ISIS: Inside the Army of Terror (10 page)

The jihadists also made heavy use of another weapon of choice: house-borne improvised explosive devices (HBIEDs), which were built into the walls of Buhriz residences and set to explode as soldiers entered. In 2013 ISIS deployed HBIEDs with devastating effect—this time against Iraqi soldiers and policemen in Ninewah to coerce them into defecting or deserting. Given how easily ISIS sacked Mosul the following year, these attacks clearly weakened an already underwhelming Iraqi authority.

Long after the battle of Buhriz was over, Diyala saw a return to sectarian warfare, with Shia militias competing against new Sunni
sahwats
who were committed to opposing the repressive al-Maliki government. The province also represents a crucial battleground for ISIS. Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi belongs to the Bobadri tribe in Diyala, where a new ISIS
wilayat
(province) was announced in December 2013. Al-Adnani, the ISIS spokesman, also said that the jihadist war on Iraq’s Shia would be most concentrated there.

LIONS FOR LAMB

The battle for Buhriz also showed the wisdom of Graeme Lamb’s attempt to co-opt the less fanatical Sunni insurgents and use them against AQI. Of all the groups for which this eventually proved feasible, none turned on their former jihadist colleagues with more fervor than the Islamic Army.

In an interview with the
Washington Post
conducted in 2004, not long after the Second Battle of Fallujah, the group’s leader, Ismail Jubouri, a Sunni tribesman, insisted that his army was all Iraqi, made up of Sunnis, Shia, and Kurds, and committed only to the expulsion of the occupiers. Maybe, but the Islamic Army was also the largest Salafist-Baathist insurgency in Iraq, and by April 2007 it had grown so tired of AQI that it appealed directly to bin Laden to rein in his runaway franchise. When that didn’t work, it appealed to the Americans.

Abu Azzam, an Islamic Army commander, offered to help the US military regain control of the overrun Baghdad belts—especially Abu Ghraib, where Sunnis faced the pincer of AQI and the Shia militias. Azzam arranged a meeting between US forces and the three thousand volunteers who signaled their willingness to join an Awakening-style gendarmerie. Among them was a 1920 Revolution Brigades member named Abu Marouf, who had been number seven on the coalition’s most-wanted list for Abu Ghraib. Reluctant though they were to collaborate with a top-level terrorist who, not weeks earlier, was hunting and killing their own, the Americans agreed to put Abu Marouf’s overtures to the test. After being handed a list of the top-ten AQI operatives in the belt city of Radwaniyah, Abu Marouf returned days later with a cell phone video showing the capture and execution of one of them.

Abu Marouf was backed by the powerful Zobai tribe in the Baghdad region, with which he waged daring raids against AQI, further proving his bona fides. In Ameriya, a neighborhood west of Baghdad, an Iraqi volunteer group known as Forsan al-Rafidayn (Knights of the Two Rivers) called in coordinates of jihadist targets for American warplanes to bomb.

Eventually, Sahwa went from being a collection of localized civic actions to an institutionalized part of Petraeus’s COIN strategy, with regional Awakening Councils answering directly to the
US military and to the Iraqi provincial governments. Initially billed as the Concerned Local Citizens program, it soon became known by the more evocative Sons of Iraq. No doubt leery of seeing a replay of the first Iraqi Security Forces train-and-equip debacle, Petraeus tracked the Awakening volunteers by taking their biometric data and cataloging it on a central database.

“The surge is poorly understood,” Ali Khedery, the longest continuously serving American diplomat in Iraq, told us. “It was less about a surge of troops and more about a surge of diplomacy with Iraq’s national leadership to force it to work together and hammer out political deals. The goal was to buy time for the politicians to reach an accommodation with one another. That’s why you saw a reduction in violence by ninety percent from pre-surge highs to the time of provincial election in 2009.”

Not coincidentally, that election was largely won in the Sunni provinces by the very tribal figures who had cannibalized AQI. Al-Rishawi’s brother earned a seat on the Anbar Provincial Council. In Diyala and Ninewah provinces, Sunni coalitions likewise came out on top.

AQI ON THE ROPES

In a June 2010 Pentagon news briefing, General Odierno claimed that in the same three-month period, US forces had “either picked up or killed 34 out of the top 42 al Qaeda in Iraq leaders. They’re clearly now attempting to reorganize themselves. They’re struggling a little bit. . . .They’ve lost connection with [al-Qaeda senior leadership] in Pakistan and Afghanistan.”

AQI was being battered by a combination of JSOC raids, US surge brigades, Sons of Iraq militias, and their own lousy communications. For years, the National Security Agency had been Hoovering up telephone chatter between and among jihadists in the field,
passing the intercepts along to the CIA and JSOC, which then tracked, arrested, or eliminated them.

“It was Darwinism,” said Derek Harvey. “All the guys who were stupid enough to use cell phones in Baghdad kept getting hit, hit, hit, and hit. That was their way of culling the herd, though it had the negative side effect of leaving the smarter and more powerful operatives in place, the ones who were good at internal counterintelligence and buffering access to key leaders. The opaqueness of ISIS today is a reflection of this tradecraft.”

Distinct from the surge and the Awakening but equally auspicious was the fact that AQI’s fortunes began to wane in 2007 in the Iraqi imagination, coinciding with the emergence of something resembling a post-Saddam national identity, which transcended sectarianism and fratricidal bloodletting. In 2007, Iraqi singer Shada Hassoun won
Star Academy
, the Middle East equivalent of
American Idol
, for a heartbreaking rendition of the ballad “Baghdad,” which she belted out wrapped in her nation’s flag. Later that year, Iraq took the Asian Cup soccer tournament, beating Saudi Arabia. AQI’s celebrity, meanwhile, dimmed in its key demographic—young Sunnis. In
Iraq After America
, Joel Rayburn recounts a telling anecdote relayed to him by a police commander in Habbaniyah, a city in Anbar, around that time:

“Stepping from his home on Christmas Eve, 2007, he had been astonished to find the young men of his neighborhood setting off fireworks, with their girlfriends, and drinking alcohol—all distinctly ‘Christian’ activities that Al Qaeda had banned. The bemused policeman had teased the youths, ‘You’re celebrating like Christians, but last year you were all Al Qaeda!’ The young men had laughed, the police officer later recalled, answering, ‘Al Qaeda? That was last year!’ ”

That the takfiris could be reduced to the level of a passing fad would prove a valuable lesson for the US military’s central command
(CENTCOM) to learn in Iraq, and an even harder one for it to remember when that fad returned with a vengeance five years later.

As AQI’s reputation sagged externally, its internal decision-making was also apparently in crisis. Mullah Nadhim al-Jibouri was originally from the town of Dhuluiya, just north of Baghdad, and had sat on al-Zarqawi’s Mujahideen Shura Council. He then joined the Awakening before moving for a time to Jordan, where a lot of the tribes’ Islamic outreach was being conducted remotely. Al-Jibouri appeared on Jordanian national television frequently, denouncing AQI for its atrocities back home. Then, in the spring of 2011, he returned to Baghdad for reconciliation talks with the al-Maliki government. Al-Jibouri gave an interview to an Iraqi television station. The next day, he was murdered in a drive-by shooting in the western part of the capital.

Several months before his death, he had conducted a Skype call with members of the US military. According to one of the officers dialed into the conversation, al-Jibouri confirmed that the creation of the ISI was in effect a putsch by AQI, which had sought to dress up its own foreign jihadism in a nationalist costume. But other Sunni insurgents saw through it. ISI created a backlash among nationalists who had not been fighting and dying just to see a Zarqawist emirate installed in the Green Zone. Many of these insurgents, furthermore, had only ever accepted AQI on an ad hoc
military basis. “ISI represented al-Qaeda’s attempt to hijack the political channel of the Iraqi insurgency,” al-Jibouri said.

All totalitarianisms thrive on myths that transcend or erase national boundaries, even ones that begin as expressions of nationalism and then have to retroactively justify their inevitable anschluss of foreign land. AQI was no different. For the first years of the war, it had created a powerful dual perception of itself—first, as the vanguard of an
Iraqi
insurgency committed to seeing the Western occupiers pummeled and expelled, and second, as the guardian of a
stolen Sunni patrimony. In its apocalyptic extremism, it erased both perceptions. Petraeus’s army had administered the powerful drug of counterinsurgency warfare, which helped Iraq’s own antibodies in turn to destroy a foreign and deadly pathogen.

But that was with nearly 170,000 American soldiers in Iraq. Today, the challenge is far more difficult because the tribes don’t trust Baghdad, and with rare exception, they are not about to partner with Shia militias against ISIS. “People don’t believe in the term
Awakening
anymore because when the Iraqi government finished using the tribes, it turned against the Sons of Iraq,” Dr. Jaber al-Jabberi, a senior political adviser o the former Deputy Prime Minister Rafi al-Issawi, told us. “It didn’t give them rights, it didn’t pay their salaries, and it put a lot of them in jail. I don’t think the tribes will do another Awakening. What they need is a provincial National Guard, which can be part of the Iraqi Security Forces but from the tribal people, who can work as not army or police but as a militia.”

ISIS has taken every precaution against seeing anything of the sort occur again.
Sahwat
is a frequent term of abuse in its propaganda; it boasts of destroying the homes of tribesmen who oppose it and of allowing former Awakening militiamen to “repent” and rejoin ISIS. “Nobody has talked to me about a new Awakening, of forming a national guard,” Sheikh Ahmed Abu Risha, al-Rishawi’s brother, told the
Guardian
in October 2014
.
That same month a mass grave filled with 150 bodies was uncovered in a ditch in Ramadi. All the corpses belonged to the Albu Nimr tribe.

6

WITHDRAWAL SYMPTOMS

ISI AND AL-MALIKI WAIT OUT THE UNITED STATES

The success of Sahwa
and the counterinsurgency meant that more jihadists were not only being killed in battle, but rounded up as enemy combatants and jailed in American-run detention facilities in Iraq. The current leader of ISIS and a host of his lieutenants were once prisoners of the United States; they were released either because the United States deemed them negligible security threats or because the al-Maliki government had other motives than the military’s security concerns. The failure of foresight, many former US officials have told us, had to do with how these prisoners were identified and categorized once in custody. “Guys we ID’d and reported to be this thing in an organization—we did that because it made it easy to understand them,” a former Bush administration official told us. “So we’d say, ‘Well, he’s the emir.’ Fuck you, he’s the emir. It’s the fifth guy standing behind him who counts.”

TERROR U.

AQI and ISI weren’t only using US-run prisons as “jihadi universities,” according to Major General Doug Stone; they were actively trying to
infiltrate
those prisons to cultivate new recruits. In 2007 Stone assumed control over the entire detention and interrogation program in Iraq, with an aim to rehabilitate rehabilitation. Not only had the internationally publicized and condemned torture of detainees at Abu Ghraib prison left a permanent stain on the occupation and America’s credibility in the war, but theater detainment facilities had also been used as little more than social-networking furloughs for jihadists. Camp Bucca, based in the southern province of Basra, was especially notorious.

According to one US military estimate, Bucca housed 1,350 hardened takfiri
terrorists amidst a general population of 15,000, yet there was little to no oversight as to who was allowed to integrate with whom. Owing to the spike in military operations coinciding with the surge, the detainee number nearly doubled to 26,000 when Stone took command in 2007.

“Intimidation was weekly, killing was bimonthly,” Stone recalled in an interview. “It was a pretty nasty place that was out of control when I got there. They used cigarettes and matches to burn down their tents and mattresses, and when we tried to rebuild the tents, they’d just burn them down again. We thought they’d burn the whole goddamn prison down.”

Stone introduced a de-radicalization program, featuring lectures by moderate Muslim imams who used the Quran and hadith to try and persuade extremists that theirs was a distorted interpretation of Islam. He started to compartmentalize inmates into what were known as Modular Detainee Housing Units (MDHUs). “Before that, we had guys in thousand-man camp blocs. We used the
MDHUs to segregate those who had been intimidated or beaten from those who did the intimidating and beating up.”

During his eighteen-month tenure, Stone either led, oversaw, or consulted on more than eight hundred thousand detainee interrogations, observing several “trends” among the AQI population. In a PowerPoint presentation he prepared for CENTCOM, summarizing his findings, Stone corroborated much of what Mullah Najim Jibouri had told military officials about this period, namely that foreign fighters were looked on unfavorably as “Iraqis [who were] trying to re-assume leadership roles.” Baathists were “attempting to use the ISI banner to regain control of some areas.” Jihadists cared more about their hometowns or local areas than they did about global or regional terrorism. AQI’s use of women and children as suicide bombers had “disgusted” many. Money, not ideology, was the primary motivation for joining AQI. Finally, AQI’s emir Abu Ayyub al-Masri was “not an influential figure to most . . .however[,] younger, more impressionable detainees” were swayed by the figure of ISI emir Abu Omar al-Baghdadi.

Early on in his command, Stone noticed a strange phenomenon that pertained exclusively to the takfiri
detainees—they would enter Camp Bucca asking to join the AQI bloc, often with foreknowledge of how the prison worked and how detainees were housed. “Sometimes guys would allow themselves to be caught. Then, in the intake process, they’d ask to be put in a specific compound which housed a lot of the al-Qaeda guys. The takfiris were extremely well organized in Bucca; they arranged where their people slept and where they were moved to based on their Friday night prayers. In fact, one of the large cell areas was nicknamed Camp Caliphate. The more I heard it, the more I began to think,
Even if they can’t get it done, they sure as shit believe they can
.”

Prison culture in Iraq was such that anyone picked up by US forces without any form of identification would give his name and
then have his biometric data processed. Iris scans, fingerprints, and DNA samples were collected from all detainees. But often the names given during the intake were fake. “Some of them would have a different name for every interrogation. It was only through biometrics that we were later able to track recidivism rates,” Stone said.

Early on, Stone said, he came across a detainee whose listed surname was Baghdadi. There was nothing inherently eyebrow-raising about that—insurgents often take their city or country of origin (or the city or country they’d like people to think they’re from) as a nom de guerre.
But this Baghdadi stood apart from others. Stone said, “His name came up on a list of people that I had. They listed him as a guy who had significant al-Qaeda links. The psychologists rated him as someone who was a really strong wannabe—not in the sociopathic category, but a serious guy who [had] a serious plan. He called himself an imam and viewed himself not as a descendant of Muhammad—we had a few of those at Bucca—but someone with a very strong religious orientation. He was holding Sharia court and conducting Friday services from the platform of being an imam.”

This Baghdadi was pensive and hardly a jailhouse troublemaker. “We had hundreds like him in what we termed the ‘leadership category,’ ” Stone said. “We ended up referring to him as an ‘irreconcilable,’ someone for whom sermons by moderate imams wasn’t going to make the slightest difference. So here’s the quiet, unassuming guy who had a very strong religious viewpoint, and what does he do? He starts to meet the ‘generals.’ By that I mean, we had a lot of criminals and guys who were in the Iraqi army who called themselves generals, but they were low-ranking officers in Saddam’s army.” All the high-level former Iraqi military officials and hard-core Baathists, including Saddam himself, were detained at Camp Cropper, another US-run facility based in Baghdad International Airport. Cropper was also the processing center for Bucca
detainees. “Some of the generals shared Baghdadi’s religious perspective and joined the takfiris—big beards and all of that.”

Stone said he believes that this man was in fact a decoy sent by ISI to pose as the elusive Abu Omar al-Baghdadi to penetrate Bucca and use his time there to mint new holy warriors. “If you were looking to build an army, prison is the perfect place to do it. We gave them health care, dental, fed them, and, most importantly, we kept them from getting killed in combat. Who needs a safe house in Anbar when there’s an American jail in Basra?”

A former ISIS member interviewed by the
Guardian
confirmed Stone’s appraisal. “We could never have all got together like this in Baghdad, or anywhere else,” Abu Ahmed told the newspaper. “It would have been impossibly dangerous. Here, we were not only safe, but we were only a few hundred [meters] away from the entire al-Qaida leadership.”

Abu Ahmed recounted how jihadist detainees scribbled one another’s phone numbers and hometowns on the elastic waistbands of their underwear and had a ready-made network upon their release. “When we got out, we called. Everyone who was important to me was written on white elastic. I had their phone numbers, their villages. By 2009 many of us were back doing what we did before we were caught. But this time we were doing it better.”

That a decoy al-Baghdadi was recruiting from the ranks of the lower or middle cadres of the former Iraqi army made perfect sense to Richard, the former Pentagon official. “We tend to look at the Iraqi army as a joke, but it was a professional army, a very large army,” he said. “What we would consider junior officers—such as captains, majors, warrant officers—we’d be dismissive of those guys in Iraq. In Arab armies, usually those are the guys that are the true professionals. The guys that rise higher than major, the real generals in Saddam’s military, have tribal connections, family money. They buy their way in. The mid-grade officers are the ones
who matter. Those dudes rocked. How else are they going to make money? Their families are starving, they gotta make money. ‘I’ll put together a convoy ambush, piece together a couple of rounds into an IED, and these guys will pay me.’ Eventually they became pretty successful and they joined up with various insurgent groups, including al-Qaeda.”

Around 70 percent of Bucca inmates in 2008 were there for about a year or so. “What this meant in reality”—Craig Whiteside, a professor at the Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island, wrote in an essay for the website War on the Rocks—“is that your average Bucca detainee was incarcerated for a year or two before being released, despite being involved in fairly serious violence against the coalition or Iraqi government. There were even examples of insurgents who were sent to and then released from Bucca multiple times—despite specializing in making roadside bombs.”

AL-MALIKI VS. WASHINGTON

Camp Bucca was closed in 2009 in line with the Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) signed between Washington and Baghdad, which mandated that US-held prisoners either be let go or transferred into Iraqi custody, and that US troops be withdrawn from Iraqi cities by June 30, 2009, handing over all security responsibilities to their Iraqi counterparts. In December 2008 President Bush and Prime Minister al-Maliki signed SOFA in Baghdad at a ceremony more remembered for its violent disruption—an audience member threw his shoes at Bush—than its diplomatic breakthrough.

In reality, by late 2008 US soldiers were already largely confined to the outskirts of Iraq’s cities and were acting more as a stopgap on sectarianism than anything else. They protected Sunni and mixed communities from Shia death squads, which operated with
state impunity, and they protected the Shia communities from the equally vicious violence of the remaining Sunni insurgency.

SOFA was certainly billed as a major victory by al-Maliki over the United States rather than a mutually agreed compact marking the end to a war. Its implementation date, June 30, 2009, was turned into a national holiday commemorating the “repulsion of foreign occupiers.” But it was what the prime minister did with his newfound internment authority that had the direst repercussions for Iraq. “The vast majority of prisoners were just let go, even the crazy Sunni ones,” said Joel Rayburn, who has made a close study of SOFA and its consequences for Iraq’s security. “Maliki thought that, as of 2008 and 2009, we were just holding innocent people who had been caught up in a sweep. The big problem was, we would capture someone based on intelligence—either signals intelligence or human intelligence—and then not be able to share our methodology with the Iraqis to explain why the captured dude was a bad dude. If it was intelligence where you had to take out all the sources, the Iraqis would say, ‘Based on whose say-so?’ They’d dismiss it. The entire Iraqi legal system runs on the authority of witness testimony. If you get two witnesses to say something, then it’s unshakable.”

Plenty of incorrigible AQI jihadists were also let out of jail after the end of US oversight of Iraq’s wartime penal system, as the late Anthony Shadid, then a foreign correspondent for the
Washington Post
, reported in March 2009. That month, 106 prisoners were released and headed straight for the Umm al-Qura mosque in Baghdad—among them, Mohammed Ali Mourad, al-Zarqawi’s former driver. Despite his likely involvement in two deadly VBIED attacks against a police station, Mourad had been let out of Camp Bucca after he was suspected of having founded a new jihadist cell consisting of fellow detainees. Shadid cited a senior intelligence official at the Iraqi Ministry of Interior who reckoned that 60 percent of freed detainees, be they Sunni or Shia, were getting up to
their old habits again and rejoining active insurgencies or Special Groups. “Al-Qaeda is preparing itself for the departure of the Americans,” the official said. “And they want to stage a revolution.”

Where Baghdad didn’t rubber-stamp their freedom, the jihadists took matters into their own hands, mounting jailbreaks of their incarcerated associates, often by paying off or intimidating Ministry of Interior personnel to help them.

“It was easy to capture al-Qaeda people,” Rayburn told us. “We’d get them by the dozen, but they had an entire system for getting their guys back out, either by ensuring that their case was dropped in court or that through bribery they could be released early or, in the last resort, that a physical break of the prison could take place. They even had, at one point in 2008 or 2009, a ‘detainee emir’—a guy who was responsible for springing jihadis from the clink—just like they had a ‘border emir’ who’d coordinate the foreign fighter rat lines into Iraq from Syria. ‘Hey, Ahmad’s trial is coming up, here’s a list of the key witnesses. Go around, get them to recant or leave, or just kill them.’ Mosul was the worst spot in the country for that. We never got a full handle on the justice and prison systems up there.”

THE AWAKENING PUT TO SLEEP

Al-Maliki’s definition of the threats to a post-American Iraq derived from his own political and sectarian biases. Detainees whose only crime was fighting US forces were not deemed true criminals necessitating further incarceration. Members of the Awakening, however, who had previously fought Iraqi Security Forces or Shia militias, were not subject to the same magnanimous gloss on rehabilitation.

Long-dormant criminal cases against the Sons of Iraq remained opened even after the suspects had been deputized as state-sanctioned militiamen. No longer useful to al-Maliki, and
with ever-diminishing US protection, they were instead harassed and bullied by the government they had served. Many were also arrested on spurious “terrorism” grounds. “Sunnis always talk about the release of prisoners who were convicted illegally or extrajudicially,” a former Iraqi government official told us. “The dropping of all these terror cases is a main demand of them now.”