ISIS: Inside the Army of Terror (20 page)

Scott Atran is one of many analysts who believes that the US government hasn’t adequately grasped the appeal of ISIS to those most susceptible to being drawn into it. “We keep hearing that the antidote is preaching moderate Islam. I tell people on the National Security Council, ‘Don’t you have kids? Does anything moderate appeal to them?’ ”

12

DIVORCE

AL-QAEDA SPLITS FROM ISIS

At the end of December 2014, ISIS released its sixth issue of
Dabiq
. The cover story promised a “testimony from within” al-Qaeda’s home base of operations, the Waziristan region of southern Pakistan. Written by a man called Abu Jarir al-Shamali, a former associate of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the article was a more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger look at the degeneration of a once noble jihadist enterprise. Al-Shamali said he traveled to Waziristan after being released from an Iranian jail in 2010. He expected to find a proud Islamic emirate: “I had thought the mujahidin were the decision makers there and that the sharia laws were implemented by them there. But alas and sadly, the dominant law was the tribal laws.” Children were attending the “secularist government” schools; paved roads indicated that Islamabad was still very much in control of the territory; and, women intermingled with men, “making the movement of the mujahid brothers difficult in the case of sudden military action.” In short, al-Qaeda’s emirate was a busted flush. Moreover, al-Shamali explained, the treachery of the mujahidin in Pakistan, principally Ayman al-Zawahiri and “his cronies who left
from the arena of Waziristan carrying secret and private messages,” had created a rift within ISI, which led to a civil war within a civil war in Syria. Jabhat al-Nusra was suddenly fighting ISIS.

AL-NUSRA AT WAR IN SYRIA

By August 2012 US intelligence estimated that al-Qaeda had roughly 200 operatives in Syria, a minority of the overall rebel formations battling the regime. But, as the Associated Press reported, their “units [were] spreading from city to city, with veterans of the Iraq insurgency employing their expertise in bomb-building to carry out more than two dozen attacks so far.” And al-Zawahiri’s exhortation had paid off because, as Daniel Benjamin, the State Department’s top counterterrorism official said, “There is a larger group of foreign fighters . . .who are either in or headed to Syria,” although he claimed that Western-backed rebel groups “assured us that they are being vigilant and want nothing to do with al-Qaeda or with violent extremists.”

That vigilance would be severely tested as FSA brigades and battalions continued to complain about their lack of resources relative to the jihadists. At that point, the United States was sending “non-lethal aid” to the opposition in the form of walkie-talkies, night-vision goggles, and Meals Ready to Eat (MREs). FSA fighters had to rely on whatever weapons the military defectors in their midst took with them from the Syrian army, commandeered stocks from raided regime installations, and black-market purchases where the prices of even “light” arms such as Kalashnikovs, rocket-propelled grenade launchers, and ammunition had been inflated because of high demand. The rebels were also growing increasingly dependent on weapons purchased for them by Saudi Arabia and Qatar, two Gulf states with antagonistic agendas and a willingness to work with Islamist fighters deemed unsavory to the West.

A little-explored facet of the Syrian Civil War was how a highly competitive bidding war for arms by fighters naturally inclined toward nationalism or secularism accelerated their radicalization, or at least their show of
having been
radicalized. In a survey of the opposition carried out by the International Republican Institute (IRI) and Pechter Polls of Princeton in June 2012, rebels made their intentions for a post-Assad Syria clear. The survey showed that 40 percent wanted a transitional government in Damascus, leading to elections; 36 percent said they wanted a constitutional assembly, as in postrevolutionary Tunisia, leading to elections. But that would slowly change, or at least appear to. In Antakya—which by the summer of 2011 had become a refugee hub, triage center, and a remote barracks for the rebels—we met with one mainstream FSA fighter who was recuperating from an injury caused by shrapnel. He drank alcohol and smoked marijuana and professed to want to see a democratic state emerge in the wake of Assadism. However, his battlefield photo showed a long-bearded Islamic militant redolent of the Chechen separatist warlord Shamil Basayev.

This rebel’s brigade, he told us, was financed by the Muslim Brotherhood, and so he felt it necessary to play up his religiosity to ensure the subsidization of his men. Another rebel commander complained how he had to sell everything, from his family mining businesses in Hama to his wife’s jewelry, to keep his small start-up battalion of a few hundred afloat, whereas jihadist leaders were turning up in safe houses throughout Syria with bags full of cash they were ready to dispense to their comrades to buy guns, bullets, and bombs. The eight-year-old arms and jihadist trafficking nexus in eastern Syrian and western Iraq was moving in the reverse direction.

On December 11, 2012, the US Treasury Department sanctioned al-Nusra as the Syrian arm of al-Qaeda, which it accused of seeking “to exploit the instability inside Syria for its own purposes,
using tactics and espousing an ideology drawn from [al-Qaeda in Iraq] that the Syrian people broadly reject.”

The designation failed to marginalize the jihadist cell. Instead, it rallied the opposition behind al-Nusra, not necessarily out of ideological sympathy but out of wartime exigency. Dr. Radwan Ziadeh, a Washington-based Syrian dissident who had belonged to the Syrian National Council, the first political vehicle for the opposition, called the decision misguided precisely because it seemed to certify the al-Assad regime’s portrayal of the conflict—as a war against terror. Dissidents inside Syria saw it much the same way.

Having asked for the better part of a year for US military intervention in the form of a no-fly zone or arms for the FSA, activists chafed at America’s blacklisting of one of the groups taking the fight most assiduously to their enemy. In December 2012, Syrians held one of their Friday demonstrations throughout the country. This one was titled “We are all Jabhat al-Nusra.”

ISI OWNS AL-NUSRA

As it happens, the first al-Qaeda agent to confirm the Treasury Department’s intelligence was none other than Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, in an audio message publicized on April 8, 2013, more than a year after al-Nusra had established itself as one of the vanguard fighting forces. It was also a month after an array of rebel factions, led by Ahrar al-Sham and al-Nusra, took its first (and so far only) provincial capital away from Syrian soldiers in the eastern city of Raqqa, which was nicknamed the “hotel of the revolution” owing to the tripling of its population from internally displaced persons.

The fall of the city nearly coincided with the anniversary of another hinge moment in the history of the modern Middle East. It had been almost ten years to the day since US forces invaded Iraq in Operation Enduring Freedom. There was a grim symmetry between
the two events. US Marines had famously helped local Iraqis raze a large statue of Saddam in Baghdad’s Paradise Square, with one even briefly, controversially, covering the monument with the Stars and Stripes. Suddenly Islamists had just toppled a bronze statue of Hafez al-Assad and hoisted the Muslim
shahada
, the black flag with Arabic script reading, “There is no god but God, and Muhammad is His messenger,” to a flagpole in another Arab metropolis ruled by Baathists. Within days, graffiti appeared on buildings in Raqqa, attributed to al-Nusra, warning that the punishment for theft was the loss of a hand. Pamphlets were distributed with images instructing women of the due modesty of dress expected of them. And while many residents had cheered the expulsion of the regime, not all welcomed their new masters or the divisive iconography they brought with them.

In the
New Yorker
, Rania Abouzeid reconstructed an intense debate had between Raqqans of all generations and an al-Nusra operative, who was handing out a leaflet explaining the necessity of replacing the Free Syrian flag—the pre-Baathist tricolor adopted by the opposition in the early months of the protest movement—with an Islamic one. Abu Noor, a man in his twenties, feared the shahada was an open invitation for the wrong kind of US intervention in Syria. “We will become a target for American drone attacks because of the flag—it’s huge,” he said. “They’ll think we’re extremist Muslims!” Abu Moayad, an older man who had helped smuggle ammunition to the rebels from Iraq, told al-Nusra that the flag denatured the first principles of the revolution: “We are not an Islamic emirate; we are part of Syria. This is a religious banner, not a country’s flag.”

ISI’s seizure of Raqqa had happened by stealth, seemingly overnight, much as its insertion of al-Nusra into all of Syria. “When the situation in Syria reached that level in terms of bloodshed and violation of honor,” al-Baghdadi declared on April 8, 2013, “and when the people of Syria asked for help and everyone abandoned them, we could not but come to their help so we appointed al-Jolani, who
is one of our soldiers, along with a group of our sons, and we sent them from Iraq to Syria to meet our cells in Syria. We set plans for them and devised policies for them and we supported them with half of our treasury every month. We also provided them with men with long experience, foreigners and locals. . . .We did not announce it for security reasons and for people to know the truth about [ISI] away from media distortion, falsehood, and twisting.”

Al-Baghdadi didn’t just confine his message to confirming what was already widely assumed—he went further, announcing that al-Nusra and ISI were uniting into one cross-regional jihadist enterprise to be known as the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS), which has alternatively been translated as the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL).

No thanks, came al-Jolani’s reply, two days later.

Although respectful of his Iraq-based superior, whom he referred to as “honorable sheikh,” al-Jolani said that he didn’t approve of the merger, much less know about it beforehand. He thanked ISI for sharing its straitened operating budget with the Syrian franchise and confirmed al-Baghdadi’s deputization of him to lead al-Nusra. However, al-Jolani left absolutely no doubt as to where his true loyalty lay—with Ayman al-Zawahiri, the “Sheikh of Jihad,” to whom he publicly renewed his and al-Nusra’s bayat.

What followed was a brief media intermission by al-Nusra and an attendant escalation in chatter by ISIS. Al-Nusra’s official media network, al-Manara al-Bayda (the White Lighthouse)
,
stopped producing material, while numerous videos began to appear from ISIS, fueling speculation that al-Baghdadi had triumphed over al-Jolani. It was only in late May–early June 2013 that al-Zawahiri, like an exhausted father trying to break up a fight between two unruly sons, intervened publicly.

In a communiqué published by Al Jazeera, he did his best to sound evenhanded in his judgment. Al-Baghdadi, he stated, was
“wrong when he announced the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant without asking permission or receiving advice from us and even without notifying us.” But al-Jolani, too, was “wrong by announcing his rejection to the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant, and by showing his links to al-Qaeda without having our permission or advice, even without notifying us.” Al-Zawhiri thereby “dissolved” ISIS and ordered both ISI and al-Nusra back to its geographically delimited corners, one having control over Iraq, the other over Syria.

No doubt aware that this pronouncement wouldn’t keep his two subordinates from restarting their argument, al-Zawahiri also hedged his bets. He appointed Abu Khalid al-Suri, al-Qaeda’s “delegate” in Syria, to act as an on-the-ground arbiter of any further squabbles that might arise from his decree. Also, in the event that al-Nusra attacked ISI or vice versa, al-Zawahiri empowered al-Suri to “set up a Sharia justice court for giving a ruling on the case.”

Al-Suri, who was killed in a suicide bombing in Aleppo in February 2014 (possibly at the hands of ISIS), was a veteran al-Qaeda agent, not to mention another beneficiary of al-Assad’s general amnesty in 2011. He had helped found Harakat Ahrar al-Sham al-Islamiyya
(the Islamic Movement of the Free Men of the Levant), one of the most powerful rebel groups in Syria today. Before his death, al-Suri was the linchpin of the long-standing operational alliance between al-Nusra and Ahrar al-Sham.

AL-ZAWAHIRI, DEFENDER OF SYKES-PICOT

Al-Zawahiri’s suspicion that the crisis between his two field commanders would outlast his paternal intervention proved correct. Al-Baghdadi refused to abide by his edict and justified his defiance by claiming that al-Zawahiri, by insisting on a distinction between the lands of Syria and Iraq, was deferring to artificial state borders drawn up by Western imperial powers at the close of the First
World War, specifically the Sykes-Picot Agreement. That was no mild charge to level at the Sheikh of Jihad.

The brainchild of Sir Mark Sykes, the secretive twentieth-century compact between London and Paris had divided the remnants of the Ottoman Empire. “I should like to draw a line from the ‘e’ in Acre to the last ‘k’ in Kirkuk,” Sykes told the British cabinet in December 1915. In reality, the Sykes-Picot Agreement was never implemented as it was originally envisaged: Mosul, for instance, was meant to fall to France’s sphere of influence but in the end became part of the British mandate in Iraq. But despite being drawn along Ottoman boundaries more than one hundred years old, the pact has become a compelling complaint for successive generations of Baathists, Communists, pan-Arab nationalists, and Islamists. The agreement was, and still is, a synecdoche for conniving and duplicitous Western designs on the Middle East, so much so, in fact, that when ISIS stormed Mosul in June 2014 and bulldozed the berms dividing Iraq from Syria, it billed the act as both the physical and symbolic repudiation of Sykes-Picot. Implicitly, too, it was a rejection of al-Zawahiri’s prescription for holy war. Al-Baghdadi’s break with the Egyptian elder was therefore more than that of a lieutenant mutinying against a general. The ISIS emir was calling his boss a has-been and a sell-out.

The al-Nusra–ISIS rupture led directly to yet another transformation in the ranks of regional, not to say global, jihadism. The majority of foreign fighters in al-Nusra’s ranks went over to ISIS, leaving the rump organization under al-Jolani heavily Syrian in constitution.