Don't Panic: Isis, Terror and the Middle East (8 page)

Bin Laden was not able to influence events in Iraq in any way, but that was not necessary. The highly decentralized “franchise” model he had created in al Qaeda guaranteed that men with the right beliefs, skills and goals would appear in Iraq to exploit the immense opportunity that an American invasion would create. And at this point, bin Laden essentially faded back into an advisory and symbolic role, although he lived on in hiding, far from the action, for another eight years.

The invasion of Iraq by 148,000 American and 45,000 British troops (accompanied by 2,000 Australians and a few Poles) began on March 19, 2003. The conquest of Iraq was just as easy as the American planners expected it to
be. By the time a flight-suited President Bush flew out to the aircraft carrier
Abraham Lincoln
to declare an end to major combat operations (with a banner saying “Mission Accomplished” prominently displayed in the background for the television cameras), only 138 American soldiers had been killed. The “kill-ratio,” as is often the case when one side tries to fight without air cover, had been around a hundred-to-one in favour of the U.S. Army. American military planners were assuming that they would be able to draw down the occupation force in Iraq to only thirty thousand soldiers by the end of the year—but there had been a striking lack of Iraqis throwing flowers.

CHAPTER 4

JIHAD: THE IRAQI PHASE, 2003–2006

T
he invasion of Iraq in 2003 came at a time when the Islamist movement in the Arab world was at an ebb. It had been entirely suppressed in Syria, and was in the final stages of losing the long civil war in Algeria. In Egypt the Muslim Brotherhood was collaborating with the dictatorship of Hosni Mubarak in exchange for being allowed a shadowy existence in politics (seventeen “independent” candidates were elected to parliament in the 2000 election) and a somewhat more visible role in providing social services in the poorest parts of the cities, but the more radical groups that had engaged in terrorist attacks in the 1980s and 1990s had been stamped out. And in Iraq there was no Islamist movement to speak of: they were all either dead or in exile.

Al Qaeda had no members and few contacts in the country, and other Islamist organizations like the Muslim Brotherhood were also largely absent. Saddam Hussein’s police state had ruthlessly hunted down and killed Islamist activists in the Sunni community. And, being an equal opportunity oppressor, Saddam dealt with Shia religious leaders who grew too prominent in the same way. So the earliest resistance to the American occupation came
mostly from army officers and soldiers who had just taken their uniforms off and gone home, in the “Sunni triangle” west of Baghdad.

They had gone home because in May 2003 the newly appointed head of the “Coalition Provisional Authority,” retired American diplomat L. Paul Bremer III, disbanded the entire Iraqi army and police force. He also banned all senior Ba’ath Party members from future employment in government service, together with anyone in the top three management layers of government ministries, government-run corporations, universities and hospitals who had been a party member at all. (As in the former Communist states of Eastern Europe, membership in the ruling party had been a requirement of promotion to senior rank in these institutions, so he was dismissing the entire top management of all these organizations, although few of them would actually have been Ba’athist activists in any meaningful sense.)

These were Bremer’s own decisions, so far as is known, and not imposed on him by the Bush administration. In effect he was not only putting the entire Sunni Arab elite out of work (for most of these jobs under Saddam were reserved for that elite), but also gutting the only two institutions, the army and the police, that at least in theory rose above mere sectarian concerns. He threw half a million people, most of them with weapons training, serious organizational abilities, or both, out on the street in the most humiliating way imaginable—and then was surprised by what they did next.

Even if Bremer had not done what he did, Iraq would likely have produced a serious resistance movement to the American occupation. It was as if a completely different army from a different United States had arrived in Iraq. Instead of the low profile and deliberate restraint of the U.S. forces in Afghanistan, Iraq got an American army that treated the country like a free-fire zone. It was true at the beginning, and remained true for years, that any American soldier could kill any Iraqi for any reason—or none—and get away with it. This reckless behaviour was accompanied by absolutely massive corruption: of the $40 billion that was made available for reconstruction in the year after the invasion (frozen Iraqi funds held in foreign banks, and money voted by the U.S. Congress), less than $10 billion was actually spent on reconstruction. The rest went in cost-plus contracts to American contractors with good White House connections, on deals with Iraqi contractors that involved huge kickbacks, and in straightforward, industrial-scale theft by Americans and Iraqis alike.

Iraq was awash in cash—in dollar bills. Piles and piles of money. We played football with some of the bricks of $100 bills before delivery. It was a wild-west, crazy atmosphere the likes of which none of us had ever experienced
.

Frank Willis, former senior official, Coalition Provisional Authority

American law was suspended, Iraqi law was suspended, and Iraq basically became a free fraud zone. In a free fire zone you can shoot at anybody you want. In a free fraud zone you can steal anything you like. And that was what they did
.

Alan Grayson, Florida-based attorney prosecuting CPA corruption
¹²

The consequence of all this corruption was that there was practically no improvement in living conditions in Iraq to compensate for all the inconveniences and humiliations of the foreign occupation. Four years after the arrival of U.S troops, Baghdad was still getting only six hours of electricity a day; even today, Iraqi living standards are far below what they were in Saddam Hussein’s heyday. So one can easily imagine the gradual development of a resistance movement against the occupation among disgruntled Iraqis over a period of a few years. In fact, it took only a couple of weeks, and the blame for that remains with L. Paul Bremer III for his demented decision to disband the entire army and police force and purge all former Ba’ath Party members from the bureaucracy. He had unwittingly imposed a social revolution on the country, driving the Sunni Arab minority from power after five centuries on top, and creating a reservoir of half a million Sunni ex-soldiers and ex-bureaucrats with a deep grievance against the occupation authorities and lots of time on their hands.

The very earliest clashes were spontaneous, like the unarmed demonstration in late April 2003 by students in the Sunni
city of Fallujah against the takeover of a local high school as a base for American soldiers. Shots were heard off in the distance, the nervous U.S. troops opened fire from the roof of the school, and thirteen students were killed. But by May the first deliberate attacks against American soldiers were taking place, mainly in Sunni areas in and around Baghdad and in the smaller Sunni cities of Fallujah and Tikrit. At first these usually consisted of ambush operations in which small groups of guerrillas would open fire at passing American vehicle convoys, together with the planting of some primitive IEDs (Improvised Explosive Devices) by the roadsides. The American occupation authorities dismissed these resisters as “dead-enders” who would soon fade away, but in fact the attacks grew quickly in scale and complexity: by mid-summer the U.S. army was losing an average of one soldier killed and seven wounded each day.

We are going to fight them and impose our will on them and we will capture them or, if necessary, kill them until we have imposed law and order on this country
.

L. Paul Bremer III, June 30, 2003
¹³

Bring ’em on!

President George W. Bush, July 2, 2003
¹⁴

I think all foreigners should stop interfering in the internal affairs of Iraq
.

Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, Mosul, Iraq, July 21, 2003
¹⁵

I think we have to recognize that as time goes on, being occupied becomes a problem
.

L Paul Bremer III, October 26, 2003
¹⁶

The insurgency took a major step up on August 19, when a massive truck bomb was driven up to the Canal Hotel in Baghdad, the headquarters of the United Nations Assistance Mission in Iraq that had been created only five days earlier, and exploded outside the office occupied by U.N. Special Representative in Iraq Sérgio Vieira de Mello. Twenty-two people were killed in the blast, including Vieira de Mello, and more than a hundred were wounded. As a result, the United Nations withdrew most of its six hundred staff from Iraq. It was not the first truck bombing in Iraq—the Jordanian embassy had been struck on August 7, killing seventeen people—but it was the first suicide bombing. It was also puzzling: why was the Iraqi resistance wasting its time attacking the United Nations?

There was no answer at the time, but in the following year a Jordanian called Abu Musab al Zarqawi, the leader of an Islamist revolutionary group, claimed credit for the attack. Zarqawi’s explanation for targeting the United Nations made much of the United Nations’ “gift” of Palestine to the Jews “so they can rape the land and humiliate our people,” but his specific grievance against Vieira de Mello was one that only an Islamist would harbour. He explained that the U.N. Special Representative deserved
to die because in a previous posting he had helped East Timor win its independence back from Muslim-majority Indonesia, which was a crime against the integrity of the Muslim lands that would one day belong to the refounded Islamic caliphate.

Zarqawi was born into poverty and Osama bin Laden into great wealth, but there are striking parallels in their ideas and their life histories. Like bin Laden, Zarqawi went to Afghanistan in the 1980s to wage jihad against the infidel occupiers, but being nine years younger than the founder of al Qaeda he got there only as the Soviet troops were pulling out, and saw no action. He met bin Laden and made a positive impression on him, although even then they had major differences about strategy: he disagreed with bin Laden’s focus on the “far enemy,” arguing that the priority was to establish an Islamic state on Arab soil. He then returned to Jordan and founded his own militant Islamist group, Jund al Sham.

Zarqawi was imprisoned by the Jordanian government in 1992, after guns and explosives were found in his home, and was only released seven years later in a general amnesty after the death of King Hussein. He immediately set about planning a terrorist attack that would kill hundreds of foreigners celebrating the millennium new year in the Radisson SAS Hotel in Amman, but the plot was discovered and Zarqawi fled to Pakistan and thence to Afghanistan—where he met again with bin Laden and other al Qaeda leaders in late 1999.

There was no going back to Jordan for Zarqawi any more, and bin Laden agreed to give him “seed money” (the figure $200,000 has been mentioned) to set up his own training camp near Herat and the Iranian border for the new group Jama’at al-Tawhid wal-Jihad (Organization for Monotheism and Jihad). It was from this seed that ISIS ultimately grew, but it had barely taken root when it had to be dug up again and moved to another country. Various Jordanian recruits arrived at the Herat camp, but their training was soon interrupted by the American response to al Qaeda’s attack on the United States in September 2001. The camp was destroyed by air attacks and Zarqawi escaped, wounded, across the Iranian border, where he reportedly received medical treatment in the Iranian city of Mashhad. His whereabouts in 2002 are subject to much debate, but he was most likely setting up a clandestine camp in Syria from which he planned to send Islamist fighters into Iraq once the much advertised American invasion happened. As indeed he did, once the occupation was in place.