ISIS ‘Made Up’ By The US, 9/11 Orchestrated By The West To Launch War On Terror, Egypt’s State Media Claims

A newspaper columnist in Egypt has accused the United States of completely fabricating ISIS (Islamic State in Iraq and Syria) and being complicit with other Western powers in orchestrating the terror attacks on September 11, 2001, in order to justify launching its so-called “War on Terror.” The column ran in Egypt’s state-run newspaper, Al-Ahram, and casts doubt on the two principle drivers in America’s (and the West’s) involvement in Middle Eastern affairs over the past one-and-a-half decades.

The Independent reported Thursday that columnist Noha Al-Sharnoubi, writing for the state-operated Egyptian newspaper Al-Ahram back on August 23, questioned the validity of the United States and other Western powers’ reasons for attacking nations like Iraq after the fall of the Twin Towers at the World Trade Center in New York on September 11, then goes one step further by postulating that ISIS was a contrivance of the United States as well. Al-Sharnoubi asked if the United States’ “official version” of the events of September 11 was even believable, allowing that the jetliner attacks on the World Trade Center could very well have been premeditated to “justify the war on terror.”

The columnist went on to question the actual existence of the Islamic State, the fundamentalist Islamic quasi-state that sprang into existence in June 2014 after extremist militants took over territory in eastern Syria and northwestern Iraq. Al-Sharnoubi posited that ISIS could have been a fabrication to “trick” the rest of the world and validate U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East.

Using reasoning often associated with conspiracy theorists, Al-Sharnoubi asked questions concerning both the 9/11 terrorist attacks and ISIS that were meant to instill the reader with incredulous doubt. She found that the 9/11 terrorists training at American flight schools too coincidental, easily “penetrated US airspace and hit the towers of the World Trade Center and the Pentagon one by one,” and weren’t shot down despite the last attacks occurring roughly 15 and 30 minutes after the Twin Towers fell.

And like conspiracy theories that have been circulating since the 9/11 terrorist attacks, including several variations on the theme of a Bush administration “inside job,” flaws in the reasoning and questioning must be pointed out. Like the fact that the planes never “penetrated US airspace” simply due to the fact that all flights involved originated in the U.S. and were never outside American airspace so they would have to “penetrate” it. And although it might have been possible for the terrorist-piloted planes to be targeted and shot down by U.S. jets, until air traffic was ordered out of the skies across the country, the military could easily have mistakenly shot down numerous airliners. Since the number of hijacked planes was unknown until all planes were grounded, save for the four that crashed, reacting to potential targets while so many aircraft were in the air would have been problematic.

Still, Al-Sharnoubi questioned the credibility of selected details, concluding, “Or was the whole thing planned [in advance] in order to justify the war on terror, the [first] episode of which [later] began in Iraq?”

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On a historical note, the actual first episode of the “War on Terror” began with the invasion Afghanistan with Operation Enduring Freedom. As noted by The New York Times, the term “War on Terror” was first used by the Bush administration just nine days after the September 11 terrorist attacks.

ISIS, by extension of the credibility deficit, also seemed to be part of a scheme or “another story” concocted by the United States and the West to to “justify the devastation, partitioning, and occupation” of countries in the Middle East, according to the Egyptian journalist, who disavowed the extremists’ propaganda videos. She also wrote that most of ISIS’ fighters were foreigners.

Although ISIS has fielded an estimated 27,000 foreign fighters since 2011, according to The Telegraph, the extremists’ total fighting strength is unclear. The Russian military, according to Russia’s TASS News Agency, estimated ISIS’ strength at 70,000 fighters, while the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights estimated the caliphate as having between 80,000 and 100,000 fighters in Syria and Iraq. The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) has reported that ISIS only had an estimated 20,000 to 31,000 fighters in 2014 according to CNN and an estimated count of 15,000 to 20,000 fighters in 2016 according to The Guardian. Note that only the CIA’s estimates would show that most of ISIS’ fighters were not from Syria and Iraq. The CIA numbers may have been an underestimate, given the estimated number of extra-nationals that have supposedly gone to the region would comprise nearly all of ISIS fighters in the region. Lastly, an internal report by ISIS noted that 90 percent of ISIS’ fighters in Iraq were Iraqi and 70 percent of its forces in Syria were Syrian, according to Reuters.

Al-Sharnoubi returned to the idea of events being orchestrated as justification for continuing military operations in the Middle East, suggesting that Western “intelligence” operatives were behind the ISIS mystique “and later Muslim citizens are arrested and killed and simply accused of perpetrating the attacks in order to justify what is happening in the Arab countries in the name of the war on terror, and in order to justify the plan to persecute the Muslims in the U.S. and Europe and expel them. Have we really been deceived, and continue to be deceived, to such an extent?!”

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Noha Al-Sharnoubi’s ultimate intent with the piece appears to be to not only discredit the United States and the West, especially with regard to actions that have led to their presence in Middle Eastern affairs but to also plant the idea of false flag incidents. In conspiracy theory circles, a “false flag” is an episode wherein covert operations attempt to instill the idea that acts and incidents were perpetrated by a certain party in order to later find said party as blameworthy for the acts and incidents.

As for the non-existence of ISIS, the Associated Press recently published an extensive survey of mass graves in Syria and Iraq reportedly created by the extremists that show some 72 grave sites containing an estimated 15,000 bodies. As Inquistr reported, it is believed that the current number of mass graves is only a small portion of the total.

Al-Sharnoubi’s reporting with regard to ISIS and the 9/11 terrorist attacks reads like selective misdirection at best, with the portion concerning the 2001 attacks nothing more than a litany of rehashed conspiracy theories that have attempted to pin the blame for the attacks on the administration of President George W. Bush ever since the tragic events occurred. They’ve been debunked again and again (for one treatment, see Popular Mechanics‘ take on the theories).

Still, the denial of ISIS’ existence notwithstanding, perhaps the Egyptian journalist should be given some credit for restraining herself from extending the blame for the 9/11 terrorist attacks on extraterrestrials, a fanciful suggestion submitted by some conspiracy theorists, according to an Inquisitr report.

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