Quarterly Essay 58 Blood Year: Terror and the Islamic State (8 page)

The third reason was subtler but more significant. Early in the war, when things looked grim for his regime, as his wife Asma was frantically emailing friends in the region to try to arrange safe passage for the family out of Syria, Bashar al-Assad began to portray the resistance as composed entirely of jihadists, and himself as the lesser of two evils. At first this was a barefaced lie, but when ISIS turned up – as genuine a bunch of hyper-violent extremists as he could hope for – it dramatically bolstered Assad’s narrative. So the regime did little to target ISIS, letting it gain control of contested areas and carve out a safe haven in Raqqa. For its part, ISIS avoided confronting the regime, and a de facto truce emerged between the two until late 2013. ISIS’s goal in Syria (at this stage) was to create a sanctuary and recover from its near-death experience in Iraq during the Surge; by mid-2012, after a year in Syria, the recovery had been so successful that it could turn back to Iraq.

The war in Syria also gave ISIS the same advantage of interior lines that we observed earlier for Iran. ISIS went to Syria because it was under pressure in Iraq; once its Syria safe haven was established, the group could build up forces for its break into Iraq, and when (in August 2014) this eventually brought an international response, it could swing back to Syria, where it continued to gain ground against Assad and competing rebel groups, even while losing territory in Iraq. Today, in 2015, coalition and Iraqi efforts have reduced the group’s territorial holdings by as much as 25 per cent in Iraq, but it has used its interior lines advantage to gain at least the same amount of ground in Syria.

In July 2012 Baghdadi declared that ISIS would return to Anbar, Diyala and the belts, called on Sunnis to support him against the Shi’a government of Iraq and announced a year-long campaign he called “Breaking the Walls,” to free AQI prisoners from Iraqi jails and attack Shi’a officials and police. An immediate spike in violence followed, with bombings, assassinations, prison raids and attacks on government installations all over Iraq, bringing incident numbers to their highest level since 2007. By mid-2013 ISIS posed a significant threat to the Iraqi government, with bases, staging areas and training camps in Anbar. In August, Jessica Lewis of the Institute for the Study of War sounded the alarm:

As of August 2013, AQI has regrouped, regained capabilities, and expanded into areas from which it was expelled during the Surge. AQI in 2013 is an extremely vigorous, resilient, and capable organization that can operate from Basra to coastal Syria . . . The “Breaking the Walls” campaign . . . consisted of a series of 24 major vehicle-borne improvised explosive device (VBIED) attacks and eight prison breaks that demonstrate the evolution of AQI’s military capability over that time . . . Since May 2013, AQI has consistently exceeded the number of VBIED attacks per month that it conducted in June 2007, while sustaining operations in Syria as well. The “Breaking the Walls” campaign ended on July 21, 2013, when al-Qaeda in Iraq successfully breached the prison at Abu Ghraib, leading to the escape of 500 or more prisoners, the majority of whom were detained during the Iraq War for terrorist activities.

That same month, Maliki – who’d been only too happy to see the Americans leave in 2011 – changed his tune and began calling urgently for US drone strikes and counterterrorism assistance, but was repeatedly rebuffed by Washington. Precisely why his requests were rejected remains unclear, but it had to have been a White House decision since President Obama personally approves all drone strikes. In any case, by September 2013 a new crisis had arisen, and it was the mishandling of this, more than anything else, that undermined US leverage as the ISIS threat grew.

On 20 August 2012 President Obama laid down a “red line” on Syrian weapons of mass destruction. He told reporters:

I have, at this point, not ordered military engagement in the situation. But the point that you made about chemical and biological weapons is critical. That’s an issue that doesn’t just concern Syria; it concerns our close allies in the region, including Israel. It concerns us. We cannot have a situation where chemical or biological weapons are falling into the hands of the wrong people. We have been very clear to the Assad regime, but also to other players on the ground, that a red line for us is [if] we start seeing a whole bunch of chemical weapons moving around or being utilized. That would change my calculus. That would change my equation.

The President’s implication was that the United States would consider a military response to Syrian use of chemical weapons, and White House spokespeople reinforced that interpretation in subsequent days. Then in April 2013 the White House told Congress that chemical weapons would constitute a “game-changer.” It’s possible this was simply a further example of the unfortunate tendency to equate talk with action, but Syrians saw a different rationale. Several told my field researchers they believed the President was telegraphing a change of policy: “Assad must go” had been replaced by “Assad can stay, as long as he doesn’t use chemical weapons.” These Syrians’ take was that US policy had shifted from regime change to regime
behaviour
change, that this was Washington’s way of communicating – to Assad, but also to leaders in Tehran, with whom the administration was negotiating on Iran’s nuclear program – that leaving Assad in power would be acceptable, provided he drew the line at massacring his own people (or, at least, did the massacring with artillery and barrel bombs rather than chemicals).

If that
was
the message, Assad ignored it. On 21 August 2013 the
New York Times
reported: “The Syrian government pounded rebellious areas east of the capital, Damascus, early Wednesday, and antigovernment activists said some rockets included chemical weapons that killed scores of people, and possibly hundreds. Photographs and videos showed rooms full of lifeless bodies laid out in rows, some wrapped in white cloths, others lined up in mass graves. Some showed victims staring and motionless, others twitching uncontrollably.” This was just the latest of several reports of chemical strikes by the regime.

The White House was caught. The administration temporised at first, questioning the eyewitness accounts, video and photographs of the attack. But evidence for the attack – if not proof of who’d done it – was incontrovertible, prompting calls for action. The President demurred, seeking approval from Congress, while allies including the UK pushed for military action, and the White House sought to recast the “red line” in a blurrier light. The message – to Syrians, allies, Americans and ISIS – was one of vacillating reluctance.

Compounding the humiliation, the administration was only saved from its self-inflicted dilemma by the Russians. In what
Mother Jones
called a gaffe, “but maybe it’s the good kind of gaffe,” Secretary of State John Kerry gave an “off-the-cuff response to a reporter who asked if there was anything Bashar al-Assad could do to avoid an American military strike. ‘Sure,’ Kerry said dismissively, he could turn over his entire arsenal of chemical weapons this week. That would do it. ‘But he isn’t about to do it,’ Kerry said, ‘and it can’t be done, obviously.’” Russia’s foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov – who was meeting with Assad’s foreign minister, Walid al-Moallem, at the time – jumped on this to propose a compromise. Syria would hand over chemical weapons, and Washington would take military action off the table. Soon an agreement was reached – and though Damascus stalled, failed to comply and quietly kept using nerve gas (at a smaller scale) in 2014–15, the threat of military action was removed. The relief in Washington was palpable.

Syrians were less relieved: for them, the way the regime was killing them mattered less than the fact that the killing went on apace, and that a chance for international action to stop it had been missed. The meta-message – lost on neither the Kremlin nor ISIS – was that acting against US interests was essentially risk-free, since no provocation, however severe, would prompt a response. Many subsequent problems in 2014 (in Iraq, Syria and Libya but also, arguably, in Ukraine and the Baltic States) flowed from that perception of weakness.

As this played out, ISIS in Syria was still largely ignoring the regime and going after its rivals – secular resistance groups, civil governance councils and other jihadists. As our field teams worked to map the conflict in Aleppo, we saw ISIS gobble up smaller groups, taking territory in the east and northeast, without opposing the Syrian military’s hold on the city’s west. Fighters from the Islamic Front and secular groups who actually
were
on the front-lines told us they were being attacked by Assad from the front and ISIS from the rear. In late 2013 this gave Assad’s military crucial breathing space, which it later used to recapture large parts of the city. By then, ISIS had grown stronger in Syria, captured all of Raqqa and parts of Idlib, Aleppo and Deir ez-Zor, created rudimentary governance structures, and acquired funds, weaponry and recruits.

As 2013 reached its sorry end, ISIS made its move in Iraq. As so often in the past, the group – which had definitively split with AQ earlier that year – applied its twin strategy of manipulating others’ grievances and exploiting sectarian conflict. In this it was abetted by Maliki’s government, which had finally overplayed its hand.

COLLAPSE

The fall of Maliki’s Iraq, 2014

The Prime Minister wasted no time after US forces left in 2011: within days he issued an arrest warrant against his Sunni vice president, Tariq al-Hashimi, on terrorism charges. Hashimi (who fled to Kurdistan and then Turkey) was sentenced to death in absentia in September 2012. A few months later Maliki targeted the finance minister, Rafi al-Issawi, arresting 150 of his staff, provoking protests by Sunnis that spiralled when Issawi narrowly survived an assassination attempt (blamed by many on Maliki) in early 2013. Demonstrations that had begun across Anbar in early 2012, with hundreds of thousands of Sunnis marching and staging Occupy-style protests, now spread across the country as Sunni grievances erupted. Shi’a communities joined these demonstrations in some areas – in an Iraqi version of the Arab Spring – to protest Maliki’s autocratic behaviour.

As mentioned, much of this was just Maliki’s reaction to changing incentives, as the US drawdown made Iraqi politics zero-sum and increased the relative influence of Iran. But there was a baffling short-sightedness to his approach. He was targeting
moderate
Sunni politicians who’d rejected insurgency, chosen to participate in the political process and were peacefully pursuing their interests through Iraq’s institutions. Likewise, he was harassing precisely those tribal leaders (in the Awakening Councils) who’d turned
against
AQI and were merely seeking to protect their communities, rather than (like the Ba’athists) to reverse the decision of 2003 or (like the jihadists) to drown the world in blood. Maliki’s actions convinced many Sunnis of something AQI had been unable to persuade them of in 2006: that peaceful politics would never work, that armed struggle was the only route to survival.

In May 2013 Iraqi police and troops destroyed a protest camp at Hawija, killing dozens of Sunni civilians in a massacre widely broadcast on Iraqi television. The Hawija massacre brought a host of insurgent groups into the fight – Ba’athists, a Sufi militia, tribal fighters, Sunni nationalists and of course ISIS. It prompted the Kurdish regional government to deploy
peshmerga
around Kirkuk – only to be accused of expansionism by Baghdad. Violence spiked massively in just a few weeks: by mid-2013 a new uprising against Maliki was in full swing.

In January 2014 ISIS fighters from Syria – well-trained, well-equipped and in large numbers – surged across the now-illusory border into Anbar, joining guerrillas from Fallujah and Ramadi in an offensive that drove the government out of both cities, leaving ISIS in complete control of Fallujah and partial control of Tikrit and Ramadi, capital of Anbar. The offensive was noteworthy in part because of its speed and violence, in part because of ISIS numbers and capabilities, but mainly – to my eyes, anyway – because it telegraphed that ISIS had moved beyond its recovery phase of 2011–12, beyond the renewed insurgency of “Breaking the Walls,” into what guerrilla-warfare theorists call a “war of movement,” acting more like a conventional army than a guerrilla organisation. Instead of operating in small, clandestine cells, in plain clothes, by night, with civilian vehicles and light weapons, ISIS was running columns comprising dozens of “technicals” – highly mobile four-wheel drives mounting cannon or heavy machine guns, carrying six to eight fighters, who could dismount to attack. It was moving openly, in large groups, by day, in uniform, fielding heavy weapons (mortars, rockets, heavy machine guns). It was combining urban terrorism and clandestine reconnaissance with mobile columns, snipers, roadside bombs, suicide attackers and terrorist cells, with a sophistication way beyond that of AQI in 2006–07. And as it captured territory, it was acquiring tanks, heavy armoured vehicles, artillery and vast amounts of funding, and picking up recruits. ISIS had emerged from the shadows.

Police and military counterattacks against Fallujah and Ramadi failed in January, and ISIS expanded towards Baghdad, Nineveh and the Kurdish region in March. Further ISIS victories followed in April, and government countermoves failed – because most Sunnis had given up on Baghdad, and because Maliki’s politicisation of the army and police had left their leadership corrupt, hollow and lacking in skill or commitment. The clincher came in May, when Maliki announced another offensive against ISIS-held towns, but also irrevocably alienated the few Sunnis who might still have been willing to trust his government by framing the fight as a battle between Sunni and Shi’a. The offensive, after some initial successes, had failed by early June. The rotten, hollowed-out edifice of Maliki’s military collapsed, Mosul fell, a string of other towns followed, and the ISIS blitzkrieg was rolling. On 29 June an ISIS Twitter account announced the renaming of ISIS as “Islamic State” and declared a caliphate with Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi at its head. A week later, Baghdadi announced the caliphate before an assembly of worshippers in the Grand Mosque of Mosul, declared himself the Caliph Ibrahim and called on Muslims worldwide to obey him.