Before the US invasion of Iraq under the Bush administration, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was a minor league terrorist with zero ties to either Saddam or Osama. He had refused to join Osama’s global jihad, Saddam had a death warrant out for him, and most Sunnis would have regarded him with scorn and disgust. In 2002, the military begged the Bush administration to let them take him out, but they were refused. Zarqawi was the war mongers’ chosen phony embodiment of an Osama/Saddam link, and they needed him alive for the time being to help them harness the post-9/11 hysteria for their war.

After the 2003 invasion, the US government completed its recasting of Zarqawi as a major threat and a big name, using the hunt for him as justification for such brutal operations as the Second Battle of Fallujah. Soon, Zarqawi was elevated to a lofty position in the Sunni insurgency against the Western invaders and their Shiite quislings. No longer pinned down by Saddam’s security forces, Zarqawi was free to accelerate the sectarian civil war that the US invasion had started with a string of terrorist bombings targeting Shiites. His outfit then grew into “Al Qaeda in Iraq” (AQI), Zarqawi only swearing allegiance to Osama a whole year into the Iraq War.

During the 2006 “Anbar Awakening,” the Sunni tribes turned on AQI and helped decimate it. The subsequent 2007 US “Surge” in Iraq thrust AQI Islamists into close prison quarters with secular former members of Saddam Hussein’s Baathist regime. Later, AQI’s new leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi would capitalize on the connections made there by heavily recruiting ex-Baathists. The military and bureaucratic expertise thus gained, combined with the religious fervor of the Islamists, made AQI into an even more formidable fighting force as it moved into Syria in 2011.

Up until then, the “Islamo-Fascist” alliance between Osama’s theocratic Al Qaeda and Saddam’s secular Baathists was nothing but a fantasy conjured up by Douglas Feith’s and David Wurmser’s Counter Terrorism Evaluation Group to lie America into the Iraq War. Saddam was an avid hunter, not a friend, of jihadists. The mythical joint threat ended up making itself real through the war it helped engender. By both “Flypaperizing” and “de-Baathifying” Iraq, the US thrust the Islamists and secular “fascists” into close proximity and gave them a common mortal enemy, thus welding them together into the real “Islamo-Fascist” alliance that would become ISIS.

In Syria, AQI joined and quickly came to lead the Sunni insurgency against the secular regime of Bashar al-Assad (another avid hunter of jihadists), and greatly benefited from the generous military support for the rebels offered by the US (under the Obama administration) and its regional allies Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar.

Much of this support was in the form of a heavy flow of weapons shipped from Benghazi, Libya after the secular regime of Muammar Gaddafi (a third avid hunter of jihadists) was overthrown thanks to US support for yet another rebellion led by veterans of Zarqawi’s jihad in Iraq.

AQI then split into two groups: the Syrian al-Nusra Front, which retained its allegiance to Al Qaeda, and ISIS, which split from the Al Qaeda leadership, although it continued to embrace the legacy of Osama bin Laden.

After both groups swelled in battle experience, recruits, territory, and American equipment in Syria, ISIS re-entered Iraq in 2014. Persecution (death squads, ethnic cleansing, etc) and political marginalization by the US-backed, Shiite-dominated Iraqi government drove the Sunni tribes back into the arms of the returning conquerors. And conquer they did: overrunning north-western Iraq all the way up to the gates of Baghdad, and capturing tons of American gear all along the way. The Obama administration responded by declaring war on ISIS.

Thanks to such exploits, and the prestige-lifting American response to them, ISIS now no longer even needs the direct person-to-person contacts made in insurgencies and conquests to propagate itself. After all, extremism is an idea, and ideas can spread by mere example and leap thousands of miles at a time.

Thus, throughout the Muslim world, we now see self-appointed “franchises” popping up, hoisting the black flag, swearing allegiance to either ISIS or Al Qaeda, and usually committing some murderous atrocity to mark their debut, often with zero coordination with the central group.

Bush’s Iraq War turned Zarqawi’s petty criminal outfit into a major guerrilla force. Obama’s Syria and Libya wars then turned it into a conquering state army. And now Obama’s ISIS war has made it an international movement.

The US has aided this international dissemination, not only by abetting the spectacular rise of ISIS and al-Nusra in Iraq and Syria, but in more direct ways too.

For example, the jihadist outpouring that Obama and Hillary Clinton released in Libya has flooded throughout North Africa: into Tunisia, Mali, and even Nigeria.

In Yemen, the Obama administration’s civilian-slaughtering drone war, authoritarian counter-revolution against Yemen’s Arab Spring, and support for Saudi Arabia’s ruthless war and blockade on the country, have led to the rise of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP).

And the US-approved and Saudi-funded counter-revolution against Egypt’s Arab Spring has led to the brutal persecution of moderate Islamists and the restoration of Egypt’s collaboration with Israel’s persecution of the Palestinians. These results in turn have contributed to the rise of extremist Islamists (the ISIS affiliate mentioned above) in the Sinai Peninsula.

Before the War on Terror, there was only a handful of Islamic terrorists, on the run and hiding out in a few isolated enclaves. After the War on Terror, their numbers, their span, and their resources have mushroomed. They are now taxing and conscripting subjects, fielding armies, and conquering large swaths of territory.