How 2 shadowy ISIS commanders designed their Iraq campaign - McClatchy DC News - The Sa... - 1 views
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The attack in Mosul wasn’t particularly surprising, according to Wameed, an Iraqi soldier who’d been assigned to the city’s main highway that night. It began June 9 with suicide bombers in cars and machine gun fire directed at checkpoints leading to the main thoroughfares of Iraq’s second largest city.
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“All checkpoints were being attacked from all sides, and not just from Daash,” he said. “Then our commanders turned off their mobile phones. We knew this was big. . . . There were just 20 of us on the highway. What could we do alone? We ran.”In the following days as much as half the Iraqi army drew the same conclusion and effectively disbanded; by some accounts less than half of the army remains combat effective. Despite its 10 to 1 numerical advantage, the army fled.
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It was one of biggest collapses of a conventional military in modern times. It also said much about the evolution of ISIS, which until the capture of Mosul and its blitzkrieg-like advance across northern and central Iraq, had been known to the world largely as a terrorist organization that had used car bombs to fight the United States in Iraq and adopted even more brutal tactics when it moved to Syria to battle the government of President Bashar Assad.In the conquest of Mosul, however, ISIS unveiled itself as a conventional fighting force with clear tactical and strategic goals _ and the patience to execute them. Its announcement Sunday that it was establishing an Islamic caliphate has taken virtually everyone in the region by surprise _ except for perhaps two men.Those would be Abu Bakr al Baghdadi, who took over the leadership of the group in 2010, and a shadowy former intelligence officer from the toppled regime of Saddam Hussein who’s known only by a pseudonym, Hajj Bakr.Assembling a coherent picture of how ISIS executed its transformation is something U.S. intelligence officials will be striving to do in coming weeks as they examine what happened to the U.S.-trained Iraqi army.
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But interviews with a wide range of people _ including a former British military officer with ties to Saddam-era Iraqi officers, activists with ties to ISIS, and an intelligence officer for the Kurdish peshmerga militia _ provide an imperfect but consistent picture of how ISIS became the most powerful and effective non-state military organization on the planet, with access to billions of dollars in military hardware, territory that includes millions of residents, and something few jihadist groups have ever had: a coherent strategy for establishing an Islamic state. The story of ISIS’s transformation begins, according to these accounts, with a decision Baghdadi made to put Hajj Bakr in charge of reorganizing the group’s leadership.