Posted on 04/12/2015 12:07:37 PM PDT by Citizen Zed
In an April 4 article, Liz Sly of the Washington Post Beirut Bureau, with 15 years' experience in the Mid-East including covering the war in Iraq, discusses the origins and leadership of ISIS.
The rise of the Islamic State or ISIS has caught many in the West off guard with little knowledge about the organization. We know that ISIS has been exceptionally brutal, showing no mercy or morality in how it has treated civilians as well as prisoners. The first question to be asked in understanding this enemy is "Who runs ISIS?"
The simple answer is that ISIS is run by a bunch of Islamic extremists. A closer look at the leaders of ISIS shows it is being run by former Iraqi military officers and officials. These were the military personnel who were fired by L. Paul Bremer when he headed the Coalition Occupation Authority after the U.S. invasion of Iraq. The Iraqi military was sent home without pay or pensions ... but they were allowed to keep their weapons. Most of these officers were members of Saddam Hussein's Baathist political party.
While Hussein was very much a secularist, the party had begun to move toward Islamic fundamentalism. An example is that beheadings became more common punishment in the two years before the U.S. invasion. After the fired Iraqi military became a backbone of the Iraqi insurgency, and with no military or police, Iraq quickly descended into anarchy.
Abu Hamza, a former local ISIS official who defected to Turkey, is quoted in the article as saying, "All the decision-makers (in ISIS) 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, but the Iraqis themselves don't fight. They put the foreign fighters on the front lines." He went on to say, "In Syria, local emirs are typically shadowed by a deputy who is Iraqi and makes the real decisions."
This is verified by analysts in Syria and Iraq, and it is theorized that the former Baathist officers are using ISIS only as a means for them to take control of Iraq. To dismiss ISIS as simply a bunch of sadistic religious nuts is to underestimate ISIS as an enemy.
Jack Dragoni attended Boston College and served in the U.S. Army in Berlin and Vietnam. He lives in Chaffee, Missouri.
In Iraq Bush disbanded the Army and froze out the baathists. The insurgency was the result.
Lemme guess... Satan?
KGB?
Val Jarrett?
And yet the place ISIS was born was Syria, and Syria remains its HQ.
This is an important point because the lefty talking points always blame the Iraq War and Bush for ISIS. But ISIS was born not in Iraq, but in Syria in the civil war that Obama encouraged.
BINGO!
islam = satan’s death cult
allah = satan
You sum it up exactly!
I'm not blaming Bush for ISIS; however,
If the civil war in Syria started in 2011....how is the Syrian civil war responsible for the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria responsible for the Islamic State of Iraq (the name PRIOR to adding Syria) declaring itself on 17 October 2006 with Ar Ramadi Iraq as the capitol of the caliphate..............?
Did somebody loan them a DeLorean or something?
What on earth are you smoking?
Lots of things were "declared" in the Iraq War. But there never was an actual Islamic State in Iraq in any real sense. AQI/the future ISIS controlled no territory in Iraq after the Surge/Anbar Awakening and existed only as an underground terrorist cell. It would have remained such had it not been for the Syrian Civil War. ISIS as we know it today was born only when Syria became destabilized enough for Al-Baghdadi to move there in 2012 and establish, for the first time, an actual physical state with its capital at Raqqa.
Because actually, they DID own ground in 2006. Part of the reason for the surge was because there were areas that Coalition Forces (read USMC/USA/IA/IP) didn't go into. Which was the Thaylat, Sharikah, and Sophia Districts of Ar Ramadi. Al Anbar University in the Tamin District was also hotbed of activity and ripe recruiting ground.
On 17 Oct 2006, they held a parade down 17th Street in broad daylight passed the 17th Street Security Station (Marine Forward Operating Base). Which was in the center of Ramadi. Live footage made CNN/AL Jazeera et al, with the FOB in the background - I'd say that capability demonstrates "owning" the ground.
They also had Thar Thar, Saddamiyah, and several other areas where there was limited/no CF presence. They also held presence out west toward Ar Rutbah, and in the tribal areas going northwest toward Al Qaim with some some presence in Hadithah, Anah, Rawah.
In early 2007, The Iraqi Police in Ar Ramadi did clearing operations from the Joint Coordination Center (aka Snake Pit) to the Ar Ramadi Hospital in the east. Much of the ISIZ/JTJ folks took off and went out to areas more remote in Iraq.
By late 2007/early 2008 they were coming back and establishing more of a presence.......only US mil wasn't doing as many kinetic operations and much of the IA/IP operations were tipped off beforehand.
For a bit, it became a back and forth between the IA/IP and the ISIZ.
Two days before I left in May of 2007, there were two simultaneous SVBIEDs at a cluster of kabob/food stands in 5 Kilo that caused over 20 IP casualties - they were loading the bodies in pick up trucks and taking them to Bravo (Ramadi) Surgical on Camp Ramadi.
My girlfriend at the time was an Army medic that responded to the K-call; those attacks were something like the 12th in 2 weeks; albeit the level of activity wasn't as high as it had been late 2006/earlier in 2007.
During and after the surge, places like Thar Thar and the hinterlands to the west/east/south of Ar Ramadi were still areas where ISIZ fighters remained and controlled unmolested - they no kidding OWNED the ground - to say otherwise is a lie.
Then it just became a waiting game until the drawdown and eventual removal of US troops.
Chaos in Syria, where many ISIZ had also been hiding out and building connections further enabled them to seize military equipment, money, and also to conduct more recruiting.
The leadership, infrastructure, caches, and expertise all existed and was well established before 2011.
There ya go. I was going to post, “Obama runs ISIS.” He helped create it, funded it, and even armed it at Benghazi.
What level of the onion do you want?
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