ISIS: Inside the Army of Terror (13 page)

THE ASSASSINATION OF ABU GHADIYAH

Most of the insurgents Syria funneled into Iraq had been hosted under the auspices of al-Assad’s own brother-in-law, Assef Shawkat, who was killed in a stunning assassination plot in Damascus in 2012 that wiped out the regime’s “crisis management cell,” the ad hoc security committee tasked with destroying the Syrian revolution. Originally believed to have been the work of Syrian rebels who infiltrated the cell, new evidence had emerged suggesting that this assassination may have been an inside job, waged by Iranian-backed hard-liners against Shawkat, who advocated negotiating with the anti–al-Assad opposition.

Shawkat’s history gives no indication of his being a softie. One of his jihadist charges was a man known as Badran Turki Hishan al-Mazidih, or Abu Ghadiyah, a Mosulawi Iraqi whom the US Treasury Department designated as a terrorist in February 2008. Abu Ghadiyah, the Treasury Department alleged, had been appointed AQI’s commander of logistics in 2004 by al-Zarqawi and had subsequently taken orders from Abu Ayyub al-Masri upon the Jordanian’s death. “As of the spring of 2007, Abu Ghadiyah facilitated the movement of AQI operatives into Iraq via the Syrian border,” the designation stated, while also listing and sanctioning the rest of Abu Ghadiyah’s Syria-based network. According to a State Department cable, subsequently published by WikiLeaks, “Bashar al-Asad was well aware that his brother-in-law . . .had detailed knowledge of the activities of AQI facilitator Abu Ghadiya.”

Abu Ghadiyah was evidently in the family business. His
“right-hand man” was also his cousin Ghazy Fezzaa Hishan, also known as Abu Faysal, who resided in Zabadani, a city northeast of Damascus known for being an important concourse for smuggling and transporting weapons from Syria into Lebanon. As of September 2006 both Abu Ghadiyah and Abu Faysal, according to the Treasury, “planned to use rockets to attack multiple Coalition forces outposts and Iraqi police stations, in an attempt to facilitate an AQI takeover in Western Iraq.”

Another member of the network was Abu Ghadiyah’s brother Akram Turki Hishan al-Mazidih, or Abu Jarrah, also based in Zabadani and in charge of weapons smuggling and, as the US government noted, “order[ing] the execution of all persons found to be working with the Iraqi Government or US Forces.”

Finally, there was another cousin, Saddah Jalut Al-Marsumi, who went by Saddah. He was an al-Qaeda financier who helped his enterprising clan transport suicide bombers from Syria to Iraq.

Abu Ghadiyah’s predecessor, the Syrian national Sulayman Khalid Darwish (who was also, rather confusingly, known as Abu Ghadiyah), had been killed by JSOC in Qa’im in 2005. That city’s strategic value is that it lies right across from the Syrian border town of Albu Kamal, and functions a bit like El Paso does for Juarez: a transnational portal through which men and money can flow in either direction.

By 2008 numerous diplomatic attempts by the United States to stop Abu Ghadiyah’s rat lines had failed. Petraeus had even sought permission from the Bush administration to parlay with al-Assad directly in Damascus, in the hope that another Sabawi-style deal might be arranged. The White House said no. Other attempts to cajole al-Assad via the UN Security Council failed.

In October 2008 the cajoling stopped. Stanley McChrystal’s JSOC, overseen by the CIA, was authorized to conduct a covert cross-border raid into Albu Kamal to kill Abu Ghadiyah, which it
did on October 26, in a special operation that resembled the assassination of Osama bin Laden in Abbottabad in 2011.

Despite the irrefutable habeas corpus
nature of the evidence, al-Assad continued to deny any involvement in sending terrorists into Iraq. Weeks after the raid, British Foreign Secretary David Miliband traveled to Damascus and once again tried the talking cure. He asked al-Assad to end his noxious activities and was met only with further professions of ignorance and innocence. Maura Connelly, the charge d’affaires at the US embassy in Damascus, recounted the meeting in a State Department cable:

“Bashar reportedly complained about the October 26 US military operation at Albu Kamal. Miliband replied the US had hit known [foreign fighter] facilitator Abu Ghadiyah. What Syria needed to do was to cooperate with the US and West. Miliband asked why Syria had not taken action against Abu Ghadiya when the US had provided a lot of information regarding his presence in Syria. ‘Even if Abu Ghadiya was there (in Albu Kamal),’ the US strike was not the way to deal with the issue, replied [al-Assad].”

Perhaps it was with the foregoing episode in mind that a year later Connelly minuted her overall impression of dealing with a regime whose “officials at every level lie. They persist in a lie even in the face of evidence to the contrary. They are not embarrassed to be caught in a lie.”

Although it garnered little media attention at the time, the most damning indictment of the al-Assad–jihadist
alliance came in the form of a US Federal Court civil judgment issued in 2008, which found Damascus liable for the kidnapping and murder of Olin Eugene “Jack” Armstrong and Jack Hensley, two American contractors who were beheaded in characteristic grisly fashion by agents of AQI.

The families of Armstrong and Hensley had originally filed their complaint not only against the regime but also against its military intelligence apparatus and al-Assad and Shawkat personally. However, the court, citing the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act (FSIA)—which places limitations on lawsuits filed in the United States against foreign states—and the fact that al-Assad and Shawkat were never served subpoenas, listed only Syria as the sole defendant. The judgment, written by Judge Rosemary Collyer, brought it all up—Shaker al-Absi, Abu al-Qaqa, the first Abu Ghadiyah, and the Foley assassination—and concluded that “Syria provided substantial assistance to Zarqawi and al-Qaeda in Iraq and that this led to the deaths by beheading of Jack Armstrong and Jack Hensley,” and that “Syria’s provision of material support and resources was inevitably approved and overseen by President Assad and General Shawkat, acting within the scope of their official duties.” The regime appealed this decision in May 2011; it lost.

ROLLED UP?

Conventional wisdom in US counterterrorism circles maintained that al-Assad’s alliance with AQI more or less ended in 2008, after Abu Ghadiyah was killed, because the regime “rolled up” its jihadist networks in eastern Syria and arrested returning foreign fighters. New evidence, however, complicates this assessment.

In December 2014 Martin Chulov of the Guardian newspaper published an in-depth profile of ISIS, confirming what had long been an allegation put forward by the al-Maliki government—that al-Assad was complicit in a devastating series of attacks against Iraqi state institutions on August 19, 2009. Sequential VBIED operations targeted the Iraqi Finance and Foreign Ministries and a police convoy in Baghdad. More than one hundred people were killed, including government employees and journalists, and around six hundred more were injured.

Al-Maliki had immediately accused the Baathists of being behind both plots. In November 2009 his government aired what it claimed were confessions obtained from three Baathist operatives involved in the August explosions.

At first, Baghdad was reluctant to assign any blame to the al-Assad regime directly, insisting only that the plots had been formulated in Syria. But it recalled its ambassador from Damascus after the regime failed to turn over two fugitive Baathists. Al-Assad responded by yanking his own envoy from Baghdad. One of the men he refused to turn over was Muhammad Younis al-Ahmed, whom he said he had already expelled from his territory. For a short time, al-Assad had tried to make al-Ahmed a Syrian-controlled leader of an Iraqi Baathist insurgency to rival the more established and self-financed Naqshbandi Army led by al-Douri, who was also being hosted on Syrian soil.

As 2009 wore on, Baghdad’s allegations against its neighbor grew more serious. Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari told members of the media in Bahrain, “Intelligence confirms that Saddamist Baathists are working from Syrian soil and enjoy the support of [the Syrian] intelligence services.” Major General Hussein Ali Kamal, the director of intelligence at the Iraqi Ministry of Interior, was absolutely convinced that this was so. Well respected by American diplomats and military officials for his professionalism, Kamal, who died of cancer in June 2014, told Chulov
that he obtained hard proof of Syria’s hosting and supervision of “two secret meetings” between al-Qaeda agents and Iraqi Baathists in 2009. Both meetings were held in Zabadani. Chulov wrote of Kamal’s reconstruction of these meetings: “[H]e laid out his evidence, using maps that plotted the routes they used to enter western Iraq and confessions that linked their journey to specific mid-ranking officers in Syria’s military intelligence units.”

Kamal apparently had an asset who wore a wire at one of the Zabadani meetings, which he said the Baathists led. “He is the most sensitive source we have ever had,” he told Chulov. “As far as we know, this is the first time there has been a strategic level meeting between all of these groups. It marks a new point in history.”

US forces were still stationed in Iraq at that point, but the objective shared by Syrian intelligence, the Baathists, and al-Qaeda was to instead destabilize al-Maliki’s government. Kamal relayed to Chulov that a source inside Syria had told him that the plotters noticed an uptick in Iraqi security around the original targets and so had decided on different ones. The Iraqi general struggled in vain for months trying to figure out where the new targets might be, until the August bombings horribly informed him.

ALI MAMLOUK’S GUIDE TO COUNTERTERRORISM

No one has better explained both the motive and nature of Syria’s collaboration with Sunni jihadism better than Ali Mamlouk, al-Assad’s director of general intelligence. In February 2010 Mamlouk surprised US diplomats in Damascus by turning up at a meeting between the State Department’s Coordinator for Counterterrorism Daniel Benjamin and Syria’s Vice Foreign Minister Faisal al-Miqdad. Mamlouk arrived, as he explained, at the prompting of al-Assad, who claimed to be seeking improved Syrian-US relations under the new American president. Obama had come to office promising a new policy of engagement with Damascus, and Mamlouk, obviously capitalizing on the opportunity the regime’s destabilization strategy had created, explained that cracking down on terrorism would be contingent on seeing that engagement policy carried through to something approaching a full normalization of bilateral relations. As relayed in a State Department cable about the meeting, Mamlouk and al-Assad sought three dispensations from
Washington, all of which confirmed Tony Badran’s gloss on the regime’s purpose for misbehavior: “(1) Syria must be able to take the lead in any regional actions; (2) politics are an integral part of combating terrorism, and a ‘political umbrella’ of improved US-Syrian bilateral relations should facilitate cooperation against terrorism; and (3) in order to convince the Syrian people that cooperation with the US was benefiting them, progress must be made on issues related to economic sanctions against Syria including spare parts for airplanes and a plane for President [Assad].”

But then Mamlouk made an interesting admission. He explained his own peculiar method of dealing with jihadists as “practical and not theoretical. . . .In principle, we don’t attack or kill them immediately. Instead, we embed ourselves in them and only at the opportune moment do we move.” But what constituted an “opportune moment” for Syria didn’t necessarily constitute one for the United States, as the preceding decade had amply demonstrated.

Was this acknowledgment of state infiltration of jihadist cells merely edifying, or did it contain an implied threat? The answer to that question lay in Mamlouk’s follow-up point to Daniel Benjamin, wherein he reminded the US diplomat that foreign fighters were still slipping into Iraq through Syria—this was about sixteen months after the Abu Ghadiyah assassination and about seven months since the last series of VBIED bombings had rocked Baghdad. However, Mamlouk continued, the regime was cracking down, and “[b]y all means we will continue to do all this, but if we start cooperation with you it will lead to better results and we can better protect our interests.”

The Syrian regime has been likened by other US diplomats to a mafia crime family. Mamlouk made the new White House an offer it couldn’t refuse.

8

REBIRTH

ISI UNDER ABU BAKR AL-BAGHDADI

ISIS’s history, according to
Dabiq
’s reconstruction, was an eleven-year utopian quest made sweeter by suffering, and one which ended in 2014 with the establishment of the caliphate. Abu Omar al-Baghdadi built the “first state in ‘modern’ times set up exclusively by the mujahidin—the active participants in the jihad—in the heart of the Muslim world just a stone’s throw away from” Mecca, Medina, and Jerusalem. And even through Sahwa and the surge, and the elimination of its own leadership, that state had endured, retreating “mostly into the desert regions of al-Anbar, where its soldiers regrouped, planned, and trained.”

THE DEATH OF AL-MASRI AND AL-BAGHDADI

In June 2008 Stanley McChrystal had been replaced as commander of JSOC by Vice Admiral William McRaven, a Navy SEAL who later coordinated Operation Neptune Spear, the raid in Abbottabad, Pakistan, that killed bin Laden in 2011. Although by 2010 most JSOC operations were in the AfPak theater—in line with the
Obama administration’s commitment to drawing down in Iraq and winning the “good war” against core al-Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan—McRaven’s team did strike a number of important victories against the Mesopotamian franchise.

The first was the killing of Abu Khalaf, Abu Ghadiyah’s kinsman who briefly assumed responsibility for the Syria-based facilitation network after the latter’s killing in October. A US official later said, “Khalaf was perhaps the most dangerous AQI facilitator in Iraq,” and that his death left a “void in AQI hierarchy.”

The second came after Iraqi forces arrested Manaf Abd al-Rahim al-Rawi, al-Qaeda’s emir in Baghdad, known to his subordinates as “the dictator.” Al-Rawi had collaborated with Baathists and Syrian intelligence to perpetrate the devastating series of bombings in Baghdad in 2009, all aimed at the al-Maliki government rather than the US military. And the Iraqis initially kept his arrest a secret. It was only after the Americans captured his twin brother that they forced al-Maliki to allow them to interrogate the dictator, who duly gave up information about his network. Al-Rawi named two couriers, whom JSOC tracked in April 2010 to a location in the Tharthar region along Salah ad-Din’s border with Anbar.

The courier’s safe house turned out to contain none other than Abu Ayyub al-Masri, hiding in a secret basement accessible only through a door underneath the kitchen sink. His companion was a man whom some had doubted ever existed: Abu Omar al-Baghdadi.

“Their killing was [a] reflection of ISI’s weakness,” Laith Alkhouri, the counterterrorism expert, said. “Masri had been preaching on operational cautiousness to Muslims, how to secure their communications and such to avoid being hit by the Americans. The power he held as the head of AQI was more in the realm of public relations. He’d released a document to supporters [that] was a step-by-step guideline showing them how they might burnish the image of global jihad. He wanted his recruits to learn how to hack
websites and marry scientific advancement with Islamist ideology.”

But this focus on the more Don Draper-ish aspects of takfirism
happened to coincide with the nadir of ISI’s popularity and prowess, owing to some of the worst tactical decision-making by its commanders since the war started. Eighty percent of the leadership had been killed along with them. Nor was the “Iraqi face” supposedly created by al-Baghdadi’s appointment as emir really working anymore. Al-Baghdadi himself had pretensions of something higher than his nominal role as
caporegime
of the Sunni insurgency, at least judging by the name he bestowed upon himself—“Emir of the Believers”—an honorific usually reserved for only the highest positions of Islamic rulership. (Mullah Omar, the fugitive Taliban leader, is called that.) “The adoption of that title,” said Laith Alkhouri, “created a huge question for jihadists unsure of where ISI was headed.” That question would be answered by Baghdadi’s successor, Ibrahim Awwad al-Badari.

THE NEW AL-BAGHDADI

Al-Badari, who assumed the nom de guerre Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, was in effect appointed by ISI’s Shura Council as a singular replacement for two slain commanders. He came seemingly out of nowhere. What is known about him in both Iraq and within US intelligence circles came to light after ISIS reigned triumphant across two countries and in the subsequent media rush to figure out the identity of this tenebrous new figure. As a result, much of the second al-Baghdadi’s biography still hovers not far above the level of rumor or speculation, some of it driven, in fact, by competing jihadist propagandists intent on scandalizing or delegitimizing the caliph being presented as more authoritative than Ayman al-Zawahiri. But this cleavage into pro and contra camps took time. “No one thought he wanted competition with al-Qaeda,” Alkhouri
said. “In secret communication, he not only pledged allegiance to al-Zawahiri, he asked if this pledge should be made public or secret. Al-Zawahiri replied that it should be kept secret to avoid complexities and take some of the pressure off ISI.”

Born in 1971 near the city of Samarra, al-Baghdadi became a scholar of Islamic studies, obtaining both a master’s degree as well as a doctorate in the subject from the University of Islamic Sciences in Baghdad’s Adhamiya suburb. He’s said to have lived in modest quarters attached to a local mosque in Tobchi, a western district of Baghdad that was fairly mixed between Sunni and Shiite residents. Like most mass murderers recollected by those who knew them in their nonage, his friends and acquaintances say he was the quiet, retiring type who in no way resembled the dangerous fanatic of recent imagination (“Neighbors Remember Serial Killer as Serial Killer” being a headline confined only to the satirical pages of the
Onion,
apparently.) Al-Baghdadi wore glasses, excelled at soccer, and carried himself in a manner befitting a scholar.

Dr. Hisham al-Hashimi, an expert on ISIS who consults with the Iraqi government, met al-Baghdadi in the late 1990s. “He did not have the charisma of a leader,” al-Hashimi told us. “When I met him, he was extremely shy and did not speak much. He was interested in religious studies, and the focus of his interest was the Quran. He was from a poor rural family, and he was not envious of urban people, as others often are. His ambition was limited to obtaining a government job within the Islamic endowment ministry.” 

According to one of his neighbors, Abu Ali, who spoke to the
Daily Telegraph
,
al-Baghdadi came to Tobchi when he was eighteen years old: “The mosque here had its own imam. When he was away, religious students would take his place. [Al-Baghdadi] would sometimes lead the prayers but not give any sermons.” He grew more reactionary as time wore on, Abu Ali remembered, recounting al-Baghdadi’s reaction to a wedding in Tobchi at which men and
women were “dancing in the same room. He was walking past on the street and saw this. He shouted ‘How can men and women be dancing together like this? It’s irreligious.’ He stopped the dance.”

Wael Essam, the Palestinian journalist with extensive experience reporting from Iraq, talked to many Sunnis who were al-Baghdadi’s colleagues during his academic days at the University for Islamic Sciences. Al-Baghdadi, they claimed, was either a member of the Muslim Brotherhood or an affiliate of it when he matriculated. His Salafist inclinations came later, well into his curriculum. “Al-Baghdadi was close to Mohammed Hardan, one of the Brotherhood’s leaders,” Essam said. “Hardan had left to fight with the mujahidin in Afghanistan and returned in the 1990s and adopted a clear Salafist ideology. Al-Baghdadi joined Hardan’s group organizationally and ideologically. He also briefly joined Jaysh al-Mujahideen [the Army of the Mujhahidin, a Sunni militant group].”

By around 2000 al-Baghdadi had a doctorate, a wife, and a son. By 2003 the United States occupied Iraq, although the future ISIS leader was not yet an insurgent. Abu Ali told the
Telegraph
that al-Baghdadi bore no discernible grievance against US forces at that point: “He wasn’t like the hot-blooded ones. He must have been a quiet planner.”

So quiet that by late 2003 he had founded his own Islamist faction, Jaysh Ahl al-Sunnah wa al-Jamaah (the Army of the People of the Sunni Community); a year after that, he was enrolled in another sort of university—Camp Bucca.

Contrary to numerous claims in the Western press that suggest that al-Baghdadi was released from Bucca in 2009, when it was shuttered, he actually served only a single yearlong stint in the internment facility, in 2004. “He was visiting a friend of his in Fallujah named Nessayif Numan Nessayif,” al-Hashimi recalled to us. “With him was another man, Abdul Wahed al-Semayyir. The
US Army intelligence arrested all of them. Baghdadi was not the target—it was Nessayif. He was arrested on January 31, 2004, and was released on December 6, 2004. He was never arrested again after that. Everything to the contrary is incorrect.”

Abu Ahmed, the former high-ranking ISIS member who knew al-Baghdadi at Bucca, told the
Guardian
that prison administrators at first took al-Baghdadi to be something of a problem-solver. His PhD in Islamic studies conferred a jurisprudential wisdom on him to which squabbling jihadist inmates seemed to defer. As such, the Americans let him travel among the different camp blocs at Bucca, ostensibly to resolve conflicts; instead, al-Baghdadi used the indulgence to recruit more foot soldiers. In time, according to Abu Ahmed, he started causing problems in the prison, using “a policy of conquer and divide to get what he wanted, which was status. And it worked.”

When al-Baghdadi was released at the end of 2004, owing to US appraisals that he posed a low-level risk to the coalition or Iraqi institutions, he grew even more extremist in orientation, according to Essam. In 2007 he joined the Mujahideen Shura Council, which al-Zarqawi had installed to nationalize the insurgency. However, al-Baghdadi’s purism and his mercurial alliance-making meant that he wasn’t really interested in working with an ideologically diverse consortium of insurgent groups, even if al-Qaeda was primus inter pares. An AQI commander from Fallujah told Essam that al-Baghdadi turned on just about every faction he ever joined. “He left the Muslim Brotherhood and he then declared them apostates and agents of [former US Ambassador to Iraq Zalmay] Khalilzad. He also left Jaysh al-Mujahideen and he engaged in hostilities against them, especially in al-Karmah [a town northeast of Fallujah]. Al-Baghdadi was always very consistent about his position on fellow Sunni militant groups that were not part of his own organization. He would say: ‘Fighting them is more of a priority than fighting the Americans.’ ”

His insistence on the need for fratricidal warfare—or
fitna
between and among Sunnis—would remain a hallmark of al-Baghdadi’s leadership well into the expansion of ISIS into Syria and Iraq. Essem also maintains that, contrary to the popular belief that al-Baghdadi came from nowhere, he was actually well-known to both Iraqis and Americans. “His uncle was Ismail al-Badri, member of Iraq’s Muslim Ulema Association, which is considered an apostate organization by his nephew. Al-Baghdadi’s sister-in-law is also married to a leader of the Iraqi Islamic Party, the vehicle of the Brotherhood in Iraq. Before the Americans withdrew, he was arrested multiple times because of his kinship to Abu Bakr.”

Furthermore, according to al-Hashimi, al-Baghdadi’s ascension to ISI emir was decided overwhelmingly, by nine out of eleven members of the Shura Council. There were three reasons for his selection. First, he belonged to the Quraysh tribal confederation, considered one of the most venerable in the Middle East, thanks to its proximity to the Prophet Muhammad. (Abu Omar al-Baghdadi was also said to have hailed from this tribe, the wellspring of all Islamic caliphs.) Second, al-Baghdadi had himself been a member of ISI’s Shura Council and was therefore close to Abu Omar. Finally, he was chosen because of his age: he was a generation younger than the other viable candidates for emir and was viewed as someone with more staying power to lead ISI out of the doldrums once US forces had quit Iraq. Today, ISIS reveres him as a “messenger.” “Whoever comes to you while your condition is united behind a single man, and intends to break your solidarity or disrupt your unity, then kill him,”
Dabiq
proclaimed, exhorting all Muslims to pledge allegiance to al-Baghdadi.

GHOSTS OF SADDAM II

Al-Baghdadi’s rise heralded yet another mutation of ISI, or rather a retrogression of it to an earlier period in the Sunni insurgency’s history. There were visibly many more former Baathists in the higher
ranks, owing no doubt to the continued Iraqization of the organization. As General Odierno noted in his June 2010 Pentagon news briefing, AQI’s leadership had been all but destroyed in a very short space of time—thirty-four out of the top forty-two operatives were removed from the battlefield in one way or another—and the franchise had lost its ability to coordinate with al-Qaeda’s headquarters in Pakistan. The vacuum this created at the top meant that, before al-Zawahiri and bin Laden could appoint a new emir from afar, the Iraqi wing of ISIS was able to decide on one of its own in Abu Bakr.

According to US officials, that was the internal story told by two disgruntled al-Qaeda members several years later. The reason they were disgruntled was that their perception of the rise of al-Baghdadi, whatever his level of education, represented the takeover of the Salafist-Jihadist movement within ISI of people without strong Salafist-Jihadist credentials—the Baathists.

There is no argument among analysts or those who knew al-Baghdadi that he is a true-believing takfirist. But, as we’ve seen already, even rock-ribbed terrorists benefit from their own who’s who, mainly in the form of filial or tribal connections that enable them to leverage a birthright afforded to them by the very societies or regimes they seek to destroy. Might al-Baghdadi have benefited from his ties to the Baathists? Given what is known of his biography and education, the likelihood is strong.

According to Derek Harvey, “he’s clearly not Zarqawi. But the breadth and size of the organization and the things it has going on from financial enterprises to administration to the running of eight separate regional commands, to its tactical partnering with Naqshbandi Army, to its tribal outreach—I see a Baathist style to all of this. And I know that one of Baghdadi’s mentors at the University of Islamic Sciences was close to Izzat al-Douri. Al-Douri continually operated from Raqqa and [the] northeastern Syria area early on in ISIS’s emergence in Syria.”