ISIS: Inside the Army of Terror (22 page)

What had begun as localized conflicts transformed into a massive armed campaign against ISIS led by the Islamic Front, the Syrian Revolutionaries Front, and the Army of the Mujahedeen, which swept ISIS from its territorial perches throughout much of northern Syria. This campaign coincided with an upsurge in popular anti-ISIS protests in Idlib and Aleppo, which ISIS tried to suppress by shooting the protestors.

As the FSA had feared, the al-Assad regime wasn’t about to stay neutral in the internecine fight and intervened objectively on the side of ISIS. As the ground fighting continued, the Syrian Air Force took to bombing areas from which ISIS had just been expelled, hitting either FSA or Islamic Front targets, when it wasn’t hitting civilians, and prompting further allegations among activists that ISIS was little more than a handmaid of the regime.

 By January 4, following an FSA-issued 24-hour deadline for ISIS to surrender and abandon Syria, two hundred jihadists had been arrested. ISIS had executed civilians and rebels and resorted to car bombings and the shelling of rebel-held territories. In a desperate communiqué apparently suing for peace, ISIS issued three demands. All road blockades in cities and villages be lifted; no ISIS fighter be detained, insulted, or harmed; all ISIS detainees and foreign fighters from any other groups should be released immediately. If these demands were not met, then ISIS would issue a general order to withdraw from all the front-line positions against the regime—the clear implication being that it would return territory to al-Assad.

On January 5 the Islamic Front announced that it had been given no choice but to turn on its former ally; it had been “push[ed]”
to battle, and while its charter was initially welcoming of foreign fighters offering assistance in the struggle against al-Assad, it would “not accept any group that claims to be a state.” Atareb was retaken by the rebels, and the black flag of ISIS replaced with the Free Syrian tricolor. An activist for the Shaam News Network in Raqqa claimed that rebels had “liberat[ed] more than 80% of the Idlib countryside and 65% of Aleppo and its countryside.” Another declared, “the presence of the State of Baghdadi is finished,” in what would prove to be too optimistic a prediction.

By the end of the first week of January, al-Nusra was leading the charge against ISIS in its regional headquarters in Raqqa city, joined by Ahrar al-Sham. Some fifty Syrian hostages held by ISIS were released from Raqqa’s answer to the DMV—which had been turned into a makeshift prison—as was one of many foreign journalists held captive by the group, the Turkish photographer Bunyamin Aygun, who’d been kidnapped the previous month. Two churches that had been burned or confiscated by ISIS were also “liberated” by al-Nusra, which declared its intent to restore them for Christian use.

A quaky truce brokered between ISIS, on the one hand, and al-Nusra and Ahrar al-Sham, on the other, appeared to lower the temperature a bit in the Aleppo suburbs, as did ISIS’s withdrawal from strategic areas close to the Turkish border, including Atmeh and al-Dana.

Al-Jolani blamed ISIS for the week of fitna that shook northern Syria but urged the formation of independent legal councils for resolving disputes to accompany the cease-fire. He also said that “detainees will be exchanged between all parties . . .and roads will be opened for everyone.”

Throughout the course of Syria’s brief Sahwa—an Awakening that suddenly featured al-Qaeda’s official franchise on the side of the sahwats—ISIS had raised a defiant slogan: “baqiyya wa
tatamaddad” (“remaining and expanding”), promising to defeat this popular turn against it and reach the Arabian Peninsula. ISIS further bombed Ahrar al-Sham’s base in Mayadeen, Deir Ezzor, near the Iraqi border, and its spokesman al-Adnani declared war on the rebels, threatening suicide attacks and car bombings against Syrians.

Amid the fitna, however, tensions and divisions within Islamist groups fighting ISIS began to appear. Abu Omar al-Shishani, then ISIS’s commander in Aleppo, signed a truce with Abu Khalid al-Suri, al-Zawahiri’s delegate in Syria, who was acting on behalf of Ahrar al-Sham and al-Nusra. For the moment, calm was restored between the jihadists. 

THE AL-NUSRA–ISIS SPLIT

But the damage wrought on the al-Nusra–ISIS relationship was irreparable. On February 2, 2014, global al-Qaeda formally ended its association with ISIS, issuing a public statement: “ISIS is not a branch of the Qaidat al-Jihad [al-Qaida’s official name] group, we have no organizational relationship with it, and the group is not responsible for its actions.”

One of the jihadists who smuggled himself across the Iraqi-Syrian border with al-Jolani during Ramadan in 2011 was Abu Maria al-Qahtani. His real name is Maysara al-Juburi, and he’s active on Twitter as a leading exponent for the al-Nusra worldview, particularly its ongoing family feud with ISIS, from which al-Qahtani defected after having served as a top commander. “The rumor is that he used to be a traffic cop before he became al-Nusra’s military operative in Deir Ezzor,” Laith Alkhouri told us. “He accused ISIS of destroying jihad in Iraq and Syria; he called the members ‘deviants.’ ”

The lineaments of this divorce ran throughout the marriage. They were already discernible in that awkward first encounter between bin Laden and al-Zarqawi in Kandahar in 1999, and in
AQI’s tempestuous eleven-year history. And though al-Nusra and ISIS have cooperated tactically since the split, allegedly even mulling some form of reconciliation in the face of coalition air strikes against both organizations in Syria, there is little chance that a broad rapprochement will occur. The latest issue of
Dabiq
makes plain that ISIS views al-Qaeda as a spent force in jihad, and itself as the inheritor of bin Laden’s legacy. The differences are too deep and many by now, according to Alkhouri. “ISIS takes the super-rightist ultra-conservative route. It is legitimate to kill even those who you cannot otherwise repel their aggression. Jolani is one of those guys. Baghdadi is even rumored to have vowed to kill him. ISIS apostatizes Muslims who didn’t know they committed some offense. So if you insulted the divine using a slang expression, they’ll behead you even if you didn’t know you insulted the divine.”

Another major discrepancy is the chicken-or-egg one about Islamic state-building. For ISIS, theocratic legitimacy
follows
the seizure and administration of terrain. First you “liberate” the people, then you found a government. For al-Qaeda, it’s the other way about: Sharia laws comes into practice before the holy war overthrows the taghut
(tyrannical) regime.

ISIS further claims that al-Zarqawi had a five-phase process for establishing the caliphate, and that he had accomplished three of them by the time al-Baghdadi arrived on the scene: the immigration of foreign fighters to the land of jihad (
hijrah)
, their enlistment in the ranks of a militancy (
jama’ah
), and their undermining of the idolators (pretty much everyone but the Zarqawists and their allies).

JIHADI RECRIMINATIONS

One of the more curious epiphenomena of this breakup is seeing Jolanist loyalists accuse Baghdadis of working for the other side. Many al-Nusra supporters have pointed to how the Syrian Air Force had largely
refrained for the better part of a year (2013–2014) from bombing rather conspicuous ISIS installations in Raqqa. Al-Nusra has a point.

A recent study conducted by the Carter Center found that, prior to ISIS’s military advances across Syria and Iraq in July and August 2014, the regime had “largely abstained from engaging [ISIS] unless directly threatened. . . .Prior to this [ISIS] offensive, the Syrian government had directed over 90% of all air raids against opposition positions.”

By Damascus’s own admission, it spent the better part of 2013 and 2014 mostly leaving ISIS alone in order to focus its aerial campaign against FSA and other rebel groups—for the simple reason that letting black-clad terrorists run around a provincial capital, crucifying and beheading people, made for great propaganda. One adviser to the regime told the
New York Times
that ignoring ISIS targets helped with the “tarring [of] all insurgents” as extremists.

We have also seen how the regime chooses to deal with terrorism by infiltration. An early defector from ISIS told CNN’s Arwa Damon in February 2012 he witnessed would-be suicide bombers being told by their battlefield emirs that they were going off to attack regime installations. In reality, they were sent on suicide missions against other rebels. “There were a lot of regime locations we could have taken without sustaining losses of our fighters,” the defector Abu Ammara said, “and we would receive orders to retreat.”

Some of this may owe to ISIS’s financial dependence on selling Syria’s oil back to the regime. As a Western intelligence source told the
Daily Telegraph
in January 2014, just a month before al-Qaeda formally severed its ties with ISIS, “The regime is paying al-Nusra to protect oil and gas pipelines under al-Nusra’s control in the north and east of the country, and is also allowing the transport of oil to regime-held areas. We are also now starting to see evidence of oil and gas facilities under ISIS control.”

“Whatever Bashar al-Assad and Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi may think of one another personally,” Frederic Hof, the former State Department
adviser on Syria, wrote, “their top tactical priority in Syria is identical: destroy the Syrian nationalist opposition to the Assad regime.”

Alkhouri said that this charge of ISIS’s collusion or conspiracy with the regime is widespread in al-Qaeda circles. “Five or six weeks ago, I came across a document—the person who released it said it came from air force intelligence—which said that Syrian intelligence has about 250 informants in the ranks of ISIS. I was not shocked in the least. I like to do reverse-engineering. How can I prove this by eliminating the noise? This is what you see: for many months, ISIS was very much capable of attacking regime soldiers but chose not to, preferring instead to transfer literally hundreds of its fighters to other areas in Syria that had been liberated by the FSA, Nusra, and other Islamist brigades. Why is ISIS doing this? Nusra says it’s for the expansion of its power: ‘Let other fighters repel or expel the regime, we’ll move in and rule the land after all the heavy lifting is done.’”

On Twitter, a popular account known as Baghdadi Leaks has been dishing what it says is inside intelligence on ISIS—and about the backstory of its emir. No one knows who runs the account, but the likelihood is high that it’s either an al-Qaeda operative or affiliate or perhaps a defector from ISIS looking to embarrass his erstwhile confederates by airing their dirty laundry. The portrait made of al-Baghdadi on this account is that of a mid-level member of ISI from 2006 to 2010 who rose through the ranks after having used his house as a drop site for secret communications between fighters and their commanders. “His job was apparently that of a go-between,” said Alkhouri. “If this is true, then he was definitely privy to secret communications—dates of operations, claims of responsibilities, the top structure of ISI’s Shura Council, who was powerful and who was not. And
that
means he was also privy to how Syria’s military intelligence was running rat lines into Iraq. This is how Nusra wants to scandalize him. ‘Baghdadi called Zawahiri a quisling, an upholder of Sykes-Picot? Yeah, well, look who’s talking.’ ”

13

SHAKEDOWN OF THE SHEIKHS

ISIS CO-OPTS THE TRIBES

“Terrain is fate in ground combat operations,” according to Jim Hickey, the US army colonel who helped capture Saddam in 2003. “Iraq is a tribal society, and families in the tribes are tied to specific pieces of ground. That’s going to shape this fight dramatically. It shaped the fight when the British were there in the First and Second World Wars. It shaped the fight when we were there.”

Much the same can be said of the Jazira, which has in the last two years served as ISIS’s strategic heartland, and the reason for its inextricability from Syria. It was here, after all, that Abu Ghadiyah had his safe house and countless other rat-line runners and “border emirs” kept their forward operating bases for AQI.

The Baathist regimes in Syria and Iraq viewed tribes and dealt with them differently. Prewar Iraqi state television channels prominently featured tribal traditions and folklore and Saddam personally mingled with both Sunni and Shia sheikhs, dispensing various incentives—such as smuggling and gray-market rights—for their
continued fealty. It was this established patronage system that AQI self-defeatingly tried to disrupt in the mid-2000s, precipitating Sahwa in Iraq.

In Syria, by contrast, the Assad regimes were generally ambivalent about the tribes and strategically inept in co-opting them. True, the regime opportunistically exploited the tribes to create social rifts on demand, such as when it Arab-ized Kurdish-dominated areas in northern Syrian, the better to contain restive Kurdish nationalism. However, the al-Assads never deemed the ancient filial confederations in their desert hinterland as significant or important as Saddam had his own.

Since its advent in the 1960s, the Syrian branch of the Baath Party saw in tribalism a twofold threat: first, tribal bonds between clans in eastern Syria and northwestern Iraq were seen as a potential advantage for the rival Iraqi branch. Second, particularly in the early years of its ascent to power, the Baath Party regarded “retrograde” tribalism as antithetical to the party’s “progressive” ideology.

Damascus’s clumsy engagement with the tribes came back to haunt it when the Syrian uprising began. Many of the early demonstrations in Deraa, for example, were driven by tribal linkages and expressed in tribal rhetoric. Protestors called for “
fazaat houran
,” the collective help of the people of the Houran valley, where Deraa is located. When the Syrian security forces used violence to suppress these demonstrations, Deraawis called on their “cousins” in the Gulf to come to their assistance.

Tribal networks played an even more pronounced role after the rebellion became militarized in early 2012. Fund organizers helped arm rebel groups in various parts of the country by appealing to their kin abroad, especially in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Bahrain.

Members of the Ugaidat tribe in Homs, for example, would reach out to their fellow Ugaidat members from eastern Syria who were living in the Gulf and had readier access to fund-raising. Some
pan-Syrian rebel coalitions were also formed partly because of tribal links. The Ahfad al-Rasoul brigade was led by Maher al-Nuaimi from Homs and Saddam al-Jamal from Deir Ezzor; both hailed from the same tribe. “People from al-Wa’ar al Qadeem and al-Dar al Kabeera in Homs, and others from the countrysides of Hama and Damascus connected with us,” an FSA financier relayed to us. “We knew each other through tribal connections.”

What started as an asset for the revolution soon became one for its jihadist deformity. Several factors explain al-Qaeda’s and ISIS’s purchase in Syria’s tribal regions.

The first has to do with the relationship between population density and geography. Tribes have their highest concentrations in Deir Ezzor, Hasaka, Raqqa, and Deraa; they constitute a full 90 percent of the population in each of those four provinces. They also number around two million in Aleppo’s rural districts. Overall, tribes account for 30 percent of Syria’s overall population, and yet they inhabit about 60 percent of its territory. In other words, tribes are bound to the countryside, where insurgents have found it far easier to navigate and bivouac. As in Iraq, this is where Zarqawists tend to coalesce whenever they’ve been booted out of urban terrain or are plotting a massive offensive against rival groups.

AL-RAFDAN’S REVENGE

In 2012 Syrian tribalism was most effectively harnessed by Jabhat al-Nusra, then still a part of ISI. One of the first al-Nusra cells in Syria, in fact, was in a small town in Deir Ezzor known as al-Ghariba, where nearly every resident belonged to the same family. Because Deir Ezzor connects Syria to Iraq, many of al-Ghariba’s inhabitants found it easy to join the Iraqi insurgency in 2003 and 2004 and imbibe Zarqawist propaganda.

The al-Assad regime uncovered the al-Nusra cell in al-Ghariba
in January 2012 and almost completely eliminated it, killing dozens of its members. Al-Nusra then relocated to a nearby town, al-Shuhail, which had long been a hub for arms smuggling between Iraq and Syria. The town was named for the tribe that inhabits it, and most of the resident families had deep-rooted connections to Salafism. Members of the Hajr family, for instance, joined the Fighting Vanguard, a group that fought the regime in Hama as part of the Muslim Brotherhood’s uprising in the 1970s and 1980s. After the US invasion of Iraq, many Hajr kin joined the Sunni insurgency. And after the Syrian uprising, when al-Nusra moved in, dozens of Hajr men joined the embryonic AQI franchise. Sometime in the summer of 2012, the town was effectively run by al-Nusra, earning it the nickname Shuhailistan.

“If you spoke about Jabhat al-Nusra in a negative way, you were effectively insulting the Shuhail,” said Amir Al-Dandal, a member of a prominent tribe in Deir Ezzor, and an organizer for the FSA. Even the internecine war between al-Nusra and ISIS took on a tribal inflection. In April 2013, al-Nusra and Jaish Muta, another rebel group in Shuhail, fought against members of the al-Bu Assaf clan, part of the Albu Saraya tribe, which is the third-largest in Deir Ezzor. Members of the al-Bu Assaf later backed ISIS in the dispute.

Similarly, when Aamer al-Rafdan, a senior al-Nusra member, defected to ISIS after the rupture, he did so less out of ideological preference and more out of patrilineal allegiance. Al-Rafdan was from al-Bekayyir, a tribe based in Jedid Ugaidat, which for decades had been at odds with the Shuhail. Al-Rafdan’s ship-jump allowed ISIS to seize control of the Conoco gas plant in Mayadeen, Deir Ezzor, delivering up a valuable resource prize to the Baghdadists and exacerbating what had been a long-running territorial dispute between the al-Bekayyir and the Shuhail. “The fighting had everything to do with the tribes, not with jihadi politics, and it was resolved on a tribal basis,” said al-Dandal. “The tension was finally
ended because the al-Bekayyir and the Shuhail both realized that any conflict would lead to greater problems in the future. The issue was resolved absent ISIS or al-Nusra’s intervention.” The truce was short-lived, however. The Shuhail expelled al-Rafdan and ISIS from Jedid Ugaidat. Then, in July 2014, ISIS conquered the Shuhail tribe, an event that had wide reverberations across Deir Ezzor.

A series of towns and villages swiftly succumbed to the jihadist blitz. Fayyadh al-Tayih, a former al-Nusra member who joined ISIS in December 2013, told us: “From the beginning, we believed that al-Shuhail was the real problem. If we were to take them, everyone else would surrender.”

Triumphant, al-Rafdan began to exact revenge. He imposed harsh conditions on the Shuhail, exiling some members for a period of three months. (Even this was a tribally orientated form of punishment.) The fall of the town and tribe marked a decisive end to the al-Nusra’s purchase in eastern Syria, granting ISIS more or less total control over the province of Deir Ezzor.

The sacking of Deir Ezzor was remarkable, given that Jedid Ugaidat was the only place where ISIS had ever carved out a real presence for itself; and even there, it had so alienated the local population that it had been temporarily expelled.

MONEY TALKS

Al-Nusra’s routing in Deir Ezzor also derived from matérial exigencies, namely its struggle to control the province’s energy resources. The Albu Ezzedine tribe asked another clan, the al-Dhaher, which was loyal to al-Nusra, to share in the revenue of smuggled oil from the al-Omar oil field, located in a desert region near Shuhail. When al-Nusra refused and claimed the revenue for itself, members of Albu Ezzedine joined ISIS.

Predictably, Sahwa
took root in places where ISIS had little
to no organic support from the populace. ISIS’s wholesale takeover of Raqqa owed heavily to the fact that this province, more than any other, was essentially occupied by non-native fighters who fought and repelled minimal regime forces in 2013. There was no local rebel infrastructure in place beforehand, and the only military challenge that ISIS faced in Raqqa came from Ahrar al-Sham and al-Nusra, both of which were significantly spent forces after suffering mass defections to ISIS following the al-Qaeda divorce.

By contrast, rebel forces in Idlib, Aleppo, the Damascus countryside, and Deir Ezzor had fought the regime’s forces and more or less governed their liberated areas for about a year before ISIS was formed and could simply move in to conquer the conquerors.

In Iraq ISIS’s reign has been characterized by much the same native-foreigner dichotomy. In Mosul residents were alienated by jihadists moving in from Tal Afar, the border town where AQI resisted US forces in 2005 and dispatched child suicide bombers. Mosulawis look down on Tal Afarians, considering the mostly Turkomen population to be poor, uneducated, and unruly.

Similar complaints are often heard in other ISIS-controlled territories where raids carried out by members from one city or town on shops or residents in another are often ascribed to preexisting socioeconomic tensions.

ISIS’S DIVIDE-AND-RULE STRATEGY

ISIS is the first and only jihadist franchise in history to successfully pit members of the same tribe against one another. This was on grim display in August 2014 when members of the Shaitat in Deir Ezzor participated in the killing of hundreds of their fellow tribesmen, at the behest of ISIS. The same coerced fratricide happened again in the Iraqi town of Hit, where members of the Albu Nimr
took part in the execution of dozens of their kinsman in October 2014. Such divide-and-rule tactics ensure that any tribal uprising against ISIS will necessarily be a fratricidal one.

In Qa’im, the other border town where the first rumblings of Sahwa were felt in 2005, a preexisting division between two tribes, the Karbala and the Mihlawiyeen, manifested in the position either eventually took on AQI. Members of the Karbala joined the Zarqawists, and the tribe lost dozens of its members in an American air raid against Rawa, where seventy insurgents were killed. Al-Mihlawiyeen, however, was opposed to AQI and later joined the Awakening councils.

Unsurprisingly, bribery has played its part in tearing tribes apart. In April 2013, after the rupture with al-Nusra, ISIS secretly sought to co-opt young tribal leaders by offering to share oil and smuggling revenues and promising them positions of authority currently held by their elders. Younger tribesmen were seen as more credible and popular, owing to their participation in the anti-Assad rebellion, whereas their seniors mainly sided with the regime or stayed neutral. One tribal figure from Albu Kamal explained how ISIS deftly used this generational-political divide in one prominent family months before it had even established any presence in the area. “They [ISIS] are giving him a portion of an oil well in the area,” the figure told us in December 2013. “They know that if they are to be eradicated in our area, who would be able to rally up people around him? Most of the other tribes in our area have no leadership; we have leadership and influence. They give him money, they protect him and consult with him on everything. The other option is, they would assassinate him.”

Such strategic forward-planning is what helped ISIS take otherwise impervious towns in Deir Ezzor in the summer of 2014, such as al-Muhassan, Shaitat, and Albu Kamal. In Mo Hassan, the seizure came as a shock to most local rebels, as the town was
known to be hostile to ISIS. Its population is famously secular and has produced many professional soldiers and officers in the Syrian Arab Army. But ideology played no role whatsoever. ISIS simply bought its way in before it fought its way in, relying on the enormous stocks of American- and Saudi-made weapons it had seized from the Iraqi Security Forces in Mosul in June 2014.

ISIS AS MEDIATOR

ISIS has also shown itself to be remarkably adept at arbitrating disputes in tribal areas. It mediated a historic reconciliation in November 2014 between two warring tribes in the Syrian border town of Albu Kamal, ending what had amounted to a War of the Roses–style thirty-year argument between al-Hassoun and al-Rehabiyeen, whose members would occasionally fight each other. “We learned they had tensions so we brought both of them together and got them to reconcile,” an ISIS member who was involved in the reconciliation told us. “They agreed and were happy.”

As part of its administration of ruled territory, ISIS has appointed an emir in charge of “tribal affairs,” a Saudi national known as Dhaigham Abu Abdullah, based in Qa’im. He receives envoys to discuss local grievances or complaints—in many cases, residents from newly captured towns in eastern Syria cross the nonexistent border to meet with Abu Abdullah as they would a federal court judge. “People are racing to win the trust of the State,” said an ISIS member from Deir Ezzor, who accompanied one of those convoys of arbitration-seekers to Anbar. “[ISIS] is a new authority in our area and people rush to present themselves as leaders to push for their personal interests, and tribalism is above everything for these people. Our leaders know this, we’re not stupid.”

In areas where killings were carried out by fellow tribesmen or a tribe from a neighboring town, ISIS uses foreign jihadists or
leaders from other regions to keep the peace. Here the importation of non-natives appears to be well considered. Saddam al-Jamal, who was responsible for the killing of seventy locals in his hometown of Albu Kamal, was not given a leadership role when ISIS returned to the area. Instead, he was tasked with the management of a refugee camp near Iraq. Al-Rafdan, the vengeance-taker from Shuhail, was reassigned to Raqqa.