Don't Panic: Isis, Terror and the Middle East (14 page)

Nobody had foreseen a collapse of the Iraqi army on such a scale, but it should not have been surprising. A small part of the reason was ISIS’s carefully cultivated reputation for extreme and bloody cruelty: in Mosul, as elsewhere, they burned, beheaded, hanged or crucified their victims (and made videos when they did these things, of course). The tactic was meant to frighten their enemies, and it did. But the much more important cause of the collapse was the fact that Iraq’s army was an army in name only. The soldiers were there to get paid, and didn’t always bother to show up between paydays. (This was often a formal arrangement in which the soldiers agreed to surrender half their pay to their officers in return for being allowed to be on permanent leave, and only about a third of the theoretically sixty-thousand-strong garrison of Mosul was actually in the city when ISIS arrived.) Many of the soldiers the army was paying didn’t even exist; people talked about “ghost battalions.” The officers had paid large bribes to get their jobs, and needed to appropriate some of their soldiers’ pay as well as selling off weapons and negotiating large kickbacks on supply contracts in order to make a decent return on their investment. That was the way the Maliki regime ran the whole country: an “institutionalized kleptocracy,” as one ex-minister is said to have put it.

Very few officers or men of the post-occupation Iraqi army expected ever to have to fight trained and disciplined opponents, and they were bewildered when they found themselves in that situation. So they fled, leaving behind them in Mosul enough shiny new American weapons to equip tens of thousands of men. ISIS didn’t even pause for breath: on the very next day, June 11, its fighters were in Tikrit and the oil refinery town of Baiji, 120 miles (180 kilometres) south of Mosul. On the following day they were only an hour’s drive from Baghdad. People began to say aloud what they had been muttering all along: that there were only about five reliable battalions in the whole quarter-million-strong, $25 billion Iraqi army. In that case, the government’s only hope was to call on the Shia militias to fill the gap and keep ISIS out of Baghdad, even though that would worsen the sectarian divide. There were about two thousand Iranian Revolutionary Guard soldiers in the country on various training missions, and they were thrown into the breach as well. That effort “saved” Baghdad, but it probably didn’t need to be saved: ISIS had conquered almost a third of the country with a few thousand militants, but it would have been insane to commit those troops to battle in a city of 6 million people, most parts of which were by now—thanks to sectarian cleansing—entirely Shia.

Some semblance of a front line therefore stabilized north of Baghdad in the succeeding days—but it did not include the province of Kirkuk, which was occupied by
Kurdish forces on June 11 after the Iraqi 12th Division that garrisoned the province fled south as part of the general rout. Kirkuk was claimed by the Kurds as their historic capital and was a rich prize because of its large oil reserves, but large numbers of Arabs had been settled there—and large numbers of Kurds and Turkmen driven out—as part of Saddam Hussein’s strategy for weakening Kurdish resistance to his rule. In post-occupation Iraq Kirkuk remained under the control of the central Iraqi government and not the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG), but the Kurds were only waiting for a chance to take it back. Owning Kirkuk and its oil would put a firm economic foundation under an independent Kurdistan, so they will not give it back easily.

Within days of the fall of Mosul, IS issued a proclamation about how Muslims should live within the “Islamic State” that had taken them over. (Christians faced three choices: to leave, pay a heavy tax for “protection,” or be killed. Shias and non-Muslim religious minorities other than Christians had only two choices, since the tax on Christians did not apply to them.) The rules for Muslims were roughly as follows:

1. People have tried secular rule—now it is time for an Islamic state.

2. Women should dress decently in loose-fitting clothes. They should leave their homes only when necessary.

3. Shrines and graves should be destroyed.

4. Any gathering or the carrying of any flag (apart from the ISIS flag) or the carrying of weapons is forbidden.

5. The police and soldiers of the unbelievers [that is, the Maliki government] can repent. We have opened places for you to do this.

6. No drugs, no cigarettes and no alcohol are permitted.

7. Tribal leaders and sheikhs should not work with the [Maliki] government and become traitors.

8. All Muslims to pray at the mosque at the correct time.

9. The money we have taken from the [Maliki] government is for the public. Only the imam of the Muslims can spend it. Thieves will have their hands cut off. [This rule refers to the estimated half billion dollars that was taken from the banks in Mosul during the conquest.]

10. For those who ask, “Who are you?”: We are the soldiers of Islam, and we have taken on the responsibility of re-establishing the Islamic caliphate.
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Yet there was no triumphalism, no arrogance in the tone of Abu Muhammad al Adnani, the ISIS spokesperson, when
he addressed the fighters who had just overrun much of Iraq in a week: “Be warned and do not fall prey to your vanities and egos. Do not let your egos fall prey to your recent military gains such as the Humvees, helicopters, rifles and military equipment.” The spectacular victories were God’s work, not theirs. And two weeks later, on June 29, the first day of the holy month of Ramadan, Adnani had a more momentous announcement to make. “The Shura [council] of the Islamic State met and discussed this issue [of the caliphate] … the Islamic State decided to establish an Islamic caliphate and to designate a caliph for the state of the Muslims. The words ‘Iraq’ and ‘al Sham’ have been removed from the name of the Islamic State in official papers and documents.” And the caliph would be, of course, “the sheikh, the fighter, the scholar who practices what he preaches, the worshipper, the leader, the warrior, the reviver, descendant from the family of the Prophet, the slave of God”—Abu Bakr al Baghdadi, henceforward to be known as Caliph Ibrahim.

This was not just playing with nomenclature. The last caliphate was abolished more than ninety years ago, when the Turkish nationalist leader Mustafa Kemal Ataturk stripped the last Ottoman sultan of his title—and many Muslims would say that it had ceased to be valid long before that, when it became merely a tool of Ottoman statecraft. Besides, Turkish sultans did not qualify to be caliphs, because none of them were Arabs descended from the tribe of the Prophet Muhammad. By contrast,
Baghdadi’s people had put a good deal of effort into ensuring that he met all the qualifications to be caliph: he was Muslim, fully grown, devout, sane and physically intact (a missing limb or eye would disqualify a candidate, because he had to be able to lead the Muslims in battle). And, above all, he hailed from the Quraysh tribe of the Arabian peninsula, or at least he said he did. (It may well have been a tradition in Baghdadi’s family to say that this was so, but in practice it is impossible to trace the descent of an Iraqi family of modest standing back fourteen centuries to confirm or reject the claim. And nobody within the reach of ISIS was going to question it publicly.)

Most important of all, Baghdadi actually controlled a state, stretching 500 miles (750 kilometres) from the eastern outskirts of Aleppo in Syria to Ramadi in Iraq. It would have been ridiculous for a group of hunted men like Osama bin Laden and his companions to declare a caliphate. That would have been as farcical as a group of Italian neo-fascists in a
trattoria
somewhere declaring the re-establishment of the Roman Empire. In the interpretation of Islam favoured by the ideologues of ISIS, the caliph must be the ruler of a state, and one that has been in existence for more than a year. That’s probably why Baghdadi waited until June 2014 to make his declaration: he had first become the ruler of a substantial tract of territory (in eastern Syria) one year before. But declaring himself caliph was still a breathtaking gamble, because he was demanding the immediate and unquestioning allegiance of all
Muslims. That was sure to annoy a lot of people, some of them very powerful.

“The legality of all emirates, groups, states and organizations becomes null by the expansion of the caliph’s authority and the arrival of its troops to their areas,” Adnani explained in the statement that declared the caliphate. “Listen to your caliph and obey him. Support your state, which grows every day.… Gather around your caliph, so that you may return as you once were for ages, kings of the earth and knights of war.” What this meant was that all existing rulers
and all rival jihadi groups
had to pledge their allegiance to Caliph Ibrahim. If they failed or refused to do so, then they were not just sinners; they were apostates who should be killed. The newly declared Islamic State (IS) was a borderless caliphate that would expand until it covered the Earth (that’s why the “Iraq and al Sham” part of the title was dropped), and when IS got to where the apostates were, they would be suitably punished.

This proclamation obviously was not going to go down well with al Qaeda or its Syrian affiliate, the Nusra Front, all of whose members had just been theoretically condemned to death if they did not recognize Abu Bakr al Baghdadi as the one true caliph. The Taliban leader Mullah Omar, Al Qaeda’s leader Ayman al Zawahiri, and jihadi ideologues such as Abu Muhammad al Maqdisi and Abu Qatada all rejected Islamic State’s declaration of the caliphate as being counterproductive to jihad. The response of Abu Mohammed al Golani, founder and leader of al Nusra,
was more concrete. He declared an “Islamic emirate” (one step below the caliphate) in the areas of Syria controlled by al Nusra, with four sub-emirates, two in northwestern Syria around Aleppo and Idlib, and two between Damascus and Syria’s southern border with Jordan. There would also be, Golani said, a centrally controlled army that moved between these sub-emirates as required.

What Golani was declaring wasn’t technically a state, nor was it formally a caliphate (there can only be one of those), but to stay in the game with Caliph Ibrahim’s Islamic State he was edging closer to both concepts. The logical endpoint of this process would be the proclamation by al Nusra of a rival caliphate demanding the loyalty of all Muslims, probably with its capital in the city of Idlib (captured by al Nusra in April 2015 after a long battle) and with Golani as the caliph. It would be a theological scandal, of course, and Golani would be condemned by most Muslims outside Syria even more vigorously than Baghdadi was. It’s bad enough to have one fake caliphate; two would be much worse. But the battlefield on which al Nusra is fighting Islamic State (despite the current de facto ceasefire between the two) is in Syria, and proclaiming a caliphate that is not dominated by Iraqis like Baghdadi could have a strong appeal for Islamist-inclined Syrians. One day Golani may decide to go all the way.

The ISIS fighting force in Iraq grew rapidly after its conquests of early June 2014. Willing recruits and tribal allies flocked to its side, seeing it as the only hope for Sunni Arabs, who were under huge pressure from the sectarian Shia government in Baghdad. Islamic State bulldozers destroyed the sand berm that defined the Iraqi-Syrian frontier, symbolically assuring Sunni Iraqis that they were now part of a much bigger Sunni enterprise. ISIS continued to mount offensives in various directions—south from Samarra towards Baghdad, east into Diyala province, west towards the border crossings into Syria, then southeast from Fallujah to cut off Baghdad from the south, switching from one target to the next as soon as their attacks ran out of steam, since it still did not have enough people to push its offensives very hard. Moreover, the resistance was stiffening as the Shia militias largely took the place of the discredited Iraqi army in the front lines. Now it was ISIS volunteers versus Shia volunteers, and it was turning out that the ISIS fighters were not ten feet tall after all. But they were still very good—they easily repelled an Iraqi government attempt to retake Tikrit in mid-July—and in early August they nearly overran Kurdistan.