Isis: Al-Aligned Groups In Iraq

The History of Isis Isis was founded in 1999 by Jordanian radical Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. Following the invasion in Iraq in 2003, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and his group of militia, who will later be known as Isis, got plenty of notoriety in the early stages of the war in Iraq for the suicide attacks on Shia Islamic mosques, civilians, Italian soldiers fighting with the US, and Iraqi institutions. In October 2004, Al-Zarqawi's group officially pledged allegiance to Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda. They then changed their name to what’s known as al-Qaeda in Iraq. Attacks by the group on civilians, Iraqi government and security forces, foreign diplomats and soldiers, and American convoys continued with roughly the same intensity. A letter sent from Al-Qaeda
to al-Zarqawi in July 2005, outlined a four-stage plan to expand the Iraq War. The plan included taking out US forces from Iraq and getting them out of the country, establishing an Islamic authority as the only authority, spreading the conflict to Iraq's neighbors who do not believe in their religion, and going against Israel, which the letter says "was established only to challenge any new Islamic entity”. A US airstrike killed al-Zarqawi on June 7 2006. The Iraq War troop surge of 2007 supplied the United States military with more soldiers and weaponry for operations targeting the group, resulting in dozens of high-level Isis members being captured or killed
Between the months of July and October 2007, al-Qaeda in Iraq lost its secure military bases in Al Anbar province and the Baghdad area.
In 2008, a series of US and Iraqi government offensives managed to drive out the Isis aligned groups. Towards the end of 2009, the commander of US forces in Iraq, General Ray Odierno, stated that the ISIS "has transformed significantly in the last two years. What once was dominated by foreign individuals has now become more and more dominated by Iraqi citizens". In July 2012, al-Baghdadi, who was now the leader of Isis, released an audio tape online announcing that Isis was returning to former strongholds from which US troops and the Iraqi government had taken from them in 2007 and 2008. Al-Baghdadi then stated that he was going to start a new offensive called breaking the walls, to try to free member of Isis who were captured and were being held in Iraqi prisons. Violence in Iraq had gotten much worse in June 2012, mostly due to the Isis car bomb attacks, and by July 2013, the casualties ever month exceeded 1,000 which weren’t seen since April 2008. In March 2011, protests began in Syria against the Syrian government of Bashar al-Assad. In the following months, violence between demonstrators and security forces led to a gradual militarization of the conflict. In August, al-Baghdadi began sending Syrian and Iraqi ISIS members into Syria to establish an organization there. Led by a Syrian known as Abu Muhammad al-Julani, this group
began to recruit fighters and establish outposts all across Syria.