Well Islam was a lot more peaceful before the US attack of Iraq and all that has happened because of it.
.
Really?
No.
Yes.
Was there an ISIS able to conquer territory before the US attack of the Iraqi people?
Eh. There has always been a lot of warlords and wars and territory changing owner there.
Correct. In spite of all the news they make with their targeted brutality, ISIS isn't even currently winning the body-count game; that honor goes to Assad's untargeted brutality. And the Syrian civil war is hardly the worst thing to happen in Islamdom in living memory -- Assad at his worst is a piker compared to Saddam. He murdered more just of his own subjects than Assad's and ISIS's totals put together; when you count the dead from the war he started with Iran, that probably triples his total. And Saddam may well have been out-murderered by Turkey's rulers in the 1915 Armenian genocide.
There has been no non-national force just running around conquering lands in a long time. ISIS represents something that hasn't existed in the ME for over a hundred years.
Hey, I get it. You're you. So you're always going to make an indefensible generalization, and then when somebody points out it isn't true you're always going to come up with an excuse for why his counterexamples don't count, relying on new criteria you'll make up on the spot in order to exclude them. It's what you do. "Non-national force just running around conquering lands" isn't something you limited your claim to when you said "Islam was a lot more peaceful".
It is ridiculous to say it is just business as usual.
But there's an obvious recent example of a non-state outfit very like ISIS, that was running around conquering lands before the US attack on the Iraqi government: the Taliban. The Taliban were "non-national" in pretty much the same way ISIS is. They were mostly Afghans but with a lot of non-Afghan volunteers, just as ISIS is mostly Arabs but with a lot of non-Arab volunteers; and they mostly conquered Afghanistan but also controlled part of Pakistan, just as ISIS mostly conquered Syria but also controlled part of Iraq.
This sort of organized crime gang with aspirations to becoming a government thrives when the real government is too weak to suppress it in some region; it goes "non-national" simply because there's a border running through the region and
both real governments are too weak to suppress it. Al Shabaab has been trying to do the same thing and conquer a piece of Kenya; likewise Boko Haram in Cameroon.
The worst thing to happen to in the ME in the last 50 years was the US sponsored and supported attack of Iran by Iraq. State violence, nothing like ISIS.
That's just yet another of the stupid conspiracy theories so beloved in the Middle East. We started supporting Iraq two years into the war, when the attack of Iran by Iraq
had already failed, and Iran was counterattacking and conquering Iraqi territory. The US government didn't sponsor or support the attack of Iran by Iraq. Why would it have done that? In 1980 Iraq was a
Soviet client state! Our government didn't want the region dominated by the USSR any more than it wanted it dominated by Iran. That's why we tipped off the Iranians that Saddam was getting ready to attack; and why when he invaded, we threatened the Soviets that we'd intervene on the side of Iran if they intervened on the side of Iraq. We didn't start that war; that's on Saddam.
