When Vladimir Putin told the world that ISIS gets a significant portion of its funding by selling oil to Turkey, he had just finished meeting with Jordan’s King Abdullah.
The King is no stranger to confronting the jihadists. Last year, Abdullah threatened to fly combat missions against Islamic State himself following the release of a horrific video that depicted a Jordanian pilot being burned alive in a cage.
Here is the picture the King sent to the militants:
In January, Jordan agreed to share intelligence with Russia in the fight against ISIS and when the French began flying sorties against the extremists following the Paris attacks, their staging ground was an undisclosed Jordanian location.
In short, Jordan has at times appeared to be more genuine in its commitment to fighting extremism than say, the Saudis, whose determination to spread Wahhabism adds fuel to the ideological fire that drives the groups the kingdom claims to be fighting. "The global war -- what I call the Third World War by other means -- is one that is a generational one," Abdullah told CNN in January. "Not only inside Islam, as we as Muslims gain the supremacy against the crazies, the outlaws, of our religion, but also reaching out to other religions that Islam is not what they have seen being perpetuated by 0.1% of our religion."
On Friday, we learn that Abdullah met with US lawmakers in secret during the week of January 11 and disclosed that British SAS forces as well as Jordanian soldiers had been on the ground fighting ISIS in Libya since at least the beginning of the year. "Jordanian slang is similar to Libyan slang," Abdullah said, explaining how his men have been able to assist the British in cleaning up the mess NATO made in Libya which, you're reminded, became a lawless wasteland in the wake of the uprising that toppled Muammar Gaddafi in 2011.
But the revelation that British SpecOps were fighting in Libya wasn't the most interesting thing to emerge from the meeting which purportedly included John McCain, Bob Corker, the chairman of the Senate foreign relations committee, and House Speaker Paul Ryan. Indeed, according to notes seen by The Guardian, Abdullah also implicated Erdogan in perpetuating Sunni extremism as well as purposefully sending terrorists to Europe. The King also suggested that Israel is allowing al-Nusra to operate on its borders because Netanyahu views the al-Qaeda affiliate as a counterweight to Hezbollah.
Below, find the bullet points from The Guardian presented with no further comment because frankly, nothing further need be said here.
The memo indicates that Abdullah also told US lawmakers:
- The Turkish president, Recep Tayyip Erdo?an, “believes in a radical Islamic solution to the problems in the region” and the “fact that terrorists are going to Europe is part of Turkish policy, and Turkey keeps getting a slap on the hand, but they get off the hook”.
- Intelligence agencies want to keep terrorist websites “open so they can use them to track extremists” and Google had told the Jordanian monarch “they have 500 people working on this”.
- Israel “looks the other way” at the al-Qaida affiliate Jabhat al-Nusra on its border with Syria because “they regard them as an opposition to Hezbollah”.