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Report: Officer under Saddam Hussein Drew Up Islamic State Master Plan
[AnNahar] An ex-intelligence officer under the late Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein was "the strategic head" behind the Islamic State
...formerly ISIS or ISIL, depending on your preference. Before that al-Qaeda in Iraq, as shaped by Abu Musab Zarqawi. They're very devout, committing every atrocity they can find in the Koran and inventing a few more. They fling Allah around with every other sentence, but to hear the pols talk they're not really Moslems....
 group and drew up the blueprints for the jihadists' capture of northern Syria, German weekly Der Spiegel reported Sunday.

Former colonel Samir Abd Muhammad al-Khlifawi, who was better known as Haji Bakr and was killed by Syrian rebels in January 2014, "had been secretly pulling the strings at IS for years", according to the magazine.
Ynet has photos of the former colonel here.
The weekly said it had been given exclusive access to 31 documents by Bakr, including handwritten lists and charts, after lengthy negotiations with a rebel group in Aleppo, northern Syria, which came in possession of the pages after IS fled the area.

The trove "was nothing less than a blueprint for a takeover", according to Spiegel, detailing the creation of a caliphate in northern Syria, complete with meticulous instructions for espionage activities, murder and kidnapping.

The magazine said Bakr was "bitter and unemployed" after the American decision to dissolve the Iraqi army in 2003. Between 2006 and 2008 he was held in the U.S. military's Camp Bucca and Abu Ghraib prison.

In the years that followed his influence grew in jihadist circles, Spiegel reported, and in 2010 Bakr and a group of other former Iraqi intelligence officers placed holy man His Supreme Immensity, Caliph of the Faithful and Galactic Overlord, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi
...formerly merely the head of ISIL and a veteran of the Bagram jailhouse. Looks like a new messiah to bajillions of Moslems, like just another dead-eyed mass murder to the rest of us...
 at the head of the Islamic State group.

The move was reportedly designed to give the group a religious dimension.

The weekly quotes an Iraqi journalist as saying career officer Bakr was himself "a nationalist, not an Islamist".
Posted by: trailing wife 2015-04-21
http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=415611