The United States' political and military operations in Iraq, beginning with the War on Terror waged by the Bush administration, contributed to the rise of the Islamic State group and the current conflict in Syria, argued United for Peace and Justice co-founder Phyllis Bennis in a talk on Thursday.

Bennis, author of “Understanding ISIS: The New Global War on Terror,” explained that she believes the U.S. War on Terror to be an underlying motivation for the United States’ partial instigation of an ongoing involvement in the Syrian conflict. “What President Obama implemented … was a continuation of the same Global War on Terror [initiated during the former George W. Bush Administration],” she said. “Syria has now become the centerpiece of the Global War on Terror.”

Moreover, the initial formation of the group was a direct response to the U.S. War on Terror and U.S. military activities in Iraq, Bennis argued.

“ISIS began as an anti-occupation organization in a US prison in Iraq in 2004, … not in 2011 when President Obama pulled the troops out,” she asserted. “They started in Camp Bucca — one of the prison camps that the US had established in Iraq. … Prisoners [in the US prison camps] were routinely humiliated and tortured.”

The breaking point, she said, was that “in 2004, photographs emerged showing all of this, and suddenly those photographs were on the front page of every newspaper and the lead story of radio newscasts all around the world. So suddenly, everybody in the world and everybody in Iraq knew what the US occupation looked like.”

“It was at that time,” she declared, “that everyone in Camp Bucca knew that any moment, they might receive the same inhumane treatment and a prison-based opposition emerged that ultimately would become ISIS.”

One of the main reasons the IS group has emerged as so powerful in Iraq is that many ordinary, non-extremist Iraqi Sunnis who oppose the U.S.-installed Iraqi government see the organization as “the lesser of two evils," Bennis averred.

She added that the war in Syria is a result of multiple conflicting interests in the region: a power struggle between Saudi Arabia and Iran, Sunni and Shiite clashes, animosity between Turkey and the Kurds, competition between the United States and Russia, and disagreements between the secular and religious components of the Assad opposition.

“All of these separate wars are being waged until the last Syrian [life],” she said. “But at the end of the day, it’s Syrians doing the dying, and none of it is benefitting Syrians or Syria.”

Meanwhile, the people forced to stay in Syria are being used as “human shields” for U.S. bombs, she asserted. While these people have been promised that there will be a great liberation of Mosul and Raqqa, “death by bombs is not liberation,” she said.

“All of this comes back to our responsibility,” Bennis proclaimed. The U.S. must take several steps to ameliorate the war in Syria and begin restabilizing the region, she argued.

“First,” she said, “stop killing people in Syria. … Stop the airstrikes, stop the drone strikes, pull out the troops, pull out the Special Forces. Make real your claim that there are no boots on the ground.”

The U.S. should also establish an arms embargo and discontinue the shipment of arms to militia groups who claim that they are against the Assad regime and the IS group, she said. Despite the United States' best intentions, weapons often end up in the wrong hands, she said, adding that an active arms embargo would help undermine the powerful political lobbies of U.S. weapons manufacturers who profit from the war in Syria.

Bennis also asserted that the U.S. should increase diplomacy and support for the humanitarian crisis in the region. “We have an enormous obligation because we are so responsible for this crisis and because we have 28 percent of the wealth of the world in this country while we only have five percent of the population,” she said.

“I find it shocking and shameful that our leaders are bragging and are proud of taking 10,000 [more] refugees in a whole year," Bennis concluded, referencing the 2016 presidential election, and said that "We need a campaign that is going to welcome Syrian refugees and that is going to demand of our government that we want more Syrian refugees because we have the right to have our children grow up with Syrians like they grow up with people from anywhere else.”

“Ending the Many Wars in Syria” was sponsored by Brandeis Peace Action, the Graduate Program in Conflict Resolution and Coexistence, Brandeis Social Justice and Social Policy, the department of Peace, Conflict, and Coexistence Studies and the department of Sociology.