THE MANAGEMENT OF SAVAGERY
BIRTH OF THE ISLAMIC STATE OF IRAQ
Al-Zarqawi’s sinister strategy hewed closely to a text titled Idarat al-Tawahhush, or The Management of Savagery, published online in 2004 as a combined field manual and manifesto for the establishment of the caliphate. Its author, Abu Bakr Naji, conceived of a battle plan for weakening enemy states through what he called “power of vexation and exhaustion.” Drawing the United States into open as opposed to “proxy” warfare in the Middle East was the whole point, because Naji believed that once American soldiers were killed by mujahidin on the battlefield, the “media halo” surrounding their presumed invincibility would vanish. Muslims would then be “dazzled” at the harm they could inflict on a weak and morally corrupted superpower as well as incensed at the occupation of their holy lands, driving them to jihad. He urged that they should then focus on attacking the economic and cultural institutions (such as the hydrocarbon industries) of the “apostate” regimes aligned with the United States. “The public will see how the troops flee,” Naji wrote, “heeding nothing. At this point, savagery and chaos begin and these regions will start to suffer from the absence of security. This is in addition to the exhaustion and draining (that results from) attacking the remaining targets and opposing the authorities.”
Naji was using the time-honored jihadist example of Egypt, but he was also implicitly referring to Iraq, where he urged the fast consolidation of jihadist victory in order to “take over the surrounding countries.” One ISIS-affiliated cleric told us that Naji’s book is widely circulated among provincial ISIS commanders and some rank-and-file fighters as a way to justify beheadings as not only religiously permissible but recommended by God and his prophet. For ISIS, The Management of Savagery’s greatest contribution lies in its differentiation between the meaning of jihad and other religious matters. Naji at one point lectures the reader, arguing that the way jihad is taught “on paper” makes it harder for young mujahidin to understand the true meaning of the concept. “One who previously engaged in jihad knows that it is naught but violence, crudeness, terrorism, frightening (others), and massacring. I am talking about jihad and fighting, not about Islam and one should not confuse them. . . .[H]e cannot continue to fight and move from one stage to another unless the beginning stage contains a stage of massacring the enemy and making him homeless. . . .”
THE SUNNI BOYCOTT
To succeed in Iraq, al-Zarqawi needed to both massacre and dispossess the enemy (the Shia and Americans) and keep Sunnis divested of any stake in what he saw as their conspiratorial project: the creation of a democratic Iraqi government. Both the Baathists and the Zarqawists undertook a campaign to enforce a Sunni boycott of the forthcoming January 2005 Iraqi election. It worked. Less than 1 percent of Sunnis cast ballots in a key province in central Iraq—Anbar. The result conformed exactly to the dire scenario outlined by al-Zarqawi in his letter a year earlier: the Shia parties won the election by an overwhelming percentage, and Ibrahim al-Jaafari, a Dawa Party candidate who had received millions in campaign funding from Iran, became prime minister in a government that would draft Iraq’s new constitution and thus determine the country’s postwar fate. The boycott marked the climax of Sunni rejectionism but also, paradoxically, the beginning of the end for the insurgency’s popular appeal, because it transformed what had hitherto been a numerically minimal element—AQI—into the dominant one.
The Sunni loss at the ballot box unsurprisingly coincided with a sharp uptick in attacks on “Shia” targets, which included state institutions and the Iraqi Security Forces (ISF). On February 28, 2005, a suicide bomb killed more than 120 people in the Shia-majority city of Hilla, just south of Baghdad, targeting young men tendering job applications with the ISF. In the crucial border town of Tal Afar, which jihadists used as a gateway to import foreign fighters from Syria, AQI ethnically cleansed mixed communities, “attacking playgrounds and schoolyards and soccer fields,” as Colonel Herbert “H. R.” McMaster later recalled. In one horrifying instance, they used two mentally disabled girls—ages three and thirteen—as suicide bombers to blow up a police recruitment line.
THE DESERT PROTECTORS
Military progress in Iraq began as improvisation—the innovative thinking of local military actors who apprehended early on that the war for “hearts and minds” wouldn’t be won by adhering to a strategy cooked up by strategists who stayed in the Green Zone or, in some cases, inside the walls of the Pentagon. Integral to the insurgency’s success was the failure by the Americans to engage with arguably the most important demographic in Sunni Iraq—the tribes. They had suffered enormously from de-Baathification. Saddam had understood the importance of these ancient confederations of families and clans and had thus made them a large part of his state patronage system: the tribes ran smuggling rings, gray-market merchant businesses, all under the auspices of al-Douri.
It wasn’t for a lack of trying that the tribes failed to persuade the coalition of their bellwether status for defeating the insurgency. A sheikh from the influential Albu Nimr tribe had offered to work with the Iraqi Governing Council and the CPA in establishing a much-needed border guard as early as 2003, an offer that was reflected in a memo prepared for the Joint Chiefs of Staff in October of that same year. “Leaders of these tribes—many of whom still occupy key positions of local authority—appear to be increasingly willing to cooperate with the Coalition in order to restore or maintain their influence in post-Saddam Iraq,” the memo read. “If they perceive failure, they may take other actions, to include creating alternate governing and security institutions, working with anti-Coalition forces, or engaging in criminal activity to ensure the prosperity and security of their tribes.” Nothing came of the memo.
Al-Zarqawi again proved more adept at navigating Iraqi culture than the CPA or US military—at least at first. “Zarqawi, or the Iraqis he had working for him, understood who was who in the tribes and he worked them,” Derek Harvey told us. “That’s how he controlled territory in Anbar and the Euphrates River Valley.”
His fatal error, however, was in overplaying his hand by turning AQI’s protection racket into an asphyxiating mode of jihadist governance. The tribes chafed at the implementation of a seventh-century civil code in areas ruled by fundamentalists, many of whom were foreign-born and behaved exactly as the colonial usurpers they were meant to expel. Tribal businesses were disrupted or taken over by those seeking their own monopoly on smuggling, and AQI protected its confiscated interest with a mafia’s thuggish zeal. It justified killing on the basis of market competition.
So when it assassinated a sheikh from the Albu Nimr tribe in 2005, Major Adam Such, who commanded the Army Special Forces Operational Detachment Alpha 555 Company under the 1st Marine Division, seized the opportunity to make AQI a pariah among its most important constituency. He recruited tribesmen to join an ad hoc militia to monitor the roads near the Anbar city of Hit—another strategically vital town that ISIS later seized in 2014. It was an inspired idea, although it lacked the necessary structural support to become wholly transformative. At the time, there was no permanent US military presence in the area to convince the locals that the routing of AQI wouldn’t be a flash in the pan, but the prelude to a long-term counterinsurgent policing mission. Still, the fact that Iraqis suddenly wanted Americans to stay in their midst indicated that the jihadists had worn out their welcome.
Another city where this proved to be so was Qa’im, which al-Zarqawi had made the capital of his Western Euphrates “emirate” for obvious geostrategic reasons. The Sunni and Bedouin town abuts the Syrian border town of Albu Kamal and is also situated along a main road connecting Iraq to Jordan. It also contains the largest phosphate mines in the Middle East, with an enormous subterranean cave system, which became a guerrilla network for moving men and materiél through undetected.
US Marines moved in to take Qa’im in September 2005, followed by subsequent sorties in subordinate AQI bases in the Western Euphrates. They constructed concrete-fortified outposts to mark an indefinite presence and thereby forestall a jihadist resurgence. Building on Adam Such’s experience in Hit, they also reached out to Qa’im’s tribes, some of which had already grown so horrified by AQI’s practices that they took up arms against the Zarqawists. In the Albu Mahal’s Hamza Battalion, the marines discovered a volunteer army that proved as committed to hammering the insurgents as they were.
Discounting corruption, the main reason why the ISF often proved inept or simply unwilling to duke it out with AQI was that many recruits were Shia, who understandably had little interest in fighting in Sunni-majority territory where they were viewed with suspicion or outright contempt. Sunni tribesmen had no such compunction, however, and were fired by self-interest to rid their areas of what may have started out as an applauded anti-American “resistance” but had devolved into a gang of obscurantist head-loppers. The graduates of the Qa’im program were turned into a battalion called the Desert Protectors, a name more than a little redolent of Lawrentian romanticism but accurate insofar as the battalion safeguarded the December 2005 parliamentary election from terrorist sabotage.
By 2006 security incidents in Qa’im had plummeted. Even in success, though, US forces still failed to discover that the tribes weren’t motivated by anything so grandiose as patriotism; they only wanted to ensure peace and quiet in their own communities, not in the entire country. A third of the Desert Protectors’ members quit after being told that it constituted a national defense force and not just a local Qa’im gendarmerie and so was duly slated for redeployment elsewhere in Iraq.
That said, Iraq’s national parliamentary election yielded unforeseen and welcome developments. One of these was the transformation of Dr. Muhammad Mahmoud Latif, a long-sought-after insurgent leader, into a partner of the United States. Appalled by how the Sunni boycott of the January election for a constituent assembly had deprived Sunnis of their say in Iraq’s self-determination, Latif realized that al-Zarqawi’s plan for delegitimizing the new government was backfiring. He also had political ambitions of his own. In the lead-up to the parliamentary vote, he gathered a collection of Ramadi tribal sheikhs who were eager to declare war on AQI and, more daringly, work with the Americans to do so, on one condition. Like the Desert Protectors, the Ramadi tribesmen wanted a guarantee that the security portfolio for Anbar’s provincial capital would devolve to themselves after AQI was no more.
Assured of the Americans’ good faith in that respect, the Anbar People’s Council was born. Its first initiative was to encourage Sunnis to join the Iraqi police, which was about to hold a large recruitment drive at a local glass factory. The council’s certification of the effort yielded hundreds of fresh applicants, who in turn became an unavoidable target for al-Zarqawi’s jihadists. On the fourth day of the glass factory drive, a suicide bomber exploded a device that killed as many as sixty Iraqis and two Americans. AQI then announced all-out war on the Anbari sheikhs who had joined the council, hunting them down individually for weeks after the bombing. Latif fled Iraq to avoid being caught in the terrorists’ dragnet. Still too vulnerable to al-Zarqawi’s strong-arm tactics, the council folded weeks later.
It took another two years for the US military to make strategic sense of what had transpired in Hit, Qa’im, and Ramadi. Pockets of wholly spontaneous and unforeseen tribal backlashes against the same foreign-led terrorist organization made sense in light of tribal history. For centuries, these clans had survived by cutting pragmatic deals with perceived dominant powers in their midst. They had done it with Saddam, and they had done it with al-Zarqawi, and they were ready to do it with the Americans. And while they still regarded the United States warily, they saw in its army a possible ally against a greater common enemy.
“I had a Marine Corps captain,” a former top US military official told us. “He was a Sioux. He didn’t know shit about Anbar or Iraq. He got out there, and he understood it immediately. The Iraqis could see he knew what was going on, and they loved him for it.”
For Derek Harvey, understanding the way Iraq’s tribes functioned was the key to all mythologies in understanding Iraq itself. “There were a lot of regime organizations that we didn’t figure out very well. The key person might not have been the head guy, but the second or third guy—and this rule of not knowing exactly who’s running the show applied to the Saddamists as much as it applies to ISIS today. The tribes had professional and in some cases religious networks that determined informal hierarchies in everything that happened in that country. Our difficulty was in learning who did what.”