ISIS: Inside the Army of Terror (9 page)

Moreover, ISI focused on hitting what Laith Alkhouri calls “soft targets” like Iraqi military bases and Shia religious leaders. “This was intended as a PR campaign to remaining Salafist factions outside the al-Qaeda fold,” said Alkhouri. “The message was: ‘We
are the only group that is looked upon as legitimate by all jihadi groups around the world. You guys are losing men every day. Why don’t you just join us?’ Jaysh al-Islami refused to join them, which is true to this day. So al-Masri and al-Baghdadi simply intensified their PR. Ultimately, they resorted to killing jihadists who didn’t join ISI in order to take over their operational territory. It was rather like a mafia turf war.”

In keeping with its name, the Islamic State of Iraq also transformed the Mujahideen Shura Council’s remit by creating and populating various other “ministries” such as one for agriculture, oil, and health. It was nation-building, or at least giving that impression. Most controversially, al-Masri, while reaffirming his commitment to bin Laden, also made bayat to al-Baghdadi, placing AQI hierarchically under the patronage of a newly formed umbrella. In jihadist terms, this was like taking a mistress and presenting her as your second wife to your first.

Al-Masri was indeed trying to have it both ways: to remain the emir of AQI while also flirting with outright secession from it to command his own independent operation in Iraq. It wasn’t until ISIS formally broke with al-Zawahiri in early 2014 that the deep and irreparable fissure created by al-Baghdadi’s pretensions of statehood and al-Masri’s subordination of his faction to ISI was at last revealed—by a very angry Ayman al-Zawahiri. In May 2014 he issued a statement in which he quoted an unknown third party who had characterized al-Baghdadi and al-Masri as “repulsive” fools. If al-Qaeda had ever reserved such animadversions for al-Zarqawi, it never publicized them.

THE NEW VBIEDS

The rise of ISI also coincided with the rise in frequency, and sophistication, of VBIED attacks. According to Jessica Lewis McFate, an Iraq analyst at the Institute for the Study of War, one reason why
ISIS today projects a much larger military strength than it actually has owes to its expert use of these devices. Not only is the carnage from VBIED bombings extensive, but the weapon is as much about psychologically discombobulating the enemy in advance of a major military push. “We see them at checkpoints mostly,” Lewis said. “We’re looking more at VBIEDs or suicide VBIEDs as a tool to catalyst an attack or drive tension for an one. So, for instance, ISIS will conduct a VBIED bombing somewhere in Baghdad or along the Euphrates River Valley, and then will test to see how the Iraqi Security Forces and Shia militias respond to those attacks.”

From 2006 onward al-Masri had specialized in pursuing these kinds of attacks in and around Baghdad; factories for the outfitting of cars and trucks with ordnance were discovered in the Baghdad “belts”—the towns and villages that surrounded the capital and where, up until the “surge,” the United States had maintained a relatively light footprint.

ISI divided Baghdad and the belts into six zones, five centered around the city. Each zone was ruled by its own local emir. Digital intelligence on ISI, obtained in a JSOC raid, found that one such emir, Abu Ghazwan, who lorded over the thirty-thousand-man town of Tarmiya, managed a number of AQI cells in northern Iraq, including ones that were recruiting women and children for suicide bombing missions. Abu Ghazwan was also intimately acquainted with the schedules of US and Iraqi patrol units, how to avoid them, and how to lay traps for them. The
Wall Street Journal
reported that in mid-February 2007, a “massive truck bomb sheared off the front of the soldiers’ base in Tarmiya, sending concrete and glass flying through the air like daggers. The soldiers at the small outpost spent the next four hours fighting for their lives against a force of 70 to 80 insurgents.” (More recently, ISIS has targeted Tarmiya with VBIED attacks: in June 2014 it blew up the houses of high-ranking Iraqi Security Forces personnel and a former tribal Awakening leader.)

Abu Ghazwan’s overview of how his mini emirate functioned suggested that ISI wasn’t just using Tarmiya as a base of terror operations—it was actively building a statelet. “We are running the district, the people’s affairs, and the administrative services, and we have committees to run the district headed by my brother Abu Bakr,” he said with not a little self-satisfaction. Indeed, AQI’s occupation of Tarmiya was redolent of the kind of Islamic fief that had characterized Ansar al-Islam’s five-hundred-square-kilometer zone in Iraqi Kurdistan, or ISIS’s rule in the eastern Syrian province of Raqqa. Abu Ghazwan even had his municipal conveyances for his Tarmiya emirate. He drove around in a white Nissan truck confiscated from the Iraqi police force and repurposed as an ISI car. He also piloted a ferryboat taken from a water treatment plant along the Tigris River.

Abu Ghazwan’s personal history also highlighted another alarming trend of ISI warfare—recidivism. He had once been a detainee of the coalition, as had another man by the name of Mazin Abu Abd al-Rahman, who was newly released from Camp Bucca, one of the largest US-run prisons in Iraq based in Basra and named for a New York City fire marshal who had perished in the Twin Towers on 9/11.

As with al-Zarqawi’s Swaqa, Camp Bucca gained a deserved reputation for serving as much as a terrorist academy as a detention facility. Islamists reaffirmed their bona fides by preaching to the converted, but also by proselytizing to new inmates from the general population of criminals who may have gone into the clink as secularists or mildly religious, only to emerge as violent fundamentalists. In Bucca, al-Rahman not only learned the finer points of sharia, he also made friends with AQI bomb-makers and thus graduated from US custody as a new-minted expert in the construction of VBIEDs. Another AQI member later recalled how al-Rahman’s time in the facility also acquainted him with the necessary contacts
to start his own jihadist cell in the northern Baghdad belt once he was released. As Michael Gordon and Bernard Trainor recount: “It took [al-Rahman] and two other men two days to build each car bomb in the Tarmiya farmhouse they used as a workshop . . .using stolen cars driven up from a parking lot where they were stored in Adhamiya and a combination of plastic and homemade explosives. The evening before an attack, the completed car bomb would be driven from Tarmiya back into Baghdad, where it would be stored overnight in a parking lot or garage before the bomber drove it to its final destination and blew it up.”

The founder of AQI had been found and killed thirteen miles away from JSOC’s headquarters at Balad Air Base. A major cottage industry for car bombs was thriving some forty miles north of Camp Victory.

5

THE AWAKENING

IRAQIS TURN ON ISI

“The history of the Anbar Awakening is very bitter,” a former high-ranking official in the Iraqi government told us toward the end of 2014. “The people who fought al-Qaeda were later abandoned by their government. Many of them were also executed by al-Qaeda, and some of them were even arrested by Iraqi forces. Until there is a perceivable change [in] the way business is done by Baghdad, I strongly doubt that people are willing to risk their lives and start something similar against ISIS.” His point, which is reflective of many Iraqi Sunnis we have interviewed, is better illuminated by the origins of the Awakening. Like most propitious discoveries, this one happened by accident.

SAHWA

The Desert Protectors program had been a short-lived but useful exercise in American alliance-building with the tribesmen of Ramadi. By 2006, however, the provincial capital of Anbar had fallen again to AQI’s dominance.

The jihadists were so entrenched in the city that they resorted to US Army Corps of Engineers–type innovations for laying undetectable IEDs to deter or kill US and Iraqi columns. They used power saws to cut away large chunks of asphalt in the road and fill the resulting craters with ordnance before reapplying a seemingly untouched blacktop. To the naked eye, it looked like normal road—until the bomb went off, damaging or destroying a Bradley fighting vehicle or Abrams tank and killing or maiming the occupants inside. The holes these inlaid IEDs left in the ground also caused severe infrastructure damage, bursting the city’s sewage pipes and flooding the streets with filth.

As elsewhere in Iraq, the provincial government in Ramadi had been keeping two sets of books, one for its official duties on behalf of Baghdad, the other for AQI, which bribed and cajoled Iraqi Security Forces and municipal officials, using its greatest asset outside of murder: oil-smuggling revenue. Barrels of purloined crude were imported into Ramadi on a regular basis from the Bayji Oil Refinery up north, then exported for resale on Iraq’s black market. This had been the tribes’ arrangement with the Saddamists for years. But the new bosses proved more difficult to work with.

Locals bridled at medieval rule, for starters, especially since one of AQI’s self-arrogated entitlements was sharia’s answer to droit du seigneur: just like ISIS today, the jihadists in 2006 raped Iraqi women at their pleasure. Tribal elders, too, were susceptible to kidnapping or murder. Two sheikhs from the Albu Aetha and Albu Dhiyab tribes had been killed already, and others were being targeted as competition to what had become the AQI’s thriving war economy.

The people of Ramadi turned slowly against terrorism. Nighttime vigilantism gained enough of a following among families of the group’s victims, who were joined by vengeful Iraqi policemen and even rival insurgents fed up with takfiris, that soon a bona fide civil resistance movement was born under the banner of Thuwar
al-Anbar, or the Revolutionaries of Anbar. It was the beginning of what became known as Sahwa
—
“Awakening.” These native revolutionaries proved so successful in Ramadi that AQI even attempted to negotiate with them.

What made Ramadi different was that, when the city was retaken by American and Iraqi forces, a post-battle strategy of police recruitment was wisely implemented not in the vulnerable city center, which, as with the glass factory episode two years prior, was an easy target for insurgent attack, but in the adjoining rural tribal districts. Keeping Sahwa confined to the countryside encouraged what was already a growing insurrection to build enough to become an officially sanctioned one, fostered by growing mutual trust between the Americans and the tribes. One of the key tribal allies was the charismatic Abdul Sattar al-Rishawi, whose compound had actually been raided twice before by US forces after allegations that he was cooperating commercially with the insurgents. Suddenly, out of the very self-interest and pragmatism that had catalyzed the temporary alliance, al-Rishawi was ready to cut a new deal with the enemy of his enemy. “People with ties to the insurgents have us over for tea,” a US lieutenant had told the journalist George Packer about a similar experience in Tal Afar in 2005, when H. R. McMaster had overseen that border town’s temporary turnaround on much the same principle. Al-Rishawi would prove one of the most significant allies the United States ever made in Iraq.

AQI’s attempt to undermine his efforts failed because tribal disaffection had already grown into a significant groundswell. Along with his brother, Al-Rishawi formed the Anbar Emergency Council, which claimed to represent seventeen Anbari tribes ready to partner with coalition forces against AQI. The council quickly expanded and was rebranded the Anbar Awakening. Al-Rishawi oversaw the recruitment of four hundred men to the Iraqi police force in October 2006, and then another five hundred in November.
He was also farsighted enough to realize that recruitment did not necessarily translate into immediate security: these cadets all had to be sent off to Jordan for training, creating a vacuum that AQI was sure to exploit. Al-Rishawi convinced Nouri al-Maliki to authorize the formation of makeshift paramilitary battalions to serve in their stead. And so the Emergency Response Units were born, led not by corrupt or incompetent neophytes but by tribesmen who had served in the former Iraqi army and knew how to fight. Just before New Year 2007, the Units numbered a little more than two thousand men.

To make these ad hoc solutions permanent, the United States also shrewdly set up new police substations throughout the Ramadi region, creating a further psychological bolster for the tribes—that US-imposed and Iraqi-maintained law and order was there to stay—which served as a deterrent for the insurgents. VBIED attacks in the outskirts of the city dropped as a result. Al-Rishawi’s general success led him into fits of hyperbole and overconfidence, although both were surely welcome to American ears at the time. “I swear to God, if we have good weapons, if we have good vehicles, if we have good support, I can fight Al Qaeda all the way to Afghanistan,” the sheikh told the
New York Times
,
and evidently also President Bush, who met him on a visit to Baghdad in 2007
.
In the end, Al-Rishawi wasn’t able to finish seeing al-Qaeda run out of Iraq. He was assassinated by the jihadists just days after his encounter with the president.

The Anbar Awakening was bottom-up rather than top-down, and thus seized upon at the brigade level by other quick-thinking and improvisational commanders who were ready to negotiate with those who only the day before were sharing tea with the insurgents. The December 2005 election had already proved that some Sunni terrorists were reconcilable to Iraq’s political system and didn’t need to be captured or killed.

Lieutenant General Graeme Lamb, General Casey’s British deputy, had long held that it was only a matter of a time until AQI’s presence proved too noxious for Sunnis and some of the jihadists’ less extremist battlefield partners turned to the coalition for help. The question was determining who could be approached in return and who was too far gone. AQI operatives were off-limits, clearly, but what about the organization’s more ideologically flexible “affiliates” in the Islamic State of Iraq? Lamb met with an emir from Ansar al-Sunna, a Salafist faction that had recently begun to doubt ISI’s methods. The emir told him that while foreign occupiers could and must be fought, Ansar al-Sunna knew that the more exigent evil facing Iraq was al-Masri and al-Baghdadi’s head-loppers and rapists. “We have watched you in Anbar for three and a half years,” he told Lamb. “We have concluded that you do not threaten our faith or our way of life. Al-Qaeda does.”

THE SURGE

Solidifying an incipient popular revolt against AQI meant adding to the conventional military capability in Iraq. Much has been written and debated about the “surge” of US forces in Iraq, which began in 2007 under a cloud of domestic political controversy in Washington. Overseen by Petraeus, the policy adopted by the president called for the injection of five additional combat brigades—up to thirty thousand more troops—and a completely overhauled war strategy. The new strategy demanded confronting not only AQI but also the vast network of state-backed Shia militias and Iranian proxies that posed just as much of a security threat to US forces and the Sunni civilians suddenly being asked to help rout jihadism. Not coincidentally, the architect of that strategy was the man in charge of implementing it.

Petraeus and Marine Lieutenant General James Mattis had
coauthored a new field manual on counterinsurgency (COIN), a 282-page guidebook for beating back a Maoist-style guerrilla resistance by turning the communities it lived among and cooperated with against it—or, to use the oft-cited Maoist metaphor, turning the sea against the fish. A mixture of soldiering and policing, COIN’s magic ratio, as codified by the Petraeus-Mattis manual, was 20-to-1,000—twenty soldiers for every one thousand civilians. (That math incorporated Iraqi army soldiers and policemen.)

The Sunni tribes didn’t have to be persuaded that hunting AQI was in their interest—they were already doing so more bravely and ably than most of the Iraqi army. Petraeus had seen that firsthand. He had been in charge of the training program of the Iraqi Security Forces, a program that had been beset by dysfunction and corruption. Many of the cadets proved incompetent or unwilling to fight. Others stole equipment and ran off to resell it—in some cases, to the very enemy America had hired them to beat. In 2007 the US Government Accountability Office released a report stating that close to 190,000 AK-47s and sidearms had disappeared from registered stocks. That meant weapons purchased by the American taxpayer were very likely floating around Iraq and killing American servicemen.

The first two surge brigades were dispatched to Baghdad, the hornet’s nest for AQI, which wasted no time trying to sabotage the new COIN strategy. AQI was strongest in the belts surrounding the capital, where newly established US outposts were attacked by coordinated VBIED assaults. In a single day in February, five such operations killed around five hundred people. Conditions were particularly nightmarish in areas with mixed Sunni-Shia populations, where Special Groups and insurgents kidnapped, tortured, killed, and ethnically cleansed each other. The US military’s solution was a partition: it built enormous and extensive concrete walls to keep one sect away from its rival.

“The key to Baghdad is this terrain, especially the north and
south,” Jim Hickey told us. “Sunni tribes and families—they were the support bases AQI used in 2005 and 2007. We ultimately won the battle for Baghdad because we cleared out the supporting belts they spent years building.”

DIYALA, THEN AND NOW

US failure in destroying AQI’s purchase on Iraq’s capital was actually rooted in some of its deceptive successes. When al-Zarqawi was killed in Hibhib in June 2006, JSOC recovered a cache of AQI intelligence that suggested that the jihadists believed they were losing their chief stronghold, the so-called Triangle of Death in southern Baghdad, to the Americans. Al-Zarqawi had contemplated yet another change of venue for his headquarters just before he was killed. But the coalition’s territorial victories were Pyrrhic because they were tactical, not strategic. Did defeat for AQI in one place mean defeat nationwide? On that, competing camps within the US defense establishment disagreed. A military intelligence analysis commissioned by George Casey Jr., Petraeus’s predecessor, concluded that all the trademarks of Zarqawist violence—suicide bombings, sniper attacks, IED detonations—were noticeably fewer, and the jihadists seemed to be too. Furthermore, the overwhelming cluster of attacks was confined to only four provinces out of Iraq’s eighteen; but half the national population resided in twelve of the remaining ones, which collectively experienced just 6 percent of all attacks. That meant that AQI was losing badly throughout Iraq, according to Casey.

The rebuttal to Casey’s sanguine appraisal was offered by Derek Harvey. Harvey thought the methodology of the general’s study was wrong and was mistaking short-term advances for long-term ones. He cited a DIA-commissioned plebiscite that had found that Iraqis had minimal confidence in their own government’s defense
establishment but were still full of admiration for the “armed resistance.” That didn’t bode well, since popular support was its own force multiplier, and one that could keep Iraq’s national security in a state of turmoil. Harvey also noted that the way the military was counting terrorist attacks was highly misleading, because it only scored ones that were successful, i.e., that resulted in casualties. But what about the
failed
attacks, the near misses? If a detonated IED turned out to be a dud or if it didn’t injure or kill people, did it still not constitute an attack and indicate AQI’s enduring ability to terrorize and operational capability to do so?

Harvey’s more depressing analysis proved correct. Since AQI kept relocating its command centers from city to city, what had been Casey’s strictly counterterrorism-focused strategy was an agonized game of Whac-a-Mole.

By 2007 AQI had set up new headquarters in Baqubah, the provincial capital of Diyala province. As they had done the prior year in Ramadi, the jihadists took over not only downtown Baqubah but the outlying rural areas in the south as well, which ran parallel to the Diyala River and afforded them a verdant canopy to mask their movements and activities. The group’s fallback base was in nearby Buhriz, a former Baathist redoubt where it had resorted to publicly executing or kidnapping locals, if not booting them from their homes. As for AQI’s “governance,” it seized the bread mills outside of the city and rationed food to command the fealty of those it didn’t dispossess or murder. Buhriz subsequently became the site of one the most intense battles of the entire Iraq War.

It started in March 2007, when a US Stryker battalion and a paratrooper squadron moved in to take the city, encountering a storm of RPG and sniper fire. The enemy targeted US forces “in small numbers,” using “subterfuge,” Sergeant 1st Class Benjamin Hanner told the
Washington Post.
“They’re controlled, their planning is good, their human intel network and early-warning networks are effective.” They
were also skillful at using decoys. They laid twenty-seven IEDs in a one-mile expanse of road but ensured that only one out of every three or four bombs was operational. “I have never seen, before or since, organization like that,” Shawn McGuire, a staff sergeant recalled to Gordon and Trainor. “They were organized. They were well trained. They shot. They could hit things. Instead of just poking around corners and shooting and running, they would bound and maneuver on you. It was almost like watching US soldiers train.”