The Rise of Islamic State Read Online Free Page A

of morale and the disintegration of the army forces. June 11 saw a reflection of the incapacity of the Maliki government to know what was happening or take a decision, when it granted approval for a peshmerga move into the city—a full day after it had fallen.
    The story of one Iraqi Army soldier gives a sense of what it was like to be caught up in this shameful defeat. In early June, Abbas Saddam, a private soldier from a Shia district in Baghdad serving in the 11th Division of the Iraqi army, was transferred from Ramadi to Mosul. The fighting started not long after he got there. But on the morning of June 10 his commanding officer told the men to stop shooting, hand over their rifles to the insurgents, take off their uniforms, and get out of the city.Before they could obey, their barracks were invaded by a crowd of civilians.
    “They threw stones at us,” Abbas recalled, “and shouted: ‘We don’t want you in our city! You are Maliki’s sons! You are the sons of mutta ! [the Shia tradition of temporary marriage much derided by Sunni] You are Safavids! You are the army of Iran!’”
    The crowd’s attack revealed that the fall of Mosul was the result of a popular uprising as well as a military assault. The Iraqi army was detested as a foreign occupying force of Shia soldiers, regarded in Mosul as creatures of an Iranian puppet regime led by Maliki. Abbas says there were ISIS fighters—called Daash in Iraq, after the Arabic acronym of their name—mixed in with the crowd. They said to the soldiers: “You guys are OK: just put up your rifles and go. If you don’t, we’ll kill you.” Abbas saw women and children with military weapons; local people offered the soldiers dishdashes to replace their uniforms so that they could flee. He made his way back to his family in Baghdad, but didn’t tell the army he was there for fear of being put on trial for desertion, as happened to a friend.
    While the Sunni in Mosul were glad to see the back of the Iraqi army and terrified of its return, they were aware that Mosul had become a very dangerous place.But there wasn’t much they could do about it. On June 11 a woman friend, a Sunni with a professional job, sent an email that gives a sense of the anxieties shared by many. She wrote:
    Mosul has fallen completely into the hands of ISIS. The situation here is quite calm. They seem to be courteous with the people & they protect all the government establishments against looters. Mosul government & all the Iraqi army, police & security forces left their positions & fled the battle. We tried to flee to Kurdistan, but they won’t allow us. They will put us as refugees in tents under the heat of the sun. So, the majority of the people just returned home & decided that they can’t be refugees. But, we don’t know what will happen in the following hours. May God protect everyone. Pray for us.
    It was not only in Mosul that the Iraqi security forces disintegrated and fled, the rout led by their commanding officers. The town of Baiji, home to Iraq’s largest refinery, gave up without a fight, as did Tikrit. Once again a helicopter appeared to take away army commanders and senior officials. In Tikrit soldiers who surrendered were divided into two groups—Sunni and Shia—and many of the latter were machine-gunned as they stood in front of a trench, their execution recorded on video to intimidate the remaining units of the Iraqi security forces. TheAmericans said that five army and Federal Police divisions out of eighteen had disintegrated during the fall of northern Iraq. At the same time even ISIS seemed taken aback by the extent of their own success. “Enemies and supporters alike are flabbergasted,” the ISIS spokesman Abu Mohammed al-Adnani declared. The boast nevertheless came with a warning that ISIS fighters should not be over-impressed by all the American-made military equipment they had captured. “Do not fall prey to your vanities and egos,” he told them, but “march