Omar Mohammed exposes how Washington paved the road for ISIS
By Alma Cordero · Reporting from El Paso ·
Dr. Omar Mohammed recounted surviving ISIS on The Free Press, revealing how American policy broke Iraq and leaving voters to face the endless human cost of military intervention.
The most terrifying revelation Dr. Omar Mohammed offered on the podcast The Free Press was not how ISIS ruled Mosul, but where its executioners came from. When the black banners went up in June 2014, the fighters had not marched in from some distant desert camp. As host Rafaela noted from Mohammed's book, the jihadist network was already inside the city, wearing Iraqi uniforms and cycling between official payrolls and criminal rosters. When the state fell, they simply switched patches.
Mohammed, who risked his neck to secretly document the occupation under the pseudonym Mosul Eye, laid bare the wreckage left in the wake of American hubris. Before ISIS could seize Mosul, Washington had to dismantle it. Following the 2003 invasion, American administrators enacted de-Ba’athification, instantly firing one million military personnel and civil servants. Men with families to feed and weapons in their closets were told to go home with nothing. The resulting sectarian purge alienated Sunnis, stoked civil war, and created the exact armed, disenfranchised underworld that eventually marched under the caliphate’s flag.
The Fallacy of the Indispensable Empire
The episode aired against the backdrop of the announced end of the U.S. military mission in Iraq. Mohammed argued that the departure of American troops will worsen instability, strengthen Iran, and recreate the conditions that birthed ISIS. That is the strongest argument the foreign policy establishment possesses: that an indefinite American garrison serves as a vital shield protecting minority populations from slaughter.
That case fails because it ignores twenty years of the long record. An imperial power cannot indefinitely police the burning house it ignited. When an invading army shatters a country's civil framework, armed brutality inevitably rushes in to fill the vacuum. Washington spent trillions of taxpayer dollars, enriched defense contractors, and sacrificed thousands of working-class soldiers only to leave behind a traumatized, fractured society. Expecting a few thousand troops to permanently freeze those tectonic fractures is an illusion designed to absolve American leaders of the catastrophe they engineered.
The Invoice Ordinary People Pay
While politicians gave speeches and generals plotted troop surges, ordinary Iraqis paid the invoice in blood. Mohammed described walking Mosul’s streets in a doctor’s coat and a baker’s apron, compiling the names of murdered neighbors and documenting Yazidi orphans stripped of their identities. He recounted watching four cameramen carefully stage-light a civilian in an orange jumpsuit before beheading him, the state apparatus turned into a grotesque theater of cruelty.
From Paris, Mohammed later fed coordinates to CENTCOM to keep trapped civilian families from being bombed in their basements, saving scores of lives. Yet he could not save his own brother Ahmed, killed by shrapnel when the offensive closed in. The architects of the war in Washington never faced a tribunal or lost a night's sleep over that shrapnel. They retired to corporate boards, think tanks, and cable news panels, leaving families from Mosul to Baghdad to bury their dead in rubble.
When citizens step into the voting booth, they must remember what bipartisan interventionism actually purchases abroad. Dr. Omar Mohammed kept the historical ledger alive with his blog so that no one could rewrite the slaughter. Justice requires our own country to look at that same ledger and finally dismantle the doctrine of endless foreign intervention that made it necessary.