“Simply put, ISIS today is essentially a Baathist-organized amalgam of virtually every Sunni tribal and jihadist insurgent group the United States has fought since April 2003.”
It is fueled by the ideology of al Qaeda and is under the nominal leadership of foreign terrorists. No matter that foreign fighters are the amirs with high-level roles, and that it took 12 years to usurp and merge all of those groups and to liberate the Sunni governorates. Ex-Baathists like Haji Bakr and al-Douri have helped ISIS’s Iraqi “caliph,” Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, manage it brilliantly.
(Quelle: Intercept)