Former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates shared what he believes are the two main reasons why Islamic State exists in an interview with Business Insider Thursday.
Gates, who served in both President George W. Bush and President Barack Obama administrations, said it is the Syrian civil war and former Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s anti-Sunni policies that gave rise to ISIS.
Gates referred to ISIS as an “outgrowth of the conflict inside Syria.” Undoubtedly, the turbulence inside the country certainly gave Islamic State a vacuum from which it could entrench itself. ISIS’ rise in 2014 saw the terrorist organization conquering a large swathe of territory in eastern and central Syria. Syrian President Bashar Assad and the various Syrian rebel groups had been fighting for about three years by the time ISIS came around, and neither were prepared to counter a secondary threat. ISIS took advantage of the opportunity, and set up its capital in the Syrian city of Raqqa, which it holds to this day.
The former Pentagon chief’s second factor, al-Maliki’s “wrongheaded” anti-Sunni policies, is more nuanced than the Syrian factor, but it is just as important to understanding ISIS.
“His policies were so negative toward the Sunnis in Iraq, that I think many Sunnis believed that ISIS would be better for them than than the government in Baghdad,” said Gates to BI’s Graham Flanagan and Pamela Engel. “Maliki gave the Sunnis in Iraq no reason to resist ISIS.”
According to Gates, Obama’s decision to remove U.S. forces certainly did not help the situation. He explained that the U.S.-trained leaders of the Iraqi Security Forces (ISF) were replaced by incompetent, corrupt “political hacks” that no Iraqi soldier would be willing to fight for.
Gates went on to note that the absence of senior U.S. leadership in Iraq “probably had some impact” on al-Maliki’s decision to follow the foolhardy policies.
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