[Bolding mine - Italics in original]

Tom Wyke, of the Associated Press, has an August 8, 2015 article with the title above — discussing why, to some degree, the Islamic State has had strategic success on the battlefield. At least part of that success, he argues, can be attributed to the 100 or so former members of Saddam Hussein’s military and intelligence services are sprinkled in key positions throughout Islamic State Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi’s militant Islamic terrorist organization. Indeed, al-Baghdadi’s Deputy. Abu Muslim al-Turkmani — was a former Army Major in Saddam’s Army. These former officers, Mr. Wyke writes, “give the Islamic State the organization, discipline, and the strategic guidance it needed [and needs], to build the military strategies which have led to the gains the militant jihadi group to their gains in Syria and Iraq.”
“While attending an Iraqi Army Artillery School nearly 20 years ago, Ali Orman remembers one Major well. An Islamic hard-liner, he once chided Orman for wearing an Iraqi flag pin into the bathroom — because it included ‘God is great.’ It is forbidden by religion to bring the name of the Almighty into a defiled place like this,’ Orman recalled being told by Maj. Taha Taher al-Ani. Orman didn’t see al-Ani again until years later, in 2003. The Americans had invaded Iraq; and, were storming toward Baghdad. Saddam Hussein’s fall was imminent. At a sprawling base north of the capital, al-Ani was directing the loading of weapons, ammunition, and ordnance into trucks to spirit away. al-Ani took those weapons with him when he joined Tawhid wa’l-Jihad, a forerunner of al-Qaeda’s branch in Iraq,” Mr. Wyke writes.
“Now. al-Ani is a Commander in the Islamic State, said Orman, who rose to become a Major General in the Iraqi Army; and, now commands its 5th Division fighting the Islamic State. Orman kept track of his former comrade through Iraqi’s tribal networks and intelligence gathered by the government’s main counter terrorism service — of which he is a member. They have been put in charge of intelligence-gathering, spying on the Iraqi forces, as well as maintaining and upgrading weapons; and, trying to develop a chemical-weapons program.”