ISIS: Inside the Army of Terror (4 page)

IRANIAN PATRONAGE

For a year or so following his flight from Afghanistan, al-Zarqawi was based in Iran and northern Iraq, although he traveled throughout the region. He visited a Palestinian refugee camp in southern Lebanon, where he recruited members to his burgeoning jihadist network, and he moved around the Sunni-majority communities of central and northern Iraq. Shadi Abdalla, bin Laden’s former bodyguard, later told German authorities that al-Zarqawi was arrested in Iran for a short time during this period before being released—an allegation that Jordanian officials claim to have corroborated on a trip to the Islamic Republic in 2003. Al-Zarqawi also went to Syria, where the GID believes he plotted Foley’s assassination, with the connivance of Bashar al-Assad’s security services.

Amman’s own file on the state sponsorship of al-Zarqawi’s terrorist activities during the lead-up to the Iraq War stood in marked contrast to what Powell had presented earlier. It wasn’t Baghdad America should have been looking at, the Jordanians said; it was Tehran. A high-level GID source told the
Atlantic
magazine in 2006:

“We know Zarqawi better than he knows himself. And I can assure you that he never had any links to Saddam. Iran is quite a different matter. The Iranians have a policy: they
want to control Iraq. And part of this policy has been to support Zarqawi, tactically but not strategically. . . .In the beginning they gave him automatic weapons, uniforms, military equipment, when he was with the army of Ansar al-Islam. Now they essentially just turn a blind eye to his activities, and to those of al-Qaeda generally. The Iranians see Iraq as a fight against the Americans, and overall, they’ll get rid of Zarqawi and all of his people once the Americans are out.”

There’s a triple irony behind this observation.

First, al-Zarqawi’s coming reign of terror in Iraq was distinguished by its focus on killing or tormenting the country’s Shia-majority population; this, he believed, would create a state of civil war that would force Sunnis into reclaiming their lost power and prestige in Baghdad and restore the glory of Nur al-Din.

Second, Iran later tried to “get rid” of al-Zarqawi’s far more formidable disciples in Iraq, transparently and boastfully leading the ground war against ISIS using both its own Revolutionary Guards Corps as well as its proxies, the heavily trained and armed Iraqi Shia militias. Iranian warplanes even reportedly bombed ISIS positions in Iraq.

Third, the Islamic Republic’s underwriting of al-Zarqawi’s activity in 2001–2002 more adequately meets the accusation leveled by the Bush administration against Saddam’s regime, of maintaining a tactical alliance or entente cordiale with al-Qaeda. By nice coincidence, this fact was even owned by al-Zarqawi’s colleague and ISIS’s current spokesman Abu Muhammad al-Adnani in a message directed at Ayman al-Zawahiri in May 2014, months after al-Qaeda formally announced its breakup with its former franchise. It was in deference to al-Zawahiri and other jihadist bigwigs, al-Adnani said, that “ISIS has not attacked the Rawafid in Iran since its establishment. . . .It has kept its anger all these years and
endured accusations of collaboration with its worst enemy, Iran, for refraining from targeting it, leaving the Rawafid there to live in safety, acting upon the orders of al Qaeda to safeguard its interests and supply lines in Iran. Let history record that Iran owes al Qaeda invaluably.”

Al-Zarqawi and bin Laden may not have trusted or even liked each other, but their partnership was forged in a common objective: snaring the United States and its Western allies in Iraq. As early as October 2002 al-Zawahiri had anticipated the war, which he said was being perpetrated not to spread democracy, but to eliminate all military opposition to the state of Israel in the Arab and Islamic world. A year later, bin Laden wrote a letter to the people of Iraq in a communiqué aired on Al Jazeera, telling them to prepare for the occupation of an ancient Islamic capital and the installation of a puppet regime that would “pave the way for the establishment of Greater Israel.” Mesopotamia would be the epicenter for a Crusader-Jewish conspiracy that would engulf the entire Middle East. In opposition bin Laden advocated urban warfare and “martyrdom operations,” or suicide bombings, and he put out a global casting call for a mujahidin army on
a scale not seen since the days of the Services Bureau. However, this appeal carried an intriguing postscript. The “socialist infidels” of Saddam Hussein’s Baathist regime, bin Laden said, were worthy accomplices in any fight against the Americans. To hurt the “far enemy,” jihadists
were thus encouraged to collaborate with the remnants of a “near enemy” until the ultimate Islamic victory could be won. The consequences of this sanctioning of an Islamist-Baathist alliance would be lethal and long-lasting.

2

SHEIKH OF THE SLAUGHTERERS

AL-ZARQAWI AND AL-QAEDA IN IRAQ

“Corrupt regimes and terrorists keep each other in business,” Emma Sky, a British adviser to the US military in Iraq, says. “It’s a symbiotic relationship.” Indeed, for all its posturing as an unbeatable fighting force, ISIS has relied more than it cares to admit on unlikely ideological allies and proxies. When the United States invaded Iraq, al-Zarqawi found some of his most enthusiastic champions in the remnants of one of the very “near enemies” he had declared himself in opposition to: the Baathist regime of Saddam Hussein. Today, ISIS’s stunning advance across northern and central Iraq has benefited from much of the same convenient, proximate deal-making.

SADDAM’S GHOST

Bin Laden’s injunction was fully realized in the early months of the occupation of Iraq, when the US military painfully discerned the hybridized nature of the insurgency it was confronting. Saddam
Hussein had not anticipated an invasion of Baghdad. But he had very much prepared his regime for a different doomsday scenario: another domestic rebellion from either Iraq’s Shia majority or its minority Kurds. At the prompting of the United States, both of these sects had risen up at the end of the First Gulf War only to be brutally slaughtered (with US acquiescence). Determined not to witness any such revolutionary ferment again, Saddam in the intervening decade constructed an entire underground apparatus for counterrevolution and took precautions to strengthen his conventional military deterrents. He beefed up one of his praetorian divisions, the Fedayeen Saddam, and licensed the creation of a consortium of proxy militias. In their magisterial history of the Second Gulf War, Michael Gordon and General Bernard Trainor note that long before the first American solider arrived in Iraq, “networks of safe houses and arms caches for paramilitary forces, including materials for making improvised explosives, were also established throughout the country.  . . . It was, in effect, a counterinsurgency strategy to fend off what Saddam saw as the most serious threats to his rule.”

The man who anatomized this strategy, and who understood that the post-invasion insurgency actually comprised holdover elements from the ancien regime
—
not the “pockets of dead-enders” as US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld had called them—was Colonel Derek Harvey, a military intelligence officer working for General Ricardo “Rick” Sanchez’s Combined Joint Task Force 7, the American headquarters in Iraq.

Harvey estimated that between sixty-five and ninety-five thousand members of Saddam’s other praetorian division, the Special Republican Guard, the Mukhabarat (a catchall term encompassing Iraq’s intelligence directorates), the Fedayeen Saddam, and state-subsidized militiamen were all rendered unemployed with the stroke of a pen after Paul Bremer, the Bush-appointed head of
the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), chose to disband the Iraqi military. Many of the sacked officers joined a nascent campaign to expel their expropriators. Added to their ranks were more disaffected Iraqis, victims of the controversial policy of “de-Baathification” that Bremer announced ten days after his touchdown in Baghdad.

Making matters worse, Saddam had licensed a gray market in Iraq designed to evade UN sanctions—in effect, a state-tolerated organized crime network, headed by Izzat Ibrahim al-Douri, his vice president. A member of the Sufi Naqshbandi Order, which claimed direct descent from the first Islamic caliph, Abu Bakr, al-Douri had been born in al-Dawr, near Saddam’s own hometown of Tikrit, in the northern Salah ad-Din province of Iraq. As such, he proved an adroit Baathist operator within the country’s Sunni heartland. And as vice president he was also able to stock arms of the regime’s intelligence services and military with his fellow Sufis. This was a form of ethnic patronage that in 2006, after Saddam’s execution, manifested itself in the creation of the Army of the Men of the Naqshbandi Order—one of the most powerful Sunni insurgency groups in Iraq, which later helped ISIS take over Mosul in 2014.

Al-Douri was an expert smuggler; he ran a lucrative stolen car ring, importing luxury European models into Iraq via the Jordanian port at Aqaba. It was a vertically integrated racket, Harvey told us, because al-Douri also maintained the auto body shops in which these illicit cars were worked on, furnishing both the factories and conveyances for the construction of vehicle-borne improvised explosive devices (VBIEDs), one of the deadliest weapons used against American troops in Iraq.

Saddam employed other counterrevolutionary measures before the war. We tend to remember his regime as “secular,” which it was up to a point. But after the First Gulf War, he sought to fortify
his regime against foreign fundamentalist opponents, such as Iran’s mullahs, and also against domestic ones that might challenge his rule on Islamist “near enemy” grounds. Thus he Islamized his regime, adding the phrase “Allahu Akbar” (“God Is Great”) to the Iraqi flag and introducing a host of draconian punishments, most of which were based on Sharia law: thieves would have their hands amputated, while draft dodgers and deserters from the military would lose their ears. To distinguish the latter from disfigured veterans of the Iran-Iraq War, Saddamists would also brand crosses into the amputees’ foreheads with hot irons.

Ramping up state religiosity had an ancillary purpose: to deflect or distract criticism from an economy battered by international sanctions. The regime thus introduced a proscription on female employment, hoping to artificially lower Iraq’s lengthening jobless rolls. Most significant, however, was Saddam’s inauguration of the Islamic Faith Campaign, which endeavored to marry Baath ideology of regime elites with Islamism. The man he tasked with overseeing this conversion curriculum was none other than his car-smuggling
caporegime
, al-Douri.

Predictably, the Faith Campaign was a Frankenstein patchwork of proselytization and mafia economics. Some of Iraq’s new-minted faithful had their hajj, or
annual religious pilgrimage to Mecca, subsidized by the state, while others were bribed with real estate, cash, and—naturally—expensive cars. Colonel Joel Rayburn, another US military intelligence officer who served in Iraq and has written a history of the country, observes that one of the unintended consequences of the Faith Campaign was also its most predictable: “Saddam believed he was sending into the Islamic schools committed Baathists who would remain loyal as they established a foothold in the mosques from which the regime could then monitor or manipulate the Islamist movement. In actuality, the reverse happened. Most of the officers who were sent to the mosques
were not deeply committed to Baathism by that point, and as they encountered Salafi teachings many became more loyal to Salafism than to Saddam.”

Many graduates of the program, Rayburn notes, found that they had much to confess and atone for in their pasts and so turned against the very ideology the Faith Campaign was meant to inculcate, and against the regime itself. Some of these “Salafist-Baathists” even went on to hold positions in a new American-fostered Iraqi government while continuing to moonlight as anti-American terrorists. One such person was Khalaf al-Olayan, who had been a high-ranking official in Saddam’s army before becoming one of the top leaders of Tawafuq, a Sunni Islamist bloc in the post-Saddam Iraqi parliament. Mahmoud al-Mashhadani showed the folly of the Faith Campaign even before the American invasion: he became a full-fledged Salafist and was subsequently imprisoned for attacking the very regime responsible for the Faith Campaign. (Al-Mashhadani went on to serve as speaker of the Council of Representatives of Iraq in 2006, a year before both he and al-Olayan were implicated in a deadly suicide bombing—against Iraq’s parliament.)

“The Faith Campaign wasn’t just about having people in the Baath party go to religious training one night a week and do their homework and such,” Harvey told us, more than a decade removed from his first analysis of who and what constituted Iraq’s insurgency. “It was about using the intelligence services to reach into the society of Islamic scholars and work with a range of religious leaders such as Harith al-Dari,” a prominent Sunni cleric from the Anbar province and the chairman of the Association of Muslim Scholars. “Even Abdullah al-Janabi,” Harvey added, referring to the former head of the insurgent Mujahideen Shura Council in Fallujah, “was an Iraqi intelligence agent, although originally he wasn’t a Salafist as we portrayed him, but rather a Sufi linked to al-Douri and the Naqshbandi Order. We didn’t recognize al-Janabi’s
true nature. He wasn’t a religious extremist at all; he was an Arab nationalist. The thing all these guys had in common was the desire for their tribe, their clan, and themselves. That’s a unifying principle. It was the Sunni Arab identity, this search for lost power and prestige, that motivated the Sunni insurgency. Many people miss that when they characterize it. If you talk to the Shiites, they understand it for what it is.”

After the US invasion, al-Douri and much of his Baathist network fled to Syria, where they were harbored by Bashar al-Assad’s regime. Despite his father Hafez’s decades-long enmity with Saddam, al-Assad viewed these fugitives as useful agents for mayhem, for terror-in-reserve, for disrupting Bush’s nation-building experiment next door. For his part, al-Douri had wanted to fuse the Iraqi and Syrian Baath parties into one transnational conglomerate, but al-Assad refused and for a time even tried to catalyze his own alternative Iraqi Baath party to rival al-Douri’s. (Syria, as we’ll examine later, became one of the leading state sponsors of both Baathist and al-Qaeda terrorism in Iraq.)

What Saddam, al-Assad, al-Zarqawi, and bin Laden all understood, and what the United States had to discover at great cost in fortune and blood, was that the gravest threat posed to a democratic government in Baghdad was not necessarily jihadism or even disenfranchised Baathism; it was Sunni revanchism.

Sunni Arabs constitute at most 20 percent of Iraq’s population, whereas Shia Arabs constitute as much as 65 percent. A plurality of Sunni Kurds (17 percent), plus smaller demographics of Christians, Assyrians, Yazidis, and Sunni and Shia Turkomen make up the fabric of the rest of the country’s society. But Saddam had presided over decades of a sectarian patronage system that broadly favored the minority at the expense of a much-impoverished and restive majority. It was for this reason that George H. W. Bush, in prosecuting the First Gulf War, never pursued a policy of total
regime change in Iraq, only (fitfully) one of regime decapitation, which failed. The elder Bush had hoped that a Baathist coup, encouraged by the routing of Iraqi forces in Kuwait, would put an end to Saddam once and for all, giving way to a more reformist or Western-amenable dictatorship.

The violent implementation of democracy meant the demographic inversion of Iraq’s power; it destroyed what many Iraqi Sunnis saw as their birthright. In his book, Rayburn recounts what one told him: “At first no one fought the Americans; not the Baath, not the army officers, and not the tribes. But when the Americans formed the Governing Council [in July 2003] with thirteen Shiite and only a few Sunnis, people began to say, ‘The Americans mean to give the country to the Shia,’ and then they began to fight, and the tribes began to let al Qaeda in.” Disenfranchised Saddamists, who had melted back into their native cities and villages along the Euphrates River, were only too happy to accommodate the new arrivals, seeing them as agents for the Americans’ expulsion and their own restoration. The jihadists, however, had different ambitions for Iraq.

AL-ZARQAWI VS. AMERICA

Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s grisly debut in Iraq was on August 7, 2003, when operatives from Tawhid wal-Jihad (“Monotheism and Holy War”), the new name for his network, taken from a banner that hung at the entrance to the Herat training camp, bombed the Jordanian embassy in Baghdad. (As ever, he saw his homeland’s government as a primary target.) A little more than a week later, al-Zarqawi orchestrated an attack on the UN headquarters in the same city. It was carried out by a twenty-six-year-old Moroccan man, Abu Osama al-Maghribi, who drove a VBIED into a wall right underneath the window of S
é
rgio Vieira de Mello, the UN’s
special representative to Iraq, killing him and twenty-one others, and wounding more than two hundred. Al-Zarqawi said that he had targeted de Mello personally for “embellish[ing] the image of America, the crusaders, and the Jews.” This “embellishment” evidently included the diplomat’s role in overseeing (Christian) East Timor’s independence from (Muslim) Indonesia—a fact that did little to dissuade some of al-Zarqawi’s Western apologists’ characterization of his terrorism as an expression of anti-imperialism.

Al-Zarqawi had help. “Originally, the Baathists cooperated in the bombing of the UN and in other suicide bombings in 2003,” Harvey said. “The safe houses of the suicide bombers were adjacent to compounds and residences of the Special Security Organization [SSO] officers.” The SSO was the most powerful security apparatus in prewar Iraq and was in charge of the Special Republican Guard and Special Forces. According to Harvey, it provided Zarqawi’s men the cars that were fashioned into VBIEDs; they also transported the suicide bombers. “The reason we know so much is that one of the suicide bombers didn’t die, and we were able to debrief him and backtrack.”

By October 2003 bin Laden’s casting call for foreign mujahidin had been heeded, thanks in part to the socialist infidels. The Saddamists had already established the “rat lines”—corridors for foreign fighters—to transport them into Iraq from a variety of terrorist cells and organizations around the Middle East and North Africa. “These jihadists had maintained a relationship for at least three years—in some cases longer—with the SSO and a general by the name of Muhammed Khairi al-Barhawi,” Harvey said. “He was responsible for their training. The idea was, if you understood who the terrorists were and kept them close to you, you wouldn’t have to worry about them striking you.”

Al-Barhawi was later appointed police chief in Mosul by Major General David Petraeus, then head of the 101st Airborne
Division, stationed in the city. Petraeus insisted that al-Barhawi’s turn to the dark side was coerced rather than voluntary. Harvey disagrees: “Barhawi had managed his familial relationships into al-Qaeda when he was police chief, then into Mosul’s police force, then into local Awakening councils when they developed. From a tribal perspective, it was the smart thing to do: have that accretion in as many places as possible.”