establishment of world war i. they think they are re-creating that. they think their caliphate which is arab is even more legitimate than turkish. isis and the islamic state believe that the only legitimate religious belief is their particular harsh brand of law. anyone who holdess other belief is deemed a heretic and liable to death or exile. isis emerged from the terror group al qaeda in iraq. the predecessor group to that was the group started. during operation iraqi freedom became the head of aqi battling against u.s. coalition forces in the streets. isis has been able to eclipse al qaeda i think primarily by the
out isis, the state of terror stern is also a former national security council member. thanks for being on new day. you ve been studying al qaeda, in iraq. since 2003 or 04. they were the genesis of isis that s what isis started out as. i want to read some portions from your book. one of the things you write is when america turned its full attention to al qaeda in the wake of september 2011 the result was like a fist smashing down on a ball of clay. what does that mean? what happened was al qaeda was based in afghanistan. and we essentially disbursed them. we wanted to remove their home from them and they disbursed into pakistan. al qaeda in iraq formed in 2004 and that was the predecessor
group of isis. one of the controversial tenets of your book. let me read it you say as president bush had claimed, iraq became a central front in the war on terrorism, but it was a front that the united states had created. are you saying basically that with the iraq war, the u.s. upset the apple cart and that isis wouldn t exist were it not for the iraq war? well there are a number of factors that came into play in the formation of isis. one of them absolutely was our decision to go to war in iraq. there had been no al qaeda group in iraq prior to our invasion? were there just terrorists or barbaric groups by another name? there was no group like al qaeda in iraq or isis until we invaded invaded. we al qaeda moved into iraq and the predecessor group of isis al qaeda in iraq also beheaded
video demands they made. they would have been i think quite alert to the fact that a rescue attempt was possible. is snatching a page out of the i the isis s book. they are more likely to hold for ransom. where we seeing is a shift. yemen is a place where kidnapping for ransom is endemic. i spent time there in fact narrowly being kidnapped by myself. and it is quite unusual in yemen more people to be killed. there was a case back in 1998 where a group of western hostages was taken by al qaeda in the arabian peninsula or a predecessor group. a hostage operation was mounted by the government. it was a fiasco and some hostages were killed in the cross-fire. in this operation that took place yesterday, we are hearing