Hezbollah leader endorses Trump’s claim that US created IS

BEIRUT — Donald Trump has found at least one person who agrees with his allegation that the US administration founded the Islamic State group.

The leader of Lebanon’s Hezbollah terror group quoted Trump at a rally in the country’s south Saturday, saying the presidential candidate’s statements were based on facts.

“This is an American presidential candidate who is saying this. What he says is based on facts and documents,” Hassan Nasrallah said.

Trump this week described President Barack Obama as the “founder” of IS. After at first defending the claim, Trump later said it was intended as sarcasm.

Nasrallah, who has sent thousands of his fighters to Syria to shore up President Bashar Assad’s forces, has long claimed that the US helped create and fuel the rise of Islamic extremists to destabilize the Middle East.

Women wave a Lebanese national flag and Lebanese Shiite movement Hezbollah flags in front of portraits of Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei (R) and Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, in the southern Lebanese town of Bint Jbeil on August 13, 2016, during a commemoration marking the tenth anniversary of the end of the war between Hezbollah and Israel. (AFP PHOTO / MAHMOUD ZAYYAT)

At the rally, Nasrallah also railed against Israel, whose “spirit, arrogance, will, trust and existence” were weakened by the Second Lebanon War fought between Hezbollah and the IDF in the summer of 2006. The 34-day war led the Israeli public to lose faith in its military, he declared.

US Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump is introduced to speak to the National Association of Home Builders in Miami Beach, Florida, on August 11, 2016. (Joe Raedle/Getty Images/AFP)

In the televised address, Nasrallah told thousands gathered to mark the 10th anniversary of the war that Israel’s defense establishment was shaken by what he claimed was a defeat to Hezbollah.

“It was an earthquake which shook the Israeli army,” Nasrallah said according to media outlets affiliated with the Shiite organization.

Nasrallah said the war created a “mutual deterrence between the Zionist entity and the resistance” and repeated his long-time threat to launch rockets towards Israel, claiming Hezbollah weapons could reach “any point” inside the country.

The Hezbollah leader also said the relative calm along the Israel-Lebanon border in recent years proved correct his boast from 2000 that the Jewish state was “more feeble than a spider’s web.”