Posted on 04/05/2015 1:40:12 AM PDT by Libloather
SANLIURFA, Turkey — When Abu Hamza, a former Syrian rebel, agreed to join the Islamic State, he did so assuming he would become a part of the group’s promised Islamist utopia, which has lured foreign jihadists from around the globe.
Instead, he found himself being supervised by an Iraqi emir and receiving orders from shadowy Iraqis who moved in and out of the battlefield in Syria. When Abu Hamza disagreed with fellow commanders at an Islamic State meeting last year, he said, he was placed under arrest on the orders of a masked Iraqi man who had sat silently through the proceedings, listening and taking notes.
Abu Hamza, who became the group’s ruler in a small community in Syria, never discovered the Iraqis’ real identities, which were cloaked by code names or simply not revealed. All of the men, however, were former Iraqi officers who had served under Saddam Hussein, including the masked man, who had once worked for an Iraqi intelligence agency and now belonged to the Islamic State’s own shadowy security service, he said.
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
Were Saddam and his cronies awful?
Yes.
Is ISIS worse?
Yes.
I’m not talking good/bad here, but rather degrees of bad.
Mussolini was not a nice man. Fascism of the Italian variety is not my favorite political ideology. But during his prewar reign, he probably killed around 200 political opponents.
Compare that to Hitler and the Nazis, who murdered roughly 12M.
So was Musso a bad guy? Yes.
Was Hitler worse? Yes.
Wow, I can only remember the democrats abandoning S. Viet Nam, Iraq, Libya after coming back into the fold, and their reversals of almost every single foreign policy policy or treaty signed by republicans. At least Bush only abandoned his own so to speak - are there more instances of republicans abandoning a US ally? Bay of Pigs - democrats - a long socialist propelled policy.
I’m no expert in this area, but we did encourage Iraqis to fight for us under both Bushes, and then walked away.
As I’ve said, there may not have been a practical alternative to the walking away part, but we quite possibly could have been more upfront about our plans with possible allies.
They were not withdrawn in 2007. The withdrawal was later, my point being that by omission, the author implied the withdrawal was in 2007.
Saddam’s Gen. alDuri was, long before the US invasion, advising Saddam to embrace islamists. That was why his rhetoric started to resemble that of bin Laden and others. That’s why he sent personnel to train al Qaeda operatives in Afghanistan in forgery, started broadcasting and posting Islamicist screeds, and started instituting sharia law in Baghdad, forcing doctors to remove tongues and hands as punishment, and allowed men like Zarqawi to set up a cell of mostly Egyptian terrorists there ...a cell whose first targets included a Christian nun, whom they decapitated in Baghdad; this is the organization that merged with Krekar’s group and which later renamed itself ISIS, and after Saddam was executed his General al Dhuri and sons and followers swore an oath of allegiance to ISIS leader Zarqawi.
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