ISIS planned chemical attacks in Europe, new details on weapons program reveal

In the summer of 2014, as his followers were ravaging the cities of northern Iraq, Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi convened a secret meeting with a weapons expert whose unusual skills the terrorist chief was anxious to acquire.

His guest was a small man, barely above 5 feet tall, and he had only recently been freed from a years-long stint in U.S. and Iraqi prisons. But before that, Salih al-Sabawi had been an Iraqi official of some renown: a Russian-trained engineer who had once helped President Saddam Hussein build his extensive arsenal of chemical weapons.

Baghdadi had summoned Sabawi, 52, to offer him a job. If supplied with the right equipment and resources, could he produce the same weapons for the Islamic State? Sabawi’s reply, according to a later intelligence report about the meeting, was yes. He could do that and more.

Thus began what U.S. and Iraqi Kurdish officials describe as a crash effort aimed at building the biggest arsenal of chemical and, potentially, biological weapons ever assembled by a terrorist group. Within six months, under Sabawi’s direction, the Islamic State would manufacture mustard gas, a chemical weapon from the World War I era, as well as bombs and rockets filled with chlorine.

*** New insights also are emerging from a U.N. investigation that is combing through millions of pages of Islamic State records as it seeks evidence of the group’s war crimes. In addition, several current and former U.S. officials in interviews with The Post spoke for the first time in detail about an urgently planned military operation, conducted in 2015 by U.S. Special Operations forces with assistance from Kurdish Peshmerga operatives, to kill Sabawi and crush the weapons program before it reached maturity.

I went back in my brain housing group on the Iraq and Afghanistan campaigns, and settled on three major flaws we made:

1. Strategic. The US failed to re-shape the world in a strategic shaping operation; in that all future trade, treaties, economic deference, military support and diplomatic dealings with the US would be predicated on each country’s national policy and execution to liquidate Wahhab/Salafist Islam with prejudice. As divorce lawyers say, “That is non-negotiable” and that means a new global leadership block would be formed (not the UN). Bush had all the political capital and global sympathy he needed.

2. Operational. COIN 101— the population must do the heavy lifting and weed out the insurgents. The Marine Corps wrote the book on COIN, and we ignored it. The population MUST isolate those that will not pursue or have interest in peace due to their adherence to Salafism, or other cultural constructs preventing peace (Haqqanis in Afghanistan). That means, the populations must be given the incentives to do so— by engaging the religious beliefs themselves. We utterly failed in this psyop.

3. Tactical. Artillery must be brought in range of the enemy, under an ROE reflecting adherents are not innocent civilians. We finally learned this lesson when Trump pushed for a decisive engagement against ISIS in Raqqa IZ. It was reduced to rubble after the M777 howitzers were brought to bear, courtesy of the 26th Marine Expeditionary Unit (the attached guns were from 1st Battalion, 10th Marines). No expensive smart bombs. Cheap high-explosive, and lots of it. It was a magnificent logistical operation that kept those guns fed, 24/7.

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