Don't Panic: Isis, Terror and the Middle East (9 page)

Zarqawi’s rapid rise to pre-eminence among the Islamist fighters who went to Iraq owed a great deal to U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell’s depiction of him as al Qaeda’s man in Iraq in the period just before the American invasion. American propagandists, trying to create some link between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda, had seized upon a report by Kurdish intelligence that al Qaeda had funded a base in Iraqi Kurdistan for a new Islamist group
called Ansar al Islam. When the latter merged with a group of Jordanian Islamists who were in touch with Zarqawi, the Kurdish secret service leapt to the conclusion that Ansar al Islam’s dealings with al Qaeda were conducted via Zarqawi. Powell then used that report and turned Zarqawi into a terrorist megastar in his presentation to the United Nations just weeks before the war.

Iraq today harbors a deadly terrorist network headed by Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi, an associate and collaborator of Osama bin Laden and his Al Qaeda lieutenants.… When our coalition ousted the Taliban, the Zarqawi network helped establish another poison and explosive training-center camp. And this camp is located in northeastern Iraq
.…

Those helping to run this camp are Zarqawi lieutenants operating in northern Kurdish areas outside Saddam Hussein’s controlled Iraq [but] Zarqawi’s activities are not confined to this small corner of north east Iraq. He travelled to Baghdad in May 2002 for medical treatment, staying in the capital of Iraq for two months while he recuperated to fight another day. During this stay, nearly two dozen extremists converged on Baghdad and established a base of operations there. These al Qaeda affiliates based in Baghdad now coordinate the movement of people, money and supplies into and throughout Iraq for his network, and they have now been operating freely in the capital for more than eight months.… We know these affiliates are connected to Zarqawi because they remain even today in regular contact with his direct subordinates.… From his terrorist network in Iraq, Zarqawi can direct his network in the Middle East and beyond
.

U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell’s speech to the UN Security Council on Iraq, February 5, 2003
¹⁷

Almost none of this was true. Zarqawi was not then a member of al Qaeda, nor was he in Iraq in 2002. There were no al Qaeda affiliates in Iraq, nor was Zarqawi running a “terrorist network” there. The whole story was concocted to provide a justification for the American invasion. But when Zarqawi showed up in Iraq in 2003, his reputation preceded him, and he quickly emerged as the leader of the foreign jihadis who were flocking into the country to take advantage of the invasion.

The bulk of the resistance activity in Iraq, including almost all the attacks on U.S. troops, continued to be carried out by Sunni Arab Iraqis through the latter half of 2003, and by November an average of three American soldiers were being killed each day. Zarqawi’s organization took relatively little part in these activities, preferring to stage specific high-profile attacks on targets that had major political significance. An example was the car bombing outside the Imam Ali Mosque in Najaf, considered by Shia Muslims to be Islam’s third-holiest site, just after Friday prayers on August 29. At least eighty-four people were killed in the blast, including Ayatollah Sayed Mohammed Baqir al Hakim and fifteen of his bodyguards. Hakim was one of the
most senior Iraqi ayatollahs and had spent the latter part of Saddam’s rule in exile in Iran. Indeed, it was Hakim who created the Badr Brigade, made up of Shia exiles from Iraq who volunteered to fight alongside the Iranians during the Iran-Iraq war. Since his return to Iraq in 2003, he had begun to call for the abandonment of anti-American violence, at least for the moment, in order to give the interim governing council appointed by the American occupation authorities a chance to show its worth.

That call for restraint could account for why Hakim became a target of Zarqawi’s wrath—but it could also simply have been the fact that he was a prominent Shia leader. Zarqawi was a takfiri, one whose interpretation of the Quran led him to believe that it was legitimate to declare Muslims “apostates” for their deviant beliefs and then kill them. In his view, all Shias fell into the category of apostates, so Iraq was a target-rich environment for him.

Saddam Hussein was captured by U.S. forces in December, and the number of attacks carried out by the resistance dropped significantly in the following months, even though the ex-dictator had not been involved in the enterprise in any way. Then the country exploded in April 2004. There were major uprisings both in the Sunni city of Fallujah and in the Shia holy cities of Karbala and Najaf. Zarqawi was not directly involved in any of these uprisings, but they brought to a head his dispute with Osama bin Laden over the appropriate tactics for jihad. In essence, bin Laden was not keen on killing fellow Muslims and
instinctively preferred a “broad front” approach that even extended to Sunni-Shia cooperation against the American occupiers in Iraq. While there were irreconcilable differences between the two groups, those could be left to be sorted out (by killing if necessary) after the infidels had been defeated. Zarqawi, on the other hand, quite apart from his takfiri hatred of Shias, feared that any collaboration between the Sunni and the Shia resistance forces could indeed result in a “broad front”—but one that would smooth over the differences by becoming secular and nationalist, and leaving religion and jihad out of the picture. That was not the war he wanted to fight.

The Sunni uprising in Fallujah began on March 31 when a vehicle carrying four American contractors strayed into the city centre and was set upon by a mob. The contractors were killed, and a video was shot of their bodies being burned, their heads being kicked off by the crowd, and two of the charred bodies being strung up, headless, handless and footless, over the stream of traffic crossing the Euphrates bridge, and left there for hours. It was an action well calculated to infuriate the American occupation authorities, and they rose to the bait, declaring that they would seize and occupy Fallujah unless the citizens handed over the people guilty of the atrocity. “What is coming is the destruction of anti-coalition forces in
Fallujah,” growled Lieut.-Col. Brennan Byrne, commander of the 1st Battalion, 5th Marine Regiment. “They have two choices: submit or die.” Obviously nobody in Fallujah was going to hand over the guilty parties, even in the unlikely event that they were still in the city, so in practice the U.S. Marines and supporting army units were committed to the street-by-street conquest of a hostile Arab city of 300,000 people. The young men of Fallujah would die like flies before the huge firepower and trained infantry brought against them by the United States, but they would fight anyway, and quite a few Americans would die too.

Five days later, just an hour and a half’s drive from Fallujah, the Mahdi Army, the Shia militia founded by Muqtada al Sadr, took control of the holy city of Karbala, and other Mahdi forces seized four other Shia-majority cities in the south of Iraq. It was the first time that Shia Arabs had openly confronted the American occupation, but Sadr, son of the martyred Grand Ayatollah Mohammad Sadeq al Sadr, who had been murdered by Saddam Hussein, was determined not to yield until the U.S. agreed to early elections for an Iraqi government. To put it very simplistically, the minority Sunnis were fighting to recover lost privileges, while the Shias were fighting to get a free vote in which their majority status would at last be recognized and rewarded. But it was possible for the two sects to have a loose alliance against the American occupation forces in the meantime.

After five days of heavy fighting in Fallujah, which caused hundreds of civilian casualties, the Marines had taken only a quarter of the city and were ordered to stop. Fighting continued to flare up sporadically until the end of April, when U.S. forces were entirely withdrawn from the city and it fell completely under insurgent control. Many other Sunni towns around Baghdad fell under rebel control at the same time—and the Sunni fighters in Fallujah sent aid to Sadr’s besieged Shia forces in Karbala, Najaf and Kufa. As the U.S. forces surrounding the Shia cities ground slowly forward, trying to kill the ill-trained militiamen who were defending the holy cities without damaging them too much, posters of Moqtada al Sadr began to appear in Sunni areas, put up by Sunnis who admired his stand against the Americans. As Zarqawi had feared, a joint Sunni-Shia insurgency that stressed nationalism and not religion was becoming possible in Iraq. It had to be stopped, and the only way was to instigate a Sunni-Shia civil war.

It was necessary to
instigate
such a war, because it would not have just happened of its own accord. Although the provinces that ultimately became Iraq had been ruled by Sunni appointees of the Ottoman Empire for hundreds of years, there was little history of violent conflict between Sunnis and Shias. Indeed, the majority of the Ba’ath Party’s founders in Iraq in the early 1950s were Shias. The party’s official policies were socialist, secular and pan-Arab, a platform that eventually led to many Shia members
leaving it because as Shias they were not interested in the unification of the Arab countries into a single state that would have a large Sunni majority. However, the Shias moved no further than the Iraqi Communist Party (which was also socialist and secular). Under Saddam Hussein, from the 1970s onward, the upper ranks of the Ba’ath Party, and likewise the senior officers of the army, became heavily Sunni, because Saddam operated by building a support network within the Sunni community. But it is a myth (although a comforting one for the Americans who ran the occupation) that Iraq was a sectarian powder keg that was bound to explode once the dictator was removed. It was the divide-and-rule tactics of the occupation authorities and Zarqawi’s deliberate provocations that pushed Iraq over the edge.

It was also in the spring of 2004 that Zarqawi’s organization began taking Western hostages, dressing them in orange jumpsuits that mimicked those worn by Muslim prisoners in American hands at Guantanamo and elsewhere, beheading them, and making the videos available on the Internet. Details of the abuse of Arab prisoners by American soldiers at Abu Ghraib prison, including allegations of rape and murder, had just been released when Abu Musab al Zarqawi appeared personally in a video with four other men whose faces were hidden by keffiyehs or balaclavas and a hostage in an orange jumpsuit, an American civilian named Nick Berg. Claiming that he was acting in retaliation for the horrors at Abu Ghraib, Zarqawi
then proceeded to cut Berg’s head off with a knife. Other “execution” videos followed, including some from other insurgent groups, and Zarqawi featured personally in another video in September, beheading another American civilian, Eugene Armstrong. This type of killing is a propaganda technique that is now closely associated with ISIS, but its parent organizations have actually been using it for a full decade already.

In the meantime, the spectre of a unified and secular Sunni-Shia resistance front emerging from the April fighting in Fallujah and the Shia holy cities finally made possible a merger between al Qaeda and Zarqawi’s Organization for Monotheism and Jihad. Osama bin Laden, despite his reservations about Zarqawi’s enthusiasm for killing the “wrong” kind of Muslims, had to recognize that the latter had been tactically right to reject even a short-term Sunni-Shia insurgent alliance in Iraq, for it was all too likely to end up as a mere nationalist movement rather than a vehicle for the fulfillment of the divine will. In October 2004, therefore, bin Laden bestowed the new name of “Al Qaeda in the Land of the Two Rivers” (“al Qaeda in Iraq” or AQI for short) on Zarqawi’s organization, while Zarqawi pledged allegiance to bin Laden. He got the better end of the deal, gaining the prestige of al Qaeda’s name while giving up no real power in return.

Zarqawi was unable to stamp out the nascent collaboration between Sunni insurgents and Moqtada al Sadr’s Shia militiamen at once. When the city of Fallujah was besieged
by American troops for a second time in October, and ultimately reduced to rubble, the Shia militiamen (who were themselves besieged in the holy cities for a second time) sent aid to the Sunni fighters. But al Qaeda in Iraq now embarked on a relentless series of suicide bomb attacks on Shia civilians that gradually extinguished the cooperative spirit and led to revenge attacks on Sunni targets by rogue Shia groups. Indeed, it’s likely that by the end of his career (he was killed in 2006) Zarqawi had come to see a Sunni-Shia civil war in Iraq as a desirable goal in its own right, even though it would have catastrophic consequences for Iraqi Sunnis.

Iraqi Sunnis were outnumbered three-to-one by their Shia fellow-countrymen, and would surely lose a sectarian civil war. Moreover, they would probably be “cleansed” out of all the mixed neighbourhoods in Baghdad where they lived alongside or near Shias, and a large minority of the five-million-strong Sunni community would probably end up as refugees, either internally displaced within Iraq or living on international charity somewhere beyond its borders. This made the prospect of civil war deeply unappealing to the average Sunni Iraqi, but Zarqawi wasn’t an Iraqi nor was he your average Sunni. He was not interested in creating a good future for Sunnis living alongside Shias within the existing state of Iraq. His first objective, like bin Laden’s, was to recreate the Sunni caliphate that had existed in the Islamic Golden Age, and there wouldn’t be any room in it for Shias anyway. (Zarqawi, unlike bin
Laden, also had some literally apocalyptic longer-term goals, but that discussion can be left until later.)