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The fall of Mosul and the quick territorial expansion of ISIL in Iraq took some by surprise. What contributed to ISIL's quick success was cooperation from local Sunni tribes and members of the traditionally secular and nationalist Baath party. This seemingly counterintuitive alliance has its rationale and deep roots in history.

The successful cooperation between radical Islamist factions, Sunni tribes and representatives of the former ruling party - currently commanders of paramilitary groups - can be traced back to the policies of Saddam Hussein in the early 1980s, which aimed to foster closer ties between those espousing the ideas of political Islam and the Baath party.

The historical preconditions for the advent of Islamist ideas in Iraq and their eager adoption by Sunni resistance forces are clearly discernible in the strategy proposed at the time by the then Iraqi president.

A secular party with Islamist ties

In 1986, at a meeting with representatives of the pan-Arab national command - the supreme ideological body of the Baath Party - Saddam Hussein offered a ceasefire, or even an alliance, between the party and the Muslim Brotherhood movement in Egypt and Sudan. In practice, for the first time in its history the militant and secular Baath party declared its readiness to cooperate with representatives of the so-called political Islam.

In the same year, the Iraqi president also defined the difference between the "democratic, national, pan-Arab state" and the "religious state" proclaimed by the Muslim Brotherhood. Following in the footsteps of the founding father of Arab nationalism and of the pan-Arab Baath party Michel Aflaq, Saddam clearly declared that he was not an atheist, but warned against any attempt to establish a religious party with an either Sunni or Shia bias. Saddam's warning at the time was probably addressed at the Islamic Dawa party, which had a dominant role among the Shia community and was regarded as the main competitor of the Baath party.

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The crisis in Iraq: Was the rise of ISIL a surprise ...