(Daily Beast) Eli Lake - The Islamic State of Iraq and the Sham (ISIS) has morphed from terrorist menace to a military force capable of over-running an army the U.S. military trained for nearly a decade. "The Iraqi army left helicopters, humvees, cargo planes and other heavy machine guns, along with body armor and uniforms" in Mosul, said General Najim al-Jabouri, now a scholar at Iraq's National Defense University. Jack Keane, a retired four-star Army general who was a key adviser to General David Petraeus during the counter-insurgency campaign in Iraq in 2007 and 2008 known as the surge, said ISIS "has grown into a military organization that is no longer conducting terrorist activities exclusively but is conducting conventional military operations....They are attacking Iraqi military positions with company- and battalion-size formations."
2014-06-12 00:00:00Full ArticleBACK Visit the Daily Alert Archive