In the second episode of his six-part series on blowback, Mehdi Hasan shows how George W. Bush's decision to invade Iraq led to the birth of ISIS.
“Your brother created ISIS,” college student Ivy Ziedrich told a startled Jeb Bush after a town hall meeting in Reno, Nevada, in May 2015. The
then-Republican presidential hopeful tried to defend his elder sibling, former President George W. Bush, by blaming the rise of the Islamic State on Barack Obama, “because Americans pulled back” from Iraq in 2011.
It sounds a bit conspiratorial, right? Calling Dubya the creator of ISIS? The reality, however, is that Ziedrich’s accusation wasn’t far off the mark.
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.
In this week’s episode of my six-part series on blowback, I examine the three ways in which Bush’s misadventure in [...]
What is Iraq? Iraq, officially known as the Republic of Iraq is a country in Western Asia. It is bordered by Turkey to the north, Iran to the east, Kuwait to the southeast, Saudi Arabia to the south, Jordan to the southwest and Syria to the west. The capital, and largest city, is Baghdad. Iraq is home to diverse
ethnic groups including Arabs, Kurds, Assyrians, Turkmen, Shabakis, Yazidis, Armenians, Mandeans, Circassians and Kawliya. Around 95% of the country's 37 million citizens are Muslims, with Christianity, Yarsan, Yezidism and Mandeanism also present. The official languages of Iraq are Arabic and Kurdish.
What is ISIS? The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS, Daesh, and other names) is a Salafi jihadist terrorist organisation. It is a former unrecognised proto-state that follows a fundamentalist, Salafi doctrine of Sunni Islam. ISIS gained global prominence in early 2014 when it drove Iraqi government forces out
of key cities in its Western Iraq offensive, followed by its capture of Mosul and the Sinjar massacre.
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