NEW YORK, September 30 (RIA Novosti) - US officials fabricated the al-Qaeda-linked Khorasan terrorist group in order to justify airstrikes on Islamic State (IS) militants in Syria to the public and the international community, Middle East analyst Murtaza Hussain told RIA Novosti on Tuesday.
"US-led attacks on Syria presented the Obama administration with two problems. The first was the difficulty of sustaining public support for a new years-long war against the IS, which clearly posed no imminent threat to the US. A second was the lack of legal justification for launching a new bombing campaign with no viable claim of self-defense or UN approval," Hussain argued.
He suggested that Washington actually fabricated a new terror threat, which has become known as the Khorasan.
"After spending weeks depicting IS as an unprecedented threat, administration officials began spoon-feeding their favorite media organizations tales of a secret group that was even scarier than IS, one that posed a direct and immediate threat to the US Homeland. Seemingly out of nowhere, a new terror group was created in media lore," the analyst said.
The United States have extended the anti-IS airstrikes it had launched in Iraq to the Syrian territory. The attacks are carried out within the framework of a strategy, outlined by US President Barack Obama. His plan involves the creation of a broad counter-terrorism coalition, with France and several Arab countries already taking part in airstrikes targeting insurgents in Syria.
Last week, the United States said it carried out airstrikes against the so-called Khorasan group, formed by al-Qaeda veterans, which was allegedly plotting terrorist attacks in the United States and Europe.
