The Rise of Islamic State (9 page)

In reality, war isn’t much foggier than peace, sometimes less so. Serious developments are difficult to hide because thousands are affected by them. And once the fighting has started, the authorities become increasingly less able to monitor and impede an enterprising journalist’s movements. Secrets about who holds what territory and who is winning and losing become difficult to keep. Informants become easier to find. In times of danger, whether in Belfast, Basra, or Damascus, people become acutely aware of any potential threat to their neighborhood: it can be as small as a new face or as large as the arrival of a military unit. A government or an army can try to maintain secrecy by banning reporters but they will pay the price as the vacuum of news is filled with information supplied by their enemies. The Syrian government put itself at a political disadvantage by denying visas to most foreign journalists, a policy it has only recently begun to reverse.

As the danger increased in Iraq after 2003, a rumor spread that foreign reporters weren’t really eyewitnesses because they had been reduced to producing “hotel journalism,” never leaving three or four well-fortified hotels. This was never true, quite apart from the fact that these
hotels were repeatedly targeted by suicide bombers. Journalists who were frightened of leaving their hotels took the sensible precaution of not going to Baghdad in the first place. I used to think that the reporters most likely to be killed or kidnapped were the inexperienced ones who were trying to make a name for themselves by taking outrageous risks. But the war reporters I knew best who died, such as David Blundy in El Salvador in 1989 and Marie Colvin in Syria in 2012, were highly experienced. Their only mistake was to go to dangerous places so frequently that there was a high chance that they would one day be hit by a bullet or a bomb.

Messy guerrilla fighting and sporadic artillery bombardments in wars with no clear frontlines are particularly dangerous. In 2004, I was nearly killed outside Kufa on the Euphrates by Shia militiamen who had been rattled by fighting with US marines earlier in the day. Suspicious of the local headdress I was wearing, they half-decided I was a spy. But I had put on the headdress as a basic disguise, in order to travel through Sunni-held villages on the road between Kufa and Baghdad.

The idea that foreign journalists just lurk in their hotels in Damascus, Baghdad, or Kabul is absurd. A more substantive charge is that they write too much about firefights and skirmishes, the fireworks of war,
while neglecting the broader picture that might determine the outcome. “My newspaper doesn’t do what it calls ‘bang-bang’ journalism,” one correspondent said grandly, explaining why none of his colleagues was covering the fighting in Syria first-hand. But the “bang-bang” matters: war may not be explicable without the politics, but the politics can’t be understood without the war. Early on in the occupation of Iraq, I went to al-Dohra power station in Baghdad after one American soldier was shot dead there and another wounded. This was a minor incident in an incipient guerrilla war, but the approval of local people as they stood around the pool of dried blood on the pavement was significant. “We are very poor but we will celebrate by cooking a chicken,” one man said. “God willing, there will be more actions like this.”

Embedding with the American and British armies meant that the journalists ended up having the same experiences as the soldiers and thinking many of the same thoughts. It’s difficult not to bond with people who are important to one’s safety and with whom one shares common dangers. Armies prefer the embedding system in part because they can favor sympathetic reporters and exclude the more critical ones. For journalists, counter-intuitively, it often means missing crucial parts of a war,
since an experienced guerrilla commander will naturally attack wherever the enemy forces are absent or weak. Anybody embedded with the army will tend to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. In 2004, when the US marines stormed the city of Fallujah, killing many insurgents, they were accompanied by most of Baghdad’s press corps. It was a famous and well-publicized victory. But the insurgent counterstrike, the capture of the much larger city of Mosul in northern Iraq, from which US soldiers had withdrawn, was largely ignored by the media at the time. When Mosul fell a second time in June 2014, few commentators even mentioned that the city had been take over by insurgents ten years earlier, or took on board the implication of this, which was that Baghdad’s control of its second city and the main stronghold of the urban Sunni had always been shaky.

The most sinister change in the way war is perceived through the media springs from what just a few years ago seemed to be a wholly positive development. Satellite television and the use of information supplied by YouTube, bloggers, and social media were portrayed as liberating innovations at the beginning of the Arab Spring. The monopoly on information imposed by police states from Tunisia to Egypt and Bahrain had
been broken. But as the course of the uprising in Syria has shown, satellite television and the Internet can also be used to spread propaganda and hate.

“Half of Jihad is Media” is one slogan posted on a jihadist website, which, taken broadly, is wholly correct. The ideas, actions, and aims of fundamentalist Sunni jihadists are broadcast daily through satellite television stations, YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook. As long as such powerful means of propagandizing exist, groups similar to al-Qaeda will never go short of money or recruits.

Much of what is disseminated by the jihadists is hate propaganda against Shia and, more occasionally, against Christians, Sufis, and Jews. It calls for support for jihad in Syria, Iraq, Yemen, and anywhere else holy war is being waged. A recent posting shows a romantic-looking suicide bomber who was “martyred” carrying out an attack on an Egyptian police station in Sinai.

Looking at a selection of such online postings, what is striking is not only their violence and sectarianism but also the professionalism with which they are produced. The jihadists may yearn for a return to the norms of early Islam, but their skills in using modern communications and the Internet are well ahead of most political movements in the world. By producing a visual
record of everything it does, ISIS has greatly amplified its political impact. Its militants dominate social media and produce well-made and terrifying films to illustrate the commitment of their fighters as they identify and kill their enemies. The Iraqi government approach to media differs radically: attempting to maintain morale by downplaying ISIS successes, emphasizing patriotism, and stressing that Baghdad can never fall. Crude propaganda like this frequently leads viewers to switch to al-Arabiya, based in Dubai but Saudi owned, or other channels that broadcast images of the events unfolding across the country, giving the advantage to ISIS propaganda.

In contrast to the sophistication of the technical production of footage by militants, the content is frequently crudely sectarian and violent. Take for instance three pictures from Iraq. The first shows two men in uniform, their hands tied behind their backs, lying dead on what looks like a cement floor. Blood flows from their heads as if they have been shot or their throats cut. The caption reads: “Shia have no medicine but the sword—Anbar victories.”

The second picture shows two armed men beside two bodies, identified by the caption as members of the anti-al-Qaeda Sunni Awakening movement in Iraq’s Salah
ad-Din province. The third shows a group of Iraqi soldiers holding a regimental banner, but the words on it have been changed to make them offensive to Sunni: “God curse Omar and Abu Bakr” (two early Sunni leaders).

Such Internet postings often include appeals for money, issued by Sunni clergy and politicians, to finance jihadi fighters. One such appeal claimed to have raised $2,500 (£1,500) for each of the 12,000 fighters that the group responsible for the appeal had sent to Syria. Another included a picture showing seven shelves, as if in a retail store, which, on closer inspection, could each be seen as displaying a different kind of grenade. The caption beneath the photograph read: “Anbar’s mujahedeen pharmacy for Shia.” ISIS images have also appeared showing prisoners being loaded into flatbed trucks by masked gunmen and later forced to lie face down in a shallow ditch with their arms tied behind their backs. Final pictures showed the blood-covered bodies of captive soldiers, probably Shia, who made up much of the rank-and-file of the Iraqi army. Captions indicated the massacre was in revenge for the death of an ISIS commander, Abdul-Rahman al-Beilawy, whose killing was reported just before ISIS’ surprise offensive that swept through northern Iraq, capturing the Sunni strongholds of Mosul and Tikrit, in mid-June 2014.

It is not just Twitter and Facebook accounts that are used by the jihadists. Two television stations based in Egypt (but reportedly financed from Saudi Arabia and Kuwait), Safa and Wesal, employ journalists and commentators who are vocally hostile to the Shia. Wesal TV broadcasts in five languages: Arabic, Farsi, Kurdish, Indonesian, and Hausa. The Iraqi government response has been to close down some “enemy television stations” as well as Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and other Internet services, although Iraqis are quick to find ways around official censorship. Followers of ISIS continually flood Twitter with pictures of the bodies of their enemies, but they also use the medium to show functioning hospitals and a consultative administrative process.

Hate preachers, likewise, can incite large numbers of followers on YouTube. Sheikh Mohammad al-Zughbi, a popular vlogger in Egypt, calls on God to protect Egypt from “the criminal traitors and the criminal Shia,” as well as from the Jews and Crusaders. Another sermon entitled “Oh Syria, the victory is coming” says President Assad is “seeking help from these Persians, the Shia, the traitors, the Shia criminals.”

Such rants could be dismissed as being addressed to a small, fanatical audience, but the numbers of viewers show them to be immensely popular. Observers of the
rebels in Syria have noted how much time they spend on the Internet, using it to follow what they believe is happening elsewhere in the conflict. Further evidence about the impact of satellite television and jihadist websites comes from prisoners taken in Iraq. While, like all prisoners, they are inclined to say what their captors want to hear, their accounts in interviews on Iraqi television ring true. Waleed bin Muhammad al-Hadi al-Masmoudi from Tunisia, the third-largest supplier of foreign jihadists to Syria, told one such program that in making his decision to come to Iraq to fight he “was deeply influenced by al-Jazeera TV channel.” Together with thirteen other volunteers from Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and Yemen, he had no difficulty in making his way to Fallujah. In another interview, Abdullah Azam Salih al-Qahtani, a former Saudi officer, said: “Arabic media and jihadist websites convinced me to come.”

Some of the portrayals of atrocities that appear on computers and television screens across the world, supposedly within hours of having taken place, are fraudulent. ISIS successes in Iraq are sometimes fabricated with the footage used to advertise them taken in Syria or Libya, or even outside the Middle East altogether. A correspondent in southeast Turkey recently visited a Syrian refugee camp where he found
ten-year-old children watching a YouTube clip of two men being executed with a chainsaw. The commentary claimed that the victims were Syrian Sunnis and the killers were Alawites; in fact the film was from Mexico and the murders had been carried out by a drug lord to intimidate his rivals.

Such fraudulent atrocity stories have an effect on a war: a Libyan militiaman who believes that the government soldiers he is fighting are under orders to rape his wife and daughters isn’t going to take many prisoners. But more often the pictures of murder and torture are accurate. Their rapid dissemination explains the ferocity of the conflict in Syria and the difficulty the participants have in negotiating an end to their civil war.

The Arab Spring revolts were a strange mixture of revolution, counterrevolution, and foreign intervention. The international media often became highly confused about what was going on. The revolutionaries of 2011 had many failings but they were highly skilled in influencing and manipulating press coverage. Tahrir Square in Cairo and later the Maidan in Kiev became the arenas where a melodrama pitting the forces of good against evil was played out in front of the television cameras. Good reporters still took immense risks, and sometimes paid with their lives, trying to explain that there was
more to what was happening than this oversimplified picture. But the worst media coverage, particularly in the first two years of the revolts, was very bad indeed. One correspondent remarked caustically that trying to describe post-2011 events in Syria from Beirut while relying on rebel sources was “like reporting the last American presidential election from Canada depending on members of the Tea Party faction of the Republican Party for information.”

Predictably, such news was so biased and unreliable that the real course of events turned out to be full of unexpected developments and nasty surprises. This is likely to continue.

In the second half of 2013 I started to write about the way in which jihadis were taking over the Syrian armed opposition; at the same time there was mounting evidence that ISIS, formerly al-Qaeda in Iraq, was rapidly increasing in strength. My newspaper, the
Independent
, asked me to nominate a “man of the year” for the Middle East and I chose Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the shadowy figure who had become leader of ISIS in 2010. A few days later, on January 3, 2014, ISIS moved into Fallujah and the government proved unable to recapture it. This was not quite as alarming as it might have been because the Iraqi prime minister was emphasizing the mortal
threat posed by Sunni counterrevolution in Anbar province to scare the Shia majority into voting for him in the parliamentary election on April 30 as “Mr. Security” and forgetting about government corruption and the lack of services. I thought that perhaps the failure to recapture the city was a deliberate electoral ploy and the assault on it would come after the poll.

But then well-informed Iraqis told me that the failure to retake Fallujah and crush ISIS in Anbar and elsewhere in northern Iraq had not happened for lack of trying. Five of the fifteen divisions in the Iraqi army had been deployed in Anbar and had suffered heavy losses from casualties and desertions. Soldiers were sent to the front with only four clips of ammunition for their AK-47s; they went hungry because their commanders had embezzled the money to be spent on food; in oil-rich Iraq, fuel for army vehicles was in short supply; some battalions were down to a quarter of their established strength. “The army has suffered a very bad defeat in Anbar,” a former Iraqi minister told me sometime in April.

Despite these warnings, I was shocked a month or so later when, on June 10, Mosul fell almost without a fight. Every derogatory story I had ever heard about the Iraqi army being a financial racket in which commanders bought their posts in order to grow rich on
kickbacks and embezzlement turned out to be true. The ordinary soldiers may have run away in Mosul but not as quickly as their generals, who turned up in civilian clothes in Erbil, the Kurdish capital. It had become apparent over the previous year that ISIS was run with a chilling blend of ideological fanaticism and military efficiency. Its campaign to take northern and western Iraq was expertly planned, choosing soft targets and avoiding well defended positions, or, as ISIS put it, moving “like a serpent through rocks.”

It was evident that Western governments had entirely misread the situation in Iraq and Syria. For two years Iraqi politicians had been warning anybody who would listen to them that if the civil war in Syria continued it would destabilize the fragile status quo in Iraq. When Mosul fell everybody blamed Maliki, who certainly had a lot to answer for, but the real cause of the debacle in Iraq was the war across Iraq’s border. The revolt of the Syrian Sunni had caused a similar explosion in Iraq. Maliki had treated the Sunni provinces like a conquered country, but the Iraqi Sunni would not have risen again without the example and encouragement of their Syrian counterparts. The ascendancy of ISIS that resulted from its being able to act as the shock troops of a general Sunni revolt may yet be reversible. But the offensive
they led in the summer of 2014 has likely ended forever the Shia-dominated state that was brought into being by the American invasion of 2003.

The fall of Mosul was only the latest of a series of unpleasant and unexpected events in the Middle East to catch the outside world by surprise. The region has always been treacherous ground for foreign intervention, but many of the reasons for Western failure to read the situation in the Middle East are recent and self-inflicted. The US response to the attacks of 9/11 in 2001 targeted the wrong countries when Afghanistan and Iraq were identified as the hostile states whose governments needed to be overthrown. Meanwhile, the two countries most involved in supporting al-Qaeda and favoring the ideology behind the attacks, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, were largely ignored and given a free pass. Both were long-standing US allies, and remained so despite 9/11. Saudi Arabia may be now pulling back on its sponsorship of jihadi fighters in Syria and elsewhere around the world for fear of blowback in the kingdom itself. Pakistan Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif may insist that he is doing all he can to rid the Pakistan security services of their extremist elements. But until the United States and its allies in the West recognize that these states are key in
promoting Islamic extremism, little real progress will be made in the battle to isolate the jihadists.

It was not governments alone that got it wrong. So too did the reformers and revolutionaries who regarded the uprisings of the “Arab Spring” of 2011 as a death blow to the old authoritarian regimes across the region. For a brief moment, sectarianism and dictatorship seemed to be crumbling; the Arab world was standing at the entrance to a brave new future free of religious hate, where political enemies fought out their differences in democratic elections. Three years later, with the democracy movements having retreated all over the region in the face of successful counterrevolution and mounting sectarian violence, this enthusiasm seems naïve. It is worth analyzing why a progressive revolutionary alternative to police states and jihadi movements like ISIS has failed so comprehensively.

The revolutions and popular uprisings of 2011 were as genuine as any in history, but the way they were perceived, particularly in the West, was often seriously awry. Unexpectedness is in the nature of revolutionary change: I have always believed that if I can spot a revolution coming, so can the head of the Mukhabarat security police. He will do everything possible to prevent it happening. Real revolutions come into being because of an
unpredictable and surprising coincidence of people and events with different motives coming together to target a common enemy such as Hosni Mubarak or Bashar al-Assad. The political, social, and economic roots of the upsurges of 2011 are very complex. That this wasn’t obvious to everyone at the time is partly a result of the way foreign commentators exaggerated the role of new information technology. Protestors, skilled in propaganda if nothing else, saw the advantage of presenting the uprisings as unthreatening, “velvet” revolutions with English-speaking, well-educated bloggers and tweeters prominently in the vanguard. The purpose was to convey to Western publics that the new revolutionaries were comfortingly similar to themselves, and that what was happening in the Middle East in 2011 was like the anticommunist and pro-Western uprisings in Eastern Europe after 1989.

Opposition demands were all about personal freedom: social and economic inequalities were rarely declared to be issues, even when they were driving popular rage against the status quo. In the years prior to the Syrian revolt, the center of Damascus had been taken over by smart shops and restaurants, while the mass of Syrians saw their salaries stagnating in the face of rising prices. Farmers, ruined by four years of drought, were moving
into shanty towns on the outskirts of the cities. The UN reported that between two and three million Syrians were living in “extreme poverty.” Small manufacturing companies were being put out of business by cheap imports from Turkey and China. Economic liberalization, lauded in foreign capitals, was rapidly concentrating wealth in the hands of a politically well-connected few. Even members of the Mukhabarat, the secret police, were trying to survive on $200 a month. An International Crisis Group report pointed out that Syria’s ruling class “has inherited power rather than fought for it … and mimicked the ways of the urban upper class.” The same was true of the quasi-monarchical families and their associates operating in parallel fashion in Egypt, Libya, and Iraq. Confident of their police-state protection, they ignored the hardships of the rest of the population, especially the underemployed, overeducated, and numerous youth, few of whom felt that they had any chance of improving their lives.

A simple-minded delusion that most problems would vanish once democracies had replaced the old police states was at the heart of the new reformist governments in the Middle East, be they in Iraq in 2005 or Libya in 2011. Opposition movements, persecuted at home or living a hand-to-mouth existence in exile, were
reassured by such a notion and it was certainly easy to sell to foreign sponsors. However, a great disadvantage of this way of seeing things was that Saddam, Assad, and Gaddafi were so demonized it became difficult to engineer anything approaching a compromise or a peaceful transition from the old to a new regime. In Iraq in 2003 former members of the Baath Party were sacked, thus impoverishing a large part of the population, which had no alternative but to fight. The Syrian opposition refused to attend peace talks in Geneva in 2014 if Assad was allowed to play a role there, even though the areas of Syria under his control were home to most of the population. These exclusion policies were partly a way of guaranteeing jobs for the boys among the opposition. But they deepened sectarian, ethnic, and tribal divisions and provided the ingredients for civil war.

What is the glue that is supposed to hold these new post-revolutionary states together? Nationalism isn’t much in favor in the West, where it is seen as a mask for racism or militarism, supposedly outmoded in an era of globalization and humanitarian intervention. But intervention in Iraq in 2003 and Libya in 2011 turned out to be very similar to imperial takeovers in the ninteenth century. There was absurd talk of “nation-building” to be carried out or assisted by foreign powers, which clearly
had their own interests in mind just as Britain did when Lloyd George orchestrated the carve-up of the Ottoman Empire. A justification for the Arab leaders who seized power in the late 1960s was that they would create powerful states capable, finally, of giving reality to national independence. They didn’t wholly fail: Gaddafi played a crucial role in raising the price of oil in 1973, and Hafez al-Assad, Bashar’s father, who had taken power in Syria two years earlier, created a state that could hold its own in a protracted struggle with Israel for predominance in Lebanon. To opponents of these regimes, nationalism was simply a propaganda ploy on the part of ruthless dictatorships concerned to justify their hold on power. But without nationalism—even where the unity of the nation is something of a historic fiction—states lack an ideology that enables them to compete as a focus of loyalty with religious sects or ethnic groups.

It’s easy enough to criticize the rebels and reformers in the Arab world for failing to resolve the dilemmas they faced in overturning the status quo. Their actions seem confused and ineffective when compared to the Cuban revolution or the liberation struggle in Vietnam. But the political terrain in which they have had to operate over the last twenty years has been particularly tricky. The dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 meant that
the endorsement or tolerance of the US, and the US alone, was crucial for a successful takeover of power. Nasser was able to turn to Moscow to assert Egyptian independence in the Suez crisis of 1956, but after the Soviet collapse smaller states could no longer find a place for themselves between Moscow and Washington. Saddam said in 1990 that one of the reasons he invaded Kuwait when he did was that in the future such a venture would no longer be feasible as Iraq would be faced with unopposed American power. In the event, he got his diplomatic calculations spectacularly wrong, but his forecast was otherwise realistic, at least until perceptions of American military might were downgraded by Washington’s failure to achieve its aims in Afghanistan and Iraq.

The deteriorating situation in Iraq and Syria may now have gone too far to re-create genuinely unitary states. Iraq is breaking up. Having taken over the northern oil city of Kirkuk, which they have long claimed as their capital, the Kurds will never surrender it or other disputed territories from which they were ethnically cleansed. Meanwhile, government rule over the Sunni Arab heartlands of north and central Iraq has evaporated with the disintegration of the Iraqi army. The
government might continue to hold the capital and the Shia-majority provinces farther south, but it will have great difficulty in re-establishing its authority over Sunni villages and towns across the country. Dr. Safa Rusoul Hussein, the Iraqi deputy national security advisor, told me that “when 100 ISIS fighters take over an area they normally recruit five or ten times their original force. These are not frontline fighters and they may join just to defend their families, but ISIS numbers grow rapidly.”

Outside help for the Iraqi government is unpredictable. Foreign intervention is as likely to come from Iran as from the United States. As a fellow Shia-majority state, Iraq matters even more to Tehran than Syria and Iran has emerged as the most influential foreign power in Baghdad since the 2003 invasion. The Iranian president Hassan Rouhani has said that Iran will act to combat “the violence and terrorism” of ISIS; indeed for a week the Baghdad rumor machine was claiming that Iranian battalions were already in Iraq, though this was unconfirmed by actual sightings. As for the US, war weariness at home rules out the return of ground troops, though advisers are being sent. Even air strikes are problematically effective because ISIS operates as a guerrilla army without easily visible movements of personnel or equipment that can be targeted. Its leadership is well practiced
at keeping out of sight. The ISIS offensive has succeeded because it has been joined by a wide uprising of former Iraqi army officers who fought the Americans and young men from Sunni villages and towns across the country. Attacking such forces with manned aircraft or drones will further anger the Sunni community, and, if ISIS fighters start being killed by US airstrikes, it may not be long before an organization renowned for its ruthlessness when seeking revenge sends its suicide bombers to destroy American targets. In any event, the likelihood of US military success is remote. It’s important to recall that, with air bases throughout the country and 150,000 soldiers on the ground, neither of which it has today, the US still failed to win an eight-year-long war.