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Al-Qaida chief Ayman al-Zawahiri The Coordinator 2015 Part 19-140-Caliphate-Iraq

C: Never leave a partially defeated enemy in one way or the other back on the battlefields.

The former Iraqi officers were probably not reconcilable, “but it was the labelling of them as irrelevant that was the mistake.” C: “The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting.” “To know your Enemy, you must become your Enemy.” “To win one hundred victories in one hundred battles is not the acme of skill. To subdue the enemy without fighting is the acme of skill ― Sun Tzu, The Art of War

The stories below give the impression and arguments that others” are likely leading the Daesh effort in Iraq, and to a lesser extend in Syria. This brings the question of what will happen if the Jihadist driven fighters come to full realisation that they are used for other purposes. And apocalyptic visions alone are not enough to capture cities and take over countries. As Abu Hamza said; the foreign fighters he served alongside were “good Muslims,” he said. But he is less sure about the Iraqi leaders. “They pray and they fast and you can’t be an emir without praying, but inside I don’t think they believe it much,” “The Baathists are using Daesh. They don’t care about Baathism or even Saddam he said. “They just want power. They are used to being in power, and they want it back.” His account, and those of others who have lived with or fought against the Islamic State over the past two years, underscore the pervasive role played by members of Iraq’s former Baathist army in an organisation more typically associated with flamboyant foreign jihadists and the gruesome videos in which they star. While the presence and strength of former Baathist officers in Daesh/IS appears contradictory it reflects the influence of the Jaysh Rijal al-Tariq al-Naqshbandi (JRTN), a group of Saddam’s former officers and Sunni Arab tribes that formed in reaction to the post-2003 Iraqi order. Additionally if so how strong is Daesh really in facts. And does the AQSL know what is happening and therefore their, for this battlefield main focus and efforts lays in Syria, the predicted location of the battle of the end of times?

C: With a focus on Iraq there are other theatres that could or already have reached similar conditions.

“A lot of people think of the Islamic State as a terrorist group, and it’s not useful.” “It is a terrorist group, but it is more than that. It is a homegrown Iraqi insurgency, and it is organic to Iraq.” “The Americans bear the biggest responsibility. When they dismantled the army what did they expect those men to do?” “They were out in the cold with nothing to do and there was only one way out for them to put food on the table.” --- Hassan Hassan, a Dubai-based analyst and co-author of the book “ISIS: Inside the Army of Terror.”

The Islamic State (IS) in Iraq and Syria may effectively employ radical Salafist doctrine to mobilize core believers and foreign fighters, but it relies on complex networks led by former Iraqi Baathist officers to operate and control its so-called caliphate. ---Denise Natali

Zarqawi kept the former Baathists at a distance, because he distrusted their secular outlook, according to Hashim, the professor. It was under the watch of the current Islamic State leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, that the recruitment of former Baathist officers became a deliberate strategy, according to analysts and former officers.

Although the presence and strength of former Baathist officers is unlikely to revive pan-Arab nationalism or secular Baathist ideology, it has implications for a countering IS strategy and eventually stabilizing Iraq.

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Alongside or within IS’ aim to devise a "pure" Islamic society is a Baathist plan to run a meticulously calculating state able to monopolize power, control territory and eradicate potential threats through brutality and terror.

Baathist influences are evident in the nature of IS terror operations — extensive security and spy networks, hierarchical bureaucracies, battlefield tactics and elaborate financial and logistical networks — similar to those used by former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and his Baathist circles for 35 years in Iraq.

The Baathist and Sunni Arab nationalist element within IS means that the terrorist network will unlikely be fully defeated anytime soon and that coalition military strategy has to be implemented alongside an effective political solution in Iraq — and Syria.

But most of the Baathists who actually joined the Islamic State are now likely to have themselves become radicalised, either in prison or on the battlefield, he said. “Even if you didn't walk in with that vision you might walk out with it, after five years of hard fighting,” said Fishman, of the New America Foundation. “They have been through brutal things that are going to shape their vision in a really dramatic way.”

A comprehensive countering IS strategy needs to address IS beyond "sacred values" and focus on Sunni Arab grievances and Iraqi nationalist beliefs embedded in this group.

Targeting IS beyond its core believers also means understanding Baathist networks, structures and tactics; the role of territories and resources for Sunni Arab nationalist groups; the disputed territories issue between Kurds and Arabs; and effects of Iranian influences on Sunni Arab behavior.

These issues will likely drive former Baathists and radical Sunni Arab nationalists in Iraq even after IS has been degraded, leaving the potential for IS successor groups to emerge.

Documents uncovered in Aleppo show that Haji Bakr, Samir Abd Muhammad al-Khlifawi, a former colonel in the intelligence service of Saddam Hussein’s air defence force, drew up the ‘blueprint for caliphate’ after being jailed by the US authorities, according to Der Spiegel

Documents uncovered in Syria reveal meticulous planning for the group’s structure and organisation, the report says, with the 31 pages of handwritten charts, lists and schedules amounting to a blueprint for the establishment of a caliphate in Syria.

“What Bakr put on paper, page by page, with carefully outlined boxes for individual responsibilities, was nothing less than a blueprint for a takeover,”

However, the article drastically oversells the importance of the Baathists within the Islamic State’s hierarchy, treating Caliph AbuBakr Al Baghdadi, and the tens of thousands who have flocked to Islamic State’s banner as merely pawns of a clever Iraqi intelligence con game:

This new cache of documents is worth considering for all they can tell us about HOW the Islamic State is able to do what it does. It would be a drastic mistake to think that they unlock any clues as to the WHY of Islamic State.

As the Center for Security Policy has noted repeatedly, the reality is that much of Islamic State’s behavior IS explained by examining matters of Islamic Law, as they related to jihad violence, relations with non-Muslims, Islamic State’s extortion of Christians and tax collection from Muslims (Jizya and Zakat), it’s treatment of women captives, etc.

Simply put, The “Islamic State as puppet for Ex-Baathists” theory fails to properly explain a whole host of Islamic State behaviors, which CAN be understood within the context of an Islamic terrorist organization, with roots in Al Qaeda and the Muslim Brotherhood with an end goal of reestablishing the Caliphate globally.

Brig. Gen. Hassan Dulaimi, a former intelligence officer in the old Iraqi army who was recruited back into service by U.S. troops in 2006, as a police commander in Ramadi, the

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capital of the long restive province of Anbar. Within months of the American departure, he was dismissed, he said, losing his salary and his pension, along with 124 other officers who had served alongside the Americans. “The crisis of ISIS didn’t happen by chance,” Dulaimi said in an interview in Baghdad, using an acronym for the Islamic State. “It was the result of an accumulation of problems created by the Americans and the [Iraqi] government.” The people in charge of military operations in the Islamic State were the best officers in the former Iraqi army, and that is why the Islamic State beats us in intelligence and on the battlefield.”

The Islamic State’s Baathist roots. Author: Denise Natali Posted April 24, 2015 The Islamic State (IS) in Iraq and Syria may effectively employ radical Salafist doctrine to mobilize core believers and foreign fighters, but it relies on complex networks led by former Iraqi Baathist officers to operate and control its so-called caliphate. Baathist leadership in IS, most recently noted in Christoph Reuter’s riveting article in Spiegel International, reinforces the political nature of IS and its Sunni Arab, Iraqi nationalist roots. Alongside or within IS’ aim to devise a "pure" Islamic society is a Baathist plan to run a meticulously calculating state able to monopolize power, control territory and eradicate potential threats through brutality and terror. Baathist influences are evident in the nature of IS terror operations — extensive security and spy networks, hierarchical bureaucracies, battlefield tactics and elaborate financial and logistical networks — similar to those used by former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and his Baathist circles for 35 years in Iraq.

How could Iraqi Baathists, known for their secular ideology, find common ground with radical Salafist groups? While the presence and strength of former Baathist officers in IS appears contradictory it reflects the influence of the Jaysh Rijal al-Tariq al-Naqshbandi (JRTN), a group of Saddam’s former officers and Sunni Arab tribes that formed in reaction to the post-2003 Iraqi order. Led by Izzat al-Douri, Saddam’s former vice president and deputy chairman of the Iraqi Revolutionary Command Council (proclaimed to be killed in a recent battle in Tikrit), the JRTN represents a fusion of Islam, Sunni Arab identity and Iraqi nationalism.

This fusion can be traced to the early 1990s, when Saddam commenced his Islamic faith campaign to consolidate Baath Party power. The campaign reflected geopolitical challenges and Iraqi security priorities after the 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran, the Iran-Iraq War (1980-1989) and Saddam’s attempts to control the "Zoroastrian" Iran and Persian-Shiite threat. It involved the Baath Party’s direct control of all religious policies and institutions in Iraq, creating Islamic structures, recruiting networks of spies and Islamic activists to work for the regime, and embedding Baath Party structures, members and security organs into religious circles.

By the late 1990s a "religious deep state" had emerged in Iraq, whereby most Sunni Islamic leaders and institutions that were created, co-opted and/or controlled by the regime were now inside the state. One of these institutions was the Islamic University of Baghdad, attended by Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, current leader of the so-called IS caliphate. Admission into the university demanded, at minimum, close ties to Baathist leaders. The Baathist-Salafist nexus was reinforced by the 13-year international sanctions regime against Iraq (1990-2003) and Baathist manipulation of the sanctions-smuggling economy. These conditions helped break down the middle class and enhanced a sense of relative deprivation and alienation in which religious radicalism and militant Iraqi Arab nationalism could breed.

The Baathist-Salafist nexus did not necessarily entail a Baathist ideological conversion. Even though Saddam forged alliances with Islamic groups and advocated greater piety in Iraq, he did not became “a born-again Muslim” as some have argued. Nor did Baathists become core believers or develop a shared identity with Salafist groups. Rather,

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most continued to instrumentalize Islam for their own individual political and party interests. Many remained tied to secular ideas, opposed Iran and Persian Shiites, and loathed the Salafists. They turned to influential local Sunni Arab Islamic leaders and groups while different Islamic strains — Salafists, Sufis and the Muslim Brotherhood — allied and opposed each other as well as distinct Baathist officials.

The post-Saddam Iraqi state allowed the Baathist-Salafist nexus to thrive. It was driven by a shared sense of Sunni Arab disfranchisement within the entire post-Saddam order, reactions against the "foreign occupation" and Baathism’s deep roots and clandestine networks among Sunni Arab populations. Baathist officers also became dominant in Iraq’s successive insurgencies. Despite foreign fighters who initially led al-Qaeda in Iraq under Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, former Sunni Arab Iraqi Baathists gradually assumed leadership positions as foreigners were killed, captured and/or relegated to mid-level and foot soldier positions.Baathist influence continued in ISIS and IS, even if the group's character changed over time. By late 2014, 18 of 19 members of the IS cabinet were Sunni Arab Iraqis with one Iraqi Turcoman, and included former Baathist military officers, former Baathist security officers or Sunni Arab tribes from western Iraq. High-level IS commanders also represent former high-ranking Baathist officers in Iraq as well as Syria. Confiscated documents of former Iraqi Baathist officer "Haji Bakr," an IS leader recently killed in Aleppo, indicate his detailed plans to create a caliphate based on meticulously calculated spy and security networks (although no Quran could be found in the house).

Indeed, since the IS takeover of Mosul in June 2014, many Sunni Arabs have defected from IS. Former Baathist officers and Sunni tribes that previously looked to IS as a trusted security force for Sunni Arab regions have reacted to IS brutality against Christians and minorities, as well as against key Sunni Arab groups. They are now seeking to create their own Sunni National Guard, or are cooperating with Iraqi Security Forces, Shiite militias and Kurdish peshmerga to expel IS from its safe havens. Still, IS remains embedded in part of the Sunni Arab community, which may not necessarily support the terrorist group but is still reticent to fight due to ongoing distrust of the Iraqi government and fear of retaliation and retribution. In fact, Sunni Arabs now regard themselves as the biggest victims of IS — stuck between a radicalized terrorist group led by some of their own and a Shiite-led government and Shiite   militias they do not trust .

Although the presence and strength of former Baathist officers is unlikely to revive pan-Arab nationalism or secular Baathist ideology, it has implications for a countering IS strategy and eventually stabilizing Iraq. The Baathist and Sunni Arab nationalist element within IS means that the terrorist network will unlikely be fully defeated anytime soon and that coalition military strategy has to be implemented alongside an effective political solution in Iraq — and Syria. A comprehensive countering IS strategy needs to address IS beyond "sacred values" and focus on Sunni Arab grievances and Iraqi nationalist beliefs embedded in this group. Targeting IS beyond its core believers also means understanding Baathist networks, structures and tactics; the role of territories and resources for Sunni Arab nationalist groups; the disputed territories issue between Kurds and Arabs; and effects of Iranian influences on Sunni Arab behavior. These issues will likely drive former Baathists and radical Sunni Arab nationalists in Iraq even after IS has been degraded, leaving the potential for IS successor groups to emerge.

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Former Saddam Hussein spy masterminded the rise of Isis, says report Documents uncovered in Aleppo show that Haji Bakr drew up the ‘blueprint for caliphate’ after being jailed by the US authorities, according to Der Spiegel. IS fighters on the Iraq-Syria border. Der Spiegel claims to have uncovered documents showing how the establishment of the group was carefully planned and put into practice. Photograph: Medyan Dairieh/Zuma Press/Corbis Reuters Monday 20 April 2015

One of Saddam Hussein’s former intelligence officers masterminded Islamic State’s takeover of northern Syria after becoming embittered by the US-led invasion of Iraq, according to a report by the German magazine Der Spiegel Documents uncovered in Syria reveal meticulous planning for the group’s structure and organisation, the report says, with the 31 pages of handwritten charts, lists and schedules amounting to a blueprint for the establishment of a caliphate in Syria. The documents were the work of a man identified by the magazine as Samir Abd Muhammad al-Khlifawi, a former colonel in the intelligence service of Saddam Hussein’s air defence force, who went by the pseudonym Haji Bakr, Spiegel says. The files suggest that the takeover of northern Syria was part of a meticulous plan overseen by Haji Bakr using techniques – including surveillance, espionage, murder and kidnapping – honed in the security apparatus of Saddam Hussein. Bakr was “bitter and unemployed” after the US authorities in Iraq disbanded the army by decree in 2003, the article says. Between 2006 to 2008 he was reportedly in US detention facilities, including Abu Ghraib prison. The Iraqi national was reportedly killed in a firefight with Syrian rebels in January 2014, but not before he had helped secure swathes of Syria, which in turn strengthened Islamic State’s position in neighbouring Iraq. “What Bakr put on paper, page by page, with carefully outlined boxes for individual responsibilities, was nothing less than a blueprint for a takeover,” the story by Spiegel reporter Christoph Reuter says.

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“It was not a manifesto of faith, but a technically precise plan for an ‘Islamic Intelligence State’ – a caliphate run by an organisation that resembled East Germany’s notorious Stasi domestic intelligence agency.” Between 2006 to 2008, Bakr was reportedly in US detention facilities, including Abu Ghraib prison. In 2010, however, Bakr and a small group of former Iraqi intelligence officers made another former US detainee, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the official leader of Islamic State, with the goal of giving the group a “religious face”, the report says. Two years later, the magazine says, Bakr travelled to northern Syria to oversee his takeover plan, choosing to launch it with a collection of foreign fighters that included novice militants from Saudi Arabia, Tunisia and Europe alongside battle-tested Chechens and Uzbeks. Iraqi journalist Hisham al-Hashimi, whose cousin served with Bakr, describes the former officer as a nationalist rather than an Islamist. The report argues that the secret to Islamic State’s success lies in its combination of opposites – the fanatical beliefs of one group and the strategic calculations of another, led by Bakr. Spiegel said it had obtained the papers after lengthy negotiations with rebels in the Syrian city of Aleppo, who had seized them when Islamic State was forced to abandon its headquarters there in early 2014.

What Ex-Baathists Within IS Do and Don’t Signify; Kyle Shideler, April 20, 2015: The interwebs are abuzz with discussion over the significance of Der Spiegel’s scoop regarding the role of Former Iraqi military intelligence officer Samir Abd Muhammad al-Khlifawi (AKA Haji Bakr), and what is reported to be pages of documents showing the plan Haji Bakr put together for Islamic State operations in Syria and the establishment of an IS intelligence service which involved both conducting Intelligence Preparation of the Battlefield (IPB) for IS fighters, including infiltrating fighters and gathering intelligence on likely resisters, and establishing a counterintelligence function within the group’s fighters. This is all good information, and does much to explain how Islamic State operates on a tactical level, and so for that reason the journalists at Der Spiegel should be applauded for their work. It also helps to explain how Islamic State has relied on Ex-Baathists with military and intelligence experience to provide the high degree of technical expertise the Islamic State has generated thus far.

However, the article drastically oversells the importance of the Baathists within the Islamic State’s hierarchy, treating Caliph AbuBakr AlBaghdadi, and the tens of thousands who have flocked to Islamic State’s banner as merely pawns of a clever Iraqi intelligence con game: But apocalyptic visions alone are not enough to capture cities and take over countries. Terrorists don’t establish countries. And a criminal cartel is unlikely to generate enthusiasm among supporters around the world, who are willing to give up their lives to travel to the “Caliphate” and potentially their deaths. IS has little in common with predecessors like al-Qaida aside from its jihadist label. There is essentially nothing religious in its actions, its strategic planning, its unscrupulous changing of alliances and its precisely implemented propaganda narratives. Faith, even in its most extreme form, is just one of many means to an end. Islamic State’s only constant maxim is the expansion of power at any price.As the Center for Security Policy has noted repeatedly, the reality is that much of Islamic State’s behavior IS explained by examining matters of Islamic Law, as they related to jihad violence, relations with non-Muslims, Islamic State’s extortion of Christians and tax collection from Muslims (Jizya and Zakat), it’s treatment of women captives, etc.

Simply put, The “Islamic State as puppet for Ex-Baathists” theory fails to properly explain a whole host of Islamic State behaviors, which CAN be understood within the context of an Islamic terrorist organization, with roots in Al Qaeda and the Muslim Brotherhood with an end goal of reestablishing the Caliphate globally.

“The Ex-Baathist theory” does not explain, for example, the amount of time and effort expended by the group in its feud with Al Qaeda, including its efforts to “pick off” groups

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formerly linked to Al-Qaeda. Accepting the oath of loyalty from Boko Haram, and urging jihadists to travel to West Africa to fight, does nothing for Saddam Hussein’s former military commanders whose goals are presumably Iraq-focused. Neither does IS’ efforts to supplant the Taliban in the AF/PAK region with a “Khorasan Province.”

It does not explain the insistence on burning a Jordanian pilot, or beheading Coptic Christians in Libya, when those acts have clearly drawn more support for efforts to defeat them and could easily have been avoided. It doesn’t explain Islamic State’s infighting with Ex-Baathists within the Army of the Men of the Naqshbandi order (JRTN), against which Islamic State conducted a purge in early April. It does not explain how Islamic State’s efforts at establishing the Caliphate with Iraq as the centerpiece actual precede the supposed Iraqi mastermind. This new cache of documents is worth considering for all they can tell us about HOW the Islamic State is able to do what it does. It would be a drastic mistake to think that they unlock any clues as to the WHY of Islamic State.

The hidden hand behind the Islamic State militants? Saddam Hussein’s.CONFRONTING THE ‘CALIPHATE’| This is part of an occasional series about the militant group Islamic State and its violent collision with the United States and others intent on halting the group’s rapid rise. By Liz Sly April 4 SANLIURFA, Turkey — When Abu Hamza, a former Syrian rebel, agreed to join the Islamic State, he did so assuming he would become a part of the group’s promised Islamist utopia, which has lured foreign jihadists from around the globe. Instead, he found himself being supervised by an Iraqi emir and receiving orders from shadowy Iraqis who moved in and out of the battlefield in Syria. When Abu Hamza disagreed with fellow commanders at an Islamic State meeting last year, he said, he was placed under arrest on the orders of a masked Iraqi man who had sat silently through the proceedings, listening and taking notes. Abu Hamza, who became the group’s ruler in a small community in Syria, never discovered the Iraqis’ real identities, which were cloaked by code names or simply not revealed.

All of the men, however, were former Iraqi officers who had served under Saddam Hussein, including the masked man, who had once worked for an Iraqi intelligence agency and now belonged to the Islamic State’s own shadowy security service, he said. His account, and those of others who have lived with or fought against the Islamic State over the past two years, underscore the pervasive role played by members of Iraq’s former Baathist army in an organization more typically associated with flamboyant foreign jihadists and the gruesome videos in which they star. Even with the influx of thousands of foreign fighters, almost all of the leaders of the Islamic State are former Iraqi officers, including the members of its shadowy military and security committees, and the majority of its emirs and princes, according to Iraqis, Syrians and analysts who study the group. They have brought to the organization the military expertise and some of the agendas of the former Baathists, as well as the smuggling networks developed to avoid sanctions in the 1990s and which now facilitate the Islamic State’s illicit oil trading.

In Syria, local “emirs” are typically shadowed by a deputy who is Iraqi and makes the real decisions, said Abu Hamza, who fled to Turkey last summer after growing disillusioned with the group. He uses a pseudonym because he fears for his safety. “All the decision makers are Iraqi, and most of them are former Iraqi officers. The Iraqi officers are in command, and they make the tactics and the battle plans,” he said. “But the Iraqis themselves don’t fight. They put the foreign fighters on the front lines.” The public profile of the foreign jihadists frequently obscures the Islamic State’s roots in the bloody recent history of Iraq, its brutal excesses as much a symptom as a cause of the country’s woes. The raw cruelty of Hussein’s Baathist regime, the disbandment of the Iraqi army after the U.S.-led invasion in 2003, the subsequent insurgency and the marginalization of Sunni Iraqis by the Shiite-dominated

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government all are intertwined with the Islamic State’s ascent, said Hassan Hassan, a Dubai-based analyst and co-author of the book “ISIS: Inside the Army of Terror.” “A lot of people think of the Islamic State as a terrorist group, and it’s not useful,” Hassan said. “It is a terrorist group, but it is more than that. It is a homegrown Iraqi insurgency, and it is organic to Iraq.”

The de-Baathification law promulgated by L. Paul Bremer, Iraq’s American ruler in 2003, has long been identified as one of the contributors to the original insurgency. At a stroke, 400,000 members of the defeated Iraqi army were barred from government employment, denied pensions — and also allowed to keep their guns. The U.S. military failed in the early years to recognize the role the disbanded Baathist officers would eventually come to play in the extremist group, eclipsing the foreign fighters whom American officials preferred to blame, said Col. Joel Rayburn, a senior fellow at the National Defense University who served as an adviser to top generals in Iraq and describes the links between Baathists and the Islamic State in his book, “Iraq After America.” The U.S. military always knew that the former Baathist officers had joined other insurgent groups and were giving tactical support to the Al Qaeda in Iraq affiliate, the precursor to the Islamic State, he said. But American officials didn’t anticipate that they would become not only adjuncts to al-Qaeda, but core members of the jihadist group. “We might have been able to come up with ways to head off the fusion, the completion of the Iraqization process,” he said. The former officers were probably not reconcilable, “but it was the labeling of them as irrelevant that was the mistake.” Under the leadership of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the Islamic State’s self-proclaimed caliph, the former officers became more than relevant. They were instrumental in the group’s rebirth from the defeats inflicted on insurgents by the U.S. military, which is now back in Iraq bombing many of the same men it had already fought twice before.

At first glance, the secularist dogma of Hussein’s tyrannical Baath Party seems at odds with the Islamic State’s harsh interpretation of the Islamic laws it purports to uphold. But the two creeds broadly overlap in several regards, especially their reliance on fear to secure the submission of the people under the group’s rule. Two decades ago, the elaborate and cruel forms of torture perpetrated by Hussein dominated the discourse about Iraq, much as the Islamic State’s harsh punishments do today. Like the Islamic State, Hussein’s Baath Party also regarded itself as a transnational movement, forming branches in countries across the Middle East and running training camps for foreign volunteers from across the Arab world. By the time U.S. troops invaded in 2003, Hussein had begun to tilt toward a more religious approach to governance, making the transition from Baathist to Islamist ideology less improbable for some of the disenfranchised Iraqi officers, said Ahmed S. Hashim, a professor who is researching the ties at Singapore’s Nanyang Technological University. With the launch of the Iraqi dictator’s Faith Campaign in 1994, strict Islamic precepts were introduced. The words “God is Great” were inscribed on the Iraqi flag. Amputations were decreed for theft. Former Baathist officers recall friends who suddenly stopped drinking, started praying and embraced the deeply conservative form of Islam known as Salafism in the years preceding the U.S. invasion. In the last two years of Hussein’s rule, a campaign of beheadings, mainly targeting women suspected of prostitution and carried out by his elite Fedayeen unit, killed more than 200 people, human rights groups reported at the time.

The brutality deployed by the Islamic State today recalls the bloodthirstiness of some of those Fedayeen, said Hassan. Promotional videos from the Hussein era include scenes resembling those broadcast today by the Islamic State, showing the Fedayeen training, marching in black masks, practicing the art of decapitation and in one instance eating a live dog. Some of those Baathists became early recruits to the al-Qaeda affiliate established by Abu Musab al-

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Zarqawi, the Palestinian Jordanian fighter who is regarded as the progenitor of the current Islamic State, said Hisham al Hashemi, an Iraqi analyst who advises the Iraqi government and has relatives who served in the Iraqi military under Hussein. Other Iraqis were radicalized at Camp Bucca, the American prison in southern Iraq where thousands of ordinary citizens were detained and intermingled with jihadists.

Zarqawi kept the former Baathists at a distance, because he distrusted their secular outlook, according to Hashim, the professor. It was under the watch of the current Islamic State leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, that the recruitment of former Baathist officers became a deliberate strategy, according to analysts and former officers. Tasked with rebuilding the greatly weakened insurgent organization after 2010, Baghdadi embarked on an aggressive campaign to woo the former officers, drawing on the vast pool of men who had either remained unemployed or had joined other, less extremist insurgent groups. Some of them had fought against al-Qaeda after changing sides and aligning with the American-backed Awakening movement during the surge of troops in 2007. When U.S. troops withdrew and the Iraqi government abandoned the Awakening fighters, the Islamic State was the only surviving option for those who felt betrayed and wanted to change sides again, said Brian Fishman, who researched the group in Iraq for West Point’s Combating Terrorism Center and is now a fellow with the New America Foundation. Baghdadi’s effort was further aided by a new round of de-Baathification launched after U.S. troops left in 2011 by then Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, who set about firing even those officers who had been rehabilitated by the U.S. military. Among them was Brig. Gen. Hassan Dulaimi, a former intelligence officer in the old Iraqi army who was recruited back into service by U.S. troops in 2006, as a police commander in Ramadi, the capital of the long restive province of Anbar. Within months of the American departure, he was dismissed, he said, losing his salary and his pension, along with 124 other officers who had served alongside the Americans. “The crisis of ISIS didn’t happen by chance,” Dulaimi said in an interview in Baghdad, using an acronym for the Islamic State. “It was the result of an accumulation of problems created by the Americans and the [Iraqi] government.” He cited the case of a close friend, a former intelligence officer in Baghdad who was fired in 2003 and struggled for many years to make a living. He now serves as the Islamic State’s wali, or leader, in the Anbar town of Hit, Dulaimi said. “I last saw him in 2009. He complained that he was very poor. He is an old friend, so I gave him some money,” he recalled. “He was fixable. If someone had given him a job and a salary, he wouldn’t have joined the Islamic State. “There are hundreds, thousands like him,” he added. “The people in charge of military operations in the Islamic State were the best officers in the former Iraqi army, and that is why the Islamic State beats us in intelligence and on the battlefield.”

The Islamic State’s seizure of territory was also smoothed by the Maliki government’s broader persecution of the Sunni minority, which intensified after U.S. troops withdrew and left many ordinary Sunnis willing to welcome the extremists as an alternative to the often brutal Iraqi security forces. But it was the influx of Baathist officers into the ranks of the Islamic State itself that propelled its fresh military victories, said Hashem. By 2013, Baghdadi had surrounded himself with former officers, who oversaw the Islamic State’s expansion in Syria and drove the offensives in Iraq. Some of Baghdadi’s closest aides, including Abu Muslim al-Turkmani, his deputy in Iraq, and Abu Ayman al-Iraqi, one of his top military commanders in Syria, both of them former Iraqi officers, have since reportedly been killed — though Dulaimi suspects that many feign their own deaths in order to evade detection, making its current leadership difficult to discern. Any gaps however are filled by former officers, sustaining the Iraqi influence at the group’s core, even as its ranks are swelled by arriving

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foreigners, said Hassan. Fearing infiltration and spies, the leadership insulates itself from the foreign fighters and the regular Syrian and Iraqi fighters through elaborate networks of intermediaries frequently drawn from the old Iraqi intelligence agencies, he said.

“They introduced the Baathist mind-set of secrecy as well as its skills,” he said. The masked man who ordered the detention of Abu Hamza was one of a group of feared security officers who circulate within the Islamic State, monitoring its members for signs of dissent, the Syrian recalled. “They are the eyes and ears of Daesh’s security, and they are very powerful,” he said, using an Arabic acronym for the Islamic State. Abu Hamza was released from jail after agreeing to fall into line with the other commanders, he said. But the experience contributed to his disillusionment with the group. The foreign fighters he served alongside were “good Muslims,” he said. But he is less sure about the Iraqi leaders. “They pray and they fast and you can’t be an emir without praying, but inside I don’t think they believe it much,” he said. “The Baathists are using Daesh. They don’t care about Baathism or even Saddam.

“They just want power. They are used to being in power, and they want it back.” ‘They want to run Iraq’ Whether the former Baathists adhere to the Islamic State’s ideology is a matter of debate. Hashim suspects many of them do not. “One could still argue that it’s a tactical alliance,” he said. “A lot of these Baathists are not interested in ISIS running Iraq. They want to run Iraq. A lot of them view the jihadists with this Leninist mind-set that they’re useful idiots who we can use to rise to power.” Rayburn questions whether even some of the foreign volunteers realize the extent to which they are being drawn into Iraq’s morass. Some of the fiercest battles being waged today in Iraq are for control of communities and neighborhoods that have been hotly contested among Iraqis for years, before the extremists appeared. “You have fighters coming from across the globe to fight these local political battles that the global jihad can’t possibly have a stake in.”

Former Baathist officers who served alongside some of those now fighting with the Islamic State believe it is the other way around. Rather than the Baathists using the jihadists to return to power, it is the jihadists who have exploited the desperation of the disbanded officers, according to a former general who commanded Iraqi troops during the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1990 and the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003. He spoke on the condition of anonymity because he fears for his safety in Irbil, the capital of the northern Iraqi region of Kurdistan, where he now resides. The ex-Baathists could be lured away, if they were offered alternatives and hope for the future, he said. “The Americans bear the biggest responsibility. When they dismantled the army what did they expect those men to do?” he asked. “They were out in the cold with nothing to do and there was only one way out for them to put food on the table.” When U.S. officials demobilized the Baathist army, “they didn’t de-Baathify people’s minds, they just took away their jobs,” he said. There are former Baathists with other insurgent groups who might be persuaded to switch sides, said Hassan, citing the example of the Army of the Men of the Naqshbandi Order, usually referred to by its Arabic acronym JRTN. They welcomed the Islamic State during its sweep through northern Iraq last summer, but the groups have since fallen out. But most of the Baathists who actually joined the Islamic State are now likely to have themselves become radicalized, either in prison or on the battlefield, he said. “Even if you didn’t walk in with that vision you might walk out with it, after five years of hard fighting,” said Fishman, of the New America Foundation. “They have been through brutal things that are going to shape their vision in a really dramatic way.” Correction: An earlier version of this story misstated the name of Ahmed S. Hashim, a professor at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. This version is correct.

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How Saddam Hussein's former military officers and spies are controlling Isis

Isis defectors say many of Saddam Hussein's former army officers and security forces are leading Isis Isis defectors say the deposed Iraqi dictator's former officers and security agents are leading the group in Iraq and Syria. Liz Sly Sunday 05 April 2015 When Abu Hamza, a former Syrian rebel, agreed to join Isis, he did so assuming he would become a part of the group’s promised Islamist utopia, which has lured foreign jihadists from around the globe. Instead, he found himself being supervised by an Iraqi emir and receiving orders from shadowy Iraqis who moved in and out of the battlefield in Syria. When Abu Hamza disagreed with fellow commanders at an "Islamic State" meeting last year, he said, he was placed under arrest on the orders of a masked Iraqi man who had sat silently through the proceedings, listening and taking notes.

Abu Hamza, who became the group’s ruler in a small community in Syria, never discovered the Iraqis’ real identities, which were cloaked by code names or simply not revealed. All of the men, however, were former Iraqi officers who had served under Saddam Hussein, including the masked man, who had once worked for an Iraqi intelligence agency and now belonged to the Islamic State’s own shadowy security service, he said. His account, and those of others who

have lived with or fought against the Islamic State over the past two years, underscore the pervasive role played by members of Iraq’s former Baathist army in an organisation more typically associated with flamboyant foreign jihadists and the gruesome videos in which they star.

Even with the influx of thousands of foreign fighters, almost all of the leaders of the Islamic State are former Iraqi officers, including the members of its shadowy military and security committees, and the majority of its emirs and princes, according to Iraqis, Syrians and analysts who study the group.They have brought to the organisation the military expertise and some of the agendas of the former Baathists, as well as the smuggling networks developed to avoid sanctions in the 1990s and which now facilitate the Islamic State’s illicit oil trading.

In Syria, local “emirs” are typically shadowed by a deputy who is Iraqi and makes the real decisions, said Abu Hamza, who fled to Turkey last summer after growing disillusioned with the group. He uses a pseudonym because he fears for his safety.

“All the decision makers are Iraqi, and most of them are former Iraqi officers. The Iraqi officers are in command, and they make the tactics and the battle plans,” he said. “But the Iraqis themselves don’t fight. They put the foreign fighters on the front lines.” The public profile of the foreign jihadists frequently obscures the Islamic State’s roots in the bloody recent history of Iraq, its brutal excesses as much a symptom as a cause of the country’s woes.

The raw cruelty of Hussein’s Baathist regime, the disbandment of the Iraqi army after the US-led invasion in 2003, the subsequent insurgency and the marginalization of Sunni Iraqis by the Shia-dominated government all are intertwined with the Islamic State’s ascent, said Hassan Hassan, a Dubai-based analyst and co-author of the book Isis: Inside the Army of Terror. “A lot of people think of the Islamic State as a terrorist group, and it’s not useful,” Hassan said. “It is a terrorist group, but it is more than that. It is a homegrown Iraqi insurgency, and it is organic to Iraq.”

The de-Baathification law promulgated by L. Paul Bremer, Iraq’s American ruler in 2003, has long been identified as one of the contributors to the original insurgency. At a

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stroke, 400,000 members of the defeated Iraqi army were barred from government employment, denied pensions — and also allowed to keep their guns. Saddam Hussein's Ba'ath party was banned after the 2003 US invasion and members banned from public office and education, removing thousands of people from their jobs The US military failed in the early years to recognise the role the disbanded Baathist officers would eventually come to play in the extremist group, eclipsing the foreign fighters whom American officials preferred to blame, said Colonel Joel Rayburn, a senior fellow at the National Defense University who served as an adviser to top generals in Iraq and describes the links between Baathists and the Islamic State in his book, Iraq After America.The US military always knew that the former Baathist officers had joined other insurgent groups and were giving tactical support to the Al Qaeda in Iraq affiliate, the precursor to the Islamic State, he said. But American officials didn't anticipate that they would become not only adjuncts to al-Qaeda, but core members of the jihadist group.“We might have been able to come up with ways to head off the fusion, the completion of the Iraqisation process,” he said. The former officers were probably not reconcilable, “but it was the labeling of them as irrelevant that was the mistake.”

Under the leadership of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the Islamic State’s self-proclaimed caliph, the former officers became more than relevant. They were instrumental in the group’s rebirth from the defeats inflicted on insurgents by the US military, which is now back in Iraq bombing many of the same men it had already fought twice before. Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi is one of the few senior Isis officials not to be a former Iraqi official

At first glance, the secularist dogma of Hussein’s tyrannical Baath Party seems at odds with the Islamic State’s harsh interpretation of the Islamic laws it purports to uphold. But the two creeds broadly overlap in several regards, especially their reliance on fear to secure the submission of the people under the group’s rule. Two decades ago, the elaborate and cruel forms of torture perpetrated by Hussein dominated the discourse about Iraq, much as the Islamic State’s harsh punishments do today.Like the Islamic State, Hussein’s Baath Party also regarded itself as a transnational movement, forming branches in countries across the Middle East and running training camps for foreign volunteers from across the Arab world.

By the time US troops invaded in 2003, Hussein had begun to tilt toward a more religious approach to governance, making the transition from Baathist to Islamist ideology less improbable for some of the disenfranchised Iraqi officers, said Ahmed S. Hashim, a professor who is researching the ties at Singapore’s Nanyang Technological University. With the launch of the Iraqi dictator’s Faith Campaign in 1994, strict Islamic precepts were introduced. The words “God is Great” were inscribed on the Iraqi flag. Amputations were decreed for theft. Former Baathist officers recall friends who suddenly stopped drinking,

started praying and embraced the deeply conservative form of Islam known as Salafism in the years preceding the US invasion.In the last two years of Hussein’s rule, a campaign of beheadings, mainly targeting women suspected of prostitution and carried out by his elite Fedayeen unit, killed more than 200 people, human rights groups reported at the time.The brutality deployed by the Islamic State today recalls the bloodthirstiness of some of those Fedayeen, said Hassan.

Promotional videos from the Hussein era include scenes resembling those broadcast today by

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the Islamic State, showing the Fedayeen training, marching in black masks, practicing the art of decapitation and in one instance eating a live dog.Some of those Baathists became early recruits to the al-Qaeda affiliate established by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the Palestinian Jordanian fighter who is regarded as the progenitor of the current Islamic State, said Hisham al Hashemi, an Iraqi analyst who advises the Iraqi government and has relatives who served in the Iraqi military under Hussein. Other Iraqis were radicalised at Camp Bucca, the American prison in southern Iraq where thousands of ordinary citizens were detained and intermingled with jihadists. Abu Musab al-Zarqawi recruited Baathists Zarqawi kept the former Baathists at a distance, because he distrusted their secular outlook, according to Hashim, the professor. It was under the watch of the current Islamic State leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, that the recruitment of former Baathist officers became a deliberate strategy, according to analysts and former officers.Tasked with rebuilding the greatly weakened insurgent organization after 2010, Baghdadi embarked on an aggressive campaign to woo the former officers, drawing on the vast pool of men who had either remained unemployed or had joined other, less extremist insurgent groups. Some of them had fought against al-Qaeda after changing sides and aligning with the American-backed Awakening movement during the surge of troops in 2007. When US troops withdrew and the Iraqi government abandoned the Awakening fighters, the Islamic State was the only surviving option for those who felt betrayed and wanted to change sides again, said Brian Fishman, who researched the group in Iraq for West Point’s Combating Terrorism Center and is now a fellow with the New America Foundation. Baghdadi’s effort was further aided by a new round of de-Baathification launched after US troops left in 2011 by then Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, who set about firing even those officers who had been rehabilitated by the American military.

Among them was Brigadier General Hassan Dulaimi, a former intelligence officer in the old Iraqi army who was recruited back into service by US troops in 2006, as a police commander in Ramadi, the capital of the long restive province of Anbar. Within months of the American departure, he was dismissed, he said, losing his salary and his pension, along with 124 other officers who had served alongside the Americans. “The crisis of Isis didn't happen by chance,” Dulaimi said in an interview in Baghdad, using an acronym for the Islamic State. “It was the result of an accumulation of problems created by the Americans and the [Iraqi] government.”

He cited the case of a close friend, a former intelligence officer in Baghdad who was fired in 2003 and struggled for many years to make a living. He now serves as the Islamic State’s wali, or leader, in the Anbar town of Hit, Dulaimi said. “I last saw him in 2009. He complained that he was very poor. He is an old friend, so I gave him some money,” he recalled. “He was fixable. If someone had given him a job and a salary, he wouldn't have joined the Islamic State. “There are hundreds, thousands like him,” he added. “The people in charge of military operations in the Islamic State were the best officers in the former Iraqi army, and that is why the Islamic State beats us in intelligence and on the battlefield.”The Islamic State’s seizure of territory was also smoothed by the Maliki government’s broader persecution of the Sunni minority, which intensified after US troops withdrew and left many ordinary Sunnis willing to welcome the extremists as an alternative to the often brutal Iraqi security forces. Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki was accused of persecuting Iraq's Sunni minority But it was the influx of Baathist officers into the ranks of the Islamic State itself that propelled its fresh military victories, said Hashem. By 2013, Baghdadi had surrounded himself with former officers, who oversaw the Islamic State’s expansion in Syria and drove the offensives in Iraq.Some of Baghdadi’s closest aides, including Abu Muslim al-Turkmani, his deputy in Iraq, and Abu Ayman al-Iraqi, one of his top military commanders in Syria, both of them former Iraqi

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officers, have since reportedly been killed — though Dulaimi suspects that many feign their own deaths in order to evade detection, making its current leadership difficult to discern.Any gaps however are filled by former officers, sustaining the Iraqi influence at the group’s core, even as its ranks are swelled by arriving foreigners, said Hassan.Fearing infiltration and spies, the leadership insulates itself from the foreign fighters and the regular Syrian and Iraqi fighters through elaborate networks of intermediaries frequently drawn from the old Iraqi intelligence agencies, he said.

“They introduced the Baathist mind-set of secrecy as well as its skills,” he said.The masked man who ordered the detention of Abu Hamza was one of a group of feared security officers who circulate within the Islamic State, monitoring its members for signs of dissent, the Syrian recalled. “They are the eyes and ears of Daesh’s security, and they are very powerful,” he said, using an Arabic acronym for the Islamic State. Saddam Hussein's former military leaders are operating in the highest levels of Isis Abu Hamza was released from jail after agreeing to fall into line with the other commanders, he said. But the experience contributed to his disillusionment with the group.The foreign fighters he served alongside were “good Muslims,” he said. But he is less sure about the Iraqi leaders. “They pray and they fast and you can’t be an emir without praying, but inside I don’t think they believe it much,” he said. “The Baathists are using Daesh. They don’t care about Baathism or even Saddam. “They just want power. They are used to being in power, and they want it back.” Whether the former Baathists adhere to the Islamic State’s ideology is a matter of debate. Hashim suspects many of them do not. “One could still argue that it’s a tactical alliance,” he said. “A lot of these Baathists are not interested in ISIS running Iraq. They want to run Iraq. A lot of them view the jihadists with this Leninist mind-set that they’re useful idiots who we can use to rise to power.” Rayburn questions whether even some of the foreign volunteers realise the extent to which they are being drawn into Iraq’s morass. Some of the fiercest battles being waged today in Iraq are for control of communities and neighborhoods that have been hotly contested among Iraqis for years, before the extremists appeared.

Former Baathist officers who served alongside some of those now fighting with the Islamic State believe it is the other way around. Rather than the Baathists using the jihadists to return to power, it is the jihadists who have exploited the desperation of the disbanded officers, according to a former general who commanded Iraqi troops during the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1990 and the US invasion of Iraq in 2003. He spoke on the condition of anonymity because he fears for his safety in Irbil, the capital of the northern Iraqi region of Kurdistan, where he now resides.The ex-Baathists could be lured away, if they were offered alternatives and hope for the future, he said. “The Americans bear the biggest responsibility. When they dismantled the army what did they expect those men to do?” he asked. “They were out in the cold with nothing to do and there was only one way out for them to put food on the table.”When US officials demobilised the Baathist army, “they didn't de-Baathify people’s minds, they just took away their jobs,” he said.There are former Baathists with other insurgent groups who might be persuaded to switch sides, said Hassan, citing the example of the Army of the Men of the Naqshbandi Order, usually referred to by its Arabic acronym JRTN. They welcomed the Islamic State during its sweep through northern Iraq last summer, but the groups have since fallen out. But most of the Baathists who actually joined the Islamic State are now likely to have themselves become radicalised, either in prison or on the battlefield, he said. “Even if you didn't walk in with that vision you might walk out with it, after five years of hard fighting,” said Fishman, of the New America Foundation. “They have been through brutal things that are going to shape their vision in a really dramatic way.” Copyright: Washington Post

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