New ISIS Military Chief Trained by Obama Administration

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Yet another top military leader for the Islamic State, or ISIS, was exposed as having been trained by the U.S. government — this one as recently as 2014 and on American soil, according to media reports confirmed as accurate by the U.S. State Department. The ISIS military leader also said in a video that he was secretly trained in Russia.

The terror leader in question, Colonel Gulmurod Khalimov (shown), who is originally of Tajikistan, is the new “minister of war” for ISIS, according to Iraq News and other sources. He took over ISIS forces after the previous U.S. government-trained ISIS military chief, Tarkhan Batirashvili (a.k.a. Abu Omar al Shishani), was reportedly killed.

U.S. authorities said Khalimov, the 41-year-old new ISIS military chief, received “appropriate vetting” prior to his advanced military and terror training by the U.S. State Department, including during the terms of Hillary Clinton and John Kerry. The former Tajik official’s involvement with ISIS apears to have been first reported by CNN last year, before he became “minister of war” for the terror group.

Critics said the latest revelations highlight major problems with U.S. foreign policy, as well as serious questions about the Obama administration’s supposed “vetting” capabilities. Indeed, for generations, the U.S. government has been caught variously arming and training mass-murdering dictators, terrorist groups, and other unsavory forces — often with tragic results.

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The new ISIS military commander began his U.S. government training in 2003 and continued for more than a decade, according to the U.S. State Department. It was not immediately clear when exactly his training in Russia took place, or who exactly was behind it. Before joining ISIS, Khalimov served as special forces commander for the Interior Ministry of Tajikistan’s brutal regime.

Tajikistan is and has been since the early 1990s ruled by a brutal communist-minded dictatorship led by Emomali Rahmon, the ruthless former chairman of the “Supreme Soviet” of the ostensibly defunct Tajik Soviet Socialist Republic. Why the U.S. government was training the totalitarian regime’s “security” forces was not immediately clear, nor was the supposed source of authority for doing so, though the public justification was, ironically, “terrorism.”

In a statement, the State Department confirmed its role in training the new ISIS military chief. “From 2003-2014 Colonel Khalimov participated in five counter-terrorism training courses in the United States and in Tajikistan, through the Department of State’s Diplomatic Security/Anti-Terrorism Assistance program,” spokesperson Pooja Jhunjhunwala explained. “All appropriate Leahy vetting was undertaken in advance of this training.” The “Leahy” vetting refers to a law sponsored by Senator Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) that prohibits U.S. training for military units that violate human rights with impunity.

Despite some apparent disagreements with the Kremlin, at least as a show put on for Western authorities, the Tajik regime and its armed forces have long been very close to Moscow. Indeed, as of 2002, the authoritarian government has been a member of the Kremlin-led “Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO),” a formal military alliance that includes other communist dictatorships and “former” Soviet states. As stated previously, Khalimov boasted on a widely circulated ISIS propaganda video of having received military training in Russia, too.

According to the U.S. State Department, the U.S. federal program through which Khalimov was trained is intended to help foreign governments and regimes learn the latest “counter-terrorism” tactics. The ostensible purpose is for those foreign governments and dictatorships to be able to more effectively battle terror groups and militants such as al Qaeda and ISIS.

Khalimov reportedly received U.S. government training in “crisis response, tactical management of special events, tactical leadership training and related issues,” according to a State Department official cited by CNN. In a video posted online, Khalimov bragged about how effective the training he received from Washington, D.C., would be in butchering Americans.

“Listen, you American pigs: I’ve been to America three times. I saw how you train soldiers to kill Muslims,” the terror leader explains in Russian as part of the 10-minute video, which also includes footage of him using a sniper rifle to blow up a tomato from about 25 yards away. “You taught your soldiers how to surround and attack, in order to exterminate Islam and Muslims…. God willing, we will find your towns, we will come to your homes, and we will kill you.”

CNN interviewed former military officials warning that, with his U.S. training, Khalimov would be very familiar with counter-terrorism tactics, protection of VIPs, and more. For U.S. troops illegally deployed to the region by Obama without a declaration of war, American and Western diplomatic personnel, persecuted Middle Eastern Christians facing genocide, and others, that knowledge and skill provided by the U.S. government could have deadly consequences.

Following his promotion to ISIS military chief, as reported by numerous media outlets around the world, the U.S. State Department has now reportedly placed a $3 million bounty on Khalimov’s head. An international arrest warrant has also been issued by the regime in Tajikistan.

But the story gets even more outrageous. The U.S. government-trained Khalimov is actually replacing another ISIS military chief who, like his successor, was also trained by the U.S. government. As The New American reported last year, Abu Omar al Shishani, a fighter from Chechnya, was trained by U.S. Special Forces in the nation of Georgia before joining ISIS and eventually becoming a top military leader before being reportedly killed.

“We trained him well, and we had lots of help from America,” an unidentified former Georgian defense official told the McClatchy news agency, which first broke the explosive story. Separately, a former military comrade of the Shishani described him as a “perfect soldier” and a “star.”

Another member of the Obama administration’s supposed “anti-ISIS” coalition, the Wahhabi-Islamic dictatorship in Saudi Arabia, which like ISIS also beheads apostates, played a key role radicalizing the jihadist leader through a hard-core Islamist mosque it funded near his village. Top U.S. officials later confirmed that Islamic dictatorships in the gulf were funding and arming ISIS directly, too.

In other words, without the direct assistance of key “anti-ISIS” governments — including Washington, D.C. — the men reputed to be ISIS’s most fearsome and skilled military leaders would almost certainly never have arrived in Syria to wage war on infidels in the first place. Indeed, as explosive evidence and news reports continue to emerge, it is becoming increasingly difficult to tell where ISIS begins and the globalist establishment ends.

As The New American reported last year, for instance, an official U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency document from 2012 exposed the fact that the Obama administration and its allies were supporting the jihadist uprising in Syria — even though they admitted to knowing that it was led by al-Qaeda and the Muslim Brotherhood. One of the key goals was simple, if horrifying: the creation of a fundamentalist Islamic State in Eastern Syria, referred to as a “salafist principality” in the document but today known as ISIS. Democrat presidential nominee Hillary Clinton received the document in 2012, as GOP contender Donald Trump noted when he blasted Obama and Hillary as co-founders of ISIS.

Even before that smoking-gun document emerged in a lawsuit by Judicial Watch, Vice President Joe Biden, speaking at Harvard, had admitted that Obama’s “anti-ISIS” coalition funded and armed various terrorist groups in Syria that went on to become ISIS. Later, U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Martin Dempsey revealed in Senate testimony that Sunni Arab dictators in Obama’s “anti-ISIS” coalition were not just supporting ISIS — they were funding it.

More recently, former Pentagon intelligence chief Michael Flynn dropped a bombshell during a TV interview. While distancing himself from the illegal policies, among other concerns, Flynn blasted the White House’s “willful” support to Islamic terrorists in Syria, including many on the official U.S. government terror list.

Similar scheming and support by the Obama administration for designated terror groups occurred in Libya, too. Beyond supporting Islamic terrorists, Obama has been showering money and weapons on communist terror groups in Syria and Iraq that are also on the U.S. State Department’s listed of designated terrorist organizations. Practically every faction fighting in Syria has benefited from support illegally provided by the Obama administration, including Iraqi allies of Syrian dictator Bashar al Assad.

Of course, federal terror laws do not provide exceptions for government officials. It is time for administration officials involved in the lawlessness to be held accountable.

At the very least, the latest example of a U.S.-trained killer for a dictatorship becoming a U.S.-trained killer for a terror group illustrates the utter stupidity of what passes for “foreign policy” in Washington, D.C. At worst, it is still more evidence of the fact that there is much more to ISIS and other terror groups than the establishment media and the White House would like Americans to know. Either way, Congress must hold the executive branch accountable.

Alex Newman, a foreign correspondent for The New American, is normally based in Europe. Follow him on Twitter @ALEXNEWMAN_JOU. He can be reached at [email protected].

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