The Jihadis Return: Isis and the New Sunni Uprising (4 page)

The shifting power dynamic along sectarian lines, most evident in the wake of the events of June 2014, also spurred fearful reactions from Iraq’s Shia community. “The Shia in Iraq see what is happening not as the Sunni reacting justifiably against the government oppressing them but as an attempt to re-establish the old Sunni-dominated-type government,” said one observer in the capital. On both the Shia and Sunni sides tensions had accumulated to the extent that a full-scale and bloody sectarian confrontation was inevitable.

The surge of young Shia men into militias in the summer of 2014 was touched off by an appeal of Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the revered Shia cleric, for people to sign up. “The street is boiling,” said one observer. Some 1,000 volunteers left Kerbala for the frontline city of Samarra, the site of the al-Askari mosque, one of the holiest Shia shrines in a city where the majority of the population is Sunni.

This polarization between the two religious groups was only intensified by the hot and cold war between the US and Russia. Proxies were at play here with Saudi Arabia and the Gulf monarchies, backed by the US, facing off against Iran, Syria, and Hezbollah in Lebanon, supported by Russia. Iranian President Hassan Rouhani, whose government has backed the Shia-led Iraqi state, pledged support for Maliki against the Sunni uprising, saying, “Iran will apply all its efforts on the international and regional levels to confront terrorism.” With a long border in common, Iraq is Iran’s most important ally, more important even than Syria. The Iranians were horrified by the sudden Iraqi military collapse, which created problems for Iran in Syria, where it had been struggling with some success to stabilize the rule of President Assad. Responding to the surge of ISIS control in Iraq in 2014, a cadre of advisers from the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps was believed to be putting together a new military force drawn from the army and militias.

Iraq has long suspected the hidden hand of Wahhabism, the variant of Islam espoused by Saudi Arabia, as being behind much of its troubles. In March 2014, Prime Minister Maliki, during an interview with France 24 television, put the blame squarely on Saudi Arabia and Qatar for the rise of Sunni violence in his country, saying that “these two countries are primarily responsible for the sectarian, terrorist and security crisis in Iraq.”

He added that allegations that he was marginalizing Sunnis were broadcast by “sectarians with ties to foreign agendas, with Saudi and Qatari incitement.” His accusations were angry and direct, alleging that Riyadh and Doha were providing support for the militants, including “buying weapons for the benefit of these terrorist organizations.”

There was considerable truth in Maliki’s charges. A proportion of aid from the Gulf destined for the armed opposition in Syria undoubtedly goes to jihadist militants in Iraq. Turkey allows weapons and jihadist volunteers, many of them potential suicide bombers, to cross its 510-mile-long border into Syria. Inevitably some of the guns, fighters, and bombers go to Iraq. This is hardly surprising given that ISIS operates in both countries as if they were one.

Over the past two years, violence has increased sharply, with nearly 10,000 Iraqi civilians killed in 2013 and almost 5,000 in just the first five months of 2014, according to Iraq Body Count. A senior US administration official, speaking in August 2013 and quoted by Jessica D. Lewis of the Institute for the Study of War, said: “We’ve had an average of about five to ten suicide bombers a month . . . We’ve seen over the [past] 90 days the suicide bomber numbers approach about 30 a month, and we still suspect that most of them are coming in from Syria.”

A blind spot for the US and other Western powers has been their failure to see that by supporting the armed uprising in Syria, they would inevitably destabilize Iraq and provoke a new round of its sectarian civil war. Al-Qa‘ida in Iraq, as it was then known, was at its lowest ebb in 2010. It had been vigorously pursued by the Americans and was under attack from the Sahwa or “Awakening” groups of anti-al-Qa‘ida fighters, mostly drawn from the Sunni tribes. It had lost many of its veterans, who were dead or in prison, and survivors were unpopular among ordinary Sunnis because of their general bloodthirstiness, killing even minor government employees who might be Sunni. Above all, it had failed to overthrow the Shia-Kurdish government. Up to 2012, many Sunnis were hopeful of extracting at least some concessions from the government without going back to war.

The spectacular resurgence of the jihadists in Iraq came through a well-planned campaign, an important element of which was systematic attacks on the prisons. Known as the “Breaking the Walls” campaign, this involved eight separate attacks to free prisoners, culminating in a successful assault on Abu Ghraib and Taji prisons in the summer of 2013 when at least 500 captives, many of them experienced fighters, escaped. The attackers fired 100 mortar bombs into the jails and used suicide bombers to clear the way as inmates rioted and started fires to confuse the guards.

Throughout 2013, ISIS attacks on security forces all over Iraq escalated. An assault by government forces on a peace camp at Hawijah, southwest of Kirkuk, on April 23 killed 50 people and injured 110, alienating many Sunni, including powerful tribes. Ill-planned government counter-offensives, which often meant detaining and mistreating all Sunni men of military age, proved counter-effective. Sporadic shelling of Fallujah and Ramadi by government forces in Anbar forced some 500,000 people out of a total population of 1.6 million in the province to flee to safer places where they often had to live rough or with whole families crammed into a single room.

All along the upper Euphrates River, food became scarce and expensive and many schools were closed. The most important Sunni religious leader in Anbar, Abdul Malak al-Saadi, who had previously counseled moderation, insisted that the April 2014 parliamentary elections were illegitimate.

In the months leading up to its general offensive in June 2014, there was some uncertainty about the degree of control ISIS had over Sunni areas. Sometimes it chose to advertise its strength and sometimes not. Its takeover of Mosul, and the ease with which it occurred, was clearly a major symbolic victory for the jihadists, showing both their own effectiveness and the fragility of Iraq’s enormous security forces.

However, the details of what precisely happened in the city remain cloudy because of a lack of reliable reporting on the ground, something that is unsurprising given the assassination campaign against local media that had taken place. Five journalists were killed in the six months after October 2013 and forty others had fled to Kurdistan and Turkey. Mukhtars, community leaders who are often the most important of the government’s representatives, were also attacked, forcing them to flee the city or to co-operate with ISIS. Minorities such as the Yazidis and Christians were targeted as well.

Mosul is of particular importance to ISIS because it was the home of many families that joined the Iraqi army under Saddam Hussein, who traditionally picked his defense minister from the city. Brutal as ISIS fighters may be, for many in Mosul they are preferable to Maliki’s Shia-dominant government forces. ISIS has been careful not to alienate the local population. ISIS spokesperson Abu Mohammed al-Adnani warned fighters to behave moderately towards the Sunni population, even those who may previously have fought on the government side. “Accept repentance and recantations from those who are sincere, and do not bother those who do not bother you, and forgive your Sunni folk, and be gentle with your tribes,” he said. It remains to be seen if this approach will work. Mosul is a traditional, conservative city, but not an intensely religious one, and it is difficult to imagine ISIS ruling it without creating friction.

The surge in ISIS control in Sunni Iraq has happened rapidly, and there is little sign thus far of an effective government counterattack. The slaughter of Shia civilians continues, with a suicide bomber in a minivan packed with explosives killing 45 and wounding 157 people at a security checkpoint at the entrance to the largely Shia town of Hilla, southwest of Baghdad, as recently as March 2014. Government security is incapable of finding and eliminating the hideouts where these devastating vehicle-born bombs are rigged.

There may be another less obvious reason for the spectacular resurgence of ISIS. According to one senior Iraqi source, the re-emergence of ISIS was significantly aided in 2011 and 2012 by Turkish military intelligence that encouraged experienced Iraqi officers, who may have participated in guerrilla war against the US occupation, to work with the movement. This might be dismissed as one more Middle East conspiracy theory, but a feature of jihadi-type movements is the ease with which they can be manipulated by foreign intelligence services.

Speaking of Iraq early in 2013, Dr. Mahmoud Othman, the veteran MP, said that “about half the country is not really controlled by the government.” Asked by Iraq’s one million strong security forces had been so ineffective against the jihadists, another politician, who did not want to be named, said: “This is the harvest of total corruption. People pay money to get into the army [so they can get a salary]—but they are investors not soldiers.” These are harsh words, but evidence of their truth is provided by the fact that ISIS is now holding a large part of the country and the Iraqi army appears powerless to do anything about it.

Just after the sarin poison gas attacks on rebel-held districts of Damascus in August 2013, I appeared on an American television program with Razan Zaitouneh, a human rights lawyer and founder of the Violations Documentation Center, who was speaking via Skype from the opposition stronghold of Douma in East Damascus.

She gave a compelling, passionate, and wholly believable account of what had happened. “I have never seen so much death in my whole life,” she said, describing people breaking down the doors of houses to find that everybody inside had been killed. Doctors in the few medical centers wept as they tried in vain to treat gas victims with the scarce medicines they had. Bodies, fifteen to twenty at a time, were being tipped into mass graves. She contemptuously dismissed any idea that the rebels might be behind the use of sarin, asking: “Do you think we are such crazy people that we would kill our own children?”

Zaitouneh had been defending political prisoners for a dozen years and was the sort of credible advocate that won the Syrian opposition so much international support in its first years. But on December 8, 2013, gunmen burst into her office in Douma and kidnapped her, along with her husband, Wael Hamada, and two civil rights activists: Samira al-Khalili, a lawyer, and Nazem al-Hamadi, a poet. None of the four has been heard from since. Although it denies any involvement, the group suspected of being behind the kidnapping is the Army of Islam, a group strong in rebel-held districts of Damascus that was created by Saudi Arabia as a jihadi counter-balance to JAN. Al-Khalili’s husband, Yassin al-Hajj Saleh, told the online publication al-Monitor: “Razan and Samira were part of a national inclusive secular movement and this led them to collide with the Islamist factions, who are inclined towards despotism.”

The kidnapping and disappearance of Ms. Zaitouneh and the others have many parallels elsewhere in Syria, where Islamists have killed civil rights activists or forced them to flee. Usually, this has happened when the activists have criticized them for killings, torture, imprisonment, or other crimes. Revolutions are notorious for devouring their earliest and most humane advocates, but few have done so with the speed and ferocity of Syria’s.

Why has the Syrian uprising, whose early supporters demanded that tyranny should be replaced by a secular, non-sectarian, law-bound, and democratic state, failed so completely to achieve these aims? Syria has descended into a nightmarish sectarian civil war as the government bombs its own cities as if they were enemy territory and the armed opposition is dominated by Salafi-jihadist fighters who slaughter Alawites and Christians simply because of their religion. Syrians have to choose between a violent dictatorship, in which power is monopolized by the presidency and brutish security services, or an opposition that shoots children in the face for minor blasphemy and sends pictures of decapitated soldiers to the parents of their victims.

Syria today is like Lebanon during the fifteen-year-long civil war between 1975 and 1990. I was recently in Homs, once a city known for its vibrant diversity but now full of “ghost neighborhoods” where all the buildings are abandoned, smashed by shellfire or bombs. Walls still standing are so full of small holes from machine-gun fire that they look as if giant woodworms have been eating into the concrete.

This is a land of checkpoints, blockades, and sieges, during which the government seals off and bombards rebel-held enclaves. The strategy is working, but at a snail’s pace that leaves much of Syria in ruins.

Aleppo, once the largest city in the country, is mostly depopulated. Government forces are advancing but are overstretched and cannot re-conquer northern and eastern Syria unless Turkey shuts its long border. Government success only strengthens the jihadists relative to other more moderate forces because they have a hardened core of fighters who will never surrender. So, as the Syrian army advances behind a barrage of barrel bombs in Aleppo, its troops are mostly fighting JAN, the official al-Qa‘ida affiliate, and the Salafist Ahrar al-Sham, backed by Qatar and Turkey. It is trying to repeat its success in parts of Damascus and Homs where it has sealed off and besieged rebel enclaves until making agreements which have approximated surrender. In contrast, the rebel enclave in the east of Aleppo city is more substantial, and closer to both the rebel heartland and the Turkish border. Its fall would mean the beginning of the end for the revolt, something its foreign backers do not wish to happen.

The degenerate state of the Syrian revolution stems from the country’s deep political, religious, and economic divisions before 2011 and the way in which these have since been exploited and exacerbated by foreign intervention. The first protests happened when they did because of the uprisings of the “Arab Spring” in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Yemen, and Bahrain. They spread rapidly because of overreaction by state security forces firing on peaceful demonstrators, thereby enraging whole communities and provoking armed resistance. The government insists that protests were not as peaceful as they looked and that from an early stage their forces came under armed attack. There is some truth to this, but if the opposition’s aim was to trap the government into a counterproductive punitive response, it has succeeded beyond its dreams.

Syria was always a less coherent society than it looked to outside observers, and its divisions were not just along religious lines. In July 2011, the Brussels-based International Crisis Group (ICG) wrote in a report: “The Syrian authorities claim they are fighting a foreign-sponsored, Islamist conspiracy, when for the most part they have been waging war against their original social constituency. When it first came to power, the Assad regime embodied the neglected countryside, its peasants and exploited underclass. Today’s ruling elite has forgotten its roots.”

In the four years of drought before 2011, the United Nations noted that up to three million Syrian farmers had been pushed into “extreme poverty” and had fled the countryside to squat in shanty towns on the outskirts of the cities. Middle-class salaries could not keep up with inflation. Cheap imports, often from Turkey, forced small manufacturers out of business and helped to pauperize the urban working class. The state was in contact with whole areas of life in Syria solely through corrupt and predatory security services. The ICG conceded that there was “an Islamist undercurrent to the uprising” but it was not the main motivation for the peaceful protests that were mutating into military conflict.

Compare this analysis of the situation in the summer of 2011 with what happened three years later. By 2014, the war had reached a stalemate and the armed opposition was dominated by ISIS. Ideologically, there was not much difference between ISIS and other jihadist groups in the opposition such as Ahrar al-Sham or the Army of Islam, which also seek a theocratic Sunni state under Sharia law. Pilloried in the West for their sectarian ferocity, these jihadists were often welcomed by local people for restoring law and order after the looting and banditry of the Western-backed Free Syrian Army (FSA), the loose umbrella group to which, at one time, 1,200 rebel bands owed nominal allegiance. In Afghanistan in the 1990s, the iron rule of the Taliban had been initially welcomed by many for the same reason.

The degree to which the armed opposition was under the thumb of foreign backers at the end of 2013 is well illustrated by the confessions of Saddam al-Jamal, a brigade leader in the Ahfad al-Rasoul Brigade and the former FSA commander in eastern Syria. A fascinating interview with Jamal, conducted by ISIS and translated by the Brown Moses blog, was recorded after he had defected to ISIS. Ignoring his self-serving denunciations of the un-Islamic actions of his former FSA associates, the interview appears to be reliable. He speaks as if it was matter of course that his own group, al-Ahfad, was funded by one or the other of the Gulf monarchies: “At the beginning of the Syrian revolution, the file was handled by Qatar. After a while, they switched to Saudi Arabia.”

Jamal says meetings of the FSA military council were invariably attended by representatives of the Saudi, UAE, Jordanian, and Qatari intelligence services, as well as intelligence officers from the US, Britain, and France. At one such meeting, apparently in Ankara, Jamal says the Saudi Deputy Defence Minister, Prince Salman bin Sultan, the half brother of Saudi intelligence chief Bandar bin Sultan, addressed them all and asked Syrian leaders of the armed opposition “who have plans to attack Assad positions to present their needs for arms, ammo and money.” The impression one gets is of a movement wholly controlled by Arab and Western intelligence agencies. It may be a measure of Saudi recognition of how dramatically the plan to overthrow Assad failed that Bandar and Salman have now both lost their jobs.

The civil war between jihadist groups that started with a co-ordinated attack on ISIS positions in January 2014 is damaging the standing of all of them. Foreign fighters who came to Syria to fight Assad and the Shia find they are being told to kill Sunni jihadists with exactly the same ideological views as themselves.

ISIS sent the suicide bomber who killed Abdullah Muhammad al-Muhaysani, the official al-Qa‘ida representative in Syria and also a leader of Ahrar al-Sham. This is evidence of how al-Qa‘ida central has links at different levels to jihadi organizations with which it is not formally associated. Attempts by Saudi Arabia, the US, and Jordan to build up a “Southern Front” of insurgents who are both anti-Assad and anti-al-Qa‘ida have so far failed, in part because of Jordanian reservations about becoming too visible as combatants.

Returning jihadists are finding their route home is not always an easy one, since their native governments, for example in Saudi Arabia or Tunisia, which may have welcomed their departure as a way of exporting dangerous fanatics, are now appalled by the idea of battle-hardened Salafists coming back. An activist in the northern Syrian city of Raqqa, seeking to speed the departure of Tunisian volunteers, showed them a video of bikini-clad women on Tunisian beaches and suggested that their puritanical presence was needed back home to prevent such loose practices.

It is a measure of Syria’s descent into apocalyptic violence that the official representative of al-Qa‘ida there, JAN, should now be deemed more moderate than ISIS. The latter retreated earlier in 2014 but this may have been a tactical move while it prepared its offensive in northern Iraq. It has a vast territory in eastern Syria and western Iraq where it can regroup and plan counterattacks. In any case, JAN has always sought mediation with ISIS and does not generally want a fight. The jihadist civil war has made life easier for the government militarily, since its enemies are busy killing each other, but it also does not have the resources to fully eliminate them. It will soon be facing an emboldened ISIS fresh from its victories in Iraq and eager to show that it can do the same in Syria.

Many mistakes have been made about Syria by both the outside world and the opposition since 2011, but perhaps the most serious was the belief that President Assad was going to go down in defeat like Muammar Gaddafi in Libya. Both the rebels and their foreign backers forgot that Gaddafi was largely overthrown by the NATO air campaign. Without NATO, the rebels would not have lasted more than a few weeks. But the belief that Assad was weak only began to be treated skeptically in 2013. In 2012, foreign governments and foreign journalists were speculating what place he might choose for exile, even though he still held all fourteen Syrian provincial capitals. ISIS now controls one of them, Raqqa on the Euphrates, but the main population centers are still held by the government. A problem here for the non-jihadi opposition was that their whole strategy, insofar as they had one, was based on creating another Libya-type situation. When that failed to materialize, they had no plan B.

Though Assad—like the opposition in 2011 and 2012—may overestimate the strength of the cards he holds, the political and military terrain today looks much more positive from his point of view. The army, the pro-Assad militias, and allies like Hezbollah are extending their grip on Damascus, on the Qalamoun Mountains along the Lebanese border, and in Homs City and province. They are, however, achieving these gains very slowly, which betrays the government’s shortage of effective combat troops and its need to avoid casualties. The overweight draftees manning checkpoints do not look as if they want to fight anybody. Rather than taking over rebel-held areas, the government simply bombards them so that the civilian population is forced to flee and those who remain are either families of fighters or those too poor to find anywhere else to live. Electricity and water is then cut off and a siege is mounted. In Adra on the northern outskirts of Damascus in early 2014, I witnessed JAN forces storm a housing complex by advancing through a drainage pipe which came out behind government lines, where they proceeded to kill Alawites and Christians. The government did not counterattack but simply continued its siege.

There are many local ceasefires in these areas which are not far from being surrenders. I was in one district called Barzeh where the FSA fighters kept their weapons, and where a rebel commander told me “we were expecting them to release 350 prisoners from Barzeh but all we have got so far is three dead bodies.” He asked me, rather despairingly, if I knew anybody in Syrian military intelligence who might know what had happened to them.