ISIS bringing the Baath party back – or are they?

The city had just been taken over by members of the extremist Sunni Muslim group, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, or ISIS, and while some locals fled their homes to avoid possible violence between the militia and the Iraqi Army, others were celebrating the end of what they saw as their oppression by an army dominated by another sect. Mosul is a mostly Sunni Muslim town; over recent years the Iraqi Army, loyal to the Shiite Muslim led government in Baghdad, has been criticized for being staffed by mostly Shiite Muslims.

The posters that appeared around Mosul on Tuesday showed former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein, a Sunni Muslim who was heavily biased in support of his own sect. Additionally rumours began to spread around the city and on social media about the imminent arrival of a prominent member of Hussein’s former Baath party, which has been banned in Iraq since 2003. That person was Izzat Ibrahim al-Douri. As the New York Times describes him, al-Douri “was a top military commander and a vice president in the Hussein government and one of the few prominent Baathists to evade capture by the Americans throughout the occupation”.

Some rumours even had it that the victory in Mosul was down to al-Douri and that he would be coming to Ninawa’s provincial government headquarters.
On Wednesday evening, masked gunmen carrying Kalashnikovs roamed the city’s streets telling locals to go to the central square where al-Douri would give a speech to celebrate what the gunmen described as “the victory of the people’s revolution”. Hundreds of Mosul’s people did as they were told and many of them took cameras and mobile phones so they could record the historic event: The return of political actors who had been gone from the scene for over a decade.