Robert Fisk: Trump may have claimed to kill al-Baghdadi, but he has brought Isis back to life
Usually, the Lord
giveth and the Lord taketh away. But in the heavenly White House this weekend,
it worked the other way round. Lord Trump took the life of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi
and then gave life back to Isis by telling us all that he’d promised to send
its surviving murderers to the borders of the UK and other European nations.
How the Isis lads must
have chuckled at this extraordinary offer. How their comrades still gestating
within our frontiers must have taken heart at such a suggestion. We have raged
mightily and for years against the vicious cult of Isis. But we counted without
the Trump cult.
True, Trump’s
particular insanity is not as costly in innocent lives as that of Isis (unless,
of course, you happen to be Palestinian or Kurdish or one of Sisi’s 60,000
political prisoners). And given that the Americans and the Russians have both
claimed to have killed Baghdadi before, it might be wise to let the statutory
three days pass just in case the wretched man pops up on yet another video. We
killed Osama four times before we actually got him, you may remember.
But this time Trump
even thanked Russia, Syria and Iraq – Syria, perhaps, being the Assad regime?
If so, certainly something to be debated in the presidential palace in Damascus
whose army has been fighting Isis – among many others – for more years than the
US military.
But for Trump to say
that the support of European nations was a “tremendous disappointment” because
they wouldn’t take back their Isis members and adding that, “I actually said to
them, if you don’t take them, I’m going to drop them right on your border and
you can have fun capturing them again ... They could walk back – they can’t
walk to our country. We have lots of water in between our country and them”....