ISIS was created in the wake of a power vacuum where Malikki, the US's stop gap measure for an Iraqi head of state who was anti- Saddam-Hussein, violently cracked down on a demonstration, which helped propel Iraq into its current violent state.
According to this piece this is where ISIS begins. Well, sort of. The whole reason Iraq exists as it does today is because we, the United States, went in to take out Saddam Hussein with the intent of defanging him and creating a kind of democracy; nation building. Regrettably the president did not heed General Shinseki's advice of going in with a combat force of at least a million men to put the nation under lock down.
The piece ignores the Iranian-Hostage crisis or the 70s and 9/11 as preludes to the Iraq war. Soldiers interviewed in other pieces about Afghanistan and Iraq all say that the natives point to Palestine and Israel as their motivation for hostilities.
Without any of that history, confronting ISIS really doesn't make much sense, much less the efforts of how to tackle ISIS. The piece interviews nearly everyone under the sun except the heads of state and other major players at the executive level. And fails to address Malikki's violent crackdown on demonstrators which led to the current military turmoil in the first place. It also ignores Assad's efforts to push forward a more progressive nation, and how his father's political enemies tried to take advantage of that, and threw Syria into civil war. And then interviews the head of Saudi intelligence who concludes that Assad has to go, when Assad was the one trying to bring Syria into the modern world.
The piece, a Frontline production, didn't look at past Frontline productions to get the history right. Because if you view this, then you might conclude that ISIS was created by Malikki leaving power, and that Assad is responsible for all of the military action taking place in Northern Iraq, Lebanon, and so forth.
But that's not the case.
What the documentary does get right is the chronology of who did what, but it doesn't get right of why in the early stages. It does, however, bring to light some of the political decisions at home here in the US and political pressures of how the executive branch believed the best politically expedient way to handle ISIS. And, like a lot of politically based military decisions, met with utter disaster.
All in all it's an interesting time line of how ISIS has been handled, but it is very poorly when it comes to the history and motivations of who did what and why.
I do not recommend viewing this piece to understand the current turmoil in the middle east. For that look to earlier Frontline documentaries on the Iraq War.
Long, poorly researched, watch at your own risk.