Is it true that the Islamic State was created by the United States?

It is widely believed that the US authorities are behind the emergence of one of the largest terrorist groups in recent years. We checked how justified this belief is.

On the evening of March 22, terrorists burst in to the Crocus City Hall concert hall located in Krasnogorsk near Moscow, where a concert of the Picnic group was to take place. The attackers opened fire on the site employees and spectators who came there, and then set the building on fire. Victims of shooting and fire steel 145 people, another 551 injured. Responsibility for the attack took on the Islamic State, on resources close to the group even appeared video taken by one of the terrorists during the attackand "Crocus". Nevertheless, Russian officials And pro-government media almost immediately after the terrorist attack, Ukraine began to be accused of organizing the incident.

March 25 in the newspaper "Komsomolskaya Pravda" was published column by the official representative of the Russian Foreign Ministry Maria Zakharova. The speaker of the Russian Foreign Ministry writes: "After"After creating al-Qaeda, the Americans, wittingly or unwittingly, had a hand in creating another monster - ISIS, which then began to uncontrollably commit terrible terrorist attacks around the world." According to Zakharova, Washington "drove himself into a trap with stories about the fact that the terrorist attack in Crocus City Hall was carried out by the terrorist organization ISIS, banned in Russia.” "an attempt to cover themselves, along with the Zelensky regime they created, with the bogeyman of the banned ISIS».

A week later, Secretary of the Russian Security Council Nikolai Patrushev expressed a similar opinion. "In conditions when the Ukrainian Armed Forces and NATO can no longer do anything on the battlefield, the enemy, out of powerlessness, is increasingly resorting to terrorist methods. […] Traces of the terrorist attack lead to the Ukrainian special services. But everyone is well aware that the Kyiv regime is not independent and is completely controlled by the United States. It must also be taken into account that ISIS, al-Qaeda and other terrorist organizations were created by Washington», — stated Patrushev at the annual meeting of the secretaries of the security councils of the member states of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO). He has a similar point of view voiced and in August 2022.

Accusations against the United States regarding its involvement in the creation "Islamic State» officials from other states also nominated. For example, in 2017 with this statement spoke Supreme Leader of Iran Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. A year earlier, Donald Trump, who was then running for the presidency of the United States, named "founder of ISIS» then head of state Barack Obama.

How was the Islamic State created?

To answer this question, we need to go back to 2003, when the United States and its allies carried out military invasion of Iraq to overthrow Saddam Hussein and search in the country of chemical and biological weapons. Despite the rapid military operation and the imminent fall of the dictatorial regime, Iraq plunged into real chaos and became one of the most dangerous countries in terms of the terrorist threat.

The fact is that under Hussein, representatives of the Iraqi Sunni minority dominated the country's leadership. Washington relied on the Shiites, who obviously longed for revenge after many years of humiliation. In an effort to renew the country's leadership as much as possible, the Americans disbanded the Iraqi army, promising to create a new one from scratch, and also contributed to the ban in the country of the Arab Socialist Renaissance Party (Baath), which had ruled for many years. As a result, thousands of officials, soldiers and officers (mostly Sunnis) turned out to be overboard and subsequently formed the backbone of various terrorist groups that proliferated throughout Iraq. George W. Bush's "de-Baathification program" destroyed all vestiges of Sunni power in Iraqi society and paved the way for a Sunni uprising against the American occupation and the new Shiite-led government. convinced American analyst Robert Kremer.

One of the groups that came to the fore at that time was Jamaat al-Tawhid wa al-Jihad (Society of Monotheism and Jihad). His created in 2002, Jordanian militant Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who had close ties with the then world-famous terrorist network Al-Qaeda, in particular, which took responsibility for terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 in the USA. Al-Zarqawi was personally acquainted with al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, with whom he established contact in 1999 while in Afghanistan. The ideology of “Jamaat at-Tawhid wa-l-Jihad” was distinguished by even greater cruelty and intransigence towards non-believers and followers of other movements in Islam, different from Sunnism, especially towards Shiites. Subsequently, despite family ties to al-Qaeda, the leaders of the future ISIS have repeatedly emphasized their autonomy from this terrorist network.

In 2006, American intelligence agencies liquidated al-Zarqawi in Iraq, and the group, which by that time was already called “Majlis Shura al-Mujahidin” (“Council Shura Mujahideen"), led by the Egyptian Abu Ayyub al-Masri. He announced the transformation of the organization into the “Islamic State in Iraq,” and its goal was to seize the entire territory of the country and establish Sharia (Islamic law) rules on it.

However, as a result of the anti-terrorist campaigns of the United States and Iraq in 2006-2007, the Islamic State of Iraq was significantly weakened. In 2010 there was liquidated leader of the al-Masri group, and command passed to Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, who immediately set a course for expanding the area of ​​activity of the militants under his control.

At least two circumstances contributed to this. Firstly, taking place in 2011 conclusion American troops from Iraq. Secondly, the eventsArab spring"in the early 2010s, which, among other things, led to a real power vacuum and civil war in neighboring Syria, where the militants of the Islamic State of Iraq quickly began to penetrate.

In April 2013, al-Baghdadi renamed group of the Islamic State of Iraq and Levant" By June 2014, it was at the zenith of its power, then ISIS changed its name to “Islamic State” (to emphasize that its range is not limited only to Iraq and Syria), the territories controlled by the organizations were declared a “caliphate”, the city of Mosul captured in northern Iraq was the capital of the “caliphate”, and al-Baghdadi was its “caliph”.

In subsequent years, thanks to the efforts of the international coalition led by the United States, as well as the actions of the Russian army, the Islamic State was defeated and divided into several autonomous wilayats (branches). Today there are at least seven of them: Syrian, Iraqi, Khorasanian, West African, Sahelian, Central African and East Asian.

The organization of the terrorist attack in Crocus is attributed to the branch of the Islamic State in Afghanistan, Vilayat Khorasan (aka IS-Khorasan). Although IS claimed responsibility for the attack, the group never emphasized that the attack was carried out by this particular wilayat.

So was the United States involved in the creation of ISIS?

To date, there is not a single documented evidence that Washington was directly involved in the creation of this organization. According to experts, we can only talk about mistakes in US foreign policy in the Middle East, which led to the rise of a number of terrorist groups, including ISIS.

How notes Lebanese-American expert Fawaz Jerges, the invasion of Iraqi territory by US-led coalition forces and their subsequent occupation of Iraq caused a turning point in Iraqi society, already fragmented and bled dry by many years of economic sanctions and war. Moreover, the destruction of Iraqi institutions by the United States, especially the dismantling of the Baath Party and the military, created a vacuum that led to a bitter power struggle.

Author of Black Flags: The Rise of ISIS laureate Pulitzer Prize winner Joby Warrick also indicatesthat the Islamic State arose as a result of the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, but does not indicate that the American authorities were directly involved in the creation of the group.

In addition to the chaos and anarchy that reigned in Iraq after the overthrow of the Hussein regime, the Americans indirectly contributed to the rise of ISIS by, for example, released the future leader of the al-Baghdadi group from the Bucca filtration camp, and in 2013 several hundred ISIS militants ran away from the US-controlled Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad. But even in these cases, there is no evidence that Washington acted intentionally to create or strengthen terrorist movements in the Middle East.

At the same time, in parallel with the mistakes in Iraq, the rise of ISIS was also facilitated by the American policy in Syria to overthrow Bashar al-Assad. How believes Iraqi expert Ayad Jamal al-Din, the weakening of the regime in Damascus, the transfer of weapons and other assistance to the opposition Syrian Free Army from the United States were useless, since all this only benefited ISIS in both Syria and Iraq.

Against this background, conspiracy theories began to spread, whose supporters are confident that the US mistakes that led first to the emergence and then to the strengthening of ISIS were not accidental.

Probably the most popular of these theories founded on non-existent sections from former US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's book "Hard Choices", which are known in some Arabic sources as "Password 360". In the clips, which circulated on social media in 2014, Clinton allegedly talks about how, as secretary of state, she oversaw Washington's plan to create ISIS to destroy the despotic rulers of the Middle East and replace them with more pliable Islamist leaders.

According to another conspiracy theory, ISIS was created as a result of Operation Hornet's Nest, which was carried out by the CIA, British intelligence MI6 and the Israeli Mossad. This information allegedly came from former CIA and US National Security Agency (NSA) employee Edward Snowden and was presented, in particular, by Iranian media and officials as being true. However, later this version was repeatedly refuted, since Snowden never had access to such documents.

Thus, we can definitely say that mistakes in US foreign policy in the Middle East contributed to the rise of ISIS and a number of other jihadist groups in the region, but this does not mean that the Americans directly participated in their creation. Documents offered as evidence indicating that Washington and its allies carried out certain special operations to establish and develop terrorist groups turned out to be fakes when checked.

Cover photo: Wilson Center screenshot

Half-truth

What do our verdicts mean?

Read on the topic:

1. The Guardian. ISIS: the inside story
2. The Atlantic. The True Origins of ISIS
3. Is it true that the Ukrainian Embassy recruited residents of Tajikistan into the International Legion through Facebook?
4. Is it true that the photo shows a young Osama bin Laden in Oxford?