ISIS Leader Takes Steps to Ensure Group’s Survival

[Purveyor]

WASHINGTON — The Islamic State’s reclusive leader has empowered his inner circle of deputies as well as regional commanders in Syria and Iraq with wide-ranging authority, a plan to ensure that if he or other top figures are killed, the organization will quickly adapt and continue fighting, American and Iraqi intelligence officials say.

The officials say the leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, delegates authority to his cabinet, or shura council, which includes ministers of war, finance, religious affairs and others.

The Islamic State’s leadership under Mr. Baghdadi has drawn mainly from two pools: veterans of Al Qaeda in Iraq who survived the insurgency against American forces with battle-tested militant skills, and former Baathist officers under Saddam Hussein with expertise in organization, intelligence and internal security. It is the merger of these two skill sets that has made the organization such a potent force, the officials say.

But equally important to the group’s flexibility has been the power given to Islamic State military commanders, who receive general operating guidelines but have significant autonomy to run their own operations in Iraq and Syria, according to American and Kurdish officials. This means that fighters have limited information about the inner workings of the Islamic State to give up if captured, and that local commanders can be killed and replaced without disrupting the wider organization. Within this hierarchy, Iraqis still hold the top positions, while Tunisians and Saudis hold many religious posts.

Much of a new understanding about the leadership of the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL, has come from information about the organization’s financial operations, recruiting methods and security measures found in materials seized during an American commando raid in May in eastern Syria. United States officials said gathering more insight on the Islamic State’s shadowy leadership structure was a top priority.

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http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/21/world/middleeast/isis-strategies-include-lines-of-succession-and-deadly-ring-tones.html?_r=0

[bemildred]

1. Duh.

That is kind of how it always works with these insurgencies. The classic and predictable response to concentration of force is dispersion of resistance, to leave no good targets. The classic and predictable response to decapitation strategies is diffusion of authority, to leave no heads to remove. Happens over and over.