Iraq: Out of the desert into Mosul (closed)

[TheCurmudgeon]

More on the Baathist/ISIS connection.

Despite the caveats, @wikibaghdady deserves closer examination—especially at a moment when ISIS’s next moves could lead to a wider conflagration and more carnage. And some of what @wikbaghdady tweeted months ago has already been borne out by facts on the ground. The leaker’s revelations about ISIS’s alliance with Saddam Hussein’s former party, the Baathists, were confirmed by the events of last week, for example. The rapid takeover of Iraqi cities was not a solo effort; the campaign relied on a cultivated network of partnerships between Sunni groups including, critically, ISIS’s pact with their ideological enemies, the Baathists—a repeated theme in @wikibaghdady’s tweets.

If ex-Baathist and other members of the previous regime are in on the game than managing the space will be much easier.

It also means that Maliki's government and military may be fully infultrated and unable to make any moves without ISIS knowing about it.

Also, a few days old, but interesting:

Two days before Mosul fell to the Islamic insurgent group Isis (the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant), Iraqi commanders stood eyeballing its most trusted messenger. The man, known within the extremist group as Abu Hajjar, had finally cracked after a fortnight of interrogation and given up the head of Isis's military council.

"He said to us, 'you don't realise what you have done'," an intelligence official recalled. "Then he said: 'Mosul will be an inferno this week'.'

Several hours later, the man he had served as a courier and been attempting to protect, Abdulrahman al-Bilawi, lay dead in his hideout near Mosul. From the home of the dead man and the captive, Iraqi forces hoovered up more than 160 computer flash sticks which contained the most detailed information yet known about the terror group.

The treasure trove included names and noms de guerre of all foreign fighters, senior leaders and their code words, initials of sources inside ministries and full accounts of the group's finances.

"We were all amazed and so were the Americans," a senior intelligence official told the Guardian. "None of us had known most of this information."

Officials, including CIA officers, were still decrypting and analysing the flash sticks when Abu Hajjar's prophecy was realised. Isis swept through much of northern and central Iraq over three stunning days, seizing control of Mosul and Tikrit and threatening Kirkuk as three divisions of the Iraqi army shed their uniforms and fled.