The Jihadis Return: Isis and the New Sunni Uprising (2 page)

The importance of Saudi Arabia in the rise and return of al-Qa‘ida is often misunderstood and understated. Saudi Arabia is influential because its oil and vast wealth make it powerful in the Middle East and beyond. But it is not financial resources alone that make it such an important player. Another factor is its propagating of Wahhabism, the fundamentalist 18th-century version of Islam that imposes sharia law, relegates women to second class citizens, and regards Shia and Sufi Muslims as heretics and apostates to be persecuted along with Christians and Jews. This religious intolerance and political authoritarianism, which in its readiness to use violence has many similarities with European fascism in the 1930s, is getting worse rather than better. A Saudi who set up a liberal website on which clerics could be criticized was recently sentenced to a thousand lashes and seven years in prison.

The ideology of al-Qa‘ida and ISIS draws a great deal from Wahhabism. Critics of this new trend in Islam from elsewhere in the Muslim world do not survive long; they are forced to flee or murdered. Denouncing jihadi leaders in Kabul in 2003, an Afghan editor described them as “holy fascists” who were misusing Islam as “an instrument to take over power.” Unsurprisingly, he was accused of insulting Islam and had to leave the country.

A striking development in the Islamic world in recent decades is the way in which Wahhabism is taking over mainstream Sunni Islam. In one country after another Saudi Arabia is putting up the money for the training of preachers and the building of mosques. A result of this is the spread of sectarian strife between Sunni and Shia. The latter find themselves targeted with unprecedented viciousness from Tunisia to Indonesia. Such sectarianism is not confined to country villages outside Aleppo or in the Punjab; it is poisoning relations between the two sects in every Islamic grouping. A Muslim friend in London told me: “Go through the address books of any Sunni or Shia in Britain and you will find very few names belonging to people outside their own community.”

Even before Mosul, President Obama was coming to realize that al-Qa‘ida-type groups were far stronger than they had been previously, but his recipe for dealing with them repeats and exacerbates earlier mistakes. “We need partners to fight terrorists alongside us,” he told his audience at West Point. But who are these partners going to be? Saudi Arabia and Qatar were not mentioned by him since they remain close and active US allies in Syria. Obama instead singled out “Jordan and Lebanon, Turkey and Iraq” as partners to receive aid in “confronting terrorists working across Syria’s borders.” There is something absurd about this since the foreign jihadis in Syria and Iraq, the people whom Obama admits are the greatest threat, can only get to these countries because they are able to cross the 510-mile-long Turkish-Syrian border without hindrance from the Turkish authorities. Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Jordan may now be frightened by the Frankenstein they have helped to create, but there is little they can do to restrain the monster.

The resurgence of al-Qa‘ida-type groups is not a threat confined to Syria, Iraq, and their near neighbors. What is happening in these countries, combined with the increasing dominance of intolerant and exclusive Wahhabite beliefs within the worldwide Sunni community, means that all 1.6 billion Muslims, almost a quarter of the world’s people, will be increasingly affected. Furthermore, it seems unlikely that non-Muslim populations, including many in the West, will be untouched by the conflict. Today’s resurgent jihadism, which has shifted the political terrain in Iraq and Syria, is already having far-reaching effects on global politics with dire consequences for us all. 

—Baghdad, July 2014

A video posted in the spring of 2014 by the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIS—formerly al-Qa‘ida in Iraq) shows foreign jihadis, most likely somewhere in Syria, burning their passports to demonstrate a permanent commitment to jihad. The film, which is professionally made, is sobering to watch for anybody who imagines that the ongoing war in Syria can be contained. It shows rather how the conflict in the great swath of territory between the Tigris River and the Mediterranean coast is starting to convulse the entire region.

You can tell by the covers of the passports being burned that most of them are Saudi, which are grass green, or Jordanian, which are dark blue, though many other nationalities are represented in the group. As each man rips up his passport and throws it into the flames, he makes a declaration of faith, a promise to fight against the ruler of the country from which he comes. A Canadian makes a short speech in English and, before switching to Arabic, says: “[This] is a message to Canada and all American powers. We are coming and we will destroy you.” A Jordanian says: “I say to the tyrant of Jordan: we are the descendants of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi [the Jordanian founding father of al-Qa‘ida in Iraq killed by US aircraft in 2006] and we are coming to kill you.” A Saudi, an Egyptian, and a Chechen all make similar threats underlining the jihadis’ open intention to operate anywhere in the world. What makes their threats particularly alarming is that their base area, the land where they are in control, is today larger by far than anything an al-Qa‘ida-type of group has held before.

If you look at a map of the Middle East, you will find that al-Qa‘ida-type organizations have become a lethally powerful force in a territory that stretches from Diyala province northeast of Baghdad, to northern Latakia province on Syria’s Mediterranean coastline. The whole of the Euphrates Valley through western Iraq, eastern Syria, and right up to the Turkish border is today under the rule of ISIS or JAN, the latter being the official representative of what US officials call “core” al-Qa‘ida in Pakistan. Al-Qa‘ida-type groups in western and northern Iraq and northern and eastern Syria now control a territory the size of Britain or Michigan, and the area in which they can mount operations is much bigger.

The Syrian-Iraqi border has largely ceased to exist. It is worth looking separately at the situation in the two countries, taking Iraq first. Here nearly all the Sunni areas, about a quarter of the country, are either wholly or partially controlled by ISIS. Before it captured Mosul and Tikrit it could field some 6,000 fighters, but this figure has multiplied many times since its gain in prestige and appeal to young Sunni men in the wake of its spectacular victories. Its very name (the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant) expresses its intention: it plans to build an Islamic state in Iraq and in “al-Sham” or greater Syria. It is not planning to share power with anybody. Led since 2010 by Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, also known as Abu Dua, it has proved itself even more violent and sectarian than the “core” al-Qa‘ida, led by Ayman al-Zawahiri, who is based in Pakistan.

Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi began to appear from the shadows in the summer of 2010 when he became leader of al-Qa‘ida in Iraq (AQI) after its former leaders were killed in an attack by US and Iraqi troops. AQI was at a low point in its fortunes, as the Sunni rebellion, in which it had once played a leading role, was collapsing. It was revived by the revolt of the Sunni in Syria in 2011 and, over the next three years, by a series of carefully planned campaigns in both Iraq and Syria. How far al-Baghdadi has been directly responsible for the military strategy and tactics of AQI and later ISIS is uncertain: former Iraqi army and intelligence officers from the Saddam era are said to have played a crucial role, but are under al-Baghdadi’s overall leadership.

Details of al-Baghdadi’s career depend on whether the source is ISIS itself, or US or Iraqi intelligence, but the overall picture appears fairly clear. He was born in Samarra, a largely Sunni city north of Baghdad, in 1971 and is well educated, with degrees in Islamic studies, including poetry, history, and genealogy from the Islamic University of Baghdad. A picture of al-Baghdadi, taken when he was a prisoner of the Americans in Bocca Camp in southern Iraq, shows an average-looking Iraqi man in his mid-twenties with black hair and brown eyes.

His real name is believed to be Awwad Ibrahim Ali al-Badri al-Samarrai. He may have been an Islamic militant under Saddam as a preacher in Diyala province, to the northeast of Baghdad, where, after the US invasion of 2003, he had his own armed group. Insurgent movements have a strong motive for giving out misleading information about their command structure and leadership, but it appears al-Baghdadi spent five years, between 2005 and 2009, as prisoner of the Americans.

After he took over, AQI became increasingly well organized, even issuing detailed annual reports itemizing its operations in each Iraqi province. Recalling the fate of his predecessors as AQI leader, al-Baghdadi insisted on extreme secrecy, so few people knew where he was. AQI prisoners either say they never met him or, when they did, that he was wearing a mask.

Taking advantage of the Syrian civil war, al-Baghdadi sent experienced fighters and funds to Syria to set up Jabhat al-Nusra (JAN) as the al-Qa‘ida affiliate in Syria. He split from it in 2013, but remained in control of a great swath of territory in northern Syria and Iraq.

Against fragmented and dysfunctional opposition, al-Baghdadi has moved fast towards establishing himself as an effective, albeit elusive, leader. The swift rise of ISIS since he took charge has been greatly helped by the uprising of the Sunni in Syria in 2011, which encouraged the six million Sunnis in Iraq to take a stand against the political and economic marginalization they have encountered since the fall of Saddam Hussein.

ISIS launched a well-planned campaign in 2013, including a successful assault on Abu Ghraib prison in the summer of that year to free its leaders and experienced fighters. The military sophistication of ISIS is far greater than the al-Qa‘ida organization from which it emerged, even at the peak of its success in 2006–7 before the Americans turned many of the Sunni tribes against it.

ISIS has the great advantage of being able to operate on both sides of the Syrian-Iraqi border. Though inside Syria ISIS is engaged in an intra-jihadi civil war with JAN, Ahrar al-Sham, and other groups, it still controls Raqqa and much of eastern Syria outside enclaves held by the Kurds close to the Turkish border. Jessica D. Lewis of the Institute for the Study of War, in a study of the jihadi movement at the end of 2013, described it as “an extremely vigorous, resilient and capable organization that can operate from Basra to coastal Syria.” Though the swiftly growing power of ISIS was obvious to those who followed its fortunes, the significance of what was happening was taken on board by few foreign governments, hence the widespread shock that greeted the fall of Mosul.

In expanding its influence, ISIS has been able to capitalize on two factors: the Sunni revolt in neighboring Syria, and the alienation of the Iraqi Sunni by a Shia-led government in Baghdad. Protests by the Sunnis that started in December 2012 were initially peaceful. But a lack of concessions by Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki together with a massacre at a peace camp at Hawijah in April 2013, which was stormed by the Iraqi army and resulted in the deaths of over 50 protestors, transmuted peaceful protest into armed resistance. In the parliamentary election of April 2014, Maliki presented himself primarily as the leader of the Shia who would quell a Sunni counterrevolution centered in Anbar. After Mosul, Maliki was blamed for refusing reform that might have blunted the appeal of ISIS, but he was not the only Shia leader who believed that the Sunni would never accept the loss of their old dominance.

The general Sunni hostility to Maliki as a proponent of sectarianism had enabled ISIS to ally itself with seven or eight Sunni militant groups with which it had previously been fighting. Mr. Maliki is not to blame for everything that has gone wrong in Iraq, but he played a central role in pushing the Sunni community into the arms of ISIS, something it may come to regret. Paradoxically, although he did well in the April 2014 parliamentary election by frightening the Shia voters with talk of a Sunni counterrevolution, he behaved as if this was merely an electoral ploy and seemed not to realize how close the Sunni were to an actual insurrection, using ISIS as their shock troops.

In this failing, he ignored some pretty obvious warning signs. At the start of 2014, ISIS had taken over Fallujah forty miles west of Baghdad as well as extensive territory in Anbar, the huge province encompassing much of western Iraq. In March, its gunmen paraded through Fallujah’s streets to show off their recent capture of US-made armored Humvees from the Iraqi army. It was a final humiliation for the US that al-Qa‘ida’s black flag should once again fly over a city that had been captured by US Marines in 2004 after a hard-fought victory accompanied by much self-congratulatory rhetoric. ISIS not only holds the city now, but also the nearby Fallujah dam, which allows them to regulate the flow of the Euphrates, either flooding or choking off the river for cities farther south. Unable to dislodge them by force, the Baghdad government diverted the water of the river into an old channel outside the control of the rebel fighters, which relieved the immediate crisis. But the fighting in Anbar showed how the military balance of power has changed in favor of ISIS. The Iraqi army, with five divisions stationed in the province, suffered a devastating defeat, reportedly losing 5,000 men dead and wounded and another 12,000 who deserted.

Farther to the north in June 2014, ISIS, joining forces with local Sunnis, took control of Mosul (Iraq’s second-largest city with a population of over one million), swiftly ousting the Iraqi military from the city. But, as one Iraqi remarked, in some respects “Mosul had ceased to be under government authority long before.” Prior to the takeover, ISIS had been levying taxes on everybody from vegetable sellers in the market to mobile phone and construction companies. By one estimate its income from this alone was $8 million (£4.8m) a month. The same sort of “taxation” was occurring in Tikrit, north of Baghdad, where a friend reported that people would not eat at any restaurant that wasn’t up to date with its tax payments to ISIS lest the place be bombed while they were dining.

Turning now to Syria: today the armed opposition to the Assad government is dominated by jihadis who wish to establish an Islamic state. They accept foreign fighters and have a vicious record of massacring Syria’s minorities, notably the Alawites and the Christians. With the exception of those areas held by the Kurds, the whole eastern side of the country, including many of the Syrian oilfields, is now under jihadi control. The government clings to a few outposts in this vast area, but does not have the forces to recapture it.

Different jihadi groups compete with each other in this region and, since early 2014, have been engaged in internecine combat. In 2012, ISIS founded JAN, sensing an opportunity during the rapidly escalating civil war in Syria and fearing that its own struggle might be marginalized. It sent the new group money, arms, and experienced fighters. A year later, it tried to reassert its authority over the fledgling group, which had become excessively independent in the eyes of ISIS leaders, attempting to fold it into a broader organization covering both Syria and Iraq. JAN resisted this effort, and the two groups became involved in a complicated intra-jihadi civil war. The Islamic Front, a newly established and powerful alliance of opposition brigades backed by Turkey and Qatar, is also fighting ISIS, despite sharing its aim of strict imposition of sharia. When it comes to social and religious mores, ISIS and JAN do not differ markedly, although the latter organization has a reputation for being less rigid. However, it was JAN fighters in Deir Ezzor on the Euphrates in eastern Syria who burst into a wedding party in a private house, beating and arresting women who were listening to loud music and not wearing Islamic dress.