According to Snopes, this claim is mostly false. Although U.S.-manufactured and provided weapons did wind up in the hands of ISIS fighters, they did so unintentionally and not as the “result of a deliberate policy or instructions from President Barack Obama or any part of his administration”. While the United States did provide weapons to groups in Syria, the misconception of Obama arming ISIS likely comes from an interview that Senator Tulsi Gabbard gave on Fox New’s Tucker Carlson Tonight.
After the death of Abu Bakr al Baghdadi, the leader of the Islamic State, in October 2019, some supporters of President Donald J. Trump turned their focus toward records of his predecessor’s actions combating the network of terrorists.
According to a number of sources, the root cause of this misinformation is a CIA program known as Timber Sycamore, which provided weapons and training to Syrian rebels in their fight against Syrian President Bashar al-Asad. It is a small amount of these weapons that eventually found their way into the hands of ISIS fighters.
The claim that Obama armed ISIS struck people as absurd in the moment, but the complicated interconnections of Middle East politics and guerilla warfare quickly clouded matters. Here are the facts:
- U.S. efforts to aid Syrian rebels against forces loyal to President Asad began in 2013, at the latest – some time before ISIS fighters were able to overrun Northern Iraq and Syria, which didn’t occur until sometime in 2014
- The provisioning was not strictly a U.S. effort. In fact, Saudi and Jordanian intelligence officials also participated in the program
- It is unlikely, based on independent analysis presented by private research firm Conflict Armament Research (CAR) to the European Union and the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ; the German Society for International Cooperation), that U.S. arms supplied to Kurdish and Syrian Arab-led Syrian Democratic Forces for use in fighting ISIS in the end wound up in ISIS’s arsenal
The analysis presented by the Swiss-based CAR, which took three years to trace almost 40,000 individual arms captured across the theater of war with ISIS, found no evidence to support the claim that Obama armed ISIS.
The origins of the pernicious claim that Obama intentionally armed ISIS are hard to separate from the general fever swamp of right-wing conspiracy theories, which have long claimed to prove that President Obama has at-best divided loyalties between the United States and his “secret Muslim” heritage. These theories no doubt receive new life each time they are repeated by President Trump and those in his administration.
Matters were clearly complicated by the presence of CIA training programs such as Timber Sycamore. From the outside looking in, it must be said, these sorts of programs seem rife for abuse, and it’s no surprise an outside observer might assume nefarious motivations. In the end, however, there is more smoke than fire—the Obama administration introduced advanced arms and weapons into Syria, but did so in an effort to arm pro-democracy rebels.