The Proxy WarWho Armed the "Islamic Civil War"

Baghdad International Airport, just after midnight on January 3, 2020. A plane from Damascus lands. Two cars collect a passenger in a dark coat and the commander waiting for him on the tarmac. They make it less than a kilometre. An American Reaper drone fires, and both cars burn.

The passenger was Major General Qasem Soleimani, commander of the Quds Force, the foreign-operations arm of Iran's Revolutionary Guard. Beside him sat Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, deputy head of the Iraqi militias that helped break ISIS. Washington said it had stopped an imminent attack.

Two days later, Iraq's prime minister stood up in parliament and told a different story. Soleimani, he said, had come to deliver Iran's reply to a message from Saudi Arabia, in talks Iraq was brokering to cool the region down. They were due to meet that morning. That same day, Iraq's parliament voted to expel American troops.

A peace envoy was killed in transit by a country that wasn't even party to the talks. To understand why anyone wanted those talks dead, you need to understand the war they were meant to end.

The war they sold you

For a decade, the news told you a simple story: Sunni against Shia, an ancient hatred fourteen centuries old, flaring up in Syria, Iraq and Yemen. Tragic, tribal, and nothing to do with us.

Now look at the map instead of the headline.

Hamas is Sunni, and it fought on Iran's side. The armies that held Damascus and Baghdad were full of Sunni soldiers. The sectarian story falls apart almost as soon as you test it.

Test another one. Who sponsored the jihad against Syria? Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the Emirates: kingdoms and emirates. Who stood against it? Iran, Iraq, Syria and Lebanon: republics, and movements born from revolution or occupation.

This wasn't Sunni against Shia. It was crowns against revolutions, and the crowns had friends in London and Washington.

The side they built

The protests in Syria in 2011 were real. The jihad that hijacked them was imported.

The plan was on paper years earlier. In 2007, Seymour Hersh reported that Washington had quietly changed strategy. To counter Iran and Hezbollah, it would lean on Saudi Arabia, and the money would reach Sunni extremist groups along the way. Insiders called it "the redirection."

When Syria broke open, the CIA launched a program code-named Timber Sycamore to arm the rebels, and Saudi Arabia paid for most of it. Hersh later reported a "rat line": the CIA and MI6 moving guns out of Libya's looted arsenals, through Turkey, into Syria.

By February 2012, Hillary Clinton's top aide, Jake Sullivan, summed up the battlefield in an email to her: "AQ is on our side in Syria." AQ means al-Qaeda. Eleven years after 9/11, it was on their side.

That August, America's own Defense Intelligence Agency warned that the insurgency was being driven by Salafists, the Muslim Brotherhood and al-Qaeda in Iraq, and that a "Salafist principality" could rise in eastern Syria. Then came the line that should have ended careers: "this is exactly what the supporting powers to the opposition want."

Two years later, the principality had a flag. ISIS declared its caliphate in June 2014. By the following spring, the UN counted more than 25,000 foreign fighters from over 100 countries in jihadist groups in Syria and Iraq. A homegrown uprising doesn't need to recruit from 100 countries.

That October, Vice President Joe Biden told a Harvard audience what the allies had done: Turkey, the Saudis and the Emiratis poured hundreds of millions of dollars and tens of thousands of tons of weapons into anyone who would fight Assad, and much of it reached al-Nusra and al-Qaeda. Within days he apologized to the Emiratis. He hadn't said anything false. He apologized for saying it out loud.

Clinton herself, in an email released by WikiLeaks, wrote that Qatar and Saudi Arabia were giving clandestine financial and logistic support to ISIL. Both stayed among the West's best weapons customers.

The West told the world it was fighting terror, while its allies paid for it.

Most Sunni Muslims had nothing to do with any of this, and they were ISIS's first and largest group of victims. This side wasn't built on a faith. It was built on one creed, Wahhabism, and the kings who export it.

The side that rose

The other side has a different origin story. It didn't come in a shipping crate.

Iran's revolution came in 1979, after twenty-six years under a Shah who had been put back on his throne when Britain and America overthrew Iran's elected prime minister in 1953. His secret police kept the country quiet until it wasn't. We'll rewind into that coup later in this series.

Hezbollah was born in 1982, in a south Lebanon under Israeli invasion and occupation. In 2013 it crossed into Syria and turned the battle of Qusayr. Iraq's Popular Mobilization Forces were born in June 2014, after ISIS took Mosul and pushed toward Baghdad and Iraq's top Shia cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, called on Iraqis to take up arms. Tens of thousands answered.

Soleimani's job was to tie these forces into one network. The West called it Iran's proxies. Iran called it the Axis of Resistance. In Iraq, the two networks fought the same enemy at the same time. The men who helped break ISIS were the men in those two cars at Baghdad airport.

Why the crowns were afraid

In March 2011, Bahrainis filled Pearl Roundabout demanding a say in their own government. Days later, Saudi troops rolled across the causeway to help crush them. That was the same spring Gulf money started flowing to Syria's "revolution."

The kings didn't fear dictators. They feared revolutions, because revolutions take down kings.

These thrones have a common origin. Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar and the emirates that became the UAE were all British protectorates. Jordan's royal family was set up by Britain in 1921. And in 1915, Britain signed the Treaty of Darin with Ibn Saud, taking his lands under its protection and arming the house that would become the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. A century earlier, that house had sworn an alliance with a preacher named Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab.

The empire left the Gulf, and the thrones it protected stayed. And at the top of the whole arrangement sits one more crown in London.

The third front: Yemen

Yemen is where the proxy war stopped pretending. In March 2015, Saudi Arabia and the UAE began bombing the Houthis, a movement from Yemen's north that had overthrown a Saudi-backed government. America refuelled the jets. Britain sold the planes and the bombs, and British personnel helped direct the strikes, according to a UK minister.

On August 9, 2018, a coalition jet hit a school bus at a market in Dahyan. Forty children died. The bomb was made in America by Lockheed Martin.

Seven years later, an American missile hit a school in Minab.

By the end of 2021, the UN estimated that 377,000 people had died in Yemen's war, most of them from hunger and disease rather than bombs.

The board below holds every sponsor, every fighter and every string between them, each with a receipt. Pick a question and watch the lines connect.

The ending they wanted

Go back to the airport. Iraq was trying to make peace between Riyadh and Tehran, and the man carrying Iran's answer never reached the meeting.

The proxy war went on without him, and in Syria it ground into a stalemate. Assad held the cities. The rebels held Idlib. Hezbollah stood guard.

Then came October 7. The next morning, Hezbollah opened a front from Lebanon in support of Gaza. Israel took the opening. In September 2024, pagers exploded across Lebanon, and days later an Israeli strike killed Hezbollah's leader, Hassan Nasrallah. Assad's guard was bleeding on its own soil.

In late November, the rebels moved. On December 8, Damascus fell and Assad fled. That night, Netanyahu claimed the credit himself: Assad's fall, he said, was "a direct result of the blows we have dealt to Iran and Hezbollah."

The man who took the capital was Abu Mohammad al-Jolani. He founded al-Nusra, al-Qaeda's branch in Syria, and America had a $10 million bounty on his head. Within weeks, the bounty was gone. By July 2025, Washington had dropped his group from its terror list. And in November 2025, under the name Ahmed al-Sharaa, he walked into the White House as the first Syrian head of state ever to visit.

The man with a $10 million bounty got a meeting at the White House. The man carrying a peace message got a drone strike.

Next: The Heist

One question is still open: where did these men come from?

Before ISIS had a flag, it had a prison number. Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the future caliph, was held at Camp Bucca, an American detention camp in southern Iraq. Former inmates say the men inside used it to meet and organize. Jolani, according to documents published in 2025, was held by U.S. forces in Iraq too.

To find out who built the jail, rewind to the war that filled it.

Episode 3: The Heist.