DISINFO: US instigated, funded, backed and protected Al Qaeda and the Islamic State during the war on terror
SUMMARY
During its 20-year war on terror, the US has instigated, funded, backed and protected terrorists in Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan or Syria, calling them ‘moderate rebels’ or ‘armed opposition’. This includes groups like Al Qaeda and the Islamic State, having been fed by the US themselves in hidden wars to obtain benefits at a global level.
RESPONSE
Recurring pro-Kremlin disinformation narrative about the West’s alleged support for terrorism.
Given that the US and other Western countries have 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 message aims to blur any distinction among all those groups in order to portray the West as a “supporter of terrorists”. In fact, the opposite is true: the US and other Western nations have been actively fighting Islamic terrorist groups 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).
See other examples of similar disinformation narratives in our database, such as claims that the US seeded chaos in Afghanistan to undermine China and Russia, that the US created a drug laboratory on a global scale in Afghanistan, that the US generated and backed Al Qaeda, the Islamic State and the Taliban, or that the US created the terrorists who killed two Spanish journalists in Africa.