America created and funds ISIS

As circulated: ISIS was built by American intelligence to justify intervention, topple Assad, or redraw the region. Supporting material includes doctored photographs said to show al-Baghdadi with US officials, forged "leaked" documents, decontextualised Clinton emails, and a widely shared reading of a 2012 Defense Intelligence Agency report as a plan rather than a warning.

Several strands are traceable. The al-Baghdadi photographs are manipulated or misidentified images of unrelated people, debunked repeatedly since 2014. The 2012 DIA memo, released through litigation, does describe the possibility of a Salafist principality emerging in eastern Syria - as a forecast of risk, which is what intelligence assessments do. The "US airdropped weapons to ISIS" claims stem from a real 2014 airdrop to Kurdish defenders of Kobani, of which one bundle drifted off target and was recovered on video by ISIS.

What is documented: US weapons reached ISIS in quantity - captured from Iraqi army stocks after Mosul, and leaked from the Syrian rebel supply chains of Timber Sycamore. Conflict Armament Research traced substantial ISIS materiel to those two routes. Allied Gulf funding for Syrian Islamist factions was also real, and reported at the time by US officials themselves. What is not documented is intent. From 2014 the United States ran a seven-year air campaign against ISIS, tens of thousands of strikes, killed successive leaders including al-Baghdadi, and armed the Kurdish-led forces that took Raqqa. No leaked record, no whistleblower, no declassified document supports deliberate creation - and the forgeries offered as proof are themselves evidence that the documentary case does not exist.