Obviously ISIS has been in the news a lot this past week in the aftermath of the Paris terror attacks, but one of the more interesting stories that is coming to light is the fact that the US may very well be to blame for their existence.

Claims are emerging that the formation of ISIS was all down to a US prison in Iraq named Camp Bucca, where many Iraqis were radicalised by extreme Muslims during their time incarcerated – including the current leader of the group Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. About 100,000 prisoners passed through its walls during 2004 – 2011 and many of them left converted to the cause of the Islamic State.

Much like prisons are nicknamed ‘universities of crime’, Camp Bucca was nicknamed ‘a university of Jihadi’. A prison commander named Major General Douglas Stone explains:

If you were looking to build an army, prison is the perfect place to do it.

We gave them health care, dental, fed them, and most importantly, we kept them from being killed in combat.

Featured Image VIA 

Image VIA

This theory is elaborated on by Andrew Thompson, a veteran of the US war in Iraq:

The radicalization of the prison population was evident to anyone who paid attention.

At Camp Bucca, the extremists forced moderate detainees to listen to clerics who advocated jihad.

The majority of prisoners were illiterate, so they were particularly susceptible.

Prisoners frequently refused medical attention and vocational training for fear of breaking religious rules.

The prisons became virtual terrorist universities: The hardened radicals were the professors, the other detainees were the students, and the prison authorities played the role of absent custodian.

Abu Ahmed – a senior figure in ISIS – confirmed this by saying the following;

We had so much time to sit and plan.

We could never have all got together like this in Baghdad, or anywhere else.

It would have been impossibly dangerous. Here, we were not only safe, but we were only a few hundred metres away from the entire al-Qaida leadership.

We all agreed to get together when we got out. The way to reconnect was easy.

We wrote each other’s details on the elastic of our boxer shorts. When we got out, we called.

Everyone who was important to me was written on white elastic. I had their phone numbers, their villages.

By 2009, many of us were back doing what we did before we were caught. But this time we were doing it better.

Image VIA

Fantastic huh? I don’t know what the US prison forces or people working at the prisons were doing at the time all this was going on, but it really does beggar belief that this could have actually occurred right underneath their noses.

I mean not only does most of that area hate the Western World for bombing them for no reason, but then the US ‘unwittingly’ provides them with the perfect framework to set up the ultimate new terrorist organisation. Good one jabronis.

Let’s hope Anonymous do a better job than them at sorting this problem out.