ISIS Created by US Invasion of Iraq

The New Observer
December 11, 2015

The international terrorist organization ISIS is the direct result of the American-led George W. Bush-era invasion of Iraq, an Amnesty International report has concluded.

The dramatic evidence for this assertion is contained in one section of the Amnesty International report titled Taking Stock: The Arming of Islamic State, December 2015, under the heading “The rise of IS in Iraq.”

According to the report, the origin of ISIS can be traced directly to the fall of Saddam Hussein in 2003.

That invasion was “justified” by the George W. Bush administration on the grounds that Hussein had links with the 9-11 World Trade Center attackers.

The Al-Qaida-Saddam link was one of the justifications the Bush administration used to invade Iraq. In a speech in October 2002, Bush said, “We’ve learned that Iraq has trained Al-Qaida members in bomb-making and poisons and gases.”

In September 2002, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld said there was “bulletproof” evidence of an Iraq-al-Qaeda connection. In his January 2003 State of the Union address, President Bush said, “Saddam Hussein aids and protects terrorists, including members of al-Qaeda.”

In reality, Hussein was an open opponent of Al-Qaeda, and had completely suppressed that organization in Iraq.

In February 2003, on the eve of the Iraq war, Bin Laden released an audiotape in which he said, “Needless to say, this crusade war is primarily targeted against the people of Islam. Regardless of the removal or the survival of the socialist [Ba’th] party or Saddam, Muslims in general and the Iraqis in particular must brace themselves for jihad.”

Bin Laden went on to say that “socialists are infidels,” directly accusing Saddam of being an apostate from Islam, the gravest charge Bin Laden could make against a fellow Muslim (“From the Shadows,” Vanity Fair, December 31, 2005).

Furthermore, it was claimed Iraq had “weapons of mass destruction” and threatened the world with “atom bombs” and “chemical weapons.”

All of these claims where shown to be shameless lies, but both Bush and Britain’s Tony Blair, under the direction of the international Jewish lobby, led their countries into an invasion of Iraq.

This conflict toppled Saddam—but directly unleashed the forces which led to the creation of ISIS, as the Amnesty International report revealed.

According to that report, “following the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 and the subsequent fall of President Saddam Hussein, a number of insurgent armed groups composed largely of Sunni men emerged in opposition to the occupying forces and the Shi’a-dominated Iraqi government.”

These organizations included, the report continued, the Al-Tawhid wa al-Jihad group, set up by Jordanian national Abu Musaab al-Zarqawi in 2002, which “became a major force in the insurgency after declaring allegiance to al-Qa’ida and establishing al-Qa’ida in Iraq.”

US support for the more “moderate” Sunni al-Sahwa (Awakening) Councils progressively weakened al-Qa’ida in Iraq, and after Abu Mussab al-Zarqawi was killed in a US air strike in 2006, al-Qa’ida in Iraq renamed itself Islamic State in Iraq (ISI).

From there, the progression to ISIS was swift, said Amnesty’s report:

When an uprising began in Syria in 2011, ISI, now headed by Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, joined the rebellion against the President of Syria, Bashar al-Assad.

Baghdadi’s attempts to set up a single organization operating across Iraq and Syria were rejected by Jabhat al-Nusra (al-Nusra Front-ANF) and al-Qa’ida, but the resulting Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) consolidated itself and began recruiting fighters.

By March 2013, the city of al-Raqqa had fallen to the now US-backed “Syrian rebels” led by ANF4 and Ahrar al-Sham. However, in subsequent weeks, ISIL ousted these groups and imposed its own control over the city and most of the governorate.

In Iraq, the report continued, ISIL “took advantage of the government forces’ violent dispersal in December 2013 of largely peaceful, year-long protests in Ramadi and Fallujah, Anbar province, joining disenchanted Sunni tribesmen and former Baathists in the fight against government forces.”

This then led to ISIL taking control of the cities of Fallujah and parts of Ramadi in January 2014.

The Iraqi army’s collapse in the face of this offensive led to the “rapid military advance of the group which was now calling itself IS, and whose fighters seized control of Mosul, Iraq’s second-largest city, in June 2014,” Amnesty said.

The seizure of Mosul was followed by the capture of much of Anbar, Diyala, Kirkuk, Nineveh, and Salah al-Din provinces.

By late 2015, IS had also significantly advanced operations in Syria, gaining effective control over large parts of al-Raqqa, eastern Aleppo, Deyr al-Zur, Hasakeh, Homs and Hama governorates, and half of Yarmouk, a neighborhood less than six miles from the capital Damascus.

From this base, ISIS has now spread its tentacles to Europe, carrying out terrorist attacks in Paris and elsewhere, and inspiring its followers as far away as California to carry out “lone wolf” attacks.

As the Amnesty International summary clearly shows, the blame for the creation of this monstrous terrorist organization can be squarely laid at the feet of George W. Bush, Tony Blair, and the Jewish neocon lobby, all of whom jointly engineered the illegal and immoral invasion of Iraq.