No worries - asking questions is how we all learn!

The US is very often blamed for various terrorist groups in the Middle East, but generally with tenuous chains linking the US. The US absolutely does a lot of fucked-up shit in foreign policy, but I’ve heard us blamed for everything from Al-Qaeda to ISIS to the Taliban - none of which hold any serious connection to US support.

Al-Qaeda is sometimes blamed on us because it did get its start during the Soviet-Afghan War - but it was funded by the Saudis and the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood. For that matter, it didn’t become anti-US until the US stationed troops in Saudi Arabia, at invitation of the Saudi government, no less, during the First Gulf War defending Kuwait (again, an objective that the Saudi government supported and was part of the coalition for). ‘Infidels’ on holy soil was too much for the religious fanatics who made up the group, and turned Al-Qaeda from neutral to hostile to the US. Guess they were craving a new enemy as the ‘godless’ Soviets declined and fell.

ISIS is, somewhat ironically, one of the stronger links to US action - but formed in opposition to US behavior, rather than by US support. The proto-form of ISIS was in the splintered religious guerillas of the insurgency in Iraq after the US invasion, loosely affiliated with Al-Qaeda. It was a minor faction, however, until the Syrian Civil War, which garnered it more influence across the Iraq border into Syria, which became its base of operations, aligned with other Islamist rebels and mostly free from oversight or suppression in the chaos of the civil war. As the Syrian Civil War turned into a brutal stalemate, ISIS split from Al-Qaeda as being insufficiently radical for their tastes, and launched an offensive back into Iraq, where the unprepared and corrupt Iraqi military leadership abandoned large numbers of fighting men and materiel to the lightning offensive.

The Taliban was formed by Pakistani Pashtuns in opposition to the originally American-supported Mujahedeen (albeit with the caveat that America had lost interest in supporting the Mujahedeen as soon as the Soviets were expelled - not without reason, either, considering that they were largely a disunited group of warlords each with their own motivations). The Pakistani ISI (their equivalent of the CIA, and astoundingly even less moral and cooperative with the civilian and military government than the CIA is with the USA, if such a thing can be imagined) sought a catspaw they could use to extract economic concessions from Afghanistan with and prevent Afghanistan from pursuing a coherent national policy that could challenge Pakistan, or Pakistan’s hold on Pashtun tribal lands, which was a recurring call from Afghan nationalists, but not anti-nationalist Afghan Islamists.