US let al-Qaeda ‘set up shop’ in Iraq: Iraq war veteran

Former American Army sniper and war veteran Garett Reppenhagen says US military invasion of Iraq “opened the door” for al-Qaeda militants to the country.

“We basically opened the door for Al-Qaeda to come to Iraq and set up shop,” Reppenhagen, a member of Iraq Veterans Against the War, told MSNBC.

He said that the US military invaded Iraq and kept American troops in the country for “ambiguous” reasons.

“When you go to war with ambiguous causes, like we did in Iraq, for me it was personally difficult, as that unraveled when we found out that there were no weapons of mass destruction, that there were no ties to 9/11,” he stated.

“We thought we were going to go home when (Iraqi dictator) Saddam Hussein was captured, you know, that did not happen, we did not find any weapons of mass destruction, that did not happen.”

Reppenhagen was deployed to Iraq in January, 2004 and was stationed at FOB Scunion near Baquaba, Iraq for one year. He completed some sniper missions in the Diyala region.

In 2003, former President George W. Bush ordered the invasion on Iraq under the pretext that the former Iraqi dictator possessed weapons of mass destruction.

In October 2004, however, a CIA report revealed that Saddam did not possess any weapons of mass destruction at the time of the invasion.

Al-Qaeda in Iraq is a shadowy group that was once allegedly led by Jordanian militant Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who was reportedly killed in June 2006.

According to US government and military officials, the group was then led by Ayyub al-Masri, who was killed along with Abu Omar al-Baghdadi, another leader of the group, in a joint Iraqi-US operation in Salahuddin province in April 2010.

The militants have been blamed for some of the deadliest terrorist attacks in Iraq since the US-led invasion.

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