The Rise of Islamic State (2 page)

Today al-Qaeda–type movements rule a vast area in northern and western Iraq and eastern and northern Syria, several hundred times larger than any territory ever controlled by Osama bin Laden. It is since bin Laden’s death that al-Qaeda affiliates or clones have had their greatest successes, including the capture of Raqqa in the eastern part of Syria, the only provincial capital in that country to fall to the rebels, in March 2013. In January 2014, ISIS took over Fallujah just forty miles west of Baghdad, a city famously besieged and stormed by US Marines ten years earlier. Within a few months they had also captured Mosul and Tikrit. The battle lines
may continue to change, but the overall expansion of their power will be difficult to reverse. With their swift and multipronged assault across central and northern Iraq in June 2014, the ISIS militants had superseded al-Qaeda as the most powerful and effective jihadi group in the world.

These developments came as a shock to many in the West, including politicians and specialists whose view of what was happening often seemed outpaced by events. One reason for this was that it was too risky for journalists and outside observers to visit the areas where ISIS was operating, because of the extreme danger of being kidnapped or murdered. “Those who used to protect the foreign media can no longer protect themselves,” one intrepid correspondent told me, explaining why he would not be returning to rebel-held Syria.

This lack of coverage had been convenient for the US and other Western governments because it enabled them to play down the extent to which the “war on terror” had failed so catastrophically in the years since 9/11. This failure is also masked by deceptions and self-deceptions on the part of governments. Speaking at West Point on America’s role in the world on May 28, 2014, President Obama said that the main threat to the US no longer came from al-Qaeda central but from “decentralized al-Qaeda
affiliates and extremists, many with agendas focused on the countries where they operate.” He added that “as the Syrian civil war spills across borders, the capacity of battle-hardened extremist groups to come after us only increases.” This was true enough, but Obama’s solution to the danger was, as he put it, “to ramp up support for those in the Syrian opposition who offer the best alternative to terrorists.” By June he was asking Congress for $500 million to train and equip “appropriately vetted” members of the Syrian opposition. It is here that there was a real intention to deceive, because, as Biden was to admit five months later, the Syrian military opposition is dominated by ISIS and by Jabhat al-Nusra, the official al-Qaeda representative, in addition to other extreme jihadi groups. In reality, there is no dividing wall between them and America’s supposedly moderate opposition allies.

An intelligence officer from a Middle Eastern country neighboring Syria told me that ISIS members “say they are always pleased when sophisticated weapons are sent to anti-Assad groups of any kind, because they can always get the arms off them by threats of force or cash payments.” These are not empty boasts. Arms supplied by US allies such as Saudi Arabia and Qatar to anti-Assad forces in Syria have been captured regularly in
Iraq. I experienced a small example of the consequences of this inflow of weapons even before the fall of Mosul, when, in the summer of 2014, I tried to book a flight to Baghdad on the same efficient European airline that I had used a year earlier. I was told it had discontinued flights to the Iraqi capital, because it feared that insurgents had obtained shoulder-held anti-aircraft missiles originally supplied to anti-Assad forces in Syria and would use them against commercial aircraft flying into Baghdad International Airport. Western support for the Syrian opposition may have failed to overthrow Assad, but it has been successful in destabilizing Iraq, as Iraqi politicians had long predicted.

The failure of the “war on terror” and the resurgence of al-Qaeda is further explained by a phenomenon which had become apparent within hours of the 9/11 attacks. The first moves from Washington made it clear that the anti-terror war would be waged without any confrontation with Saudi Arabia or Pakistan, two close US allies, despite the fact that without the involvement of these two countries 9/11 was unlikely to have happened. Of the nineteen hijackers that day, fifteen were Saudi. Bin Laden came from the Saudi elite. Subsequent US official documents stress repeatedly that financing for al-Qaeda and jihadi groups came from Saudi Arabia and the Gulf
monarchies. As for Pakistan, its army and military service had played a central role since the early 1990s in propelling the Taliban into power in Afghanistan where they hosted bin Laden and al-Qaeda. After a brief hiatus during and after 9/11, Pakistan resumed its support for the Afghan Taliban. Speaking of the central role of Pakistan in backing the Taliban, the late Richard C. Holbrooke, US special representative to Afghanistan and Pakistan, said: “We may be fighting the wrong enemy in the wrong country.”

The importance of Saudi Arabia in the rise and return of al-Qaeda 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, eighteenth-century version of Islam that imposes sharia law, relegates women to the status of second-class citizens, and regards Shia and Sufi Muslims as non-Muslims 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. For example, in recent
years, a Saudi who set up a liberal website on which clerics could be criticized was sentenced to a thousand lashes and seven years in prison. The ideology of al-Qaeda 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 are 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-Qaeda–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’s monster they have helped to create, but there is little they can do to restrain it. An unspoken purpose of the US insistence that Saudi Arabia, UAE, Qatar, and Bahrain take part or assist in the air strikes on Syria in September was to force them to break their former links with the jihadis in Syria.

There was always something fantastical about the US and its Western allies teaming up with the theocratic
Sunni absolute monarchies of Saudi Arabia and the Gulf to spread democracy and enhance human rights in Syria, Iraq, and Libya. The US was a weaker power in the Middle East in 2011 than it had been in 2003, because its armies had failed to achieve their aims in Iraq and Afghanistan. Come the uprisings of 2011, it was the jihadi and Sunni-sectarian, militarized wing of rebel movements that received massive injections of money from the kings and emirs of the Gulf. The secular, non-sectarian opponents of the long-established police states were soon marginalized, reduced to silence, or killed. The international media was very slow to pick up on how the nature of these uprisings had changed, though the Islamists were very open about their sectarian priorities: in Libya, one of the first acts of the triumphant rebels was to call for the legalization of polygamy, which had been banned under the old regime.

ISIS is the child of war. Its members seek to reshape the world around them by acts of violence. The movement’s toxic but potent mix of extreme religious beliefs and military skill is the outcome of the war in Iraq since the US invasion of 2003 and the war in Syria since 2011. Just as the violence in Iraq was ebbing, the war was revived by the Sunni Arabs in Syria. It is the government and media consensus in the West that the civil war
in Iraq was reignited by the sectarian policies of Iraqi prime minister Nouri al-Maliki in Baghdad. In reality, it was the war in Syria that destabilized Iraq when jihadi groups like ISIS, then called al-Qaeda in Iraq, found a new battlefield where they could fight and flourish.

It was the US, Europe, and their regional allies in Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait, and United Arab Emirates that created the conditions for the rise of ISIS. They kept the war going in Syria, though it was obvious from 2012 that Assad would not fall. He never controlled less than thirteen out of fourteen Syrian provincial capitals and was backed by Russia, Iran, and Hezbollah. Nevertheless, the only peace terms he was offered at the Geneva II peace talks in January 2014 was to leave power. He was not about to go, and ideal conditions were created for ISIS to prosper. The US and its allies are now trying to turn the Sunni communities in Iraq and Syria against the militants, but this will be difficult to do while these countries are convulsed by war.

The resurgence of al-Qaeda–type groups is not a threat confined to Syria, Iraq, and their near neighbors. What is happening in these countries, combined with the growing 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 population, will be increasingly affected. It seems unlikely that non-Muslims, including many in the West, will be untouched by the conflict. Today’s resurgent jihadism, having shifted the political terrain in Iraq and Syria, is already having far-reaching effects on global politics, with dire consequences for us all.

On June 6, 2014, ISIS fighters began an attack on Mosul, the second-largest city in Iraq. Four days later, the city fell. It was an astonishing victory by a force numbering some 1,300 men against a nominal 60,000-strong force including the Iraqi army and federal and local police. Like much else in Iraq, however, the disparity in numbers was not quite what it looked like. Such was the corruption in the Iraqi security forces that only about one in three of them was actually present in Mosul, the rest paying up to half their salaries to their officers to stay on permanent leave.

Mosul had long been highly insecure. Al-Qaeda in Iraq (as ISIS had formerly been known) had always
maintained a strong presence in this overwhelmingly Sunni city of two million. For some time they had been able to extract protection money from businesses on a regular basis. In 2006 a businessman friend of mine in Baghdad told me that he was closing his cell phone shop in Mosul because of the payments he had to make to al-Qaeda. Exaggerated accounts of the success of the US troop surge the following year, which supposedly crushed al-Qaeda, ignored the militants’ grip on Mosul. A few weeks after the fall of the city, I met a Turkish businessman in Baghdad who said that he had held a large construction contract in Mosul over the last few years. The local emir or leader of ISIS demanded $500,000 a month in protection money from his company. “I complained again and again to the government in Baghdad,” the businessman said, “but they would do nothing about it except to say that I should add the money I paid to al-Qaeda to the contract price.”

ISIS had another advantage, which has so far given it an edge over its many enemies. The Euphrates and Tigris river valleys, and the bleak steppe and desert where it operates in northern and western Iraq and eastern Syria, look very much the same whatever side of the border you are on. But the political and military conditions are wholly different in the two countries, enabling
ISIS commanders to move their forces back and forth between them, to take advantage of opportunities and to catch their enemies by surprise. Thus, ISIS took Mosul and Tikrit in June but did not attack Baghdad; in July it inflicted a series of defeats on the Syrian army; in August it stormed into Iraqi Kurdistan; and in September it was assaulting the Syrian Kurdish enclave at Kobani on the border with Turkey. ISIS was much strengthened by operating in two different countries.

The fall of Mosul in June 2014 is such a turning point in the history of Iraq, Syria, and the Middle East that it is worth describing in some detail how and why it fell.

In the lead-up to the siege, ISIS’s campaign had begun with what appear as diversionary attacks on other targets in northern Iraq. This was probably a tactic to keep the Iraqi army and government in two minds for as long as possible about the real target. First, a column of vehicles packed with gunmen, and carrying heavy machine guns, smashed its way into Samarra in Salah ad-Din province on June 5 and seized much of the city. This was bound to elicit a strong government response because Samarra, though mostly Sunni, is the site of al-Askari, one of the holiest Shia shrines. A bomb attack in 2006 had led to a furious Shia response, with Sunni being massacred all
over Baghdad. Predictably, the Iraqi army helicoptered in reinforcements from its elite Golden Division to drive out the enemy fighters. Other diversions included one in which gunmen seized part of the university campus at Ramadi, the capital of Anbar province, where hundreds of students were briefly held prisoner. In another at Baquba, northeast of Baghdad, a car bomb hit the counterterrorism bureau. Here, as elsewhere, the assault team did not press home their attacks and soon withdrew.

The attack on Mosul was much more serious, though this was not at first apparent. It began with five suicide bombings backed up by mortar fire. ISIS was joined by other Sunni paramilitary groups, including the Baathist Naqshbandi, Ansar al-Islam, and the Moujahideen Army, though how far these groups operated outside the authority of ISIS has been a matter of dispute. Jihadi fighters overran and tore down government checkpoints that had long paralyzed traffic in the city but proved useless as a security measure. These attacks were no different from those diversionary sorties launched further south, but on June 7 the US and the Kurdish Interior Ministry both detected a large ISIS convoy traveling from Syria towards Mosul. The next day’s fighting was critical, as squads of ISIS fighters seized important buildings including the Federal Police headquarters. In
Baghdad the government wholly failed to comprehend the seriousness of the situation, telling worried US diplomats that it would take a week to send reinforcements to Mosul. It also turned down an offer by Massoud Barzani, the Kurdish leader, to send his peshmerga into Mosul to fight ISIS, considering it as an opportunistic land grab.

Defeat became irreversible on July 9, when three top Iraqi generals—Abboud Qanbar, the deputy chief of staff, Ali Ghaidan, the ground forces commander, and Mahdi Gharawi, the head of Nineveh Operations—climbed into a helicopter and fled to Kurdistan. This led to a final collapse of morale and the disintegration of the army forces. June 11 saw a reflection of the incapacity of the Maliki government to know what was happening or take a decision, when it granted approval for a peshmerga move into the city—a full day after it had fallen.

The story of one Iraqi Army soldier gives a sense of what it was like to be caught up in this shameful defeat. In early June, Abbas Saddam, a private soldier from a Shia district in Baghdad serving in the 11th Division of the Iraqi army, was transferred from Ramadi to Mosul. The fighting started not long after he got there. But on the morning of June 10 his commanding officer told the men to stop shooting, hand over their rifles to the insurgents, take off their uniforms, and get out of the city.
Before they could obey, their barracks were invaded by a crowd of civilians.

“They threw stones at us,” Abbas recalled, “and shouted: ‘We don’t want you in our city! You are Maliki’s sons! You are the sons of
mutta
! [the Shia tradition of temporary marriage much derided by Sunni] You are Safavids! You are the army of Iran!’”

The crowd’s attack revealed that the fall of Mosul was the result of a popular uprising as well as a military assault. The Iraqi army was detested as a foreign occupying force of Shia soldiers, regarded in Mosul as creatures of an Iranian puppet regime led by Maliki. Abbas says there were ISIS fighters—called Daash in Iraq, after the Arabic acronym of their name—mixed in with the crowd. They said to the soldiers: “You guys are OK: just put up your rifles and go. If you don’t, we’ll kill you.” Abbas saw women and children with military weapons; local people offered the soldiers dishdashes to replace their uniforms so that they could flee. He made his way back to his family in Baghdad, but didn’t tell the army he was there for fear of being put on trial for desertion, as happened to a friend.

While the Sunni in Mosul were glad to see the back of the Iraqi army and terrified of its return, they were aware that Mosul had become a very dangerous place.
But there wasn’t much they could do about it. On June 11 a woman friend, a Sunni with a professional job, sent an email that gives a sense of the anxieties shared by many. She wrote:

Mosul has fallen completely into the hands of ISIS. The situation here is quite calm. They seem to be courteous with the people & they protect all the government establishments against looters. Mosul government & all the Iraqi army, police & security forces left their positions & fled the battle. We tried to flee to Kurdistan, but they won’t allow us. They will put us as refugees in tents under the heat of the sun. So, the majority of the people just returned home & decided that they can’t be refugees. But, we don’t know what will happen in the following hours. May God protect everyone. Pray for us.

It was not only in Mosul that the Iraqi security forces disintegrated and fled, the rout led by their commanding officers. The town of Baiji, home to Iraq’s largest refinery, gave up without a fight, as did Tikrit. Once again a helicopter appeared to take away army commanders and senior officials. In Tikrit soldiers who surrendered were divided into two groups—Sunni and Shia—and many of the latter were machine-gunned as they stood in front of a trench, their execution recorded on video to intimidate the remaining units of the Iraqi security forces. The
Americans said that five army and Federal Police divisions out of eighteen had disintegrated during the fall of northern Iraq. At the same time even ISIS seemed taken aback by the extent of their own success. “Enemies and supporters alike are flabbergasted,” the ISIS spokesman Abu Mohammed al-Adnani declared. The boast nevertheless came with a warning that ISIS fighters should not be over-impressed by all the American-made military equipment they had captured. “Do not fall prey to your vanities and egos,” he told them, but “march towards Baghdad” before the Shia could recover.

I arrived in Baghdad on June 16, when people were still in a state of shock following the collapse of the army. People could not quite believe that the period starting in 2005 when the Shia tried to dominate Iraq, as the Sunni had done under Saddam Hussein and the monarchy, was suddenly over. The disaster from their point of view was so unexpected and inexplicable that any other calamity seemed possible. The capital should have been secure: it had a Shia majority and was defended by the remains of the regular army, as well as tens of thousands of Shia militiamen. But then almost the same might have been said of Mosul and Tikrit.

The government’s first reaction to defeat was disbelief and panic. Maliki blamed the fall of Mosul on a deep
conspiracy, though he never identified the conspirators. He looked both baffled and defiant, but appeared to feel no personal responsibility for defeat—despite having personally appointed all fifteen of the army’s divisional commanders.

In the first days after the fall of Mosul there was a sense of half-suppressed hysteria in the empty streets: people stayed at home, frightened, to follow the latest news on television. Many had stocked up on food and fuel within hours of hearing about the army’s collapse. Sweetshops and bakeries make special pasties for breaking the fast at the end of the day during Ramadan, but few people were buying them. Weddings were cancelled. Rumors swept the city that ISIS was planning to make a sudden lunge into the center of Baghdad and storm the Green Zone, in spite of its immense fortifications. A Baghdad newspaper reported that no fewer than seven ministers and forty-two MPs had taken refuge in Jordan along with their families.

The biggest fear was that ISIS fighters, only an hour’s drive away in Tikrit and Fallujah, would time their attack to coincide with an uprising in the capital’s Sunni enclaves. The Sunni in Baghdad, though buoyed by the news of the fall of Sunni provinces to the insurgents, were afraid that the Shia would be tempted to carry out
a pre-emptive massacre of the Sunni minority in the city as a potential fifth column. Sunni strongholds, like Adhamiya on the east bank of the Tigris, appeared to be deserted.

For example, I tried to hire a driver recommended by a friend. He told me he needed the money but he was a Sunni, and the risk of being stopped at a checkpoint was too great. “I am so frightened,” he said, “that I always stay at home after six in the evening.” It was easy to see what he meant. Sinister-looking men in civilian clothes, who might be from government intelligence or from the Shia militias, had suddenly appeared at police and army checkpoints, picking out suspects. These new plain-clothed officers were clearly in a position to give orders to the policemen and soldiers.

Sunni office workers asked to go home early to avoid being arrested; others stopped going to work. Being detained at a checkpoint carries an extra charge of fear in Baghdad because everybody, particularly the Sunni, remembers what it led to during the sectarian civil war of 2006–7: many of the checkpoints were run by death squads and the wrong ID card meant inevitable execution. Press reports claimed the killers were “men dressed as policemen,” but everybody in Baghdad knows that policemen and militiamen are often interchangeable.

There was nothing paranoid or irrational about the ever-present sense of threat. Iraq’s acting national security adviser, Safa Hussein, told me that “many people think” ISIS will “synchronize attacks from inside and outside Baghdad.” He believed such an assault was possible, though he thought it would lead to defeat for ISIS and the Sunni rebels who joined them. The Sunni are in a minority, but it wouldn’t take much for an attacking force coming from the Sunni heartlands in Anbar province to link up with districts in the city such as Amariya. For ISIS, seizing even part of Baghdad, one of the great Arab capitals and former seat of the Caliphate, would give credibility to its claim to be founding a new state.