ISIS: Inside the Army of Terror (11 page)

Conditions were especially grim in Diyala province, which had been pacified at great expense in the preceding years and yet fell into chaos again after the surge. In August 2008 the prime minister had dispatched personnel from the Iraqi Special Operations Forces—one of the few effective counterterrorism units in the Iraqi security apparatus—into the office of the provincial governor of Diyala to arrest both a local councilman and the president of the University of Diyala, a Sunni. The operation resulted in the killing of the governor’s press secretary.

By the summer of 2009 the 3rd Stryker Brigade of the US 2nd Infantry Division had returned to Diyala, where it spent a year observing the crackdown on Sunni political power. It wasn’t enough that AQI was hunting Sunnis who had repudiated it; anyone affiliated with the Awakening was targeted for arrest by the state on dubious or nonexistent evidence. Such prejudicial justice didn’t apply to Shia prisoners, however, many of whom were released back into society with no questions asked—or so claimed the Diyala governor, who left Iraq in 2012 after a systematic campaign of intimidation by al-Maliki–appointed officials following the murder of his press secretary. More ominously, the Stryker brigade found, the central government was no longer paying the salaries of Awakening members. After a month or two without pay, they’d be liable to quit or even return to the arms of the insurgency they had previously repudiated.

The problem was no better in Anbar. Shadid interviewed Colonel Saad Abbas Mahmoud, the police chief of al-Karmah,
northeast of Fallujah. Mahmoud claimed to have been nearly assassinated twenty-five times, by means crude and creative. “He was delivered a Koran rigged with explosives buried in the pages between its green covers, then, less than two weeks later,” Shadid reported, “his dish of dulaymiya, a mix of chicken, lamb, a slab of fat, and rice, was poisoned, sending him to the hospital for ten days. When he got out, two bombs detonated near his house in Fallujah.” Mahmoud was in charge of three thousand Sons of Iraq in al-Karmah who were paid a measly $130 per month—or were supposed to be. They hadn’t received their salaries in three months.

The original plan for the Awakening was to integrate these volunteers into a more official form of government service, hiring them to work in state ministries, for instance. The Iraqi agency tasked with transitioning them was called the Implementation and Follow-up Committee for National Reconciliation (IFCNR), and while it’s true that by 2010, nearly thirty thousand volunteers had moved from being volunteer watchmen into certified candidates for state employment, they still had to compete for government jobs, many of which were extremely low-level. Al-Maliki showed little interest in carrying forward a program originally shoehorned into place by the United States.

Mullah Nadim Jibouri claimed before he was assassinated that as of mid-2010, a full 40 percent of AQI was composed of deserters or defectors from the Sons of Iraq. This figure may be exaggerated, but it was certainly plausible given two key events that year that helped deepen the fissures reemerging between the tribes and the central government.

The first was Iraq’s national election, which al-Maliki didn’t win as easily as he had expected to, and technically didn’t win at all. The US assessment of his dictatorial tendencies were such that, even before the polls opened, Odierno feared a defeat for the incumbent
might result in his putsch or cancellation of democracy in order to retain power. Many Sunnis say that’s exactly what happened anyway.

Even before the election, Iraq’s Accountability and Justice Commission—the sequel bureaucracy to the CPA’s de-Baathification Commission—banned more than five hundred candidates running for parliament because of their links to the Baath Party. Naturally, the majority of these were Sunnis and part of the Iraqiya alliance led by former interim Prime Minister Ayad Allawi’s faction. (Allawi, despite being a Shia, was seen as the mainstream Sunni electorate’s best hope for regaining the premiership.) Odierno, with good reason, saw that behind this broad-brush campaign of delegitimization lurked the hand of Iran’s Quds Force.

Despite preelection skulduggery, the vote went smoothly on March 7, 2010, with 60 percent turnout and little reported violence throughout the country. The one person it didn’t go quite so smoothly for was al-Maliki.

Allawi’s Iraqiya bloc won two more seats than did the State of Law Coalition, holding a 91-to-89 margin of victory. Iraqiya even performed remarkably well in the Shiite south, winning some two hundred thousand votes. The new parliament had been increased by fifty seats, from 275 to 325 in total, but the addition of legislators belied the near-categorical housecleaning that the election represented. There were 262 seats that went to first-time candidates, meaning that almost the equivalent of the previous parliament had been sacked. By all accounts, al-Maliki’s polling had been way off. He would need to form a government by partnering with any of the other major blocs. Defeat unleashed his paranoia in a grand fashion.

Despite the election being deemed fair by UN monitors, al-Maliki accused the body of conspiring with Iraq’s electoral commission to oust him. It was all a neo-Baathist plot, abetted by the United States, and he demanded a recount.

Al-Maliki used every means at his disposable—including legal
rereadings of the constitution—to push the election toward power for his government.

Yet the electoral commission certified Iraqiya’s win. The following day, Iraq’s president, Jalal Talabani, flew to Tehran for negotiations between the State of Law Coalition and the Iraqi National Alliance. Iraqiya was to be stopped at all costs, even if it meant that rival Shia parties had to work together under the supervision and blessing of their foreign state sponsor, Iran. The new government would finally be decided through these negotiations and through more judicial maneuvering. Al-Maliki eventually formed a national unity government that also included Kurds and Iraqiya—but with the incumbent returning as prime minister.

Odierno, for one, saw how flagrant manipulation and Iranian meddling in a sovereign state’s election would be viewed by Iraq’s Sunnis. So did Ali Khedery, the former US diplomat who arrived in the Green Zone on the back of the invasion in 2003, and served as Ryan Crocker’s aide during the surge and Awakening period. Khedery maintains today that the US handling of the 2009 election only exacerbated Sunni grievances in Iraq, convincing many that they
were
being purposefully kept from power. The history of the postelection period did no favors in dispelling this assumption. Ambassador Hill had likened an Iraqiya win to the return of the Afrikaners in South Africa. Vice President Joseph Biden, whom President Obama put in charge of the administration’s Iraq policy, is recorded as saying, “Maliki hates the goddamn Sunnis” but nevertheless acceded to the return of this sectarian incumbent. “I know one guy, one of the most peaceful, moderate Iraqis you can imagine,” Khedery told us. “He had been a bottom-level Baathist, one of Saddam’s engineers. He says, ‘Look, I was never sectarian before. I never liked Iran, we fought a war with them. I love my country, I’m a nationalist. But I’ve become sectarian now because there’s nowhere else for a moderate or a secularist to be. We’re losers. I’ve become as sectarian as the people I used to hate.’ ”

DIPLOMATIC DISENGAGEMENT

As much as the consequences of the surge have been debated in US policy circles, so too has the wisdom (or lack thereof) of a categorical troop withdrawal from Iraq in 2011. Did this enable the easy reconstitution of ISI? Could it have been avoided with more fleet-footed or energetic diplomacy by the Obama administration, which had intended to renew and extend SOFA but had come to the negotiating table late in the day and with the air of being even less interested in maintaining a postwar US garrison than was the supposedly hard-bargaining al-Maliki?

There was actually little debate within the ranks of both the US and Iraqi militaries about the necessity to extend SOFA. Obama’s chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Mike Mullen, had advocated leaving a minimum of sixteen thousand troops, a figure deemed way too high by the White House’s national security team. “I’ll bet you my vice presidency Maliki will extend SOFA,” Joe Biden had said. But al-Maliki didn’t, owing to the fact that the minuscule troop number Obama ultimately decided on—3,500 personnel permanently stationed in Iraq, with 1,500 more rotated in at regular intervals for training Iraqi forces and conducting counterterrorism operations—wasn’t worth the cost of wrangling with his own deeply divided parliament, which had to ratify any bilateral agreement.

What the debate over military disengagement obscures, however, is that the United States withdrew
politically
from Iraq even sooner and arguably with more lasting consequence for the country’s future instability.

Colonel Rick Welch ran the national tribal leader program for the US military during the Awakening and helped transfer the responsibility for continued Sunni and Shia tribal outreach over to the State Department. What he found was a US foreign service
ill-equipped to ensure the Sons of Iraq stayed on the right side of the conflict. As Welch recounted:

“The joke of the day at the embassy was: ‘If you want to know what the embassy is doing, go to the [commissary] on Thursday, and look at how much alcohol was on the shelf and compare that to how much was there by Saturday.’

“It was as if Iraq wasn’t still a conflict or war zone. The time when it needed the keenest and sharpest minds that understood the country was in that preelection and immediate postelection period because Maliki pulled a fast one with his supreme court. And the Sons of Iraq, the tribal leaders, would complain about what he was doing. They called it the ‘purge.’ Yet the State Department’s talking point was, ‘We’re really sorry to hear that, but Iraq is a sovereign country. We cannot interfere.’

“I remember this moderate tribal leader, with this look of incredulity on his face. ‘You cannot interfere?’ he asked. ‘Yes, we can’t interfere.’ ‘Didn’t I just see President Obama authorize the bombing of Libya? Wasn’t that a sovereign country? And didn’t I hear President Obama interfere in Egypt and say that Mubarak had to go? And didn’t I hear the president intervene in Syria and say that Assad has to go? Don’t you have sanctions against Iran, another sovereign country? Didn’t you invade our country and aren’t you still here? It’s not that you can’t intervene—we’ve watched you intervene all around us to remove long-standing dictators. What we hear you say is that you won’t intervene to stop a rising dictator right here and restore the democracy you brought to us.’ ”

Against Obama’s rosy prognosis in 2011 that Iraq was a democratic success, Saleh al-Mutlaq, al-Maliki’s deputy prime minister, had gone on CNN and said that Iraq was spiraling into “dictatorship.” “It is a one-party show and one-man show. Yes, al-Maliki is the worst dictator we have ever seen in our history,” al-Mutlaq noted without the slightest trace of irony given the dictator who had been overthrown in 2003. The United States, he charged, was blind and stupid to think it had the kind of leverage over Baghdad it believed it did. “The whole set of the government, from the president to the prime minister, was the decision of Iran,” he said.

To counter this criticism from his own cabinet, al-Maliki ordered tanks to surround al-Mutlaq’s home, as well as the homes of Rafi al-Issawi, now the finance minister, and his vice president, Tariq al-Hashimi. On December 18, al-Hashimi fled to Iraqi Kurdistan after al-Maliki’s security forces held his plane on the tarmac at Baghdad International Airport while he awaited departure. Al-Hashimi was allowed to fly off, but three of his bodyguards were detained for “suspected terrorist activity” (one later died in custody). The next day, an arrest warrant was issued for al-Hashimi himself. He remained in exile in Iraqi Kurdistan before moving to Turkey. In 2012, he was sentenced to death in absentia by hanging by a judiciary widely seen as acting under al-Maliki’s personal instructions.

These and other crackdowns on Sunni politicians precipitated Arab Spring–style protests in Sunni areas throughout Iraq—and a counterresponse from al-Maliki, which only aggravated them.

On April 23, 2013, three days after Iraq’s provincial elections were held, the Iraqi Security Forces razed one protest site in Hawija, near Kirkuk. They claimed to be searching for the killer of an Iraqi soldier at the site, and although stories differ as to what happened next, the aftermath is not in dispute: twenty Sunnis were killed and more than one hundred were injured. The Hawija violence led to Sunni violence throughout Iraq, targeting police stations and army
checkpoints. The speaker of Iraq’s parliament, Osama al-Nujaifi, called for al-Maliki’s resignation in response to the carnage. Clashes spread to Mosul and Baghdad, where Sunni mosques were blown up and Iraqi security officials were yanked from their cars and murdered, and then to Shia cities, where AQI-style terrorist attacks took place. Sunnis took to calling for an armed national revolution, agitating for al-Douri’s Naqshbandi Army and Sahwa militias.

BREAKING THE WALLS

It hardly helped Iraq’s overall stability during this fraught period that AQI had used 2012–2013 to execute its Breaking the Walls campaign, which was characterized by eight daring attacks on Iraqi prisons, all designed to spring former operatives and replenish the ranks of the organization.

Jessica Lewis McFate of the Institute for the Study of War separated the growth of the ISIS campaign into four distinct phases. The first saw four prison attacks, including one against the Tasfirat prison in Tikrit in September 2012, an operation that freed one hundred inmates, nearly half of whom were believed to be al-Qaeda operatives slated for state execution. The second phase targeted locations along the Green Line—the demarcation point between Iraq proper and the Kurdistan Regional Government’s semiautonomous zone—no doubt designed to capitalize on roiling political and economic tensions between Erbil and Baghdad. The third phase saw the return of VBIED sorties in Baghdad and the belts region, targeting Iraqi Security Forces and Shia civilian areas. Here the jihadists sought to exploit another widening gulf in Iraqi society: that between the al-Maliki government and Sunni protestors who, inspired by the Arab Spring but mainly driven by domestic turmoil, had taken to the streets of Fallujah and elsewhere. The fourth and final phase began in mid-May 2013 and was
meant to terrorize the Shia, clearly to precipitate another sectarian civil war and the return of Shia militias. Almost half of the VBIED waves during Breaking the Walls, Lewis McFate found, occurred in this phase, coinciding with the Sunni protests, which culminated in the most successful jailbreak of the entire campaign: the July 2013 freeing of five hundred inmates from Abu Ghraib prison. According to the Obama administration, whereas suicide bombings in Iraq averaged between five and ten per month in the years 2011 and 2012, from the period encompassing the last three months of Breaking the Walls, that number jumped to thirty per month.