If these Islamic maniacs didn't have these seasoned officers directing them, they would just be another ragtag army and would have been defeated quite a while back.
ISIS top command dominated by ex-officers in Saddam Hussein's army
Saturday, August 8, 2015 8:13pm
Associated Press (2009)
U.S. soldiers stroll past two bronze busts of former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein in Baghdad, Iraq in 2009.
BAGHDAD — The Islamic State group's top command is dominated by former officers from Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein's military and intelligence agencies, according to senior Iraqi officers on the front lines of the fight against the group, as well as top intelligence officials, including the chief of a key counterterrorism intelligence unit.
The experience they bring is a major reason for the group's victories in overrunning large parts of Iraq and Syria. The officers gave ISIS the organization and discipline it needed to weld together jihadi fighters drawn from across the globe, integrating terror tactics like suicide bombings with military operations.
Patrick Skinner, a former CIA case officer who has served in Iraq, said Hussein-era military and intelligence officers were a "necessary ingredient" in ISIS's stunning battlefield successes last year, accounting for its transformation from a "terrorist organization to a proto-state."
"Their military successes last year were not terrorist, they were military successes," said Skinner, now director of special projects for the Soufan Group, a private strategic intelligence services firm.
How officers from Hussein's mainly secular regime came to infuse one of the most radical Islamic extremist groups in the world is explained by a confluence of events over the past 20 years — including a Hussein-era program that tolerated Islamic hard-liners in the military in the 1990s, anger among Sunni officers when the United States disbanded Hussein's military in 2003, and the evolution of the Sunni insurgency that ensued.
Continue reading at:
ISIS top command dominated by ex-officers in Saddam Hussein s army Tampa Bay Times?
ISIS top command dominated by ex-officers in Saddam Hussein's army
- Associated Press
Saturday, August 8, 2015 8:13pm
Associated Press (2009)
U.S. soldiers stroll past two bronze busts of former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein in Baghdad, Iraq in 2009.
BAGHDAD — The Islamic State group's top command is dominated by former officers from Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein's military and intelligence agencies, according to senior Iraqi officers on the front lines of the fight against the group, as well as top intelligence officials, including the chief of a key counterterrorism intelligence unit.
The experience they bring is a major reason for the group's victories in overrunning large parts of Iraq and Syria. The officers gave ISIS the organization and discipline it needed to weld together jihadi fighters drawn from across the globe, integrating terror tactics like suicide bombings with military operations.
Patrick Skinner, a former CIA case officer who has served in Iraq, said Hussein-era military and intelligence officers were a "necessary ingredient" in ISIS's stunning battlefield successes last year, accounting for its transformation from a "terrorist organization to a proto-state."
"Their military successes last year were not terrorist, they were military successes," said Skinner, now director of special projects for the Soufan Group, a private strategic intelligence services firm.
How officers from Hussein's mainly secular regime came to infuse one of the most radical Islamic extremist groups in the world is explained by a confluence of events over the past 20 years — including a Hussein-era program that tolerated Islamic hard-liners in the military in the 1990s, anger among Sunni officers when the United States disbanded Hussein's military in 2003, and the evolution of the Sunni insurgency that ensued.
Continue reading at:
ISIS top command dominated by ex-officers in Saddam Hussein s army Tampa Bay Times?
