1. Let’s start with Abu Musab al-Zarqawi the
founder of the group that would become the Islamic State. Zarqawi came from a
poor family in Jordan and was introduced to Salafism in a religious school
there. When he got older he was caught up in the fervor over the war in
Afghanistan. He went there twice, the first being in 1989, but wasn’t really involved in
much fighting. What seemed like a more important factor in his early
development was his relationship with Abu Mohammed al-Maqdisi and their
imprisonment in Jordan in 1994. Can you explain how that shaped the early
Zarqawi?
In way, he was the
jihadi commander who never should have been. Zarqawi had none of Osama’s
eloquence or Zawhiri’s strategizing. He was a thug, an alcoholic and a bit of
meathead who did time in Jordan for a host of petty crimes and what may have
been not-so-petty ones such as pimping. His first trip to Afghanistan reads
very much like an anti in search of a climax, to borrow a phrase from the late
Christopher Hitchens. He arrived just as the Red Army was withdrawing. And
while it’s true he attending a few notorious training camps, such as Sado (the
Fort Dix of al-Qaeda at the time), Zarqawi really didn’t become a warrior until
much later. Rather, he chose to immerse himself in journalism, acting as
Boswell to all the veteran mujahideen then tromping around Peshawar and the
Afghan-Pakistan borderlands. He wrote for a publication called The
Impenetrable Edifice, although I've no doubt that what was truly
impenetrable was Zarqawi’s prose. He was semi-literate and also non-starter as
a jihadist theologian, until, that is, he linked up with Maqdisi, whom he met
in Peshawar and who would go on to serve as his spiritual mentor, rather as
Abdallah Azzam had done for bin Laden, at least until the latter linked up with
Zawahiri.
When they returned to
Jordan, Zarqawi and Maqdisi attempted to start their own terrorist cell,
targeting the Hashemite monarchy and state institutions, but the entire thing
devolved quickly into farce. Their cell had been monitored by Jordan’s General
Intelligence Directorate (GID) more or less from its inception and an attempt
by Zarqawi and Maqdisi to stockpile arms reads more Four Lions than The
Hurt Locker. So they went to jail. It was here that Zarqawi really came
into his own.
What he lacked in
brains, he made up for in leadership. I think in the book we liken him to Che,
who is much romanticized in communist historiography (and by misguided college
students) but who had far more charisma than candlepower. Zarqawi built his
body in the clink. He also cultivated a Salafist-jihadist following, impressing
even the guards at al-Swaqa who saw him, rather bizarrely, as something of a
conflict resolution specialist, a boss who could keep rival underlings in line
and from tearing each other apart. (Although when he did stand up to prison
authorities, he was isolated and tortured.) My favorite anecdote from this
period was his confronting a fellow inmate who had been convicted for
bomb-throwing. The guy had been reading, as one does in jail, Crime and
Punishment and Zarqawi wrote him a hectoring note denouncing the infidel
Russian novelist “Dofeesky.” That nation-states have been felled by such
IQs…
Prisons in the Middle
East are universities for jihadists, a place for them not to be rehabilitated
but further ideologized. This was especially so for Zarqawi. He took lessons
from Maqdisi in the art of writing fatwahs and tracts, one of which was
apparently read by bin Laden approvingly once it had been smuggled out of
prison. It was at al-Swaqa, too, that Zarqawi’s star began to outshine that of
his master and a kind of protege-mentor role reversal began to occur. However,
Zarqawi would always be in thrall to Maqdisi; when the latter later condemned
al-Qaeda in Iraq’s brutal beheading of fellow Muslims — this in a letter
Maqdisi was almost certainly coerced into writing by the GID back in Jordan —
Zarqawi is said to have read the animadversion and wept.
2. Do you see any parallels between
Zarqawi’s
time in prison and his successor Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi when he was arrested and
spent a year in U.S. run detention facility Camp Bucca in Iraq in 2004?
Yes, absolutely. The
administrators of Camp Bucca likewise saw Baghdadi as a wrangler of tougher
elements “behind the wire,” although he was incarcerated for only a year,
whereas Zarqawi did about five (he was let out when King Hussein succeeded his
father on the throne and declared a general amnesty in Jordan). Another important
distinction: Zarqawi’s total lack of an Islamic education versus Baghdadi’s PhD
in theology from an elite university. This can only have leant the latter an
automatic clerical authority whereas, as discussed, Zarqawi had to earn his
bona fides.
But it’s certainly
correct to say that Bucca in the early days of the occupation was horribly
mismanaged, with very little regard for how jihadists were using the prison to
recruit even minor criminals and also refine their tradecraft. There were
actual bomb-making courses being taught there, believe it or not, and the
facility was otherwise seen as a tremendous furlough opportunity for weary
insurgents, some of whom, as Gen. Doug Stone told me, were actually trying to
break into jail. And why not? You were fed three squares a day,
protected by armed guard and otherwise kept from being killed by a rival group
or by coalition forces. Club Med for head-loppers! Also, Bucca was a place to
maximize what I’ve taken to calling Rolodex pragmatism. Counterterrorists tend
to fetish rigid hierarchies — who made bayat to whom, who’s in the People's
Front of Judea versus the Judean People's Front and so on — but the truth more
often than not is that groupuscules and cells and factions coalesce based on
mundane considerations such acquaintanceship and association. One inmate would
befriend another and then write down the name of that guy’s cousin in Ramadi in
the elastic band of his underwear so that when he got out, he had a place to go
and an insurgency to join.
3. After being released from prison in
1999 under an amnesty Zarqawi went back to Afghanistan and met Osama bin Laden
to ask for aid. Zarqawi would later pledge loyalty to Al Qaeda when he was
fighting in Iraq in October 2004. Zarqawi always had a difficult relationship
with Al Qaeda however, which was revived by Baghdadi leading the two to
officially split in February 2014. Can you explain what the differences were
between Zarqawi and bin Laden, and what that meant for the global jihad
movement?
Yes, bin Laden hated
Zarqawi and the feeling was mutual. Zarqawi didn’t come as a modest acolyte to
Kandahar to meet the venerated leader of al-Qaeda; he came as a brash and
arrogant wannabe who couldn’t understand why bin Laden was so focused on
hitting the United States when all these taghut and apostate regimes
were there for the hitting in the Middle East. (By this point, bin Laden had
evolved, if that word can be used in this context, from a near-target to
far-target proponent, which is to say, he no longer wanted to attack Muslim-led
states but the imperial superpower responsible for their state of corruption
and decay.) Furthermore, Zarqawi had a pathological hatred of the Shia, which
offended bin Laden on two levels: not only did he think a sectarian war would
undermine the greater jihadist enterprise but his own mother was a Syrian
Alawite. So this was rather like Stalin cracking a joke about Jews in front of
Trotsky. Nevertheless, thanks to one of bin Laden’s lieutenants, Zarqawi
was seen as a useful ally because of his extensive Levantine connections
(again, who he knew counted for more than what he knew). So a startup loan for
about $200,000 was given by al-Qaeda to Zarqawi for the establishment of a
training camp in Herat. By all accounts, this was more successful than even
Zarqawi’s admirers believed it was going to be. So a pragmatic rather than
formal relationship was struck. After 9/11 and the overthrow of the Taliban by
NATO, bin Laden also foresaw the coming invasion of Iraq and Zarqawi was an early infiltrator of Iraqi Kurdistan. Thanks to a series of
“spectacular” attacks his group Monotheism and Jihad perpetrated in the early
days of the occupation, namely against the Jordanian embassy and United Nations
in Baghdad, Zarqawi became both the public face of the anti-American insurgency
as well as a celebrity jihadist. His pledge of allegiance to bin Laden in 2004,
and the formation of al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI), was therefore a marriage of
convenience rather than one of true love. It meant the Zarqawists would now have
access to al-Qaeda’s extensive international finance network and propaganda
apparatus, although the local subsidiary’s innovations in both areas would
eventually eclipse what its parent organization could manage. Indeed, in 2005, it was bin Laden asking Zarqawi for a loan; and it was
Zarqawi who patented the now-familiar agitprop of recording the decapitation of
victims dressed in orange Gitmo-style jumpsuits.
Like all marriages of
convenience, this one was dysfunctional and, in retrospect, fated for divorce.
It just took ten years to happen. The genocidal campaign against the Shia —
Zarqawi designated them his top enemy, even above the Americans — always
horrified bin Laden because he knew that declaring war on Iraq’s (Muslim)
majority was a strategic blunder. Zarqawi, on the other hand, reckoned that
this would only militarize and radicalize the Shia, who already had the Badr
Corps (his bête noire) and other IRGC-backed paramilitary groups acting as de
facto arms of the Iraqi government, not to say death squads. The Shia would
retaliate against the Sunnis, thereby driving the latter into AQI’s fold.
Perhaps over nostalgic for the Afghan-Soviet War he never actually saw, Zarqawi
believed that his grim plan to foment sectarian civil war would lead to a global
casting call for mujahideen pouring into Iraq and thus swelling, or
replenishing, the ranks of Sunnis.
Bin Laden thought this
was madness as it would only create fitna and distract from the
overriding objective of bleeding and defeating America in first Iraq and then
elsewhere in the Middle East. So here we see the original argument between
Zarqawi and bin Laden introduced in Kandahar in 1999 — how to treat the Shia
and which target to prioritize — codified in fire and blood.
4. Al Qaeda in Iraq went through
several stages until it became the current Islamic State. One of those was
going from a mostly foreign entity under Zarqawi to a largely Iraqi one under
Abu Ayub al-Masri and Baghdadi. How did that process come about and what was
the motivation?
Zarqawi had problems to
contend with which al-Qaeda never really did: nationalism. Even Iraqi Sunnis
weren't keen on the idea of a jumped-up Jordanian telling them whom to kill and
how to live, so Zarqawi attempted to “Iraqize” his franchise by incorporating
other native insurgencies into the so-called Mujahideen Shura Council. Of
course, AQI was primus inter pares of this cobbled-together body, the
formation of which was really just a PR stunt to reduce what by now was
becoming the popular perception of the Zarqawists as just another species of
foreign occupier.
By the time he was
killed by JSOC in 2006, Zarqawi was already moving AQI away from his nominal
boss in Abbottabad. Bin Laden and Zawahiri dispatched Abu Ayub al-Masri, an
Egyptian, to helm AQI, but al-Masri took Zarqawi’s independence further by
anointing Abu Omar al-Baghdadi, a native Iraq, the head of a new umbrella
organization known as the Islamic State of Iraq (ISI), into which AQI was
subsumed. Al-Masri then took the extraordinary step of making bayat to
al-Baghdadi, thus confusing who the rightful master and commander of Iraq’s
al-Qaeda faction truly was and, not coincidentally, infuriating bin Laden.
Indeed, the captured intelligence now in the Harmony database about how angry
these moves made AQHQ is fascinating because it foreshadows what happened 7
years later, or rather 18 months ago: ISIS’s split from al-Qaeda and its
repudiation of Zawahiri as a has-been and sell-out.
Al-Masri and
al-Baghdadi’s existence was only ever confirmed by their demise in 2010, at the
hands of another JSOC team. But by this point, what had happened at the upper
echelons of AQI/ISI? Zarqawi’s Iraqization program succeeded all too well; many
ex-Baathists from Saddam’s army or mukhabarat were now in key positions
of power on the Shura and Military Councils and therefore the kingmakers of the
future emir.
I’ll refrain from
stoning my friend Craig Whiteside who says the Baathist infiltration of
contemporary ISIS is overplayed because I think he and I agree that this isn’t
about some furtive ideological power-play by the Saddamist equivalents of marranos.
Though he knows as well as anyone that plenty of Baathists became
true-believing Salafi-Jihadists before the U.S. invasion thanks to Saddam’s
Islamic Faith Campaign, which was an attempt to create a Frankenstein monster
of the perfect ideologue: half religious fanatic, half secular one. The
Campaign, overseen by Izzat al-Duri, was envisioned as a bulwark against any
threat, foreign or domestic (but primarily domestic) to Baathist rule. Khalaf Ulayan was Baathist who became a
Salafist during the 1990s and formed Jaysh al-Islami after the invasion. And
Mahmoud al-Mashhadani, who was an anti-regime Salafist nonetheless tolerated by
the regime during the Faith Campaign, became the speaker of post-Saddam Iraqi
parliament. He allegedly moonlighted as an affiliate to Ulayan and may have had
a hand in blowing up his own parliament. So these hard and fast distinctions
really don’t apply.
Hell hath no fury like a
counterterrorism analyst in search of straw men. The Baathist predominance in
the leadership structure of ISIS is an established fact, but somehow this has
now transformed into an argument over whether or not ISIS is fundamentally
“secular”? No one serious can argue that, and no one serious has. I suspect
this is just one of the sillier epiphenomena of the very silly debate, which
preoccupied the American news cycle for 15 minutes, as to whether or not ISIS
is “Islamic.”
It’s more than a mere
coincidence that so many “former regime elements” have taken over ISIS. Might
it be because they know a thing or two about operational security,
counterintelligence, guerrilla and informational warfare and that this
tradecraft trumped whether or not their beards were long enough or they had
memorized the whole of the Koran?
If we only examine ISIS
through the prism of their advertised dogma, or through our own preferred prism
of counterterrorism, we overestimate and underestimate them simultaneously.
ISIS has got us arguing over what to call it or whether or not it’s truly
“Islamic,” which of course is a terrific distraction from killing ISIS. You
could call ISIS Bette Midler and that still wouldn’t change life for anyone in
Raqqa.
I remember doing a TV
spot several months ago in which some very well-intentioned but not very
well-informed MNSBC journalist made the case that during the Cold War plenty of
socialists were opposed to Stalinism. Yes, indeed they were and I think I’m
fairly well acquainted with this intellectual history. But I almost felt sorry
informing him that the question as to whether or not Stalinism was the truest
expression of Marxism or a perversion of it is one that Marxists still struggle
with it, and they do so without getting the vapors of even having it raised in
the first place. This debate, too, occurs alongside the one which queries
whether or not Russia has simply got the “DNA” for authoritarian rule.
All totalitarian
movements adapt, even to the point of turning their own doctrines upside-down.
ISIS sells oil to the nusayris in Damascus and sells the priceless
artifacts it doesn’t powder on the international black market, rationalizing
this self-enrichment on the basis of Islamic canon. (In point of fact, it tends to smash the stuff that’s too damned big to
smuggle out of Syria or Iraq.) Yes, well the Red Army under Trotsky used czarist officers
to train its rank-and-file in the basics of 19th-century battlefield
discipline. Stalin had “socialism in a single country,” which ran against the
whole of Marxist-Leninist canon, an underlying principle of which was that
without the exportation of revolution, the experiment in Russia would fail.
Then Stalin had a pact with Hitler after characterizing German social democrats
opposed to the latter as “social fascists.” The about-face was so dramatic
that the morning and evening editions of a leading French Communist daily ran
contradictory editorials on August 23, 1939. And so on. I’m constantly
surprised that people are so surprised that history owes as much to brute
improvisation as it does to the brutality of big ideas or that of even bigger
personalities.
How else did ISIS get
taken over by the ancien regime? Derek Harvey told me that the early
days of the occupation were all about low-hanging fruit: the guys the U.S.
caught or offed on the battlefield most easily were the ones stupid enough to
use their cellphones and, in essence, the U.S. did the insurgency a favor by
culling the idiots from the professionals. Making it through eight years of
war, Sahwa and surge and coming out in the leadership structure of the most
formidable terrorist organization in history seems to have a common
characteristic. The Iraqi Baathists are better survivors than carbuncular,
Nutella-munching teenagers from Jeddah, who are going to be used as suicide
bombers or Kurdish target practice anyway.
Here's a final point. By
2013 there was a marked generational split detectable in the ranks of jihadism,
with the MTV youth vote — or “cool” factor — going overwhelmingly to ISIS. The
process which began under Zarqawi, who was about 10 years younger than bin
Laden, but it only grew as AQI’s battlefield mythos did. There is now something
of a turf war playing out between Jabhat al-Nusra and ISIS over control of
Syria. ISIS accuses al-Qaeda of being a closeted upholder of Sykes-Picot, and
it is true that Zawhiri seems far more concerned with the borders of
“artificial” nation-states than does Baghdadi, a fact recently emphasized by
Nusra leader Abu Mohammed al-Jolani in his al-Jazeera interview (really,
Qatar’s political campaign on his behalf) in which he basically asked, “Can’t
we all just get along and listen to Gertrude Bell?”
5. By 2010 Al Qaeda in Iraq was at a
low point with most of its leadership rounded up or killed and many tribes and
other insurgent groups having turned against it with the Sahwa movement. Let’s talk about how the
group made its comeback as the Islamic State. How important was Camp Bucca, the
release of many prisoners after the U.S. withdrawal in 2011, and the IS prison
breaks?
Bucca played a big role,
for reasons given above, as an incubator of the next cycle of AQI/ISI leaders
and a place where you could simply cool your heels and manufacture new willing
executioners, all under the supervision of Uncle Sam. When custody of detainees
was more or less turned over to Baghdad in 2009, al-Maliki decided prioritized
releasing those prisoners who had “only” targeted American soldiers, figuring
that now that the foreign occupier was on his way out, there’d be no recidivism
or return to sectarian civil war. As with most things, he was wrong. Look up
Anthony Shadid’s reporting in the Washington Post from around this time.
You had AQI guys returning to al-Anbar like mob bosses from Howard Beach, ready
and eager to get back to business. And guess what they did?
Springing comrades from
the clink is of course easier than recruiting and training new comrades, so
there was every expectation that AQI would resort to “Breaking the Walls”-style
jailbreaks. Also, conquering Sunni territory per force gives you access to all
the Sunni inmates held in those cities and towns, a good number of them agents
of your organization. So campaigns of conquest automatically swell the ranks,
too.
Beyond Bucca, though,
was that the former insurgents we had successfully turned against AQI felt
abandoned by us and so melted back into old habits. Al-Maliki never trusted the
Sahwa and had no interest in following on its military gains with concomitant
political ones (and remember: Sahwa was all about Sunnis warily eyeing
accommodation with a changed political reality in Iraq). How many Sons of Iraq
were successfully incorporated into the ISF? Mullah Nathim Jabouri, who was
actually one of the founders of the Mujahedin Shura Council, estimated that by
early 2011, 40 percent of the Awakening had returned to AQI. This is roughly
when Joe Biden went on record exclaiming that al-Maliki “hates the goddamn
Sunnis,” but nonetheless backed his fraudulent re-election. Joe Biden also went
on record betting his vice presidency that al-Maliki would sign the new SOFA.
Joe Biden is still vice president. And al-Maliki is still largely in control of
Iraq.
We have this wonderful
anecdote in the book relayed to me to by Col. Rick Welch — it’s around early
2011, I think. A Shia tribesman goes to the U.S. embassy and complains to Chris
Hill’s staff that a new Saddam is being born right in the Green Zone but this
one with American connivance, and so what does Washington intend to do about
it? He was met with looks which I’ve come to associate with Foreign Service
types who wish they’d finished degrees in Comparative Literature instead. They
were too busy popping the champers and packing up to the get the hell out of
war-ravaged country and they told the sheikh that Iraq was now a “sovereign”
country and the U.S. simply couldn’t interfere. This was right after Mubarak
was told to step down and a no-fly zone was either being mooted or imposed over
Libya. We’d gone from “You Break It, You Own It” to the Pottery Barn No Returns
Policy, apparently.
There's this adorable
non sequitur being put peddled by apologists for the Hashd al-Shaabi that the
U.S. has somehow “romanticized” the Awakening as a grand moment of spiritual
enlightenment for tribal Sunnis when in fact these were bad guys all along.
U.S. brigade commanders seem to recall the Awakening and its precursors very
differently; taking tea with sheikhs who not a month before had been taking
shots at them, or trying to blow up their forward operating bases. What was Abd
Sattar al-Rishawi’s compound before it was cannon fodder for insurgents? A
clearinghouse for insurgents. That didn’t mean, however, that Abd Sattar wasn’t
a valuable and necessary ally or sincere in pledging to chase the takfiris
all the way into the Hindu Kush if that’s what it took. So long as the U.S. was
on his side, he meant it. But here's the thing: Abd Sattar did not chant “Death
to America” as his militias were receiving American air support and weaponry.
Nor did he claim pompously to be able to uproot AQI without the Great Satan’s
help. Quite the contrary, in fact — he said he’d deliver thousands of
volunteers to join the Sons of Iraq and we didn't believe him; then he
delivered thousands of volunteers and they kept coming even after they were
blown up for collaborating with us.
Also, is it
retrospective romanticism to point out that Abd Sattar was not fighting AQI on
behalf of a foreign dictatorship's theocratic first principles but as a
self-interested chieftain leader whose life and livelihood depended on doing
so? A social contract was inked based on an avowed and desperate dependency.
That's why the Sahwa worked. It was a matter of cold calculation and political
realism, which might as well be the motto of every Iraqi and Syrian tribe.
Sunnis didn’t like the Americans and wanted them gone but at least the
Americans didn't rape their women, assassinate their leaders or monopolize their
grey and black market economies. AQI did all of those things. Nor did the
Americans ethnically cleanse Sunnis from their towns and cities once they
expelled the Zarqawists, hoover up Sunnis at checkpoints and toss them into
secretive dungeons hidden in the basements of Iraqi government ministries. The
ISF, rife as it was with Sadrists, Badr agents and Special Group loyalists, did
exactly that, and al-Maliki was an accomplice to it. That’s why the Sahwa
unraveled.
6. In August 2011 Baghdadi sent men to
create an IS affiliate in Syria. This would later become Jabhat al-Nusra. In
Syria IS seemed to have learned from their mistakes in Iraq and implemented
many policies aimed at tribes and the general public to win popular support.
What were some of the keys to its success there?
First, it presents
itself as a model of transparent good governance as against the fleshpots and
corruptions of all alternatives, be they the Assad regime, the Islamic Front or
the Free Syrian Army. Where the FSA devolved into warlordism and brigandry,
ISIS adhered to strict administrative discipline — something even its
detractors have to acknowledge. When they took over a town, they got the
garbage off the street, the bakeries up and running, and their own draconian
“courts” to adjudicate matters of law and order. (It helped greatly that
Assad never prioritized bombing ISIS-held areas because he wanted the
“controlled chaos” of a jihadist-dominant opposition. There were residents of
al-Bab who at one point said, “We prefer Daesh here to the FSA because the
former spare us from the regime’s bombardment.” Also, the regime agreed to
restore electricity so long as the terrorists were in control of the town.)
We marvel at how anyone
can find this appealing given what we know about ISIS jurisprudence. The U.S.
government likes to pretend that there is no “state” apparatus of which to
speak, we’re dealing exclusively with a brutal and barbarous terrorist
organization. This is fanciful, dangerous thinking, and completely contrary to
common sense. If you’ve survived four years of dire attritional warfare —
barrel bombs, chlorine gas attacks, Scud missiles, terror-famines, and
torture-house prisons — a Maoist re-education camp can seem the a Mövenpick
hotel. ISIS capitalizes on the demoralization and exhaustion of local
populations, principally in Syria, and convinces them that it is their
singular, last hope for a bit of respite.
The biggest lesson ISIS
learned from Iraq was that it could be defeated if and when Sunnis reject it
like a body doing a transplanted organ. To safeguard against this, it’s made
the Sahwa the nemesis of its internal propaganda campaign, presenting Sunnis
with a stark choice: If you partnered with the Crusader-Rafida conspiracy in
the past, all will be forgiven if you repent and pledge your undying allegiance
to Caliph Ibrahim. They actually hold mass “repentance rallies” in mosques in
Mosul and Fallujah, which are sort of like the takfirist answer to those
Moonie mass weddings held at Shea Stadium in the 80s. Again, it’s not that
former Awakening Council members are sinister to their core or have suddenly
been converted to the ISIS cause; they just don’t want to get their fucking
heads cut off.
So there’s the carrot.
Now here’s the stick: their videos show ISIS militants, often dressed in ISF
uniforms, tracking and murdering Sunni “collaborators” with the Iraqi
government. It’s some of the sickest stuff they’ve produced, frankly, busting
into a sheikh’s house pretending to be police or army soldiers, then forcing him
to confess on camera and making him and his sons dig their own graves. Again,
put aside whatever culturalist claptrap you’ve heard about the Middle East,
Arabs, or Islam. From a purely human standpoint, what kind of choice is this:
Submission or death? What would you do?
ISIS seeks to make those
it enslaves complicit in its own crimes. It’s managed to divide a tribe against
itself; in the massacre of the Albu Nimr, other members of the tribe took part
in killing their confederates. Preventing the Albu Nimr from ever recovering
from the trauma of fratricide is precisely the point. This is social
engineering through atrocity. Read Robert Conquest. Read Tim Snyder. Read Anne
Applebaum. This is nothing new to history.
7. In 2004 Zarqawi operative Abu Bakr
Naji published Management of Savagery, which is said to be a seminal
text for the Islamic State. What was the book about and how did it shape IS’s strategy and
tactics?
What’s the one
observational constant for the average Sunni in the cafes of Cairo or the shisha
bars of Antakya? “We have been dispossessed, disinherited, ethnically
cleansing, all with either the active support or acquiescence of the United
States, which prefers the Shia to us.” It’s perhaps the compliment that vice
pays to virtue that America always believes that its good intentions trump the
darkest imaginings the rest of the world has as to its true motives. Zarqawi
had us bungling our way into Iraq to accidentally enthrone the Shia. Baghdadi
has done this story one better: America is conspiring with Iran and the
Iraqi Shia to keep the Sunnis down, and this has been the grand design from
2003. Why did Obama fail to enforce his “red line” on chemical weapons? Because
it was a lie from the beginning. Why did the U.S. oust Saddam but leave Assad
in place? Because it supports the regime and a broader project to facilitate
Shia hegemony in the region. Why is the U.S. dropping bombs on Sunnis but
giving close air support to Qassem Soleimani and his jihadists? Ditto. Why is
the U.S. acting as Iran’s lawyer in nuclear negotiations and freeing up
hundreds of millions of dollars for Hezbollah and the Quds Force? You get the
idea, habibi.
Look at ISIS snuff
films. People only focus on the horrific mode of execution, and never on the
agitprop either preceding or following the main event. They invariably exhibit
the carnage, allegedly created by coalition bombs. “Here are dead Sunni babies killed
by the infidel West, the Jews and their apostate Arab and polytheistic Shia
partners.” It isn’t necessary to persuade the Sunni umma to subscribe to ISIS’s
ideology or even believe in the establishment of the caliphate — a task that’s impossible, and ISIS knows it. It’s sufficient, however, to
have Sunnis ask why Assad, Iran, America, and Europe are all on the same side
in this war, why ISIS is deemed the greater menace to civilization, and to thus
keep a distance from those seeking to oust ISIS. There is no
credible or coherent answer to this question on offer from Washington, although
Samantha Power tweets her heart out.
I’ve had a few
breakfasts with a leading U.S. diplomat who asks me every time how best to
“counter the ISIS narrative.” Leaving aside that I always nearly lose my
breakfast whenever I hear the word “narrative,” I tell him, “What do you mean,
counter it? U.S. foreign policy is the haymaker for that narrative.” Even
Baghdadi must be impressed at the extent to which ISIS conspiracy theory has
graded into actual American decision-making. That the Obama administration is
seeking a condominium or rapprochement with the Islamic Republic, and actively desires
IRGC control over restive areas of the Levant and Mesopotamia — this is no
longer a feverish delusion confined to the pages of Dabiq. You can read
it in every Arab newspaper, every other American broadsheet, and hear it in the
interviews Obama has granted to sympathetic journalists where he contrasts
“rational” Shia jihadism to the irrational Sunni variety. He even told the
attendees of that awkward GCC summit at Camp David that they should invent
their own Quds Force and model their expeditionary operations on the
trailblazing Hajj Qassem. This is like Ronald Reagan telling NATO that must
channel its inner Andropov. ISIS can’t buy this kind of propaganda.
8. Some analysts have begun to argue
that IS is losing the initiative, and that the road to their defeat has begun.
What is your position on this?
On its way to being
defeated, which is why it’s in possession of one more provincial capital than
it had before the U.S. declared war on it a year ago, and affiliates pledging
allegiance to it from Gaza to Indonesia?
Look, I had to educate
myself in researching the early years of AQI, which was really a process of
immersing myself in counterinsurgency epistemology: how to be educated
about this type of warfare. You can count bullets expended, corpses produced,
square miles lost and gained, but are these really adequate metrics for
determining who’s winning and who’s losing? What the
jihadists get up to when the cameras aren’t rolling or their exploits aren’t
making it onto A1 of the Times matters far more than whatever Josh Earnest
thinks is the top news item of the day.
Did we “win” in the
Battle of Second Fallujah in 2004? In the technical sense, we did in that AQI
was expunged from the city, but not before thousands of pounds of ordnance were
dropped on the city, practically leveling it, and not before we lost a
proportionately high degree of Marines and Army soldiers and not before AQI had
already embarked upon setting up a new command center in Mosul. This is how
Zarqawi and bin Laden fashioned victory out of defeat; they “bled” the big bad
superpower enough to make (almost) everyone in the U.S. realize what a mistake
the Iraq war was in the first place. And this conceit became an enormous
recruitment tool for mujahidin who saw American contractors being hung
upside down in Fallujah and IEDs going off in the Green Zone, all played out on
al-Jazeera and CNN.
Now we’re in far worse
spot than we were under George Casey’s command because at least back then there
was a command. It took 30,000 Shia militiamen and ISF soldiers to
even try to “liberate” Tikrit, and they got stuck in their tracks by (at most)
750 jihadists. ISIS turns this into their Sparta moment. If U.S. F-18s are all
that's keeping Iraq together, then there isn't much of a state left of which to
speak, is there?
There’s a lot of a cheerleading masquerading as analysis
right now (ironically, much of it coming from the very bien-pensant quarters
that forecast the apocalypse a decade ago when George W. Bush announced
the surge). We
got lucky in 2006-2007 because the sociological Briar Patch in which ISIS
thrives — the Sunni tribal heartland of Iraq — simply had enough. The
difference then was that the U.S. had over 150,000 troops on the ground to try
and capitalize on that disillusionment. Who is there now? Asaib Ahl al-Haq,
Kataeb Hezbollah, the Badr Corps, Lebanese Hezbollah and the Quds Force, all
chanting “Ya Hussein” and brandishing portraits of Khomeini and Khamenei.
Michael Pregent has mordantly termed this the “Sons of Iran” moment for Iraq,
yet still we find supposedly serious people in supposedly serious think tanks
who say that Sunnis are going to rise up en mass to make the world safe for
velayat e-fiqh.
In Syria, there’s a
better chance to make a bit of good out of a lot misery, owing to the
demography and the longstanding presence of battle-hardened anti-ISIS Sunni
actors. But do I see even the beginnings of a hint that the Obama
administration has any desire to do something substantive here? No. The
president has consistently made two promises: the first is that fighting ISIS
will be something for his successor to do (who loves you, Hillary?), and the
second is that Iran will not get the bomb while he’s in office (Chelsea
will be commander-in-chief when this happens). He’ll make good on both vows, I
reckon.
The unfortunate truth is
that the U.S. is treating Syrian Sunni Arabs rather as al-Maliki treated their
Iraqi counterparts—as suspects who have to prove that they’re not terrorists in
disguise. You might call this the lethal bigotry of high expectations. I mean,
did you see poor Ash Carter, looking like a dog who’s just been through the car
wash, explaining that $500 million in taxpayer money has gone to training 60
Syrian rebels? Sixty Syrian rebels — that’s barely an iftar dinner
in Beirut. This is not a policy, it’s a college fraternity prank.
I’m all for helping the
YPG, and I’m a proponent of an independent Kurdistan. But from a national
security perspective, does it not disturb those paid to be disturbed by popular
violent sentiments in the Middle East that America has now become the Kurdish
Air Force in northern Syria while the Pentagon won’t even give the FSA’s
CENTCOM’s phone number? What message does this send to both prospective Sunni
allies and to ISIS and Iran? Will the YPG liberate Raqqa City, Deir Ezzor or
Palmyra? I have a higher opinion of the Kurds than that.
What happens when we run
out of ethnic minorities to protect? Are we going to countenance the majority
in Syria, at long last? That I even have to put it like that shows you how lost
America is in the region.
SOURCES
Weiss, Michael Hassan, Hassan, ISIS, Inside the Army of
Terror, New York: Regan Arts, 2015
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