How A U.S. Prison Camp Help Spawn The Islamic State

Yuri Kozyrev/NOOR

Michael Weiss and Hassan Hassan, Daily Beast: ISIS Used a U.S. Prison as Boot Camp

In an excerpt from their new book on ISIS, Michael Weiss and Hassan Hassan show how jihadists used a U.S.-run Iraqi prison to coordinate with al Qaeda.

In ISIS: Inside the Army of Terror, American journalist Michael Weiss and Syrian analyst Hassan Hassan explain how these violent extremists evolved from a nearly defeated Iraqi insurgent group into a jihadi army of international volunteers who behead Western hostages in slickly produced videos and have conquered territory equal to the size of Great Britain. Beginning with the early days of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the founder of ISIS’s first incarnation as “al Qaeda in Iraq,” Weiss and Hassan explain who the key players are—from their elusive leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi to the former Saddam Baathists in their ranks—where they come from, how the movement has attracted both local and global support, and where their financing comes from.

The following excerpt concerns Iraq midway through the first decade of this century.

WNU Editor: A depressing read .... they had a very good idea on who the bad actors were .... but they released them anyway. This is why prisoners of war are kept in prison until the war is over (even if the war may last for years) ..... but former Iraqi PM Maliki and his government though otherwise, and the U.S. did not care because they were leaving Iraq by the end of 2011 anyway.