ISIS Led by Saddam's Commanders and spies; Big Shadow of Saddam’s Baathist regime in ISIS

Many of the top leaders of the ISIS terrorist group were members of brutal Iraqi dictator Saddam's inner circle.
Despite the large number of foreign fighters, members of Iraq’s former Baathist army make up the majority of ISIS's military and security committees and its emirs and princes, according to the report.
The expertise the men bring help ISIS to outmaneuver the Iraqi and American militaries and the networks they developed for overcoming sanctions through smuggling are now helping ISIS with its oil trade, The Washington Post reports.
Even in Syria, the local emirs are shadowed by an Iraqi deputy who makes the decisions, a man using the pseudonym Abu Hamza told the Post. Abu Hamza became disillusioned with ISIS and eventually escaped to Turkey.
"All the decision makers are Iraqi, and most of them are former Iraqi officers. The Iraqi officers are in command, and they make the tactics and the battle plans," Abu Hamza told the Post. "But the Iraqis themselves don’t fight. They put the foreign fighters on the front lines."
Experts told the Post that the former Baathist members were steered to ISIS when the Iraqi army was disbanded after the American invasion of 2003. The Iraqi forces were barred from government employment and pensions, but were allowed to keep their weapons.
Facing poverty for years, many responded to ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi's recruitment.Hassan Hassan, a Dubai-based analyst and co-author of the book “ISIS: Inside the Army of Terror.”