An ex-intelligence officer under the late Iraqi president Saddam Hussein was “the strategic head” behind the Islamic State (IS) group, formerly known as the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, and drew up the blueprints for the extremists’ capture of northern Syria, German weekly Der Spiegel reported on Sunday.
Former colonel Samir Abd Muhammad al-Khlifawi, who was better known as Haji Bakr and was killed by Syrian rebels in January last year, “had been secretly pulling the strings of the Islamic State group for years,” according to the magazine.
The weekly said it had been given exclusive access to 31 documents by Bakr, including handwritten lists and charts, after lengthy negotiations with a rebel group in Aleppo, Syria, which came into possession of the pages after the Islamic State group fled the area.
The trove “was nothing less than a blueprint for a takeover,” Der Spiegel said, detailing the creation of a caliphate in northern Syria, complete with meticulous instructions for espionage activities, murder and kidnapping.
The magazine said Bakr was “bitter and unemployed” after the US decision to dissolve the Iraqi army in 2003. Between 2006 and 2008, he was held in the US military’s Camp Bucca and Abu Ghraib prison.
In the years that followed, his influence grew in extremist circles, and in 2010, Bakr and a group of other former Iraqi intelligence officers placed cleric Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi at the head of the Islamic State group, Der Spiegel reported.
The move was reportedly designed to give the group a religious dimension.
The weekly quotes an Iraqi journalist as saying career officer Bakr was himself “a nationalist, not an Islamist.”
The Islamic State group, notorious for horrific acts of violence, including rape, torture and beheadings, declared a caliphate in June last year that straddles large parts of Iraq and Syria under its control.
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