IS top command dominated by ex-officers in Saddam's army

1	FILE - In this March 20, 2009, file photo, U.S. Army soldiers stroll past two bronze busts of former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein in the Green Zone in Baghdad, Iraq.
2	Under its leader, Iraqi jihadi Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the Islamic State group's top command is dominated by former officers from Saddam's military and intelligence agencies, according to senior Iraqi officers and top intelligence officials.
3	BAGHDAD (AP) - While attending the Iraqi army's artillery school nearly 20 years ago, Ali Omran remembers one major well.
4	An Islamic hard-liner, he once chided Omran for wearing an Iraqi flag pin into the bathroom because it included the words "God is great."
5	"It is forbidden by religion to bring the name of the Almighty into a defiled place like this," Omran recalled being told by Maj. Taha Taher al-Ani.
6	Omran didn't see al-Ani again until years later, in 2003.
7	The Americans had invaded Iraq and were storming toward Baghdad.
8	Saddam Hussein's fall was imminent.
9	At a sprawling military base north of the capital, al-Ani was directing the loading of weapons, ammunition and ordnance into trucks to spirit away.
10	He took those weapons with him when he joined Tawhid wa'l-Jihad, a forerunner of al-Qaida's branch in Iraq.
11	Now al-Ani is a commander in the Islamic State group, said Omran, who rose to become a major general in the Iraqi army and now commands its 5th Division fighting IS.
12	He kept track of his former comrade through Iraq's tribal networks and intelligence gathered by the government's main counterterrorism service, of which he is a member.
13	It's a common trajectory.
14	Under its leader, Iraqi jihadi Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the Islamic State group's top command is dominated by former officers from Saddam's military and intelligence agencies, according to senior Iraqi officers on the front lines of the fight against the group, as well as top intelligence officials, including the chief of a key counterterrorism intelligence unit.
15	The experience they bring is a major reason for the group's victories in overrunning large parts of Iraq and Syria.
16	The officers gave IS the organization and discipline it needed to weld together jihadi fighters drawn from across the globe, integrating terror tactics like suicide bombings with military operations.
17	They have been put in charge of intelligence-gathering, spying on the Iraqi forces as well as maintaining and upgrading weapons and trying to develop a chemical weapons program.
18	Patrick Skinner, a former CIA case officer who has served in Iraq, said Saddam-era military and intelligence officers were a "necessary ingredient" in the Islamic State group's stunning battlefield successes last year, accounting for its transformation from a "terrorist organization to a proto-state."
19	"Their military successes last year were not terrorist, they were military successes," said Skinner, now director of special projects for The Soufan Group, a private strategic intelligence services firm.
20	How officers from Saddam's mainly secular regime came to infuse one of the most radical Islamic extremist groups in the world is explained by a confluence of events over the past 20 years - including a Saddam-era program that tolerated Islamic hard-liners in the military in the 1990s, anger among Sunni officers when the U.S. disbanded Saddam's military in 2003, and the evolution of the Sunni insurgency that ensued.
21	The group's second-in-command, al-Baghdadi's deputy, is a former Saddam-era army major, Saud Mohsen Hassan, known by the pseudonyms Abu Mutazz and Abu Muslim al-Turkmani, according to the intelligence chief.
22	Hassan also goes by Fadel al-Hayali, a fake name he used before the fall of Saddam, the intelligence chief told The Associated Press.
23	Like others, he spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the intelligence.
24	During the 2000s, Hassan was imprisoned in the U.S.-run Bucca prison camp, the main detention center for members of the Sunni insurgency, where al-Baghdadi also was held.
25	The prison was a significant incubator for the Islamic State group, bringing militants like al-Baghdadi into contact with former Saddam officers, including members of special forces, the elite Republican Guard and the paramilitary force called Fedayeen.