ISIS — the Islamic State — figures in John Kiriakou’s commentary as the definitive product of American policy failure in Iraq and Syria.
Born in an American prison
Kiriakou’s origin story for ISIS is blunt: it was created in an American military prison in Iraq.[1] Baghdadi founded the group while in U.S. custody, after a determination that al-Qaeda wasn’t radical enough, wasn’t violent enough — “we almost forced it on them.”[2] The deeper cause was the war itself: ISIS came out of the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq — a war launched, he says, for revenge rather than any Iraqi connection to 9/11 — and its founders attacked precisely because al-Qaeda seemed insufficiently anti-American and insufficiently violent.[3][4][5] Much of its arsenal was American hardware supplied to the Iraqi government and easily captured.[6]
The coalition’s math
As an analyst would, Kiriakou kept running the numbers on the anti-ISIS campaign and finding them absurd: ISIS was in seven countries, and the U.S. was bombing two.[7] Raqqa was a city of 20,000 with perhaps 2,000 ISIS fighters — and four countries were bombing it around the clock: “you can only bomb so many targets.”[8] He suspected ISIS was effectively doing dirty work compatible with the aims of U.S. allies bent on toppling Assad, and noted that Turkey had no inherent beef with ISIS — the group had never attacked Turkey; what they shared was a common enemy in the Kurds.[9]
On funding, he points to the early-2014 email from Hillary Clinton to John Podesta stating that ISIS was funded by the governments of Saudi Arabia and Qatar.[10]
Syria
Kiriakou’s Syria warnings ran on the same rails: the “moderate” fighters Washington armed against Assad were, in his words, terrorists who changed their names — al-Qaeda, the Nusra Front, whatever the label.[11][12] He argued Assad — whatever else he was — had never threatened Israel, and that an ISIS caliphate over all of Syria would mean the slaughter of Christians and rival Muslim groups alike.[13] By 2025 his assessment was simply that “ISIS is gone from Syria — it’s been gone for a long time,” and continued U.S. presence there was about saving face.[14]
More broadly, ISIS serves Kiriakou as an entry in his catalogue of threat inflation: the government has called the Russians, the Chinese, and ISIS each “the greatest threat” — “why should we believe them when everything else they’ve told us” hasn’t held up?[15]
The succession in Syria
On who replaced Assad, Kiriakou is pointed about the provenance rather than the ideology: Syria was taken over by “the former deputy leader of ISIS, who apparently was chosen by the CIA” — an origin he says “leads me to believe he was probably a CIA paid CIA agent,” while flagging it as a subject for another conversation.[16]
A co-founder in the presidency
In Kiriakou’s account of Syria, the organization’s history runs directly into the current government in Damascus: al-Julani was “a member of al-Qaeda” and “a co-founder of ISIS,” and had allegedly taken up arms against the United States.[17] Putting the same résumé to a senior Turkish official later, Kiriakou described him as “the former co-founder of ISIS, Daesh, whatever you want to call it” and “a former senior commander of al-Qaeda.”[18]
Fought by one ally, financed by another
Kiriakou had set out the structural version of this complaint in 2015, before the funding correspondence he cites elsewhere became public. The government in Riyadh, he said, supports movements around the region and the world that the United States — and specifically the State Department — has formally identified as terrorist groups, naming the Nusra Front alongside jihadi groups in Afghanistan in the 1980s and 1990s.[19]
The contradiction he drew from it is the one he has repeated since: “here we find ourselves as an American government fighting these groups around the world when in fact our dear friends the Saudis are organizing them and financing them, and they think nothing of just flouting that to us.”[19]