Black Flags (37 page)

“
He always had religious or other books attached on the back of his bike,” the neighbor, Tariq Hameed, told a
Newsweek
interviewer, recalling the studious teenager who lived nearby in one of Samarra’s lower-middle-class neighborhoods. The son of a Sunni imam who preached in the city, Baghdadi wore the traditional prayer cap and
white dishdasha of the religiously devout, and he preferred to spend his free time at the mosque rather than keeping company with other young men from the town, Hameed said. “I never saw him in trousers and shirt, like most of the other guys in Samarra,” the neighbor said. “He had a light beard, and he never hung out in cafés.”

A single fact about his family background would prove crucial later in life: as a member of Iraq’s al-Bu Badri tribe, he could claim to be part of the same ancestral line as Muhammad—a requirement, in the opinion of some Islamic scholars, for anyone seeking to become the caliph, or the leader of the Muslim nation. The distinction did not count for much in gritty Samarra, where there are hundreds of al-Badris and dozens of other tribes that can legitimately claim to be part of the Prophet’s lineage. Still, Baghdadi’s extended household practically smoldered with religious fervor, which may help explain his youthful devotion and his later drift toward fanaticism. Baghdadi’s grandfather bore the title “Haji,” having journeyed to the holy Kaaba Shrine at Mecca as a religious pilgrim, and there were numerous preachers and religious teachers among his uncles and ten siblings. His father’s sermons were noteworthy, according to one of Baghdadi’s jihadist biographers, for their emphasis on the “
promoting of virtue and preventing of vice.”

He came of age during some of the most turbulent years in modern Iraqi history. Born in 1971, he was in his late teens when the Iran-Iraq War ended in a bitter stalemate after eight years of fighting and a combined loss of at least a half-million lives. He was nearly twenty when the Iraqi army suffered its humiliating defeat in the first Gulf War. Somewhere in between, he likely served his mandatory stint in the Iraqi army, though there is no evidence that he saw combat. What is clear is that he moved to Baghdad as a young man to attend college, and earned a bachelor’s degree in Islamic law and theology in 1999. His plunge into the arcane world of seventh-century religious codes appears to have brought out his puritanical side; acquaintances remembered how the college-aged Baghdadi would become irritated when men and women were allowed to dance in the same room during wedding celebrations. “It’s irreligious!” he would complain. In any case, he liked the subject well enough to continue his studies well into his early thirties. He was thirty-two and on a track to
obtain his doctorate, and a future professorship, when the U.S. invasion of Iraq began on March 20, 2003.

The opening bursts of the U.S. “shock and awe” bombing campaign lit up the world of the Islamic law student, who, better than most, understood the Koran’s injunction to defend Muslim lands against invaders. He signed up that same year with one of the many small resistance movements that engaged in hit-and-run attacks against U.S. troops, though his actual contributions appear to have been unremarkable.

And then, a few months later, he was caught. Some of the circumstances of his capture have become obscured, but U.S. records confirm that an Ibrahim Awad al-Badri was seized by GIs during a raid on a house in Fallujah in late January 2004. He was then transported to one of Iraq’s most feared destinations, the U.S. detention center known as Camp Bucca.

He arrived on February 4. A military photographer snapped the startled visage of a round-faced man approaching the start of middle age, wearing wire-framed glasses and an outsized beard. For the security-conscious Baghdadi, it remains one of only a small handful of photographs known to exist. The next time he posed for a portrait, more than ten years later, he would be a changed man in every respect. His journey from devout youth to bloodthirsty extremist was about to begin.

—

The prison where Baghdadi landed was a two-square-mile city of barbed wire and tents, erected on a sun-scorched plain a few miles from Iraqi’s border with Kuwait. To those helicoptering in at night, as the U.S. sailors who guarded the prison often did, Camp Bucca looked a bit like Las Vegas: an immense city of light in the middle of empty desert. But inside the wire, it was more like the Wild West.

Built initially by the British for military prisoners of war, the camp expanded rapidly under American control to accommodate huge numbers of Iraqis swept up after the start of the insurgency. Though the camp was designed to house twenty thousand men, the population ballooned at times to more than twenty-six thousand, all living in communal tents in a place where summertime temperatures regularly
climbed to 140 degrees. The heat, amplified by an oily Persian Gulf humidity, menaced guards and inmates equally. “
It actually feels like you’re in a microwave,” a boatswain’s mate on tower duty told a visiting navy journalist.

The camp’s commanders made substantial improvements in later years, replacing tents with air-conditioned cinder-block huts and adding classrooms for literacy and vocational training for carpentry and masonry. But in early 2004, it was the Islamists who controlled life inside the tent villages. Inmates were segregated by creed, and the Sunnis, in their sector, lived under strict Sharia law, self-imposed and brutally enforced. Anyone who disobeyed—or who betrayed the others by showing cordiality toward the Americans—could suffer punishment ranging from a beating to having an eye gouged out. In Compound 30, where the most violent Islamists were kept, prisoners vented their hostility by hurling feces or pellets called chai rocks—a residue of sweet tea mixed with sand and dried in the sun—at passing guard patrols.

One of the camp’s senior managers acknowledged that the Camp Bucca of Baghdadi’s time was both dysfunctional and, from the perspective of commanders looking to quell the Sunni insurgency, counterproductive. By corralling Islamist radicals and ordinary Iraqis in a lawless desert pen, U.S. officials inadvertently created a “jihadi university” that helped inculcate Islamist ideas into a new generation of fighters, the officer said.

“
Extremists mingled with moderates in every compound,” Lieutenant Commander Vasilios Tasikas, who ran legal operations at the prison, wrote in a 2009 essay in the
Military Review
. “Unfortunately, U.S. forces had adopted a model of detention operations that assumed that those interned were ‘all bad guys’ to be ‘warehoused’ for an indeterminate amount of time and released randomly in arbitrary groups. This approach was not only naïve and myopic, it was also dangerous; predictably, it fueled the insurgency inside the wire.”

If Bucca was indeed a jihadi university, Baghdadi would ultimately become its greatest alumnus. Though hardly a tough guy, he found a way to survive and even thrive in prison. Baghdadi forged a number of important friendships and alliances, including one with a Zarqawi disciple called Abu Muhammad al-Adnani, who became his
chief deputy and spokesman years later. Moreover, the young Islamic scholar found that his academic expertise gave him a certain stature. The camp’s mini–Islamist society needed someone who could interpret Sharia rules, and on that score, Baghdadi was exceptionally qualified. He could lead the daily prayers, in which inmates in their identical yellow uniforms lined up by the thousands on their prayer mats to pledge fealty to Allah. He was also experienced at speaking and teaching classical Arabic, the form used in the Koran and in formal ceremonies and speeches. Baghdadi, having lived his entire life among clerics, could even mimic the singsong delivery of the most learned imams of the great mosques of Baghdad and Mosul. As a vessel, his voice was pleasant yet authoritative, and the men liked to listen to it.

They would not have many opportunities. The scholarly qualities that helped Baghdadi earn respect among fellow detainees also allowed him to gain an early release. Camp Bucca regularly discharged its less dangerous prisoners to alleviate severe overcrowding, a source of constant tension and occasional riots among the inmates. In late 2004, a prison panel reviewed the record for Ibrahim Awad al-Badri and decided that the bespectacled academic posed little threat. He was discharged on December 6, 2004, but not before a medical team took a cheek swab to preserve a record of his DNA. If the same man were to turn up anywhere, dead or alive, in connection with a future terrorist act, U.S. officials could be precisely sure of whom they had.

Baghdadi emerged from his ten-month exposure to U.S. forces with an even greater determination to fight them. Years later, his quest to defeat America became a prayerful refrain. “
Deal with America and its allies, O Allah,” he would say in one of his public prayers. “Harshen your grip on them….Defeat them with the worst of defeats they will ever suffer. Divide their gatherings, split their body, dismember them completely, and make us raid them, and not them raid us.”

—

For a time, Baghdadi would try to avoid further entanglements with Americans. He was married now, to the first of his three wives, and he was father to at least one child, a four-year-old son. He returned
to school after prison and resumed his progress toward a doctorate in Islamic law, which he received in 2007. But the degree was not yet his when Baghdadi was drawn back into the insurgency. His old organization had merged with several others in the advisory council or
shura
created by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in 2006, and Baghdadi was asked to be one of the council’s advisers on matters concerning Sharia law.

A profile compiled by Western intelligence officials suggests that Zarqawi, a dabbler in theology who enjoyed debating with religious scholars, probably knew the man who would eventually replace him. But at the time, Baghdadi was still an obscure figure, even among the jihadists. “
Zarqawi was closer than a brother to me, but I didn’t know Baghdadi. He was insignificant,” Ahmed al-Dabash, a contemporary and member of another militant faction, the Islamic Army of Iraq, told London’s
Telegraph
newspaper in 2014. “He used to lead prayer in a mosque near my area. No one really noticed him.”

Zarqawi’s death in June 2006 changed everything. The heirs to the Jordanian’s al-Qaeda in Iraq movement had different ideas about how to run an insurgency, and they quickly reorganized themselves under a new name: the Islamic State of Iraq. Among the dominant leaders now were a number of former officers of Saddam Hussein’s vanquished army—Sunni colonels and majors who had allied themselves with Zarqawi but were never fully trusted by him. With the Jordanian gone, the former Baathists moved to assert Iraqi control over the group, from its central hierarchy to the provincial towns that were controlled by the Islamists in all but name. Once again, Baghdadi’s credentials made him uniquely valuable: Here was a bona fide Sharia expert with a solid Sunni-Iraqi pedigree who could ensure that the group’s scattered cells toed the line, ideologically. Baghdadi was quickly appointed chief of Sharia for a small farming town called al-Karma, just outside Fallujah. Soon afterward, he was placed in charge of religious affairs for all of Anbar Province. Then, in early 2010, he was appointed as the top Sharia official for the entire organization.

The promotion effectively made Baghdadi the third-ranking officer of the Islamic State, subordinate only to the senior leader and the minister of war. It’s the post he held on April 18, 2010, when U.S.
missiles and Iraqi rockets flattened a safe house outside the city of Tikrit, eliminating the group’s number one and number two leaders in a single blow. At least for the moment, Baghdadi, the bookish academic dismissed by peers as “insignificant,” stood alone at the head of the Islamic State of Iraq.

A month would pass before Baghdadi’s emirship was made official. Despite his senior ranking, his move to the top of the organization was by no means guaranteed. Indeed, many Western and Middle Eastern intelligence officials believed the job would go to a more seasoned figure with extensive experience commanding and leading operations. Yet, although Baghdadi was still a relative outsider, he won the support of the leadership council’s mix of former Baathists and Zarqawists.

Among those who approved of the promotion was a ruthless Iraqi army colonel named Samir al-Khlifawi, the leader of the group’s military council. A former Baathist who joined the insurgency after the U.S. invasion,
Khlifawi urged Baghdadi to accept the top leadership and promised to serve as his top deputy and mentor, according to documents discovered years later, after Khlifawi’s death during fighting in Syria. The white-bearded Khlifawi, more commonly known by his jihadist name Haji Bakr, was regarded by intelligence analysts as a savvy strategist who was chiefly responsible for the Islamic State’s early military successes.

Despite his lack of military experience, Baghdadi offered certain advantages to the group. One was the Sharia scholar’s willingness to provide religious cover for acts of brutality that clerics around the world had condemned as un-Islamic. Everything that made the group so widely reviled—the beheadings, the suicide bombings, the kidnappings, the extortion, the war against Shiites, the spilling of so much innocent Muslim blood—Baghdadi not only endorsed, but declared legally justified under Islamic law.

His other great asset was his suitability for the role of caliph—symbolically important for an organization that wanted its “Islamic State” claims to be taken seriously. Baghdadi, with his genealogical and scholarly pedigrees, could aspire to heights of leadership beyond Zarqawi’s grasp.

Over the years that followed, Baghdadi worked deliberately to
prepare himself for the mythical role to which he had been divinely appointed, according to a U.S. official familiar with Baghdadi’s history. “
He cloaked himself with all the right religious credentials, and paid close attention to imagery, to clothing, to the way he moved and talked,” the official said. “He would go to great lengths to show that he was in his rightful place.”

It was in the service of that goal that Baghdadi dispatched his emissaries across the border in August 2011, seeking a Syrian launchpad for the caliphate that still languished on the ground in his native country. A successful venture, in Baghdadi’s view, would help ensure the survival of his organization for years to come. More important, the Islamic State would be taking a first step toward erasing the artificial boundaries imposed by colonial powers to divide Muslims.