ISIS: Inside the Army of Terror (12 page)

By the end of the summer, more than seven hundred Iraqis were being killed each month, and the conditions for Sunni rejectionism turning into jihadist extremism in force had returned. At the end of December, in response to an ISIS killing spree, al-Maliki deployed security forces to Ramadi to put an end to the antigovernment protests. They withdrew in the face of tribal resistance. ISIS then sacked Fallujah on New Year’s Day 2014 and announced that it had become an “Islamic emirate” committed to defending Sunnis from al-Maliki.

“Maliki pushed the Sunnis so far that they had to rise up,” Rick Welch said. “They tried to get reforms, but they couldn’t. Tribal honor was on the line and revenge thinking was on the line. Maliki made this crisis.”

7

ASSAD’S PROXY

SYRIA AND AL-QAEDA

ISIS’s resurgence in Iraq coincided with its takeover of a large swath of territory in next-door Syria, a fact which the regime of Bashar al-Assad had tried to exploit to claim victimhood at the hands of international terrorism. The Assad regime’s absurd claim was proved false by the uncovering of undeniable forensic proof that Syria helped keep AQI afloat, before the US withdrawal from Iraq. Al-Rishawi, the Anbar Awakening leader, told the
New York Times
before he was murdered by AQI, “This is all Syria’s doing. Syria is doing bad things.”

It was. Al-Assad has managed to unite a chorus of varied global accusers—ranging from the US military, the Sons of Iraq, his own former diplomats and security officials, innumerable Syrian rebels, and even the al-Maliki government—in affirming and condemning his state sponsorship of Zarqawism. The proliferation of ISIS in both Iraq and Syria can’t be understood without examining Damascus’s long-running collaboration with its forerunner organization.

HAFEZ’S ISLAMISM

We have seen how secular Iraqi Baathism had a habit, in the last century, of making an accommodation with Islamism in order to preempt its revolutionary potential. The Syrian counterpart was no different.

The Muslim Brotherhood uprising in Syria, which began in 1976 and was brutally suppressed in 1982 by forces loyal to Hafez al-Assad, had tended to obscure the regime’s strategic alliance with a host of Sunni Islamist parties and paramilitaries, alliances premised on mutually beneficial geopolitical needs: chiefly, confronting the United States and Israel. As scholar Eyal Zisser has noted, by the mid-1990s, Hafez al-Assad was no longer the dread nemesis of those seeking a marriage between mosque and state because “Damascus started to see the Islamists as perhaps the only possible means by which to enhance its regional standing, gain influence in neighboring countries, and bring domestic tranquillity to Syria itself.”

When the elder al-Assad died in 2000, and his London-trained ophthalmologist son ascended to the presidency, this arrangement increased. Up until recently, for example, despite a national Syrian law banning the Brotherhood as party or organization, Damascus had no qualms about hosting Khaled Mashal, the chairman of the politburo of Hamas. Today, the regime relies overwhelming on the paramilitary assets of Hezbollah and Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps—both US-designated terrorist entities—to continue its grueling war of attrition against a legion of domestic and foreign-backed insurgencies. These of course consist of Islamist and jihadist rebels, some of whom are former prisoners of the regime, if not former accomplices of it in Iraq.

Even before the United States toppled Saddam, al-Assad had embarked on a policy of facilitating foreign fighters’ movement into Iraq to destabilize the occupation. An office situated across from
the US embassy in Damascus even helped would-be insurgents book bus travel to the Syria-Iraq border. In 2007 CENTCOM announced that it had captured a “Saddam Fedayeen leader involved in setting up training camps in Syria for Iraqi and foreign fighters,” although the person’s name was not released.

That same year, US forces killed Muthanna, a man designated as al-Qaeda’s emir for the Syrian-Iraqi border region, in the city of Sinjar. According to Major General Kevin Bergner, the spokesman for coalition forces, Muthanna acted as “a key facilitator of the movement of foreign terrorists” from the one country into the other. As with other high-value targets, Muthanna possessed a cache of useful intelligence, which became known as the Sinjar Records. A study published in 2008 by the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point (CTC) analyzed these records and found that more than half of 376 foreign fighters in Iraq listed their occupation as “suicide bomber,” indicating again the expendable nature of non-Iraqi jihadists to AQI, and also underscoring one reason why sending such cannon fodder to their deaths abroad wasn’t seen as potentially self-defeating for Damascus. The Sinjar Records also confirmed that the foreign fighters were entering Iraq from the Syrian province of Deir Ezzor, typically using the Syrian border town of Albu Kamal, which lies adjacent to the Iraqi city of Qa’im—where al-Zarqawi established his headquarters after fleeing Fallujah in 2004 and where a proto-Awakening got started the following year. The flow, the CTC concluded, came in three distinct “waves.”

The first began shortly before the invasion, when Saddam exhorted Arabs from around the region to join in the forthcoming insurgency. This fielded a number of Bedouin tribesmen hailing from Deir Ezzor and Hasaka, as well as other jihadists egged on by Sheikh Ahmad Kuftaro, Syria’s mufti, who wasted no time in lending state legitimacy to the incendiary sermons wafting out of
mosques and madrassas in his country. “In border villages and cities,” the CTC study stated, “houses were donated for volunteers to live in while local notables—both religious and tribal figures—organized transportation and accommodations for them in Iraq. According to local sources, hundreds of fighters passed through Albu Kamal and [Hasaka] just before the US invasion, leading to rapid increases in the cost of housing, food, and weapons—all of which greatly benefited the locals. The Syrian authorities monitored the flow, but made no move to stop it.”

The second wave arrived with the First Battle of Fallujah, when the al-Assad regime’s new show of trying to stop the rat lines was eclipsed by rampant corruption: Syrian Mukhabarat
officers were bribed into letting Syrians cross the border anyway.

The third wave followed the 2005 Cedar Revolution, which brought an end to Syria’s military occupation of Lebanon and was prompted by popular revulsion at the assassination of former Lebanese prime minister Rafik Hariri, for which a UN tribunal indicted members of Hezbollah, al-Assad’s terrorist ally.

“CALL US”

Al-Assad, of course, has always denied orchestrating or coordinating the jihadist activities in Iraq in any way, and he has even played up his supposed cooperation with Washington in the war on terror. Yet many of his regime’s former officials now say his state sponsorship of AQI was hardly a secret and was quite clearly premised on two separate but related motives. The dictator had hoped it would be a severe warning to the Bush administration after Iraq, and as Jason Burke’s
The 9/11 Wars
shows, he also wanted to divert Islamists’ attention away from his regime by keeping them preoccupied next door.

“For Assad the problem was much bigger than America invading Arab countries for regime change,” Bassam Barabandi, a
former diplomat at the Syrian embassy in Washington, DC, told us. After the 2011 uprising, Barabandi covertly helped hundreds of dissidents and activists obtain passports for their relatives who were trying to flee a war-ravaged country. “Assad understood that part of Bush’s strategy in Iraq was to end minority rule of Sunnis ruling over majority Shiite. He feared that he would be next. From then on, he started to work with mujahidin; he did everything possible to convince the Americans, ‘Don’t come after me, otherwise I’ll send more terrorists next door to kill your soldiers.’ ”

For about five years, the US reply to this ultimatum was mainly diplomatic, and al-Assad sometimes acceded to Washington’s demands, lending the impression that he was dismantling the jihadist networks on his soil. It was all a feint, Barabandi said, part of the strategy to use Syria’s facilitation of terrorism as a bargaining chip. The former diplomat described for us how Sabawi Ibrahim al-Hassan al-Tikriti, Saddam’s half-brother who had been hiding in Syria and was wanted by both the Americans and Iraqis, finally came to be handed over. “The Americans went to Assad in 2005 and asked for his help in catching Sabawi,” Barabandi said. “He was on the border of Syria and Iraq, and he was leading the Baathist terrorists. Bashar was of course hosting him. Practically, the Americans and Iraqis were asking for his help: ‘We will try to improve our relations with you in return.’ Assad agreed. Imad Moustapha [the Syrian ambassador to the United States at the time] was in the meeting in Damascus with the US under secretary of state, where this was discussed and decided. Imad told us the story. In fact, he told everyone this story. After two days, Assef Shawkat [al-Assad’s own brother-in-law and Syria’s top intelligence officer] contacted Imad to tell him to tell his American friends that Sabawi would be in such-and-such area of Iraq. They informed the Americans exactly where he was, and they captured him.”

Tony Badran, an expert on Syria at the Washington-based
Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, has characterized al-Assad’s underwriting of al-Qaeda as a form of attention-seeking. “It’s about the regime’s conception of its role and position in the region,” Badran said. “It believes that its longevity lies in being perceived as an indispensable regional power, and so its foreign policy with respect to the West is: ‘You have to talk to us. Just pick up the phone and talk to us; it doesn’t matter what’s discussed, we just want to hear from you.’ For Assad, the ability to boast that the United States is an interlocutor is a matter of power projection. It lets him pretend that he’s the linchpin for Arab-Israeli peace or a real force for counterterrorism. He creates the problems he then oh-so-magnanimously offers to solve.”

ABU AL-QAQA AND SHAKER AL-ABSI

Badran mentioned, as an example, the curious case of an Islamist Kurdish cleric named Sheikh Mahmoud Gul Aghasi, who more commonly went by the name Abu al-Qaqa. Having called for US soldiers to be “slaughtered like cattle” in Iraq, al-Qaqa was allowed to preach openly in Aleppo—following his brief arrest by the regime after 9/11—despite his loud championship of Syria’s transformation into a Sharia-compliant Islamic state. As recounted by journalist Nicholas Blanford, who interviewed the cleric in 2003, al-Qaqa organized “festivals denouncing the [United States] and Jews. Many of these festivals were attended by Syrian officials, and some of al-Qaqa’s followers grew suspicious of their leader. Those suspicions hardened when it was learned that al-Qaqa had delivered a list of Wahhabis in Syria to the state security agency. Was al-Qaqa playing a double game, preaching jihad while handing over jihadists to the authorities?”

Blanford argued that al-Qaqa was tolerated by the regime so long as he stayed in the terrorist export business; forswearing
attacks at home was the price for running jihadists. This was why on the wall of al-Qaqa’s mosque in Aleppo there was a sign displaying “a bomb with a red line drawn through it.”

The Mukhabarat’s relationship with this demagogue was hardly Syria’s best-kept secret. “Abu al-Qaqa was a strange phenomenon,” said Muhammad Habash, a former Syrian MP who, in 2008, headed the de-radicalization program at Sednaya prison in Damascus. “He was preaching about jihad in a mosque situation in one of Aleppo’s most crowded neighborhoods. In the Sakhour mosque, he not only preached about jihad, but he held military training for young people heading to Iraq. With a sermon like that, an imam would usually spend the rest of his life in prison, along with his family and relatives and those who attended the sermon.”

Habash told us that he first met al-Qaqa in 2006.

“I was giving a lecture at the Islamic Research Centre and someone stood up to talk. He spoke with such charisma, so I asked to meet him afterward in my office. I told him, ‘I would like to know you, you have such a strong presence when you speak.’ He was accompanied by two young men who were listening attentively to what he was saying, and he was engaging them in the talk. He seemed to have strong leadership skills. I told him of my plans in Aleppo since it was announced as the new capital of Islamic culture in that year. I had a project for Islamic reform, and I wanted the help of someone like him in Aleppo. We both agreed that there was some room for such activism under this regime. When he left, someone came out and told me he was Abu al-Qaqa, and asked why I talked to him. I did not believe that. He was wearing a suit and tie, and had a tidy beard. His presence gave no indication of his infamous violent side.”

Following that initial encounter, Habash met with al-Qaqa regularly. “He spoke to me proudly about his role in preventing the Americans from entering Syria. He was a tool for the regime, and in the end he was shot.”

Yet another famous case was that of Shaker al-Absi, the Palestinian leader of an al-Qaeda–linked militant group, called Fatah al-Islam, who also worked with al-Zarqawi in planning the murder of USAID worker Laurence Foley in 2002. “Shaker al-Absi was the mastermind for the Foley assassination, which was put together in Damascus,” said David Schenker, formerly the Pentagon’s top policy aide on the Levant and now the director of the Program on Arab Politics at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. “I am 100-percent convinced that it was planned in Syria with Assad’s involvement, tolerance, permission, and support. In fact, I don’t think there’s any debate about that anymore. The smoking gun isn’t Zarqawi, it’s al-Absi who was in Syria, and then went to Jordan to oversee the assassination.”

The Jordanians sentenced both al-Zarqawi and al-Absi to death in absentia and requested the latter’s extradition from Damascus. Al-Assad refused and claimed to have put al-Absi in prison. “According to reports in the Arabic press, he was subsequently released and ended up running a terrorist training camp for al-Qaeda operatives going into Iraq from Syrian territory,” Schenker said. Regardless of what happened to him in Syria, he was clearly free to leave the country in 2007, because he led Fatah al-Islam’s armed uprising against the Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF) in the Nahr al-Bared Palestinian refugee camp. Although the LAF put down the rebellion, al-Absi was never apprehended. Fatah al-Islam later posted to its website that he returned to Syria, where he may have been killed by the security services. According to Schenker, he had in fact been “exported” to Lebanon in 2007 and maintained ties to the Syrian Mukhabarat throughout the Nahr al-Bared siege. “How
do we know that? There was a Lebanese [pro-Assad] cleric named Fathi Yakan from the Tripoli area who went several times into the camp to serve as an intermediary to contact Absi. A week or so later, he showed up in pictures with Assad in Damascus.”