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| Iraq |
| Are Saddam-era soldiers secretly behind the rise of Islamic State? |
| 2015-08-10 |
| [Jpost] 'ISIS top brass is Iraqi army's former best and brightest." The Associated Press piece by Hamza Hendawi and Qassim Abdul-Zahra informs us that the "experience" these officers bring to Islamic State (IS, also ISIS or ISIL) help provide it discipline and military prowess. The evidence provided by the authors was that army officers of the current Iraqi government had blamed their inability to stop IS on the presence of these Saddam military experts. Ali Omran, who now serves in Iraq's 5th division, claimed that an old artillery major he knew was serving with the Islamists now. The article claimed Saud Mohsen Hassan, who also goes by the names Abu Mutazz, Abu Muslim al-Turkmani and Fadel al-Hayali, was a Saddam-era major and now is the IS "second in command." Four of nine members of the IS military council were Saddam-era officers. Seven of 12 IS provinces even has governors who served in the Ba'ath army. In total there might be as many as 100- 160 Saddam-era soldiers in the IS ranks, according to the report. A short review of the "evidence" = unsupported statements by various Iraqi "experts", and its coverage by western press ...LET'S PAUSE and digest all this. 140 or so men who served under Saddam are thought to play a role in middle or senior ranks of IS. Three Saddam-era officers ended up in the top six ranks of IS. Here we find Abu Ayman al-Iraqi, a former colonel in the air defense, Haji Bakr and Abu Ahmed al-Alwani, whose real name is Waleed Jassem al-Alwani, a former Saddam-era soldier. When one considers how large Saddam's army was, it would be surprising if IS didn't have a plethora of former Saddam-era soldiers. Just the elite units in Saddam's disbanded army included 30,000 commandos, tens of thousands of Republican Guard and trained "fedayeen," or guerrilla fighters who were supposed to lead the insurgency. Saddam's elites were Sunnis, precisely the people disaffected under Nuri al-Maliki's Shi'ite-led government. But what was this "formidable" military experience they brought to help IS? If they had fought in the Iran- Iraq war they would today be in their fifties or older. Most of these men came of age when Saddam's army was withering on the vine in the 1990s, and they spent 10 years supposedly unemployed from 2003 to 2013, when they decided to secretly become the backbone of IS? Why had they been such dismal insurgents for those 10 years, only then suddenly finding their stride? The truth is that a story of a Ba'athist hidden hand has been packaged and provided by sources in Iraq and Syria, primarily those who support the Iraqi government, are connected to its army or support the Shi'ite militias, in order to excuse the abject failure of the Iraqi central government; "Saddam is back, please help us, it's not our fault." Other sources have little credibility and are passed off by journalists as if they give some sort of real evidence. The Iraqi army, that received hundreds of millions of dollars in equipment and training from the US, melted away in 2014. It surrendered thousands of US armored vehicles and Humvees to IS. So we are to believe that a few Saddam-era colonels, majors and captains, artillery officers and air defense intelligence honchos swept aside thousands of vehicles, literally whole divisions, in their 2014 offensive? The same men who were so incompetent under Saddam? What is a Saddam-era "air defense colonel"? What air defense? His air defense achieved nothing. Saddam's intelligence services were good, but what does that have to do with IS ability to destroy the Iraqi army and withstand the bludgeoning of Iranian-backed Shi'ite militias? IS is a formidable fighting force in a sense, because its enemies are often so worthless. IS emerged in Iraq and Syria because of a backbone of Sunni supporters who were disenfranchised or disillusioned by the insurgency against Maliki and Syrian President Bashar Assad. When it came up against Kurdish fighters, after initial gains, it was defeated. The Kurds complained that their real problem fighting IS was lack of armored vehicles and anti-armor weapons, because ISIS had stolen so much American equipment. In small-unit battles IS was not superior to Kurdish peshmerga militia, who had learned their tactics fighting Saddam. My personal view is that ISIS crisis been deliberately inflated by the "West" to justify rapprochement with Iran |
| Posted by:g(r)omgoru |
| #8 Excellent post. Thank you very much! jf |
| Posted by: borgboy 2015-08-10 16:26 |
| #7 Also, ISIL has spent most of its time attacking Sunni areas in Iraq and Kurdish areas near the border. Almost as if they're Iraq and Iran's way of ethnically cleansing the Kurds and Sunnis without having to take the blame for it. |
| Posted by: Thing From Snowy Mountain 2015-08-10 15:32 |
| #6 Now that I've read the article instead of the title, I have to say I halfway disagree. I think ISIS has been inflated by Syria and Iraq. The Iraqi government basically starved the army in the Sunni and Kurd areas for supplies, and then "surrendered" vehicles to ISIS. Stop and think: if you want to get away from ISIS, are you going to leave your vehicle, with a full tank of gas, the keys in the ignition, and the engine running, and then run away on foot in the desert? |
| Posted by: Thing From Snowy Mountain 2015-08-10 15:28 |
| #5 My personal view is that ISIS crisis been deliberately inflated by the "West" to justify rapprochement with Iran You're giving Obama and the feckless Europeans way too much credit. |
| Posted by: jvalentour 2015-08-10 09:10 |
| #4 Now, the riveting new book, "Courting Disaster", How the CIA Kept America Safe”(Regnery), has been published. Here is an excerpt: "Just before dawn on March 1, 2003, two dozen heavily armed Pakistani tactical assault forces move in and surround a safe house in Rawalpindi. A few hours earlier they had received a text message from an informant inside the house. It read: "I am with KSM." Bursting in, they find the disheveled mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, in his bedroom. He is taken into custody. In the safe house, they find a treasure trove of computers, documents, cell phones and other valuable "pocket litter." Once in custody, KSM is defiant. He refuses to answer questions, informing his captors that he will tell them everything when he gets to America and sees his lawyer. But KSM is not taken to America to see a lawyer Instead he is taken to a secret CIA "black site" in an undisclosed location. Upon arrival, KSM finds himself in the complete control of Americans. He does not know where he is, how long he will be there, or what his fate will be. Despite his circumstances, KSM still refuses to talk. He spews contempt at his interrogators, telling them Americans are weak, lack resilience, and are unable to do what is necessary to prevent the terrorists from succeeding in their goals. He has trained to resist interrogation. When he is asked for information about future attacks, he tells his questioners scornfully: "Soon, you will know." It becomes clear he will not reveal the information using traditional interrogation techniques. So he undergoes a series of "enhanced interrogation techniques" approved for use only on the most high-value detainees. The techniques include water-boarding. He begins telling his CIA debriefers about active al Qaeda plots to launch attacks against the United States and other Western targets. He holds classes for CIA officials, using a chalkboard to draw a picture of al Qaeda's operating structure, financing, communications, and logistics. He identifies al Qaeda travel routes and safe havens, and helps intelligence officers make sense of documents and computer records seized in terrorist raids. He identifies voices in intercepted telephone calls, and helps officials understand the meaning of coded terrorist communications. He provides information that helps our intelligence community capture other high-ranking terrorists. KSM's questioning, and that of other captured terrorists, produces more than 6,000 intelligence reports, which are shared across the intelligence community, as well as with our allies across the world. In one of these reports, KSM describes in detail the revisions he made to his failed 1994-1995 plan known as the "Bojinka plot" to blow up a dozen airplanes carrying some 4,000 passengers over the Pacific Ocean. Years later, an observant CIA officer notices the activities of a cell being followed by British authorities appear to match KSM's description of his plans for a Bojinka-style attack. In an operation that involves unprecedented intelligence cooperation between our countries, British officials proceed to unravel the plot. On the night of Aug. 9, 2006 they launch a series of raids in a northeast London suburb that lead to the arrest of two dozen al Qaeda terrorist suspects. They find a USB thumb-drive in the pocket of one of the men with security details for Heathrow airport, and information on seven Trans -Atlantic flights that were scheduled to take off within hours of each other: • United Airlines Flight 931 to San Francisco departing at 2:15 PM • Air Canada Flight 849 to Toronto departing at 3:00 PM • Air Canada Flight 865 to Montreal departing at 3:15 PM • United Airlines Flight 959 to Chicago departing at 3:40 PM • United Airlines Flight 925 to Washington departing at 4:20 PM • American Airlines Flight 131 to New York departing at 4:35 PM • American Airlines Flight 91 to Chicago departing at 4:50 PM They seize bomb-making equipment and hydrogen peroxide to make liquid explosives. And they find the chilling martyrdom videos the suicide bombers had prepared. Today, if you asked an average person on the street what they know about the 2006 airlines plot, most would not be able to tell you much. Few Americans are aware of the fact al Qaeda had planned to mark the fifth anniversary of 9/11 with an attack of similar scope and magnitude. And still fewer realize the terrorists' true intentions in this plot were uncovered thanks to critical information obtained through the interrogation of the man who conceived it: Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. This is only one of the many attacks stopped with the help of the CIA interrogation program established by the Bush Administration in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. In addition to helping break up these specific terrorist cells and plots, CIA questioning provided our intelligence community with an unparalleled body of information about al Qaeda Until the program was temporarily suspended in 2006, intelligence officials say, well over half of the information our government had about al Qaeda; how it operates, how it moves money, how it communicates, how it recruits operatives, how it picks targets, how it plans and carries out attacks-came from the interrogation of terrorists in CIA custody. Former CIA Director George Tenet has declared: "I know this program has saved lives. I know we've disrupted plots. I know this program alone is worth more than what the FBI, the Central Intelligence Agency, and the National Security Agency put together have been able to tell us." Former CIA Director Mike Hayden has said: "The facts of the case are that the use of these techniques against these terrorists made us safer. It really did work." Even Barack Obama's Director of National Intelligence, Dennis Blair, has acknowledged: "High-value information came from interrogations in which those methods were used and provided a deeper understanding of the al Qaeda organization that was attacking this country." Leon Panetta, Obama's CIA Director, has said: "Important information was gathered from these detainees. It provided information that was acted upon." John Brennan, Obama's Homeland Security Advisor, when asked in an interview if enhanced-interrogation techniques were necessary to keep America safe, replied: "Would the U. S. be handicapped if the CIA was not, in fact, able to carry out these types of detention and debriefing activities, I would say yes." On Jan. 22, 2009, President Obama issued Executive Order 13491, closing the CIA program and directing that, henceforth, all interrogations by U. S. personnel must follow the techniques contained in the Army Field Manual. The morning of the announcement, Mike Hayden was still in his post as CIA Director, He called White House Counsel Greg Craig and told him bluntly: "You didn't ask, but this is the CIA officially non-concurring". The president went ahead anyway, over ruling the objections of the agency. A few months later, on April 16, 2009, President Obama ordered the release of four Justice Department memos that described in detail the techniques used to interrogate KSM and other high-value terrorists. This time, not just Hayden (who was now retired) but five CIA directors-including Obama's own director, Leon Panetta objected. George Tenet called to urge against the memos' release. So did Porter Goss. So did John Deutch. Hayden says: "You had CIA directors in a continuous unbroken stream to 1995 calling saying,'Don't do this.'" In addition to objections from the men who led the agency for a collective 14 years, the President also heard objections from the agency's covert field operatives. A few weeks earlier, Panetta had arranged for the eight top officials of the Clandestine Service to meet with the President. It was highly unusual for these clandestine officers to visit the Oval Office, and they used the opportunity to warn the President that releasing the memos would put agency operatives at risk. The President reportedly listened respectfully-and then ignored their advice. With these actions, Barack Obama arguably did more damage to America's national security in his first 100 days of office than any President in American history. |
| Posted by: Besoeker 2015-08-10 08:55 |
| #3 |
| Posted by: 2015-08-10 08:40 |
| #2 I didn't think this was remotely secret. |
| Posted by: Thing From Snowy Mountain 2015-08-10 08:37 |
| #1 So, the "JV" team is now composed of experts? |
| Posted by: ed in texas 2015-08-10 08:27 |