ISIS: Inside the Army of Terror (23 page)

Unlike al-Assad, but rather like Saddam, then, ISIS has made tribal outreach an integral part of its governing strategy, the better to keep the impossibility of another Awakening an integral part of its war strategy. Where it hasn’t scared or tempted tribesmen into submission with propaganda about “repentance” and the consequences of not seeking it, it has inserted itself as a buffer between feuding clans, relying, no doubt, on the experience and hard-won knowledge of its former Baathist leadership. Not for nothing did al-Baghdadi, in announcing the formation of ISIS in April 2013, explicitly refer to two categories of people: Muslims and the tribes of Syria.

ISIS’s success in playing tribes, or members of the same tribe, against one another is a product of policies it has followed since its battlefield resurgence in 2011. It has followed a divide-and-rule policy to ensure that social and tribal rivalry and hostility are more pronounced than any unified enmity to ISIS. That will undoubtedly complicate the issue of working with tribes to defeat ISIS militarily, because even if some members of one tribe decide to become sahwats, chances are they’ll be fighting their own kinsmen.

It is a fear often voiced by sheikhs in both Iraq and Syria. As Frederic Wehrey of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace wrote, ISIS “has proven to be a more adaptable and entrenched opponent today than its predecessor was in the mid-2000s, deploying a potent mix of extreme violence and soft power to both coerce and co-opt the tribes. Underpinning all of this are truisms that often elude tribal enthusiasts: tribal authority is fickle,
hyper-localized, often artificially constructed, and therefore hard to fully harness.”

The volte-face situation in Iraqi Sunni areas was just as much a product of the policies of Nouri al-Maliki—and more directly the military campaign in Anbar in early 2014. The antigovernment protests in that province following the US withdrawal saw the rise of mainstream Sunni religious and tribal figures, politically in the protests camps and militarily in the Anbar desert—even though ISI was present in the background. Instead of taking these figures’ concerns seriously, al-Maliki portrayed his military campaign in Anbar in unequivocally sectarian terms. In a speech he delivered on Christmas 2013, he characterized it as an ancient war between the partisans of the Prophet’s grandson Hussain and the son of the first Ummayad ruler, Yazid, in the seventh century. 

This disastrous miscalculation arguably cost al-Maliki his premiership. It certainly helped open the door for ISIS’s return in Anbar. “Once things settle down, the tribes will realize how the [al-Assad and al-Maliki] regimes marginalized them and get back to their senses,” the ISIS mediation official told us. “They are our people, but they need to know that they cannot get it their way. They have to understand we are the only ones who can help them and protect them.”

ISIS’s tribal strategy does have its limitations; the biggest being that it is still regarded as a temporary governing force, an ally that was made out of convenience or brute necessity. The tribes accept the temporary situation as the best of all worlds, and because they don’t want their areas turned into combat zones. But they don’t endorse ISIS ideologically or join it en masse because they calculate that its reign won’t last forever. Smaller tribes are joining ISIS, many of them driven by power politics rather than any sympathy for takfirism
or the caliphate.

14

AL-DAWLA

THE ISLAMIC “STATE” SLEEPER CELLS

Abu Adnan came early to the meeting with us in a five-star hotel in Sanliurfa, also known as Urfa, in southern Turkey, near the Syrian border. Abu Adnan was in his late thirties and had been referred by a contact as someone who had inside knowledge about ISIS. He introduced himself as a doctor who worked in makeshift hospitals in ISIS-controlled territories. He initially seemed curious to know what we thought of the “state,” for which he provided medical services, and our appraisal of attitudes toward it in the Middle East and internationally. He listened attentively, as did a younger companion who sat next to him.

Then Abu Adnan came clean, revealing that he wasn’t just a doctor but also an
amni
, a security official for ISIS. He declined to answer specific questions about his job and dodged others, but he proudly explained that there are dozens of men like him working with ISIS outside of Syria, many in neighboring countries. “A believer does not get stung from the same hole twice,” Abu Adnan said, referring to a saying attributed to the Prophet Muhammad, which is more or less the Islamic equivalent of “Fool me once . . .”

“We cannot afford to wait for others to spy on us,” he said. “Information is the foundation and the pillar for everything. We need to know if there are activities outside the borders that might affect us in the future. We need to have a presence outside our territories. We need to do all that without compromising the state, so it is important to have reliable, efficient, and trusted people doing that.”

Amniyat
, or security units, are one of the vital organs of ISIS intelligence and counterintelligence, developed thanks to the former Iraqi Mukhabarat officers in its ranks. Amniyat, in fact, is headed by Abu Ali al-Anbari, the former intelligence officer in Saddam’s regime. In ISIS territories these units are known to carry out raids to arrest wanted individuals and to probe security-related cases. However, little else is publicly known about the work of Amniyat. Even within a local ISIS structure, they have to operate separately from other sectors, such as the clerical authority, the military, and
khidmat al-muslimeen
(“Muslim Services”). 

Another ISIS member, Abu Moawiya al-Sharii, who serves the organization as a
sharii
, or cleric, confirmed that walls of separation exist between and among local ISIS affiliates. “Each one has a speciality,” Abu Moawiya said. “I don’t know what the military commanders do or know, and they don’t know what an amni knows.”

Such separation of powers helps with ISIS’s pretense of statehood, reminiscent of the walled-off bureaucracies and departments in any government. But it also guards against infiltration and espionage—a particular obsession among ISIS’s upper cadres and no doubt also a holdover from their Baathist origins. Even though ISIS tends to be more flexible in its recruitment and membership requirements than Nusra, it has established an elaborate and layered internal security apparatus to insulate its core leadership from provincial officers, and vice versa. “Our enemies are clever and determined,” Abu Adnan said. “What we can do is to make sure the body of the state is strong, so that it can heal no matter how far they
weaken it. So even if they destroy us in one area, you can be sure we’re still there. We don’t have to be exposed and visible.”

At the hotel in Sanliurfa, Abu Adnan gave no outward sign of belonging to a takfiri
organization known for its bearded and black-clad militants just miles to the south. He was clean-shaven and dressed in modern attire—more Mohamed Atta than Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. Yet in the course of the interview he thumbed through his mobile phone photos to show himself mingling and posing with ISIS leaders in Raqqa, northern Hasaka, and Aleppo. He said that security officers, depending on the seniority of their position, have to learn a range of skills, from military training to political orientation to communication skills to clandestine activity. Abu Adnan claimed to have network of smugglers on the Syrian-Turkish border who would help potential fighters enter Syria to join ISIS. They operated in plain sight of the Turkish authorities and, like Abu Adnan, wouldn’t be conspicuously out of place in any Western city.

“ISIS moves with incredible speed,” Chris Harmer, the analyst at the Institute for the Study of War said, trying to explain how the terror army not only mobilizes forces but springs up in places where they previously had no discernible presence. “They have embedded, nested sleeper cells that start picking people off. We saw this in Mosul in June. Clearly, they had a list of people they were going to kill in the first seventy-two hours in the seizure of the city.”

Mayser Hussain, a paramedic from Sahl al-Ghab, Hama, explained how ISIS has outfoxed the FSA there. “We have a group of 580 fighters from Sahl al-Ghab and Mount Shahshabu; many of them have secretly pledged allegiance to ISIS, as a sleeper cell. They’re ready to fight. They haven’t made it public because the FSA group in the region, Suqour al-Ghab Brigades, is dominant. Suqour al-Ghab has around four thousand fighters, so they can’t fight it.”

Hussain said that the group that pledged allegiance to ISIS used to be known as al-Farouq; now it’s called Jabhat Sham. “I used
to work with them when they were al-Farouq. Lately they offered me to join them as a paramedic. They told me that because I’ve been defending them in public and online, because I grew a beard and trimmed my mustache . . .‘We are ready, and we are preparing ourselves to take the whole region.’ ”

ISIS, Hussain said, has experience recruiting from FSA cadres and offers incentives for mainstream rebels to defect to its ranks. A current policy is that anyone who has fought with the FSA, Ahrar al-Sham, or al-Nusra against ISIS and leaves to join al-Baghdadi’s army is more likely to be promoted within its ranks. Abu Bilal, the FSA financier whose house was burned down by ISIS, told us the story of Obeida al-Hindawi, a former FSA fighter, who had worked for ISIS in secret for three to six months before declaring his affiliation. During that time, al-Hindawi received funding through local channels, all linked to external FSA donors. He was in regular communication with a Tunisian emir in al-Muhassan, where his mother’s family hails from and where, as we examined in a previous chapter, ISIS has recruited tribesmen.

“During his secret allegiance, Obeida objected to our plan to join the fight against ISIS and he said that we should distance ourselves from it. He single-handedly recruited FSA members and convinced his former colleagues to join. Two of his brothers who led the brigade in the town were killed. He then became the commander of the brigade. Suddenly, he stopped fighting and said he no longer had any money or that his cars stopped working. It was all a ruse; he’d been with ISIS for a while at that point.”

The one group that knew al-Hindawi’s true affiliation was al-Nusra, which Abu Bilal said had better intelligence than anyone else in the area. “Nusra stormed Obeida’s house in April or May. Everyone was asking why. Nusra said he was an ISIS member who paid money to people to join. He’d fled and went to Raqqa. He announced his allegiance when he returned from Raqqa to al-
Muhassan, as ISIS took Busaira, a town in Deir Ezzor, in June, and two days before they advanced into Nusra’s stronghold in the town of Shuhail. He raised the ISIS flag and built a checkpoint and activated all the sleeper cells.” Al-Hindawi was later involved in the execution of Shaitat tribesmen in nearby villages.

Zakaria Zakaria, a journalist from Hasaka, said that ISIS’s infiltration of al-Nusra was equally impressive. When many al-Nusra jihadists in Hasaka wanted to defect to ISIS in early 2012, ISIS told them to stay put for the time being. “When ISIS made it public later on, already half of the members were with them, and the rest either fled to Turkey or joined.”

OVERTAKING THE FSA

A mere twenty-six miles north of Aleppo, al-Bab had fallen to the FSA the previous summer and served as a fallback base for battalions laying siege to Aleppo, sections of which were being progressively peeled away from the regime.

One of the authors met Barry Abdul Lattif while reporting from al-Bab and the Bab al-Hadid quarter of Aleppo in late July 2012, in the midst of Ramadan. An early pro-revolution media activist, Lattif had earned a reputation among foreign correspondents for being a charismatic but unnerving adrenaline junkie. He loved to chase the regime’s Sukhoi fighter jets and attack helicopters as much as he loved to take queasy Western journalists (such as us) into the most forbidding war zones in Syria. A day before our visit, he had sustained a small shrapnel injury, the result, we were told, of sniper bullets ricocheting off the ground in Salaheddine, which was then the fiercely contested Stalingrad of Aleppo, a city laid waste by aerial bombardment and round-the-clock shelling.

The al-Bab of Ramadan 2012 had offered one of the most encouraging signs of the anti-Assad revolution. The FSA presence
guarding the town was mostly financed by local merchants, not foreign donors, and perhaps because it was salaried by the community it protected, it exhibited none of the taints of corruption or venality that would come to characterize the larger rebel camp later. Fighters stationed in the downtown barracks of the al-Khatib Brigade (one of the many units so named for Hamza al-Khatib, a thirteen-year-old boy who was killed by al-Assad’s forces in 2011) would flash the peace sign or insist on posing for photographs.

But it was al-Bab’s civil society that seemed so pregnant with promise. The Assad regime had all but destroyed al-Bab’s city hospital and so, in order to tend to the wounded, local volunteers and professional doctors set up a makeshift field hospital in the basement of a mosque. They keep meticulous records of those they treated, which, they said, included civilians, FSA fighters, but also al-Assad’s soldiers and even some shabiha
.
By nightfall, the streets of a pastoral Levantine hamlet were transformed into ecstatic scenes of protest and municipal action. Because all government services were stopped after al-Bab fell to the opposition, the people of the town had to take care of themselves. So FSA fighters put down their Kalashnikovs and picked up brooms and garbage bags, joined by white-gloved volunteers who rode around on motorbikes that looked like large hair dryers.

“Where are the terrorists here?” Lattif had asked that summer, mocking the regime’s propaganda that everyone and anyone who stood up against it was al-Qaeda.

The terrorists arrived a year later.

Now living in Turkey and working for RMTeam, a Syrian research and humanitarian aid organization, Lattif recounted how ISIS moved into al-Bab and ultimately seized control of the entire town. “After they announced their ‘state’ and after they defected from al-Qaeda, they started to arrest activists around the liberated areas. For the first time, I saw it—it was August 2013, they came to al-Bab and they captured some bad FSA battalions.”

What made the battalions “bad”? “They were thieves. They kidnapped some civilians and asked for money to set them free,” Lattif said. “So Daesh arrested the battalions. In the early days, the civilians liked Daesh; they didn’t know that it had its own project and its own plans for al-Bab.”

The regime had never stopped bombarding al-Bab. According to Lattif, it had hit a school next to the hospital, which had by then been partially restored to working order. Twelve medics, Lattif said, were killed in that attack. Believing that the presence of takfiris would only invite further collective punishment on the town, the people began protesting against ISIS. “It lasted for three or four days. After that, some FSA brigades negotiated with Daesh for Daesh to leave the city. So they withdrew to the farmland around al-Bab. But they stayed there, just above the city, hovering, very close. And every day they captured new people, more FSA fighters from the bad battalions. They didn’t yet capture any activists, they just issued threats against them—for me, especially. Almost everybody in the city asked me every day on Facebook if I was still free. They warned me that I was in danger, that Daesh was coming for me.”

It was after ISIS seized near-total control of Raqqa, Lattif said, that it returned to al-Bab in force, creating a “siege” around the city. It began clashing with the FSA battalions as well as Ahrar al-Sham and al-Nusra fighters. “There were not too many men from those two groups in al-Bab at this point,” Lattif said. The FSA was still the predominant insurgency, with around 1,500 fighters in al-Bab (many of them imported from neighboring areas, such as Minbij and Aleppo), followed distantly by Ahrar al-Sham, and then al-Nusra.

To force al-Bab into surrender, ISIS resorted to a favored tactic of the regime: starvation. It kept stealing the wheat from silos just outside the city, and the FSA was enlisted to stop the plunder lest the residents, already suffering, run out of bread. ISIS raided the main al-Bab headquarters for Liwa al-Tawhid, the largest brigade
in Aleppo, killing around twenty-one men, Lattif said. Then the “regime bombarded the city with helicopters. It targeted only civilians in the center of the city. So Daesh took the advantage of that attack and came inside. It saw the opportunity created by the regime.”

Al-Assad, Lattif insisted, was very crafty. “He wanted to give the impression to the civilians that Daesh and the regime are one. His goal was to start a civil war with the FSA.”

By January 2014—the month that Syria’s minor
sahwa
began—ISIS had brought snipers to strategic locations throughout al-Bab. They began picking off civilians and rebels. “They shot everyone,” Lattif said. “I was in the al-Bab media office when Daesh took about a quarter of the city, in the southern district. Suddenly, everything went silent. There was no sound at all. All the fighting had stopped.

“We closed our office and went back to our homes. At about 11:00 at night, I went to take a look around the city to see what was happening. I saw Liwa al-Tawhid leave. There were no armed fighters left in al-Bab. I don’t know where they went.”

Ahrar al-Sham, he said, maintained a presence around the city but not inside it. “I stayed with them until morning. It was Friday night. I saw many Ahrar al-Sham fighters with cars with machine guns enter the city at around 4:00 a.m. Then, about an hour and a half later, three trucks, all filled with ammunition and rockets and all belonging to Ahrar al-Sham, drove out of al-Bab. There was an emir of Ahrar al-Sham who came over to us and asked the fighters I was with to leave our checkpoint because we were the last checkpoint in the city. Everyone had left for Aleppo, he told us.”