Don't Panic: Isis, Terror and the Middle East (11 page)

The Sunni tribal leaders in Anbar province knew exactly
who was to blame for the catastrophe that was engulfing their community: the Islamists, who had got the sectarian civil war going, quite deliberately, with their anti-Shia terrorism. They also knew where they lived. Beginning in 2005, some of these traditional leaders began to collaborate with the local American forces against al Qaeda in Iraq, and other Islamist groups. The American authorities spotted the trend and began working to extend it to other Sunni-majority areas where the Islamists had a big presence. Ex-Ba’athist army officers who had previously fought in the anti-American insurgency changed sides, and tens of thousands of young Sunni men desperate for employment enlisted in the irregular forces that began to be called the “Sons of Iraq.” They were paid well (by Iraqi standards) for their work: at one stage 130,000 fighters, many of them former insurgents, were being paid $300 each a month to kill or expel the jihadis. The movement as a whole was dubbed “The Awakening,” and it waged an ultimately successful campaign in Anbar and in the “Sunni Belt” of towns that surround Baghdad against the mostly foreign-born Islamist fighters of al Qaeda in Iraq.

They hunted al-Qaeda down with a vengeance. They dragged al-Qaeda guys through streets behind cars … they had videos of feet on the altars in mosques … It was pretty much just a ruthless slaughter
.

David Matsuda, an anthropologist “embedded” with the U.S. army in Iraq
¹⁹

At the end of 2008 al Qaeda leaders admitted that their forces throughout Iraq had suffered 70 percent casualties in the course of the year, falling from 12,000 to 3,500. The loss of influence by al Qaeda in Iraq in these years is reflected in the fact that the U.S. government, having originally posted a bounty of $25 million for the death or capture of Masri, reduced it in 2008 to only $100,000. By 2010 both Anbar and the “Sunni Belt” of towns around Baghdad were largely under the control of the Awakening forces and their American allies. The American forces were also getting a much better flow of intelligence, and in April of that year both Abu Ayyub al Masri and Abu Omar al Baghdadi were tracked to a safe house near Tikrit. It was attacked in a U.S.-led raid, and both men detonated their suicide vests to avoid capture. Al Qaeda in Iraq was leaderless once more.

The steep fall in the sectarian murder rate in Baghdad and the imposition of a precarious peace in Anbar created a window of opportunity for the U.S. forces to get out of Iraq while leaving behind what appeared to be a pacified country with some hope for the future. (Plenty of money was still coming in from Iraq’s oil exports, after all, even if the bulk of it was stolen by government ministers, civil servants, and military and police commanders.) Nothing had been permanently resolved, but in November 2008 President Bush, desperate to paint his worst blunder with a veneer of success before leaving office, signed an agreement with Prime Minister Maliki that set the end of 2011
as the deadline for the final withdrawal of all American troops. American combat troops would have to leave Iraqi cities and towns and withdraw to their bases by the end of June 2009. And when Barack Obama became president in early 2009, he moved the deadline for the final departure of U.S. troops forward to May 2010.

So, then, it wasn’t all that bad, was it? A total of 4,425 U.S. troops killed (and another 318 dead from other “coalition” countries). At least 178,000 Iraqis whose deaths by violence are well documented, but upwards of half a million total “excess” Iraqi deaths including those who died of war-related causes like the collapse of the Iraqi healthcare system, according to the
Lancet
survey and the
Opinion Research Business
survey.
²⁰
A big butcher’s bill, but some people would argue that it was worth it if Iraq finally emerged from its ordeal as a peaceful, united, democratic country. If only.

What had actually emerged in Iraq by 2010 was a tripartite division of the country between Kurds, Shia Arabs and Sunni Arabs. In the case of the Kurds, they received formal recognition in the 2005 federal constitution, which made provision for “the region of Kurdistan, along with its existing authorities, as a federal region” and stipulated that the laws passed and decisions made by the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) since 1992 would remain in force.
(The KRG had been created at that time by a Kurdish uprising against Saddam Hussein’s regime after his defeat in the first Gulf War, and had been protected until the American invasion of 2003 by a “no-fly zone” that enabled it to defy the legal authority of Baghdad and to function virtually as an independent state.) While the Kurdish proto-state never declared formal independence because of strong opposition from Turkey, which has a large Kurdish population in the southeastern provinces adjacent to Iraqi Kurdistan, its de facto independence continued after 2003.

The KRG’s army, the Peshmerga, was never integrated into the new Iraqi army, which had no presence on its territory, and Kurdistan’s 8 million people remained largely immune to the post-2003 violence and terrorism that reigned in the Arab-majority parts of the country. Beyond the three governorates that are legally part of the KRG, it maintains claims to other neighbouring territories that were historically Kurdish-majority, including the important oil region around the city of Kirkuk, where a large Arab population was settled during the decades of the Saddam Hussein regime. Most Kurds are Sunni, with a Shia minority, but there have been no clashes between them in the territory of the KRG. For most practical purposes, it is a separate country from Iraq.

The situation was much more complex in Arab Iraq, where about three-quarters of the population is Shia. Having been underdogs governed by the Sunni minority for centuries, the Shias of Iraq were determined to
dominate the government that emerged from the 2005 election (which was boycotted by most Sunni Arabs). Nouri al Maliki, the prime minister who emerged after extensive political bargaining in 2006, governed in a relentlessly sectarian style that further alienated Sunni Arabs. His manner was somewhat moderated in his first term by the great influence of the American occupation forces, but after the election of 2009, with the American withdrawal just around the corner, it rapidly became more extreme. In particular, Maliki reneged on a promise to integrate the “Sons of Iraq,” the Sunni militias of the Awakening, into the Iraqi army: only 9,000 were accepted into the army, another 30,000 were given jobs in government ministries, and the rest, as many as 90,000 men, were just left out. Shia concerns about the long-term implications of an independent Sunni militia were quite understandable, but Maliki’s “solution” to the problem was a blunder as grave in its consequences as L. Paul Bremer’s decision to disband the entire Iraqi army from the Saddam Hussein era in 2003. Indeed, the consequences were almost identical: the re-emergence, post-2010, of an armed Sunni resistance to the Shia authorities in Baghdad. Which in turn opened the door for a restoration of the influence of al Qaeda in Iraq in the Sunni areas.

CHAPTER 6

JIHAD: IRAQ AND SYRIA, 2010–2013

T
he untimely demise of AQI’s leader, Abu Ayyub al Masri, and of Abu Omar al Baghdadi, the titular head of the “Islamic State of Iraq,” in April 2010 was a turning point for the organization: it was only four years from that nadir of its fortunes to its conquest of most of the Sunni areas of Iraq in the summer of 2014. The person most closely associated with that turnaround is Abu Bakr al Baghdadi, who succeeded to the leadership of the ISI in the following month at the age of thirty-nine. (The name al Qaeda in Iraq was dropped shortly afterwards, and the division between the two organizations, never more than titular, was erased.)

Abu Bakr al Baghdadi grew up in the small city of Samarra, a predominantly Sunni town. According to research done by the
Süddeutsche Zeitung
newspaper and Germany’s ARD television channel, he was a mediocre student who had to repeat a year in school because his English was so bad, but he was a very good football player and a pious youth (the children to whom he gave Quran lessons called him “the believer”). He failed to gain admission to the law faculty of the University of Baghdad because of his poor marks, but the Islamic University of Baghdad
accepted him into the theology faculty in 1991. He graduated eight years later with a PhD in Islamic theology, and he appears to have passed the remaining four years of Saddam’s rule as a junior cleric at a mosque in the Baghdad suburb of Tobchi.

The American invasion in 2003 galvanized him, and he promptly helped to found Jamaat Jaysh Ahl al-Sunnah wal-Jamaah (Army of the Followers of the Sunnah and the Community), a small “army” of militants who began launching attacks on U.S. troops, although, as the head of the Shari’ah committee, Baghdadi probably did not see combat. He was arrested by U.S. forces in February 2004 and imprisoned as a “civilian internee” at Camp Bucca in southern Iraq near the Kuwait border. American intelligence had little or nothing on him, however, and he was not seen as particularly dangerous—just another of the thousands of Iraqi men swept up in various raids and held without charge for looking suspicious. But it was probably his eleven months there that transformed him from an outraged Islamic scholar into a militant and ruthless terrorist leader.

Camp Bucca was a terrorist university. Jihadis who spent time there—and there are thousands of them—still refer to it as “The Academy.” Divided into about twenty separate compounds, it held 22,000 people at its peak, including Islamist militants, ex-Ba’athist bureaucrats and army officers who were suspected of being active in the resistance, and many confused people who had no idea
why they were there. It was a pressure cooker where new links were forged and new ideas were explored. “We could never have got together like this in Baghdad,” said a senior officer in ISIS who was interviewed by Martin Chulov of the
Guardian
in 2014: “It would have been impossibly dangerous. Here, we were not only safe, but we were only a few hundred metres away from the entire al-Qaeda leadership.” Not only that, but the same compounds held many former senior Ba’athists, ex-military men and bureaucrats who had been fighting the American invaders in quite separate organizations. An alliance between the two groups would offer many advantages if it could be achieved, for the Ba’athists had precisely the professional military skills and the experience in running large state organizations that the ISI lacked.

Chulov’s informant, who used the pseudonym Abu Ahmed, had not known anything about Abu Bakr al Baghdadi before arriving at Camp Bucca, but was impressed by his calm and his charisma. It was the ideal place for Baghdadi to deploy his two most valuable assets—his PhD in Islamic theology and the fact that his family could claim a direct line of descent from the Prophet Muhammad—in order to gain the respect and trust of his fellow prisoners. At the same time, Baghdadi made himself useful to his American captors by mediating in quarrels between rival factions in the camp and keeping matters calm. “He was respected very much by the U.S. army,” Abu Ahmed said. “If he wanted to visit people in another camp, he could,
but we couldn’t. And all the while a new strategy, which he was leading, was rising under their noses, and that was to build the Islamic State. If there was no American prison in Iraq, there would be no Islamic State now. Bucca was a factory. It made us all. It built our ideology.”
²¹

This new ideology was a radical departure from the ideas of Osama bin Laden and the other leaders of the original al Qaeda organization. Bin Laden was a cautious man who may not have expected to see such a thing as an “Islamic State” come to pass in his lifetime. His plans assumed that he was working for long-term results: first you have to attack the “far enemy” (the Western countries) and get them to invade Muslim countries; that will eventually radicalize the Muslim peoples so much that Islamist revolutions will become possible; and then, even after the revolutions, you have to proceed cautiously towards the ultimate goal of a restored caliphate, always aware that nationalists in every Muslim country will furiously resist being submerged in a pan-Islamic state that would erase their national identities. To use a Marxist analogy, if Osama bin Laden was Lenin, Abu Bakr al Baghdadi was Pol Pot.