Blowback: How ISIS Was Created by the U.S. Invasion of Iraq

SHORT VIDEO CLIPS, 13 May 2019

Mehdi Hasan – The Intercept

Had it not been for Bush’s catastrophic decision to invade and occupy Iraq in 2003, in defiance of international law, the world’s most feared terrorist group would not exist today. ISIS is blowback. Within weeks after the fall of Saddam Hussein, the U.S. morphed from heroic liberators into brutal occupiers. In Fallujah, which would later become an ISIS stronghold, U.S. troops opened fire on a crowd of peaceful protesters in April 2003, killing and wounding dozens of Iraqis. The U.S. also disbanded the Iraqi army later that same year, thrusting half a million well-trained and heavily-armed Iraqi troops into unemployment. Many of those troops later became top ISIS commanders. In southern Iraq, the U.S. military established Camp Bucca, where they detained tens of thousands of Iraqis, many of them noncombatants. Together, the shootings, the torture, the general chaos, all helped drive thousands of Iraqis from the minority Sunni community into the arms of radical groups led by brutal gangsters, such as Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. Zarqawi’s Al Qaeda in Iraq, formed in 2004 to fight U.S. troops and their local allies, was a precursor organization to … ISIS.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4yPTAxI8wTY

This article originally appeared on Transcend Media Service (TMS) on 13 May 2019.

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