{"id":61282,"date":"2015-08-08T10:51:14","date_gmt":"2015-08-08T14:51:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/valorguardians.com\/blog\/?p=61282"},"modified":"2015-08-08T10:52:28","modified_gmt":"2015-08-08T14:52:28","slug":"saddams-ghost-in-isis","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/?p=61282","title":{"rendered":"Saddam’s ghost in ISIS"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Associated Press<\/a> reports that the ghost of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq is alive and well in the upper echelons of ISIS’ leadership. Of course, it’s Bush’s fault;<\/p>\n

How officers from Saddam’s mainly secular regime came to infuse one of the most radical Islamic extremist groups in the world is explained by a confluence of events over the past 20 years \u2014 including a Saddam-era program that tolerated Islamic hard-liners in the military in the 1990s, anger among Sunni officers when the U.S. disbanded Saddam’s military in 2003, and the evolution of the Sunni insurgency that ensued.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

It looks like the Bush Administration did the right thing by disbanding the Iraqi Army in 2003. In fact, the article opens with the story of how one of Hussein’s generals, Taha Taher al-Ani, now a commander for ISIS, was loading up weapons and ammunition for an insurgency before the Americans even got to Baghdad in 2003. So, disbanding the Army had nothing to do with his decision, did it?<\/p>\n

The Associated Press also blames the US-run prison, Bucca, for introducing these ISIS people to each other;<\/p>\n

The prison was a significant incubator for the Islamic State group, bringing militants like al-Baghdadi [the leader of ISIS] into contact with former Saddam officers, including members of special forces, the elite Republican Guard and the paramilitary force called Fedayeen.<\/p>\n

In Bucca’s Ward 6, al-Baghdadi gave sermons and [al-Baghdadi’s current deputy and a former Saddam-era army major, Saud Mohsen] Hassan emerged as an effective organizer, leading strikes by the prisoners to gain concessions from their American jailers, the intelligence chief said.<\/p>\n

Former Bucca prisoners are now throughout the IS leadership. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Yeah, well, it appears as though we had all of the right people in prison, then. It begs the question “Why are they out now?”<\/p>\n

Saddam-era veterans also serve as “governors” for seven of the 12 “provinces” set up by the Islamic State group in the territory it holds in Iraq, the intelligence chief said.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The article claims that these former officers of Saddam’s bring a measure of tactical expertise to ISIS. I wonder how they figure there is any military expertise to gain from forcing their soldiers into murderous waves against the Iranians, or forcing them to sit like ducks for the air campaign that the US waged against them in 1991 or their full-flight from Baghdad in 2003. Yeah, that’s some kind of expertise they have going there. It doesn’t take expertise to wrest control of towns and villages from unarmed civilians and cowing them into submission by beheading their neighbors in public.<\/p>\n

“IS’s military performance has far exceeded what we expected. The running of battles by the veterans of the Saddam military came as a shock,” a brigadier general in military intelligence told the AP….<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The only experience the Saddam-era leaders have is being shot at…by the Iranians and by the US. ISIS military successes are a result of the terror they inflict on folks, not some magical expertise they learned from Saddam Hussein. ISIS gained prominence in the region because the US left Iraq and refused to take the lead to end the civil war in Syria. ISIS took advantage of that void. Period.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Associated Press reports that the ghost of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq is alive and well in … Saddam’s ghost in ISIS<\/span>Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":28097,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-61282","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-terror-war"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61282","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=61282"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61282\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/28097"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=61282"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=61282"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=61282"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}