The 9/11 Wars (44 page)

So 2005 thus ended as it had begun. In Washington and London, politicians continued to insist that progress was being made. That Iraqis voted ‘yes’ in the referendum on the constitution in October and had gone to the polls, again relatively peacefully, to elect a new full-term government in December was cited as evidence of political maturity and nascent stability. However, Sunnis had voted overwhelmingly against the constitution, which they believed would deny them a fair share of central political power and the immense oil wealth that went with it.
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Many, both inside and outside Iraq, felt an explosion of violence was imminent. One senior British diplomat, speaking off the record shortly after returning from a long posting in Baghdad, dully summed up his time in Iraq in the first weeks of 2006. ‘I think we will look back and say that 2005 was a bad year,’ he said. ‘I hope to God that the next one brings us something better.’ In Baghdad’s upmarket Karada, the barber Jaffar, who had grumbled about the Green Zone being lit up ‘like in an Indian musical’ two years previously had other things to worry about. No one came now to have their hair cut. Half the neighbourhood was deserted. Robberies were common. Bodies were turning up in the streets. Most were Shia, killed by Sunnis. Some were Sunnis, killed by Shia. At his local bakery, the young men sweating over the dough kept AK-47s close by. Most bakers were Shia and thus, like the queues of police recruits, easy and identifiable targets. ‘I spend a lot of time praying,’ Jaffar said.
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Less than a month later came the al-Askariya mosque explosion and a further slide into terrible violence became inevitable.

AL-QAEDA IN MESOPOTAMIA AND THE 9/11 WARS

When, in October 2004, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi had finally overcome his reluctance to enter into a close relationship with al-Qaeda and had sworn allegiance to Osama bin Laden, the name he chose for his network was ‘Tanzim Qaedat al-Jihad fi Bilad al Rafidayn’, usually translated as ‘the Al-Qaeda Jihad Organization in the Land of the Two Rivers’ or ‘Al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia’ or, becoming progressively more distant from the original, ‘al-Qaeda in Iraq’, or ‘AQI’.
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The problem with the repeated reduction of the admittedly long-winded original title to the snappier ‘AQI’ was that it obscured the group’s independent origins, the nature of its project, its fragmented nature and its place within the broader ‘jihadi’ movement. For though al-Zarqawi was now nominally loyal to bin Laden, the name he had taken for his organization was in fact a clear statement that his ‘territorialist’ philosophy and local strategy remained very much intact. Firstly, there was his use of the word
tanzim
, which meant organization or armed militia in the context of an insurgency. This showed the difference between al-Zarqawi’s approach, based on the establishment of a coherent and organized armed group, and that of strategists such as Abu Musab al-Suri. The latter’s very motto was ‘
nizam, la tanzim
’, ‘system not organization’.
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Secondly, there was the reference to a real, physical, identifiable place, the patch of ground that the militants meeting in Falluja had yearned for. This place, for al-Zarqawi, was ‘the land of the two rivers’, i.e. the fertile strip watered by the Tigris and the Euphrates, the cradle of human civilization. By using such an archaic name, al-Zarqawi avoided recognition of the existence of a nation state known as Iraq and, by extension, the ‘unIslamic’ concept of any nation other than the
ummah
, the community or nation of all believers. The insistence on place indicated too al-Zarqawi’s practical attachment to the establishment of a physical geographic base for the radical Islamic movement from which a broader campaign to bring the rest of the Middle East and potentially the Islamic world within the boundaries of a new caliphate could be waged. The problem for al-Zarqawi was, of course, that he was not Iraqi and was thus attempting to appropriate territory to which he had no evident right and a war that was not his own.

This was not an unfamiliar problem for leaders of international Islamic extremist groups. Indeed the original
raison d’être
of al-Qaeda back in the late 1980s had been to draw together various different national strands of Islamic militant activity under a single umbrella, co-opting local campaigns with limited local objectives into one global strategy with global objectives. The foundation of the group had been one of the consequences of the bitter debate between thinkers who favoured a return to a fight against the ‘near enemy’, Israel and the ‘hypocrite, apostate’ Middle Eastern regimes governing at the time, and others who saw the defeat of the Soviet Union as showing the way forward. For the latter, the time had come for a global battle in which a key foe and target would be the ‘far enemy’ of the West and more specifically the USA. It was American support, they argued, that propped up regimes in Egypt and in Saudi Arabia (as well as Israel), and the only way to bring down President Mubarak or the House of Saud would be through attacks on the USA, which would force Washington to abandon its allies in the region. Through the 1990s, Al-Qaeda offered local groups resources and tried to draw together a web of networked militant movements. However, alliance with al-Qaeda was something of a Faustian pact, requiring the surrender of varying degrees of autonomy and an internationalization of what had usually only been seen as a local battle hitherto. By entering into a relationship with al-Qaeda with its globalized message and objectives local groups thus risked support in their own communities, where there may have been a desire for change in people’s immediate circumstances but there was often much less enthusiasm for a war against the much more abstract ‘Crusader-Zionist’ alliance.

The 1990s had shown quite how resistant local communities often were to attempts to mobilize them for a greater cause. Despite the violence of the fighting on the ground, broadly moderate local Muslim populations in the Balkans and the Caucasus had unequivocally rejected pan-Islamic global ‘jihadi’ ideologies.
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Initial attempts by Osama bin Laden in the early 1990s to co-opt the Groupe Islamique Armée in Algeria into his nascent global network had been angrily rebuffed.
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Attempts a few years later to build links with Indonesian organizations such as the Lashkar Jihad involved primarily in local sectarian violence had also failed. An effort in the Philippines to co-opt the Abu Sayyaf group had had only very limited success. When radicals had succeeded in making inroads, their successes were more due to political manoeuvring among the local groups or the states (or even superpowers) that were backing them than any significant support among local people. By the end of the decade, the huge resources amassed by al-Qaeda were certainly proving attractive – leaders of Iraqi Kurdish groups had after all sought out bin Laden to ask for funds and training as did a range of other militants – but none of those making the trip to Afghanistan in the hope of obtaining financial or other aid had anything like a mass popular constituency. Even the relationship between the Taliban in Afghanistan and their foreign guests remained extremely complex, and support for the project of bin Laden and his associates among ordinary Afghans, where memories of the extremism and lack of respect to local cultures showed by largely Arab international fighters during the war of the 1980s remained fresh, was negligible.
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Bin Laden, al-Zawahiri and others were, of course, aware of this. After all, the whole point of the 9/11 attacks had been to broaden the support base of both al-Qaeda and its affiliates by sparking a wave of radicalization and mobilization across the Islamic world. In this, al-Qaeda had, as previous chapters have shown, met with some success. The question was whether in the extraordinary circumstances that existed by 2005, created as much by the actions of America and its allies as by al-Qaeda’s various initiatives, this success would be consolidated and expanded. Would the resistance offered by broad populations to global radical ideologies through the 1990s be finally overcome? Or would the global ideology and culture of contemporary militant Islam, stripped as it was of much of its local specificity and context, once again have great difficulty in convincing local communities that their best hopes of salvation, however defined, lay in extremism? After four years of conflict, the most obvious test case was Iraq, where these exact questions were being posed at a local level in a very immediate way. If the battle in Europe would determine how far radical Islam would be allowed to spread in geographic terms across the world, the battle in Iraq would indicate how deep into societies extremism could penetrate. If al-Qaeda’s brand of militant activism and ideology failed to attract mass support in Iraq, given the chaos, the violence and the American-led occupation, it was unlikely to do so elsewhere.

In retrospect there had been many early signs indicating what turn events in Iraq were likely to take. The foreign volunteers who arrived through 2003 and early 2004 had been neither universally nor unconditionally welcomed. In some instances the more nationalist, more secular insurgents steeped in Ba’athist pan-Arab ideologies called the newcomers
irhabeen
, or terrorists, and either avoided them or tried simply to exploit their willingness to participate in suicide operations. And though the first battle of Falluja in April 2004 had seen locals and foreigners fighting alongside one another, strains had emerged relatively soon both among the different elements within the insurgents and between local people and the foreign militants.
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This was lost in the chaos, confusion and hyperbole surrounding events at the time and received little attention. But it was there nonetheless. Many points of difference were cultural. Though the footsoldiers of the new al-Qaeda-affiliated groups were often young local men, the leaders were largely foreigners who enforced a form of ultra-rigorous Salafi orthodoxy entirely stripped of any local cultural context. Militants connected to one group in Falluja stopped locals smoking, for example, though getting through a packet of cigarettes a day was almost as much a part of being an adult Iraqi male as being able to use an AK-47 or liking Egyptian soap operas (which were also now banned). Others attempted to force women to wear the full head-to-toe coverings traditional in the Gulf but alien even in conservative Anbar.
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Other tensions were social. As had been the case with Arab volunteers in Afghanistan during the 1980s and in Bosnia in the 1990s, newcomers wanted relationships with local women. In part this was a deliberate strategy to build connections among local tribes and communities but also a simple consequence of the inevitable desires of young men at war. One aspect in which traditional society in Anbar resembles that in much of Afghanistan is the degree to which the honour of a man, a family or a community is vested in its women and so the demands of the newcomers, often backed by force, caused immediate clashes, often fatal. Again as in Afghanistan during the war against the Soviets, there were arguments over styles of prayer and worshipping at tombs, seen as polytheism or
shirq
by many raised in strict Gulf Salafi traditions. One Falluja resident was reported to have shot dead a Kuwaiti who told him he could not pray at the grave of his ancestors.
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Then there were political divergences, particularly over the future or indeed concept of any Iraqi nation. Local fighters identified themselves both as defenders of Islam and of ‘Iraq’. As the name of al-Zarqawi’s group indicated with its reference to ancient Mesopotamia, the land of the two rivers, the foreigners saw the concept of the nation state as unIslamic. They were there to ‘kill infidels’ not liberate Iraq, as the young Yemeni fighter Abu Thar had said in Falluja in late 2004.
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Then there were tensions over more mundane issues of basic local politics. The new leaders of the Islamic militants, whether foreign or Iraqi, were competing with the traditional local tribal sheikhs for power and resources. The new groups were unwitting social revolutionaries, attracting elements who previously had little status in traditional Iraqi rural society. One of the most notorious leaders of the militant groups which emerged in Falluja in the summer of 2004 was a former Baghdad electrician.
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Then, there were economic reasons for tensions. Much of the local tribes’ wealth was based on smuggling. By mid-2005, many of the more lucrative routes were in the hands of militants who, Iraqi or otherwise, diverted the funds away from local communities and their traditional leaders, denying the latter what was usually their most important source of patronage. Finally, there were simple military reasons for the growing disaffection. Though full of zeal, the foreign militants, as in Afghanistan in the 1980s, were untrained and unpredictable.
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Though their operations often grabbed the headlines, the vast proportion of the IEDs and ambushes directed at coalition troops were the work of Iraqis for whom the insurgency remained first a local war against a foreign occupying force before being a global religious jihad.

By spring of 2005, armed clashes were being reported between tribesmen and foreign militants across Anbar province and elsewhere.
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These intensified as the year went on. To make up for their loss of genuine popular support, militants of groups such as al-Zarqawi’s were forced to rely increasingly on simple murder and intimidation. This violence, which was often deliberately public, took more and more baroque forms such as tying people to burning tyres, boiling them alive or killing them by drilling holes through their limbs.
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Even by the tough standards of Anbar and Saddam Hussein’s Iraq the brutality was shocking.
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In Anbar, every such act sparked a new series of blood feuds, setting militants against families and tribes, leading to further alienation of local people and thus to even more killings and intimidation. One important moment was reached when a significant number of Sunni leaders in Iraq recognized that two and a half years of fighting had gained them very little, that the demographic superiority and consequent political dominance of the Shia was now an established fact and that they needed to participate in elections if they were going to have a chance of retaining any stake in central government. Such thinking naturally led to a direct clash between their local aims and the global, universal ideologies of the foreigners, who had no interest whatsoever in any accommodation with the new authorities in Iraq let alone their American allies.