ISIS: Inside the Army of Terror (7 page)

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AGENTS OF CHAOS

IRAN AND AL-QAEDA

Iraqi’s Sunnis had just as much of a learning curve to adapt to as did the US military. Having squandered most of their political power through a disastrous boycott of the January 2005 election, they were not about to repeat the blunder again at the one in December 2005. The about-face was statistically staggering. In December, in Ramadi, Sunni voter turnout was around 80 percent, whereas in January it had been a measly 2 percent. The letdown, then, was commensurately disappointing. Shia political blocs again came out on top, albeit with a small margin of victory, which did little to dissuade many Sunnis of the conspiracy theory that al-Zarqawi had cleverly capitalized on and that suddenly appeared wholly realized: an Iranian-American alliance was purposefully keeping them from their rightful place as the true masters and custodians of Baghdad.

Sunni participation in the December election also had another disconcerting side effect: because many of the more nationalistic or “moderate” insurgents quit the battlefield in favor of trying their luck
at the ballot box, AQI’s role in Iraq’s terrorism grew more concentrated. Additionally, less moderate non-AQI insurgents, such as the 1920 Revolution Brigades (named for Iraq’s anticolonial uprising against the British in that same year). And though Jaysh al-Islami (the Islamic Army), was vying with the Zarqawists for control of territory in Mosul, it was not yet ready to abandon Sunni rejectionism for reconciliation. AQI’s overreach had alienated many, but al-Zarqawi was still able to exploit demographic anxieties, which long predated the war.

Kanan Makiya, a scholar of Baathist Iraq, had forecast a dire scenario for a post-Baathist state in his 1993 book
Cruelty and Silence
: “After Saddam is gone, when people’s lives and those of their loved ones look as if they are on the chopping block, Sunni fears of what the Shi’a might do to them in the name of Islam are going to become the major force of Iraqi politics. The more Iraq’s Shi’a assert themselves as Shi’a, the greater will be the tendency of Iraq’s Sunni minority to fight to the bitter end before allowing anything that so much as smells of an Islamic republic to be established in Iraq. They see in such a state—whether rightly or wrongly is irrelevant—their own annihilation.”

Al-Zarqawi’s choice to Iraq’s Sunnis was therefore “My barbarism or theirs.” In order to make his option even more persuasive, he needed to dispel one of the greatest liabilities to AQI’s popular appeal—its perception as a foreigner’s jihadist army. He thus needed to “Iraqize” his franchise. In January 2006 al-Zarqawi announced the creation of the Majlis Shura al-Mujahidin fi al-Iraq (the Mujahidin Advisory Council of Iraq). Initially, this consortium consisted of six different Salafist groups, five of which were Iraqi in composition, leaving AQI as the sole outlier, albeit with central control over the council’s operations. Contributing to what was, in effect, a new marketing or “branding” strategy for takfirism was the chauvinistic and authoritarian behavior of the newly elected Iraqi government.

SHIA MILITIAS, IRANIAN PROXIES

Given the world’s current preoccupation with ISIS and the current US campaign against it, it’s easy to forget that a decade ago, the American military saw as formidable a terrorist threat in the portly, demagogic Shia cleric Muqtada al-Sadr. The son of the revered Muhammad Sadiq al-Sadr, who was killed by Saddam’s Mukhabarat in 1999, the younger al-Sadr by rights ought to have been confined to the lower rung of Shia religious leaders. He ruled an impoverished and overcrowded ghetto in northeast Baghdad formerly known as Saddam City and renamed Sadr City after the invasion. He founded his own paramilitary organization, the Jaysh al-Mahdi (Mahdi Army), not long after the regime’s fall, seeing it as Iraq’s counterpart to Hezbollah (“the Party of God”), the Iranian proxy paramilitary in Lebanon that had long straddled the fault line between US-sanctioned terrorist entity and internationally legitimized political party, occupying posts in the Lebanese cabinet and wielding furtive influence within the country’s ostensibly independent intelligence services and armed forces. The Party of God proved the perfect template for carving out a similar terrorist “deep state” in Iraq.

Like all warlords, al-Sadr wanted to rule his fief uncontested. Left largely alone by US forces, he created his own sphere of influence with the help of the Iranians. The Sunni conspiracy theory of a Washington-Tehran plot to destroy Iraq can have been met only with anger and bemusement by GIs who experienced firsthand how Iran sought to make life as bloody and difficult for them as possible. The Battle of Najaf in August 2004 was essentially a proxy war between the United States and Iran’s elite foreign intelligence and military apparatus, the Revolutionary Guards Corps-Quds Force (IRGC-QF), coordinated on the Iraqi side by an Iranian operative named Sheikh Ansari, who US intelligence concluded
was embedded with the Mahdi Army in Najaf and was helping it conduct its combat operations. Ansari was an operative for the Quds Force’s Department 1000, which handled Iran’s intelligence portfolio in Iraq.

Iran’s hegemony in Iraq began well before the regime change. The devastating eight-year war with Iraq had turned the Islamic Republic into a place of refuge for hundreds of thousands of Iraqi Shia who fled Saddam. With Saddam gone, many of these exiles were able to return home to a country where the Shia were enfranchised by nascent democracy and to launch both political and paramilitary apparatuses upon an infrastructure that had been quietly and covertly built up for years under Baathist rule.

• • •

The Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI) was in fact a wholesale creation of Iranian intelligence and Mohammed Baqir al-Hakim. SCIRI’s armed wing, al-Zarqawi’s hated Badr Corps, operated as Tehran’s fifth column in Iraq. “The mullahs ran a very subversive campaign against Saddam long before we got into that country, and we were dealing with those same lines of communications before we got there,” said Colonel Jim Hickey, the former commander for the 4th Infantry Division brigade that captured Saddam in December 2003—an operation in which Hickey played a key role.

When the Americans arrived, Tehran’s campaign of sabotage and terrorism fell principally to IRGC-QF’s commander Brigadier General Qassem Suleimani, who answered directly to Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. A former CIA officer not long ago described Suleimani, who has understandably been promoted to major general in the years since, as “the single most powerful operative in the Middle East today and no one’s ever heard of him.”

David Petraeus, when he became the top US general in Iraq, got to know Suleimani quite well, referring to the master spy as
“evil” and mulling whether or not to tell President Bush that “Iran is, in fact, waging war on the United States in Iraq, with all of the US public and governmental responses that could come from that revelation.” For Petraeus, Iran had “gone beyond merely striving for influence in Iraq and could be creating proxies to actively fight us, thinking that they [could] keep us distracted while they [tried] to build WMD and set up [the Mahdi Army] to act like Lebanese Hezbollah in Iraq.”

In 2007, five American servicemen were killed in an ambush in Karbala carried out by agents of Asa’ib Ahl al-Haq (the League of the Righteous), a splinter militia of the Mahdi Army set up with al-Sadr and Iran’s assistance. Not only had the Quds Force officer stationed at the Iranian consulate in Karbala quit his post shortly before the ambush took place, but one of the leaders of Asa’ib Ahl al-Haq, Qais al-Khazali, confessed to Iran’s masterminding of the entire operation.

Suleimani’s deputy in bleeding America in Iraq was Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, an Iraqi national who had lived in Iran and had been tied to the 1983 bombing of the US embassy in Kuwait. Al-Muhandis had gone from being a Badr Corps member to a full-fledged Quds Force operative
before
he was elected to Iraq’s parliament. He also set up another so-called Special Group—the American euphemism for Sadrist breakaway militias—called Kata’ib Hezbollah, which similarly targeted US forces.

Suleimani had spent his career in the 1990s stopping the flow of narcotics into Iran from Afghanistan; he’d spend the subsequent decade in the Iraqi import business. Al-Muhandis was selected to oversee trafficking one of the deadliest weapons ever used in the Iraq War: a roadside bomb known as the explosively formed penetrator, or EFP for short. When detonated, the heat from the EFP melts the copper housing of the explosive, turning it into a molten projectile that can cut through steel and battle armor, including
tank walls. The US military reckoned that these devices constituted 18 percent of all coalition combat deaths in the last quarter of 2006. They were manufactured in Iran and smuggled across the border by Iranian agents working with the Badr Corps, then used by all manner of Shia militias, earning them the sobriquet “Persian bombs.” In July 2007 two-thirds of US casualties were suffered at the hands of these Shia militias, prompting Petraeus to assess the Mahdi Army as “more of a hindrance to long-term security in Iraq than is AQI,” as he wrote to US Defense Secretary Robert Gates. For this reason, many in the military advocated bombing the EFP factories in Iran, regardless of the diplomatic fallout. And whatever Petraeus considered telling the president, America
was
at war with Iran in Iraq.

General McChrystal’s JSOC arrested Mohsen Chizari, the head of the Quds Force’s Operations and Training staff, along with the Quds Force’s station chiefs for Baghdad and Dubai, in late 2006. (Chizari had just come from a meeting at SCIRI headquarters and been spotted by a US surveillance drone.) Another JSOC raid in Erbil, the capital of the Kurdistan Regional Government, intended to net Brigadier General Mohammad Ali Jafari, a senior Quds Force commander, but instead captured five lower-ranking Iranian officers. Eventually, “countering Iran’s influence” in Iraq got to be such a full-time job that JSOC bifurcated its task forces according to quarry. Task Force 16 would hunt down AQI, while Task Force 17 would go after Suleimani’s operatives and their proxies in the Special Groups.

In some cases, the United States discovered, its two enemies were secretly collaborating with each other. Suleimani intermittently helped AQI for the simple reason that any agent of chaos and destruction that hastened the American departure from Iraq was deemed a net positive for Tehran. In 2011 the US Treasury Department had sanctioned six Iranian-based al-Qaeda operatives, who had helped transport money, messages, and men to and from
Pakistan and Afghanistan via Iran. “Iran is the leading state sponsor of terrorism in the world today,” Under Secretary for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence David S. Cohen said at the time. “By exposing Iran’s secret deal with al-Qa’ida allowing it to funnel funds and operatives through its territory, we are illuminating yet another aspect of Iran’s unmatched support for terrorism.”

Former US Ambassador to Iraq Ryan Crocker told the
New Yorker
in 2013 that a decade earlier US intelligence confirmed the presence of al-Qaeda in Iran—itself no great revelation, given that al-Zarqawi had made the Islamic Republic his fallback base after fleeing Kandahar the previous year. (According to the London-based Saudi newspaper
Asharq al-Awsat
,
Suleimani is even reported to have boasted in 2004 that al-Zarqawi and Ansar al-Islam were free to move in and out of Iran at will through multiple border crossings—and that al-Zarqawi had even trained at an IRGC camp in Mehran.) However, Crocker claimed that al-Qaeda in Iran was seeking to strike at Western targets in Saudi Arabia in 2003. He enjoyed a somewhat amenable back channel with Iranian officials given the latter’s quiet assistance to the United States in routing the Taliban: a case of enemy-of-my-enemy logic that proved opportunistic and fleeting. When Crocker traveled to Geneva the same year that the United States invaded Iraq and prevailed upon them to halt al-Qaeda’s terrorism against America in the Gulf, they refused. On May 12, 2003, three compounds in Riyadh were blown up in a combination attack involving gunfire and VBIED bombings. Dozens were killed, including nine Americans. “They were there, under Iranian protection, planning operations,” the ex-diplomat recounted to the
New Yorker
.

Meanwhile, the sectarian deep state of al-Sadr’s fantasy and the Sunnis’ nightmare was indeed emerging with the collusion of the new Iraq government. After December 2005 SCIRI was placed in charge of Iraq’s Ministry of Interior, which commanded sixteen
thousand troops. The outgoing Interior Minister was Falah Naqib, a Sunni who, along with his uncle Adnan Thabit, had cobbled together the first post-Saddam gendarmeries put to use by the Americans in the form of the Special Police Commandos and the Public Order Brigades. Naqib saw nothing but trouble in Iran’s fifth column running the national police force of Iraq. “We either stop them or give Iraq to Iran,” Naqib reportedly told George Casey Jr. “That’s it.”

Naqib’s replacement was Bayan Jabr, an SCIRI functionary whom the Americans viewed as less extremist in orientation than others members of the party. But, by way of trying to limit the damage he could still do, they arranged for Thabit to remain on as head of the Ministry of Interior’s armed forces. This posed no problem for Jabr, whose workaround solution was not to deal with or through Thabit at all and to simply replace the paramilitary forces under his command with loyal Badr Corps and Mahdi Army militiamen. The counterpart brigade in charge of West Baghdad menacingly patrolled the streets, blasting Shia songs on December 15, 2005, just as Sunnis took to the polls to participate in what was for many their first democratic election. A Ministry of Interior uniform conferred authority and impunity on active members of sectarian death squads.

A Badr-influenced Special Police Commando unit, better known as the Wolf Brigade, was one of the worst offenders. The Islamic Organization for Human Rights, an Iraqi nongovernmental organization (NGO), found that that Ministry of Interior was guilty of twenty cases of detainee abuse, six of which resulted in death and most of which were carried out by the Wolf Brigade in Mosul. According to a State Department cable from the US embassy in Baghdad, the NGO “described practices such as use of stun guns, hanging suspects from their wrists with arms behind back, holding detainees in basements with human waste, and beatings.”