The Jihadis Return: Isis and the New Sunni Uprising (3 page)

Despite this conflict, non-jihadi groups are today peripheral in the Syrian opposition. In particular the more secular Free Syrian Army (FSA), whose political wing was once designated by the West as the next rulers of Syria, has been marginalized. ISIS holds eastern Aleppo province while much of the recent fighting in Aleppo city itself has been led by JAN and Ahrar al-Sham, another al-Qa‘ida-type movement. A recent attack on Syrian government–held territory in Latakia, located on the Mediterranean coast, was spearheaded by Morrocan jihadis along with Chechens. Meanwhile, JAN fighters run some of the suburbs of Damascus and a variety of villages and towns stretching up to the Turkish border. The fighting between ISIS and the other jihadis is really a battle over the spoils, more of a reflection of how strong they are than of any differences with respect to their long-term aims.

This sharp increase in the strength and reach of jihadist organizations in Syria and Iraq has generally been unacknowledged until recently by politicians and media in the West. A primary reason for this is that Western governments and their security forces narrowly define the jihadist threat as those forces directly controlled by al-Qa‘ida central or “core” al-Qa‘ida. This enables them to present a much more cheerful picture of their successes in the so-called “war on terror” than the situation on the ground warrants. In fact, the idea that the only jihadis to be worried about are those with the official blessing of al-Qa‘ida is naïve and self-deceiving. It ignores the fact, for instance, that ISIS has been criticized by the al-Qa‘ida leader Ayman al-Zawahiri for its excessive violence and sectarianism. After talking to a range of Syrian jihadi rebels not directly affiliated with al-Qa‘ida in southeast Turkey earlier this year, a source told me that “without exception they all expressed enthusiasm for the 9/11 attacks and hoped the same thing would happen in Europe as well as the US.”

Jihadi groups ideologically close to al-Qa‘ida have been relabeled as moderate if their actions are deemed supportive of US policy aims. In Syria, the Americans backed a plan by Saudi Arabia to build up a “Southern Front” based in Jordan that would be hostile to the Assad government in Damascus, and simultaneously hostile to al-Qa‘ida-type rebels in the north and east. The powerful but supposedly moderate Yarmouk Brigade, reportedly the planned recipient of anti-aircraft missiles from Saudi Arabia, was intended to be the leading element in this new formation. But numerous videos show that the Yarmouk Brigade has frequently fought in collaboration with JAN, the official al-Qa‘ida affiliate. Since it was likely that, in the midst of battle, these two groups would share their munitions, Washington was effectively allowing advanced weaponry to be handed over to its deadliest enemy. Iraqi officials confirm that they have captured sophisticated arms from ISIS fighters in Iraq that were originally supplied by outside powers to forces considered to be anti-al-Qa‘ida in Syria.

The name al-Qa‘ida has always been applied flexibly when identifying an enemy. In 2003 and 2004 in Iraq, as armed Iraqi opposition to the American and British-led occupation mounted, US officials attributed most attacks to al-Qa‘ida, though many were carried out by nationalist and Baathist groups. Propaganda like this helped to persuade nearly 60 percent of US voters prior to the Iraq invasion that there was a connection between Saddam Hussein and those responsible for 9/11, despite the absence of any evidence for this. In Iraq itself, indeed throughout the entire Muslim world, these accusations have benefited al-Qa‘ida by exaggerating its role in the resistance to the US and British occupation.

Precisely the opposite PR tactics were employed by Western governments in 2011 in Libya, where any similarity between al-Qa‘ida and the NATO-backed rebels fighting to overthrow the Libyan leader, Muammar Gaddafi, was played down. Only those jihadis who had a direct operational link to the al-Qa‘ida “core” of Osama bin Laden were deemed to be dangerous. The falsity of the pretense that the anti-Gaddafi jihadis in Libya were less threatening than those in direct contact with al-Qa‘ida was forcefully, if tragically, exposed when US ambassador Chris Stevens was killed by jihadi fighters in Benghazi in September 2012. These were the same fighters lauded by Western governments and media for their role in the anti-Gaddafi uprising.

Al-Qa‘ida is an idea rather than an organization, and this has long been the case. For a five-year period after 1996, it did have cadres, resources, and camps in Afghanistan, but these were eliminated after the overthrow of the Taliban in 2001. Subsequently, al-Qa‘ida’s name became primarily a rallying cry, a set of Islamic beliefs, centering on the creation of an Islamic state, the imposition of sharia, a return to Islamic customs, the subjugation of women, and the waging of holy war against other Muslims, notably the Shia, who are considered heretics worthy of death. At the center of this doctrine for making war is an emphasis on self-sacrifice and martyrdom as a symbol of religious faith and commitment. This has resulted in using untrained but fanatical believers as suicide bombers, to devastating effect.

It has always been in the interest of the US and other governments that al-Qa‘ida be viewed as having a command-and-control structure like a mini-Pentagon, or like the mafia in America. This is a comforting image for the public because organized groups, however demonic, can be tracked down and eliminated through imprisonment or death. More alarming is the reality of a movement whose adherents are self-recruited and can spring up anywhere.

Osama bin Laden’s gathering of militants, which he did not call al-Qa‘ida until after 9/11, was just one of many jihadi groups twelve years ago. But today its ideas and methods are predominant among jihadis because of the prestige and publicity it gained through the destruction of the Twin Towers, the war in Iraq, and its demonization by Washington as the source of all anti-American evil. These days, there is a narrowing of differences in the beliefs of jihadis, regardless of whether or not they are formally linked to al-Qa‘ida central.

Unsurprisingly, governments prefer the fantasy picture of al-Qa‘ida because it enables them to claim victories when it succeeds in killing its better-known members and allies. Often, those eliminated are given quasi-military ranks, such as “head of operations,” to enhance the significance of their demise. The culmination of this heavily publicized but largely irrelevant aspect of the “war on terror” was the killing of bin Laden in Abbottabad in Pakistan in 2011. This enabled President Obama to grandstand before the American public as the man who had presided over the hunting down of al-Qa‘ida’s leader. In practical terms, however, his death had little impact on al-Qa‘ida-type jihadi groups, whose greatest expansion has occurred subsequently.

The key decisions that enabled al-Qa‘ida to survive, and later to expand, were made in the hours immediately after 9/11. Almost every significant element in the project to crash planes into the Twin Towers and other iconic American buildings led back to Saudi Arabia. Bin Laden was a member of the Saudi elite, and his father had been a close associate of the Saudi monarch. Citing a CIA report from 2002, the official 9/11 report says that al-Qa‘ida relied for its financing on “a variety of donors and fundraisers, primarily in the Gulf countries and particularly in Saudi Arabia.” The report’s investigators repeatedly found their access limited or denied when seeking information in Saudi Arabia. Yet President George W. Bush apparently never even considered holding the Saudis responsible for what happened. An exit of senior Saudis, including bin Laden relatives, from the US was facilitated by the US government in the days after 9/11. Most significant, twenty-eight pages of the 9/11 Commission Report about the relationship between the attackers and Saudi Arabia were cut and never published, despite a promise by President Obama to do so, on the grounds of national security.

In 2009, eight years after 9/11, a cable from the US Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, revealed by WikiLeaks, complained that donors in Saudi Arabia constituted the most significant source of funding to Sunni terrorist groups worldwide. But despite this private admission, the US and Western Europeans continued to remain indifferent to Saudi preachers whose message, spread to millions by satellite TV, YouTube, and Twitter, called for the killing of the Shia as heretics. These calls came as al-Qa‘ida bombs were slaughtering people in Shia neighborhoods in Iraq. A sub-headline in another State Department cable in the same year reads: “Saudi Arabia: Anti-Shi’ism As Foreign Policy?” Now, five years later, Saudi-supported groups have a record of extreme sectarianism against non-Sunni Muslims.

Pakistan, or rather Pakistani military intelligence in the shape of the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), was the other parent of al-Qa‘ida, the Taliban, and jihadi movements in general. When the Taliban was disintegrating under the weight of US bombing in 2001, its forces in northern Afghanistan were trapped by anti-Taliban forces. Before they surrendered, hundreds of ISI members, military trainers, and advisers were hastily evacuated by air. Despite the clearest evidence of ISI’s sponsorship of the Taliban and jihadis in general, Washington refused to confront Pakistan, and thereby opened the way for the resurgence of the Taliban after 2003, which neither the US nor NATO has been able to reverse.

The “war on terror” has failed because it did not target the jihadi movement as a whole and, above all, was not aimed at Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, the two countries that fostered jihadism as a creed and a movement. The US did not do so because these countries were important American allies whom it did not want to offend. Saudi Arabia is an enormous market for American arms, and the Saudis have cultivated, and on occasion purchased, influential members of the American political establishment. Pakistan is a nuclear power with a population of 180 million and a military with close links to the Pentagon.

The spectacular resurgence of al-Qa‘ida and its offshoots has happened despite the huge expansion of American and British intelligence services and their budgets after 9/11. Since then, the US, closely followed by Britain, has fought wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and adopted procedures normally associated with police states, such as imprisonment without trial, rendition, torture, and domestic espionage. Governments wage the “war on terror” claiming that the rights of individual citizens must be sacrificed to secure the safety of all.

In the face of these controversial security measures, the movements against which they are aimed have not been defeated but rather have grown stronger. At the time of 9/11, al-Qa‘ida was a small, generally ineffectual organization; by 2014 al-Qa‘ida-type groups were numerous and powerful. In other words, the “war on terror,” the waging of which has shaped the political landscape for so much of the world since 2001, has demonstrably failed. Until the fall of Mosul, nobody paid much attention.

In Iraq, events are not always what they seem. Take two recent occurrences that illustrate the difference between appearance and reality there. The first relates to the recapture of Fallujah in January 2014 by ISIS, aided by tribal militias. This was a body blow to the Iraqi government: Fallujah is only forty miles west of Baghdad; a famous Sunni stronghold; and a gateway to the capital. Soon after ISIS retook the city and reportedly stationed between 300 and 500 men armed with high-powered sniper rifles on its outskirts, government supporters circulated a reassuring video on Twitter and Facebook. It included some narrative in Iraqi Arabic, was shot from the air, and showed insurgents being targeted and eliminated by air-launched missiles. This was morale-raising stuff for government supporters. Unfortunately for them, within just a few hours of the video’s first release, someone noticed that it had been shot in Afghanistan and was actually a video of American aircraft firing missiles at Taliban fighters. It is highly doubtful that Iraqi airpower is capable of carrying out such precision attacks; it later resorted to dropping random barrel bombs stuffed with explosives on Fallujah. The failure to take back Fallujah over a period of six months, and the need to invent even token victories for the Iraqi army, showed the real weakness of Iraq’s million-strong security forces – 350,000 soldiers and 650,000 police – something that was to be revealed even more starkly when ISIS swept away government authority across northern and western Iraq in June 2014.

Such deceptions are not all on the government side. A year previously, in December 2012, the arrest of the bodyguards of the moderate Sunni Finance Minister, Rafi al-Issawi, by the government led to widespread but peaceful protests in Sunni provinces in northern and central Iraq. Sunni Arabs make up about a fifth of Iraq’s 33 million population. At first, the demonstrations were well attended, with protesters demanding an end to political, civil, and economic discrimination against the Sunni community. But soon they realized that Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki was offering only cosmetic changes and many stopped attending the weekly demonstrations.

In the Sunni city of Tikrit, capital of Salah Ad-Din province, 10,000 people had at first come to rallies, but the number then sank to just 1,000. A local observer reported: “It was decided that all mosques should be shut on Fridays except for one, forcing all the faithful to go to the same mosque for Friday prayers. Cameras eagerly filmed and photographed the crowd to make it look like they were all protesters and the images were beamed back to the Gulf, where their paymasters were fooled (or maybe they weren’t) into thinking that the protests were still attracting large numbers.” The eyewitness in Tikrit suggests cynically that the money supposedly spent on feeding and transporting non-existent demonstrators was pocketed by protest leaders. The message was not that the Sunni were less angry than before but that peaceful protest was mutating into armed resistance.

These two stories illustrate an important political truth about contemporary Iraq: neither the government nor any of the constitutional political movements are as strong as they pretend to be. Power is divided, and these divisions have helped ISIS to emerge far stronger and more speedily in Iraq than anybody expected.

Though ISIS had gained momentum and notoriety leading up to June 2014, their victory in Mosul came as a major surprise—even to ISIS itself. “Enemies and supporters alike are flabbergasted,” said ISIS spokesman Abu Mohammed al-Adnani. It is difficult to think of any examples in history when security forces a million strong, including 15 divisions, have crumbled so quickly after attacks from an enemy force that has been estimated at 6,000. Key to making this possible was the fact that the Sunni population as a whole, sensing that an end to its oppression was at hand, was prepared to lend at least their tacit support.

The lack of morale and discipline in the Iraqi army were evidently also a major factor. Asked about the Iraqi military’s cause of defeat, one recently retired Iraqi general was emphatic: “Corruption! Corruption! Corruption!” It started, he said, when the Americans told the Iraqi army to outsource food and other supplies around 2005. A battalion commander was paid for a unit of 600 soldiers, but had only 200 men under arms and pocketed the difference, which meant enormous profits. The army became a money-making machine for senior officers and often an extortion racket for ordinary soldiers who manned the checkpoints. On top of this, well-trained Sunni officers were sidelined. “Iraq did not really have a national army,” the general concluded.

Corruption in the military took place at every level. A general could become a divisional commander at a cost of $2 million and would then have to recoup his investment from kickbacks at checkpoints on the roads, charging every goods vehicle that passed through. An Iraqi businessman told me some years ago that he had stopped importing goods through Basra port because the amount of money he had to spend bribing officials and soldiers at every stage as his goods were moved from the ship at the dockside to Baghdad made it unprofitable.

Another friend in Baghdad (I am afraid any account of Iraq will always be littered with sources who wish to remain anonymous) told me: “Soldiers under Saddam Hussein often wanted to desert – they were scarcely paid. But they knew they would be killed if they did, so it was better to die in battle. The present army has never been a national army. Its soldiers were only interested in their salaries and they were no longer frightened of what would happen to them if they ran away.”

Iraqis are not naïve. The grim experiences of their country’s rulers over the past 50 years have led many to recognize them as being self-serving, greedy, brutal, and incompetent. Ten years ago, some had hopes that they might escape living in a permanent state of emergency as the US and Britain prepared to overthrow Saddam Hussein. Others were wary of Iraqis returning from abroad who promised to build a new nation.

A few months before the 2003 invasion and occupation, an Iraqi civil servant secretly interviewed in Baghdad made a gloomy forecast. “The exiled Iraqis are the exact replica of those who currently govern us . . . with the sole difference that the latter are already satiated since they have been robbing us for the past 30 years, “ he said. “Those who accompany the US troops will be ravenous.”

Many of the Iraqis who came back to Iraq after the US-led invasion were people of high principle who had sacrificed much as opponents of Saddam Hussein. But fast-forward a decade and the prediction of the unnamed civil servant about the rapaciousness of Iraq’s new government turns out to have been all too true. As one former minister put it, “the Iraqi government is an institutionalized kleptocracy.”

“The corruption is unbelievable,” said political scientist and activist Ghassan al-Attiyah. “You can’t get a job in the army unless you pay; you can’t even get out of prison unless you pay. Maybe a judge sets you free but you must pay for the paperwork, otherwise you stay there. Even if you are free you may be captured by some officer who paid $10,000 to $50,000 for his job and needs to get the money back.” In an Iraqi version of catch-22, everything is for sale. A former prison detainee said he had to pay his guards $100 for a single shower. Racketeering was, and continues to be, the norm: one entrepreneur built his house on top of a buried oil pipeline, drilled into it, and siphoned off quantities of fuel.

Corruption complicates and poisons the daily life of Iraqis, especially those who can afford to pay. But the frequent demand for bribes has not in itself crippled the state or the economy. The highly autonomous Kurdistan Regional Government is deemed extremely corrupt, but its economy is booming and its economic management is praised as a model for the country. More damaging for Iraq has been the wholesale theft of public funds. Despite tens of billions of dollars being spent, there is a continued shortage of electricity and other necessities. Few Iraqis regret the fall of Saddam, but many recall that, after the devastating US air strikes on the infrastructure in 1991, power stations were patched up quickly using only Iraqi resources.

There is more to Iraqi corruption than the stealing of oil revenues by a criminalized caste of politicians, parties, and officials. Critics of Prime Minster Maliki, who has been in power since 2006, say his method of political control has been to allocate contracts to supporters, wavering friends, or opponents whom he wants to win over. But that is not the end of the matter. Beneficiaries of this largesse have been “threatened with investigation and exposure if they step out of line,” said one Iraqi observer. Even those who had not been awarded contracts knew that they were vulnerable to being targeted by anti-corruption bodies. “Maliki uses files on his enemies like J. Edgar Hoover,” the observer said. The government cannot reform the system because it would be striking at the very mechanism by which it rules. State institutions for combating corruption have been systematically defanged, marginalized, or intimidated. Why has the corruption in Iraq been so bad? The simple answer that Iraqis give is that “UN sanctions destroyed Iraqi society in the 1990s and the Americans destroyed the Iraqi state after 2003.” Under Maliki’s Shia-dominated government, patronage based on party, family, or community determines who gets a job, contributing further to the political and economic marginalization of Iraq’s Sunni population that began after the fall of Saddam Hussein.

It is evident that ISIS has been able to exploit the growing sense of alienation and persecution among the Sunni in Iraq. “Belittled, demonized, and increasingly subject to a central government crackdown, the popular movement is slowly mutating into an armed struggle,” reports the International Crisis Group. “Many Sunni Arabs have concluded that their only realistic option is a violent conflict increasingly framed in confessional terms.” In other words, they see their best chance of surviving and even winning the struggle for power in Iraq is to fight as Sunnis against Shia hegemony.

The Shia-dominated government might have gotten away with its confrontational approach before 2011. But when the predominant theme of the Arab Spring uprising in Syria took the form of a revolt by the Sunni majority backed by Saudi Arabia and the Sunni monarchies of the Gulf and Turkey, the sectarian balance of power in the region began to change.

Previously, the Iraqi Sunni had been resentful but largely resigned to the Shia-Kurdish domination of Iraq established in 2003. They were fearful of a renewed onslaught by Shia militias and Shia-controlled security forces, which had driven the Sunni out of much of Baghdad in the sectarian civil war of 2006 and 2007.

A US embassy cable in September 2007 said: “More than half of all Baghdad neighborhoods now contain a clear Shia majority. Sunnis have largely fled to outlying areas or have been concentrated into small enclaves surrounded by Shia neighborhoods.” To a great extent, this remains true today.