A user here sent me a PM after a, cough, certain presidential candidate, cough, suggested that President Obama had founded ISIS. They wanted to know how and when ISIS had actually been founded.

I wrote a long reply, which were it not for the 20 year subject matter I think might make for a good fit here. As a context, OP asked if IS had been founded in 1999, 2004, or 2014, so I reference these dates that the user had suggested below. I've asked the mods and got a green light, so without further ado: the Founding of Islamic State.

So the founding of what is today ISIS is quite closely linked to the career of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. Zarqawi was a Jordanian ex-criminal, born in 1966. The name itself is a nom de guerre, "Zarqawi" is just his hometown, Zarqa, Jordan. Self-radicalizing in the 1980s, Zarqawi travelled to Afghanistan in 1989 to join the anti-Soviet Jihad, but of course the Soviets were already withdrawing, but in any event he wanted to join up with the Jihad, which among the Arabs was led by Osama bin Laden. (NB this isn't saying much. The Arab role in the Afghan jihad was kind of a joke. They did little good, but no harm, and so were tolerated but didn't do very much and weren't very effective.)

Then, as now, Jihadist networks rely on a system of credentialing before you can meet someone as important as Bin Laden. Zarqawi did not have the credentials. Where Bin Laden was a soft-spoken multi-millionaire son of one of the most prominent billionaires in Saudi Arabia who affected to be a religious authority, Zarqawi was blunt, rough, violent. He lingered in Afghanistan for a bit, but wouldn't get to meet bin Laden for another decade.

He returned to Jordan, founded an extremist group called Jund ash-Sham (Jund is difficult to translate, wiki is wrong to say it means "Soldiers of the Levant" that would be "junud", the page for "Jund" is accurate though, so maybe "The Levant Division" or something.) He was pretty quickly arrested and put in jail until 1999 when he was released as part of a general amnesty.

By this time, bin Laden had already founded al-Qaeda (the exact date of its founding is disputed), returned to Afghanistan after being basically kicked out of Sudan (1996) and declared his war against the West (later in 1996,) and carried out the east Africa embassy bombings in 1998.

Zarqawi then went back to Afghanistan, this time to meet bin Laden to gain money and support. Once again, the organization around bin Laden was cautious and they had Zarqawi spied on before they could meet. Zarqawi was particularly noted in those spy reports for his hatred of the Shia. Bin Laden's mother was Shia, and al-Qaeda was, in any event, dedicated to attacking the west, not the Shia. So while there was no attempt to persuade Zarqawi to join al-Qaeda, they give him their blessing and support to found his own group. While "core al-Qaeda" was by this point of course carrying out and planning attacks of their own (including 9/11), their other raison d'etre was simply to have all their fingers in all the international jihadi pies. Zarqawi suited this latter purpose

Thus he founded "Jama'at al-Tawhid wal-Jihad", "The Organization of Monotheism [NB, in a Jihadist context this is quite a bit stronger, as it implies that Trinitarian Christians, for example, are not monotheists] and Jihad" in 1999, the first of your proposed dates. Initially the group was based in and focused on Jordan, but with a training camp in Afghanistan.

In 2001 after 9/11 and the US invasion, the group, and Zarqawi himself, were forced to relocate. Initially seeking shelter in Iran (ironically, given his anti-Shia hatred), he next relocated to Iraq as it was already becoming clear that that would be the next US target in the War on Terror.

So for that entire year, Zarqawi and his cells prepared, and were ready for the US invasion, launching very early attacks against the UN headquarters and one of the main Shia holy sites. The UN departed after its headquarters was attacked, and attack on the Shia was an early provocation to sectarian conflict in the Iraq War. When the US invaded, al-Qaeda, embarrassingly, considering their mission of killing Americans, had no presence in Iraq, the main battlefield against the Americans. When Zarqawi applied for formal membership of his group in al-Qaeda in 2004, despite serious disagreements about his proposed approach (particularly his willingness for mass-civilian casualties against his sectarian enemies), bin Laden and his deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri accepted Zarqawi's oath of allegiance. And so "Tanzim Qaidat al-Jihad fi Bilad al-Rafidayn", more commonly known as "al-Qaeda in Iraq" (AQI) was founded in 2004, a date you haven't mentioned but equally critical.

The parts of ISIS that make ISIS distinctive can already be seen in AQI's behavior at this point. It's Zarqawi who does stuff like make snuff films of hostage beheadings. Zarqawi is also clearly influenced by apocalyptical notions in Islam and the end times' association with the caliphate. So already in 2004 Zarqawi writes: "Perhaps [AQI would establish the] caliphate according to the prophetic method."

This notion was rejected by core al-Qaeda, which wanted to win the war before declaring the caliphate, and, moreover, rejected his entire strategy, which was to win the war by fomenting a sectarian total-war by beheadings and blowing up shrines, etc. as far as was necessary.

While Zarqawi initially conceded to these reproaches: "...by April 2006, Zarqawi had changed his mind. He announced a consultative council....he described it as the "nucleus for establishing an Islamic state." That state, he proclaimed, would be established in three months."

US forces killed Zarqawi in June 2006. But the group nonetheless proclaimed itself the "Islamic State in Iraq" in October 2006, the second of your proposed dates. After Zarqawi's death, the proclaimed leader of this Islamic State was Abu Umar al-Baghdadi, who was named "commander of the faithful." This title is not quite the same as, but is very closely related to the title of Caliph.

There is some dispute about what this person's role was prior to and even after 2006, whether he was a figurehead or a pro-level operator who was just so good no one knew who he was, but as Will McCants comments: "No one had ever heard of him, not even other jihadists." There's not enough space here to go over the history of the Iraq insurgency after this point, but to make a long story short, despite successfully surviving and carrying out some large scale attacks, things did not go very well for the Islamic State in Iraq (ISI)/AQI (though it had a new name, it was technically, if somewhat ambiguously, part of al-Qaeda.) The group was mismanaged by its own leadership. Even radical jihadists within the organization didn't apparently like its approach. From a major insurgent presence that could plausibly call itself a state, the US surge marginalized the group through defeats to such an extent that the claim to statehood seemed ridiculous.

Abu Umar al-Baghdadi was killed in 2010 as part of these operations and was succeeded by Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. Bin Laden, for his part, was killed in 2011.

The connection with Syria dated to at least 2007, if not earlier, as, "according to the U.S. government...85 to 90 percent of the foreign fighters in Iraq had come through Syria. The Islamic State had received many of those fighters and had maintained its facilitation network in Syria...."

In December 2011, at the instructions of core al-Qaeda, Baghdadi sent Abu Muhammad al-Jawlani to Syria to establish Jabhat al-Nusra (JAN) in December 2011. Despite being sent by the Islamic State in Iraq, JAN soon began to play a distinctive and highly independent role in the Syrian conflict. Where ISI was eliminationist towards rivals, JAN was cooperative with other Jihadist groups.

After a falling out over these tactical differences, JAN declared its independence from ISI and allegiance to AQ in April 2013. Needless to say this pissed off Baghdadi in his own relation with AQ, to which he was still nominally loyal. AQ rebuffed ISI's appeal, and consequently ISI ignored AQ's ruling. AQ in February 2014 then renounced all ties with ISI.

The result was an enormous split in the Jihadist community between IS and AQ, with the result that IS ended up with a huge number of fighters loyal to it in Syria, thus ISIS.

In the chaos of 2014, with the US having withdrawn from Iraq and the Syrian regime reeling, these thousands of fighters exploded across the region. In June 2014 they captured Mosul, and controlled a contiguous territory all the way to the outskirts of Aleppo, an enormous territory by any standard.

And so, having taken Mosul, one of the most important cities in Islamic history, they declared that Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi was not just commander of the faithful, but was Caliph of the Islamic State on 29 June, 2014. The third of your proposed dates.

So when and how did ISIS start? Well, that's not an easy thing to say. For me there is roughly equal merit to 2004, when AQI is founded, to 2006 when AQI declares itself to be an Islamic State, and to 2014, when that Islamic State breaks with AQ and declares itself to be a caliphate. It just depends on what you mean.

Source wise:

pre-2001:

See:

Steve Coll's Ghost Wars

and Lawrence Wright's The Looming Tower.

On ISIS itself and for all of the quotes included above see Will McCants' The ISIS Apocalypse.

edit: added some extra quotations marks to a sentence that had been offset with a colon, but I just wanted to make clear I was quoting.

So I got a copy of a memoir written by my great-great-uncle just before he died. He led a fascinating life:

• Grew up a farmer in southern California
• Aerial combat photographer in WW2
• Naturalist (thanks, GI Bill!) & world authority on cactus and other plants of the American Southwest and Northern Mexico
• Led expeditions to the Galapagos Islands and Gulf of California
• Director of the California Academy of Sciences

The memoir itself is a great read. I'm considering doing something like an "annotated edition" for friends and family - fact-checking some of his claims, attaching pictures, expanding and clarifying some things he mentioned in passing. Does anyone know of any resources that could help on something like this?

In everyone's opinion how much of a grounding in History should people such as International Relations and Social Science scholars have? Often times when I read their works and many main points are evidenced through historical claims, so is it acceptable to have people who are not historians making assertions, and in some cases writing policy, without a firm foundation in the history they are citing? Where is a reasonable place to draw the line with how much of a basis in a field such as history qualifies you to apply aspects from that field to another field?

reddit is maybe not the best sample pool for this question, but why not:

Who was the best American Girl?

So today, my apartment put up a notice in the elevator stating that pets are forbidden in the complex. All pets found a week from today will be "disposed of". Before this, they have a "no pets" sign at the entrance, but I just ignored it.

What should I do? My cat is affectionate and I don't think I'd have trouble finding someone else to adopt him (NOOOOOOO!!!!), but the other two strays are less photogenic. I can either abandon them far away where they can revert back to being strays, or hide them in my apartment Anne Frank-style.

Who are the most famous bards from antiquity ranging through the dark ages?

I need book reccomendations about Ancient Egypt.

Does anyone have a guilty pleasure alternate history scenario they cooked up while studying their field?

Could anyone tell me where I can find a copy of History of the World part 2?

Does anyone have a journal or letter or something they read where it really hit you that, "Wow, there's an actual human behind this historical figure?"

Like if Queen Victoria wrote, "Man, I had the shits so bad today...Now I'm doing that waddle-walk from wiping too much, but I'm trying to be subtle about it."