“Barack Obama is directly responsible for it, because when he pulled everybody out of Iraq, al Qaeda went to Syria, became ISIS, and ISIS is what it is today thanks to Barack Obama’s failures,“
McCain said, according to The Washington Post as cited in a Huffington Post article. I am not a Washington Post subscriber, and didn’t read the original. The Huffington Post piece doesn’t explain the connection between ISIS in Syria and a gay club shooting in Orlando.
James Harkin has an interesting perspective on the rise of ISIS in Syria:
By the time it was rolled out, ISIS wasn’t so much a diktat from Iraq as a meeting of jihadi minds—one buttressed by networks of recruits that had already been established in Europe.
—James Harkin, Hunting Season, (New York: Hachette Books, 2015), 94.
