You have to hand it to Washington. When it comes to foreign policy blunders, the US certainly isn’t afraid to double and triple down.
As a
leaked diplomatic cable from 2006 definitively shows, the US has actively sought to stoke sectarian violence in Syria for at least the last ten years and part of that effort has involved coordinating with Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Turkey to support Sunni extremists.
That support led directly to what has to be considered the most absurd foreign policy outcome in the history of modern statecraft and we never tire of calling it out: Washington, Ankara, Riyadh, and Doha trained and equipped a group of fighters, told them to go and destabilize the Assad regime, and somewhere along the way, that group of fighters went rogue and metamorphosed into a insane band of black flag-waving, sword-wielding, white Nike-wearing, desert bandits hell bent on establishing a medieval caliphate.
Whether or not ISIS is still getting support now that they have gone completely native we’ll never know for sure, but what we do know is that despite the sheer ridiculousness of that “train and equip” exercise, the US and its regional allies went on to arm and fund still more Sunni extremists hoping against hope that they might manage to find the rebel Goldilocks zone and finally back a group that is all at once effective at fighting to overthrow the regime and not prone to going absolutely nuts in the process.
