Report: Militia Leader on Scene of US Embassy Raid Was Obama WH Guest in 2011
As the world awaits developments in Tuesday’s attack on the United States embassy in Baghdad, it’s taken less than a day for the country’s latest crisis to reach back to Barack Obama.
While hundreds of Iranian-back militia members swarmed the sprawling embassy grounds, according to The Washington Post, several faces stood out as being particularly influential in the troubled country.
But one of the leaders, according to Breitbart, was more than just a familiar face in Baghdad power circles – he’d also reportedly been a guest of the Obama White House in 2011.
The man is Hadi al-Amiri, a former Iraqi transportation minister who now heads the Badr Organization, one of the most powerful of Iraq’s numerous armed militia groups, according to The Post.
And virtually nothing about his past indicates he’s anything but an enemy of the United States.
Allied with Iran — the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism — the Badr Organization was a key player battling American forces in the 2003 fighting that followed the United States invasion of Iraq. It also has members who’ve gone to Syria to fight alongside the dictator Bashar Assad, The Post reported.
According to Breitbart, the Badr Organization falls under the same umbrella group as the Iranian-backed militia Kataib Hezbollah, the terrorist group that was hit by an American airstrike on Sunday after organizing an attack on a U.S. base on Friday. Monday’s embassy assault was sparked by Sunday’s airstrike.
Yet this was a man who reportedly visited the White House in 2011, accompanying then-Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki.
It may be telling that, according to news reports at the time, the Obama White House did not disclose Amiri’s presence with Maliki – but the Iraqi list of the delegation included his name, Breitbart reported.
It wasn’t clear what role he was playing at the embassy grounds in Baghdad on Tuesday.
It also wasn’t clear what he role he might have played in the White House talks back in 2011, but his presence then – as an Iraqi official with well-known ties to the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps in the heart of American power – made some media outlets curious about what he was doing there at all.
On Dec. 15, 2011, the website RealClearPolitics published a transcript of a White House briefing exchange between Fox News correspondent Ed Henry and then-White House spokesman Jay Carney.
Carney was so clumsy in his attempt to play dumb when asked about Amiri’s presence that the transcript was headlined: “Carney Dodges Question About Iranian Terrorist Visiting the White House.”
No honest person who recalls the Obama administration can claim the White House of 2009 – 2017 ever dealt with Iran as though it was a country at war with the United States.
From Obama’s first days in office, when he ignored the so-called “Green Revolution” against Iran’s Islamofascist leadership, to his last days, when he engineered the Iran nuclear deal that President Donald Trump has had the good sense to withdraw from, the Obama White House was an image of craven appeasement when it came to challenges from the Islamic Republic.
Since taking office in 2017, Trump has faced numerous challenges of his own from Tehran, including the downing of a U.S. drone and provocations such as an attack on a large Saudi oil field.
Now, it appears Trump is facing his gravest challenge from Iran to his administration yet, in the form of an embassy attack that strongly echoes the 1979 U.S. Embassy takeover in Tehran that started what has become a four-decades-long state of hostility between the United States and Iran.
And it appears that one of the “influential” men in the crowd of that embassy attack – to use The Washington Post’s description – turns out to have been a visitor to the Obama White House who had links to Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps, the terrorist country’s premier military arm.
Less than a day into what could be an extended embassy crisis in Iraq, at least one curious – and quite possibly sinister — tie to the Obama administration has already shown up.
Given Iran’s history of meddling in the affairs of Iraq – and given the Obama administration’s disgraceful eight years of abasement before the Iranians (including planeloads of cash delivered like ransom, as reported by The Wall Street Journal), it’s not likely to be the last.
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