Quarterly Essay 58 Blood Year: Terror and the Islamic State (7 page)

This strategy drew on Zawahiri’s hard-won knowledge that confronting apostates on their own turf, through civil unrest or domestic terrorism, could never work. They were sustained by the United States and could thus draw on unlimited financial, political and military support from their overlords in Washington, who would turn a blind eye to any oppression their protégés inflicted as long as the oil kept flowing, Israel remained secure and the United States retained its pre-eminence. The answer, bin Laden and Zawahiri insisted, was to punch past the “near enemy” to attack the United States directly. Bin Laden argued, “We have to cut [off] the head of the snake.” A strike in depth would make America withdraw, or provoke an overreaction that would trigger a mass uprising and force it out. Once Washington could no longer protect its puppets, they could be overthrown through military action, led (of course) by al-Qaeda. From this emerged the 9/11 attacks, designed – in what Niall Ferguson called “a hideous compliment” to the centrality of Manhattan and the Pentagon to the Western-dominated world – to strike at the sources (financial, military and political) of US power.

Cut to 2011, and this history made the Arab Spring a huge problem for AQ. For twenty years bin Laden and Zawahiri had been telling people they could never change regimes through peaceful action, that the only solution was global terrorism against the superpower. In all that time, AQ had only managed to kill a few thousand Americans (and vastly more Muslims) and bring about even stronger US engagement in the region.

The Arab Spring contradicted AQ’s entire narrative. Ordinary populations, through civil disobedience, peaceful protest and democratic activism, had just overthrown regimes in Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen and Libya, and forced concessions from Algeria, Jordan and Morocco. In less than six months they’d achieved vastly more than AQ had in two decades. People power, not terrorism, looked like the way forward, and far from rushing to defend its protégés, Washington seemed to be choosing democracy over stability. President Obama announced in February that “the status quo is unsustainable” and that Egypt’s transition to democracy “must begin now.” By May he was rallying a coalition to protect anti-Gaddafi rebels in Libya; by August he was saying, “The time has come for President Assad to step aside.” And with bin Laden dead and Zawahiri mired in the succession struggle, AQ was nowhere to be seen and unable to respond.

Of course, the Arab Spring did not usher in an age of democracy. By September 2011, premature elections forced voters to choose between Egypt’s only two organised political blocs: supporters of the former military regime, or the Muslim Brotherhood. The election of the Brotherhood’s Mohammed Morsi was, in effect, a vote for anyone but the old regime. But Morsi’s autocracy paved the way for mass protests, a military coup, a return to repression and a growing insurgency. In Libya, Gaddafi was overthrown and killed by October 2011, but competition among regions and clans weakened the transitional government. By September 2012, militants controlled several cities, killing four Americans (including Chris Stevens, the first US ambassador murdered in the line of duty since 1979) in Benghazi. In October 2013 a unilateral US raid into Tripoli captured former AQ operative Abu Anas al-Libi, wanted for the 1998 US embassy bombings in East Africa, but fatally undermined Libya’s government in the process – days later, Prime Minister Ali Zeidan was kidnapped by militants protesting the raid; he was forced to flee Libya a few months later, his government then collapsed, and the country fragmented into two warring blocs. In Bahrain, a Saudi-backed crackdown suppressed democracy protests, and in Yemen the fall of Ali Abdullah Saleh’s regime plunged the country into civil war and provoked an escalating regional conflict, which, after festering for several years, is now dragging in regional powers.

People from the broader movement for change, including radicals who’d temporarily considered a parliamentary route to power and democrats who’d backed peaceful protest and civic action, became disillusioned and started turning back to the armed struggle. This was a golden opportunity for AQ, or for Zawahiri himself with his personal history, and eventually AQ did recover, throwing itself into the fray and making significant gains. But at the crucial moment in 2011, AQ was unable to react as fast as its powerful new rival: the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria.

REBIRTH

Iraq and Syria, 2011–14

When it began in March 2011, the Syrian crisis looked like the uprisings in Egypt: a broad-based, secular, largely non-violent reform movement against a repressive regime. But it escalated into insurgency within weeks, as troops gunned down protestors, while regime death squads,
shabiha
(“spooks”), launched a campaign of kidnapping, torture and murder. As it turned out, Syria’s dictator, Bashar al-Assad, had learnt from watching what had happened to Ben Ali in Tunisia, Saleh in Yemen and Mubarak in Egypt, and from what was happening to Gaddafi in Libya: he had no intention of going quietly. On the contrary, he was determined to crush the uprising as quickly and brutally as possible. Assad also had sponsors – Iran and Russia – who were committed to his survival, and were there for him in ways the United States no longer was for Mubarak or Saleh, and nobody had ever been for Gaddafi or Ben Ali.

The Iranians, in particular, had been through their own pro-democracy unrest during the Green Movement in 2009 – a precursor to the Arab Spring – and had used the experience to hone their already well-developed tools of repression. Support from Iran and Russia, the international focus on Libya, and capable home-grown institutions like the widely feared Syrian Air Force Intelligence Directorate, may explain why Assad survived the democracy movement when Mubarak and Gaddafi didn’t. Disunity among a highly factionalised set of opponents also played a role. Whatever the reason, in the face of lethal repression, the peaceful protests faded, armed resistance groups organised, secular civilians – including leaders of the democracy movement – were marginalised, and a collection of regime defectors, Islamist militants, Kurdish separatists and secular nationalists arose in their place. And, of course, the inevitable conflict entrepreneurs emerged to exploit the chaos.

As in other conflicts of the Arab Spring, my researchers and I had front-row seats to the horrifying spectacle of Syria’s descent into madness. We had analysts in Cairo and Kurdistan, regularly visiting Turkey and Lebanon and working in Libya, Egypt and Iraq. We had several research teams in Syria, working for two NGOs and an aid agency trying to get relief to vulnerable civilians. Our task was to monitor where aid was going (including who was stealing and selling it), to understand the scope of the humanitarian, economic and governance crisis, to map zones of control and contested areas, and thereby to evaluate the effectiveness of the aid.

By this stage we were a pretty hardened bunch – working Pakistan, Afghanistan, Somalia, Iraq and Libya in quick succession will do that – but the conflict in Syria was so gruesome that even analysts desensitised by long exposure to Iraq became disheartened and needed frequent sanity breaks. Travelling to the region to meet our field teams, ironically, boosted their morale, as they saw ordinary Syrians striving selflessly under heartbreakingly desperate conditions.

The Syrian conflict was rapidly pulling in outsiders. Lebanese Hezbollah sent advisers and by 2013 was fielding whole combat units – a commitment that cost Hezbollah support in Lebanon, where it had presented itself as supporting Lebanese interests against Israel, rather than (as it now appeared) intervening in a Shi’a–Sunni conflict on behalf of its Iranian masters. The Iranians sent Quds Force operatives, weapons, economic and humanitarian aid, and intelligence support. Prime Minister Maliki opened Iraq’s airspace and borders for supplies to the Assad regime.

Russia – which maintains a major naval base at Tartus, on Syria’s Mediterranean coast – was less overt, but began to provide trainers, advisers and assistance of its own. Its main contribution was to block a UN resolution that might have produced international intervention. Russia regarded the 2011 Libyan intervention as a betrayal of trust. The UN Security Council resolution authorising it had explicitly ruled out the use of ground occupation forces, but in the event special forces from France, Italy, Jordan, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates and elsewhere deployed, arms flowed to the rebels, and once the operation was underway, opportunism took hold: the United States and other NATO nations (along with regional Arab powers) seized the opportunity to get rid of Gaddafi altogether. The Russians were furious at what they saw as a bait-and-switch, and this time they were having none of it – not that Washington seemed to have the slightest appetite for getting involved in Syria, despite the President’s off-the-cuff assertion that Assad must go.

On the rebel side, volunteers flocked from North Africa, Arabia, Central Asia and the former Soviet Union (with many Chechen and Daghestani fighters interested in taking down a Russian ally). Weapons and supplies came from Libya by sea and from Arab states by land via Turkey, which left open its long border with Syria, while money flowed from the Arabian Gulf and from charities and wealthy individuals worldwide. PKK-aligned Kurdish groups and
peshmerga
from Iraqi Kurdistan joined self-defence groups to protect Kurdish areas, while tribal forces arose in Hasakah, across Syria’s frontier with Anbar. AQ, as it began to recover in late 2011, organised Jabhat al-Nusra (JN), later designated its official franchise, while jihadists travelled from Morocco, Libya, Egypt, Southeast Asia and Europe. Into this mix also came fighters from ISI, now led by Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.

Baghdadi became leader of ISI in May 2010. Born near Samarra in 1971, his backstory remains sketchy. What we
think
we know is that he was a local preacher, and a student at the Islamic University of Baghdad, earning a doctorate in Islamic Studies, and that he claimed descent from the Quraysh, the tribe of the Prophet Mohammed. Like many Iraqis, his life was transformed in 2003: he co-founded one of the dozens of independent resistance groups to emerge after Saddam fell, was arrested near Fallujah in early 2004, detained at Camp Bucca in southern Iraq until December that year, then released (according to US records) or else escaped (according to his ISIS biography). He was at Bucca with several future ISI leaders (many of them former Ba’athists), and his group became a founding organisation of the Mujahidin Shura Council (MSC) – AQI’s umbrella body established at Ameriya, Baghdad, in September 2006. The council absorbed its constituent groups to become ISI, and Baghdadi became an ISI commander in Diyala and the Baghdad belts before assuming ISI leadership in 2010.

He took over ISI at its lowest point, when the Surge had massively reduced the group’s numbers, supporters and activity, and almost certainly his first goal was simply to survive. But as the drawdown continued, it became much easier for ISI to plan and run operations. Baghdadi was able to replenish ISI’s leadership with former Ba’athist intelligence and special operations personnel, all with experience fighting the occupation, so that by late 2010 former regime officers represented a third of ISI’s leadership, including its top commander, Haji Bakr, an ex-Iraqi army colonel who’d been with Baghdadi in Bucca. In this way, Baghdadi preserved a core of experience, and by early 2011 he was able to restart offensive operations.

Like al-Qaeda, ISI was hugely affected by bin Laden’s death and the failure of the Arab Spring – but for ISI the impact was positive. As bin Laden’s death became known, Baghdadi announced a retaliatory terror campaign. By late 2011, ISI had launched more than a hundred operations across Iraq, killing hundreds of Shi’a police, troops and officials. As well as hitting security forces, Baghdadi ran a systematic assassination campaign against Sunni members of Iraq’s parliament and tribal leaders who’d joined the Awakening, and staged dozens of coordinated bombings and attacks. Unlike core AQ, ISI had stable leadership and no succession issues – Baghdadi had been running the group for just under a year by the time bin Laden was killed, and henchmen like Haji Bakr had orchestrated the assassination of rivals – so these attacks cemented his position (albeit making him increasingly dependent on former regime loyalists). The ISI attacks also drew little response from US forces (who were in the final stages of pulling out, allies like Australia and the United Kingdom having already left). On 22 December 2011, days after the last American troops left, ISI exploded fifteen bombs across eleven districts of Baghdad, killing sixty-nine and injuring 169. Even Baghdadi must have been surprised at his apparent impunity.

His most important move, however, was to send a small band of experienced fighters into Syria in August 2011, followed by a more senior group (including Haji Bakr) in late 2012. The cadres had three objectives – preserve ISI’s capability, create strategic depth by expanding into Syria and exploit the emerging sectarian conflict there, which was starting to mirror the carnage AQI had provoked in Iraq, as resistance to Assad’s Alawite and Shi’a-supported regime increasingly came from poor, pious, rural Sunnis. In Syria, the ISI operatives found a better situation than they’d left in Iraq, for three reasons.

First, unlike the Syrian resistance, which was still fragmented into dozens of groups and pulled apart by the interests of competing sponsors, ISI – soon adding “Syria” to its name to become ISIS – was more mature. It had evolved through consolidation and unification in 2004–06, learnt from its mistakes during the Surge and developed battle-proven tactics. This made it better structured and more capable, helping it gain support from Syrian rebels and absorb other groups. It could also draw on the organisation and expertise of experienced operatives from Saddam’s intelligence service and the clandestine stay-behind network established by Douri.

Second, whereas the Syrian resistance in 2011 looked a lot like the Iraqi resistance of 2003 – a collection of ex-soldiers, regime defectors and citizens with little battlefield experience – ISIS fighters had years of tough combat under their belts. They were hardened veterans who knew exactly how to fight an urban guerrilla war and understood the regime’s tactics (which were not dissimilar to Maliki’s). This made them the best game in town, and many politically neutral Syrians (and increasing numbers of foreign fighters) joined ISIS simply because it seemed the most capable and professional group.