The Islamic State (IS) is a jihadist organization that emerged from the conditions created by the American occupation of Iraq and subsequent regional conflicts. While not a principal architect of the Afghan operation, it has been a substantial beneficiary of the broader regional architecture that the operation served. The destruction of Iraqi secularism and the production of jihadist Islam served Israeli strategic interests by providing propaganda imagery for operations against Palestinian populations.
The Islamic State did not emerge from nowhere. It emerged from the conditions the American occupation of Iraq produced. The American invasion destroyed the Iraqi state, creating sectarian conditions that empowered the most extreme Sunni religious factions while marginalizing the Sunni political class that had run Iraq before the invasion. The American detention system, particularly Camp Bucca, brought together Iraqi former Baathist military officers and jihadist religious figures in conditions that allowed them to organize across previously separate networks. The American withdrawal of combat forces in 2011 left the Maliki government in Baghdad, whose sectarian Shia orientation continued to alienate Sunni populations and to push Sunni regions toward armed opposition. The Syrian civil war that began in 2011 created cross-border conditions that allowed Iraqi jihadist networks to expand their operations and to acquire the weapons, fighters, and territory that would become the Islamic State’s caliphate.
The senior leadership of the Islamic State was substantially composed of former Iraqi Baathist military officers who had been displaced by the American de-Baathification process. The organization’s military doctrine reflected Baathist military training combined with jihadist religious framing. Its administrative capacity, which surprised Western analysts when IS held substantial territory across 2014 to 2017, reflected the institutional knowledge of officers who had run Iraqi state institutions before the American invasion destroyed their careers. The Islamic State was, in this sense, the direct product of specific decisions made by named American officials in 2003 and the years following, including Paul Bremer’s de-Baathification order, the dissolution of the Iraqi army, and the sectarian power-sharing structure imposed by the occupation.
The Islamic State’s atrocities were extensively covered by Western media, particularly during the 2014 to 2017 period when the organization controlled substantial territory and conducted its most spectacular violence. The coverage of beheading videos, of Yazidi enslavement, of the destruction of Palmyra and other heritage sites, of mass executions of Iraqi soldiers, was extensive and was used to justify renewed American military operations in Iraq and Syria. However, the coverage substantially erased the question of how the Islamic State had come to exist, of what specific American decisions had produced the conditions for its emergence, and of the continuity between the Islamic State’s leadership and the personnel of the Iraqi state the American occupation had destroyed. The Islamic State was presented as essential Islamic barbarism, requiring American military operations to defeat, rather than as the predictable consequence of previous American military operations.
The Islamic State has been substantially defeated militarily as a territorial organization. However, the conditions that produced it have not been resolved. Iraq remains a fragmented state with continuing sectarian tensions, with substantial Iranian influence in the Shia south that is now itself a target of American operations, with continuing American military presence justified by counterterrorism objectives that the same American policy has continuously produced new targets for. The cycle continues. The next manifestation of jihadist organization in Iraq, when it occurs, will be presented as the unfortunate necessity of continued American operations rather than as the consequence of the operations themselves. The architecture has been running this cycle in Iraq for twenty-two years. The Iraqi population continues to bear the cost.