Authors: Joby Warrick
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Increase the assistance. Do more,” he urged. Despite White House promises, after the chemical attack, to speed up CIA training for rebels in Jordan and southern Turkey, the effort was too small and too slow to make a difference. “We really aren’t doing anything,” he said.
Making matters worse, Ford was being regularly summoned to Capitol Hill to defend the administration’s policies in congressional hearings. Sensing a political opportunity, Republicans hurled insults at Ford in televised hearings, seeking to make the diplomat a symbol for White House ineptitude in managing the crisis. At one hearing,
McCain questioned Ford’s grasp of the Syrian crisis and suggested that the diplomat was willing to accept Assad’s continued butchery of his own people.
“It seems like that is a satisfactory outcome to you,” McCain said.
Ford kept calm, but inside he was furious.
“Do I need this?” he thought.
The reality, as Ford understood it, was that Congress was just as divided over what to do as the administration. Hawks such as McCain wanted to arm the rebels, but other Republicans favored military support only for groups that were fighting ISIS. Still other lawmakers—Republicans and Democrats—were leery of any U.S. involvement, reflecting an opinion held by large majorities of the American electorate.
Ford was ready to quit by the fall of 2013, though he was persuaded by State Department colleagues to stay on for another six months. When he finally turned in his resignation letter in early 2014, no one tried to stop him. By then, his efforts within the administration seemed to him increasingly futile, and the highly partisan, highly personalized attacks from Congress had drained his resolve to continue trying.
“I don’t mind fighting, but when my integrity is being challenged by people who don’t even know what’s going on—it’s ridiculous,” he said.
Ford’s resignation was officially announced on February 28, 2014. Days later, McCain asked the ambassador to stop by his office so he could personally thank him for his service.
Ford considered the request for a moment, then politely relayed his reply: “No.”
22
“This is a tribal revolution”
In the decade since the group’s founding, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s jihadist followers had been called terrorists, insurgents, and Islamist militants. Now they were a full-fledged army. In the late spring of 2014, the troops of the Islamic State surged across western Iraq and into the consciousness of millions of people around the world. Moving with remarkable speed, ISIS vanquished four Iraqi army divisions, overran at least a half-dozen military installations, including western Iraq’s largest, and seized control of nearly a third of Iraq’s territory.
Analysts and pundits described the ISIS blitz as sudden and surprising, a fierce desert storm that appeared out of thin air. But it was hardly that. The ISIS conquest of June 2014 was a carefully planned, well-telegraphed act, aided substantially by Iraqis who had no part in ISIS and no interest in living under Sharia law. In the end, the movement’s greatest military success was less a statement of ISIS’s prowess than a reflection of the same deep divides that had roiled Iraq since the U.S. invasion in 2003.
At the root of the spring’s dramatic events was a conflict between Iraq’s Shiite government and one Sunni tribe, the Dulaims. It happened to be the familial clan of Zaydan al-Jabiri, the Ramadi sheikh and rancher who had been caught up in the fight against Zarqawi nearly a decade earlier. Zaydan had first watched his fellow tribesmen
take up arms against the Americans in 2004, amid soaring anger over the occupation. He had then been a key participant in the anti-Zarqawi backlash known as the Anbar Awakening, when tribal militias helped drive insurgents out of their villages. Now the currents had shifted again, and Zaydan would watch with approval as his entire tribe rose up against an Iraqi government that many Dulaims saw as a greater threat than Zarqawi had ever been.
Zaydan was now fifty, thicker around the middle, but with the same mane of black hair, a successful businessman who wore a tailored suit as comfortably as the dishdasha and keffiyeh he wore to more traditional engagements. He had three wives, and a brick house that could have been plucked out of a tony subdivision in suburban San Diego. But beginning around 2010, Zaydan had come to view Iraq’s government as at war with Sunnis like himself. The country’s minority Sunnis had ruled Iraq up until the U.S. invasion, when power was handed to Shiites. Now, with American troops out of the way, the score settling had begun in earnest, or so it seemed to the Dulaims. It was objectively true that Sunnis had lost positions of power in the government and armed services, and there were numerous documented cases in which Shiite conscripts had brutalized Sunnis in their homes in the guise of rooting out terrorism. In Zaydan’s mind, it was all part of an Iranian-inspired plan to ensure that Iraq never again posed a threat to Tehran’s interests in the region.
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The ones who are leading now were thieves, bandits, and sectarian religious parties,” Zaydan said, referring to the cohort in power since Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s narrow election in 2010. “Even with all the bad things the Americans did in Anbar, they didn’t kill people in mosques, and they respected our religion. Those who are with the Iranians do not. They want to get rid of everything called ‘Sunni.’ I’m not saying the Americans were great, but they were better than these.”
Then, beginning in late 2012, Sunni relations with the central government turned sharply worse. On December 21, government security forces raided the home of Rafi al-Issawi, a popular Sunni politician and a former Iraqi finance minister who had been outspoken in his criticism of the Maliki government. Thousands of Dulaims took to the streets in Fallujah, some of them carrying banners
that read “Resistance Is Still in Our Veins.” The rally eventually grew into a weekly pan-Sunni protest that spread to multiple cities and continued for month after month.
After more than a year of such protests, Maliki had finally had enough. On December 30, 2013, he sent security forces into Ramadi to shut down the demonstrations and break up a tent city that had sprouted in one of the city’s plazas. Clashes broke out, and on New Year’s Day 2014, protesters set fire to four Ramadi police stations. On January 2, rioting spread to neighboring Fallujah. On January 3, a convoy of armed ISIS militants rolled into town. The jihadists joined tribal militias in street battles with outmatched police and troops, inflicting more than one hundred casualties. Finally, on January 4, the remnants of Fallujah’s government evacuated the town, and Islamic fighters raised the black flag of ISIS over the city’s administration building.
The Dulaimi-ISIS alliance quickly drew support from other Sunni tribes as well as from a shadowy organization of former Baathists known as the Naqshbandi Order. The Sunni pact waged seesaw battles with army troops for several weeks for control of Ramadi and five other cities, but an uneasy truce settled over Fallujah, with ISIS firmly in charge of the center of town. It was the first time the terrorist group could officially claim an Iraqi city as its own.
ISIS seized the moment to fire off a stream of propaganda images on Twitter, showing its victorious troops parading around the center of the same city from which U.S. marines had ousted Zarqawi’s men a decade earlier. Among the fighters posing for photographs was Abu Wahib al-Dulaimi, the flamboyant, publicity-obsessed ISIS commander for Anbar Province who had shot the three Syrian truck drivers on an Anbar highway the previous spring. In one frame, he grimaces, rifle in hand, next to a burning police car, wearing a black overcoat and boots like a Western gunslinger. In another, he walks through one of the captured police stations carrying a stack of files, like some kind of doomsday office clerk. Iraqis who saw the images might have noticed the familiar last name: Abu Wahib’s surname identifies him as a member of the Dulaim tribe, making him a kinsman to the men who had organized the Fallujah protests. Enemies before, they were now officially on the same side.
At the White House, President Obama’s security advisers viewed the same images with dismay. Administration officials quickly announced plans to speed up the delivery of promised military aid to the Maliki government, including new Hellfire missiles. Security for Iraqis was Maliki’s problem now—he had insisted on it—but a terrorist takeover of an Iraqi city could not be allowed to stand.
To Zaydan, however, as for many other Sunnis, the revolt was purely an internal affair, one the Americans and the Baghdad government had completely misread, again.
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This is a tribal revolution,” Ali Hatim al-Suleiman, the leader of the Dulaim tribe, told the London-based Arabic-language newspaper
Asharq Al-Awsat
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“Iraqi spring,” explained Tariq al-Hashimi, the Sunni politician and friend of the U.S. ambassador to Syria, Robert Ford, speaking from exile in Turkey after Maliki tried to arrest him.
The Sunnis candidly acknowledged that the tribes had handed ISIS the keys to Anbar Province, but only as a temporary measure. ISIS was merely providing the additional firepower needed to help Sunnis assert long-sought independence from Iraq’s abusive central government, they said. Besides, these jihadists were Sunni patriots, not the death-obsessed criminals who had run the organization during Zarqawi’s time.
“They changed,” Zaydan said of the group. “Their leadership became Iraqi, and their program changed completely. The government claims that Baghdadi is a terrorist, but he’s not a terrorist. He’s defending fifteen million Sunnis. He’s leading the battle against the Persians.”
It was true that Zarqawi also had gotten a pass when he burst into Anbar Province with his small band of Sunni militants after the U.S. invasion. Zarqawi also had been a man of the tribe, but a different tribe. Baghdadi, by contrast, was a true Iraqi, raised in Samarra, Zaydan noted. He could be controlled.
“He will not dare talk about Sharia here, because he knows the tribes will not tolerate it,” Zaydan said. “These people learned their lesson. They won’t try the same things they did last time.”
In fact, ISIS already was moving to settle scores in Anbar neighborhoods that had welcomed the group’s arrival. Abdalrazzaq al-Suleiman,
a Sunni tribal sheikh and one of Zaydan’s Ramadi neighbors, happened to be away on business when a truck filled with black-clad fighters drove up to his farm. The jihadists shot several of Suleiman’s bodyguards, destroyed his cars, and then leveled his house with explosive charges. Suleiman’s offense: Eight years earlier he had been a leader of the Anbar Awakening movement that cooperated with U.S. troops in driving Zarqawi’s followers out of the province.
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They stole everything that was in my house before they blew it up,” said Suleiman, who moved to Jordan for safety. “It was my duty and honor to work with the Americans as a tribal leader fighting terrorism. But now it feels like we’ve been abandoned. We were left in the middle of the road.”
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On February 11, 2014, two of America’s top intelligence officials walked into a Senate hearing room to deliver what is traditionally one of the dreariest presentations of the congressional year: the catalogue of global woes known as the “Annual Threat Assessment.” This one would be exceptionally grim. The director of national intelligence, James Clapper, and the chief of the Defense Intelligence Agency, General Michael Flynn, outlined emerging perils from a multitude of sources, including cyber-terrorism, a newly aggressive Russia, North Korean nuclear ambitions, global pandemics, and a potential calamitous unraveling of government authority throughout the Middle East and North Africa. Then, when the topic turned to Syria and ISIS, Flynn made a startling prediction.
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ISIL probably will attempt to take territory in Iraq and Syria to exhibit its strength in 2014,” Flynn said, using the federal government’s preferred acronym for the terrorist group in his testimony. Black flags were already flying over Fallujah, he said, and the takeover of that city would likely be repeated elsewhere, demonstrating the Islamists’ growing strength and “ability to concurrently maintain multiple safe havens.”
Flynn used the careful language appropriate to a congressional hearing, but his private assessment of the situation was even more dire. He had gone up against the same terrorist organization a decade earlier, and he understood ISIS’s capabilities better than most.
A former chief of intelligence for General Stanley McChrystal, Flynn had helped lead the hunt for Zarqawi in Iraq. He recognized in ISIS the same familiar ideology and tactics. After the prison breaks the previous year, he even recognized many of the names.
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These are children of Zarqawi,” Flynn said. “We were able to capture many of the mid-to-high level commanders in the eighteen months after Zarqawi’s death. The majority were Iraqis, many of them former military guys who were put in the prison system. They’re all out now.”
But ISIS also was clearly learning and adapting, gaining new capabilities under Baghdadi’s oversight, Flynn explained. Baghdadi was a more careful planner, and he was willing to be both patient and strategic in building alliances and support networks. In short, ISIS’s recent gains in Iraq had been no accident.
“They got better because they saw how they were defeated,” Flynn said. “Zarqawi was trying to create a civil war immediately to turn the situation in Iraq to his advantage. But the one big mistake he made was that he did not gain enough favor with the tribes in Anbar Province. He stole authority from them and then really abused it, because he was a vicious guy. This new crowd realizes that and they’re operating differently.”
Slowly, Baghdadi had repaired relations with the Sunni tribes, Flynn said, echoing the assessment made by Zaydan and other tribesmen. The ISIS leader exploited Syria’s uprising to rebuild his finances while bringing in fresh recruits and a renewed sense of purpose. And he also had built an organizational structure made up of subject experts in fields as diverse as housing and transportation and strategic messaging.
“This current crowd, they are thinking long term,” Flynn said. “They see this as a generational effort.”