How the US helped to create ISIS

Daily Beast - In ISIS: Inside the Army of Terror, American journalist Michael Weiss and Syrian analyst Hassan Hassan explain how these violent extremists evolved from a nearly defeated Iraqi insurgent group into a jihadi army of international volunteers who behead Western hostages in slickly produced videos and have conquered territory equal to the size of Great Britain. Beginning with the early days of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the founder of ISIS’s first incarnation as “al Qaeda in Iraq,” Weiss and Hassan explain who the key players are—from their elusive leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi to the former Saddam Baathists in their ranks—where they come from, how the movement has attracted both local and global support, and where their financing comes from:

Al Qaeda in Iraq and the Islamic state of Iraq weren’t only using U.S.-run prisons as “jihadi universities,” according to Major General Doug Stone; they were actively trying to infiltrate those prisons to cultivate new recruits. In 2007, Stone assumed control over the entire detention and interrogation program in Iraq, with an aim to rehabilitation. Not only had the internationally publicized and condemned torture of detainees at Abu Ghraib prison left a permanent stain on the occupation and America’s credibility in the war, but theater detainment facilities had also been used as little more than social-networking furloughs for jihadists. Camp Bucca, based in the southern province of Basra, was especially notorious.

According to one U.S. military estimate, Bucca housed 1,350 hardened takfiri [a takfiri is a Muslim who accuses another Muslim of apostasy] terrorists amid a general population of 15,000, yet there was little to no oversight as to who was allowed to integrate with whom. Owing to the spike in military operations coinciding with the surge, the detainee number nearly doubled to 26,000 when Stone took command in 2007.

“Intimidation was weekly, killing was bimonthly,” Stone recalled in an interview. “It was a pretty nasty place that was out of control when I got there. They used cigarettes and matches to burn down their tents and mattresses, and when we tried to rebuild the tents, they’d just burn them down again. We thought they’d burn the whole goddamn prison down.”

Stone introduced a deradicalization program, featuring lectures by moderate Muslim imams who used the Quran and hadith to try and persuade extremists that theirs was a distorted interpretation of Islam. He started to compartmentalize inmates into what were known as Modular Detainee Housing Units. “Before that, we had guys in the MDHUs to segregate those who had been intimidated or beaten from those who did the intimidating and beating up.”