The Paper Tiger of the Tigris: How ISIS Took Tikrit Without a Fight

Screen capture from YouTube video.

Iraq's military was rendered cowardly by its own paranoia. It's quick retreat in the wake of ISIS' advance provided the shabby ISIS forces with the opportunity to gain equipment, money, legend, and more recruits. Now ISIS is truly is a force to be reckoned with, whereas it wasn't before.


By Andrew Slater
Around 2 p.m. on Wednesday the 11th of June, ISIS forces entered the city of Tikrit, Saddam Hussein’s hometown, in a small vanguard of just 30 unarmored trucks without firing a shot. This underwhelming force was a far cry from the horde of ISIS fighters the soldiers and policemen of the city feared would come swarming out of the desert. That fear of ISIS had more to do with the fall of Tikrit, than anything the group actually did inside the city. Fear alone was enough to induce surrender and retreat.

In a province with tens of thousands of Iraq Security Forces, Tikrit, the provincial capital, was seized without a fight.

The story of ISIS’s advances in Iraq has been distorted from the start, colored by the group’s own self-serving mythology and by the Iraqi government’s attempts to conceal the rapid breakdown of its security forces. Just as ISIS has tried to claim sole credit for its victories, obscuring the role played by other members of the broad Sunni insurgency, they have exploited the Iraqi security forces failures as signs of their own strength.

The truth, revealed through interviews with locals and Iraqi security forces, is that the ISIS was far from invincible. The group might have been contained early on, before it advanced on Baghdad and foreign powers, including the U.S., were called to rescue Iraq, if the Iraqi security forces had been willing to fight. The collapse of Baghdad’s army has made ISIS vastly more powerful, every surrender moving the myth of ISIS’s strength closer to reality.

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