ISIS Blowback: Created by the US Invasion of Iraq - Mehdi Hasan

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.

Hosted by Mehdi Hasan (https://twitter.com/mehdirhasan), “ISIS: Created by the Invasion of Iraq” is the second episode of a six-part Blowback series for The Intercept. Mehdi Hasan will examine key examples of blowback in greater detail and explore how foreign policy decisions by the U.S. and its allies often produce blowback and so-called unintended consequences.

The Intercept is an investigative nonprofit news organization dedicated to producing fearless, adversarial journalism. We believe journalism should bring transparency and accountability to powerful governmental and corporate institutions.


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