The Saddam factor

When I made my first trip to Baghdad in December 2003—nine months after the U.S. invasion—resistance to U.S. occupation already was underway. Military casualties spiked to 110 a month, and Saddam Hussein himself was rumored to be behind a growing insurgency.

Word on the street was the former dictator was directing the resistance, sometimes disguised as a taxi driver, a woman, or a shepherd. The U.S.-led coalition was on the hunt for weapons of mass destruction, or WMDs, and Iraqis knew Saddam had used them—in chemical attacks on his own people, the Kurds, no less. From hiding, they feared, he might do so again.

But that month U.S. soldiers captured Saddam hiding in a hole in the ground, and next the experts declared his regime did not possess weapons of mass destruction, after all.

Strange then, how one of Saddam’s chemical masters has ended up in the hands of U.S. forces 13 years later—captured for leading the chemical weapons program for Islamic State from a bunker outside of Mosul. The discovery unearths an inconvenient truth in Iraq: Behind the Islamic State, or ISIS, “insurgency” is a dedicated effort by Saddam-era veterans to retake Iraq.

In early March U.S. commandos (a secretive effort of unknown numbers Defense Secretary Ash Carter calls his “no-kidding force”) captured Sleiman Daud al-Afari—a specialist in chemical and biological weapons with Saddam’s Military Industrialization Authority. About 50 years old, al-Afari (also known as David Bakker) headed Islamic State’s new branch for research and development of chemical weapons.

Clearly the Saddam Hussein regime was bent on developing a WMD regime in the heart of the Middle East.

The Americans captured him near Tal Afar, one of the historically Christian enclaves of Nineveh Plain that ISIS overran in 2014. Follow-up airstrikes destroyed two facilities nearby suspected of housing labs and equipment for making chemical weapons, chiefly mustard gas.

Tests confirm ISIS used mustard gas in attacks in Syria last August. In Iraq last month, Islamic State fired about 30 rounds of mustard gas on Kurdish forces near Sinjar. The barrage left more than 100 soldiers and civilians injured. Detonated in large amounts, experts say, the gas creates a dust cloud that’s absolutely deadly.

More than a decade after the partisans and pundits all declared that George W. Bush was wrong, that Saddam had no stockpile and no capacity for weapons of mass destruction, the architects of that nonexistent program, plainly, are still at it.

Al-Afari is only one of numerous former Saddam protégés, Baath Party leaders turned fugitives, behind ISIS. Among the most notable: Izzat Ibrahim al-Douri, a long-time aide to Saddam who eluded U.S. forces. Al-Douri was rumored killed a year ago, then surfaced in a video, and has been since the mid-2000s a driving force behind Sunni jihadism in Iraq.

Besides al-Douri, at least four former Saddam officers make up Islamic State’s governing Military Council—and anywhere from 100 to 160 Saddam-era veterans hold senior or mid-level offices, says Iraqi intelligence officer Ali Omran.

The reason you aren’t hearing about who’s really behind ISIS is it’s a reality that makes everyone look bad.

For Republicans, the ouster of Saddam wasn’t the success they drummed it up to be—and it didn’t rid Iraq of a terror-sponsoring, WMD-prone dictator.

For Democrats, the persistence—and now brutality—of Saddam cronies indicates the menace they’ve so long downplayed was, and is, real. Clearly the Saddam Hussein regime was bent on developing a WMD regime in the heart of the Middle East and supporting terrorists in pursuit of using them.

Not owning up to the reality, first and foremost, means the United States makes the same old mistakes while danger multiplies. We launch airstrikes and commit more troops, yet downplay the extent of U.S. failure and depth of lingering menace. ISIS is no longer a terrorist organization but a proto-state with military successes won by seasoned military minds.

You have to wonder if failing to be honest about that long war, with its cost of more than $2 trillion and 4,500 American lives lost, isn’t a factor in our domestic economic and political meltdown.

Email mbelz@wng.org