ISIS: Inside the Army of Terror (2 page)

Most important, ISIS presents itself to an embattled Sunni minority in Iraq, and an even more persecuted and victimized Sunni majority in Syria, as the sect’s last line of defense against a host of enemies—the “infidel” United States, the “apostate” Gulf Arab states, the “Nusayri” Alawite dictatorship in Syria, the “rafida” one in Iran, and the latter’s satrapy in Baghdad.
 
Even here, as with all conspiracy theories, ISIS relies on kernels of truth and awkward geopolitical realities to depict a satanic global enterprise ranged against it. Syria’s warplanes are now flying the same skies as America’s, purportedly bombing the same targets in eastern Syria—while the US government maintains that Assad has no future in Damascus. In Iraq, Iranian-built Shia militia groups, some of them designated by the US government as terrorist entities (because they have American blood on their hands), now serve as the vanguard of the Iraqi Security Forces’ ground campaign to beat back ISIS, with the advertised supervision and encouragement of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards Corps, another US-designated terrorist entity. These militias are also committing acts of ethnic cleansing in Sunni villages along the way, earning the censure of Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch—all while US warplanes indirectly provide them with air cover. Whatever Washington’s intentions, its perceived alliance of convenience with the murderous regimes of Syria and Iran is keeping Sunnis who loathe or fear ISIS from participating in another grassroots effort (like the earlier Iraqi “Awakening”) to expel the terrorists from their midst. Those who have tried have been mercilessly slaughtered; others have simply been co-opted and pledged fealty to the slaughterers.
 

At once sensationalized and underestimated, brutal and savvy, ISIS has destroyed the boundaries of contemporary nation-states and proclaimed itself the restorer of a lost Islamic empire. An old enemy has become a new one, determined to prolong what has already been an overlong war.

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FOUNDING FATHER

ABU MUSAB AL-ZARQAWI’S JIHAD

“Rush O Muslims to your state. Yes, it is your state. Rush, because Syria is not for the Syrians, and Iraq is not for the Iraqis.” Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi—by then anointed Caliph Ibrahim—heralded the end of ISIS and the birth of the Islamic State on June 28, 2014, the first day of Ramadan. He preached from the pulpit of the Great Mosque of al-Nuri in Mosul, a city his forces had taken control of days earlier. Although a native-born Iraqi, al-Baghdadi was abolishing his and all forms of citizenship. As he saw it, the nations of the Fertile Crescent and indeed the world no longer existed. Only the Islamic state did. Moreover, humanity could neatly be divided into two “camps.” The first was the “camp of the Muslims and the
mujahidin
[holy warriors] everywhere”; the second was “the camp of the Jews, the Crusaders, their allies.” Standing there, draped in black, al-Baghdadi presented himself as the heir to the medieval Abbasid caliphate as well as the embodied spirit of his heroic predecessor, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who had spoken in much the same revolutionary terms and who had revered the mosque from which Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi was preaching the fulfillment of a darkling vision eleven years in the making.

THE BOY FROM ZARQA

The scruffy burg of Zarqa lies about twenty-five miles to the northeast of Amman, Jordan. Before its most notorious native son adopted the name of the town for his nom de guerre, it had two main associations, one liturgical and the other humanitarian. Zarqa was the biblical staging ground of Jacob’s famous struggle with God and is today the location of al-Ruseifah, the oldest Palestinian refugee camp in Jordan. Ahmad Fadhil Nazzal al-Khalaylah, as al-Zarqawi was born, hailed not from a nationless people but from the Bani Hassan tribe, a confederation of Bedouins who resided on the East Bank of the Jordan River and were known for their loyalty to the Hashemite Kingdom. Al-Zarqawi’s father was a
mukhtar
, a village elder, municipally empowered to arbitrate local disputes, although his son was more fond of getting into them. Al-Zarqawi was an unpromising student who wrote Arabic at a semiliterate level, dropped out of school in 1984, the same year his father died, and resorted immediately to a life of crime. “He was not so big, but he was bold,” one of al-Zarqawi’s cousins later recounted to the
New York Times
. He drank and bootlegged alcohol; some contemporaries also say that he was a pimp. His first stint in prison was for drug possession and sexual assault.

Worried that her son was descending into an underworld from which he’d never escape, al-Zarqawi’s mother, Um Sayel, enrolled him in religious courses at the Al-Husayn Ben Ali Mosque in Amman. The experience was transformative. Faith had the intended effect of supplanting the lawlessness, but not in the way Um Sayel might have hoped.

It was in the mosque that al-Zarqawi first discovered Salafism, a doctrine that in its contemporary form advocates a return to theological purity and the traditions of the Prophet Muhammad. Salafists deem Western-style democracy and modernity not only fundamentally irreconcilable with Islam, but the main pollutants
of the Arab civilization, which after World War I stagnated under the illegitimate and “apostate” regimes in Egypt, Jordan, Syria, and Iraq. At the most extreme end of their continuum, the Salafists are also adherents of jihad, a word that denotes “struggle” in Arabic and contains a multitude of definitions. When the Soviets invaded Afghanistan in 1979, however, its primary definition meant “armed resistance.”

THE HAYATABAD MILIEU

Hayatabad is a city on the outskirts of Peshawar, Pakistan, that rests at the base of the Khyber Pass, the slipway for multiple empires that have entered, and then exited, Afghanistan. In the late 1980s, the city had become a kind of Casablanca for the Soviet-Afghan war, then winding down. It was a city of perpetual waiting and planning, host to soldiers, spies, peddlers, crooks, warlords, smugglers, refugees, black marketeers, and veteran and aspiring holy warriors.

It was also the operational headquarters of Osama bin Laden, one of the scions of a billionaire Saudi industrial family, who was busy laying the groundwork and amassing the personnel for his own start-up organization, al-Qaeda. Bin Laden’s mentor at the time was also one of Hayatabad’s leading Islamist theoreticians, a Palestinian named Abdullah Azzam, who in 1984 had published a book that became a manifesto for the Afghan mujahidin. It argued that Muslims had both an individual and communal obligation to expel conquering or occupying armies from their sacred lands. Certainly galvanized by Israel’s military occupation of his birthplace, Azzam explicitly made the anti-Soviet campaign the priority for all believing Muslims, not just Afghans. Like al-Baghdadi’s exhortations decades later, Azzam’s was a global casting call for mujahidin from around the world to join one camp against another. Though not quite advocating a transnational caliphate, Azzam did think
that Afghanistan was where a viable Islamic state could be constructed on the ashes of Communist hegemony. This war, after all, was still a purist one, not yet diluted by a cocktail of competitive and paradoxical ideologies, which the Palestinian cause had lately been, thanks to the secular nationalism of Yasser Arafat and the jet-set Leninist terrorism of Carlos the Jackal.

So when Azzam relocated to Peshawar, he and bin Laden became den mothers to the arriving “Arab-Afghans,” as the foreign mujahidin were colloquially known, who were eager to wage holy war but clueless as to how or where to begin. Together they founded Maktab al-Khadamat, or the Services Bureau, which operated out of a residence bin Laden owned. If Azzam was the Marx, a grand philosopher articulating the concept of a new revolutionary struggle and drawing in the necessary disciples to realize it, then bin Laden was his Engels, the wealthy scion who paid the bills and kept the lights on while the master toiled on texts that would change the world.

About three thousand Arab-Afghans passed through this jihadist orientation center, where they were provided food, money, and housing, as well as acculturated to a strange and ethno-linguistically heterodox North-West Frontier. Untold millions of dollars passed through the Services Bureau as well, much of it raised by bin Laden and Azzam, and some of it channeled by the Saudi government, with which bin Laden—through his family’s construction empire—had close ties. Some of the world’s most notorious international terrorists gained their most valuable commodity—contacts—under the patronage systems set up by bin Laden and Azzam.

Azzam and his pupil eventually fell out, owing to bin Laden’s closeness to another rising celebrity in the jihadist firmament: Ayman al-Zawahiri, an Egyptian surgeon who had done three months of medical work for the Red Crescent Society in Pakistan in the summer of 1980 and had even taken short jaunts into Afghanistan to
observe the war firsthand. By the end of the decade, al-Zawahiri had earned global notoriety for being among the hundreds imprisoned and tortured for his alleged complicity in the assassination of Egyptian president Anwar Sadat. He had been the emir, or prince, of Jamaat al-Jihad, or the Jihad Group, which had sought a coup d’etat
in Cairo and the establishment of an Islamic theocracy in its place.

After his release, al-Zawahiri returned to Peshawar in 1986 to resume his medical work at a Red Crescent hospital, and to reconstitute al-Jihad. His Salafism by that time had grown more extreme; he had been flirting with the concept of
takfirism—
the excommunication of fellow Muslims on the basis of their supposed heresy, and an injunction that almost always carried with it a death sentence. Thus, when al-Zawahiri befriended bin Laden, he was put on a direct collision course with Abdullah Azzam, who was opposed to Muslims killing other Muslims. For Azzam, jihadism’s true target was the irreligious and depraved West, which of course included the state of Israel. Al-Zawahiri and Azzam hated each other and competed for bin Laden’s attention and good graces. Most of all, they competed for his money.

In late November 1989 Azzam and two of his sons were killed after a roadside bomb blew up their car on the way to a mosque. (Theories as to the likely culprits behind the bomb ranged from the KGB to Saudi intelligence to the CIA to bin Laden and/or al-Zawahiri.) The very next month, one of Azzam’s other sons, Huthaifa Azzam, went to the Peshawar airport to collect a group of mostly Jordanian Arab-Afghans who were arriving late in the day to fight the Red Army, then about two months shy of a categorical withdrawal from Afghanistan. One of the arrivals was al-Zarqawi.

CLAUSEWITZ FOR TERRORISTS

In the spring of 1989 Abu Musab al-Zarqawi made his way from Hayatabad eastward into the city of Khost, Afghanistan, arriving just
in time to see the Red Army defeated. Rather than return to Jordan as the man who had missed the holy war, he stayed on in the North-West Frontier region until 1993, establishing more useful contacts among those vying to determine the fate of a post-Soviet Afghanistan. Among those were the brother of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the 9/11 mastermind, and Mohammed Shobana, who published a jihadist magazine called
Al-Bunyan Al-Marsus
(the
Impenetrable Edifice
). Despite his remedial Arabic, and solely on the basis of his referral by a well-regarded cleric, al-Zarqawi was hired as one of the magazine’s correspondents. He also met his future brother-in-law, Salah al-Hami, a Jordanian-Palestinian journalist affiliated with Abdullah Azzam’s
Al-Jihad
,
the in-house magazine of the Services Bureau. Al-Hami had lost a leg to a land mine in Khost, and he later claimed that it was during his convalescence in a hospital, after complaining that he would never find a wife with his deformity, that al-Zarqawi offered one of his seven sisters to al-Hami for the purposes of marriage. She traveled to Peshawar for the wedding, an event that furnished the first and only footage of al-Zarqawi until April 2006, when his al-Qaeda franchise in Iraq released a propaganda video showing its black-clad commander firing a machine gun like Rambo.

According to al-Hami, al-Zarqawi’s reportage consisted mostly of interviews with veterans of the Soviet-Afghan war, through whom he lived vicariously. At night, he would try to memorize the Quran.

Al-Hami returned to Jordan after a few months with his new bride, but his brother-in-law stayed on, participating in what was then an incipient civil war for the fate of a newly liberated Afghanistan. He cast his lot with the Pashtun warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, who served intermittently as the prime minister in Kabul before his administration was eventually usurped by the Taliban, whereupon Hekmatyar fled to Iran. Al-Zarqawi’s days as a chronicler of other people’s war stories were at an end. He wanted to make his own.

He attended a series of training camps on the Afghanistan-
Pakistan border, including Sada al-Malahim (“the Echo of Battle”), which was essentially the Fort Dix for al-Qaeda. It graduated the masterminds of the two separate World Trade Center attacks, Ramzi Yousef and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. As recounted by Loretta Napoleoni in her book
Insurgent Iraq: Al-Zarqawi and the New Generation
, bin Laden’s ex-bodyguard, Nasir Ahmad Nasir Abdallah al-Bahari, described camp life at Sada al-Malahim as three distinct phases of training and indoctrination. The first was “the days of experimentation,” which lasted for fifteen days, during which a recruit was subjected to “psychological, as well as moral, exhaustion”—this, evidently, to separate the softies from the real warriors. The second was the “military preparation period,” which lasted for forty-five days, during which a recruit was taught first how to wield light weapons, then graduated on to shoulder-borne surface-to-air missiles and cartography courses. The third and final phase was “the guerrilla war tactics course,” which taught military theory. Clausewitz for terrorists.

HOMECOMING

Al-Zarqawi returned to Jordan in 1992 and was placed immediately under surveillance by the kingdom’s General Intelligence Directorate (GID), who were then worried that repatriating Arab-Afghans would redirect their attention to the enemy at home. GID was right to be worried. Their fears were proven out in 1993, when Jordan’s peace talks with Israel exacerbated Islamist antipathy against the kingdom and those fighters newly returned from the Afghan front began founding jihadist start-ups of their own, such as Jaysh Muhammad (the Army of Muhammad) and al-Hashaykkah (the Jordanian Afghans).

Al-Zarqawi’s return to civilian life was inevitably abortive. He visited Abu Muhammad al-Maqdisi, a Jordanian-Palestinian Salafist whom he had met in Hayatabad, and who had been the one to refer him as a suitable correspondent for Shobana’s magazine.
Al-Maqdisi had recently published a blistering anti-Western screed,
Democracy: A Religion
, which drew a stark line between the political economy of the “pagans” and Allah’s divine law. Together, in a Levantine shadow play of the bin Laden and Azzam double act, al-Zarqawi and al-Maqdisi proselytized in makeshift salons around Jordan, inveighing against their government’s warming relations with Israel and America’s meddling, imperialistic role in the Middle East. Al-Maqdisi was a pedantic scholar, full of invective about the perceived shortcomings of contemporary politics; al-Zarqawi was charismatic but an intellectual lightweight. “He never struck me as intelligent,” Mohammed al-Dweik, al-Zarqawi’s future lawyer, said years later.

Al-Maqdisi founded his own Jordanian jihadist cell known as Bayt al-Imam (the House of the Imam) and enlisted al-Zarqawi. Their first foray into homegrown terrorism smacked more of a Keystone Kops farce than of a grisly tragedy. Weapons discarded by the retreating Iraqi army at the end of the First Gulf War had furnished a thriving Kuwaiti market for matériel. Al-Maqdisi, who had lived in the Persian Gulf for a time and had the relevant connections, purchased antipersonnel mines, antitank rockets, and hand grenades and had them smuggled into Jordan for future terrorist attacks against the kingdom. Al-Maqdisi gave al-Zarqawi the contraband to hide, then asked for it back; al-Zarqawi obliged, save for two bombs, which he would later claim were for “use in a suicide operation in the territories occupied by the Zionists.” Aware that the GID was tracking their movements and knew about their illicit wares, both terrorists had tried to flee Jordan before they were caught. In March 1994 both were arrested—al-Zarqawi after the GID raided his house and found his stockpile of weapons. Discovered in bed, he tried to shoot one officer and then commit suicide. He managed neither. He was charged and convicted with illegal weapons possession and belonging to a proscribed terrorist organization.