Russia unmasked ISIL as Western 'pawn' in Mideast: Analyst

The United States is determined to counter Russia’s successes in Syria through increased funding for the military campaign against Daesh (ISIL) -- which Moscow has unmasked as a “Western pawn” in the Middle East, says a political analyst in California.

“Russia has been the major player in combating ISIL and has successfully unmasked ISIL as a Western element in Syria and throughout the Middle East,” Rodney Martin, a former US congressional staffer, said in an interview on Wednesday.

US Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter announced on Tuesday that the Pentagon was planning to increase the military budget to combat the Daesh terrorist group in 2017.

"Because we are accelerating the campaign, the Department of Defense is backing that up and we need to back it up in our budget with a total of $7.5 billion in 2017, fifty percent more than in 2016,” he said.

Martin said that Carter’s is “basically one upmanship in a chess game to counter Russian successes in Syria.”

“All of this has to do with Russia. It has very little to do with ISIL. The West will never allow ISIL to be fully defeated, like it has never allowed the Taliban to be defeated,” he noted.

“The US has never allowed any of its extremist boogeyman that it has used as pawns in its policies in the Middle East to be defeated,” he stressed.

Martin said that the only nations truly battling Daesh terrorists are Syria, Iran and Russia, and this unified effort scares “the Jewish-Zionist interests” in the Pentagon and the State Department.

US sending 'pretty scary signal'

In addition to the increased budget for the purported war against Daesh, the United States plans to deploy more heavy weapons and military equipment in Europe to fortify NATO’s eastern flank.

Secretary Carter proposed allocating $3.4 billion, quadrupling last year's amount, to increase US military presence in Eastern Europe to counter “Russia’s aggression.”

The deployment will help US and NATO forces to maintain “a full armored combat brigade” in the region at all times, according to the New York Times.

It would add between 3,000 and 5,000 rotational soldiers to the US footprint in Europe.

The new deployment is “a pretty scary signal to be sending” at a time when tensions are escalating between Russia and Turkey, a NATO ally, over the conflict in Syria, said Don DeBar, analyst and radio host in New York.

“It has been an open secret that the US and NATO have been moving their arms and personnel up to Russia’s borders pretty steadily since [Bill] Clinton was president,” DeBar told Press TV.

Obama administration officials have said the deployment will send a signal to Russian President Vladimir Putin that the US is “deeply suspicious of his motives in the region.”

DeBar said it will be interesting to see how the Russians will react. “They have been surprising NATO with some of their equipment and their tactics and their ability to project power in Syria a lot lately.”

“But it is a really bad sign,” he said of the Pentagon’s plans. “The United States essentially is saying that we are upping, even further, our commitment of war-making material to Russia’s border.”

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