Correlation is not necessarily causation — but is a very strong indicator of a causal connection. What is not in doubt is that the obsession with trying to depose Assad in Syria led to some very strange terrorist bedfellows for the US, France, the UK and Turkey. Of course, the Russian insight that Assad was the least of many evils led to their support of equally vicious groups opposed to the barbarian allies that the West supported.
Barack Obama was President from 2009 till 2017. The timeline of the ISIS virulence is entirely contemporary. Allowing ISIS to grow was certainly not intentional but it was a foreseeable consequence which unfolded due to indecision and default. The ISIS threat was not recognised very well during Obama’s first term. Since they were opposed to Assad, they were considered good guys. Their growth was encouraged and fuelled by the funnelling of funds and weapons, not only from the the US and the West but also from fundamentalist sources in Saudi Arabia. The tacit Russian support for Assad developed into major air strikes against ISIS in Syria in late 2015. That crucially turned the tide, both for Assad and against ISIS. Now the US followed the Russian lead. By the end of 2019, ISIS no longer controlled any geographical territory and was no longer a significant threat as a geopolitical force. Of course, it still remains, even today, as a fundamentalist group capable of sporadic terrorist actions.
The Islamic State – also known as ISIS, ISIL, or Daesh – emerged from the remnants of al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI), a local offshoot of al Qaeda founded by Abu Musab al Zarqawi in 2004. It faded into obscurity for several years after the surge of U.S. troops to Iraq in 2007. But it began to reemerge in 2011. Over the next few years, it took advantage of growing instability in Iraq and Syria to carry out attacks and bolster its ranks.
The group changed its name to the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) in 2013. ISIS launched an offensive on Mosul and Tikrit in June 2014. On June 29, ISIS leader Abu Bakr al Baghdadi announced the formation of a caliphate stretching from Aleppo in Syria to Diyala in Iraq, and renamed the group the Islamic State. ….. The Baghdadi era of ISIS ended on October 26, 2019, when the leader was killed in a U.S. raid in northern Syria.
The rise and spread of ISIS was to a large extent due to the West’s obsession with effecting regime change in Syria by any means and whatever cost. Even when the time came to deal with the ISIS monster that had been allowed to grow (around 2015-16), the Obama risk-aversion and indecisiveness continued until the US began to follow the lead of the Russian intervention.
Not just coincidence I think.
And now Biden, it would seem, is by cowardice and by default, allowing the space for a new monster Taliban to take over Afghanistan and then spread its tentacles. Kabul is surrounded. The evacuations from Kabul bring images of the evacuation of Saigon to mind. And Biden is washing his hands off the whole thing. “They’ve got to fight for themselves, fight for their nation”. And a new debacle beckons.
Not just coincidence.
It is not a coincidence either that the Taliban, like ISIS, are based on a hard-line, Sunni, ideological strain of virulence emanating from Saudi Arabia.
The k2p blog 