Former US military intelligence chief: We knew something like ISIS was coming

The former head of one of the US government's leading intelligence divisions says that the US believed that religious extremists could carve out a sizable safe-haven in Syria as early as 2012 - but that the US did little to stop this from happening.

In an interview with Mehdi Hasan for Al Jazeera, retired Lieutenant General Michael Flynn, who lead the Defense Intelligence Agency from 2012 to 2014, called out the administration on its alleged inaction during the first year of the Syrian civil war.

Hasan quotes what he describes as a "secret" DIA analysis from August 2012 warning that the chaos in Syria could allow for the creation of a Salafist enclave in the country's desert east. Hasan asked Flynn whether this meant the US actually predicted the rise of the ISIS caliphate and did nothing to stop it.

Although Al Qaeda in Iraq was hobbled when the US military pulled out of Iraq in 2011, the collapse of Syria provided AQI with a safe-haven. The rule of a sectarian Shi'ite government in Baghdad, and the Baghdad government's failure to integrate anti-Al Qaeda Sunni militants into the security forces, provided further impetus for the group's growth.

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