Lederen for kurdisk etterretning sier at de advarte USA og Storbritannia for fem måneder siden om ISIS’ planer for Nord-Irak. Ingen av dem reagerte.

“I have completely lost hope in America after listening to President Barack Obama,” the head of Kurdish intelligence, Lahur Talabani, said.

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Rooz Bahjat, one of Mr Talabani’s senior lieutenants, said of the warnings of conflict: “We had this information then, and we passed it on to your government and the US government.

“We knew exactly what strategy they were going to use, we knew the military planners. It fell on deaf ears.”

Mr Bahjat estimated there were now 4,000 foreign fighters with Isis, of whom 400 to 450 were British, including one who was killed last week in fighting in Jalawla, near the Iranian border.

He warned that they and the Isis leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, were now a greater threat to western countries than that posed by Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda in 2001. “Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi is now something Bin Laden could only dream of being,” he said.

There is a widespread sense in Iraq that Britain and America were so disillusioned by their failure to establish order in the country that they lowered their presence in the region. Since David Cameron’s government came to power in 2010, it has been explicit in refocusing Britain’s diplomatic efforts in the Arab world on its traditional allies in the Gulf.

This led to a downgrading of intelligence resources in Iraq. “Both the Americans and the British had options to upgrade their presence on the ground many months before this happened but seem not to have acted on that,” said Michael Stephens, an analyst at the Royal United Services Institute, a think tank.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/iraq/10918853/Britain-and-US-neglected-alert-to-Iraq-jihadist-takeover.html