Associated Press

BAGHDAD (AP) — The Iraqi soldiers tell of how they can hardly live with the shame of their rout under the onslaught of the Islamic militants. Their commanders disappeared. Pleas for more ammunition went unanswered. Troops ran from post to post only to find them already taken by gunmen, forcing them to flee.

"I see it in the eyes of my family, relatives and neighbors," one lieutenant-colonel who escaped the militants' sweep over the northern city of Mosul told The Associated Press. "I am as broken and ashamed as a bride who is not a virgin on her wedding night."

Iraq's military has been deeply shaken by their collapse in the face of fighters led by the al-Qaida breakaway group Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, who in the course of just over a week overran Mosul then stormed toward Baghdad, seizing town after town, several cities and army base after army base over a large swath of territory.

The impact is hurting efforts to rally the armed forces to fight back. Shiite militiamen and volunteers have had to fill the void as the regular army struggles to regroup.

Top commanders have been put under investigation. Conspiracy theories are running rampant to explain the meltdown. Some Shiite allies of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki have accused Kurds in the north of encouraging the military collapse so they could grab territory and weapons for themselves — an accusation that they've provided no proof for but that is straining already tense ties with the Kurdish autonomous zone, where officials deny the claim.

On Tuesday, al-Maliki retired three generals who had been deployed in Mosul and ordered legal proceedings against them. He also dismissed a brigadier general and ordered his court martial in absentia. He said he planned to retire off or court martial more senior officers, but gave no details.

John Kerry: U.S. won't demand Maliki resignPlay Video

Already he had ordered the questioning of the military's Chief of Joint Operations Gen. Abboud Gambar and the ground forces commander Gen. Ali Gheidan, according to security officials who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the subject. The two face no charges and no legal action has been taken against them.

Al-Maliki has also vowed to bring the full weight of military law, including the execution of deserters, on anyone who is found out to have fled the battle.

Al-Maliki is trying to turn the armed forces around. He told army commanders and volunteers in a rally south of Baghdad this week that the rout served as a much needed wake-up call. He said it would lead to the exposure and punishment of military commanders and politicians he accuses of betraying their country. He has also cryptically blamed conspiracies, acts of treachery and meddling Arab nations.

The blow was particularly harsh in a country that has traditionally prided itself on the prowess of its soldiers, with the faith of its Shiite majority immersed in a narrative of martyrdom that is rooted in the fabled bravery of its saints.

In an attempt to restore faith in the armed forces, state-run Iraqiya television has been airing little over the past week besides clips of troops and police marching or in action, helicopters strafing what is purportedly militants' positions and soldiers and policemen performing traditional dancing with civilians.

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FILE - In this Thursday, June. 12, 2014 file photo, Iraqi men line up outside of the main army recru …

Members of the political coalition led by al-Maliki openly accused the Kurdish self-rule government of collusion with the Islamic militants in the capture of Mosul, Iraq's second-largest city, by doing nothing to prevent its fall. They said Kurdish fighters illegally seized large quantities of weapons and equipment left behind by fleeing Iraqi troops.

After the seizure of Mosul, Kurdish fighters deployed in the vital oil city of Kirkuk in the north and parts of Diyala province northeast of Baghdad that the Kurds have long claimed as their own.

Al-Maliki's allies have not produced evidence to back up their claims, which the Kurds categorically denied. The Kurds say they moved into the areas to protect them after Iraqi government forces left. Otherwise, Islamic State fighters would have taken them, they argue.

And in what seemed an implicit dig at the military's rout, the prime minister of the Kurdish region, Nechirvan Barzani, dismissed Baghdad's charges as "running away from the truth."

The breakdown is rooted in multiple factors. Even after the United States spent billions of dollars training the armed forces during its 2003-2011 military presence in Iraq, the 1 million-member army and police remain riven by sectarian discontents, corruption and a lack of professionalism.

ISIS ADVANCES TOWARD BAGHDADPlay Video

The territory that the Islamic State has captured has an overwhelmingly Sunni population, where resentment is high against al-Maliki's Shiite-dominated government because of what they see as discrimination against their communities. Sunnis in the armed forces are hesitant to be seen fighting for al-Maliki, and Shiite troops deployed in Sunni areas feel isolated and vulnerable amid hostile territory. Morale in the military is already low in a battle against a Sunni insurgency that has grown the past two years, with desertions rife, particularly by Sunnis.

At the time Islamic State fighters overran Mosul a week ago, there were about 50,000 federal and regular local police in the city and two army divisions totaling about 24,000 troops. The federal police were largely Shiites, the locals mainly Sunnis from Mosul. One of the army divisions was mixed Sunni-Shiite and the other was mainly composed of Kurds.

Among the troops who escaped Mosul, the humiliation hits deep.

The lieutenant colonel, a Shiite who spoke to the AP on condition of anonymity because of fears of reprisals, had been stationed in an air base in Mosul. They received orders to pull out and fall back to their division headquarters, but when they got there they found it had already been captured by militants who were looting its arsenals. So he and his comrades fled to the city of Kirkuk, to the southeast, then proceeded to Baghdad.

He said they were detained briefly at a checkpoint near Baghdad and questioned by other soldiers why they fled — a further shame.

John Kerry: Airstrikes are on the table in IraqPlay Video

"I have been fighting in Mosul for five years, we never ran away. Some of us were killed and injured, but we never ran away," he said. "Now, people tell me we are cowards, can you imagine? I cannot sleep. Death is more merciful."

Montazar al-Rubiae, a member of the paramilitary federal police force in Mosul, said his unit battled for 18 hours against militant fighters in Mosul until they ran out of ammunitions. Their calls for reinforcements and ammunition went unanswered. They pulled back to their headquarters, where they heard other federal police had fled, putting on civilian clothes and abandoning their weapons. His unit redeployed and fought more, but then pulled back to a checkpoint on Mosul's southern outskirts — which they too found already taken by militants.

They received orders to withdraw — and the commander of his brigade and his top aides quickly left in three pickup trucks. "When we tried to get a lift with them, they just drove on in the direction of Irbil," he said, referring to the nearby capital of the Kurdish autonomous zone.

Then the remains of his unit came under attack, prompting them to change into civilian clothes and flee for Kurdish areas.

"They came out from everywhere and started hunting us one after the other, like birds," he said.

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Iraqi military humiliated by retreat

"I am as broken and ashamed as a bride who is not a virgin on her wedding night," a lieutenant colonel says.
Hurting efforts to fight back

Obama to create world's largest ocean preserve

WASHINGTON (AP) — Moving to protect fragile marine life, President Barack Obama announced plans Tuesday to create the largest ocean preserve in the world by banning drilling, fishing and other activities in a massive stretch of the Pacific Ocean.

Using presidential authority that doesn't require new action from Congress, Obama proposed to expand the Pacific Remote Islands Marine National Monument, which President George W. Bush designated to protect unique species and rare geological formations. The waters are all considered U.S. territory because they surround an array of remote, mostly uninhabited islands that the U.S. controls between Hawaii and American Samoa.

Carbon pollution is making the world's oceans more acidic, pollution is threatening marine life and overfishing could wipe out entire species, Obama warned as he vowed to expand the sanctuary during an ocean conservation conference hosted by the State Department.

"If we ignore these problems, if we drain our oceans of their resources, we won't just be squandering one of humanity's greatest treasures," Obama said in a recorded video message. "We'll be cutting off one of the world's major sources of food and economic growth, including for the United States. We cannot afford to let that happen."

Obama hasn't settled on the final boundaries for the preserve. The White House said Obama planned to solicit input from fishermen, scientists, politicians, experts in conservation and others before the new protections take effect.

But conservation groups the potential reach could be massive.

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Secretary of State John Kerry, left, and Undersecretary of State for Economic Growth Catherine Novel …

Under maritime law, nations have exclusive economic control over waters that extends 200 nautical miles from its coast. Drawing on an geographic analysis of U.S. possessions in the region, the Pew Charitable Trusts determined that Obama could protect more than 780,000 square miles — almost nine times what Bush set aside when he created the monument. If Obama were to also protect all U.S. waters in the Pacific other than Hawaii, the sanctuary could grow to roughly 1.5 million square miles, Pew said.

The practical effect of the expanded marine sanctuary could be modest. At present, very little commercial fishing is conducted in the waters Obama is seeking to protect, and there are no signs that drilling in the waters is imminent. But conservation groups said it was crucial to take proactive steps to prevent those activities going forward.

"Anywhere there are fish to be extracted or minerals or resources, these locations are under threat form commercial extraction," said Matt Rand, who runs Pew's global ocean legacy project.

The executive steps, first reported by The Washington Post, come as Obama is searching for ways to leave his second-term mark on the environment despite opposition from many Republicans in Congress.

Presidents have authority to phase out commercial fishing and other activities from U.S. waters under the 1906 Antiquities Act, the same law that allows for land-based national monuments to be created by executive order.

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Actor Leonardo DiCaprio speaks at the second day of the State Department's 'Our Ocean' c …

Still, the moves could rankle some GOP lawmakers who say Obama is exceeding his authority by going around Congress to promote his agenda on issues like the environment, immigration and gay rights. Earlier this month Obama unveiled sweeping new pollution limits on U.S. power plants amid signs that Congress wouldn't act soon to combat climate change.

In a related environmental move, Obama also vowed to create a government program to combat black market fishing and seafood fraud, in which seafood products are mislabeled to hide their origin. The White House said 20 percent of the wild marine fish caught each year are part of the black market, at a cost of $23 billion to the legitimate fishing industry.

"President Obama's announcement is a historic step forward in the fight against seafood fraud and illegal fishing worldwide," said Beth Lowell of the conservation group Oceana. "This initiative is a practical solution to an ugly problem and will forever change the way we think about our seafood."

Obama, in his public comments, indicated the significance was partially symbolic, but could spur the rest of the world to take action.

"For this effort to succeed, it has to be bigger than any one country," Obama said.

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Reach Josh Lederman at http://twitter.com/joshledermanAP

Twitter Snitch Spills ISIS’s Secrets

Twitter Snitch Spills ISIS’s Secrets

A mysterious Twitter account is trying to stop ISIS’ rise to power by spilling the terror group’s secrets online. For more than six months a series of tweets have detailed the alleged covert alliances and conspiratorial machinations behind the ascension of The Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham, the Islamist group taking over large parts of Iraq. Taken together, the tweets form a slanted but valuable picture of ISIS and one of the only portraits of its leaders. Perhaps even more important, the account is still active, sending out tweets days ago about ISIS’s current strategy in Iraq and what it plans to do next.

Sitting over a keyboard somewhere, likely in a Syrian town now held by rebel forces, is @wikibaghdady, the leaker behind the anti-ISIS account. He may be a former ISIS member who defected to ISIS’ rivals in Syria, the al Qaeda backed Al Nusra front, as some analysts have speculated. Or, “he” may actually be more than one person, with @wikibaghdady serving as the avatar for a group effort to undermine ISIS’ official story and knock it from its perch atop the jihadist movement. Whatever the case, @wikibaghdady has put ISIS in uncomfortable positions, revealing the true name of the group’s leader and a deeply controversial association.

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The online gang fight goes back to Syria and the competition between jihadist groups there for turf, religious authority, and the spoils of war. So does the @wikibaghdady account; it too grew out of the fighting in Syria as a reaction to ISIS’ maximalist approach and the bloody in-fighting between Islamist factions there.

Brian Fishman, a fellow at The New America foundation and ISIS analyst who has been following the group for years, is cautious about @wikibaghdady’s claims but called the account, “at minimum a keen observer of events in Syria,” and “a key source of ideas that should be investigated through other means.” A similar assessment came from Hassan Hassan, an analyst at the Delma institute in Abu Dhabi and expert on radical groups in the region. “The account does seem to offer credible insider information about ISIS,” Hassan said, “but it is not wholly accurate…[and] should be taken with a pinch of salt.”

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Despite the caveats, @wikibaghdady deserves closer examination – especially at a moment when ISIS’ next moves could lead to a wider conflagration and more carnage. And some of what @wikbaghdady tweeted months ago has already been borne out by facts on the ground. The leaker’s revelations about ISIS’ alliance with Saddam Hussein’s former party, the Baathists, were confirmed by the events of last week, for example. The rapid takeover of Iraqi cities was not a solo effort; the campaign relied on a cultivated network of partnerships between Sunni groups including, critically, ISIS’ pact with their ideological enemies, the Baathists – a repeated theme in @wikibaghdady’s tweets.

It’s a catchy name for a jihadi leaker – @wikibaghdady – an obvious nod to the de jure politics of radical transparency and an easy handle to remember for the account’s 36,100 followers. But whoever is behind the tweets isn’t motivated by an allegiance to truth, or the idea that it can be liberated and spoken to power. Like a mafisoso complaining that his fellow hitman failed to play by the rules, it’s not the murders that bother @wikibaghdady but the way they are carried out. The account’s criticisms focus on ISIS’ inner workings, the deceptions and cynical deals it used to engineer its rise. But along with the expose of internal politics, it also questions the purity of ISIS’ Islamist ideology and challenges the group’s religious authority.

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Whoever @wikibaghdady is, two things about him are clear: he’s a fellow Islamist who has a beef with ISIS, and he’s someone close to the group, providing the kind of details that only come from intimacy. That doesn’t make him some kind of hero but if snitches had to be saints, the NYPD would shut down tomorrow. Wikibaghdady isn’t outing secrets to curb ISIS’ wanton slaughter. He’s a fellow jihadi playing dirty politics against members of his own cohort.

@Wikibaghdady began on December 10, 2013 with a first tweet marked “urgent” that promised to “reveal the secrets of the organization of the State of Iraq and the Sham.” Building on the staged drama of the moment, the first tweet ended with “Coming soon.”

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Most of @wikibaghdady’s secret history of ISIS is a straightforward chronicle of purported facts about the group, presented as a series of questions, posed and then answered by the account. But pulling back the curtain and exposing ISIS’ inner workings, @wikibaghdady claims that ISIS is an elaborate fraud, pretenders to the Caliphate.

In the days and months after that first tweet, the account delivered a continuous stream of information about ISIS. First, the leaker outed the true identity of ISIS’ shadowy leader known, at that time, only by his assumed name of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. The biographical details that followed fit with the available record and have been confirmed by subsequent reports on Baghdadi – that his real name is Ibrahim Awwad Ibrahim Bou Badri bin Armoush, and he was born not in Baghdad but Samarra.

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The names of the other leaders on Baghdadi’s ISIS council, the details of the organization’s structure, its financial schemes and plans for the future followed. In just under a thousand published tweets, the account has provided valuable if unreliable details on ISIS evolution.

A Twitter intrigue may seem trivial measured against mass graves in Iraq and the prospects of a regional civil war but it’s significant for two reasons. First, with so little known about ISIS and its leader Baghdadi, even accounts from self-interested parties can add valuable pieces to the puzzle.

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Secondly, Twitter has become an important tool for jihadi group’s financing and recruitment efforts as J.M Berger, an expert in extremist groups and their online strategies, has noted. While Twitter has been a powerful platform for ISIS to spread its message to fanboys and potential recruits, the medium can also expose ISIS vulnerabilities and provide its enemies with a means to exploit them. Along with the eager celebrants that ISIS’ gruesome photostream attracts, Twitter has opened the group up to attacks and created a significant new front for inter-jihadi disputes. With ISIS working hard to hide its secrets and push propaganda as fact, leakers may turn out to be an increasingly important source of information about it and other extremist groups.

Perhaps the most significant charge @wikibaghdady made – and the one that now seems most prophetic, after the group took control of Mosul, Iraq’s 2nd biggest city – is that ISIS’ inner chamber of power, hidden by Baghdadi’s public front, is led by a former Baathist and colonel in Saddam’s army called Haji Bakr. According to @wikibaghdady, it was Bakr who engineered Baghdadi’s rise to power after ISIS’ former leader, Abu Omar al-Baghdadi, was killed in 2010 by a joint U.S.-Iraqi operation in Tikrit.

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That Baathist connection resurfaced last week after ISIS’ Iraq offensive and has proven to be a critical aspect of the group’s strategy and a cornerstone of its current ability to take and hold ground.

Last week, on June 13, the @wikibaghdadi account claimed a "Meeting between ISIS and Naqshbandi Army near al-Qayara area south of Mosul had taken place with representatives from Izzat Ibrahim al-Douri and Baghdadi.”

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Izzat Ibrahim al-Douri is a mythic figure among many of Iraq’s Sunnis. A high-ranking commander in the Iraqi army before the American invasion, al-Douri became the leader of Iraq’s banned Baath party after Hussein was executed in 2007. He managed to evade capture by American and Iraqi forces and has been in hiding pretty much since then. Since his disappearance, sightings of al-Douri have been reported in Mosul but he has never resurfaced publicly. Now, al-Douri appears to have resurfaced leading the The Naqshbandi Army, the former Baathist officers who form a cornerstone of the Sunni coalition in Mosul that includes ISIS.

After hiding out for years in Mosul, cultivating the underground Sunni insurgent forced,reports of al-Douri suddenly started popping up in the last week. Despite the rhetoric about the ISIS takeover of Iraq, it’s clear that the group’s rapid advance owed much to its alliance with other Sunni groups including the Baathist Naqshbandis led by al-Douri.

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But @wikibaghdady goes further than just positing the alliance between ISIS and Baathist forces. The account claims that the two groups struck a deal which will place the Baathists in control of a new ruling coalition.

@Wikibaghdady’s claims are so significant because Islamists and Arab nationalists are, by and large, sworn enemies. For absolutists like ISIS and al Qaeda, corrupt Arab regimes and their sacrilegious leaders are supposed to be the first against the wall -- along with religious apostates.

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The Naqshbandi order, whose authority @wikibaghdady claims ISIS has ascented to, manages to be both Islamist and nationalist, as they are Baathists and adherents of Sufism, the minority Muslim denomination that ISIS and other fundamentalist groups consider heretical. Yet @wikibaghdady has claimed not only that ISIS is currently allied with The Naqshbandi, but that they will be in charge once the fighting is over.

An alliance between ISIS and Iraqi Baathists can be explained away as matter of necessity, a tactical commitment that can be broken once the fighting is over. (In the past, nationalist and Islamist groups have cooperated; and some Baathists like Haji Bakr have later become Islamists.) But a governing coalition led publicly by a prominent Baathist like al-Douri would be much harder, if not impossible, for ISIS to square with its own espoused principles and justify to the global jihadi audience, whose support could tip the balance of power towards their rival Islamist groups.

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Hassan, who has been studying the ISIS-Baathist alliance said, “I believe there was an initial understanding between representatives of Douri and representatives of Baghdadi to share power in Sunni areas. But any such understanding soon collapsed, and we started to see ISIS trying to dominate the areas and reign supreme.” There is an unbridgeable gulf between the groups because “ISIS considers that Baathists follow an un-Islamic ideology,” Hassan said. And the natural conflicts between ISIS and the Baathists “are too deep for any such alliance to last.”

Fishman, the New America analyst, said that “there is a lot of evidence that ISIS has cooperated with the Naqshabandi Army in Iraq, which implies some agreement between al-Baghdadi and al-Douri.” But, he added, “it is one thing to build a military alliance and another to have a shared vision for governance. I don't think this alliance will last as constructed. I don't think ISIS will subsume itself to the Naqshabandi's. There's plenty of evidence ISIS is declaring itself in areas it controls.”

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In claiming that ISIS would bow to another group, @wikibaghdady appears to have overplayed the propaganda hand. But if recent history is an guide, that won’t stop him – or them – from dishing out new dirt on the Islamists who have captured the attention of the world.

Twitter snitch spills militant group's secrets

A mysterious account is trying to stop the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham's rise to power.
Explores inner workings, deals

WASHINGTON (AP) — The CIA and other spy agencies are scrambling to close intelligence gaps as they seek ways to support possible military or covert action against the leaders of the al-Qaida-inspired militant group that has seized parts of Iraq and threatens Baghdad's government.

The lack of clear intelligence appears to have shifted President Barack Obama's immediate focus away from airstrikes in Iraq because officials said there are few obvious targets. However, officials said no final decisions had been made and suggested Obama ultimately could approve strikes if strong targets do become available.

As the U.S. intensifies its intelligence collection efforts, officials are confronting a diminished spying capacity in the Middle East, where the 2011 departure of U.S. troops and the outbreak of civil war in Syria left large swaths of both countries largely off-limits to American operatives.

U.S. intelligence analysts are working to track the movements of key figures in the militant group known as the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant, which seized Mosul, Tikrit and other towns in Iraq as the country's military melted away. They are sifting through data provided by Jordanian, Saudi, Turkish and other intelligence services, as well as their own human sources, satellites, drones and communications intercepts by the National Security Agency, U.S. intelligence officials say. The officials would not be quoted by name because they were not authorized to discuss the classified details publicly.

Obama planned to brief top congressional leaders on his administration's possible responses to the crumbling situation in Iraq during a White House meeting Wednesday.

The Obama administration has discussed the possibility of launching targeted airstrikes, either with drones or manned aircrafts, to try to blunt the momentum of the fast-moving Sunni insurgency. Other options under consideration include deploying a small contingent of U.S. special operations forces to help train the Iraqi military and boosting intelligence available to the Iraqis.

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In this Tuesday, June 17, 2014 image taken from video obtained from British Broadcaster Sky, which h …

More broadly, the Obama administration is also pressing for Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki to take steps to make his Shiite-dominated government more inclusive. Obama said last week that any short-term U.S. military actions in Iraq would not be successful unless they were accompanied by political changes by the government in Baghdad.

It's unclear whether the CIA and the NSA have been able to locate the top insurgent figures, such as Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the ISIL's leader. Baghdadi, who was released in 2009 after spending four years in U.S. military custody in southern Iraq, came away with an appreciation of American monitoring technology that made him an elusive target once he took command, said Richard Zahner, a retired Army general and former senior NSA official.

But intelligence agencies have been tracking the ISIL for years, officials say, watching closely as it grew stronger in the Syrian civil war and began to challenge the Shiite-dominated Baghdad government.

"We have had a real interest, along with our friends the Jordanians, the Turks and others, in doing all we could to watch these guys," said Rep. Jim Himes, a Connecticut Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee. "We have a reasonable sense for the nature of ISIL, but we have very limited visibility into who is doing what to whom right now."

The CIA and other agencies are assembling detailed dossiers known as "targeting packages" that amount to profiles of insurgent commanders, including as much day-to-day information as can be gathered about their location, movements, associates and communications. Those packages can be used to target the subjects for drone strikes or other military action, though they also can be used for nonlethal purposes, current and former officials say.

President Obama briefs top lawmakers on Iraq optio …Play Video

More than a year ago, the CIA's Counterterrorism Center expanded a team of officers at the agency's headquarters in northern Virginia to track and target al-Qaida-linked militants operating in Syria and Iraq. Those efforts are now intensifying, U.S. officials say. They would not discuss in detail their efforts to monitor the Iraqi insurgents for fear of tipping them off. Already, they said, key leaders communicate through couriers and take other steps to avoid eavesdropping.

Despite challenges, intelligence agencies know "quite a bit" about the current organization and its leadership, said a senior U.S. intelligence official, expressing a widely held view within the CIA and other agencies.

One hurdle is that much of the intelligence network the U.S. built up during eight years of fighting in Iraq has been dismantled, including a network of CIA and Pentagon sources and an NSA system that U.S. officials said made available the details of every Iraqi insurgent email, text message and phone-location signals in real time. Some monitoring is still possible, Zahner said.

The spy agencies appear to have been surprised by the sudden move by the ISIL to seize Mosul and other cities. The Senate Intelligence Committee is reviewing data from the past six months to determine what various agencies knew and said about the possibility of a major offensive, according to a committee staffer who was not authorized to be quoted.

Still, there was some warning. One top official, Lt. Gen Mike Flynn of the Defense Intelligence Agency, predicted to Congress in February that the ISIL "probably will attempt to take territory in Iraq and Syria to exhibit its strength in 2014, as demonstrated recently in Ramadi and Fallujah, and the group's ability to concurrently maintain multiple safe havens in Syria."

Fueling that analysis, he said, was the fact that some Sunni tribes and nationalist groups were working with the ISIL to oppose a Baghdad government they viewed as oppressive.

Behind the scenes, intelligence analysts warned about the increasing difficulties Iraq's security forces faced in combating the ISIL, and the political strains that were contributing to Iraq's declining stability, a senior intelligence official said. They reported on the ISIL's efforts to spark uprisings in areas with substantial Sunni populations and how the Iraqi military's failure to counter ISIL gains in Mosul allowed the group to deepen its influence there, the official said.

Some observers have urged an air campaign that they believe could effectively dislodge the ISIL from the towns it has seized.

"It would be challenging but certainly doable," said David Deptula, who retired in 2010 as the top Air Force general for intelligence and who planned the bombing campaign in the first Gulf War.