What led to Obama’s decision to launch airstrikes on fighters with the “Islamic State” in northern Iraq.
For the first time since the U.S. withdrew troops from Iraq in 2011, U.S. fighter jets bombed northern Iraq Friday to thwart what President Obama described as a potential "genocide" at the hands of the ultra-violent "Islamic State" (IS).
In 2003, the U.S. invaded Iraq to oust then-President Saddam Hussein after the Bush administration, wrongly, argued that he possessed weapons of mass destruction. Over the next seven years, more than 4,000 U.S. soldiers and hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians died as the country descended into a chaotic civil war and a bloody insurgency against the U.S. occupation. In 2008, President Obama campaigned on a pledge to withdraw U.S. troops from Iraq, which he completed in 2011.
Handout / Reuters
The self-described "Islamic State" first appeared as an al-Qaeda offshoot after the 2003 U.S.-led invasion of Iraq and the bloody Sunni insurgency and civil war that followed. IS has comprised different groups and names, with mergers and breaks over time.
The group's stated goal is an Islamist state in Syria and Iraq.
Stringer/Iraq / Reuters
The group officially changed its name to "Islamic State" in June. Before that, IS most recently went by Islamic State of Iraq and Sham (ISIS), Arabic for Syria. Sham can also be translated as Levant, hence some use ISIL instead of ISIS.
Before 2011, IS used various other names, as well.
Stringer/Iraq / Reuters
The group expanded into Syria in 2011, taking advantage of the security vacuum created after the country's uprising shifted from non-violence into an all-out bloody regional battle. Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, once a top al-Qaeda leader in Iraq, led them there.
Here Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi delivers a sermon at a mosque in Iraq on July 5, in one of his few public appearances. The Syrian conflict began in 2011 as a non-violent uprising against President Bashar al-Assad; it has since descended into a bloody civil war between Assad, IS, and other armed Syrian rebels representing a spectrum of interests. More than 170,000 Syrians have died from the violence, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, while more than 9 million have been displaced.
AP Photo/Militant video
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