Posted on 04/05/2015 1:40:12 AM PDT by Libloather
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.
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
Love how the paragraph is framed to imply US troops were withdrawn in 2007...
So how do they know they’re from Iraq and former officers if they don’t know who they are and the leader is masked???
Officers, no matter the military, have s certain air to them.
And regional dialects mark people, just like a new yorker sitting in Georgia would stick out like a squawking parrot when they spoke?
One possibility to base from at least.
They were, in the context meant. US troops remained in the country, but we abandoned those who had fought alongside us in the Awakening to the not-so-tender mercies of their sectarian rivals.
The alternative, of course, would have been to set up Iraq as a de facto colony and impose our own ideals of religious freedom and non-discrimination on all parties.
There was then and is now effectively zero support in America for such a policy. Don't support it myself.
But let's not kid ourselves that we didn't abandon those who fought with us in Anbar, as we abandoned the Kurds, the Montagnards, the men of the Bay of Pigs, and many others over the last 70 years.
People who believe the US won't abandon them if it becomes convenient are idiots. Sadly, that applies to all administrations, not just Obama's.
I didn’t see Iran mentioned anywhere.
Summary- Bush’s fault.
It is usually a democrat decision to abandon the people....
The Kurds and Shia were abandoned by Bush 1 after the Gulf War. We encouraged them to rebel against Saddam, then we left them to deal with him without our support.
GWB abandoned the Sunnis who fought alongside us in the Awakening to the Shia in control of the Iraqi government.
Sadly, it’s a bipartisan tradition.
Was Hussein’s Iraq really drifting towards Islamic Fundamentalism before the 2003 invasion?
How old was that guy during Gulf War I?
I quite agree the Shia of Iraq are not all wonderful people. In fact, neither are the Sunni of Iraq. They were the main support of Saddam and now of ISIS.
But my point was simply that we encouraged the Shia (and Kurds) to rebel against Saddam in 1990 because it was convenient for us. Then we walked away, with the minor exception of the no-fly zones. Does anybody really think they would have rebelled as they did if they’d known we were going to leave Saddam in power to come after them? I have no idea what, if any, promises were made to them.
Would the Sunnis have fought alongside us in the Awakening if they’d known we’d leave them to the Shia?
My point is not that we should have remained and propped up any of these groups. That could only really be done by some sort of neo-colonialism, which of course would create its own, probably worse, problems. We’d almost certainly wind up in conflict with the very people we went in to protect.
My point is actually that we shouldn’t make promises we have no intention of keeping. When the Shia and Kurds rebelled we should have publicly notified them we weren’t planning to hang around and support them. Same with the Sunni a decade or two later.
That would have been the honorable thing to do.
No democratic country has honor. If only because group A gets voted out and group B feels no obligation to honor group A’s commitments.
BTW, I left out the biggest single betrayal by America in the 20th. South Vietnam. That being a prime example. Democrats felt zero obligation to honor commitments made by Nixon. So they didn’t.
Nahh. Saddam was actually quite liberal, in the original meaning of the term, to women, Christians and other religious minorities, etc.
He was an authoritarian, not a totalitarian.
IOW, he went after people who were or who he thought might become, a threat to his rule. He didn’t go after, for the most part, people because of who they were.
A very evil man, but what has replaced him is not necessarily a huge improvement.
I find this sad, because one of my axioms used to be: There’s no such thing as a bad reason to overthrow a dictator.
Well, turns out there is. What replaces him might very well be worse.
I’ve thought for a long time what you just posted. And that going into Iraq was a big mistake. But this article says Iraq was drifting away from secularism towards fundamentalism. If that’s true, there is more of a justification for the 2003 invasion.
bump
Only if we’re going to invade every country moving towards fundamentalism. Including Turkey. And Pakistan, which has nukes.
Good point. I continue to believe the Iraq invasion was a blunder. I was just wondering out loud if this article is presenting new and possibly mitigating information.
The invasion obviously shook things loose in the Middle East.
That’s not necessarily and entirely a bad thing. The existing order was much like a pressure cooker with a plugged relief valve. It’s only a question of when it will blow, not whether.
The article claims Saddam was just as bad as ISIS. And ISIS is not launching scuds at Israel. Or invading Kuwait, just yet. They are repeating Saddam’s war with Iran though. Think we now know why Obama and McCain were arming the group that later became ISIS.
Saddam was not as bad as ISIS. At least not for Christians, Yazidis, women, etc.
There were no public crucifixions or burnings under Saddam. Women were not enslaved and sold to the highest bidder. Though if you pissed him or a member of his government off sufficiently I have no doubt similar things happened in private.
Those are Saddam’s men in charge of ISIS. You do remember his two sons right ?
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.