SHEIKH OF THE SLAUGHTERERS
AL-ZARQAWI AND AL-QAEDA IN IRAQ
“Corrupt regimes and terrorists keep each other in business,” Emma Sky, a British adviser to the US military in Iraq, says. “It’s a symbiotic relationship.” Indeed, for all its posturing as an unbeatable fighting force, ISIS has relied more than it cares to admit on unlikely ideological allies and proxies. When the United States invaded Iraq, al-Zarqawi found some of his most enthusiastic champions in the remnants of one of the very “near enemies” he had declared himself in opposition to: the Baathist regime of Saddam Hussein. Today, ISIS’s stunning advance across northern and central Iraq has benefited from much of the same convenient, proximate deal-making.
SADDAM’S GHOST
Bin Laden’s injunction was fully realized in the early months of the occupation of Iraq, when the US military painfully discerned the hybridized nature of the insurgency it was confronting. Saddam Hussein had not anticipated an invasion of Baghdad. But he had very much prepared his regime for a different doomsday scenario: another domestic rebellion from either Iraq’s Shia majority or its minority Kurds. At the prompting of the United States, both of these sects had risen up at the end of the First Gulf War only to be brutally slaughtered (with US acquiescence). Determined not to witness any such revolutionary ferment again, Saddam in the intervening decade constructed an entire underground apparatus for counterrevolution and took precautions to strengthen his conventional military deterrents. He beefed up one of his praetorian divisions, the Fedayeen Saddam, and licensed the creation of a consortium of proxy militias. In their magisterial history of the Second Gulf War, Michael Gordon and General Bernard Trainor note that long before the first American soldier arrived in Iraq, “networks of safe houses and arms caches for paramilitary forces, including materials for making improvised explosives, were also established throughout the country. . . . It was, in effect, a counterinsurgency strategy to fend off what Saddam saw as the most serious threats to his rule.”
The man who anatomized this strategy, and who understood that the post-invasion insurgency actually comprised holdover elements from the ancien regime—not the “pockets of dead-enders” as US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld had called them—was Colonel Derek Harvey, a military intelligence officer working for General Ricardo “Rick” Sanchez’s Combined Joint Task Force 7, the American headquarters in Iraq.
Harvey estimated that between sixty-five and ninety-five thousand members of Saddam’s other praetorian division, the Special Republican Guard, the Mukhabarat (a catchall term encompassing Iraq’s intelligence directorates), the Fedayeen Saddam, and state-subsidized militiamen were all rendered unemployed with the stroke of a pen after Paul Bremer, the Bush-appointed head of the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), chose to disband the Iraqi military. Many of the sacked officers joined a nascent campaign to expel their expropriators. Added to their ranks were more disaffected Iraqis, victims of the controversial policy of “de-Baathification” that Bremer announced ten days after his touchdown in Baghdad.
Making matters worse, Saddam had licensed a gray market in Iraq designed to evade UN sanctions—in effect, a state-tolerated organized crime network, headed by Izzat Ibrahim al-Douri, his vice president. A member of the Sufi Naqshbandi Order, which claimed direct descent from the first Islamic caliph, Abu Bakr, al-Douri had been born in al-Dawr, near Saddam’s own hometown of Tikrit, in the northern Salah ad-Din province of Iraq. As such, he proved an adroit Baathist operator within the country’s Sunni heartland. And as vice president he was also able to stock arms of the regime’s intelligence services and military with his fellow Sufis. This was a form of ethnic patronage that in 2006, after Saddam’s execution, manifested itself in the creation of the Army of the Men of the Naqshbandi Order—one of the most powerful Sunni insurgency groups in Iraq, which later helped ISIS take over Mosul in 2014.
Al-Douri was an expert smuggler; he ran a lucrative stolen car ring, importing luxury European models into Iraq via the Jordanian port at Aqaba. It was a vertically integrated racket, Harvey told us, because al-Douri also maintained the auto body shops in which these illicit cars were worked on, furnishing both the factories and conveyances for the construction of vehicle-borne improvised explosive devices (VBIEDs), one of the deadliest weapons used against American troops in Iraq.
Saddam employed other counterrevolutionary measures before the war. We tend to remember his regime as “secular,” which it was up to a point. But after the First Gulf War, he sought to fortify his regime against foreign fundamentalist opponents, such as Iran’s mullahs, and also against domestic ones that might challenge his rule on Islamist “near enemy” grounds. Thus he Islamized his regime, adding the phrase “Allahu Akbar” (“God Is Great”) to the Iraqi flag and introducing a host of draconian punishments, most of which were based on Sharia law: thieves would have their hands amputated, while draft dodgers and deserters from the military would lose their ears. To distinguish the latter from disfigured veterans of the Iran-Iraq War, Saddamists would also brand crosses into the amputees’ foreheads with hot irons.
Ramping up state religiosity had an ancillary purpose: to deflect or distract criticism from an economy battered by international sanctions. The regime thus introduced a proscription on female employment, hoping to artificially lower Iraq’s lengthening jobless rolls. Most significant, however, was Saddam’s inauguration of the Islamic Faith Campaign, which endeavored to marry Baath ideology of regime elites with Islamism. The man he tasked with overseeing this conversion curriculum was none other than his car-smuggling caporegime, al-Douri.
Predictably, the Faith Campaign was a Frankenstein patchwork of proselytization and mafia economics. Some of Iraq’s new-minted faithful had their hajj, or annual religious pilgrimage to Mecca, subsidized by the state, while others were bribed with real estate, cash, and—naturally—expensive cars. Colonel Joel Rayburn, another US military intelligence officer who served in Iraq and has written a history of the country, observes that one of the unintended consequences of the Faith Campaign was also its most predictable: “Saddam believed he was sending into the Islamic schools committed Baathists who would remain loyal as they established a foothold in the mosques from which the regime could then monitor or manipulate the Islamist movement. In actuality, the reverse happened. Most of the officers who were sent to the mosques were not deeply committed to Baathism by that point, and as they encountered Salafi teachings many became more loyal to Salafism than to Saddam.”
Many graduates of the program, Rayburn notes, found that they had much to confess and atone for in their pasts and so turned against the very ideology the Faith Campaign was meant to inculcate, and against the regime itself. Some of these “Salafist-Baathists” even went on to hold positions in a new American-fostered Iraqi government while continuing to moonlight as anti-American terrorists. One such person was Khalaf al-Olayan, who had been a high-ranking official in Saddam’s army before becoming one of the top leaders of Tawafuq, a Sunni Islamist bloc in the post-Saddam Iraqi parliament. Mahmoud al-Mashhadani showed the folly of the Faith Campaign even before the American invasion: he became a full-fledged Salafist and was subsequently imprisoned for attacking the very regime responsible for the Faith Campaign. (Al-Mashhadani went on to serve as speaker of the Council of Representatives of Iraq in 2006, a year before both he and al-Olayan were implicated in a deadly suicide bombing—against Iraq’s parliament.)
“The Faith Campaign wasn’t just about having people in the Baath party go to religious training one night a week and do their homework and such,” Harvey told us, more than a decade removed from his first analysis of who and what constituted Iraq’s insurgency. “It was about using the intelligence services to reach into the society of Islamic scholars and work with a range of religious leaders such as Harith al-Dari,” a prominent Sunni cleric from the Anbar province and the chairman of the Association of Muslim Scholars. “Even Abdullah al-Janabi,” Harvey added, referring to the former head of the insurgent Mujahideen Shura Council in Fallujah, “was an Iraqi intelligence agent, although originally he wasn’t a Salafist as we portrayed him, but rather a Sufi linked to al-Douri and the Naqshbandi Order. We didn’t recognize al-Janabi’s true nature. He wasn’t a religious extremist at all; he was an Arab nationalist. The thing all these guys had in common was the desire for their tribe, their clan, and themselves. That’s a unifying principle. It was the Sunni Arab identity, this search for lost power and prestige, that motivated the Sunni insurgency. Many people miss that when they characterize it. If you talk to the Shiites, they understand it for what it is.”
After the US invasion, al-Douri and much of his Baathist network fled to Syria, where they were harbored by Bashar al-Assad’s regime. Despite his father Hafez’s decades-long enmity with Saddam, al-Assad viewed these fugitives as useful agents for mayhem, for terror-in-reserve, for disrupting Bush’s nation-building experiment next door. For his part, al-Douri had wanted to fuse the Iraqi and Syrian Baath parties into one transnational conglomerate, but al-Assad refused and for a time even tried to catalyze his own alternative Iraqi Baath party to rival al-Douri’s. (Syria, as we’ll examine later, became one of the leading state sponsors of both Baathist and al-Qaeda terrorism in Iraq.)
What Saddam, al-Assad, al-Zarqawi, and bin Laden all understood, and what the United States had to discover at great cost in fortune and blood, was that the gravest threat posed to a democratic government in Baghdad was not necessarily jihadism or even disenfranchised Baathism; it was Sunni revanchism.
Sunni Arabs constitute at most 20 percent of Iraq’s population, whereas Shia Arabs constitute as much as 65 percent. A plurality of Sunni Kurds (17 percent), plus smaller demographics of Christians, Assyrians, Yazidis, and Sunni and Shia Turkomen make up the fabric of the rest of the country’s society. But Saddam had presided over decades of a sectarian patronage system that broadly favored the minority at the expense of a much-impoverished and restive majority. It was for this reason that George H. W. Bush, in prosecuting the First Gulf War, never pursued a policy of total regime change in Iraq, only (fitfully) one of regime decapitation, which failed. The elder Bush had hoped that a Baathist coup, encouraged by the routing of Iraqi forces in Kuwait, would put an end to Saddam once and for all, giving way to a more reformist or Western-amenable dictatorship.
The violent implementation of democracy meant the demographic inversion of Iraq’s power; it destroyed what many Iraqi Sunnis saw as their birthright. In his book, Rayburn recounts what one told him: “At first no one fought the Americans; not the Baath, not the army officers, and not the tribes. But when the Americans formed the Governing Council [in July 2003] with thirteen Shiite and only a few Sunnis, people began to say, ‘The Americans mean to give the country to the Shia,’ and then they began to fight, and the tribes began to let al Qaeda in.” Disenfranchised Saddamists, who had melted back into their native cities and villages along the Euphrates River, were only too happy to accommodate the new arrivals, seeing them as agents for the Americans’ expulsion and their own restoration. The jihadists, however, had different ambitions for Iraq.
AL-ZARQAWI VS. AMERICA
Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s grisly debut in Iraq was on August 7, 2003, when operatives from Tawhid wal-Jihad (“Monotheism and Holy War”), the new name for his network, taken from a banner that hung at the entrance to the Herat training camp, bombed the Jordanian embassy in Baghdad. (As ever, he saw his homeland’s government as a primary target.) A little more than a week later, al-Zarqawi orchestrated an attack on the UN headquarters in the same city. It was carried out by a twenty-six-year-old Moroccan man, Abu Osama al-Maghribi, who drove a VBIED into a wall right underneath the window of Sérgio Vieira de Mello, the UN’s special representative to Iraq, killing him and twenty-one others, and wounding more than two hundred. Al-Zarqawi said that he had targeted de Mello personally for “embellish[ing] the image of America, the crusaders, and the Jews.” This “embellishment” evidently included the diplomat’s role in overseeing (Christian) East Timor’s independence from (Muslim) Indonesia—a fact that did little to dissuade some of al-Zarqawi’s Western apologists’ characterization of his terrorism as an expression of anti-imperialism.
Al-Zarqawi had help. “Originally, the Baathists cooperated in the bombing of the UN and in other suicide bombings in 2003,” Harvey said. “The safe houses of the suicide bombers were adjacent to compounds and residences of the Special Security Organization [SSO] officers.” The SSO was the most powerful security apparatus in prewar Iraq and was in charge of the Special Republican Guard and Special Forces. According to Harvey, it provided Zarqawi’s men the cars that were fashioned into VBIEDs; they also transported the suicide bombers. “The reason we know so much is that one of the suicide bombers didn’t die, and we were able to debrief him and backtrack.”
By October 2003 bin Laden’s casting call for foreign mujahidin had been heeded, thanks in part to the socialist infidels. The Saddamists had already established the “rat lines”—corridors for foreign fighters—to transport them into Iraq from a variety of terrorist cells and organizations around the Middle East and North Africa. “These jihadists had maintained a relationship for at least three years—in some cases longer—with the SSO and a general by the name of Muhammed Khairi al-Barhawi,” Harvey said. “He was responsible for their training. The idea was, if you understood who the terrorists were and kept them close to you, you wouldn’t have to worry about them striking you.”
Al-Barhawi was later appointed police chief in Mosul by Major General David Petraeus, then head of the 101st Airborne Division, stationed in the city. Petraeus insisted that al-Barhawi’s turn to the dark side was coerced rather than voluntary. Harvey disagrees: “Barhawi had managed his familial relationships into al-Qaeda when he was police chief, then into Mosul’s police force, then into local Awakening councils when they developed. From a tribal perspective, it was the smart thing to do: have that accretion in as many places as possible.”
KILLING THE SHIA
Between 2003 and 2005, the Zarqawists were still a minority in Iraq’s terrorism. According to a study conducted by the Jamestown Foundation, a Washington-based think tank, a mere 14 percent of what the United States had dubbed “Sunni Arab rejectionists” belonged to al-Zarqawi’s network. However, this contingent was overrepresented in the media because of the prominence Colin Powell gave to al-Zarqawi, and the fact that al-Zarqawi’s terrorism accounted for a full 42 percent of all suicide bombings—the mode of violence with the bloodiest toll—perpetrated in Iraq.
The same month Tawhid wal-Jihad bombed the Jordanian embassy and the United Nations, it also assassinated Ayatollah Mohammed Baqir al-Hakim, the leader of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI) with a VBIED. In fact, it was al-Zarqawi’s father-in-law, Yassin Jarrad, who carried out the suicide VBIED, which struck the Imam Ali Mosque, one of Shia Islam’s holiest shrines, outside the city of Najaf, and killed somewhere around a hundred people. Al-Zarqawi made no secret of his pathological hatred of Iraq’s demographic majority.
A letter said to have been written by him and addressed to bin Laden was intercepted by the Kurds in January 2004. It made al-Zarqawi’s Machiavellian plot quite clear: The Shia, it read, were “the insurmountable obstacle, the lurking snake, the crafty and malicious scorpion, the spying enemy, and the penetrating venom.” It went on to state, “The unhurried observer and inquiring onlooker will realize that Shi’ism is the looming danger and the true challenge,” its practitioners grave-worshippers, idolaters, and polytheists.
Genocidal rhetoric was followed by genocidal behavior. Though al-Zarqawi had also exploited what was then an incipient but real problem in Iraq’s political evolution: namely, the creeping takeover of state institutions by chauvinistic Shia politicians, many of whom were either spies or agents of influence of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC). One of al-Zarqawi’s named nemeses was the Badr Corps, the armed wing of the SCIRI, a political party whose very name indicated its Khomeinist foundations. By isolating Badr, which was targeting and abusing the Sunnis, al-Zarqawi managed to translate real sociopolitical grievances into an eschatological showdown. “[T]he Badr Brigade . . .has shed its Shi’a garb and put on the garb of the police and army in its place,” he wrote. “They have placed cadres in these institutions, and, in the name of preserving the homeland and the citizen, have begun to settle their scores with the Sunnis.”
Al-Zarqawi’s prescription was to start a civil war by “targeting and hitting [Shia] in [their] religious, political, and military depth [to] provoke them to show the Sunnis their rabies and bare the teeth of the hidden rancor working in their breasts. If we succeed in dragging them into the arena of sectarian war, it will become possible to awaken the inattentive Sunnis as they feel imminent danger and annihilating death at the hands of these Sabeans.”
ISIS has couched its current campaign in Syria and Iraq in exactly this sectarian-existential grammar, fondly recalling al-Zarqawi’s war strategy in its official propaganda. And it has followed in his footsteps by targeting Shia to prompt their counterreaction (and overreaction), in order to drive Sunnis into ISIS’s protective arms. In June 2014, after sacking Camp Speicher, the former US military base in Tikrit, al-Baghdadi’s jihadists boasted, for instance, that they had executed seventeen hundred Shia soldiers the Iraqi army had surrendered. That figure may have been exaggerated, but not by much: Human Rights Watch later confirmed the existence of mass execution sites of Shia, with a collective death toll of 770. In Mosul, the very same day ISIS took the city, it stormed Badoush Prison and hauled off some fifteen hundred of its inmates. It drove them all out to a nearby desert and separated the Sunnis and Christians from the Shia. Members of the first two categories were then carted away elsewhere; the Shia were first abused and robbed, then lined up and shot over a ravine after they each called out their number in line.
TELEVISED BEHEADINGS
Al-Zarqawi proved a dire pioneer in another important respect: marriage of horrific ultraviolence and mass media Like ISIS commanders today, he was especially fond of beheadings and the attention they get in the West. He very likely personally decapitated the American contractor Nicholas Berg in 2004 in a video posted online and circulated around the world. The staging of this grotesque event was also significant.
As with James Foley, Steven Sotloff, and Peter Kassig, ISIS’s latest American victims, Berg was dressed in a Guantanamo-style orange jumpsuit, forced to his knees, and compelled to identify himself. An imprecation was then recited by his captors, before a knife was applied to his throat, with one editing discrepancy: in Berg’s case, the full beheading was featured on-screen, whereas ISIS has preferred (no doubt for added international media exposure) to keep most of the gore offscreen. Also, Berg’s body was discovered and his family notified before his snuff film ever got exhibited.
In its August-September 2004 issue, Voice of Jihad, a magazine published by the Saudi branch of al-Qaeda, carried an endorsement of the practice by Abd El-Rahman ibn Salem al-Shamari, who referred specifically to the beheading of an Egyptian by the Zarqawists: “O sheikh of killers Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, continue to follow the straight path with Allah’s help, guided by Allah, Fight together with the monotheists against the idol-worshipers, together with the warriors of jihad against the collaborators, the hypocrites, and the rebellious . . .show him [any soldier from among the Saudi king’s legions] no mercy!” Al-Zarqawi’s trademark earned him the name “Sheikh of the Slaughterers.”
Though Al-Zarqawi retained an audiovisual squad of reportedly three people who were fluent in computer editing software and comparatively cruder Internet technology, ISIS has dramatically improved on al-Zarqawi’s media savvy, employing its own channel and social media feeds for disseminating information. The spectacle of murder most foul, however, had the same intended effect at the hands of both perpetrators.
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Not all jihadists approved of al-Zarqawi’s murder of Muslims, no matter if they were Shia. His former mentor al-Maqdisi was an outspoken critic. Writing to his former protégé from his latest Jordanian prison cell, where he still languished, the cleric chided al-Zarqawi: “The clean hands of mujahedin should be protected from being tarnished with the blood of the protected people.” However, as former CIA analyst Bruce Riedel has observed, these sentiments may not have been genuine: shortly after the letter was published, Jordan let al-Maqdisi out of jail and placed him under house arrest, prompting allegations by jihadists that his rebuke of al-Zarqawi may have been edited or ghostwritten by the GID as a form of psychological warfare against the insurgency.
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Although al-Zarqawi professed to be profoundly hurt by his former teacher’s criticism (he claimed to have wept when he read the letter), al-Maqdisi’s counsel did nothing to lessen Tawhid wal-Jihad’s violence against Muslims. Al-Zarqawi told him to take care with issuing such restrictive fatwas in the future. Today, al-Maqdisi has lambasted ISIS as “deviant” and criticized its much-publicized atrocities, as well as its alienation of the local Muslim communities and armed groups in Syria. However, that has not stopped ISIS from trying to curry favor with al-Maqdisi’s followers. As scholar Michael W. S. Ryan has noted, the first issue of ISIS’s propaganda magazine, Dabiq, features an extensive discussion of Millat Ibrahim, or the path of Abraham, which is not coincidentally the title of the 1984 tract al-Maqdisi published, inspiring any number of mujahidin to sojourn to Afghanistan.
AL-ZARQAWI’S APPEAL
Before Blackwater attained international notoriety for the lethal shooting of seventeen Iraqis in western Baghdad’s Nisour Square in 2007, its mercenaries made headlines three years earlier as corpses horrifically hung upside down from a railroad bridge in Iraq’s Anbar province. Then, as now, Fallujah was a byword for hell on earth to scores of American soldiers—and tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians.
Fallujah and Anbar’s provincial capital, Ramadi, were meant to have had a sizable US troop presence after the 2003 invasion. However, the ease with which the military cut through the country and straight into Baghdad altered the military’s plans. Instead, the cities that would become the main hot spots for Sunni rejectionism had the lightest American “footprint.” The failure of foresight seems staggering in retrospect, given that the Euphrates River Valley consists of what Derek Harvey says was not only the Sunni heartland, but also the national wellspring of Baathism.
Uday and Qusay Hussein, Saddam’s sons, fled to Anbar province when their father’s high command quit Baghdad in advance of the approaching US army. According to Wael Essam, a Palestinian journalist who was embedded with insurgents in Fallujah, many former Baathists, Mukhabarat officers, and Republican Guardsmen who took up arms to fight coalition forces “all affirmed they were not fighting for Saddam but for Islam and Sunnis.” The beheading of Nicholas Berg, US intelligence believed, took place in Jolan, a neighborhood in northwest Fallujah, which Tawhid wal-Jihad had established as one of its earliest garrisons.
An initial attempt to retake Fallujah in the spring of 2004—named, somewhat infelicitously, Operation Vigilant Resolve—ended in calamity. Integral to the Bush administration’s reconstruction project for Iraq was the swift transfer of sovereignty and governance to the Iraqis themselves. This included the extraordinary responsibility of national security for a nation still very much in the throes of war. The Iraqis were hardly ready, willing, or able to assume that role, and so US Marines bore the brunt of the fighting instead. An attempt to stand up to a local Iraqi Fallujah Brigade ended in failure: the entire outfit disintegrated, and 70 percent of its recruits wound up joining the insurgency instead.
The main American weapon against Zarqawists in Anbar was Predator drone air strikes, waged by the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), domiciled at Balad Air Base north of Baghdad and headed by Major General Stanley McChrystal. JSOC reckoned it had killed six out of fourteen “major operators” by September 2004, including al-Zarqawi’s newest “spiritual adviser.” Regardless, the organizational structure of Tawhid wal-Jihad remained intact despite intense aerial bombardment, and if anything, the group only grew in strength, number, and popular appeal after the battle, which became known as the First Battle of Fallujah, showed how a combination of domestic and foreign insurgencies could bleed a mighty superpower. McChrystal assessed that the threat posed by al-Zarqawi’s network was much greater than what the military had dismissively taken to calling “former regime elements”—an assessment that was greatly bolstered in October 2004 when al-Zarqawi finally did what he had refused to do four years earlier: make bayat to bin Laden.
By then adept at the uses of psychological warfare and propaganda, al-Zarqawi chose to broadcast his pledge of allegiance to the al-Qaeda chief, and did so two weeks after Donald Rumsfeld claimed that he did not believe al-Zarqawi was allied with bin Laden (a reversal of the allegation Colin Powell had advanced a year earlier at the UN).
The Jordanian’s bent-knee subordination resulted in the Tawhid wal-Jihad’s name change to Tanzim Qaedat al-Jihad fi Bilad al-Rafidayn, or “al-Qaeda in the Land of the Two Rivers,” which Washington shortened to al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI). So where the Jordanian entered Iraq a mere affiliate or ally of al-Qaeda, he was, a year into the war, fully enlisted as bin Laden’s field commander. It would be the Saudi billionaire’s enterprise, he insisted, that would inherit Mesopotamia.
A month after making bayat, al-Zarqawi attempted to put this proposition to the test with the Second Battle of Fallujah, which began in early November 2004. Dwarfing its predecessor, this operation saw ten American army battalions mobilized, including two marine regiments, and several hundred Iraqi soldiers, many acting as scouts for viable targets. It was also accompanied by F/A-18 Hornet jets, which dropped two-thousand-pound bombs on points around the city.
The marines also discovered what the AQI franchise had gotten up to by way of community outreach in Fallujah. In addition to a calendar for video-recorded beheadings, soldiers uncovered kidnapping victims who had had their legs removed. In total, three “torture houses” were uncovered in the city, along with an IED-manufacturing facility that gave US forces a clue as to the route taken by foreign fighters: a recovered GPS device showed that its owner had entered the country from the west, via Syria.
Ten thousand homes, or about a fifth of total residences in Fallujah, were destroyed in two weeks’ worth of intense urban warfare, matched by punishing air strikes. The aftermath was a pocked moonscape, uninhabitable for many—not that many were left. Fallujah had largely been evacuated, with hundreds of thousands of refugees fleeing before the start of major fighting. Roughly a quarter of all insurgents killed by US troops in 2004—2,175 out of 8,400—died at the Second Battle of Fallujah, but at a proportionally high price: 70 marines were also killed, and 651 were wounded, in addition to other US casualties.
In other words, another tactical victory for the United States was rendered strategically negligible because of the enormous propaganda boon it delivered to the insurgency. The Second Battle of Fallujah was more Dunkirk than Waterloo for the jihadists and the Baathists who, if anything, scattered their number to other parts of central and northern Iraq, such as Mosul, where the marines believed that al-Zarqawi had fled after the first day of intense combat operations. Bin Laden, too, took the opportunity to transform a setback into a major forward stride, claiming that he had been acquainted with some of the “martyrs” of the battle and laying the responsibility for Fallujah’s undeniable devastation at the feet of President Bush. America was waging a “total war against Islam,” bin Laden declared, while the Zarqawists had “written a new page of glory into the history of our community of believers.”
What began for bin Laden as a wary collaboration premised on Rolodex opportunism and for al-Zarqawi as the need for start-up capital had clearly metamorphosed into an open and celebrated alliance. The al-Qaeda leader’s hesitations about his field commander’s arrogance and sectarianism were sacrificed to the morale-building blows the latter was delivering to the world’s greatest far enemy. In December 2004 bin Laden answered al-Zarqawi’s bayat with warm acceptance, naming him a “noble brother” and calling on the “unification of the jihadi groups under a single standard which recognizes al-Zarqawi as the Emir of al-Qaeda in Iraq.”
The title was somewhat deceptive, however, because al-Zarqawi was in fact granted an operational purview that extended well beyond Iraqi territory, into outlying Arab countries as well as Turkey. As Bruce Riedel recounts, some al-Qaeda ideologues even gelled to al-Zarqawi’s fanatical anti-Shiism, which was not endorsed (and was later criticized) by core al-Qaeda leadership. One Saudi ideologue in particular praised the Jordanian for characterizing the Shia as part of a long, uninterrupted line of perfidious collaborators dating back to the Mongol invasion of the Middle East—an invasion that resulted, infamously, in the obliteration of Baghdad in the thirteenth century. Here the thirteenth-century Islamic theologian Ibn Taymiyyah—the godfather of Salafism—was invoked for his commandment, “Beware of the Shiites, fight them, they lie.” The Mongols in the contemporary context were the American occupiers, and also the “Jews,” who were said to be standing right behind them in Iraq. Al-Zarqawi was thus seen as upholding a seven-hundred-year-old tradition of Islamic resistance. According to this framework, a Muslim has to abide by three criteria of tawhid, or monotheism: to worship God, to worship only God, and to have the right creed. In the medieval period, Ibn Taymiyyah used the foregoing criteria of tawhid to excommunicate the Shia and Sufis after he established that their practices and beliefs—including the veneration of imams—compromised their worship of God alone.
As Riedel puts it, al-Zarqawi was also being celebrated not just as a great descendant of Ibn Taymiyyah’s line, but as the ultimate strategic trap-layer for the infidels of the West. He portrayed the United States and its European allies, the United Nations, and the Shia-dominant Iraqi government as coconspirators in a plot of antique vintage, the aim of which was the violent disinheritance of 1.3 billion Sunnis of the Islamic world. He had, according to his Saudi admirer, “such capabilities that the mind cannot imagine. He prepared for fighting the Americans over a year prior to the American occupation of Iraq. He built the camps and arsenals,” and he recruited and enlisted people from all over the region—from Palestine to Yemen.
ISIS today relies on much of the same triumphalist discourse about a coming civilizational showdown in the Middle East. Every issue of Dabiq opens with this quote from al-Zarqawi: “The spark has been lit here in Iraq, and its heat will continue to intensify—by Allah’s permission—until it burns the crusader armies in Dabiq.” Dabiq refers to the countryside of modern-day Aleppo, where ISIS also continues to have an entrenched and expanding military presence. “This place was mentioned in a hadith,” Dabiq (the magazine) notes, “describing some of the events of the Malahim (what is sometimes referred to as Armageddon in English). One of the greatest battles between the Muslims and the crusaders will take place near Dabiq.”
In other words, the next trap being laid for America, as al-Zarqawi originally envisioned it, was in northern Syria.
THE SUNNI TRIANGLE
The disbursal of Islamic militants from Fallujah into other parts of Iraq meant that the “spark” of al-Zarqawi’s apocalyptic ideology caught fire throughout the rest of the country, particularly where anti-American sentiment was especially high: where US forces were in densest concentration. One insurgent stronghold was Haifa Street, a thoroughfare that ran parallel with the Tigris River, just north out of the Assassins’ Gate, the entrance to the Green Zone. Haifa Street in particular was a totem of Sunni disenfranchisement: residents living in luxury apartments along this Babylonian Champs-Élysées had been the well-paid elites favored by the Saddam regime. But many were unemployed and unemployable in transitional Iraq, thanks to de-Baathification, and so were being drawn into the insurgency in one form or another. It made no difference that Ayad Allawi, a onetime Baathist turned enemy of the party and a secular shia well-respected by Sunnis, was now the interim prime minister of Iraq. Gordon and Trainor recount how on one inoperable US Bradley fighting vehicle that sat along the street in September 2004 “insurgents had hung a black Tawhid wal-Jihad flag on its 25mm gun, and the battalion tasked with controlling the place, from the 1st Cavalry Division, began calling Haifa ‘Little Fallujah’ and ‘Purple Heart Boulevard,’ after the medal that would be awarded to 160 of the unit’s 800 soldiers by the time they went home in early 2005. In Dora [yet another district of Baghdad infiltrated by insurgents], another 1st Cavalry battalion began to see new graffiti as Second Fallujah inflamed the Sunni population and the January election loomed: ‘No, No, Allawi, Yes, Yes, Zarqawi.’ ”
THE FALL(S) OF MOSUL
Iraq’s second-largest city, Mosul, had seemed relatively stable during the early days of the occupation, when it was first secured by Petraeus’s 101st Airborne. But the calm was illusory. Al-Zarqawi had made the city his fallback base, and just days into major combat operations for the Second Battle of Fallujah, Mosul fell to the insurgency.
Ninewah’s provincial capital had always been susceptible to Sunni rejectionism, given its cocktail composition of Saddamists and Salafists. Unemployment in Mosul hovered at around 75 percent, according to Sadi Ahmed Pire, the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan’s security chief in the city, and thus locals could be hired to carry out terrorist operations for as little as fifty dollars. As in prior battles, the local Iraqi police and army disappeared, their stations either stormed by insurgents facing little resistance or set ablaze. The ease with which Mosul collapsed also seemingly vindicated Derek Harvey’s prior assessment to the US military: namely that the city’s US-appointed police chief, Muhammed Khairi al-Barhawi, had been quietly playing for both teams.
Though al-Barhawi may have been an Iraqi intelligence asset all along, the Zarqawists certainly didn’t make it easy for other Mosulawis to sincerely partner with the Americans. They were especially brutal to any Iraqi soldier or policeman who didn’t abandon his post; in one notorious episode, they even tracked a wounded major to the hospital where he was being treated and beheaded him there. In the end, as with Fallujah, it took another overwhelming commitment of US firepower and manpower—joined by an unusually competent contingent of the Iraqi Special Police Commandos—to regain control of Mosul in the face of a combined Baathist–al-Qaeda onslaught of machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades.
A decade later, history repeated itself, as Mosul once again fell to a hybridized insurgency made up of al-Zarqawi’s disciples and the Baathists of al-Douri’s Naqshbandi Army. Only this time, there was no US military presence to retake the city. ISIS sacked Mosul in less than a week. The jihadists rule it to this day.