The Rise of Islamic State (3 page)

On August 8, the US Air Force started bombing ISIS in Iraq, and on September 23, the generals added ISIS and Jabhat al-Nusra, the al-Qaeda representative in Syria, to its targets. The militants, who had moved their men and equipment out of buildings and locations that could be easily hit, reverted to the guerrilla tactics that had served them well in the past.

In the US and Britain (which began air operations in Iraq on September 27), there was bombast about “degrading and destroying” ISIS, but there was no evidence of a long-term plan other than to contain and harass the jihadis by military means. As so often during
the US military intervention in Iraq between 2003 and 2011, there was excessive focus by the media on the actions of Western governments as the prime mover of events. This was accompanied by an inadequate understanding of the significance of developments on the ground in Iraq and Syria as the force really driving the crisis in both countries.

Similarly, there was much joy in Western capitals when Iraq finally got rid of Nouri al-Maliki as prime minister and replaced him with Haider al-Abadi. The new administration was billed as more inclusive of Sunni Arabs and Kurds than under Maliki, but it was still dominated by the Dawa party, which had even more members in the cabinet than previously, and other Shia religious parties. Abadi promised the Sunni that there would be an end to the bombardment of Sunni civilian areas; but in one week in September Fallujah was shelled on six out of seven days, with twenty-eight civilians killed and 118 wounded, according to the local hospital.

The degree of political change was exaggerated, and not enough attention was given to the fact that Abadi, even with ISIS fighters a few miles from Baghdad, was unable to get the Iraqi parliament to approve his choices for the crucial posts of defense and interior ministers until October. Reidar Visser, the Norwegian expert on
Iraq, rated this failure as “far more significant than the plethora of international gatherings that are currently going on in the name of defeating ISIS in Iraq.”

A pointer to the real state of affairs at this time was the outcome of a weeklong siege of an Iraqi army base at Saqlawiyah, just outside Fallujah, at the end of which ISIS fighters overran the position, killing or capturing most of the garrison. An Iraqi officer who escaped was quoted as saying that “of an estimated 1,000 soldiers in Saqlawiyah, only about 200 had managed to flee.” ISIS said it had seized or destroyed five tanks and forty-one Humvees in liberating the area “from the filth of the Safavids [Shia].” Surviving Iraqi soldiers complained that during the siege they had received no reinforcements or supplies of ammunition, food or water, though they were only forty miles from Baghdad. In other words, three and a half months after the fall of Mosul and six weeks after the start of US air strikes, the Iraqi army was still unable to withstand an ISIS assault or carry out an elementary military operation. As at Mosul and Tikrit, the apparently Napoleonic successes of ISIS were partly explained by the incapacity of the Iraqi army.

In Syria the air strikes likewise led ISIS to revert to guerrilla-style operations, aside from two offensives it had launched in the north against Kurdish enclaves.
Some rebel units around Damascus, which had earlier given themselves Islamic-sounding names to attract Saudi and Gulf financing, opportunistically switched to more secular-sounding titles in a bid to attract American support. Jabhat al-Nusra, which, possibly to its own surprise, had been targeted by the US, condemned the American air raids and pledged common action with other jihadis against “the Crusaders.” As in Iraq, it was not going to be easy to turn the Sunni and the rebels against ISIS now that the US was beginning to be seen as the de facto ally of Assad, whatever its protestations to the contrary.

In June many people in Baghdad had feared that ISIS would launch an assault on the capital, but the attack never came. As the attention of the world switched to a Malaysian aircraft shot down over Ukraine by Russian-supplied rebels and the Israeli bombardment of Gaza that killed 2,000 Palestinians, ISIS consolidated its position in the overwhelmingly Sunni Anbar province that sprawls across western Iraq. In Syria, it defeated or incorporated into its ranks other rebel groups and captured four different Syrian army bases, inflicting heavy casualties and taking much heavy equipment: the worst defeats suffered by the Damascus government in the whole of the uprising.

The newly declared caliphate was expanding by the day. It now covered an area larger than Great Britain and inhabited by some six million people—a population larger than that of Denmark, Finland, or Ireland. In a few weeks of fighting in Syria ISIS had established itself as the dominant force in the Syrian opposition, routing the official al-Qaeda affiliate, Jabhat al-Nusra, in the oil-rich province of Deir Ezzor and executing its local commander as he tried to flee. In northern Syria some 5,000 ISIS fighters were using tanks and artillery captured from the Iraqi army in Mosul to besiege half a million Kurds in their enclave at Kobani on the Turkish border. In central Syria, near Palmyra, ISIS fought the Syrian army as it overran the al-Shaer gas field, one of the largest in the country, in a surprise assault that left an estimated 300 soldiers and civilians dead. Repeated government counterattacks finally retook the gas field, but ISIS still controlled most of Syria’s oil and gas production. The US Air Force was to concentrate on blowing up ISIS oil facilities when it started its bombardment; but a movement that claims to be fulfilling the will of God and makes a cult of martyrdom is not going to go out of business (or even be seriously demoralized) because of a shortage of cash.

The birth of the new state was the most radical change to the political geography of the Middle East since the
Sykes-Picot Agreement was implemented in the aftermath of the First World War. Yet at first this explosive transformation created surprisingly little alarm internationally, or even among those in Iraq and Syria not yet under the rule of ISIS. Politicians and diplomats tended to treat ISIS as if it is a Bedouin raiding party that appears dramatically from the desert, wins sweeping victories, and then retreats to its strongholds, leaving the status quo little changed. The very speed and unexpectedness of its rise made it tempting for Western and regional leaders to hope that the fall of ISIS and the implosion of the caliphate might be equally sudden and swift. As in any great disaster, people’s moods gyrated between panic and wishful thinking that the calamity was not as bad as first imagined.

In Baghdad, with its mostly Shia population of seven million, people knew what to expect should the murderously anti-Shia ISIS forces capture the city, but they took heart from the fact that it had not happened yet. “We were frightened by the military disaster at first, but we Baghdadis have got used to crises over the last thirty-five years,” one woman said. Even with ISIS at the gates, Iraqi politicians went on playing political games as they moved ponderously towards replacing the discredited prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki.

“It is truly surreal,” a former Iraqi minister said to me. “When you speak to any political leader in Baghdad they talk as if they had not just lost half the country.” Volunteers had gone to the front after a fatwa from the grand ayatollah, Ali al-Sistani, Iraq’s most influential Shia cleric. But by July these militiamen were streaming back to their homes, complaining that they were half-starved and forced to use their own weapons and buy their own ammunition. The only large-scale counterattack launched by the regular army and the newly raised Shia militia was a disastrous foray into Tikrit on July 15 that was ambushed and defeated with heavy losses. There is no sign that the dysfunctional nature of the Iraqi army has changed. “They were using just one helicopter in support of the troops in Tikrit,” the former minister said, “so I wonder what on earth happened to the 140 helicopters the Iraqi state has bought in recent years?” The answer probably was that the money for the missing 139 helicopters had simply been stolen.

In the face of these disasters the Shia majority took comfort from two beliefs that, if true, would mean the present situation was not as dangerous as it looked. They argued that Iraq’s Sunnis had risen in revolt, and ISIS fighters were only the shock troops or vanguard of an uprising provoked by the anti-Sunni policies and actions
of Maliki. Once he was replaced—as seemed inevitable given the pressure from Iran, America, and the Shia clerical hierarchy—Baghdad would offer the Sunnis a new power-sharing agreement with regional autonomy similar to that enjoyed by the Kurds. Then the Sunni tribes, former military officers, and Baathists who had allowed ISIS to take the lead in the Sunni revolt would turn on their ferocious allies. Despite the many signs to the contrary, Shia at all levels were putting faith in this comforting myth that ISIS was weak and could be easily discarded by Sunni moderates once they had achieved their goals. One Shia said to me: “I wonder if ISIS really exists.”

Unfortunately, ISIS not only exists but is an efficient and ruthless organization that has no intention of waiting for its Sunni allies to betray it. In Mosul it demanded that all opposition fighters swear allegiance to the caliphate or give up their weapons. In late June and early July the militants detained former officers from Saddam Hussein’s time, including two generals. Groups that had put up pictures of Saddam were told to take them down or face the consequences. “It doesn’t seem likely,” Aymenn al-Tamimi, an expert on jihadis, said, “that the rest of the Sunni military opposition will be able to turn against ISIS successfully. If they do, they
will have to act as quickly as possible before ISIS gets too strong.” He pointed out that the supposedly more moderate wing of the Sunni opposition had done nothing to stop the remnants of the ancient Christian community in Mosul from being forced to flee after ISIS told them they had to convert to Islam, pay a special tax, or be killed. Members of other sects and ethnic groups denounced as Shia or polytheists were being persecuted, imprisoned, and murdered. The moment seemed to be passing when the non-ISIS opposition could successfully mount a challenge.

The Iraqi Shia offered another explanation for the way their army disintegrated: it was stabbed in the back by the Kurds. Seeking to shift the blame from himself, Maliki claimed that Erbil, the Kurdish capital, “is a headquarters for ISIS, Baathists, al-Qaeda and terrorists.” Many Shia believed this: it made them feel that their security forces (nominally 350,000 soldiers and 650,000 police) failed because they were betrayed, not because they would not fight. One Iraqi told me he was at an
iftar
meal during Ramadan “with a hundred Shia professional people, mostly doctors and engineers, and they all took the stab-in-the-back theory for granted as an explanation for what went wrong.” The confrontation with the Kurds was important because it
made it impossible to create a united front against ISIS: it showed how, even when faced by a common enemy, the Shia and Kurdish leaders could not cooperate. The Kurdish leader, Massoud Barzani, had taken advantage of the Iraqi army’s flight to seize all the territories, including the city of Kirkuk, which have been in dispute between Kurds and Arabs since 2003. He now has a 600-mile common frontier with the caliphate and might have been an obvious ally for Baghdad, where Kurds make up part of the government. By trying to scapegoat the Kurds, Maliki ensured that the Shia would have no allies in their confrontation with ISIS if it resumed its attack in the direction of Baghdad. As for the Sunni, they were unlikely to be satisfied with regional autonomy for Sunni provinces and a larger share of jobs and oil revenues. Their uprising has been turned into a full counterrevolution that aims to take back power over all of Iraq.

In the roasting summer days of July, Baghdad had a phony-war atmosphere, like London or Paris in late 1939 or early 1940, and for similar reasons. People had feared an imminent battle for the capital after the fall of Mosul, but it had not happened yet and optimists hoped it would not happen at all. Life was more uncomfortable than it used to be, with only four hours of electricity
on some days, but at least war had not yet come to the heart of the city. I went for dinner at the Alwiyah Club in central Baghdad and had difficulty in finding a table. Iraq’s Shia leaders had not grasped that their domination over the Iraqi state, brought about by the US overthrow of Saddam Hussein, was finished, and only a Shia rump was left. It ended because of their own incompetence and corruption, and because the Sunni uprising in Syria in 2011 destabilized the sectarian balance of power in Iraq.

In Syria the ISIS-led Sunni victory in Iraq threatened to break the military stalemate. Assad had been slowly pushing back against a weakening opposition: in Damascus and its outskirts, the Qalamoun Mountains along the Lebanese border, and Homs, government forces had been advancing slowly and were close to encircling the large rebel enclave in Aleppo. But Assad’s combat troops are noticeably thin on the ground, need to avoid heavy casualties, and only have the strength to fight on one front at a time. The government’s tactic is to devastate a rebel-held district with artillery fire and barrel bombs dropped from helicopters, force most of the population to flee, seal off what may now be a sea of ruins, and ultimately force the rebels to surrender. But the arrival of large numbers of well-armed ISIS fighters fresh from recent successes was posing a new and
dangerous challenge for Assad. A conspiracy theory much favored by the rest of the Syrian opposition and by Western diplomats, that ISIS and Assad are in league, was shown to be false as ISIS won victories on the battlefield. Likewise in Baghdad the conspiracy theory that ISIS was in league with the Kurds was dramatically blown away when ISIS launched their next surprise attack against Kurdish regions, defeated the peshmerga in Sinjar, forcing the Yazidis to flee, threatening the Kurdish capital Erbil, and provoking the re-entry of the US military into the Iraq war.

As ISIS became the largest force in the Syrian opposition it presented the West and its regional allies—Saudi Arabia, Qatar, UAE, and Turkey—with a quandary: their official policy was to get rid of Assad, but ISIS was now the second strongest military force in Syria; if he fell, it was in a good position to fill the vacuum. Like the Shia leaders in Baghdad, the US and its allies responded to the rise of ISIS by descending into fantasy. They pretended they were fostering a “third force” of moderate Syrian rebels to fight both Assad and ISIS, though in private Western diplomats admit that this group doesn’t really exist outside a few beleaguered pockets. Aymenn al-Tamimi confirmed that this Western-backed opposition “is getting weaker and weaker”; he believes
supplying them with more weapons won’t make much difference. When US air strikes began the US did tell the Syrian government when and where they would be, but not the “moderate” rebels whom the US was publicly backing. The American military presumably calculated that anything they told the Free Syrian Army, the loose umbrella group of rebel units, would be known to ISIS and Jabhat al-Nusra within minutes.