'All NATO Is Good for Is Increasing the Threat to Europeans From Jihadists'

WASHINGTON (Sputnik) — NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg’s statement that the alliance would join the war on Daesh terrorist group (banned in Russia) would increase the terror threat to Europe, Jatras said.

On Thursday, Stoltenberg said in a briefing said the alliance would provide support like air-to-air refueling and intelligence sharing, but did not intend to deploy ground forces.

"All NATO is good for is increasing the threat to Europeans from jihadists," Jatras said Friday.

The role of NATO and prominent alliance members the United Kingdom (UK) and France in the destabilization of Syria and Libya since 2011 had led directly to the terror attack in Manchester that took at least 22 lives this week, Jatras stated.

"Consider: Would Manchester have happened if NATO had not turned Libya into a playground for Daesh and al-Qaeda?" he asked.

Salmen Abedi, who has been identified as the suicide bomber in the attack at the packed Manchester Arena concert hall on Tuesday night had returned to Libya and apparently been exposed to extremist elements there and in Syria, Jatras noted.

"Salman Abedi, no ‘lone wolf’ he, would not have had people available to help him make his bomb per his recent visits to Libya… if not for NATO and its irresponsible leaders like Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Nicolas Sarkozy, and David Cameron," he said.

An estimated 10,000 Libyans, most of them refugees from the upheavals in their country since the toppling of longtime ruler Muammar Qadhafi in 2011 live in the Manchester area.

"This is not just blowback of the general sense that causing ‘instability’ and ‘radicalization’ comes back to hit its sponsors, like the migrant crisis, or even the birth of al-Qaeda as a consequence of the 1980s jihad against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. In this case it’s more direct," Jatras said.

Then-UK Prime Minister Daivd Cameron had ordered his air force to provide protection and support for the rebel forces who toppled Gadhafi. Therefore he was directly responsible for the collapse of Libya and the flood of refugees he welcomed into his own country afterwards, Jatras recalled.

"Since this happened in the UK, Cameron should be held directly responsible for the carnage in Manchester," he said.

The Manchester attack also confirmed that the real threat to Europe came not from Russia but from Islamist terror groups, Jatras noted.

President Donald Trump’s call at the NATO summit in Brussels for the alliance’s European members to spend more on "defense" was no more than a rhetorical point, Jatras observed.

"It won’t have any impact in the real world. The Europeans will not pony up more for NATO," he said.

NATO, Jatras concluded, is an "absurd, outdated, and counterproductive structure" and should have been disbanded in 1991.

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