The U.S. invasion of Iraq created the material and psychological conditions on the ground that ultimately led to the Islamic State group, according to the Chilcot intelligence report released Wednesday.
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“Many of the problems we see in Iraq today stem from that disastrous decision to dismantle the Iraqi army and embark on a program of de-Baathification,” said British Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond. “That was the big mistake of post-conflict planning. If we had gone a different way afterwards we might have been able to see a different outcome.”
According to The Guardian, the Joint Intelligence Committee report says security services were increasingly concerned that the occupation was promoting extremism, and early as three years into the war, British intelligence officials were concerned about the rise of Sunni jihadist resistance to the regime of Shia President Nouri Al-Maliki, which was Western-backed.
By 2007, the report said, al-Qaida (called AQ-I in the documents) had “no shortage of suicide bombers. AQ-I is seeking high-profile attacks. We judge AQ-I will try to expand its sectarian campaign wherever it can: suicide bombings in Kirkuk have risen sharply since October when AQ-I declared the establishment of the notional ‘Islamic State of Iraq’.”
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Many leading al-Qaida figures were members of the banned Arab Socialist Ba'ath Party, and of the disbanded Iraqi Army, and went on to form the IS Group.
This report directly refutes repeated assertions of former British Prime Minister Tony Blair that the group began during the Syrian civil war, not in Iraq.
A strong nationalist strain defined the occupation of both Iraq and Afghanistan, drawing comparisons to the futility of U.S. involvement in Vietnam. A U.K. foreign office memo from 2003 warned “all the evidence from the region suggests that coalition forces will not be seen as liberators for long, if at all. Our motives are regarded with huge suspicion.”