#ISIS Jihadists Enter Ruthless Alliance with Former Saddam Loyalists in Baath Party of #Iraq

Following up on my previous entry, "#ISIS Advance Through Iraq is 'Basically a Blitzkrieg'."

And now at the New York Times, "Uneasy Alliance Gives Insurgents an Edge in Iraq":

ERBIL, Iraq — Meeting with the American ambassador some years ago in Baghdad, Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki detailed what he believed was the latest threat of a coup orchestrated by former officers of Saddam Hussein’s Baath Party.

“Don’t waste your time on this coup by the Baathists,” the ambassador, Zalmay Khalilzad, chided him, dismissing his conspiracy theories as fantasy.

Now, though, with Iraq facing its gravest crisis in years, as Sunni insurgents have swept through northern and central Iraq, Mr. Maliki’s claims about Baathist plots have been at least partly vindicated. While fighters for the extremist Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, once an offshoot of Al Qaeda, have taken on the most prominent role in the new insurgency, they have done so in alliance with a deeply rooted network of former loyalists to Saddam Hussein.

The involvement of the Baathists helps explain why just a few thousand Islamic State in Iraq and Syria fighters, many of them fresh off the battlefields of Syria, have been able to capture so much territory so quickly. It sheds light on the complexity of the forces aligned against Baghdad in the conflict — not just the foreign-influenced group known as ISIS, but many homegrown groups, too. And with the Baathists’ deep social and cultural ties to many areas now under insurgent control, it stands as a warning of how hard it might be for the government to regain territory and restore order.

Many of the former regime loyalists, including intelligence officers and Republican Guard soldiers — commonly referred to as the “deep state” in the Arab world — belong to a group called the Men of the Army of the Naqshbandia Order, often referred to as J.R.T.N., the initials of its Arabic name. The group announced its establishment in 2007, not long after the execution of Mr. Hussein, and its putative leader, Izzat Ibrahim al-Douri, was one of Mr. Hussein’s most trusted deputies and the highest-ranking figure of the old regime who avoided capture by the Americans.

Referring to the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria’s fighters, Michael Knights, an analyst at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy who has researched the Naqshbandia group, said, “They couldn’t have seized a fraction of what they did without coordinated alliances with other Sunni groups.”

In some areas under militant control, including areas around Mosul, Kirkuk and Tikrit, he said, “there are definitely pockets where the Naqshbandias are wearing the pants.”

Mr. Douri, the king of clubs in decks of cards given to American forces in 2003 to identify the most-wanted regime leaders, is a mysterious figure, so furtive he was even declared dead in 2005. It is believed that he is still alive today — he would be in his early 70s — although even that is uncertain. After the American invasion he was said to have fled to Syria, where he reportedly worked with Syrian intelligence to restore the Baath Party within Iraq and led an insurgency from there that mainly targeted American interests.

“He’s a great totem of the old regime,” Mr. Knights said. “You need that kind of individual to keep the flame going.”

It's said that representatives of Douri's Naqshbandia group have met with Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the secretive ISIS leader sometimes considered the next Osama bin Laden.

Notice the irony here: The left claimed there was no evidence that Saddam Hussein maintained ties or support for al-Qaeda before 9/11, and it was claimed no weapons of mass destruction were found in Iraq in 2003; but in 2014 Saddam's top butchers are now coordinating chemical weapons development with al-Qaeda-in-Iraq's splinter group, all while the Democrat who was once the most antiwar member of the U.S. Senate prepares to launch airstrikes on some of the world's most dangerous elements, who President George W. Bush had placed in the Axis of Evil.

Blow-back is a bitch sometimes, especially for the Democrats.

PREVIOUSLY: "No WMDs? #ISIS Jihadists Seize Saddam's 'Premiere' Chemical Weapons Production Facility."