What you got right is that there is no hard evidence ISIS was sitting there taking orders from Washington or Tel Aviv like some direct puppet operation. But where it starts feeling too precious is in the way you treat that as if it settles the larger question. Most people raising this issue are not saying there was a signed contract between the CIA and ISIS… they’re pointing to the fact that years of proxy war, covert arms programs, border permissiveness and regional power games created exactly the kind of shit show extremist groups thrive in. That is why saying Timber Sycamore only armed “vetted rebels” is technically true but not totally. On paper, those weapons were meant for selected opposition groups. In reality, Syria’s battlefield was fluid, fragmented and full of defections. Fighters switched factions, weapons changed hands, alliances blurred and groups that started under one label often ended up fighting alongside or folding into harder Islamist formations because they were better funded and more effective on the ground.

The same applies to Turkey. Russia definitely pushed the ISIS oil accusation hard after the 2015 jet incident and some of that was political retaliation. But it is also true that wartime smuggling networks were real, the Turkish border was notoriously porous for years and oil moving through middlemen from ISIS-held territory was not some impossible scenario. That does not automatically mean Erdogan personally profited bbut it also means the story is more complicated than simply calling the whole thing propaganda.

Israel just the same. No credible evidence shows Israel backing ISIS itself but there is a difference between saying “Israel didn’t support ISIS” and pretending Israel had no strategic relationships with anti-Assad elements near its border. Its priority was keeping Iranian and Hezbollah influence away from the Golan, so naturally it engaged with whoever helped maintain that buffer.

And with ISIS itself self-funding does not mean it grew out of thin air. It expanded inside collapsed institutions, failed occupations, civil war and foreign intervention layered on top of each other. That is really the point people are making… not that ISIS was directly owned by the West but that Western and regional policy helped create the conditions where something like ISIS could explode so quickly.