LONDON — Almost 13 years after 9/11, a jihadi organization with a
murderous anti-Western ideology controls territory in Iraq and Syria, which are
closer to Europe and the United States than Afghanistan is. It commands
resources and camps and even a Syrian military base. It spreads its propaganda
through social media. It has set the West on edge through the recorded beheading
of the American journalist James Foley — with the promise of more to come.
What went wrong? The United States and its allies did not go to war to eradicate
Al Qaeda camps in Afghanistan only to face — after the expenditure of so much
blood and treasure — a more proximate terrorist threat with a Qaeda-like
ideology. The “war on terror,” it seems, produced only a metastasized variety of
terror.
More than 500, and perhaps as many as 800, British Muslims have headed for Syria
and Iraq to enlist in the jihadi ranks. In France, that number stands at about
900. Two adolescent girls, 15 and 17, were detained last week in Paris and face
charges of conspiring with a terrorist organization. The ideological appeal of
the likes of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria is intact. It may be
increasing, despite efforts to build an interfaith dialogue, reach out to
moderate Islam, and pre-empt radicalization.
“One minute you are trying to pay bills, the next you’re running around Syria
with a machine gun,” said Ghaffar Hussain, the managing director of the Quilliam
Foundation, a British research group that seeks to tackle religious extremism.
“Many young British Muslims are confused about their identity, and they buy into
a narrow framework that can explain events. Jihadists hand them a simplistic
narrative of good versus evil. They give them camaraderie and certainty. ISIS
makes them feel part of a grand struggle.”
A large part of Western failure has been the inability to counter the attraction
of such extremism. Perhaps racked with historical guilt, European nations with
populations from former colonies often seem unable to celebrate their values of
freedom, democracy and the rule of law. Meanwhile, in the Arab world the central
hope of the Arab Spring has been dashed: that more open and representative
societies would reduce the frustration that leads to extremism.
President Obama shunned the phrase “war on terror” to distance himself from the
policies of President George W. Bush. But in reality he chose to pursue the
struggle by other military means. He stepped up drone attacks on several fronts.
His most conspicuous success was the killing of Osama bin Laden in 2011.
The curtain, it seemed, had fallen on America’s post-9/11 trauma. Then, a little
over three years after Bin Laden’s death, ISIS overran the Iraqi city of Mosul
and the world woke up to the radicalization through the festering Syrian war of
another generation of Muslims; youths drawn to the slaughter of infidels (as
well as Shiite Muslims) and the far-fetched notion of recreating an Islamic
caliphate under Shariah law. When a hooded ISIS henchman with a British accent
beheaded Foley last week, the new threat acquired urgency at last.
The list of American errors is long: Bush’s ill-conceived and bungled war in
Iraq; a failure to deal with the fact that two allies, Saudi Arabia and
Pakistan, have been major sources and funders of violent Sunni extremism; an
inability to seize opportunity in Egypt, home to nearly a quarter of the world’s
Arabs, and so demonstrate that Arab societies can evolve out of the radicalizing
confrontation of dictatorship and Islamism; a prolonged spate of dithering over
the Syrian war during which Obama declared three years ago that “the time has
come for President Assad to step aside” without having any plan to achieve that;
a lack of resolve in Syria that saw Obama set a red line on the use of chemical
weapons only to back away from military force when chemical weapons were used;
an inability to see that no one loves an Arab vacuum like jihadi extremists, and
a bloody vacuum was precisely what Obama allowed Syria to become; and
inattention, until it was too late, to festering sectarian conflict in a broken
Iraqi society left to its fate by a complete American withdrawal.
The chicken that came home to roost from the Syrian debacle is called ISIS. It
is not Al Qaeda. But, as the journalist Patrick Cockburn has noted, Al Qaeda “is
an idea rather than an organization, and this has long been the case.”
ISIS grew through American weakness — the setting of objectives and red lines in
Syria that proved vacuous. But the deepest American and Western defeat has been
ideological. As Hussain said, “If you don’t have a concerted strategy to
undermine their narrative, their values, their worldview, you are not going to
succeed. Everyone in society has to take on the challenge.”
BAGHDAD — When American forces raided a home near Falluja during
the turbulent 2004 offensive against the Iraqi Sunni insurgency, they got the
hard-core militants they had been looking for. They also picked up an apparent
hanger-on, an Iraqi man in his early 30s whom they knew nothing about.
The Americans duly registered his name as they processed him and the others at
the Camp Bucca detention center: Ibrahim Awad Ibrahim al-Badry.
That once-peripheral figure has become known to the world now as Abu Bakr
al-Baghdadi, the self-appointed caliph of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria
and the architect of its violent campaign to redraw the map of the Middle East.
“He was a street thug when we picked him up in 2004,” said a Pentagon official
who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss intelligence matters. “It’s
hard to imagine we could have had a crystal ball then that would tell us he’d
become head of ISIS.”
At every turn, Mr. Baghdadi’s rise has been shaped by the United States’
involvement in Iraq — most of the political changes that fueled his fight, or
led to his promotion, were born directly from some American action. And now he
has forced a new chapter of that intervention, after ISIS’ military successes
and brutal massacres of minorities in its advance prompted President Obama to
order airstrikes in Iraq.
Mr. Baghdadi has seemed to revel in the fight, promising that ISIS would soon be
in “direct confrontation” with the United States.
Still, when he first latched on to Al Qaeda, in the early years of the American
occupation, it was not as a fighter, but rather as a religious figure. He has
since declared himself caliph of the Islamic world, and pressed a violent
campaign to root out religious minorities, like Shiites and Yazidis, that has
brought condemnation even from Qaeda leaders.
Despite his reach for global stature, Mr. Baghdadi, in his early 40s, in many
ways has remained more mysterious than any of the major jihadi figures who
preceded him.
American and Iraqi officials have teams of intelligence analysts and operatives
dedicated to stalking him, but have had little success in piecing together the
arc of his life. And his recent appearance at a mosque in Mosul to deliver a
sermon, a video of which was distributed online, was the first time many of his
followers had ever seen him.
Mr. Baghdadi is said to have a doctorate in Islamic studies from a university in
Baghdad, and was a mosque preacher in his hometown, Samarra. He also has an
attractive pedigree, claiming to trace his ancestry to the Quraysh Tribe of the
Prophet Muhammad.
Beyond that, almost every biographical point about Mr. Baghdadi is occluded by
some confusion or another.
The Pentagon says that Mr. Baghdadi, after being arrested in Falluja in early
2004, was released that December with a large group of other prisoners deemed
low level. But Hisham al-Hashimi, an Iraqi scholar who has researched Mr.
Baghdadi’s life, sometimes on behalf of Iraqi intelligence, said that Mr.
Baghdadi had spent five years in an American detention facility where, like many
ISIS fighters now on the battlefield, he became more radicalized.
Mr. Hashimi said that Mr. Baghdadi had grown up in a poor family in a farming
village near Samarra, and that his family was Sufi — a strain of Islam known for
its tolerance. He said Mr. Baghdadi had come to Baghdad in the early 1990s, and
over time became more radical.
Early in the insurgency, he gravitated toward a new jihadi group led by the
flamboyant Jordanian militant operative Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. Though Mr.
Zarqawi’s group, Al Qaeda in Iraq, began as a mostly Iraqi insurgent
organization, it claimed allegiance to the global Qaeda leadership, and over the
years brought in more and more foreign leadership figures.
It is unclear how much prominence Mr. Baghdadi enjoyed under Mr. Zarqawi. Bruce
Riedel, a former Central Intelligence Agency officer now at the Brookings
Institution, recently wrote that Mr. Baghdadi had spent several years in
Afghanistan, working alongside Mr. Zarqawi. But some officials say the American
intelligence community does not believe Mr. Baghdadi has ever set foot outside
the conflict zones of Iraq and Syria, and that he was never particularly close
to Mr. Zarqawi.
The American operation that killed Mr. Zarqawi in 2006 was a huge blow to the
organization’s leadership. But it was years later that Mr. Baghdadi got his
chance to take the reins.
As the Americans were winding down their war in Iraq, they focused on trying to
wipe out Al Qaeda in Iraq’s remaining leadership. In April 2010, a joint
operation by Iraqi and American forces made the biggest strike against the group
in years, killing its top two figures near Tikrit.
A month later, the group issued a statement announcing new leadership, and Mr.
Baghdadi was at the top of the list. The Western intelligence community
scrambled for information.
“Any idea who these guys are?” an analyst at Stratfor, a private intelligence
company that then worked for the American government in Iraq, wrote in an email
that has since been released by WikiLeaks. “These are likely nom de guerres, but
are they associated with anyone we know?”
In June 2010, Stratfor published a report on the group that considered its
prospects in the wake of the killings of the top leadership. The report stated,
“the militant organization’s future for success looks bleak.”
Still, the report said, referring to the Islamic State of Iraq, then an
alternative name for Al Qaeda in Iraq, “I.S.I.’s intent to establish an Islamic
caliphate in Iraq has not diminished.”
The Sunni tribes of eastern Syria and Iraq’s Anbar and Nineveh Provinces have
long had ties that run deeper than national boundaries, and ISIS was built on
those relationships. Accordingly, as the group’s fortunes waned in Iraq, it
found a new opportunity in the fight against Bashar al-Assad’s government in
Syria.
As more moderate Syrian rebel groups were beaten down by the Syrian security
forces and their allies, ISIS increasingly took control of the fight, in part on
the strength of weapons and funding from its operations in Iraq and from
jihadist supporters in the Arab world.
That fact has led American lawmakers and political figures, including former
Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, to accuse President Obama of aiding
ISIS’ rise in two ways: first by completely withdrawing American troops from
Iraq in 2011, then by hesitating to arm more moderate Syrian opposition groups
early in that conflict.
“I cannot help but wonder what would have happened if we had committed to
empowering the moderate Syrian opposition last year,” Representative Eliot L.
Engel, the senior Democrat on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said during a
recent hearing on the crisis in Iraq. “Would ISIS have grown as it did?”
But well before then, American actions were critical to Mr. Baghdadi’s rise in
more direct ways. He is Iraqi to the core, and his extremist ideology was
sharpened and refined in the crucible of the American occupation.
The American invasion presented Mr. Baghdadi and his allies with a ready-made
enemy and recruiting draw. And the American ouster of Saddam Hussein, whose
brutal dictatorship had kept a lid on extremist Islamist movements, gave Mr.
Baghdadi the freedom for his radical views to flourish.
In contrast to Mr. Zarqawi, who increasingly looked outside Iraq for leadership
help, Mr. Baghdadi has surrounded himself by a tight clique of former Baath
Party military and intelligence officers from the Hussein regime who know how to
fight.
Analysts and Iraqi intelligence officers believe that after Mr. Baghdadi took
over the organization he appointed a Hussein-era officer, a man known as Hajji
Bakr, as his military commander, overseeing operations and a military council
that included three other officers of the former regime’s security forces.
Hajji Bakr was believed to have been killed last year in Syria. Analysts believe
that he and at least two of the three other men on the military council were
held at various times by the Americans at Camp Bucca.
“He has credibility because he runs half of Iraq and half of Syria,” said Brian
Fishman, a counterterrorism researcher at the New American Foundation.
Syria may have been a temporary refuge and proving ground, but Iraq has always
been his stronghold and his most important source of financing. Now, it has
become the main venue for Mr. Baghdadi’s state-building exercise, as well.
Although the group’s capture of Mosul, Iraq’s second-largest city, appeared to
catch the American intelligence community and the Iraqi government by surprise,
Mr. Baghdadi’s mafia-like operations in the city had long been crucial to his
strategy of establishing the Islamic caliphate.
His group earned an estimated $12 million a month, according to American
officials, from extortion schemes in Mosul, which it used to finance operations
in Syria. Before June, ISIS controlled neighborhoods of the city by night,
collecting money and slipping in to the countryside by day.
The United Nations Security Council is considering new measures aimed at
crippling the group’s finances, according to Reuters, by threatening sanctions
on supporters. Such action is likely to have little effect because, by now, the
group is almost entirely self-financing, through its seizing oil fields,
extortion and tax collection in the territories it controls. As it gains
territory in Iraq, it has found new ways to generate revenue. For instance,
recently in Hawija, a village near Kirkuk, the group demanded that all former
soldiers or police officers pay an $850 “repentance fine.”
Though he has captured territory through brutal means, Mr. Baghdadi has also
taken practical steps at state-building, and even shown a lighter side. In
Mosul, ISIS has held a “fun day” for kids, distributed gifts and food during Eid
al-Fitr, held Quran recitation competitions, started bus services and opened
schools.
Mr. Baghdadi appears to be drawing on a famous jihadi text that has long
inspired Al Qaeda: “The Management of Savagery,” written by a Saudi named Abu
Bakr Naji.
Mr. Fishman called the text, “Che Guevara warmed over for jihadis.” William
McCants, an analyst at the Brookings Institution who in 2005, as a fellow at
West Point’s Combating Terrorism Center, translated the book in to English, once
described it as “the seven highly effective habits of jihadi leaders.”
American officials say Mr. Baghdadi runs a more efficient organization than Mr.
Zarqawi did, and has unchallenged control over the organization, with authority
delegated to his lieutenants. “He doesn’t have to sign off on every detail,”
said one senior United States counterterrorism official. “He gives them more
discretion and flexibility.”
A senior Pentagon official said of Mr. Baghdadi, with grudging admiration: “He’s
done a good job of rallying and organizing a beaten-down organization. But he
may now be overreaching.”
But even before the civil war in Syria presented him with a growth opportunity,
Mr. Baghdadi had been taking steps in Iraq — something akin to a corporate
restructuring — that laid the foundation for the group’s resurgence, just as the
Americans were leaving. He picked off rivals through assassinations,
orchestrated prison breaks to replenish his ranks of fighters and diversified
his sources of funding through extortion, to wean the group off outside funding
from Al Qaeda’s central authorities.
“He was preparing to split from Al Qaeda,” Mr. Hashimi said.
Now Mr. Baghdadi commands not just a terrorist organization, but, according to
Brett McGurk, the top State Department official on Iraq policy, “a full blown
army.”
Speaking at a recent congressional hearing, Mr. McGurk said, “it is worse than
Al Qaeda.”
Tim Arango reported from Baghdad,
and Eric Schmitt from Washington.
Omar
al-Jawoshy contributed reporting from Baghdad; Hwaida Saad from Beirut, Lebanon;
The Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant,
too hardline even for al-Qaida,
is believed to control about $2bn
and 10,000 men
Monday 16 June 2014
12.59 BST
Theguardian.com
Mark Tran
What is Isis?
Led by an Iraqi, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, Isis (the Islamic State in Iraq and the
Levant – al-Sham in Arabic) is a militant group so hardline that it was
disavowed by al-Qaida's leader, Ayman al-Zawahiri. The group's reputation for
brutality was reinforced when it released photos and videos over the weekend
showing some of the prisoners it had captured being killed apparently in the
desert near Tikrit. Claims that 1,700 prisoners were killed could not be
verified.
Isis has already shown its ruthlessness in the areas of Syria under its control,
namely eastern Aleppo and the city of Raqqa. It was blamed for the February
killing of a founding member of the Salafi group Ahrar al-Sham and the group's
leader in Aleppo, Muhammad Bahaiah, who had close connections to senior al-Qaida
leaders. It was also blamed for the assassination of Jabhat al-Nusra's leader in
the Idlib governorate, Abu Muahmmad al-Ansari, along with his wife, children and
relatives. It ordered the crucifixion of a man accused of murder. Other forms of
punishment include beheadings and amputations.
How did the group start?
Isis has its roots in the al-Qaida group in Iraq, the Islamic State of Iraq
(ISI). ISI's involvement in the Syrian conflict was indirect at first. Abu
Muhammad al-Joulani, an ISI member, established Jabhat al-Nusra in mid-2011,
which became the main jihadi group in the Syrian war. Joulani received support
and funding from ISI and Baghdadi.
Baghdadi sought to gain influence over the increasingly powerful Jabhat al-Nusra
by directly expanding ISI's operations into Syria, forming Isis in April last
year, but differences over ideology and strategy soon led to bitter infighting.
Isis turned out to be too extreme not just for Jabhat al-Nusra but for al-Qaida
itself, leading to a public repudiation by Zawahiri, who last month called on
Isis to leave Syria and return to Iraq.
How has it grown so powerful?
Isis has secured huge cashflows from oilfields in eastern Syria, which it
commandeered in late 2012. It also reaped windfalls from the smuggling of raw
materials plundered from the crumbling state and priceless antiquities from
archeological digs. Computer sticks captured just before the fall of the
northern Iraqi city of Mosul have shown the full extent of the group's finances.
Before Mosul, total cash and assets of Isis came to $875m (£515m). After Mosul,
the group's financial assets are estimated to be about $2bn, with money taken
from banks and military supplies captured. Isis now controls territory that
stretches from the eastern edge of Aleppo, in Syria, to Falluja, Mosul and now
Tal Afar in Iraq.
Who will stop Isis?
The US is reported to be preparing to open a direct dialogue with Iran about how
to deal with Isis. The Wall Street Journal reported on Sunday that Washington
was set to open talks with Tehran on ways to push back the militants. Whether
this will extend to military coordination – US air strikes, or drone
intelligence in support of Iranian Revolutionary Guards or Iraqi units – is up
in the air.
Isis also poses a threat to the Kurdish regional government, as it and radical
Sunnis may be even more difficult for Kurds to deal with than the Shia-led
government of Nouri al-Maliki. In any case, stopping Isis will fall mainly on
Maliki's shoulders. The Iraqi prime minister has vowed to retake every inch
seized by the militants.
What do we know about its members?
The information from the computer sticks shows the group's leaders to have been
carefully chosen. Many of those who reported to the top tier are battle-hardened
veterans of the insurgency against the US a decade ago. Isis has bolstered its
numbers by recruiting thousands of foreign volunteers in Syria, some from Europe
and the US, and is estimated to have more than 10,000 men under its control. The
computer sticks included names and noms de guerre of all foreign fighters,
senior leaders and their code words, and initials of sources inside ministries.
What are its aims?
Baghdadi believes that the world's Muslims should live under one Islamic state
ruled by sharia law, the first step towards which is establishing a caliphate
spanning Syria and Iraq. Charles Lister, a visiting fellow at the Brookings
Institution, Doha, wrote in a paper last month: "Isis now presents itself as an
ideologically superior alternative to al-Qaida within the jihadi community and
it has publicly challenged the legitimacy of al-Qaida leader Ayman al-Zawahiri.
As such it has increasingly become a transnational movement with immediate
objectives far beyond Iraq and Syria."
