Islamic State head Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi announces global Caliphate in July 2014 at the Grand Mosque in Mosul, Iraq.
With 250,000 officers and soldiers finding themselves without work overnight, they became easy recruits for the then still tiny group called “al-Qaida in Iraq,” led by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a Jordanian street thug who had been radicalized into militant jihadism during his imprisonment in the 1990s. Battalions defected to al-Zarqawi en masse. bringing with them tanks, artillery and thousands of rifles. About half of IS’ top commanders are said to have been former officers in Saddam’s army.