Qaeda, the Islamic State and the Taliban
SUMMARY
The US attacked Afghanistan because the Taliban committed the sin of hosting Al Qaeda, but the US itself had backed those groups, as it did with the Islamic State. The US exit of Afghanistan is a deja-vu, something that we have already seen in other occasions, as we have already seen how the US has wanted to fight something that it had generated and backed. It happened with the Islamic State, it is happening with Al Qaeda, and will happen with the Taliban.
RESPONSE
This is a recurring pro-Kremlin disinformation narrative about the West’s alleged support for terrorism. Contrary to the claim, the US didn’t generate or backed Al Qaeda, the Islamic State or the Taliban, but it has been actively fighting them for decades and years (Al Qaeda since the 1990s, the Taliban since 2001 and the Islamic State since its creation as an independent group and its takeover of Mosul in 2014).
While it is true that the US backed anti-Soviet Afghan resistance groups in the 1980s, technically the Taliban as an armed movement weren’t created until 1994, then a mere faction in the ongoing Afghan civil war. Some scholars believe that the Taliban may have benefited at the time from some US indirect aid to Pakistan, which actively supported the movement, but this is different from claiming that the US “backed” them. Given that the US has also backed opposition armed groups in Syria, all of which are labelled as “terrorists” by both the Syrian regime of Bashar Al Assad and Russia, this disinformation narrative aims to blur any distinction among all those groups in order to portray the US as a “supporter of terrorists”.
See other examples in our database, such as claims that the West encouraged the creation of the Islamic State, who are its mercenaries; that the West is supporting terrorists to encircle Russia; that the EU is supporting terrorism against the Syrian state; that instead of killing ISIS leader Abu Bakr Al Baghdadi, the US may have evacuated him; that the US is transporting ISIS members to Afghanistan; or that extremists and Nazis are being trained in Ukraine to act in Belarus.