On May 13, Ivy Ziedrich, a 19-year-old college student at the University of Nevada, gained national attention when she boldly declared to Republican presidential candidate Jeb Bush at a town hall meeting that “Your brother created ISIS.” Ziedrich asserted that America’s hasty retreat from Iraq under President Obama was not a contributing factor to the growing power of the Islamic State, but rather that the blame lay with the decision of the administration of George W. Bush to disband the Iraqi Army. Ziedrich was immediately hailed as a hero and shot into the national spotlight, conducting interviews on MSNBC and being talked about everywhere from the New York Times to the Washington Post.
There’s just one problem with the Ziedrich story: she’s wrong. At least in part.
{mosads}The Islamic State’s rise is a vastly more complicated affair than Ziedrich put it. (In all fairness, it is also more complicated than what was stipulated by Jeb Bush). Various factors, including failed states, civil wars, sectarian tensions, outside funding, and mistakes by the United States combined to enable the rise of the brutal terrorist organization that we witness today. The creators of the IS simply happened to be in the right time and at the right place to take advantage of them — in other words, a perfect storm.
Let’s start with the most cited factor in the IS’ rise: the Iraq War of 2003. It is true that the Iraq War contributed to the rise of the Islamic State. The removal of Saddam Hussein from power created a vacuum that led to the rise of sectarianism, and, as Ziedrich stated, the disbanding of the Iraqi military led to a plethora of unemployed former soldiers with access to weaponry, allowing them to join the insurgency — evidenced by the fact that the IS has utilized a network of former members of Saddam Hussein’s Baath Party to help militarize and run the organization, according to Richard Barrett of the Soufan Group.
Yet the greater blame rests not on President Bush’s invasion of Iraq, but with former Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. Maliki, the leader of a Shiite political party, promised to run a more inclusive government—to bring more Sunnis into the ministries, to bring more Sunnis from the Sons of Iraq militia into the national army, to settle property disputes in Kirkuk, and to negotiate a formula on sharing oil revenue with the Sunni population. However, Maliki did not follow through on his pledges and instead pursued policies designed to strengthen Shiites and marginalize Sunnis, including packing the Iraqi military and police with Shiite loyalists while sidelining many effective commanders who led Iraqi troops in the battlefield gains of 2007-2010, a period during which al Qaeda in Iraq, the predecessor of the Islamic State, was significantly trounced. As a result, the Sunnis, finding themselves excluded from the political process, took up arms as the route to power and as a means of resisting oppression by the Shia government. Indeed, al-Maliki was backed by the Bush administration to become the new Iraqi premier, yet he was chosen under the assumption that he would make good on his promises. The Bush administration was not aware of al-Maliki’s future failure, even if it should have been.
As Jeb Bush stated, Obama’s early exit from Iraq further contributed to the rise of the Islamic State. His complete withdrawal from Iraq compounded the mistake of the Bush administration in destabilizing Iraq, while undoing Bush’s self-corrective measure, the surge. Interested in satisfying his political base by withdrawing from the “war of choice,” Obama failed to keep adequate long-term residual forces on the ground, leaving much of Iraq defenseless. Obama also made a significant mistake by not arming more moderate Syrian opposition groups early on in the Syrian civil war. His hesitation allowed the fighting to drag on, and as more moderate Syrian rebel groups were beaten down by the Syrian security forces, the IS increasingly took control of the rebellion, in part on the strength of weapons and funding from its operations in Iraq and from jihadist supporters in the Arab world.
Which leads to the next factor in the rise of the Islamic State — the Syrian civil war and the aftermath of the Arab Spring. Refusing to surrender to political pressure and protests against his regime, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad practically declared war on Syria’s Sunni population, creating the sense that the Syrian people had nothing to lose and that they needed a protector, a mantle that was taken on by the Islamic State. The fighting against Assad, and the lawless vacuum it created in Syria, allowed the Islamic State to gain control of large swaths of territory. Neighboring Iraq also devolved into a lawless state lacking the means to defend its borders, and Islamic State insurgents were able to conquer land there as well — Iraqi land constituting even greater importance, as it contains the oil fields the IS uses to fund itself. Moreover, Assad is an Alawite, an offshoot of Shia Islam, thus re-invoking the sense of the persecution of Sunnis by “Shia” leaders, similar to the situation that occurred in Iraq. Sunni outrage at both leaders intensified IS recruitment in both the Middle East and throughout the other regions of the world, lending the organization the substantial number of fighters it currently boasts.
Additionally, the fall of Muammar Gaddafi’s regime in Libya as a result of the Arab Spring led to the shipment of Gaddafi’s vast weapons stockpiles across the porous borders of the Middle East, some of it finding its way to the rebel fighting in Syria and Iraq.
Lastly, the Islamic State was noticeably aided in its genesis by outside funding from countries such as Turkey, Qatar, and Kuwait. According to Andrew Tabler, a senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, a key component of the IS’ early support came from wealthy individuals in the Gulf States of Kuwait and Qatar and Saudi Arabia, mainly to support the toppling of the Assad Regime, an Iranian ally, and have the IS act as an Iranian buffer. The support came either with the tacit nod of approval from those regimes or as a result of poor money laundering protections in those states. Turkey let the Islamic State grow early on to impede the Kurds; Turkey only agreed to allow the United States to use air bases there to launch strikes against Islamic State forces in Syria on July 23 of the present year.
Evidently, the rise of the Islamic State was enabled through a wide variety of significant factors. It is advisory to remember when discussing such an important policy issue not to shout catchy partisan slogans, but to scrutinize all aspects of the situation. Only once we are able to identify the buildup to the Islamic State can we understand how to rectify past mistakes and put forth solutions to assist in the depletion of the Islamic State’s rise and capabilities.
Cohen is the former president of the Brandeis International Journal and current president of Brandeis Conservatives.