Donald Trump has repeatedly said U.S. President Barack Obama is the founder of the so-called Islamic State, an assertion that has widely been debunked and criticized by the media and his political opponents.
“ISIS is honouring President Obama. He’s the founder of ISIS. He founded ISIS. I would say the co-founder would be crooked Hillary Clinton,” the Republican presidential nominee told supporters at a rally in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., on Wednesday. He later repeated the attack-line at rallies in three U.S. and during an interview Thursday with CNBC.
And while Trump backtracked Friday, insisting he was being sarcastic.
So who did found the so-called Islamic State? The actual founder was Jordanian terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, according to the Mapping Militants project at Stanford University.
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The group has its origins in the early 2000s when it was identified as Jama’at al-Tawhid wa’l Jihad. The terror group later joined al-Qaida to form a branch of the terrorist group in Iraq. Al-Zarqawi, the head of al-Qaida in Iraq, was killed in a U.S. airstrike in 2006.
In 2013, the militant group split from al-Qaida to become the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, also known as the Islamic State, ISIS or Daesh.
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Joby Warrick, author of the book, Black Flags: The Rise of ISIS, which won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction, has called Trump’s assertions “ludicrous.”
“It’s like saying that Ronald Reagan is the founder of al-Qaida because the arms he sent to the mujahedeen in Afghanistan after the Soviet invasion led to the creation of al-Qaida,” Warrick told the Washington Post, where he also works as a reporter.
“ISIS arose in response to the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003. Zarqawi moved into Iraq in advance of the invasion in anticipation of leading a Sunni insurgency.”
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Warrick also said that while some have blamed the Obama administration for ISIS’s proliferation, it’s not that simple.
“The conflict in Syria created a perfect vacuum in terms of governance, and so the civil war became an opportunity for the restoration of the organization,” he told the Post. “You could fault the White House for not intervening into the Syrian conflict. But there are all kinds of questions about whether any actions taken by the United States would make a difference.”
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