A video produced by the office of Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei claimed that the United States created ISIS, and is therefore responsible for last week’s terror attacks in Paris, The Times of Israel reported Wednesday. The video was published on a Facebook page run by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, Iran’s extraterritorial militia.
In stilted, apparently computer-generated English, an announcer explains over images from the Paris attacks and Middle Eastern conflict zones that American and Saudi “involvement in creating the ISIS [Islamic State] project is being exposed more than ever.”
“France is going through sad bloody nights,” the narrator says. “Bloodiest blood has been shed on the streets of Paris, reportedly by the ISIS terrorists. Many express condolences. Even the Saudi king and the US president. The same ones” who the video claims are behind IS.
Titled, “Who was behind the Paris attacks,” the four-minute video argues that the US founded IS in a bid to resist Shiite forces in Syria and elsewhere, and has funded, armed and trained the group indirectly through American allies in the region.
The video ties together disparate news stories, including American support for Islamist fighters during the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the 9/11 attacks, and the reported meeting of the terrorists who founded ISIS in an American-run prison in Iraq, to weave a narrative that the United States has fostered the creation and growth of ISIS. Since the United States was running the prison at the time ISIS was formed, the narrator of the video asserts that the meeting “could not be regarded as a mere coincidence.” “When the 9/11 tragedy occurred in the U.S., and while the main perpetrators of this event have not yet been introduced to the world, the U.S. government launched attacks Iraq and Afghanistan as a response, and started to spread insecurity and terrorism in the region for a decade,” the video claimed.
Lee Smith, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, reported earlier this week that Iranian leaders and media were blaming France for bringing the terror on itself. Hossein Salami, the deputy commander of the IRGC, reportedly said that the “French nation paid the price for France gov support to ISIS.” “ISIS’s rabid dog bites its master,” exclaimed the front page of the hardline newspaper Kayhan, which has close ties to Khamenei.
Smith observed that since France has been targeting ISIS with airstrikes, the claim that France aided ISIS only to have ISIS turn around and attack France is “nonsense.” Rather, Syria, and its sponsors Iran and Russia, are engaged in an information campaign with the following message: “Iran and allies are the good guys, and the Arabs and Turkey are the black hats. We warned you that the terror you support against us would blow back on you. Now join up with us or else it will happen again.”
An op-ed in the official Palestinian newspaper al-Hayat al-Jadida accused the Mossad, Israel’s intelligence agency, of carrying out the Paris attacks.
In September, another Khamenei-produced video threatened that Iran would defeat the United States in war.
[Photo: MEMRI-TV / YouTube ]