Read The Rise of Islamic State for Free Online Page A

Army, the loose umbrella group of rebel units, would be known to ISIS and Jabhat al-Nusra within minutes.
    Fear of ISIS grew internationally after the fall of Mosul, but only really became deep and pervasive when ISIS routed the Kurdish forces in Sinjar in early August and seemed poised to take the Kurdish capital Erbil. There was a sudden reordering of alliances and national priorities. As argued above, the foster-parents of ISIS and the other Sunni jihadi movements in Iraq and Syria had been Saudi Arabia, the Gulf monarchies, and Turkey. This doesn’t mean the jihadis did not have strong indigenous roots, but their rise was crucially supported by outside Sunni powers. The Saudi and Qatari aid was primarily financial, usually through private donations, which Richard Dearlove, the former head of MI6, says were central to the ISIS takeover of Sunni provinces in northern Iraq: “Such things do not happen spontaneously.” In a speech in London in July, he said the Saudi policytowards jihadis has two contradictory motives: fear of jihadis operating within Saudi Arabia, and a desire to use them against Shia powers abroad. He said the Saudis are “deeply attracted towards any militancy which can effectively challenge Shiadom.” It is unlikely the Sunni community as a whole in Iraq would have lined up behind ISIS without the support Saudi Arabia gave directly or indirectly to many Sunni movements. The same is true of Syria, where Prince Bandar bin Sultan, the former Saudi ambassador to Washington and head of Saudi intelligence from 2012 to February 2014, had done everything he could to back the jihadi opposition until his dismissal. Fearful of what they’ve helped create, the Saudis now veered in the other direction, arresting jihadi volunteers rather than turning a blind eye as they go to Syria and Iraq, but it may be too late. Saudi jihadis have little love for the House of Saud. On July 23, ISIS launched an attack on one of the last Syrian army strongholds in the northern province of Raqqa. It began with a suicide car-bomb attack; the vehicle was driven by a Saudi called Khatab al-Najdi who had put pictures on the car windows of three women held in Saudi prisons, one of whom was Hila al-Kasir, his niece.
    Turkey’s role has been different but no less significant than Saudi Arabia’s in aiding ISIS and other jihadigroups. Its most important action has been to keep open its 560-mile border with Syria. This gave ISIS, al-Nusra, and other opposition groups a safe rear base from which to bring in men and weapons. The border crossing points have been the most contested places during the rebels’ “civil war within the civil war.” Most foreign jihadis have crossed Turkey on their way to Syria and Iraq. Precise figures are difficult to come by, but Morocco’s interior ministry said recently that 1,122 Moroccan jihadis have entered Syria, including 900 who went in 2013, 200 of whom were killed. Iraqi security suspects that Turkish military intelligence may have been heavily involved in aiding ISIS when it was reconstituting itself in 2011. Reports from the Turkish border say ISIS is no longer welcome, but with weapons taken from the Iraqi army and the seizure of Syrian oil and gas fields, it no longer needs so much outside help. The Turkish and Syrian Kurds accused Turkey of still being secretly hand-in-glove with ISIS, but this is probably an exaggeration. It would be truer to say that Turkey could see the advantages of ISIS weakening Assad and the Syrian Kurds. As the bombing of Syria began in September the US would boast of having assembled a coalition of forty states, but this loose alliance was not only unwieldy but had so many different agendas as to paralyze united action.
    For America, Britain, and the Western powers, the rise of ISIS and the caliphate is the ultimate disaster. Whatever they intended by their invasion of Iraq in 2003 and their efforts to unseat Assad in Syria since 2011, it was not to see the creation