The Syrian Army would still have been able to destroy the Jihadists if it wasn't for the US waging war against the Syrian Army, by the way of airstrikes and missile strikes.
I can definitively say that Iraq would not have collapsed into a failed state if Saddam had been deposed organically. Hell, if it wasn't for the occupation of Iraq by the US up to and including this very day its possible the Iraqi state would have been able to rebuild itself, one way or another.
That being said, a large amount of terrorist groups in the Middle East find the roots even earlier, in the US support of jihadis against the Soviets.
And wouldn't you know it! The founder of Jama'at al-Tawhid wal-Jihad, was financed and trained in order to go fight against the USSR in Afghanistan. Financed by who exactly? By Bin Laden, of course. Which himself got his money and material for who? Wouldn't you believe it, it's the old red white and blue again.
The mass defection of Syrian Army soldiers and officers to the Free Syrian Army guaranteed that the conflict was going to a bloody mess with arms falling into hands of all parties, long before the US started supplying arms. And no, you can't for certain say that Iraq would have fared better, as Iran would have fueled Shia sectarianism all the same in Iraq as it did post US invasion. Iran in fact was Sadam's greatest concern before his WMD bluff backfired.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American-led_intervention_in_t... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_attacks_...
Yes, and that has contributed to make the ISIS mess even worse. In that way the US is responisble for that.
>The mass defection of Syrian Army soldiers and officers to the Free Syrian Army guaranteed that the conflict was going to a bloody mess with arms falling into hands of all parties, long before the US started supplying arms.
The Free Syrian Army, which was also incidentally funded and armed by the US.
>And no, you can't for certain say that Iraq would have fared better, as Iran would have fueled Shia sectarianism all the same in Iraq as it did post US invasion. Iran in fact was Sadam's greatest concern before his WMD bluff backfired.
In which case either he would have been overthrown or the country would have fragmented. In both cases, the state or states would have been able to crush ISIS.
The Western interventions tend to piss everybody off and flood the country with cash, guns, and training opportunities, and it's easy to hit up wealthy princes in UAE and Saudi for cash for your militant group when it's a matter of driving the US out.
Just one big snowball landing at the doorstep of one of the planet's poorest countries.
ISIS (whatever the longer, more complicated history) was empowered and truly came into being in Syria during the uprising against Assad, initiated, ironically by whistleblower Chelsea Manning during the 'Arab Spring'.
ISIS was able to spread into Iraq because of the lack of US power, not because of the presence of it.
If the US hadn't pumped Syria full of weapons, ISIS would have been destroyed. If the US didn't invade Iraq, ISIS would have been destroyed too. Therefore, the rise of ISIS is a consequence of US intervention. There is nothing misleading or nuanced about it, it's just how it is. And people before the Iraq War and in the lead up to what happened in Syria were warning that exactly this would happen. And it did.
The 'availability of weapons' is not a primary cause of the rise of ISIS.
Take a moment to learn about the 'Arab Spring' [1], which started the Syrian civil war, which was the definitive geopolitical even that enabled the real rise what we now think of as ISIS.
First - ISIS has origins as more of a rag-tag group, of which there were very many in Syria for decades, but through a variety of opportunistic mergers, splits, allegiances forged and broken, ultimately became what it is. To say 'ISIS' was 'this or that' in 1999 wouldn't properly describe what it was.
The 'Arab Spring' was sparked in the Arab world ironically by the leaking of US Diplomatic Cables by Chelsea Maning, which by the way, largely showed US foreign core trying to do their jobs in a world full of corruption and stupidity. The cables revealed to the 'Arab Street' just how corrupt their leaders were - and protests were set off in Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Algeria, Syria - and other places.
Various groups vying for power (i.e. Muslim Brotherhood) in the ME would use the opportunity to make a play for power.
The US was 'involved' everywhere, but mostly not to a material extent initially, except for Egypt obviously.
Syrian rebels of various kinds, rose up and civil war broke out with Assad against a variety of antagonists.
A weakened regime lost control over wide swaths of mostly empty territory in E. Syria near Iraq to what we now call ISIS.
None of this was materially caused by US occupation of Iraq.
Later, Barack Obama's will to 'get the troops out of the ME' inclined him to pull troops from Iraq. (FYI in retrospect even if we consider that the war in Iraq was a huge mistake itself, it was still probably a mistake to withdraw too early. It has echoes of Saigon).
Literally the day the US troops were gone, Shia Iraqi PM al-Maliki purged government of Sunni entities, pushed the Shia dominated federal Army into Sunni territory, setting of a soft-grade civil war.
The Sunni tribes, more fearful of Shia-laden government forces than they were of ISIS ... 'allowed' ISIS to come in from Syria and join up with sympathetic fighters.
As a side note: Iraqi Army units, surrounded by ISIS fighters in Sunni territory were told by Sunni tribes, that if they disarmed themselves, that the tribes would provide them safe passage back to Souther Iraq, essentially, the tribes would protect them from ISIS. But of course, they were double crossed. ISIS grabbed large Iraqi Army units, completely unarmed, and proceeded to execute them by the truckload in one of the worst massacres in modern history: literally rivers of blood forming from the lines of Shia Iraqi Soldiers beheaded one-by-one by ISIS.
And then of course ISIS had the run of Sunni Iraq until a very crude coalition of Iranian, US, Iraqi and Kurdish forces pushed them out, town by town.
Were the US to have left just a few battalions, literally 'behind the wire' in some empty plot outside of Bagdad, the US would have been able to maintain political leverage over al-Malaki in order to prevent him from his aggressive purge resulting in civil war, and the entry of ISIS.
It's important to remember that ISIS is 'the fault of ISIS' and their supporters. They're one of the worst stains of people on the historical record. Second, if there are more indirect issues we want to look at, it's the brutally uncivil, corrupt, selfish, power-hungry and irrational civil structures around the Middle East.
> If the US didn't invade Iraq, ISIS would have been destroyed too.
Yeah, and Saddam would still be in power, torturing and genociding. Wasn't exactly nice before either.
You can't just do that and then go 'well, it's their own democracy now, they're good.'
We're still seeing the repercussions of slavery playing out on the streets of the United States in the form of protests to this very day.
Iraq itself asked the US to leave, and they didn't. I believe the technical term for that is "occupation".
And by the way, if the US was so interested in stopping torturous dictators they'd go after the Saudis. And we don't, because the only thing the State Department cares about is US imperial interests. Notice in all these cases, the life of the common man got worse, but magically the US achieved all of its interests. How interesting.
Anyways, a lazy list of links:
https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a48032/private-armies-...
https://www.militarytimes.com/news/your-navy/2019/03/14/who-...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_private_military_contr...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_private_contractor_dea...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_military_company
https://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2018/04/pentagon-...