Thank you for posting this link. Fascinating background. .look forward to the next installment.
Part Two: Spies Like ISIS
How ISIS Picks Its Suicide Bombers
They come from Russia, France, even New Jersey to end their lives for an Islamic State. But an ISIS defector reveals that Saddam's old spies are the ones holding all the triggers.
The ISIS leadership, after all, is mainly Iraqi, and if there is a political, as opposed to religious, objective underlying all its activity, it is the restoration of Sunni power in Baghdad.
All fighters from the Caucasus or former Soviet republics tend to be referred to by the catch-all word Chechens. And while Abu Omar al-Shishani, an ethnic Chechen from Georgia, is one of the most recognized (and overhyped) battlefield commanders in ISIS, Chechens are running their own outfits with very little supervision or command-and-control from Raqqa.
The entire apparatus was honeycombed with semi-autonomous fiefs, often tasked with keeping track of what the others were up to. A general intelligence department reported to the security emir for a region who was in charge of deputy emirs for individual districts. A head of secret spy cells and an intelligence service and information manager for the district reported to each of these deputy emirs. The spy cells at the local level reported to the district emir's deputy. The goal was to have everyone keeping an eye on everyone else.
This naturally puts one in mind of the KGB or Stasi hardly a coincidence given that many of the top-ranking ISIS officials are former members of Saddam Hussein's mukhabarat and therefore past pupils of Warsaw Pact security organs. In fact, the man who constructed the ISIS franchise in Syria, the now-deceased Haji Bakr, had once been a colonel in Saddam's Air Defense Intelligence Service
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/11/16/how-isis-picks-its-suicide-bombers.html