A lot of ISIS’ success was actually due to the poor state of than actual fighting. ISIS owes it’s success to the fact that in many instances, Iraqi soldiers and police refused to stay and fight and fled. There were numerous times when they simply fled their posts and bases in the face of ISIS’ advance, and they abandoned four cities to ISIS. The most egregious example was probably Mosul, when two Iraqi divisions - 30,000 soldiers backed by armor and helicopters, ran away from 800 ISIS fighters.
Much of this was probably due to Sunni-Shiite sectarian tensions (ISIS is Sunni, the Iraqi government is Shiite-dominated, and many Sunni soldiers probably didn’t want to fight their fellow Sunnis for a Shiite government). Then, there’s the fact that the Iraqi military lacks the professionalism and discipline of a competent fighting force. Corruption and outright insubordination are rife. A host of logistical problems and an incompetent officer corps also caused a drop in morale that led to soldiers retreating - one Iraqi soldier told the media that he and his comrades had initially been ready to fight, but they ended up fleeing Mosul after food and reinforcements failed to arrive, and their senior commanders fled and abandoned them.
In short, it’s not so much ISIS’ strength as much as the Iraqi Army’s outright incompetence that let ISIS have the success it does.
Not only that, but ISIL had some of the former SH military ranks joining them because the Shiite dominated government in Baghdad had pretty much locked Sunnis out of any power sharing deal. Some of those ex-SH folks were high ranking military men with expertise sorely lacking on the Iraqi side.
So why is it that no maps show them as a de facto country? I’ve seen lots of maps with territories they control, but nothing looking like a country. The maps have been relatively stable in terms of territory for a while: is this just propaganda (=the enemy is illegitimate), or is this because they truly don’t control the hinterland of their area, or what?
Pre-1991 or pre-2003? the Iraqi armed forces were among the best equipped and trained (not to mention hardened) in 1991. By 2003, not so much, which is why it was so much easier for us to defeat them the second time even though we didn’t have the same benefit of nearby staging points and overflight permissions.
I’ve read this elsewhere, but have wondered about the fact that the Baathists were largely secular, while ISIS is about as hard-core Islamist as you get.
I guess there either were some amount of Islamists in the SH military, or some number of them have seen the light (either genuinely or for utilitarian purposes) or ISIS tolerates some number of non-Islamists for their military expertise. Or some combination of the above.
To be a country, you have to be acknowledged by others as a country. Also, while ISIS collects fees, some of the utilities themselves are nonetheless run by the Syrian government. I doubt whether ISIS has many ambassadors. Their borders are certainly in flux.
ISIS tends to be pragmatic, not just brutal. They tend to keep on existing ministers and experts. Provided the managers understand who is in charge.
Where was Muqtada al-Sadr’s infamous 100,000 man Shiite army? The Mahdi Militia fought US forces to a standstill in Sadar City. The US finally had to build a wall to keep their mortars and rockets from striking distance of the Green Zone.
Wasn’t part of the reason the Iraqi Army fled because ISIS brutally killed Iraqi military prisoners and thus scared the crap out of the Iraqis? Part of ISIS’ propaganda seems to be aimed at scaring their opponents with their brutality
The Iraqi Army melted away in the face of ISIS so quickly due to several reasons:
When the US left Iraq at the end of 2011 the Iraqi Army was not ready, it was not a functional army. This was due to several reasons.
-Paper soldiers, when I was in military in Iraq it was widely know that many Iraqi military divisions and formations were composed greatly of “paper soldiers”. These soldiers only existed in name only and were there just to fill quotas and the pockets of the division’s officers (I would say at least 25-30% of for some divisions).
-Many of the front line soldiers were decent with heavy mentoring from US troops. However, it was the more “mundane” and less glamorous military tasks the Iraq army could not get down. This included: woefully inadequate logistics capabilities (they always had problems fueling there vehicles and procuring basic necessities), not so reliable intelligence gathering/analysis abilities
-Lack of helicopter support: the Iraqis only had a handful of transport helicopter to ferry troops to certain hots pots and most of these helicopters were either situated near Baghdad or with special forces units.
-An almost non-existent Air Force: once the US left Iraq only had a handful of air assets to provide close air support to its troops, as far as I know they only had a half-dozen Cessna aircraft retrofitted with two hellfire missiles, these served as both roles close air support and ISR (the recon in the sky).
2.Politicization of the Military: I never liked Iraq’s former president Nouri al-Maliki, he was a Saddam Hussein-lite, he set up the Iraq military to fail in several ways:
-Replacing competent Generals with political stooges: Any half-way decent General he saw who wasn’t the same political party and didn’t tow the party he would replace with weaker less a capable one. This attitude trickled down from the division staff to lower levels of the army encouraging political/sectarian loyalty based promotion, discouraging promising young officers.
-Use Special Forces as a political tool for Maliki: The special forces our Green Berets became very-very capable and proficient. They became highly capable guys who needed little or not mentoring by the time the US left. However, as soon as the US left Maliki saw there potential and placed all Special Forces units under his direct supervision using them as his version of a modern day Praetorian Guard. Any time a political rival would show up on his RADAR these guys would show up at their door in the middle of the night.
Disenfranchisement of Sunnis:
-It is no secret that the Al-Qaeda in Iraq and it’s eventual offshoot ISIS is composed of Sunnis. Before the US left the military managed to quell many of Sunni related insurgent groups by offering man disaffected Sunnis jobs and political power. This was mainly started by Son’s of Iraq and fostered by the US. This put Sunni’s in charge of day to day security in their own areas helping to quell most of the Al Qaeda related insurgency and damping the flames of sectarian strife between Sunnis and Shias. However, as soon as the US left Nouri Al Maliki saw this "Sunni Organization as a political liablility. He soon disarmed many of them, cut their funding, and politically marginalized them. This led to thousands of men without jobs and without any local civilians to quell Al Qaeda (or ISIS) from rising up again.
-Alienation of Sunnis: as I stated before many of these Sunni Son’s of Iraq became unemployed and with little political power so when the Arab Spring came many of them protested what they viewed as a corrupt Maliki regime. This just further sparked Malikis paranoia thinking this was the much feared Coup he thought was coming. So he responded the way most strong men do: he crushed the protests killing hundred of activists in process. This only further pushed the moderate reformers to fringes and lit the fuze for what would become the monster ISIS.
This all led to the fall of Fallujah in January 2014 and the fall of Mosul in June (this sent shock waves across the Middle East and in Washington) and ISIS veritable blitz to Baghdad during the summer. Many of Iraq divisions assigned to these areas were composed of the weak heavily sectarian units Maliki placed there. So you have these Shia Iraqi soldiers fighting Sunni militants in Sunni territory, why would any Iraqi Shia want to fight and die for Sunnis who don’t even like the Shia? And that is why you had many of these Iraqi units melting away in the face of motivated Sunni ISIS.
Look at the Cuban revolution for example. Fidel Castro’s men only numbered a few hundred but were able to defeat the Batista Regime of thousands because the Batista soldiers were fighting against motivated revolutionaries in territory were the locals hated them.
Source Note: Many of these sources occurred before the rise of ISIS, so if you followed these events you can see that something of this nature was an eventuality.
