Quarterly Essay 58 Blood Year: Terror and the Islamic State (14 page)

44
“The time has come for President Assad to step aside”: Barack Obama, quoted in Scott Wilson and Joby Warrick, “Asad must go, Obama says,”
The Washington Post
, 18 August 2011.

44
“killing four Americans”: Adolph “Spike” Dubs, killed in a kidnapping in Kabul in February 1979, was the last US ambassador murdered in the line of duty. Arnold Raphel (who died in a plane crash with Pakistani President Zia ul-Haq in August 1988) was arguably another – though the cause of the crash remains unclear, and it may have been simply an accident.

46
“The Iranians, in particular”:
New Yorker
writer Laura Secor produced some of the most insightful reportage on the Green Revolution, as it unfolded in 2009. Her forthcoming
Children of Paradise: A Biography of Iran’s Democracy Movement
(Penguin Canada, 2016) examines these issues in more detail.

46
“a highly factionalised set of opponents”: There is also a strong urban–rural and social class dynamic in the conflict. See David Kilcullen and Nathaniel Rosenblatt, “The Rise of Syria’s Urban Poor: Why the War for Syria’s Future Will Be Fought Over the Country’s New Urban Villages,”
Prism
, vol. 4, Syria Supplement, 2014 pp. 3–10.

47
For the full text of the UN Security Council resolution, see United Nations,
Security Council Approves ‘No-Fly Zone’ over Libya, Authorizing ‘All Necessary Measures’ to Protect Civilians, by Vote of 10 in Favour with 5 Abstentions,
17 March 2011, <
www.un.org/press/en/2011/sc10200.doc.htm
>.

47
“special forces . . . deployed”: John Barry, “America’s Secret Libya War,”
The Daily Beast
, 30 August 2011, <
www.the-dailybeast.com/articles/2011/08/30/americas-secret-libya-war-u-s-spent-1-billion-on-covert-ops-helping-nato.html
>.

48
“the President’s off-the-cuff remark”: Wilson and Warrick.

48
“AQ, as it began to recover”: Author’s discussion with a clandestine services officer with extensive Iraq experience, Rabat, Morocco, October 2013.

48
“what we
think
we know” and “or else escaped”: These “facts” (which need to be taken with some scepticism due to their source) come from a brief bio of Baghdadi published by ISIS in July 2013 under the title
Moments from the Life Journey of our Master the Emir of the Believers Abu Bakr al-Husseini al-Qurashi al-Baghdadi – May Allah Preserve Him – Emir of the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant
, translation available online at SITE Group, <
http://news.siteintelgroup.com/blog/index.php/entry/226-the-story-behind-abu-bakr-al-baghdadi
>.

49
“But as the drawdown continued”: Ben Hubbard and Eric Schmitt, “Military Skill and Terrorist Technique Fuel Success of ISIS,”
The New York Times
, 27 August 2014.

49
This discussion of developments in Syria, and in Iraq after the US drawdown draws on reporting from our field networks and analysts in Iraq and Syria, as well as reports by Bill Roggio’s
Long War Journal
, ongoing analysis by the Institute for the Study of War and the Jamestown Foundation, and independent researchers. See <
www.caerusassociates.com
> and <
www.firstmilegeo.com
> for our reporting, as well as <
www.longwarjournal.org
>, <
www.jamestown.org
>, and <
www.understandingwar.org
>.

49
“ISI had launched more than a hundred operations”: See “Al Qaeda in Iraq claims Hilla attack, vows revenge,”
Dawn
(Pakistan), 9 May 2011, <
www.dawn.com/news/627307/al-qaeda-in-iraq-claims-hilla-attack-vows-revenge
>.

49
“ISI exploded fifteen bombs across eleven districts”: Associated Press in Baghdad, “Baghdad bomb attacks leave scores dead and hundreds injured,”
The Guardian
, 23 December 2011.

50
“It could also draw on”: For example, see Christoph Reuter, “The Terror Strategist: Secret Files Reveal the Structure of Islamic State,”
Der Spiegel
, 18 April 2015, which explores a document cache allegedly removed from the house in Syria where Haji Bakr was killed in January 2014 that demonstrates ISIS’s roots in Saddam-era secular intelligence and covert operations structures.

50
“This made them the best game in town”: References to Syrian respondents, unless otherwise noted, draw on interviews, survey responses and field team research conducted by Caerus Associates in Syria and Iraq between 2011 and 2015. For safety reasons, individual respondents are not identified.

50
“Bashar al-Assad began to portray the resistance”: Ian Black, “Why Bashar al-Assad stresses al-Qaida narrative: Syria has seen influx of foreign fighters, but regime has been spinning terror line since last March to help justify state violence,”
The Guardian
, 19 May 2012.

51
“Baghdadi declared that ISIS would return”: Maamoun Youssef, “Al-Qaida: We’re returning to old Iraq strongholds,” Associated Press, 22 July 2012, <
https://news.yahoo.com/al-qaida-were-returning-old-iraq-strongholds-131645698.html
>.

51
“By mid-2013 ISIS posed a significant threat”: Kristina Wong, “Royce: US ignored calls to strike ISIS for months,”
The Hill
, 23 July 2014, <
http://thehill.com/policy/defense/213091-royce-us-ignored-calls-to-strike-isis-for-months
>.

51–2
“As of August 2013”: Jessica D. Lewis,
Al Qaeda in Iraq Resurgent: The Breaking the Walls Campaign, Part I
, Middle East Security Report No. 14, Institute for The Study of War, Washington DC, September 2013, p. 7.

52
“Maliki . . . changed his tune”: Lewis, 2013.

52
“President Obama personally approves all drone strikes”: Daniel Klaidman, “Obama: I Make the Drone Decisions,”
The Daily Beast
, 23 May 2013, <
www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/05/23/obama-i-make-the-drone-decisions.html
>

52
“I have, at this point”: Barack Obama, quoted in Glenn Kessler, “President Obama and the ‘red line’ on Syria’s chemical weapons,”
The Washington Post
, 6 September 2013.

52
“The President’s implication was”: Kessler, 2013.

53
“game-changer”: Kessler, 2013.

53
“Syrians saw a different rationale”: Telephone discussions with activists in Aleppo, Idlib and Damascus, 20 and 24 August 2012.

53
“The Syrian government pounded”: It was aided in this, incidentally, by the
New York Times,
which quietly revised its report from “Syrian Rebels Accuse Government of Chemical Attack” to “Scores Killed in Syria, with Signs of Chemical War” and finally to “Images of Death in Syria, but No Proof of Chemical Attack”. For the original version of this story, see: Ben Hubbard and Hwaida Saad, “Syrian Rebels Accuse Government of Chemical Attack,”
The New York Times
, 21 August 2013, <
www.newsdiffs.org/diff/300484/300584/www.nytimes.com/2013/08/22/world/middleeast/syria.html
>, but the evening it was posted, the full text was replaced with new copy based on the same reporting but with a different editorial slant, entitled “Scores Killed in Syria, with Signs of Chemical War.” The following day the headline was changed to “Images of Death in Syria, but No Proof of Chemical Attack”, and copy added to support the White House attempt to raise doubts on the veracity of the Syrian eyewitnesses. This (twice revised) version remains on the
New York Times
website at <
www.nytimes.com/2013/08/22/world/middleeast/syria.html
> and the revision took place without any explanation from the
Times
.

53
“The administration temporised at first”: Hubbard and Saad, 2013.

54
“but maybe it’s the good kind of gaffe” and “off-the-cuff response”: Kevin Drum, “Kerry Gaffes, But Maybe It’s the Good Kind of Gaffe,”
Mother Jones
, 9 September 2013, <
www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2013/09/kerry-gaffe-syria-chemical-weapons-russia
>.

54
“quietly kept using nerve gas”: Chemical attacks, which international investigators concluded were carried out by the regime, continued to occur, including on 11 April 2014 and 17 March 2015. See Arms Control Association, “Timeline of Syrian Chemical Weapons Activity 2012–14,” July 2014, <
www.armscontrol.org/factsheets/Timeline-of-Syrian-Chemical-Weapons-Activity
> for the April 2014 attack, and Hugh Naylor, “Chemical Weapons Attack Alleged in Syria,”
The Washington Post
, 17 March 2015, for the 2015 incident.

54
“Fighters from the Islamic Front and secular groups”: Caerus Associates,
Mapping the Conflict in Aleppo
, Washington DC, February 2014, <
http://caerusassociates.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/Caerus_AleppoMappingProject_Final-Report_02-18-14.pdf
>.

56
“he issued an arrest warrant against his Sunni vice president”: Associated Press in Baghdad, “Iraq Vice-President sentenced to death amid deadly wave of insurgent attacks,”
The Guardian
, 10 September 2012.

56
“Maliki targeted the finance minister”: Michael R. Gordon, “Tensions Rise in Baghdad with Raid on Official,”
The New York Times
, 20 December 2012; Associated Press, “Bomb hits convoy of Iraq’s Sunni finance minister after demonstrations by his backers,” Fox News online, 13 January 2013.

57
“Further ISIS victories followed in April, and government countermoves failed”: For more detail, see this piece on the fall of Mosul by two Caerus analysts – Yasir Abbas and Dan Trombly, “Inside the Collapse of the Iraqi Army’s Second Division,”
War on the Rocks
, 1 July 2014, <
http://warontherocks.com/2014/07/inside-the-collapse-of-the-iraqi-armys-2nd-division/
>.

58
“Maliki announced another offensive”: Anzela Armero (channel) “Nuri al-Maliki sectarian violence continues,” YouTube, 28 May 2014, <
www.youtube.com/watch?v=rDrVt_TFUM4
>.

58–9
“America has abdicated”: James Traub, “America Has Abdicated Its Guiding Role in the Middle East to a Sectarian Arab Military Force. What Could Go Wrong,”
Foreign Policy
, 10 April 2015.

60
Clausewitz wrote that “The first, the supreme, the most far-reaching act of judgment that the statesman and commander have to make is to establish by that test the kind of war on which they are embarking, neither mistaking it for, nor trying to turn it into, something that is alien to its nature”. See Michael Eliot Howard and Peter Paret (eds and trans)
On War: Carl von Clausewitz
, Princeton University Press, 1976, p. 89.

62
For the full text of the Montevideo Convention, see the Yale Law Library plain-text version at <
http://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/intam03.asp
>.

63
“professional soldiers, not terrorists, designed this structure”: Reuter.

64
“Radicalised individuals in Western democracies”: For a good summary of this perspective, see Graeme Wood, “What ISIS Really Wants,”
The Atlantic
, March 2015.

66
“Local Sunni populations”: Rod Nordland, “Iraq Forces, Pushing ISIS out of Tikrit, Give Few Thanks for U.S. Airstrikes,”
The New York Times
, 2 April 2015.

66–7
“in his book on modern Iraqi politics”: Kanan Makiya,
Republic of Fear: The Politics of Modern Iraq
, updated edition, University of California Press, 1998, pp. 108, 275.

67
“uses terrorism as a tactic”: Audrey Kurth Cronin, “ISIS is not a Terrorist Group,”
Foreign Affairs
, vol. 94, no. 2, March–April 2015.

68
“Vast differences exist”: Cronin.

71
“Some Western governments”: See Maajid Nawaz,
Radical: My Journey Out of Islamic Extremism
, W.H. Allen, London, 2013 and Akbar Ahmed,
Journey Into Islam: The Crisis of Globalization
, Brookings Institution Press, Washington DC, 2008. See also Akbar Ahmed,
The Thistle and The Drone: How America’s War on Terror Became a Global War on Tribal Islam,
Brookings Institution Press, Washington DC, 2013.

73
“boomerang effects”: Stephen Graham, “Foucault’s Boomerang – The New Military Urbanism,”
Development Dialogue
, no. 58, April 2012, pp. 37–8.

73
“the militarisation of police”: For an excellent study of this phenomenon in its US context, see Radley Balko,
Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America’s Police Forces,
PublicAffairs, 2013.

74
“convergence between crime and war”: See Michael Miklaucic and Jacqueline Brewer (eds)
Convergence: Illicit Networks and National Security in the Age of Globalization
, National Defense University Press, Washington DC, 2013, for a range of perspectives on this phenomenon.