Quarterly Essay 58 Blood Year: Terror and the Islamic State (3 page)

At this point jihadists like Abu Musab al-Zarqawi came out of the woodwork. Zarqawi was a Jordanian street criminal and drug dealer who’d embraced militant Islam in prison in the 1990s, travelled to Afghanistan in 1999, where he formed his own terrorist camp in Herat, fought in loose alliance with AQ (though never under its authority) in 2001, fled to Iran after the Taliban fell, and made his way to Iraq to organise resistance against the expected invasion. Zarqawi was in Iraq nine months before the coalition invasion, but his relationship with Saddam remains unclear. According to a CIA report that was only fully declassified in 2015, the Iraqi government knew by June 2002 that Zarqawi was present under an assumed name (a fact Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of State Colin Powell and others interpreted as proof that Saddam was in league with AQ), but it now seems probable that Zarqawi had no direct relationship with the Ba’athists until
after
the invasion.

Likewise, as far as we know, Zarqawi was never under AQ authority before the Iraq war. He did eventually pledge
bayat
(allegiance) to bin Laden, bringing his group under nominal AQ authority in October 2004 as
Tanzim Qaidat al-Jihad fi Bilad al-Rafidayn
– “The Organisation of al-Qaeda (The Base) for Jihad in Mesopotamia,” usually anglicised as al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI). But even after this rebranding, Zarqawi remained independent, and the friendly relationship between him and the AQ leaders would soon collapse.

Now, exploiting the post-invasion security vacuum, Zarqawi and his cells set out to foster conflict between the occupation force and the population. AQI was behind several incidents portrayed at the time as spontaneous acts of protest turned violent through Western naivety and heavy-handedness. In fact, they were provocations – as insurgents do, Zarqawi was manufacturing incidents and manipulating the resulting grievances, his group acting as a catalyst to turn chaos into uprising. By summer 2003 – through provocations like these, and spectacular attacks like the truck bomb with which Zarqawi murdered Sérgio Vieira de Mello, the Special Representative of the UN Secretary-General in Iraq, and twenty others – he and those like him had forced the international community behind blast walls and inside armoured vehicles, separating them from the people and turning wary cooperation into open resistance. As Osama bin Laden’s deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, said in September 2004, the insurgency “turned America’s plan upside down. The defeat of America in Iraq and Afghanistan has become just a matter of time, with God’s help. The Americans in both countries are between two fires. If they carry on, they will bleed to death – and if they pull out, they lose everything.”

This two-front dynamic became a hole in the heart of Western strategy: the cost, in human life, credibility, money and time, of extracting ourselves from the unforced error of Iraq fatally weakened the impact of Disaggregation. The demand on resources, like the cost in lives lost and ruined, was stupendous, as was the drain on policy-makers’ attention. It was impossible to get leaders to focus on resurgent violence in Afghanistan, al-Shabaab in Somalia, the Pakistani Taliban, rising anti-Americanism in countries subjected to drone strikes, terror cells in Europe, AQ franchises in other continents, or any of the other issues we could have addressed – perhaps prevented – had the United States and its coalition allies (including Australia and the UK) not been mired in Iraq.

As Crumpton’s chief strategist, I spent weeks at a time in one conflict zone or another – Iraq, Pakistan, Afghanistan, the Horn of Africa, Southeast Asia – gathering data, setting up joint counterterrorism efforts, collating field reports that consistently showed a deteriorating situation. In mid-2006, after field visits to a series of frontier outposts in Afghanistan and Pakistan, I wrote an assessment for Condoleezza Rice, Secretary of State, laying out our lack of progress against a growing cross-border insurgency. This was obvious to anyone with the slightest knowledge of conditions there, and all my bosses agreed – in principle – but that didn’t mean they had the resources or attention span to do anything about it. Iraq overwhelmed even the US government’s organisational capacity: it was so big, so bad and so politically problematic that it crowded out everything else.

Bob Gates, Rumsfeld’s successor as Secretary of Defense (and his mirror image in virtually every way), encapsulated the opportunity cost of this tunnel vision: asked his priorities, Gates said “Iraq, Iraq and Iraq.” He was right – Iraq
had
to top the list, given the disaster that had developed on his predecessor’s watch. Nevertheless, in digging out of Iraq, we were sapping political will, exhausting patience, depleting resources and creating a new monster – Zarqawi’s group.

And Zarqawi was far from the only threat. If we extend the World War II analogy, Hitler potentially faced a war on two fronts after 1941, but at least he was operating on what strategists call “interior lines” – he held a central block of territory, could shift assets from one front to another, and as the conflict continued his forces were pushed closer to their bases, making them easier to supply and support. By contrast, Western powers after 2003 operated on exterior lines – at the end of supply routes that grew longer, more costly and less secure as the twin conflicts continued, with limited ability to shift resources from one front to another. If any player operated on interior lines, it was Iran – with Afghanistan directly to its east and Iraq to its west. Tehran hastened to capitalise on this advantage. Iranian forces backed Shi’a militias like the Mahdi Army of Muqtada al-Sadr, the Badr Organisation and several other clandestine groups. Iran sent operatives from the Quds Force, the covert action arm of the Revolutionary Guard under the command of Qasem Soleimani, into Iraq to sponsor attacks against the coalition.

Indeed, from March 2004 there was not one insurgency in Iraq, but at least six. Alongside jihadists like Zarqawi were Sunni nationalists, who rejected the transformation of Iraq into what they saw as an Iranian satellite. Izzat Ibrahim al-Douri, one of Saddam’s vice presidents – the most senior Ba’athist to evade capture in 2003 – was now running a resistance network of religious groups and former officers which he’d organised before the war, using plans, safe houses and weapons caches established years earlier.

On the Shi’a side, besides the militias and Iranian proxies were the Sadrists, a movement of poor, pious Shi’a, engaged as much in social revolution as in sectarian warfare. Criminal networks – built on tribal or business relationships – fostered a shady cast of characters we might call “conflict entrepreneurs,” who fought not for victory (to end the war on terms favourable to their side) but rather to perpetuate the violence, because it brought them riches, power and status. Each group had its factions, and its factions-within-factions – I counted more than 150 separate militant groups at one point in 2007. Then there were the Kurds – an entire third of Iraq that had risen against Saddam to carve out its own well-armed autonomous region, and one of the few places in the entire country where most people didn’t despise the West.

Within this crowded conflict space, Iran backed the Shi’a militias, sent operatives to ensure its influence, paid off politicians, sponsored political parties, engaged in economic warfare, gave its proxies the deadliest explosive devices seen in the war (EFPs, explosively-formed projectiles that converted a copper plug into a jet of plasma that could punch through armoured vehicles like a blowtorch through butter) and ran covert operations to bog coalition forces down in both Iraq and Afghanistan. For their part, some Sunni states turned a blind eye to fighters travelling from or through their territory. These fighters came to Iraq from North Africa, the Middle East, and (in smaller numbers than today) Asia and Europe. This sectarian dynamic – which soon amounted to a proxy war between Shi’a Iran and Sunni states – made the conflict increasingly violent and destabilising as it went on.

Zarqawi’s group specialised in exploiting sectarian violence, and the war took an extraordinarily nasty turn after February 2006, when one of his terror cells bombed one of the holiest sites in Shi’a Islam, the al-Askari shrine at Samarra, thereby unleashing a full-scale religious war. By September, hundreds of civilians were being killed every week, mostly in Baghdad and the belts, in a cycle of kidnapping, assassination and tit-for-tat atrocities that the occupation force seemed powerless to stop. Shi’a groups operated defensively, protecting their community against jihadists and Sunni nationalists, but this didn’t stop them kidnapping, torturing and killing Sunni civilians when they could. Because Sunnis had boycotted the 2005 elections, the Shi’a controlled the government ministries responsible for essential services, which they could (and did) shut down in order to force people to flee Baghdad’s few remaining Sunni enclaves, a subtle but effective form of “ethnic cleansing.” In mid-2006, for example, some Shi’a areas had constant electricity while Sunni enclaves were lucky to get four hours a day – this in a place where many water and sewage systems are electrically powered, so that a power outage often means a water outage as well.

For its part, AQI sought to provoke Shi’a paramilitaries (and the Shi’a-dominated Iraqi Police and Army) against the Sunnis, trying to inflict as much pain as possible on its own people. It took me a while to figure out the reason for this, but the difference in tactics was clear from the start. You might be driving down a narrow street in a Shi’a neighbourhood and feel a sudden chill – no kids on the street, windows open, people stepping into doorways as you passed. You’d get that prickly feeling in the back of your neck and know you were about to be hit. People would pull children into houses to protect them, and open windows so the blast wouldn’t break them: they knew an attack was coming – the insurgents had warned them, because their goal was to protect the Shi’a population.

By contrast, in Sunni areas AQI would initiate ambushes or detonate car bombs without warning, in streets packed with their own people. On 19 March 2007, in the mainly Sunni district of Adhamiyah, a man drove a car into a market with two children – a boy and a girl aged six or seven – in the back. The guards allowed them through and let them park, since they were clearly a family. Once inside, the driver jumped out, the children began screaming in terror, and the car detonated with a blast that tore them apart and killed several shoppers. This was one of only three enemy actions in my whole time in Iraq that made me cry actual tears.
Who would
do
that to a child?
I wanted to scream. I wanted to find the human filth responsible for this and shoot them between the eyes, on the spot. At that moment I knew the hatred every Iraqi parent felt – and provoking that hatred in the Shi’a, and directing it against Sunnis in a cycle of escalating violence and fear, was the twisted genius of AQI.

For AQI’s campaign was driven by a brutal political logic: in provoking the Shi’a, Zarqawi hoped to back the Sunni community into a corner, so that his group would be all that stood between Sunnis and the Shi’a death squads, giving people no choice but to support AQI, whatever they thought of its ideology. This cynical strategy – founded on a tacit recognition that AQI’s beliefs were so alien to most Iraqis that they’d never find many takers unless backed by trickery and force – meant that Shi’a killing Sunni was actually good for AQI, and so they’d go out of their way to provoke the most horrific violence against their own people.

For example, fighters from an AQI cell might establish a safe house in a Sunni neighbourhood, creating a hideout in an abandoned row of buildings, fortifying compounds and mouse-holing connecting walls so they could move freely. They’d assassinate a few local Sunnis in spectacularly brutal fashion to remind everyone else to keep their eyes down and their mouths shut. Once they’d created a base, AQI would scout the neighbouring Shi’a community, kidnap young boys, torture them to death and dump the bodies – eyes gouged out, ears, little limbs and genitals hacked off, cigarette and blowtorch burns all over them or (an AQI trademark) the tops of their heads sliced open and electric drills thrust into their brains – back on the street in front of their houses, hoping to trigger outrage and retaliation from the Shi’a. Their goal was to provoke a sectarian conflict that would force Sunnis to close ranks in an AQI-led proto-state – which, by October 2006, they were already calling
Dawlat al-Iraq al-Islamiyyah
– the Islamic State of Iraq (ISI). Like gangsters running a protection racket, they themselves created the violence from which they offered to protect people. Why leave it to chance?

And Shi’a groups, already nursing decades of grievance against Sunni-dominated Iraq, were all too happy to oblige. Abu Deraa, for example, a Shi’a militant in the slums of Sadr City on Baghdad’s east side, killed hundreds of Sunnis in this period, earning himself the nickname “the Shi’ite Zarqawi.” A YouTube video of June 2006 showed him fattening a young camel on a bottle of Coca-Cola, promising to butcher it and distribute the meat to the poor in Sadr City once he’d killed Tariq al-Hashimi, Iraq’s Sunni vice-president. The conflict entrepreneurs got into the action too, with kidnapping gangs auctioning off terrified children for slaughter, in a makeshift night market that operated under lights near the soccer stadium. A whole underground industry grew up around the making of sectarian snuff videos – an infantry unit I worked with in June 2007 found a makeshift studio in an abandoned industrial site south of Baghdad, with the Klieg lights and editing suite still set up, and blood pooling on the floor and sprayed above head height on the walls. All this was happening under our noses – coalition policy was to hand over as fast as possible to the Iraqi government, keep US troops out of the cities, and live on large self-contained bases rather than among the people. The country was tearing itself apart while we kept our eyes on the exit.

As AQI was provoking and exploiting this vicious sectarian war, the AQ leaders around bin Laden and Zawahiri, looking on from their Pakistani safe haven, were appalled. Not on humanitarian grounds, of course: it was just that they had a different strategy in mind.