Republican presidential nominee repeatedly refers to president as ‘Barack Hussein Obama’ and says Hillary Clinton is DAESH (IS, formerly ISIS) co-founder.
Donald Trump escalated his rhetoric against Barack Obama on Wednesday, dubbing the US president as the “founder of Isis”.
The Republican presidential nominee’s comments, made at a rally in Sunrise, Florida, came as Trump continued to face a backlash for hinting a day earlier that his opponent, Hillary Clinton, be assassinated by gun rights supporters.
“ISIS is honoring President Obama,” Trump said of DAESH (IS, formerly ISIS). “He is the founder of ISIS. He founded ISIS. And, I would say the co-founder would be crooked Hillary Clinton.”
Trump’s declaration echoed an attack he made against Clinton last week, also in Florida, in which he said the former secretary of state “should get an award from them as the founder of ISIS”.
Read more: Trump Calls Clinton the ‘Founder of ISIS’
The origins of Isis trace back to the aftermath of the US invasion of Iraq in 2003. The group has been deemed an offshoot of al-Qaida, which carried out the attacks on 11 September 2001. Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the Jordanian militant terrorist viewed as the founder of DAESH, was killed in a US airstrike in Baghdad in 2006.
Although ISIS has expanded rapidly during Obama’s tenure, seizing in particular on the Syrian civil war, the administration has also made gains in its military campaign against the extremist group. US army Lieutenant General Sean MacFarland said on Wednesday an estimated 45,000 fighters linked to Isis had been killed in the two years since the US-led military coalition against the network was launched.
