ISIS: Inside the Army of Terror (5 page)

KILLING THE SHIA

Between 2003 and 2005, the Zarqawists were still a minority in Iraq’s terrorism. According to a study conducted by the Jamestown Foundation, a Washington-based think tank, a mere 14 percent of what the United States had dubbed “Sunni Arab rejectionists” belonged to al-Zarqawi’s network. However, this contingent was overrepresented in the media because of the prominence Colin Powell gave to al-Zarqawi, and the fact that al-Zarqawi’s terrorism accounted for a full 42 percent of all suicide bombings—the mode of violence with the bloodiest toll—perpetrated in Iraq.

The same month Tawhid wal-Jihad bombed the Jordanian embassy and the United Nations, it also assassinated Ayatollah Mohammed Baqir al-Hakim, the leader of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI) with a VBIED. In fact, it was al-Zarqawi’s father-in-law, Yassin Jarrad, who carried out the suicide VBIED, which struck the Imam Ali Mosque, one of Shia Islam’s holiest shrines, outside the city of Najaf, and killed somewhere around a hundred people. Al-Zarqawi made no secret of his pathological hatred of Iraq’s demographic majority.

A letter said to have been written by him and addressed to bin Laden was intercepted by the Kurds in January 2004. It made al-Zarqawi’s Machiavellian plot quite clear: The Shia, it read, were “the insurmountable obstacle, the lurking snake, the crafty and
malicious scorpion, the spying enemy, and the penetrating venom.” It went on to state, “The unhurried observer and inquiring onlooker will realize that Shi’ism is the looming danger and the true challenge,” its practitioners grave-worshippers, idolaters, and polytheists.

Genocidal rhetoric was followed by genocidal behavior. Though al-Zarqawi had also exploited what was then an incipient but real problem in Iraq’s political evolution: namely, the creeping takeover of state institutions by chauvinistic Shia politicians, many of whom were either spies or agents of influence of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC). One of al-Zarqawi’s named nemeses was the Badr Corps, the armed wing of the SCIRI, a political party whose very name indicated its Khomeinist foundations. By isolating Badr, which was targeting and abusing the Sunnis, al-Zarqawi managed to translate real sociopolitical grievances into an eschatological showdown. “[T]he Badr Brigade . . .has shed its Shi’a garb and put on the garb of the police and army in its place,” he wrote. “They have placed cadres in these institutions, and, in the name of preserving the homeland and the citizen, have begun to settle their scores with the Sunnis.”

Al-Zarqawi’s prescription was to start a civil war by “targeting and hitting [Shia] in [their] religious, political, and military depth [to] provoke them to show the Sunnis their rabies and bare the teeth of the hidden rancor working in their breasts. If we succeed in dragging them into the arena of sectarian war, it will become possible to awaken the inattentive Sunnis as they feel imminent danger and annihilating death at the hands of these Sabeans.”

ISIS has couched its current campaign in Syria and Iraq in exactly this sectarian-existential grammar, fondly recalling al-Zarqawi’s war strategy in its official propaganda. And it has followed in his footsteps by targeting Shia to prompt their counterreaction (and overreaction), in order to drive Sunnis into ISIS’s protective arms. In June 2014, after sacking Camp Speicher, the former US
military
base in Tikrit, al-Baghdadi’s jihadists boasted, for instance, that they had executed seventeen hundred Shia soldiers the Iraqi army had surrendered. That figure may have been exaggerated, but not by much: Human Rights Watch later confirmed the existence of mass execution sites of Shia, with a collective death toll of 770. In Mosul, the very same day ISIS took the city, it stormed Badoush Prison and hauled off some fifteen hundred of its inmates. It drove them all out to a nearby desert and separated the Sunnis and Christians from the Shia. Members of the first two categories were then carted away elsewhere; the Shia were first abused and robbed, then lined up and shot over a ravine after they each called out their number in line.

TELEVISED BEHEADINGS

Al-Zarqawi proved a dire pioneer in another important respect: marriage of horrific ultraviolence and mass media Like ISIS commanders today, he was especially fond of beheadings and the attention they get in the West. He very likely personally decapitated the American contractor Nicholas Berg in 2004 in a video posted online and circulated around the world. The staging of this grotesque event was also significant.

As with James Foley, Steven Sotloff, and Peter Kassig, ISIS’s latest American victims, Berg was dressed in a Guantanamo-style orange jumpsuit, forced to his knees, and compelled to identify himself. An imprecation was then recited by his captors, before a knife was applied to his throat, with one editing discrepancy: in Berg’s case, the full beheading was featured on-screen, whereas ISIS has preferred (no doubt for added international media exposure) to keep most of the gore offscreen. Also, Berg’s body was discovered and his family notified before his snuff film ever got exhibited.

In its August-September 2004 issue,
Voice of Jihad
, a magazine published by the Saudi branch of al-Qaeda, carried an endorsement
of the practice by Abd El-Rahman ibn Salem al-Shamari, who referred specifically to the beheading of an Egyptian by the Zarqawists: “O sheikh of killers Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, continue to follow the straight path with Allah’s help, guided by Allah, Fight together with the monotheists against the idol-worshipers, together with the warriors of jihad against the collaborators, the hypocrites, and the rebellious . . .show him [any soldier from among the Saudi king’s legions] no mercy!” Al-Zarqawi’s trademark earned him the name “Sheikh of the Slaughterers.”

Though Al-Zarqawi retained an audiovisual squad of reportedly three people who were fluent in computer editing software and comparatively cruder Internet technology, ISIS has dramatically improved on al-Zarqawi’s media savvy, employing its own channel and social media feeds for disseminating information. The spectacle of murder most foul, however, had the same intended effect at the hands of both perpetrators.

• • •

Not all jihadists approved of al-Zarqawi’s murder of Muslims, no matter if they were Shia. His former mentor al-Maqdisi was an outspoken critic. Writing to his former prot
é
g
é
from his latest Jordanian prison cell, where he still languished, the cleric chided al-Zarqawi: “The clean hands of mujahedin should be protected from being tarnished with the blood of the protected people.” However, as former CIA analyst Bruce Riedel has observed, these sentiments may not have been genuine: shortly after the letter was published, Jordan let al-Maqdisi out of jail and placed him under house arrest, prompting allegations by jihadists that his rebuke of al-Zarqawi may have been edited or ghostwritten by the GID as a form of psychological warfare against the insurgency.

• • •

Although al-Zarqawi professed to be profoundly hurt by his former teacher’s criticism (he claimed to have wept when he read the
letter), al-Maqdisi’s counsel did nothing to lessen Tawhid wal-Jihad’s violence against Muslims. Al-Zarqawi told him to take care with issuing such restrictive fatwas in the future. Today, al-Maqdisi has lambasted ISIS as “deviant” and criticized its much-publicized atrocities, as well as its alienation of the local Muslim communities and armed groups in Syria. However, that has not stopped ISIS from trying to curry favor with al-Maqdisi’s followers. As scholar Michael W. S. Ryan has noted, the first issue of ISIS’s propaganda magazine,
Dabiq,
features an extensive discussion of Millat Ibrahim,
or the path of Abraham, which is not coincidentally the title of the 1984 tract al-Maqdisi published, inspiring any number of mujahidin to sojourn to Afghanistan.

AL-ZARQAWI’S APPEAL

Before Blackwater attained international notoriety for the lethal shooting of seventeen Iraqis in western Baghdad’s Nisour Square in 2007, its mercenaries made headlines three years earlier as corpses horrifically hung upside down from a railroad bridge in Iraq’s Anbar province. Then, as now, Fallujah was a byword for hell on earth to scores of American soldiers—and tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians.

Fallujah and Anbar’s provincial capital, Ramadi, were meant to have had a sizable US troop presence after the 2003 invasion. However, the ease with which the military cut through the country and straight into Baghdad altered the military’s plans. Instead, the cities that would become the main hot spots for Sunni rejectionism had the lightest American “footprint.” The failure of foresight seems staggering in retrospect, given that the Euphrates River Valley consists of what Derek Harvey says was not only the Sunni heartland, but also the national wellspring of Baathism.

Uday and Qusay Hussein, Saddam’s sons, fled to Anbar province when their father’s high command quit Baghdad in advance of
the approaching US army. According to Wael Essam, a Palestinian journalist who was embedded with insurgents in Fallujah, many former Baathists, Mukhabarat officers, and Republican Guardsmen who took up arms to fight coalition forces “all affirmed they were not fighting for Saddam but for Islam and Sunnis.” The beheading of Nicholas Berg, US intelligence believed, took place in Jolan, a neighborhood in northwest Fallujah, which Tawhid wal-Jihad had established as one of its earliest garrisons.

An initial attempt to retake Fallujah in the spring of 2004—named, somewhat infelicitously, Operation Vigilant Resolve—ended in calamity. Integral to the Bush administration’s reconstruction project for Iraq was the swift transfer of sovereignty and governance to the Iraqis themselves. This included the extraordinary responsibility of national security for a nation still very much in the throes of war. The Iraqis were hardly ready, willing, or able to assume that role, and so US Marines bore the brunt of the fighting instead. An attempt to stand up to a local Iraqi Fallujah Brigade ended in failure: the entire outfit disintegrated, and 70 percent of its recruits wound up joining the insurgency instead.

The main American weapon against Zarqawists in Anbar was Predator drone air strikes, waged by the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), domiciled at Balad Air Base north of Baghdad and headed by Major General Stanley McChrystal. JSOC reckoned it had killed six out of fourteen “major operators” by September 2004, including al-Zarqawi’s newest “spiritual adviser.” Regardless, the organizational structure of Tawhid wal-Jihad remained intact despite intense aerial bombardment, and if anything, the group only grew in strength, number, and popular appeal after the battle, which became known as the First Battle of Fallujah, showed how a combination of domestic and foreign insurgencies could bleed a mighty superpower. McChrystal assessed that the threat posed by al-Zarqawi’s network was much greater than what the military had
dismissively taken to calling “former regime elements”—an assessment that was greatly bolstered in October 2004 when al-Zarqawi finally did what he had refused to do four years earlier: make bayat to bin Laden.

By then adept at the uses of psychological warfare and propaganda, al-Zarqawi chose to broadcast his pledge of allegiance to the al-Qaeda chief, and did so two weeks after Donald Rumsfeld claimed that he did not believe al-Zarqawi was allied with bin Laden (a reversal of the allegation Colin Powell had advanced a year earlier at the UN).

The Jordanian’s bent-knee subordination resulted in the Tawhid wal-Jihad’s name change to Tanzim Qaedat al-Jihad fi Bilad al-Rafidayn, or “al-Qaeda in the Land of the Two Rivers,” which Washington shortened to al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI). So where the Jordanian entered Iraq a mere affiliate or ally of al-Qaeda, he was, a year into the war, fully enlisted as bin Laden’s field commander. It would be the Saudi billionaire’s enterprise, he insisted, that would inherit Mesopotamia.

A month after making bayat, al-Zarqawi attempted to put this proposition to the test with the Second Battle of Fallujah, which began in early November 2004. Dwarfing its predecessor, this operation saw ten American army battalions mobilized, including two marine regiments, and several hundred Iraqi soldiers, many acting as scouts for viable targets. It was also accompanied by F/A-18 Hornet jets, which dropped two-thousand-pound bombs on points around the city.

The marines also discovered what the AQI franchise had gotten up to by way of community outreach in Fallujah. In addition to a calendar for video-recorded beheadings, soldiers uncovered kidnapping victims who had had their legs removed. In total, three “torture houses” were uncovered in the city, along with an IED-manufacturing facility that gave US forces a clue as to the
route taken by foreign fighters: a recovered GPS device showed that its owner had entered the country from the west, via Syria.

Ten thousand homes, or about a fifth of total residences in Fallujah, were destroyed in two weeks’ worth of intense urban warfare, matched by punishing air strikes. The aftermath was a pocked moonscape, uninhabitable for many—not that many were left. Fallujah had largely been evacuated, with hundreds of thousands of refugees fleeing before the start of major fighting. Roughly a quarter of all insurgents killed by US troops in 2004—2,175 out of 8,400—died at the Second Battle of Fallujah, but at a proportionally high price: 70 marines were also killed, and 651 were wounded, in addition to other US casualties.

In other words, another tactical victory for the United States was rendered strategically negligible because of the enormous propaganda boon it delivered to the insurgency. The Second Battle of Fallujah was more Dunkirk than Waterloo for the jihadists and the Baathists who, if anything, scattered their number to other parts of central and northern Iraq, such as Mosul, where the marines believed that al-Zarqawi had fled after the first day of intense combat operations. Bin Laden, too, took the opportunity to transform a setback into a major forward stride, claiming that he had been acquainted with some of the “martyrs” of the battle and laying the responsibility for Fallujah’s undeniable devastation at the feet of President Bush. America was waging a “total war against Islam,” bin Laden declared, while the Zarqawists had “written a new page of glory into the history of our community of believers.”