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Re: Is the world better off without Saddam, George?
There was never any time when things were good in Iraq. All the "surge" did was send a few thousand extra troops but even then the total number was tens of thousand less than the US had originally had there failing to keep a lid on things. What did keep a lid on things long enough for the US to retreat without getting shot to bits was that Bush put all the terrorists on the payroll so they'd stop shooting Americans :Originally Posted by walrus
Ex-insurgents Want More Money, or Else
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July 25, 2008
AFP
The Iraqi officer leading a U.S.-financed anti-jihadist group is in no mood for small talk -- either the military gives him more money or he will pack his bags and rejoin the ranks of al-Qaeda.
"I'll go back to al-Qaeda if you stop backing the Sahwa (Awakening) groups," Col. Satar tells U.S. Lt. Matthew McKernon, as he tries to secure more funding for his men to help battle the anti-U.S. insurgents.
Most members of the Awakening groups are Sunni Arab former insurgents who themselves fought American troops under the al-Qaeda banner after the fall of the regime of executed Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein.
Some, like Satar, had served in Saddam's army before joining Al-Qaeda. Others were members of criminal gangs before deciding to fight the insurgents, with the backing of the U.S. military.
They earn around 300 dollars a month and their presence at checkpoints and on patrol has become an essential component of the U.S.-led coalition's strategy to restore order in the war-wracked country.
"I like my work," said Satar, who is in charge of security south of Baquba in Iraq's eastern Diyala province.
According to McKernon Satar has a contract with the U.S. military to employ 230 men "but he has more than 300" under his command, which is why he wants more money to keep them happy.
The U.S. military knows perfectly well that many people joined Awakening groups simply because it was a good way to make money, and that if the cashflow dries up some would not hesitate to return to al-Qaeda.
In a bid to avoid this, the U.S.-led coalition is helping Awakening members to return to a "normal life," according to US Admiral Patrick Driscoll.
He told AFP that options included helping them return to the lives they had before joining the insurgency or joining the Iraqi security forces.
Some 17,000 Awakening members have opted for the second choice, and 2,500 of them now hold administrative positions, Driscoll said.
But not everyone in Baquba is happy with the situation.
"Yesterday's killers have now become our protectors," said one sceptical resident who spoke on condition of anonymity. "Who should I trust to protect my family?"
Despite levels of violence nationwide hitting a four-year low, Diyala remains one of the most dangerous regions in Iraq because of the al-Qaeda presence.
On Thursday police said a woman suicide bomber attacked an Awakening patrol in central Baquba, killing eight people including a local Sahwa commander.
Little more than a year ago, Baquba was the scene of deadly fighting that forced many residents to flee.
Among them was the Shiite Wahab family. Despite simmering tensions that continue to grip Baquba, the family recently returned home to the Katun neighbourhood, a mostly Sunni area in the western part of town.
No sooner had they settled in than a home-made bomb blasted through the gate of their house. On Wednesday the eldest son, Mahmud, discovered a second bomb just yards away from the building.
American soldiers accompanied by Iraqi policemen and troops arrived to investigate, accompanied by Abu Zarra, an Awakening group commander of 300 men in Katun.
As bomb disposal teams examined the device, Abu Zarra was overheard by an AFP correspondent discussing with one of his men how much protection money they could extort from the Wahab family.
After the bomb was finally blown up by the experts, a U.S. Soldier teased Abu Zarra, telling him: "Isn't this just like the good old days when you were the terrorist?"
Meanwhile the U.S. Army has files on all Awakening members -- including finger prints and retinal identification.
"They know that we know who they are," said Capt. Kevin Ryan.
If you want to know what became of the Iraqi Sunnis once we stopped paying them and left them facing the Shiite government then read this.
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.
His account, and those of others who have lived with or fought against the Islamic State over the past two years, underscore the pervasive role played by members of Iraq’s former Baathist army in an organization more typically associated with flamboyant foreign jihadists and the gruesome videos in which they star.
Even with the influx of thousands of foreign fighters, almost all of the leaders of the Islamic State are former Iraqi officers, including the members of its shadowy military and security committees, and the majority of its emirs and princes, according to Iraqis, Syrians and analysts who study the group.
They have brought to the organization the military expertise and some of the agendas of the former Baathists, as well as the smuggling networks developed to avoid sanctions in the 1990s and which now facilitate the Islamic State’s illicit oil trading..........
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world...759_story.html
And this is just beautiful. Before anybody else wighs in on whether invading Iraq was a good idea then read this from a guy who interviews ex-ISIS fighters. :
This whole experience has been very familiar indeed to Doug Stone, the US general on the receiving end. “He fits the absolutely typical profile,” Stone said afterward. “The average age of all the prisoners in Iraq when I was here was 27; they were married; they had two children; had got to sixth to eighth grade. He has exactly the same profile as 80 percent of the prisoners then…and his number-one complaint about the security and against all American forces was the exact same complaint from every single detainee.”
These boys came of age under the disastrous American occupation after 2003, in the chaotic and violent Arab part of Iraq, ruled by the viciously sectarian Shia government of Nouri al-Maliki. Growing up Sunni Arab was no fun. A later interviewee described his life growing up under American occupation: He couldn’t go out, he didn’t have a life, and he specifically mentioned that he didn’t have girlfriends. An Islamic State fighter’s biggest resentment was the lack of an adolescence. Another of the interviewees was displaced at the critical age of 13, when his family fled to Kirkuk from Diyala province at the height of Iraq’s sectarian civil war. They are children of the occupation, many with missing fathers at crucial periods (through jail, death from execution, or fighting in the insurgency), filled with rage against America and their own government. They are not fueled by the idea of an Islamic caliphate without borders; rather, ISIS is the first group since the crushed Al Qaeda to offer these humiliated and enraged young men a way to defend their dignity, family, and tribe. This is not radicalization to the ISIS way of life, but the promise of a way out of their insecure and undignified lives; the promise of living in pride as Iraqi Sunni Arabs, which is not just a religious identity but cultural, tribal, and land-based, too.
What I Discovered From Interviewing Imprisoned ISIS Fighters | The Nation
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