Revealing the mastermind behind the IS rebels

On April 19, after a period of investigation, German daily Der Spiegel published important data showing that a former intelligence officer under the late Iraqi President Saddam Hussein was the mastermind behind the notorious Islamic State (IS) insurgents in Iraq and Syria.

In a lengthy article titled “Secret data exposes the origins of IS,” Spiegel said its reporters had access to 31 websites filled with documents, charts, and handwritten lists that formed a detailed plan for establishing the Islamic State in Syria.

The massive plan was the brainchild of a man named Samir Adb Muhammad al-Khlifawi, a former intelligence colonel who served under Hussein and went by the code name Haji Bakr.

Iraqi soldiers who served under Saddam Hussein

Spiegel said the documents confirm that the rise of IS to take over a large area in northern Syria was part of a meticulous plan drawn up and supervised by Haji Bakr using all methods, from reconnaissance, espionage, murder, kidnapping...

Although this former intelligence colonel was killed in a fierce battle with Syrian rebels in January 2014, by then he had used his experience to build the world's most powerful and richest terrorist organization.

“What Bakr had laid out on the websites was carefully assigned to individuals, like a blueprint for a takeover,” Spiegel said.

“It is not a religious manifesto, but technically a concrete direction for establishing an 'Islamic Intelligence State' operated by a unit similar to the former East German domestic intelligence agency Stasi,” Spiegel wrote.

IS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi is just a puppet created by former Iraqi intelligence officers?

According to Spiegel, from a powerful intelligence colonel, Bakr became "bitterly unemployed" after the US authorities in Iraq issued a decree disbanding the entire army of the old government in 2003. From 2006 to 2008, he was said to have been detained in US prisons, including the notorious Abu Ghraib prison.

Around 2011, Bakr assembled a small group of former Iraqi intelligence officers to “produce” Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the official leader of the Islamic State militants, in order to give this notorious terrorist organization a “religious face”.

In 2013, Bakr personally traveled to northern Syria to oversee his strategy of seizing territory, which began by attracting tens of thousands of young foreign fighters to Syria to join his rebel organization.

Iraqi journalist Hisham al-Hashimi, whose cousin served under Bakr, describes the former colonel as more of a nationalist than a Muslim. Spiegel therefore argues that the key to IS’s current expansion is its ability to reconcile the contradictions between the blind religious beliefs of its Muslims and the careful strategic calculations of a group of intelligence officers led by Bakr.

Spiegel said it received the documents after lengthy negotiations with rebels in the Syrian city of Aleppo. Aleppo fell to rebels after IS was forced to withdraw from its bases in the city in early 2014.

According to danviet.vn