ISIS: Inside the Army of Terror (14 page)

Al-Hashimi pointed out that al-Baghdadi had sought in his youth to pursue a career at Saddam’s Ministry of Islamic Endowments. “I had a talk with a senior former Iraqi official who was a senior official in Saddam’s regime and under al-Maliki,” an active US military official told us.

“I asked him specifically about al-Baghdadi. ‘Did you know who he was?’ Not specifically, but he knew the background that he came from and the extended network he came from. In Saddam’s time, where this guy was from and where his family was from was very much a Saddamist-Baathist stronghold. The people who came from Samarra were very tight with the regime. Al-Baghdadi went to the Islamic University of Baghdad at exactly the time of Saddam’s Faith Campaign—in other words, at a time when the Baath Party was controlling admissions. There’s no way you’d get into the Islamic University at that time without getting vetted and approved by the party, and there’s no way you’d get vetted and approved by the party without having an extended family network of uncles and cousins and so on who are in the regime and endorsing you. So yeah, al-Baghdadi may not have been a Baathist himself, but I guarantee you he had a lot of Baathist family members who put him into the Islamic University.”

As we’ve examined, the anti-American insurgency in Iraq drew its strength from Sunni revanchism. One way to view Baathism historically is as one among many exponents of Sunni political power. It competed in its heyday with pan-Arab nationalism, as expounded by Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser, the Islamism of Sayyed Qutb’s Brotherhood, and the Salafist-Jihadism of bin Laden. Indeed, the Islamic Faith Campaign was meant to preempt
Salafism’s usurpation of Baathism. Today, the secular socialist ideology is in a tenuous state of coexistence and competition with the caliphate-building takfirism
of ISIS.
Amatzia Baram and Pesach Malovany, two scholars of contemporary Iraq, take this thesis even further and make an intriguing case for viewing al-Baghdadi as the rightful heir to Saddam Hussein. For one thing, they argue, even though he is originally from Samarra, his chosen nom de guerre, al-Baghdadi, immediately situates the Iraqi capital as ISIS’s center of gravity, which it was under the Abbasid caliphate, itself an important Islamic touchstone for the dead Iraqi dictator. “Saddam never declared himself to be a caliph,” Baram and Malovany write, “but his conceptual connection with the Abbasid caliphate centered in Baghdad was profound. One of the nicknames attached to his name was ‘Al-Mansur,’ which means ‘Victorious by the grace of God,’ but that was also the name of the most important Abbasid caliph. . . .Saddam also gave names derived from the Abbasid history to numerous military units he established. . . .So, as far as the central role of Iraq and Baghdad is concerned, Abu-Bakr al-Baghdadi is Saddam’s disciple.”

“The brutality, the tradecraft, how ISIS is behaving on and off the battlefield—it’s really no different from the Saddamists, in my view,” said Derek Harvey, who would surely know.

There is also a grim parallel between Saddam and al-Baghdadi’s hatred of the Shia. The Baathist slaughtered 150,000 of them during Saddam’s thirty-year reign, most notoriously during the suppression of the Shia and Kurdish uprising against his regime in March 1991, at the end of the First Gulf War. When his tanks rolled into Najaf in 1991, they had the slogan “La Shi`a ba`d al-yawm” (“No Shia after today”) painted on their sides.

If there is a difference in the ideology of murderous sectarianism, then, it is one of scale. For all his savagery, Saddam did not make it a matter of state policy to seek the wholesale destruction of
the Shia, nor could he—they were still tolerated in the upper echelons of the Iraqi military and in the Baath Party, even after the 1991 massacres. Al-Baghdadi, however, has so far demonstrated nothing short of annihilationist intention, following in the dark pathological tradition of al-Zarqawi. To ISIS, the Shia are religiously void, deceitful, and only marked for death.

ALL THE EMIR’S MEN

Harvey’s insight is all the more compelling for the fact that ISIS’s high command consists of former or recovering Saddamists, those who occupied elite posts in the Iraqi military or Mukhabarat. Al-Hashimi credits two men in particular with helping al-Baghdadi advance in ISI.

The first is Abu Abdul-Rahman al-Bilawi (real name: Adnan Ismael Najm), who was killed during ISIS’s siege of Mosul in June 2014. He joined AQI during al-Zarqawi’s era and had been al-Baghdadi’s chief of the general military council for ISIS, with a purview encompassing all of Iraq’s eighteen provinces. Originally from al-Khalidiya in Anbar, Bilawi was formerly a captain Saddam’s army. He, too, had been detained at Camp Bucca, although a year or so after al-Baghdadi’s confinement.

The second influencer, according to al-Hashimi, is Abu Ali al-Anbari, a native of Mosul and ISIS’s man in charge of operations in Syria. Before becoming a jihadist, al-Anbari was also an officer in Saddam’s army. Somewhere in between, according to the
Wall Street Journal
, he had been affiliated with Ansar al-Islam before the group kicked him out following accusations of financial corruption. Iraqi and Syrian militants think al-Anbari was selected as al-Baghdadi’s deputy in the Levant because of his political pragmatism; his “knowledge of Shariah Islamic rules isn’t considered as extensive as that of other senior leaders,” the
Journal
reported.

Abu Ayman al-Iraqi, another member of ISIS’s Military Council, was formerly a lieutenant colonel in Saddam’s air force intelligence, according to a cache of internal documents recovered by Iraqi forces. Another former US detainee, his previous nom de guerre,
under Baathist rule, was Abu Muhannad al-Suweidawi. So entrenched in his native soil was al-Iraqi that Laith Alkhouri said to us that he needed assistance migrating next door. “The moment that ISIS expanded into Syria, al-Iraqi went in. There is no way he went on his own to Syria. He couldn’t navigate the place by himself. He led ISIS in Aleppo and Latakia, and he must be the group’s top guy for security in Deir Ezzor. He’s leading much of ISIS’s current efforts against other Syrian rebel factions.”

Another graduate of both Bucca and the Baath regime was Fadel Ahmed Abdullah al-Hiyali (also known as Abu Muslim al-Turkmani or Haji Mutazz). In December 2014 General Martin Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, claimed that al-Turkmani was killed by US air strikes, though jihadists say that it was in November. Prior to that, al-Turkmani was thought to have occupied a position possibly equal to that of al-Anbari in the ISIS hierarchy. A former lieutenant colonel in Iraq’s Special Forces, he was apparently one of many victims of the disbandment of the Iraqi army in 2003 by Paul Bremer, the American envoy who ran Iraq after the war. Al-Turkmani linked up with another Sunni insurgent group before joining AQI.

Baghdad is said to have handpicked al-Suweidawi and al-Turkmani during their detention at Camp Bucca.

In some cases, the devil’s rejects were also Bremer’s and al-Maliki’s. The
New York Times
reported in August 2014 that after Mosul fell, an unnamed former general in Saddam’s army called to apply to the Iraqi Security Forces. His application was refused. Now a member of ISIS, he has reportedly told the army that wouldn’t have him, “We will reach you soon, and I will chop you into pieces.”

“The Baathists originally said that their return to power was going to be based on Islam,” Harvey told us. “That’s what Saddam’s letters and his guidance said.” Michael Pregent, a former US military intelligence officer who advised the Kurdish peshmerga in Iraq, argues that ISIS’s attempt to mask or elide the curricula vitae of its top commanders is part of its war strategy. “They can’t use their old affiliation as a recruitment tool to get people to come over and fight. A return to Baathism isn’t a great selling point, especially when you claim to be committed to Baathism’s defeat in Syria. It’s like saying that every Army Ranger or Special Forces soldier suddenly became a Branch Davidian.”

FROM TBILISI TO ALEPPO

There is one prominent exception to al-Baghdadi’s preference for Iraqis over foreign mujahidin
in positions of influence in ISIS. Known internationally as the “red-bearded jihadist,” Abu Omar al-Shishani, or Tarkhan Batirashvili, as he was born, is an ethnic Chechen in his late twenties from the Pankisi Gorge region of Georgia who actually served in the US-trained Georgian army as a military intelligence officer. He fought in the 2008 Russo-Georgian War but was later diagnosed with tuberculosis, according to his father, Teimuraz, and so was dismissed from the army.

The Batirashvili men were all Christian, but Teimuraz’s sons became radical Muslims. Al-Shishani even hung up the phone when told that his father hadn’t converted to Islam.

He was arrested for arms possession and served time in a Georgian prison, where his evolution into a hard-core Salafist may have taken place. Released in 2010 as part of Georgia’s general amnesty for prisoners, al-Shishani traveled sometime thereafter to Turkey, and then crossed into Syria. “Now he says he left because of his faith, but I know he did it because we were poor,” Teimuraz told the BBC.

The Chechen first emerged in Syria in 2013 as the head of his own al-Qaeda–inspired jihadist cell, Jaysh Al-Mujahireen Wal-Ansar
(the Army of Emigrants and Partisans), which consisted mainly of Muslims from the former Soviet Union. Russia’s domestic security service, the FSB, has reckoned that as many as five hundred Russian nationals are fighting in Syria, with hundreds more from other ex-Soviet countries, a statistic that can’t be independently confirmed. However, it bears noting that Russia factors prominently into ISIS’s propaganda as an enemy nation, no doubt owing to its warrior class from the Caucasus and desire to recruit more.

Al-Shishani formally joined ISIS and bundled his Army of Emigrants and Partisans into its ranks in December 2013, after making bayat to al-Baghdadi. Serially reported since as having been killed in combat—typically at the hands of Kurdish militias—he has now even earned the special attention of Ramzan Kadyrov, Vladimir Putin’s handpicked warlord-president of Chechnya. In November 2014 Kadyrov announced one of the many alleged deaths of al-Shishani, the “enemy of Islam,” on his favorite social media platform, Instagram, before deleting the announcement. This prompted speculation that the Chechen may have actually been killed in Syria and that Kadyrov’s obituary was the FSB’s way of confirming the news. Whatever the case, the Georgian’s main function for ISIS seems to be as its celebrated Patton of the
muhajireen
.

Chechens, as a rule, are viewed by others ISIS jihadists as the most formidable warriors, owing to decades of experience fighting a grueling insurgency against the Russian army. “Shishani is the most visible commander, even while ISIS’s command-and-control is still being directed by Baghdadi and former Baathists,” according to Chris Harmer, an analyst at the Institute for the Study of War. “The Chechens stand apart from the other foreign jihadists. If I’m in the ISIS Military Council, I’m not going to take a guy who
has experience fighting the Russians and turn him into a suicide bomber. I’m going to make him a platoon commander.”

For more than a year, al-Shishani’s genius as a military strategist was heralded and taken as the received wisdom among observers of the Syrian conflict after the Army of Emigrants and Partisans played a decisive role in sacking the Menagh air base in Aleppo, an installation that had been besieged for months by rebels of all sorts, including ISIS. Some of them even made impressive incursions inside the base only to then be beaten back by Syrian soldiers. Menagh finally fell after al-Shishani dispatched two foreign suicide bombers (one was reportedly a Saudi) who detonated a VBIED in an armored car they drove right up to the base’s command center. Largely a morale boost to the anti-Assad cause, the Menagh operation was generously credited by other rebels as a major ISIS victory over the regime (leaving aside that al-Shishani and his Emigrants and Partisans didn’t fully enlist in ISIS until six months later).

Lately, this heroic portrayal has come in for revisionist scrutiny by al-Shishani’s former comrades who fought alongside him and say his legend is tabloid embroidery. As Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty reported in November 2014, another Chechen jihadist named Khalid Shishani believes that his namesake is actually a lousy field commander. “Umar Shishani is a person who is absolutely useless in military terms,” Khalid wrote in a statement posted to Russian jihadist forums. “He lacks knowledge of military tactics—and that’s putting it nicely. Take note that it’s only the infidel (i.e., the Western) mass media that has written about Umar Shishani’s military genius. They have greatly inflated his identity and presented him as a genius military specialist, which is the complete opposite of the real picture. This person only knows how to send mujahedin as cannon fodder, and that’s it.”

Even if we attribute this to sour grapes or an intramural falling- out, it must be said that al-Shishani’s reputation has been better
served by the
Daily Mail
than by the Salafist-Jihadist cognoscenti. Alkhouri said that he’s the butt of innumerable jokes in online jihadists forums because his knowledge of Islam is “shit,” and his spoken Arabic is even worse.

THE MANAGEMENT OF HYPE

The transformation of foreign fighters into contemporary Saladins is actually a main plank of jihadist recruitment, going back to al-Zarqawi’s days. After all, even the Jordanian founder of AQI had come off as Gomer Pyle with an assault rifle until his tech department edited him into every inch the emir. “Look at who these foreign fighters are, first of all,” Richard, the ex-counterterrorist, said. “In most cases, they’re adventurers who don’t have a pot to piss in back home, whether that’s Belgium, Manchester, Algeria, Yemen or, OK, Georgia. They got hopped up through social media or proselytizing outside the mosque and went off to fight jihad. These are the same guys militaries around the world have been counting on forever to be privates or infantrymen. They’re knucklehead nineteen-year-olds looking to do something in their life because they don’t have shit to do back in Belgium.”