Don't Panic: Isis, Terror and the Middle East (13 page)

The Syrian regime rapidly lost control of large rural areas where Sunni Arabs made up most of the population. It lost most of Aleppo, the country’s biggest city, although it was more successful in holding the rebels around Damascus off in the outer suburbs. But most of the minorities either sided with the regime or stayed neutral, so by early 2012 the military situation had stabilized to a considerable extent, with the government holding most of the major roads and at least part of every provincial capital, but lacking the manpower to take back the rest of the country. At that time most observers still expected that Assad’s regime would fall quite soon, but in fact the map has changed little in the succeeding years except for the loss by the government of two provincial capitals, Raqqa in March 2013 and Idlib in March 2015, and the conquest of the easternmost part of the country by ISIS. Which brings us back to the question of Islamic State.

When Abu Bakr al Baghdadi assumed its leadership in May 2010, the group was still called Islamic State in Iraq and it still didn’t control any significant swath of territory either in Iraq or elsewhere. There was not much point in launching major attacks in Iraq that might delay the final
departure of American troops from the country (by then postponed to December 2011), but the outbreak of the Syrian civil war presented Baghdadi with an unexpected opportunity. In August 2011 he sent Abu Muhammad al Golani, a Syrian-born militant who had been fighting for al Qaeda in Iraq since the early days of the invasion, to create a Syrian branch of ISI.

Golani was a powerful figure in his own right, an alumnus of Camp Bucca who had subsequently been a close associate of Abu Musab al Zarqawi. In 2011 he was serving as the head of ISI operations in Mosul province in northern Iraq. (As an Islamist organization dedicated to the creation of a single globe-spanning Islamic state, ISI has never paid attention to the nationality of its fighters as long as their Islam was of the right sort.) He took some Syrian fighters who had been serving with ISI in Iraq back to Syria with him, accompanied by some individual Iraqi experts. The new Syrian branch announced its existence in January 2012 as the Jabhat al Nusra li Ahli al Sham (The Support Front for the People of Syria)— generally known in English as the Nusra Front—and rapidly grew into one of the largest Islamist organizations among the diverse groups fighting the Assad regime.

Being, like Islamic State in Iraq, an affiliate of al Qaeda, the Nusra Front was placed on the United States’ list of foreign terrorist organizations and banned from receiving any American aid. However, it was flush with cash, allegedly coming in part from private donors in Saudi
Arabia and Qatar, and could buy all the weapons it needed (including American weapons) from non-Islamist groups who needed the money. While active in the fight against Assad, it devoted a large part of its time and effort to securing a firm territorial base across northern Syria.

ISI fighters coming from the long war of insurgency in Iraq, whether Syrian or Iraqi by origin, had experience and skills that made them more effective than most of the newly formed, often poorly armed and led militias that jostled for attention in the Syrian insurgency, and so there was a constant drift of Syrian fighters towards the Nusra Front. It was an Islamist organization, of course, holding extreme views on the proper way to interpret the rules of the religion and imposing them on the population within the territory it controlled, but with the whole Syrian insurgent movement becoming steadily more Islamic and less secular in its tone, this extremism did not isolate it politically. Al Nusra grew, it expanded territorially, and it prospered. By 2012, with the Syrian civil war essentially stalemated and the front lines barely moving, al Nusra had grown from around five hundred to about five thousand fighters in a year.

Meanwhile, back in Iraq, things were slowly starting to look up for ISI. The alienation of Sunni Iraqis by the deeply sectarian and staggeringly corrupt government of Nouri
al Maliki led eventually to popular protests in Anbar province. Beginning in December 2012, the protests spread rapidly to all the Sunni-majority parts of Iraq, and in the course of the year hundreds of protesters were killed in numerous clashes with the Iraqi army and police. By May 2013 mass-casualty bomb attacks targeting Shia areas of Baghdad resumed after a three-year hiatus (presumably the bombs were ISI doing its bit to help the confrontation grow). By the end of the year Sheik Abdul Malik al Saadi, an influential Sunni cleric, was calling the Maliki government “a sectarian government that wants to smash and eradicate the Sunni people in its own country,” and demanding that all Sunni politicians resign from their posts and abstain from the political process. It wasn’t exactly a Sunni Arab declaration of independence from Iraq, but it came close. So things were coming along quite nicely for ISI in Iraq, and even better for its al Nusra branch in Syria.

It was probably the brightening prospects for his organization that emboldened Abu Bakr al Baghdadi to take the fateful step in April 2013 of declaring the transformation of ISI into ISIS: the Islamic State of Iraq
and Syria
. (The last word of the title in Arabic is actually “al Sham,” a word that denotes not only Syria but also Lebanon and Palestine, but for practical purposes just “Syria” will do. Both the United States and the U.K. governments translate al Sham as “the Levant,” a rather antique English term for the entire Arabic-speaking eastern coast of the Mediterranean, and so ISIS is sometimes referred to in those quarters as ISIL.) By
adopting the new title “Islamic State of Iraq and Syria” Baghdadi was implicitly folding al Nusra back into the mother organization and downgrading Golani, the leader of al Nusra, to merely the Syrian branch manager of ISIS. He probably foresaw the consequences, but he did it anyway.

We inform you that neither the al-Nusra command nor its consultative council, nor its general manager were aware of this announcement. It reached them via the media and if [Baghdadi’s] speech is authentic, we were not consulted.”

Statement attributed to Abu Muhammad al Golani, head of al Nusra
²³

Golani predictably rejected the re-merger. There were probably personal and national motives at play here (Golani really was a Syrian, even if his ideology prevented him from saying so), but by now there were real differences between the two organizations as well. The basic religious ideology was the same, but the Nusra Front generally (not always) refrained from mass-casualty terrorist attacks on civilians, and did not engage in the spectacular public acts of extreme cruelty that ISI was making its trademark. Moreover, Golani had the support of al Qaeda in resisting the takeover bid: Ayman al Zawahiri, the Egyptian militant who had taken over as leader of al Qaeda after U.S. Special Forces killed Osama bin Laden in 2010, ruled that the merger should not go ahead. So Baghdadi finally took the inevitable last step and broke relations with al Qaeda: later in April he released an audio
message in which he rejected Zawahiri’s ruling and insisted that the merger of the two organizations would go ahead. “I have to choose between the rule of God and the rule of Zawahiri,” he said, “and I choose the rule of God.”
²⁴
A significant number of al Nusra fighters defected to ISIS, heightening the tensions between the two, and the war between ISIS and al Nusra got underway.

You may be wondering, at this point, why we should be lavishing such attention on the tangled political intrigues of organizations that were then (with the exception of al Qaeda) quite obscure. One answer is obvious: because that’s how everybody wound up where they are today, and even if you can’t remember all the names you get the idea. The other is subtler. ISIS, over the past couple of years, has acquired a vastly overblown reputation as the ultimate “terrorist” juggernaut, sprung from nowhere and led by an evil genius. It is nothing of the sort. Baghdadi is a clever, industrious man who truly believes in what he is doing, but any management expert would recognize that the way these organizations are behaving is well within the bounds of normal business competition. (Except for the particular business they are in, of course.)

The war of words between al Nusra and ISIS in Syria only turned into full-scale war in January 2014, when Golani gave ISIS a five-day ultimatum to accept mediation to end the infighting or be “expelled” from the region. ISIS responded by describing the Nusra Front as the “front of betrayal and treason,” and in the heavy fighting of the next
four months,
Al Jazeera
reported, the two organizations lost about three thousand fighters killed.
²⁵
A major offensive by al Nusra was defeated, and during the summer of 2014, ISIS drove the rival Islamist organization out of one of its key strongholds in Deir ez-Zor, capturing oil fields that had been an important source of al Nusra’s income. That income now went to ISIS, and the group had also consolidated a strong territorial base in eastern Syria, where it no longer faced any serious pressure either from the Assad regime or from rival militant groups. So, naturally, it turned its attention back to Iraq.

CHAPTER 7

THE CALIPHATE AT LAST!

B
y December 2013 what amounted to a Sunni insurgency was already underway in Iraq’s Anbar province, with the two biggest cities, Fallujah and Ramadi, largely under rebel control. ISIS fighters were visible in many parts of the province and took part in the fighting, but the Sunni resistance was a much broader front in which ISIS was only one element—and besides, at that point the attention of the ISIS high command was still firmly fixed on the war with al Nusra in Syria. ISIS could not afford to fight on two fronts at once, for its total fighting strength in both Iraq and Syria was around seven thousand men. There were plenty of volunteers but they still had to be paid (around $400 a month for foreign fighters, less for locals), and ISIS was having cash-flow problems.

Six months later the situation was very different. The war with al Nusra was over, ISIS controlled eastern Syria (apart from the military airbase outside Deir ez-Zor city) including almost the entire length of the Syrian-Iraqi border, and, now that it had access to oil, its cash flow problems were solved. It was ready to expand both in numbers and in territory, and Iraq was practically begging for its attention. The great ISIS offensive in Iraq began on June 4,
2014, not in Anbar but well to the north in Mosul province—and it is unlikely that the ISIS commanders initially thought of it as “great.” It was the usual military thing: keep advancing until you run into serious resistance, and then see if you can break through it. If so, keep going; if not, then the offensive stops there. So they were probably quite surprised when they ended up in possession of the city of Mosul, Iraq’s third-biggest, only six days later.

There were no heavy weapons involved on ISIS’s side; just the usual pick-up trucks with four or five fighters in the back, and the occasional vehicle-mounted machine-gun. There was virtually no resistance west of Mosul, and on June 6 the ISIS fighters—fifteen hundred at most, but possibly as few as five hundred on the first day of contact—just drove straight into the city, shooting up the two-man checkpoints as they passed them. The Iraqi army garrison outnumbered them at least fifteen to one, but there was no real battle. Some small groups of soldiers or police tried to put up an organized resistance here and there, but they were quickly overwhelmed, and the rest was just mounting chaos and hysteria as terrified soldiers scrambled to get out of the way of the ISIS fighters. Soon they were changing into civilian clothes and trying to get out of the city, for there was no point in surrendering: with ISIS, capture usually meant execution. Hundreds of thousands of civilians also fled east across the Tigris River bridges, including most of the city’s Christian, Kurdish and other minority populations. By June 10 the city (pre-war
population 1.5 million) was entirely in ISIS’s hands. In battle, Napoleon said, the moral is to the physical as three to one; in Mosul it was at least twenty-to-one.