Iraqi army tackles its demons too late

BAGHDAD: As Iraqi forces battled the IS group, former general Abdel Karim Khalaf came to a sad realisation — they were fighting against some of his former army comrades.

The tactics IS militants used — from the way they dug tunnels to their construction of defences — were lifted straight from the manual of the old Iraqi armed forces under dictator Saddam Hussein.

“They had expertise and methods inherited from the army,” retired army commander Khalaf said. “They knew us.” When the Us-led invasion toppled Saddam 15 years ago in 2003 it splintered Iraqi society and fractured loyalties among those who had served in the country’s armed forces.

One of the first decisions made by Paul Bremmer, the American head of the occupation authority, was to dismantle all security forces in the country.

That controversial move would come back to haunt Us-led forces as it pushed many members of Iraq’s disbanded military, police and intelligence agencies to join movements fighting against them.

“Saddam-era military expertise was critical to the development of the insurgency”, said Fanar Haddad, an Iraq expert at the Middle East Institute.

The seepage of knowledge from Iraq’s former security forces into the insurgency came to devastating fruition when IS stormed across Iraq and northern Syria in 2014.

Among the group’s leadership were veterans of Saddam’s forces who put their training to use conquering territory and running the self-declared “caliphate”.

Former Republican Guard officer Fadel Ahmad al Hayali was secondin-command to IS chief Abu Bakr al Baghdadi until he was killed in an October 2015 air strike near Mosul in northern Iraq, the US has said.

As Baghdadi’s deputy, he was in charge of arms transfers, explosives, vehicles and people between Iraq and Syria.

Another veteran was Samir Abd Muhammad al Khlifawi, called the group’s “most important strategist” by German weekly Der Spiegel.

Using the nom de guerre Haji Bakr, the former air force intelligence officer helped devise plans used by the group to take control of northern Syria before he was killed by rebels in 2014.

Hisham al Hashemi, an expert on militant movements, said these were not isolated examples as IS filled its military and security bodies with former Saddam-era officers.