Don't Panic: Isis, Terror and the Middle East (10 page)

If refounding the Sunni caliphate is the goal, then anything that strengthens the Sunni identity and weakens the Iraqi identity of Sunni Iraqis is a good thing, even if it inflicts untold misery and death on the community that is being manipulated. Just as bin Laden was practising a kind of tough love when he staged the 9/11 attacks in order to bring the wrath of the United States down on innocent Muslims—for that would hasten the Islamist revolutions that were in their ultimate best interest—so Zarqawi’s civil war would hurt the Iraqi Sunnis a lot but would ultimately free them from their residual loyalty to the “infidel” Iraqi state and deliver them into the earthly paradise of a real Islamic state. It has been suggested that he just liked killing Shias too much, but the deliberation and persistence of his anti-Shia bombing campaign suggest that he had given the matter some thought.

Zarqawi’s greatest setback, therefore, was the American agreement to hold elections in Iraq in 2005. Despite its claimed democratizing mission, the United States had originally sought to avoid early elections—the American proconsul L. Paul Bremer had said before the invasion “We’re going to be running a colony almost”—but in a confrontation in 2004 with the senior Shia cleric in Iraq, Grand Ayatollah Ali al Sistani, Bremer had been forced, by the threat of a Shia general strike, to agree to elections. The result, as every Sunni knew in advance, was a National
Assembly and government dominated by the Shia parties, now quite legally in the saddle. The new prime minister, Nouri al Maliki, was a fervently sectarian Shia who had spent twenty-four years in exile under Saddam Hussein, half of it in Iran. The long-term goal of takfiris like Zarqawi was the conversion or elimination of all the Shias and other heretics, but in practical terms the elections made it clear (if it hadn’t been before) that Iraq would be a Shia-run country, and that his cherished dream of a Sunni caliphate would require the partition of the country between Sunnis and Shias. So from his point of view a civil war between Sunnis and Shias would be a very good thing.

Moqtada al Sadr stood his Shia militia down in 2005, having gained an assurance that American troops would not operate in the holy cities, but the Sunni insurgent attacks continued throughout the year, causing an average of three American deaths a day. In counterpoint to these regular anti-“Crusader” operations were AQI’s occasional big bombs in Shia mosques and other Shia gathering places—and, as the year went on, there was an ominous rise in the number of retaliatory attacks by Shias on Sunnis. Zarqawi’s swan song was a huge bomb that destroyed the al-Askari mosque in Samarra in February 2006. The mosque, built in 944, was one of the most important Shia shrines in the world. In the days following its destruction, Shia attacks on Sunni mosques and people, and Sunni counter-attacks, killed at least five hundred people, perhaps as many as a thousand. It was at this point that the
new army and police force, now largely Shia in membership, began to be seen by Sunnis as just more Shia vigilantes, only in uniform. There was no going back after the Samarra bombing: the civil war had arrived at last.

Four months later, in June 2006, Zarqawi himself was killed in a targeted American airstrike while attending a meeting in an isolated “safe house” north of Baqubah. One of his wives and their child died with him. According to an American military intelligence estimate, Zarqawi never had more than three hundred fighters, most of whom were not Iraqis, but he single-handedly managed to tip the balance in favour of a full-scale Sunni-Shia civil war in Iraq before he died.

CHAPTER 5

JIHAD: THE IRAQI PHASE, 2006–2010

They say the killings and kidnappings are being carried out by men in police uniforms and with police vehicles, but everybody in Baghdad knows the killers and kidnappers are real policemen
.

Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari, summer 2006
¹⁸

T
he civil war that Abu Musab al Zarqawi had been trying to start with his relentless attacks on Shias was already getting underway in mid-2005, but the bombing of the al-Askariya mosque in February 2006 gave it wings. The police and various Shia militias in Baghdad attacked at least two dozen Sunni mosques in the city with heavy machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades, and the ethnic cleansing (more properly sectarian cleansing) of mixed neighbourhoods, already a noticeable phenomenon in 2005, gained an unstoppable momentum. It was not that Iraqis were all religious fanatics. There were gradations of piety across the communities, with the Shia the most devout and the Kurds the most secular, but Iraq in general had been one of the most secular countries in the Arab world for a long time.

The sectarian civil war had been deliberately caused by
Sunni fanatics for a mixture of religious and strategic reasons, but the people being pulled out of their cars at roadblocks and tortured and murdered for being “Sunni” or “Shia” were not necessarily religious at all. It had quickly become a war about the numbers, the power and the will of rival communities that had been defined by their ancestral religious affiliations, not about what particular individuals believed or did not believe. Iraqi ID cards did not give the holder’s religion, but a license plate from the wrong province on your car or a given name that was identifiably Sunni or Shia could be enough to get you killed. And the majority of the people being killed were Sunni, because the great majority of those in the new police force and the new army, both rebuilt from scratch in the past few years, were Shia.

The death toll was highest around Baghdad, which had the highest number of mixed neighbourhoods. By mid-2006, a hundred bodies a day were being found in sewers or on garbage heaps in the capital alone, many bearing signs of severe torture, including broken bones, missing eyes, missing teeth, burns caused by acid or flame, and wounds caused by power drills and nails. Some died of these tortures; the rest were finished off with a bullet to the head. And of course for every corpse, more than a dozen other people moved from their own homes to some other place where they would be surrounded only by members of their own sect. Three thousand deaths a month, but fifty thousand refugees a month, some moving
to a safer location in Baghdad or elsewhere in Iraq, others fleeing the country entirely.

So many were moving that a major study by Dr. John Agnew, distinguished professor of geography at the University of California, Los Angeles, was able to track the progress of the cleansing by satellite photographs that measured the brightness at night of different parts of Baghdad. The areas that had always been exclusively Sunni or Shia remained at a constant brightness (during the few hours when electricity was available) throughout the period, while the much larger mixed areas grew darker as the losing group was killed or driven out, leaving nobody at home to turn on the lights.

By mid-2007, the mixed areas had lost, on average, half their brightness, and the Shias had conquered three-quarters of Baghdad. About half of the “cleansed” refugees—1.8 million, by a 2007 estimate of the U.N. High Commission for Refugees—were still somewhere in Iraq, but 2 million had fled abroad, the wealthier ones mostly to Syria, the poor to Jordan. The exiles included more than half of Iraq’s doctors and other skilled professionals, and at least half of its smaller minority groups—Christians, Jews, Yazidis, Mandaeans, Palestinians and Turkmen—who had no safe neighbourhoods to move to. Collectively, they once made up 10 percent of the country’s population, but most of them will never return home again: communities with several thousand years of history in Iraq were scattered to the winds in 2005–2007, never to come together again.

This ghastly civil war gradually drew to a close for four reasons: the “surge” in American troop numbers in Iraq; the simple fact that by mid-2007 there were almost no mixed neighbourhoods left to cleanse in Baghdad; an internal power struggle in al Qaeda in Iraq; and the so-called “Awakening” in Anbar province, the huge Sunni-populated province stretching from western Baghdad to the western border with Jordan.

Much has been made of the “surge” in American troops in Iraq in 2007. After four years during which the total number of U.S. troops in Iraq never deviated far from 140,000, President Bush declared in January 2007 that he would send an extra twenty thousand American troops to Iraq on a temporary basis, mainly to help the Iraqi government re-establish control over the capital. In the end, almost forty thousand were sent, and a lot of the U.S. troops already in the country had their tours of duty extended in order to provide more manpower for this job. It seemed to work, in the sense that sectarian killings in the Baghdad region—80 percent of the deaths in the civil war occurred within 30 miles (50 kilometres) of the capital—fell precipitously during 2007. But they were bound to fall anyway, since the sectarian cleansing was a finite task that was an accomplished and irreversible fact by the end of that year.

There is no doubt that the sheer number of additional American troops deployed in Baghdad made some
difference, especially since they were deliberately dispersed throughout the city and stayed long enough in one area to get to know it a bit. However, since they lacked the language skills and local knowledge even to identify Sunnis or Shias at any given checkpoint, it seems unlikely that they were the decisive factor in ending a civil war that was fought mainly by means of thousands of individual kidnappings and murders. They arrived rather late in the game, and Professor Agnew’s nighttime satellite data suggested that the surge had “no observable effect, except insofar that it has helped to provide a seal of approval for the process of ethno-sectarian neighbourhood homogenization that is now largely achieved.” In other words, the U.S. troops simply erected concrete walls, Belfast-style, between the now thoroughly cleansed and homogenous Sunni and Shia areas.

After the death of Abu Musab al Zarqawi in 2006, al Qaeda in Iraq fell on hard times. A successor was announced, an Egyptian jihadi named Abu Ayyub al Masri. Aware that the organization’s existing name made it sound like a foreign force in Iraq (which it indeed was at this point), Masri declared the creation of a front organization called the “Islamic State of Iraq” in October 2006, and chose as its leader an Iraqi called Abu Omar al Baghdadi (not to be confused with the Baghdadi who currently rules the much larger entity that is simply called Islamic State). The territory where the Islamic State of Iraq (ISI) had a significant presence and claimed to be in control (although it often wasn’t) included the governorates of Baghdad, Anbar,
Diyala, Kirkuk, Salaheddin, Nineveh and parts of Babel and Wasit: that is, the parts of central and western Iraq where most Sunni Arabs live. From that time on, Masri, as an Egyptian, was only the minister of war of ISI, formally subordinate to its Iraqi leader, Abu Omar al Baghdadi—but it was the AQI cadres who still ran almost everything.

This step was exactly what you would expect from an organization whose declared goal was the re-establishment of the historic eighth-century caliphate based in Baghdad, and it certainly made sense to give the organization an Iraqi face, but the Islamic State of Iraq never had any real substance. What crippled it was the rise of the “Awakening” movement among the Sunni Arabs of Anbar province. Al Qaeda in Iraq and its local supporters had established almost complete control over Anbar by 2005, but it had also made itself very unpopular. Ordinary Sunnis in Anbar may not have understood that the sectarian cleansing of Sunnis in Baghdad, just to the east of them, was the direct and intended consequence of AQI’s terrorist campaign against Shia mosques and neighbourhoods, but they did see AQI members extorting money, muscling in on traditional smuggling routes, demanding wives from the local tribes, imposing their own extreme version of Shari’ah law—and killing anybody who resisted or complained. There was a substantial reservoir of resentment against them, and American money and tactical support turned it into an actual military campaign.