Tonight, I'm going to hold an exceptional conference about how the people of the "State" almost won the war against the Americans.
At camp Bucca, the Iraqis arrested during the invasion of Iraq lived like the Americans, drinking Pepsi and eating too much meat. When they were released, they began the Jihad against the Americans because their food contains excessive sugar: they became fat. So tonight, I'm going to tell yout the means used to build the caliphate to wage Jihad against the American food. Ormar, Abou Ahmad and Maher are answering the questions.
First and foremost, let's talk about the leader of the "State"
Where Ibrahim, aka "Maradona", turns to religious studies because he is myopic and mediocre at school.
Ibrahim al-Badri was born in Samarra, a hundred kilometers north of Baghdad, Iraq, on July 28, 1971, to a poor family of the Sunni minority, to which Saddam Hussein belonged.
After taking his bachelor's degree, Ibrahim al-Badri - who will later take the name of war "Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi" ['from Baghdad'] - settled with his parents in Tobji, a Sunni district North-West of Baghdad. His academic performance had been disappointing, severely reducing the academic choices of the bachelor who was already 20. "Ibrahim wanted to become a lawyer," recalls Omar, who used his panties on the benches of the school attended by the future caliph in Samarra, before settling, like him, in the district of Tobji, where he still resides today. "He was excellent in some subjects, but too average in others ", says Omar, who, for several years, found himself in the same class as one of Ibrahim's [three] brothers.On the statement of the baccalaureate of little Ibrahim, obtained from the" cell of the Falcons ", a elite unit of Iraqi intelligence, we learn, for example, that Ibrahim had got 98 out of 100 in mathematics, but only 57 out of 100 in English. His overall average of 80 out of 100 was largely insufficient to access popular faculties, such as medicine, engineering or law, who rejected his candidacy. [...]
Ibrahim al-Badri renounced becoming a lawyer and planned to make a career in the army, like his brother Shamsi. But he failed, because of myopia. If he had had good eyes, would Ibrahim nevertheless become the leader who would endorse, two decades later, the massacre, by his jihadist hordes, of thousands of Iraqi soldiers and policemen, at the creation of his caliphate, in 2014, on the grounds that they served the "impious" government of Baghdad? No one can say categorically that it would have changed anything in his career. But being part of Saddam Hussein's army will not prevent many of his officers from joining, after the fall of the Baathist regime, in 2003, the ranks of the Isis organization, or the jihadist groups from which it emerged.
Little Ibrahim finally enrolled the only University of Baghdad which accepted him: that of Koranic studies. A lot of consolation for graduates eager to arm themselves with a university degree, whatever it may be, despite mediocre results; a siding that also attracts many young people from conservative backgrounds. The faculty is home to enlightened professors or theologians, and is also an airlock for potential jihadists seeking academic security before they can take action. Over there, Ibrahim rubbed shoulders with future members of armed groups that emerged a few years later to fight the US occupation. His frustrated career plans did not affect him, they will prove his ability to bounce back and forth.
The future caliph invested himself fully in his studies while working, after classes, as guardian of the mosque Hajji Zaïdan. Some sources claim that Ibrahim moved to Baghdad without his parents, and that the Hajji Zaidan mosque provided him with a room he occupied [free], in exchange, he served the place of worship.
The former Samarra kid used to call Tobji's faithful to prayer, and he led with ease. Just as he would strive, tirelessly, to improve his speaking skills.
As in Samarra, faithful to his passion for football and his penchant for leadership, he created a football team gathering the faithful of the mosque Hajji Zaïdan and won as captain. "He was very talented", says Omar, his classmate in Samarra. I played in the opposing team and often I prayed that Ibrahim broke a leg so that we could beat them. In the neighborhood, Ibrahim was now nicknamed "Maradona".
Omar claims that Ibrahim was "kind, nice" at that time. But, gradually, the Maradona of Tobji became radicalized, and Omar attended helplessly to the "metamorphosis" of his childhood friend.
"He fell back on himself and became angry, he abandoned football, games, the good life, to go down the wrong path." He wanted everyone to come in, life was only suffering and everything was sin.
Then Ibrahim, a staunch supporter of Saddam Hussein during the second Gulf War, was sent by the Americans to Abu Ghraib prison and then to Bucca, a jihad-like camp.
The dates of Ibrahim's incarceration in Abu Ghraib, unveiled so far by the US military and other sources are contradictory and, moreover, sometimes also denied by the testimonies of prisoners who have rubbed shoulders with the future Caliph at Camp Bucca. But a fact is certain: he was released from Camp Bucca in December 2004. After being locked up in Abu Ghraib.
To increase his chances of being released quickly, the number 157911 was discreet and even adopted the attitude of the model prisoner. When he did not exercise his football skills with his fellow prisoners, under the astonished gaze of the guards, the "Maradona of Bucca" was referee between the prisoners, as soon as a quarrel broke out.
According to One of his fellow detainees, Abu Ahmad, who later became a senior figure in ISIS and later defected, the future lieutenant of the caliphate, was playing the role of the mediator and made himself respected by the American soldiers, that "was part of the act" of Ibrahim. "At the same time," says Abu Ahmad, "Ibrahim was pursuing a new strategy, which was taking place under their noses: building the Islamic State." And in Bucca, the ground was favorable.
Despite the decision to [isolate] the most dangerous detainees, mainly al-Qaeda members, in separate shacks, "emirs still managed to hide in the middle of the prison population. At night, the extremist elements held Islamic courts, and the prisoners who served as informants to the jailers had their arms broken. " Bucca is a real "jihad school". The best of Iraq, in the opinion of the Iraqi authorities.
But Bucca is not just a "jihad academy", a launching pad for terrorists eager to fight with the Americans and their Iraqi auxiliaries. It was the incubator of the Islamic State.
The meeting place of two terrors, in conditions of detention creating bonds stronger than those of blood. In the hell of Abu Ghraib or the "academy" of Bucca, post-Saddam Iraq is perceived as a tragedy by extremist Sunnis who, even behind bars, receive news from outside. The occupation promised to drag on and the Shia-dominated Iraqi power that was about to take hold, "carried by US tanks," was already suspected of being reluctant to reasonably integrate the now orphaned Sunni minority.
Likewise, the ousting of the Baath [Saddam Hussein's party] executives and the dismantling of the Iraqi police and army by the American administration were experienced as a humiliating injustice by the defeated Baathists.
In Bucca, the ex-servants of the Raïs "signed", even more quickly than the jihadists, the birth certificate of the caliph, promising to put in the service of the future reign their military, security and police know-how. The dictatorship of Saddam Hussein, which they served effectively, was for a long time a solid bulwark against religious extremism. It was to be a user's guide, then a perfect model of tyranny; both for those wishing, while driving out the occupier, to avenge the old regime, and for those wishing to replace it with an Islamic dictatorship, whose foundations were inculcated in prison itself.
For Abu Ahmad, "if there was no US prison in Iraq, ISIS would not be born Bucca, it built the ideology."
According to Abu Ahmad, for Ibrahim and the other jihadist leaders of the camp, Bucca was even an excellent training for future executives of the Islamic State. "For us, it was a school," he says, "but for them [senior officials] it was a management college." [Later, when an emir was killed], it never caused a vacancy. as there were people trained in prison."
One after the other, the "graduates of the academy" were released. Before leaving the camp, they wrote on the elastics of their panties, addresses and phone numbers that would allow them to meet or contact the insurgency. "Once free [thanks to the precious information hidden in the panties], we called the others and began to work," says Abu Ahmad, saying that this "elastic technique" was adopted by number of prisoners. "It was really that simple,"[...]
In 2011, part of the Syrian people revolted against their leader, Bashar al-Assad. Several secular and religious movements take up arms to overthrow the dictator. The emir Ibrahim, in decline in Iraq, joined the jihadist factions to associate them with the group he created there. He settled in the Syrian city of Raqqa to run his movement.
"Dr. Bachar" inherited the presidency and absolute power of his father, Hafez, in July 2000; and when the first demonstrations burst, on 15 March, 2011, the repression was relentless. In the image of the reign of Assad, whose brutality fell on the country forty years ago.
The population was resisting and hundreds of soldiers defected; joining the protest movement, often with their only service weapon, to protect the protesters[...]
It was A boon for Emir Ibrahim, who saw the opportunity to expand his field of action. Syria would be an ideal rear base, with a vital space for the caliphate in Iraq, where the Islamic State in Iraq was losing ground. gaining a foothold in a [second] country would boost its moribund organization, and perhaps even allow it to establish a transnational state. [...]
A few months after the start of the revolt, Al-Baghdadi sent one of his men to Syria, Abu Mohammed al-Joulani, to establish a branch of the IS. The jihadization of the Syrian revolution was now underway, in the shadow of a peaceful movement that would be the first target. And the first victim.
In May 2011, two months after the start of the revolt, Bashar al-Assad freed hundreds of Islamists from the military prison of Sednaya, located 30 kilometers north of Damascus. A prison hell where, alongside prisoners of conscience, there are some 1,100 jihadists, including many veterans of the Iraq war. Among the detainees released by Damascus, Salafist leaders, who were soon to lead the most formidable Syrian armed factions.
In Sednaya, jihadist prisoners made the law. A jungle cleverly maintained, and strictly controlled by the Machiavellian Assadian system. Because it is the gotha of international jihad that is gathered there, by the Syrian regime: veterans of Iraq, but also of Afghanistan, jihadists of the region, but also of the Gulf and the Maghreb, who are walking around in the prison, dressed with Afghan clothes, and armed with knives.
Maher Esber, an opponent of Bashar al-Assad who spent six years in Sednaya is saying: "In total, during my incarceration, the Islamists murdered about sixty people, eight of them in front of me, dead beheaded or killed with sword, chopper or iron bar. The regime knew what was happening, but, it was a kind of laboratory, as if it wanted to test, at the level of this prison, what it could do in Syria, and what it had already achieved in Lebanon and elsewhere ... Power had turned Syria into a jihad launching pad in Iraq, where it sent these jihadists, and released them into its own territory to discredit the rebellion and divide its ranks. A game involving risks that Damascus had always been able to take. [...] The release of these elements was for the regime a highly risky bet, but it took it because it knew it would have no impact on the first circles of power, and that it would serve them politically. " [...]
In 2014, Al-Baghdadi took the city of Mosul and proclaimed himself "caliph" of the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant, a proto-state that spanned part of Syria and Iraq.
Lined with oil fields and located 450 kilometers east of Raqqa, Mosul was teeming with dormant cells. Former Baathists as well as members of tribes and armed factions.
A heterogeneous group, but united against the sectarian Shiite power of Baghdad, accused of being loyal to Iran. It was on this alliance that Al-Baghdadi counted to take Mosul, sending only 1,500 jihadists to conquer a city officially held by 80,000 Iraqi military and police.
The mission was completed in less than four days, following a brief battle that caused virtually no casualties in ISIS ranks. Al-Baghdadi called it "revenge of Bilaoui", a military leader and former friend of Bucca, who fell a few hours before in the assault on Mosul. This ISIS blitzkrieg artisan was also immediately replaced by Abu Muslim al-Turkmani, [a former Iraqi intelligence officer under Saddam Hussein, killed in 2015] a former Baathist officer whom Ibrahim was seeing in Bucca ten years earlier. A veteran of all the wars of Saddam in whom the future caliph had full confidence. The future would prove him right. [...]
To his new chief of staff, Al-Baghdadi gave the order to advance towards the autonomous region of Kurdistan in Iraq, and to march on the capital, to bring down the regime. Iraq seems on the brink of implosion. As in Mosul, where police and soldiers abandoned weapons and uniforms before fleeing, followed by half a million civilians; the rest of the province of Nineveh, near Syria, fell almost without firing a shot.
With shiny new four-wheel-drive vehicles, holding stacks of cash, and equipped with rocket launchers and anti-aircraft weapons, Al-Baghdadi's black-hooded hordes also captured large swathes of territory in the neighboring provinces of Kirkuk, and in Salaheddine, brutally executing on their way hundreds of Shiite soldiers ...
Their breakup in the Central Bank of Mosul would make Al-Baghdadi the richest terrorist leader in the world. A jackpot of $ 430 million, adding to the colossal revenues generated by the oil, antiquities and human trafficking in which the organization operates, in addition to the confiscation of property and the imposition of "taxes" to the people living under its yoke.
Since 2014 and his self-proclamation at the head of the caliphate, Al-Baghdadi was holed up. It is most often at a distance that he directed his troops, receiving his lieutenants "at home", sometimes in house clothes, surrounded by his family and sexual slaves.
And yet, Despite their initial success, the Jihadists were still eating too much American food, Pepsi and hamburgers. They were too fat and not tough enough. That's why they were losing the war.
When the Iraqi army launched its massive offensive in October 2016 to liberate Mosul, "capital" of the caliphate, Ibrahim urged his men to fight to the death; preferring to shelter in the vast desert area between Syria and Iraq, serving as a base fallback to the executives of the Islamic State.
In November 2017, Al-Baghdadi is in Rawa, 400 kilometers south of Mosul. His caliphate was in retreat, driven out of almost all its territories. Nevertheless, he urged his followers, in an audio recording broadcast by his propaganda organ, to "resist" and "unleash the war [...] everywhere" in the world.
Note: Abou Ahmad and Maher may remind you of the names of some administrators of the forum. They are not related to them.
