A former US commander says the Daesh (ISIL) terrorist group would not have existed if the US had not been “too dumb” to invade Iraq and eliminate its dictator Saddam Hussein.
Michael Flynn, former commander of US Special Forces in Afghanistan and Iraq, said on Sunday that without the US war on Iraq, Dash wouldn’t be existed.
“We were too dumb,” Flynn told German newspaper Der Spiegel. “We didn’t understand who we had there at that moment.”
“It was huge error,” he said. “As brutal as Saddam Hussein was, it was a mistake to just eliminate him.”
Flynn, who served in the US Army for more than 30 years, said, “First we went to Afghanistan, where al-Qaeda was based, then we went to Iraq. Instead of asking ourselves why the phenomenon of terror occurred, we were looking for locations. This is a major lesson we must learn in order not to make the same mistakes again.”
The US invaded Iraq in March 2003 under the pretext of finding weapons of mass destruction. No such weapons, however, were ever found in Iraq.
The invasion plunged Iraq into chaos, resulting in years of deadly violence and the rise of terrorist groups like al-Qaeda, which was a precursor of Daesh.