After seeing about the rise of ISIS and other groups I would like to learn about the history of these areas (Specifically post WW2 onwards in Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Syria). I understand that for this subreddit it has to be 20 years or older, so could somebody please explain things like the gulf wars the Iran Iraq war, and the war in Afghanistan? Also if I wish to learn about the rise of Al-Qeada, ISIS, the invasion of Iraq etc where should I post? Thanks
Ok, I'll try to take your request a bit at a time, but before we begin this is waaaaay too big a question to answer in a 10,000 character post. Moreover, anyone who proposes to answer it in 10,000 characters or even 10,000 words is lying to you. (KarlreMarks brilliant "One Sentence Explanation of what caused ISIS" notwithstanding.)
Trying to figure this stuff out is quite literally my profession and it's something I personally work towards and study very hard but you can (and people have) dedicated decades to these issues and you're simply not going to find a short answer to it.
That being said, I'll try to point you in the right direction, or at least in the direction of the path I've taken.
Specifically post WW2 onwards in Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Syria).
First in terms of periodization:
I'd encourage you to go a bit further back. If you're just looking at post WW2, frankly, the Middle East will not make much sense to you. If nothing else you'll be missing out on:
Among many, many, many other such issues.
My own personal suggestion would be to start at least with the outbreak of WWI. For a wider context of the "modern" era in the Middle East that is perhaps most commonly dated to the invasion of Egypt by Napoleon in 1798 and the subsequent rise of Muhammad Ali Pasha.
Secondly in terms of regionalization:
While "Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Syria" are obviously the hotspots du jour, I don't think you are you going to find much enlightenment by necessarily looking at the the histories of these countries in particular. Prior to 1979, for instance, Afghanistan had not been a centrally important country in the Islamic world since the Timurids in the 15th century. The Faqir of Ipi notwithstanding, I'm not sure you're going to find much to interest you in pre-1979 Afghan history in the context of your question.
Like many Arabists I am (perhaps unfortunately, but somewhat unabashedly) an Egypto-centrist, but it's not for nothing that there's an old joke in counterterrorism circles that goes something like "9/11 was born in Nasser's dungeons" or something to that effect. At the very least, an understanding of the contemporary Middle East requires a solid grounding in the intellectual and political history of 20th century Egypt, and I would say especially the rise of Islamism starting with the founding of the Muslim Brotherhood in 1928 and then in the writings of Said Qutb, the Brotherhood's break with Qutb, the expansion of international branch organizations of the MB (e.g. Hamas) and so on, as well as the failures of Nasserist pan-Arabism culminating in Egypt's peace with Israel in 1979 are critical to understanding what was and is going on in the region.
Likewise, and while this is effectively a field of study in its own right, there's no version of the history of the Middle East in the 20th century that makes sense without at least some solid understanding of the Zionist movement and the Israeli-Palestinian and Israeli-Arab conflicts.
So while I don't want to necessarily discourage you from looking at the national histories of Afghanistan or Pakistan, I suspect they're going to be far less relevant to your question about conflict in the Middle East than certain topics of Intellectual History.
So the organizations that you referred to (ISIS, AQ), are sometimes referred more categorically as something like "Transnational Islamist Terror Organizations. So as an example of the impact of that, if we were to write a national history of a country like Egypt, Said Qutb might get a minor footnote. But if our interest is a transnational history of Islamsim, then Qutb can (and in many of the books that I read quite literally does) get whole chapters.
All of that is of course without even getting into what level of knowledge of regional culture, language, religion, politics, economics, etc. etc. etc. would be appropriate to try to approach these these questions. Such an approach would of course include some kind of grounding the 1400 year history of Islam, the major languages of the region (especially Arabic, Persian and Turkish) and some kind of historical awareness of the Middle East in its historical context since at least the rise of Islam in the 7th century.
Or, for that matter, a history of the global context of all this, for instance by considering the impact of the cold war and the relative objectives and policies of the United States and the Soviet Union in the region, not to mention the older, 19th century colonialist/imperialist histories, particularly of France and Britain.
But again, that's just basically all as just necessary background to even understand the primary matter at hand.
could somebody please explain things like the gulf wars the Iran Iraq war, and the war in Afghanistan? ... [and] the rise of Al-Qeada, ISIS, the invasion of Iraq etc.
I (and several others whom I will link to) have written about many of these questions in the sub before in posts that might be of interest, in no particular chronological order:
To go back to my point at the top, I've written thousands of words on this but these posts are still nowhere near to explaining "the history of the middle east, and the conflicts within them." I won't go feign Socratic humility by saying I know nothing, but I don't know nearly enough about modern Iran, about Lebanon, about Shia movements generally, about the middle-century history of Iraq, about Syria, about state policy in Saudi Arabia, about the role and history of Algeria, etc. etc. etc. to claim that I have some kind of true, concrete grasp on this. And that's without even getting into interpretative or historiographical questions, that's purely on the issue of background knowledge.
All of that said, I think I can point you towards some Books for further reading:
(Introductory survey books)
Country Specific Books
Islamism
The Afghan Jihad, Al-Qaeda, Afghanistan, Iraq, ISIS
Unfortunately I'm not sure I can point to anything good at the moment in book length on the origins/path of the Arab Spring, I've been quite close to it and so haven't really read anything at book length.
In terms of other subs I'd encourage you to also check out and follow /r/syriancivilwar and /r/MENAConflicts, although the former is far more active than the latter.
This is a question spanning many decades and multiple countries and potentially involving unrelated things. I'm afraid this might be too big (?) of a question to be answered. May be you should break these up (I assume some of these had already been individually asked and answered previously).