“IS, right. This terrorist group is an unacceptable disease that must, at all costs, be excised from the corpus of the world.” St. Vincent nodded. They were in his bailiwick now. No one within the Alchemists knew as much about IS as he did. “Seven years, that’s how long Mobius has been in gestation. Our aim, as I said, was to take control of the oil fields in northern Iraq. To understand completely we must go back in time to before this country’s invasion of Iraq. There were weapons of mass destruction inside Iraq—the reports were correct, but Saddam knew nothing about them. They were brought in by our people, controlled by our people masquerading as Saddam’s elite forces for the benefit of reconnaissance drone flights. The moment Cheney, Wolfowitz, and our talking head neo-cons pushed Bush into believing he had no other choice but to invade Iraq, we spirited them out of the country.

“The result you know. Our people played on the arrogance of the high-level neo-cons so that they never gave a thought to what must actually happen in the aftermath. They assumed a nice tidy pro-Western government would be set up by the grateful populace, which Democratic elections would ensure. And the enormous cost of the war would be paid for by Iraqi oil. That was a pipe dream. None of it happened, as you all know. The chaos that resulted was just what we had envisioned, just what we wanted.”

St. Vincent paused to open a bottle of water and take several sips before continuing. “But, frankly, I had concerns that the chaos of tribal warfare would not reach the Kurds, would not threaten their territory. My fear was that they would not solicit our help.

“Then everything changed. My backdoor agreement with Universal Security Associates bore fruit. One of King Cutler’s foreign assets told him about a newly forming group known as ISIS, Islamic State in Iraq and al-Sham, now simply known as Islamic State. This interested me greatly for two reasons: first, ISIS’s stated aim was to absorb Iraq, Syria, Jordan, the Levant, Palestine, and Israel into a radical Islamic version of the ancient land known as al-Sham. Second, ISIS was too radical even for al-Qaeda. Even at that time, its leaders had distanced the organization from ISIS.” St. Vincent shook his head. “Still, I had no way of knowing the steps ISIS would take in order to achieve a goal that, frankly, appeared far beyond their grasp.