ISIS: Inside the Army of Terror (6 page)

What began for bin Laden as a wary collaboration premised on Rolodex opportunism and for al-Zarqawi as the need for start-up capital had clearly metamorphosed into an open and celebrated alliance. The al-Qaeda leader’s hesitations about his field commander’s arrogance and sectarianism were sacrificed to the morale-building blows the latter was delivering to the world’s greatest far enemy.
In December 2004 bin Laden answered al-Zarqawi’s bayat with warm acceptance, naming him a “noble brother” and calling on the “unification of the jihadi groups under a single standard which recognizes al-Zarqawi as the Emir of al-Qaeda in Iraq.”

The title was somewhat deceptive, however, because al-Zarqawi was in fact granted an operational purview that extended well beyond Iraqi territory, into outlying Arab countries as well as Turkey. As Bruce Riedel recounts, some al-Qaeda ideologues even gelled to al-Zarqawi’s fanatical anti-Shiism, which was not endorsed (and was later criticized) by core al-Qaeda leadership. One Saudi ideologue in particular praised the Jordanian for characterizing the Shia as part of a long, uninterrupted line of perfidious collaborators dating back to the Mongol invasion of the Middle East—an invasion that resulted, infamously, in the obliteration of Baghdad in the thirteenth century. Here the thirteenth-century Islamic theologian Ibn Taymiyyah—the godfather of Salafism—was invoked for his commandment, “Beware of the Shiites, fight them, they lie.” The Mongols in the contemporary context were the American occupiers, and also the “Jews,” who were said to be standing right behind them in Iraq. Al-Zarqawi was thus seen as upholding a seven-hundred-year-old tradition of Islamic resistance. According to this framework, a Muslim has to abide by three criteria of
tawhid
, or monotheism: to worship God, to worship
only
God, and to have the right creed. In the medieval period, Ibn Taymiyyah used the foregoing criteria of tawhid to excommunicate the Shia and Sufis after he established that their practices and beliefs—including the veneration of imams—compromised their worship of God alone.

As Riedel puts it, al-Zarqawi was also being celebrated not just as a great descendant of Ibn Taymiyyah’s line, but as the ultimate strategic trap-layer for the infidels of the West. He portrayed the United States and its European allies, the United Nations, and the Shia-dominant Iraqi government as coconspirators in a plot of
antique vintage, the aim of which was the violent disinheritance of 1.3 billion Sunnis of the Islamic world. He had, according to his Saudi admirer, “such capabilities that the mind cannot imagine. He prepared for fighting the Americans over a year prior to the American occupation of Iraq. He built the camps and arsenals,” and he recruited and enlisted people from all over the region—from Palestine to Yemen.

ISIS today relies on much of the same triumphalist discourse about a coming civilizational showdown in the Middle East. Every issue of
Dabiq
opens with this quote from al-Zarqawi: “The spark has been lit here in Iraq, and its heat will continue to intensify—by Allah’s permission—until it burns the crusader armies in Dabiq.” Dabiq refers to the countryside of modern-day Aleppo, where ISIS also continues to have an entrenched and expanding military presence. “This place was mentioned in a hadith,”
Dabiq
(the magazine) notes, “describing some of the events of the Malahim (what is sometimes referred to as Armageddon in English). One of the greatest battles between the Muslims and the crusaders will take place near Dabiq.”

In other words, the next trap being laid for America, as al-Zarqawi originally envisioned it, was in northern Syria.

THE SUNNI TRIANGLE

The disbursal of Islamic militants from Fallujah into other parts of Iraq meant that the “spark” of al-Zarqawi’s apocalyptic ideology caught fire throughout the rest of the country, particularly where anti-American sentiment was especially high: where US forces were in densest concentration. One insurgent stronghold was Haifa Street, a thoroughfare that ran parallel with the Tigris River, just north out of the Assassins’ Gate, the entrance to the Green Zone. Haifa Street in particular was a totem of Sunni
disenfranchisement: residents living in luxury apartments along this Babylonian Champs-
É
lys
é
es had been the well-paid elites favored by the Saddam regime. But many were unemployed and unemployable in transitional Iraq, thanks to de-Baathification, and so were being drawn into the insurgency in one form or another. It made no difference that Ayad Allawi, a onetime Baathist turned enemy of the party and a secular shia well-respected by Sunnis, was now the interim prime minister of Iraq. Gordon and Trainor recount how on one inoperable US Bradley fighting vehicle that sat along the street in September 2004 “insurgents had hung a black Tawhid wal-Jihad flag on its 25mm gun, and the battalion tasked with controlling the place, from the 1st Cavalry Division, began calling Haifa ‘Little Fallujah’ and ‘Purple Heart Boulevard,’ after the medal that would be awarded to 160 of the unit’s 800 soldiers by the time they went home in early 2005. In Dora [yet another district of Baghdad infiltrated by insurgents], another 1st Cavalry battalion began to see new graffiti as Second Fallujah inflamed the Sunni population and the January election loomed: ‘No, No, Allawi, Yes, Yes, Zarqawi.’ ”

THE FALL(S) OF MOSUL

Iraq’s second-largest city, Mosul, had seemed relatively stable during the early days of the occupation, when it was first secured by Petraeus’s 101st Airborne. But the calm was illusory. Al-Zarqawi had made the city his fallback base, and just days into major combat operations for the Second Battle of Fallujah, Mosul fell to the insurgency.

Ninewah’s provincial capital had always been susceptible to Sunni rejectionism, given its cocktail composition of Saddamists and Salafists. Unemployment in Mosul hovered at around 75 percent, according to Sadi Ahmed Pire, the Patriotic Union of
Kurdistan’s security chief in the city, and thus locals could be hired to carry out terrorist operations for as little as fifty dollars. As in prior battles, the local Iraqi police and army disappeared, their stations either stormed by insurgents facing little resistance or set ablaze. The ease with which Mosul collapsed also seemingly vindicated Derek Harvey’s prior assessment to the US military: namely that the city’s US-appointed police chief, Muhammed Khairi al-Barhawi, had been quietly playing for both teams.

Though al-Barhawi may have been an Iraqi intelligence asset all along, the Zarqawists certainly didn’t make it easy for other Mosulawis to sincerely partner with the Americans. They were especially brutal to any Iraqi soldier or policeman who didn’t abandon his post; in one notorious episode, they even tracked a wounded major to the hospital where he was being treated and beheaded him there. In the end, as with Fallujah, it took another overwhelming commitment of US firepower and manpower—joined by an unusually competent contingent of the Iraqi Special Police Commandos—to regain control of Mosul in the face of a combined Baathist–al-Qaeda onslaught of machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades.

A decade later, history repeated itself, as Mosul once again fell to a hybridized insurgency made up of al-Zarqawi’s disciples and the Baathists of al-Douri’s Naqshbandi Army. Only this time, there was no US military presence to retake the city. ISIS sacked Mosul in less than a week. The jihadists rule it to this day.

3

THE MANAGEMENT OF SAVAGERY

BIRTH OF THE ISLAMIC STATE OF IRAQ

Al-Zarqawi’s sinister strategy hewed closely to a text titled
Idarat al-Tawahhush
,
or
The Management of Savagery
, published online in 2004 as a combined field manual and manifesto for the establishment of the caliphate. Its author, Abu Bakr Naji, conceived of a battle plan for weakening enemy states through what he called “power of vexation and exhaustion.” Drawing the United States into open as opposed to “proxy” warfare in the Middle East was the whole point, because Naji believed that once American soldiers were killed by mujahidin on the battlefield, the “media halo” surrounding their presumed invincibility would vanish. Muslims would then be “dazzled” at the harm they could inflict on a weak and morally corrupted superpower as well as incensed at the occupation of their holy lands, driving them to jihad. He urged that they should then focus on attacking the economic and cultural institutions (such as the hydrocarbon industries) of the “apostate” regimes aligned with
the United States. “The public will see how the troops flee,” Naji wrote, “heeding nothing. At this point, savagery and chaos begin and these regions will start to suffer from the absence of security. This is in addition to the exhaustion and draining (that results from) attacking the remaining targets and opposing the authorities.”

Naji was using the time-honored jihadist example of Egypt, but he was also implicitly referring to Iraq, where he urged the fast consolidation of jihadist victory in order to “take over the surrounding countries.” One ISIS-affiliated cleric told us that Naji’s book is widely circulated among provincial ISIS commanders and some rank-and-file fighters as a way to justify beheadings as not only religiously permissible but recommended by God and his prophet. For ISIS,
The Management of Savagery
’s greatest contribution lies in its differentiation between the meaning of jihad and other religious matters. Naji at one point lectures the reader, arguing that the way jihad is taught “on paper” makes it harder for young mujahidin to understand the true meaning of the concept. “One who previously engaged in jihad knows that it is naught but violence, crudeness, terrorism, frightening (others), and massacring. I am talking about jihad and fighting, not about Islam and one should not confuse them. . . .[H]e cannot continue to fight and move from one stage to another unless the beginning stage contains a stage of massacring the enemy and making him homeless. . . .”

THE SUNNI BOYCOTT

To succeed in Iraq, al-Zarqawi needed to both massacre and dispossess the enemy (the Shia and Americans) and keep Sunnis divested of any stake in what he saw as their conspiratorial project: the creation of a democratic Iraqi government. Both the Baathists and the Zarqawists undertook a campaign to enforce a Sunni boycott of the forthcoming January 2005 Iraqi election. It worked.
Less than 1 percent of Sunnis cast ballots in a key province in central Iraq—Anbar. The result conformed exactly to the dire scenario outlined by al-Zarqawi in his letter a year earlier: the Shia parties won the election by an overwhelming percentage, and Ibrahim al-Jaafari, a Dawa Party candidate who had received millions in campaign funding from Iran, became prime minister in a government that would draft Iraq’s new constitution and thus determine the country’s postwar fate. The boycott marked the climax of Sunni rejectionism but also, paradoxically, the beginning of the end for the insurgency’s popular appeal, because it transformed what had hitherto been a numerically minimal element—AQI—into the dominant one.

The Sunni loss at the ballot box unsurprisingly coincided with a sharp uptick in attacks on “Shia” targets, which included state institutions and the Iraqi Security Forces (ISF). On February 28, 2005, a suicide bomb killed more than 120 people in the Shia-majority city of Hilla, just south of Baghdad, targeting young men tendering job applications with the ISF. In the crucial border town of Tal Afar, which jihadists used as a gateway to import foreign fighters from Syria, AQI ethnically cleansed mixed communities, “attacking playgrounds and schoolyards and soccer fields,” as Colonel Herbert “H. R.” McMaster later recalled. In one horrifying instance, they used two mentally disabled girls—ages three and thirteen—as suicide bombers to blow up a police recruitment line.

THE DESERT PROTECTORS

Military progress in Iraq began as improvisation—the innovative thinking of local military actors who apprehended early on that the war for “hearts and minds” wouldn’t be won by adhering to a strategy cooked up by strategists who stayed in the Green Zone or, in some cases, inside the walls of the Pentagon. Integral to the insurgency’s
success was the failure by the Americans to engage with arguably the most important demographic in Sunni Iraq—the tribes. They had suffered enormously from de-Baathification. Saddam had understood the importance of these ancient confederations of families and clans and had thus made them a large part of his state patronage system: the tribes ran smuggling rings, gray-market merchant businesses, all under the auspices of al-Douri.

It wasn’t for a lack of trying that the tribes failed to persuade the coalition of their bellwether status for defeating the insurgency. A sheikh from the influential Albu Nimr tribe had offered to work with the Iraqi Governing Council and the CPA in establishing a much-needed border guard as early as 2003, an offer that was reflected in a memo prepared for the Joint Chiefs of Staff in October of that same year. “Leaders of these tribes—many of whom still occupy key positions of local authority—appear to be increasingly willing to cooperate with the Coalition in order to restore or maintain their influence in post-Saddam Iraq,” the memo read. “If they perceive failure, they may take other actions, to include creating alternate governing and security institutions, working with anti-Coalition forces, or engaging in criminal activity to ensure the prosperity and security of their tribes.” Nothing came of the memo.

Al-Zarqawi again proved more adept at navigating Iraqi culture than the CPA or US military—at least at first. “Zarqawi, or the Iraqis he had working for him, understood who was who in the tribes and he worked them,” Derek Harvey told us. “That’s how he controlled territory in Anbar and the Euphrates River Valley.”

His fatal error, however, was in overplaying his hand by turning AQI’s protection racket into an asphyxiating mode of jihadist governance. The tribes chafed at the implementation of a seventh-century civil code in areas ruled by fundamentalists, many of whom were foreign-born and behaved exactly as the colonial usurpers they were meant to expel. Tribal businesses were disrupted or taken
over by those seeking their own monopoly on smuggling, and AQI protected its confiscated interest with a mafia’s thuggish zeal. It justified killing on the basis of market competition.

So when it assassinated a sheikh from the Albu Nimr tribe in 2005, Major Adam Such, who commanded the Army Special Forces Operational Detachment Alpha 555 Company under the 1st Marine Division, seized the opportunity to make AQI a pariah among its most important constituency. He recruited tribesmen to join an ad hoc militia to monitor the roads near the Anbar city of Hit—another strategically vital town that ISIS later seized in 2014. It was an inspired idea, although it lacked the necessary structural support to become wholly transformative. At the time, there was no permanent US military presence in the area to convince the locals that the routing of AQI wouldn’t be a flash in the pan, but the prelude to a long-term counterinsurgent policing mission. Still, the fact that Iraqis suddenly
wanted
Americans to stay in their midst indicated that the jihadists had worn out their welcome.

Another city where this proved to be so was Qa’im, which al-Zarqawi had made the capital of his Western Euphrates “emirate” for obvious geostrategic reasons. The Sunni and Bedouin town abuts the Syrian border town of Albu Kamal and is also situated along a main road connecting Iraq to Jordan. It also contains the largest phosphate mines in the Middle East, with an enormous subterranean cave system, which became a guerrilla network for moving men and materiél through undetected.

US Marines moved in to take Qa’im in September 2005, followed by subsequent sorties in subordinate AQI bases in the Western Euphrates. They constructed concrete-fortified outposts to mark an indefinite presence and thereby forestall a jihadist resurgence. Building on Adam Such’s experience in Hit, they also reached out to Qa’im’s tribes, some of which had already grown so horrified by AQI’s practices that they took up arms against the
Zarqawists. In the Albu Mahal’s Hamza Battalion, the marines discovered a volunteer army that proved as committed to hammering the insurgents as they were.

Discounting corruption, the main reason why the ISF often proved inept or simply unwilling to duke it out with AQI was that many recruits were Shia, who understandably had little interest in fighting in Sunni-majority territory where they were viewed with suspicion or outright contempt. Sunni tribesmen had no such compunction, however, and were fired by self-interest to rid their areas of what may have started out as an applauded anti-American “resistance” but had devolved into a gang of obscurantist head-loppers. The graduates of the Qa’im program were turned into a battalion called the Desert Protectors, a name more than a little redolent of Lawrentian romanticism but accurate insofar as the battalion safeguarded the December 2005 parliamentary election from terrorist sabotage.

By 2006 security incidents in Qa’im had plummeted. Even in success, though, US forces still failed to discover that the tribes weren’t motivated by anything so grandiose as patriotism; they only wanted to ensure peace and quiet in their own communities, not in the entire country. A third of the Desert Protectors’ members quit after being told that it constituted a
national
defense force and not just a local Qa’im gendarmerie and so was duly slated for redeployment elsewhere in Iraq.

That said, Iraq’s national parliamentary election yielded unforeseen and welcome developments. One of these was the transformation of Dr. Muhammad Mahmoud Latif, a long-sought-after insurgent leader, into a partner of the United States. Appalled by how the Sunni boycott of the January election for a constituent assembly had deprived Sunnis of their say in Iraq’s self-determination, Latif realized that al-Zarqawi’s plan for delegitimizing the new government was backfiring. He also had political ambitions of his
own. In the lead-up to the parliamentary vote, he gathered a collection of Ramadi tribal sheikhs who were eager to declare war on AQI and, more daringly, work with the Americans to do so, on one condition. Like the Desert Protectors, the Ramadi tribesmen wanted a guarantee that the security portfolio for Anbar’s provincial capital would devolve to themselves after AQI was no more.

Assured of the Americans’ good faith in that respect, the Anbar People’s Council was born. Its first initiative was to encourage Sunnis to join the Iraqi police, which was about to hold a large recruitment drive at a local glass factory. The council’s certification of the effort yielded hundreds of fresh applicants, who in turn became an unavoidable target for al-Zarqawi’s jihadists. On the fourth day of the glass factory drive, a suicide bomber exploded a device that killed as many as sixty Iraqis and two Americans. AQI then announced all-out war on the Anbari sheikhs who had joined the council, hunting them down individually for weeks after the bombing. Latif fled Iraq to avoid being caught in the terrorists’ dragnet. Still too vulnerable to al-Zarqawi’s strong-arm tactics, the council folded weeks later.

It took another two years for the US military to make strategic sense of what had transpired in Hit, Qa’im, and Ramadi. Pockets of wholly spontaneous and unforeseen tribal backlashes against the same foreign-led terrorist organization made sense in light of tribal history. For centuries, these clans had survived by cutting pragmatic deals with perceived dominant powers in their midst. They had done it with Saddam, and they had done it with al-Zarqawi, and they were ready to do it with the Americans. And while they still regarded the United States warily, they saw in its army a possible ally against a greater common enemy.

“I had a Marine Corps captain,” a former top US military official told us. “He was a Sioux. He didn’t know shit about Anbar or Iraq. He got out there, and he understood it immediately. The Iraqis could see he knew what was going on, and they loved him for it.”

For Derek Harvey, understanding the way Iraq’s tribes functioned was the key to all mythologies in understanding Iraq itself. “There were a lot of regime organizations that we didn’t figure out very well. The key person might not have been the head guy, but the second or third guy—and this rule of not knowing exactly who’s running the show applied to the Saddamists as much as it applies to ISIS today. The tribes had professional and in some cases religious networks that determined informal hierarchies in everything that happened in that country. Our difficulty was in learning who did what.”