ISIS: Inside the Army of Terror (8 page)

Other Iraqi government institutions also fell under the sway
of Shia sectarians such as the Health Ministry, the deputy head of which was Hakim al-Zamili, a Mahdi Army agent. Ambulances were used not to transport the sick and injured but to ship weapons. Hospitals, meanwhile, were refashioned into execution sites for Sunnis, driving many in Baghdad to travel outside the capital to seek medical treatment.

Iraq’s prime minister, Ibrahim al-Jaafari, created his own intelligence agency, the Ministry of State for National Security Affairs, headed by Shirwan al-Waeli, a man who funneled intelligence on US troop movements to the Mahdi Army and gave the Sadrists practical oversight over much of Iraq’s travel industry—the commercial airline sector especially. Right under the noses of US civilian and military authorities, then, the Mahdi Army was doing in Baghdad what Hezbollah had done in Beirut: seizing control of the major international airport and its attendant facilities. It ran the customs office, the sky marshal program, even its contracted cleaning company, existing employees of which the Sadrists murdered to create job vacancies for themselves. It imported weapons hidden in cargo holds of planes from Iran. It also had ready access to the international comings and goings of Sunnis—knowledge that, unsurprisingly, led to many kidnappings and murders.

No single episode better characterized for Sunnis the new republic of fear being constructed atop the ruins of the former one than Jadriya Bunker. A detention facility situated just south of the Green Zone, the bunker’s Special Interrogations Unit was run by Bashir Nasr al-Wandi, nicknamed “Engineer Ahmed.” A former senior intelligence operative for the Badr Corps, Engineer Ahmed was, like Hadi al-Amari, seconded to Suleimani’s Quds Force. When US soldiers finally opened the door to this dungeon prison, they found 168 blindfolded prisoners, all who had been held there for months, in an overcrowded room filled with feces and urine.

Nearly every prisoner was a Sunni, and many bore signs of
torture—some were so badly beaten that they had to be taken to the Green Zone for medical treatment. Because it fell under the Ministry of Interior’s purview, Bayan Jabr was forced to answer for what had transpired. He claimed never to have visited the prison and dismissed the human rights abuses in a press conference. Only the “most criminal terrorists” were detained, Jabr said, and by way of showing how gently they had been dealt with, added “no one was beheaded, no one was killed.” Testifying to the grim cooperation between Shia-run ministries in al-Jaafari’s Iraq, Jabr’s predecessor, Falah Naqib, who lived only a few blocks from the Jadriya Bunker, claimed to have seen ambulances coming and going from the building, and speculated that prisoners were being transported in them.

“The Iraq War upset the balance of power in the region in Iran’s favor,” Emma Sky, the former adviser to the US military, told us. “It is common in the Arab world to hear talk of secret deals between Iran and the United States, and laments that the US ‘gave Iraq to Iran.’ ” This geopolitical perception, Sky said, accounts for one of the primary reasons that Sunnis have been attracted to ISIS.

RICHER THAN BIN LADEN

In 2006 the US government found that AQI, along with other Sunni insurgent factions, could collect between $70 and $200 million annually from criminal enterprises. According to Laith Alkhouri, a specialist on al-Qaeda at Flashpoint Partners, an intelligence firm, al-Zarqawi’s gangland past clearly influenced his career as a terrorist warlord. “AQI resorted to any number of methods to make money, from stealing US military weapons and trading them with other insurgent groups, to kidnapping and ransoming hostages. They’d raid the houses of top-ranking Iraqi army officers, then interrogate them inside their own homes. They’d tell them: ‘Give us the names, addresses, and phone numbers of other high-ranking army officers.’
Some of these kidnapping victims were very rich, and their families would pay. When that didn’t work, al-Qaeda would simply kill the officers in their houses.”

From 2005 to 2010 subsidies from Gulf Arab donors and dubious Middle East “charities” accounted for at most an insignificant 5 percent of AQI’s overall budget. Oil smuggling from the Bayji Oil Refinery, in Salah ad-Din province, was keeping al-Zarqawi’s apparatus in clover.

A Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) assessment conducted in 2006 found that “[e]ven a limited survey of revenue streams available to the insurgency strongly suggests revenues far exceed expenses.” AQI’s resources had by then eclipsed those of its Pakistan-based leadership, forcing Osama bin Laden into the embarrassing position of cadging for cash from his reluctant subordinate.

Nor would al-Zarqawi’s nominal junior status in the al-Qaeda hierarchy make him more eager to acquiesce to the instructions of his superiors. In July 2005 al-Zawahiri sent him a letter, couched in tones of fraternal advice, though the message was unmistakable: stop murdering Iraq’s Shia. The Egyptian believed that AQI ought to be pursuing a three-phase strategy. First and foremost, expel the American occupier; second, establish an Islamic emirate in the Sunni parts of Iraq; third, use this terrain to plot terrorist attacks against other Arab regimes. Al-Zawahiri counseled al-Zarqawi to avoid the “mistakes of the Taliban,” which he believed collapsed too quickly because it had played only to its support base in Kandahar and Afghanistan’s southern region at the expense of the rest of the country.

Al-Zawahiri was in effect flirting with a kind of jihadist nationalism, at least as a tactical tool to keep a parasitical organization from alienating its host country. Al-Zawahiri was the patient planner, whereas al-Zarqawi was the foolhardy warrior who thought he could battle any and all comers at once. There was one enemy that al-Zawahiri didn’t think it wise to take on, at least not yet: Iran.

Fearing that the Islamic Republic’s response to any AQI provocations in Iraq would be formidable (it already was that in response to the US occupation) al-Zawahiri told al-Zarqawi that “we and the Iranians need to refrain from harming each other at this time in which the Americans are targeting us.” This letter, composed in July 2005, reflected what ISIS spokesman Abu Muhammad al-Adnani would remind the Egyptian of in May 2014; that “Iran owes al Qaeda invaluably.”

The letter was never intended for public dissemination; as far as the rest of the world was supposed to know, al-Qaeda high command looked on their Mesopotamian emir’s performance with something less than unmixed enthusiasm. The CIA leaked the critical missive in part to aggravate what was then still a deep fissure running between the Sheikh of the Slaughterers and his masters in Central Asia. A lot of good it did.

On February 22, 2006, four AQI terrorists, dressed in the uniforms of the Iraqi Ministry of Interior, detonated several explosives inside the al-Askari Mosque in Samarra, one of the holiest shrines in Shia Islam and a mausoleum for two of the sect’s twelve revered imams.

The mosque had been built in 944 AD and remodeled in the nineteenth century, although its celebrated gilt dome, which was ruined in the explosions, was only added at the turn of the twentieth century. The day of the bombing, Iraq’s vice president, Adel Abdul Mahdi, a Shia, likened it to 9/11. Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani called for peaceful protests, while hinting that if the Iraqi Security Forces couldn’t protect other sacred sites, then Shiite militias might have to. One of Iraq’s NGOs found that after the bombing several hundred terrified Shia families fled Baghdad, while US forces announced an emergency mission, Operation Scales of Justice, to mitigate the anticipated wave of retaliatory violence against Sunnis.

The al-Askari Mosque bombing accomplished in the
international imagination what al-Zarqawi had intended and what most Iraqis had already been living through for three years—a civil war.

Al-Sistani’s plea for restraint was not heeded by the Sadrists and Iranian-run Special Groups, whose weapons of choice for use on Sunni captives included power drills and electrical cords. Bodies were dumped in the Tigris River. The Mahdi Army also set up checkpoints in Ghazaliya, one of several strategically key towns that ran along a major highway from Baghdad to Anbar. Uniformed Iraqi policemen were enlisted to stop cars passing by and check the identity papers of the passengers; if they were Sunni, they’d be disappeared in an elaborate show of officialdom that was in fact a Sadrist form of ethnic cleansing.

Sunni insurgents paid the Shia back in the same coin. AQI and other Islamist insurgent groups, including ones that would eventually turn on AQI, used every horrific means at their disposal to push the Shia out of Ameriya Fallujah, a Sunni-majority town in western Baghdad that had been choked off and partially starved by the Sadrists. The Iraqi army and police, all answerable to newly installed prime minister Nouri al-Maliki, another Dawa party member, were seen as accomplices to the rampant killings and abductions, which al-Maliki appeared to be tolerating. This was the issue put forth in a classified memo, subsequently leaked, from Stephen Hadley of the White House National Security Council to President Bush in 2006, after Hadley’s visit to Baghdad.

“Reports of nondelivery of services to Sunni areas,” the memo read, “intervention by the prime minister’s office to stop military action against Shiite targets and to encourage them against Sunni ones, removal of Iraq’s most effective commanders on a sectarian basis, and efforts to ensure Shiite majorities in all ministries—when combined with the escalation of [Mahdi Army] killings—all suggest a campaign to consolidate Shiite power in Baghdad.”

THE DEATH OF AL-ZARQAWI

Al-Zarqawi’s whereabouts had been a mystery to coalition forces since the Second Battle of Fallujah, although, according to Bruce Riedel, he’d actually been captured a few times by Iraqis who had no idea of the identity of their prisoner. He may even have once escaped from US custody on the sly. To find al-Zarqawi through his underlings, JSOC and the British Special Air Service (SAS) began rounding up lower-level AQI members in the spring of 2006. In one raid, during which the group’s leader in the town of Abu Ghraib was captured, US commandos found the unedited propaganda video of al-Zarqawi clumsily handling a machine gun. This detainee and another mid-ranking AQI operative captured separately outlined the jihadist network in detail, providing the Americans with the name of al-Zarqawi’s latest spiritual adviser, Abd al-Rahman. From there, it was a matter of reverse-engineering al-Rahman’s mode of communication with al-Zarqawi, via a series of couriers. US forces discovered that their target had been hiding in plain sight all along: al-Zarqawi’s safe house was in Hibhib, a town northeast of Baghdad and just twelve miles away from JSOC’s own headquarters at Balad Air Base.

On June 7, 2006, a US drone quietly surveilled al-Rahman making contact with al-Zarqawi. By early evening, an F-16 had dropped a five-hundred-pound laser-guided bomb on the location, followed by a second, satellite-guided munition. Iraqi soldiers found al-Zarqawi first, still alive but mortally wounded. He died as McChrystal’s men reached the scene. Jordanian intelligence, which had claimed to know al-Zarqawi better than he ever knew himself, took partial credit for his discovery.

In death, the Sheikh of the Slaughterers earned the kind of panegyrics from al-Qaeda’s core leadership that had eluded him in life. He was a “knight, the lion of jihad,” bin Laden announced
in a bit of revisionist canonization. All foregoing words of caution to the contrary, he suddenly fully endorsed al-Zarqawi’s mass murder of Iraqi Shia as payback for their collaboration with the “Crusaders.”

THE NEW WAR STRATEGY

The death of al-Zarqawi hardly meant the demise of AQI. The Mujahidin Advisory Council he installed as a way to domesticate an expat-heavy franchise appointed another non-native emir: Abu Ayyub al-Masri, an Egyptian national who used another nom de guerre,
Abu Hamza al-Muhajir.

He knew al-Zawahiri and al-Zarqawi personally. Al-Masri had belonged to al-Jihad in the 1980s. He traveled to Afghanistan the same year as al-Zarqawi, whom he met at an al-Qaeda training camp. When al-Zarqawi headed to Iraq in 2003, al-Masri went with him.

Al-Masri’s appointment was at once a continuation and repudiation of al-Zarqawi’s legacy. For one thing, he took the Iraqization program further when, in October 2006, he declared that his franchise was part of a mosaic of homegrown Islamic resistance movements, which he named the Islamic State of Iraq (ISI). Its demesne was Ninewah, Anbar, and Salah ad Din provinces, but also areas where Sunnis didn’t have numerical strength, such as Babil, Wasit, Diyala, Baghdad, and Kirkuk, an oil-rich and once cosmopolitan city that had been “Arabized” by Saddam in the 1980s and that the Kurds to this day consider their “Jerusalem.” ISI’s appointed leader, Abu Omar al-Baghdadi, al-Masri added, was a native Iraqi, whom the Mujahideen Shura Council had voted on to be its leader, yet who never appeared in videos or audio files, presumably for security reasons. Some doubted he even existed at all, until his corpse confirmed that he did.

But al-Masri had a different outlook on the purpose of terrorism than did his predecessor. After his succession became public, US forces captured AQI’s emir for southwestern Baghdad, who, in the course of his interrogation, spelled out what divided the two jihadist commanders. Al-Zarqawi, he said, saw himself in messianic terms, as the defender of all Sunnis against the Shia; al-Masri saw himself as a talent scout and exporter of terror, for whom Iraq was but one staging ground in the fight against “Western ideology worldwide.” In this respect, al-Masri was closer to al-Zawahiri as a grand strategist. “He came from outside, he was the guy sent by al-Zawahiri and bin Laden to be their man in Iraq,” Joel Rayburn told us. “But he joined up with al-Baghdadi, who was an Iraqi Salafist, so there was this inside-outside partnership. Al-Baghdadi lent the street cred to the operation; al-Masri was the supervisory muhajid standing behind him.” AQI was thus becoming more adept at navigating Iraqi power politics: the person said to be in charge isn’t the one necessarily in charge.

The al-Masri–al-Baghdadi duo served practical purposes, too. The Egyptian was the point of reference for an uninterrupted supply of foreign fighters, whereas the Iraqi didn’t want to openly marry himself to al-Qaeda for fear of losing Sunni support among insurgents who believed they were fighting a more nationalistically oriented jihad. Both men wanted to establish an Islamic emirate on the ashes of the Americans and their Shia helpmeets, but the difference was one of emphasis. Most of the Sunni groups that joined ISI protested, as military historian Ahmed Hashim notes, on the grounds that “they were interested in liberating Iraq and not in creating an Islamic state.”