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May 30th, 2015 
David Schulberg 
Reuters/Stringer
Opinion pieces by Eisa Ali, RT UK’s correspondent in London
We return to Baghdad, and my social media feeds are buzzing over a released DIA report from 2012 that talks about US policy in Syria.
The report states that “Western countries, the Gulf states and Turkey are supporting” the efforts of opposition forces to take full control of Syria’s eastern areas adjacent to western Iraqi provinces.
The location and description of the nature of the Salafist group matches perfectly the so-called Islamic State [IS, formerly ISIS/ISIL]. It has served as a vindication for those who have long suspected the Gulf dictatorships, Turkey and the Western powers of being behind the rise of IS.
Seymour Hersh wrote in ‘The Redirection’ in 2007 about the change in US policy towards the backing of Sunni extremists against Iran and its allies, primarily Syria. The perception on the ground, among the vast majority of people I’ve spoken to anyway, is that the US is behind the rise of IS, along with Israel and Saudi Arabia.
This DIA document, and the silence in Western media that has met it, will only fuel that perception.
‘I feel like a stranger in my own country’
We have just spent several days travelling through different towns and cities in the South of Iraq.
One of our cameramen, who goes by the alias Zaid, is from Basra. He is a black Iraqi, one of hundreds of thousands who have lived in Iraq for centuries. Zaid traces his family’s presence in Iraq back more than 400 years, to a family of wealthy landowners who migrated from Africa.
As we drive, we pass through checkpoint after checkpoint and I start to notice a trend. The soldiers ask where Zaid and I are from. I apparently am too pale and Zaid apparently is too dark to be Iraqi.
Zaid answers ‘Basra’ in a thick Iraqi accent and teases the soldiers, who laugh and send us on our way.
Zaid is sitting on the driver’s side so the soldiers see him first and thus inquire about him first. It doesn’t happen at every checkpoint but it happens enough to catch my attention.
Zaid is a softly spoken, funny and hardworking young man and even though he laughs when it happens, something tells me it must be pretty tiresome. I try to broach the topic gently about how he feels constantly being tested.
“Honestly I sometimes feel like a stranger in my own country and sometimes I just want to get up and leave. I always have to prove who I am in my own country.”
The profiling that takes place at the checkpoints and elsewhere is probably motivated as much by ignorance as it is by hatred, he says.
In one sense it is understandable. There’s a war going on and the security forces have to check if people are who they say they are. Foreigners regularly blow themselves up to kill Shias in Iraq and apparently book themselves a place in paradise.
Source Article from http://friendsofsyria.co/2015/05/29/iraq-diary-day-8-does-the-dia-report-talk-about-isis-roots/
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