ISIS: Inside the Army of Terror

SHAKEDOWN OF THE SHEIKHS

ISIS CO-OPTS THE TRIBES

“Terrain is fate in ground combat operations,” according to Jim Hickey, the US army colonel who helped capture Saddam in 2003. “Iraq is a tribal society, and families in the tribes are tied to specific pieces of ground. That’s going to shape this fight dramatically. It shaped the fight when the British were there in the First and Second World Wars. It shaped the fight when we were there.”

Much the same can be said of the Jazira, which has in the last two years served as ISIS’s strategic heartland, and the reason for its inextricability from Syria. It was here, after all, that Abu Ghadiyah had his safe house and countless other rat-line runners and “border emirs” kept their forward operating bases for AQI.

The Baathist regimes in Syria and Iraq viewed tribes and dealt with them differently. Prewar Iraqi state television channels prominently featured tribal traditions and folklore and Saddam personally mingled with both Sunni and Shia sheikhs, dispensing various incentives—such as smuggling and gray-market rights—for their continued fealty. It was this established patronage system that AQI self-defeatingly tried to disrupt in the mid-2000s, precipitating Sahwa in Iraq.

In Syria, by contrast, the Assad regimes were generally ambivalent about the tribes and strategically inept in co-opting them. True, the regime opportunistically exploited the tribes to create social rifts on demand, such as when it Arab-ized Kurdish-dominated areas in northern Syrian, the better to contain restive Kurdish nationalism. However, the al-Assads never deemed the ancient filial confederations in their desert hinterland as significant or important as Saddam had his own.

Since its advent in the 1960s, the Syrian branch of the Baath Party saw in tribalism a twofold threat: first, tribal bonds between clans in eastern Syria and northwestern Iraq were seen as a potential advantage for the rival Iraqi branch. Second, particularly in the early years of its ascent to power, the Baath Party regarded “retrograde” tribalism as antithetical to the party’s “progressive” ideology.

Damascus’s clumsy engagement with the tribes came back to haunt it when the Syrian uprising began. Many of the early demonstrations in Deraa, for example, were driven by tribal linkages and expressed in tribal rhetoric. Protestors called for “fazaat houran,” the collective help of the people of the Houran valley, where Deraa is located. When the Syrian security forces used violence to suppress these demonstrations, Deraawis called on their “cousins” in the Gulf to come to their assistance.

Tribal networks played an even more pronounced role after the rebellion became militarized in early 2012. Fund organizers helped arm rebel groups in various parts of the country by appealing to their kin abroad, especially in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Bahrain.

Members of the Ugaidat tribe in Homs, for example, would reach out to their fellow Ugaidat members from eastern Syria who were living in the Gulf and had readier access to fund-raising. Some pan-Syrian rebel coalitions were also formed partly because of tribal links. The Ahfad al-Rasoul brigade was led by Maher al-Nuaimi from Homs and Saddam al-Jamal from Deir Ezzor; both hailed from the same tribe. “People from al-Wa’ar al Qadeem and al-Dar al Kabeera in Homs, and others from the countrysides of Hama and Damascus connected with us,” an FSA financier relayed to us. “We knew each other through tribal connections.”

What started as an asset for the revolution soon became one for its jihadist deformity. Several factors explain al-Qaeda’s and ISIS’s purchase in Syria’s tribal regions.

The first has to do with the relationship between population density and geography. Tribes have their highest concentrations in Deir Ezzor, Hasaka, Raqqa, and Deraa; they constitute a full 90 percent of the population in each of those four provinces. They also number around two million in Aleppo’s rural districts. Overall, tribes account for 30 percent of Syria’s overall population, and yet they inhabit about 60 percent of its territory. In other words, tribes are bound to the countryside, where insurgents have found it far easier to navigate and bivouac. As in Iraq, this is where Zarqawists tend to coalesce whenever they’ve been booted out of urban terrain or are plotting a massive offensive against rival groups.

AL-RAFDAN’S REVENGE

In 2012 Syrian tribalism was most effectively harnessed by Jabhat al-Nusra, then still a part of ISI. One of the first al-Nusra cells in Syria, in fact, was in a small town in Deir Ezzor known as al-Ghariba, where nearly every resident belonged to the same family. Because Deir Ezzor connects Syria to Iraq, many of al-Ghariba’s inhabitants found it easy to join the Iraqi insurgency in 2003 and 2004 and imbibe Zarqawist propaganda.

The al-Assad regime uncovered the al-Nusra cell in al-Ghariba in January 2012 and almost completely eliminated it, killing dozens of its members. Al-Nusra then relocated to a nearby town, al-Shuhail, which had long been a hub for arms smuggling between Iraq and Syria. The town was named for the tribe that inhabits it, and most of the resident families had deep-rooted connections to Salafism. Members of the Hajr family, for instance, joined the Fighting Vanguard, a group that fought the regime in Hama as part of the Muslim Brotherhood’s uprising in the 1970s and 1980s. After the US invasion of Iraq, many Hajr kin joined the Sunni insurgency. And after the Syrian uprising, when al-Nusra moved in, dozens of Hajr men joined the embryonic AQI franchise. Sometime in the summer of 2012, the town was effectively run by al-Nusra, earning it the nickname Shuhailistan.

“If you spoke about Jabhat al-Nusra in a negative way, you were effectively insulting the Shuhail,” said Amir Al-Dandal, a member of a prominent tribe in Deir Ezzor, and an organizer for the FSA. Even the internecine war between al-Nusra and ISIS took on a tribal inflection. In April 2013, al-Nusra and Jaish Muta, another rebel group in Shuhail, fought against members of the al-Bu Assaf clan, part of the Albu Saraya tribe, which is the third-largest in Deir Ezzor. Members of the al-Bu Assaf later backed ISIS in the dispute.

A series of towns and villages swiftly succumbed to the jihadist blitz. Fayyadh al-Tayih, a former al-Nusra member who joined ISIS in December 2013, told us: “From the beginning, we believed that al-Shuhail was the real problem. If we were to take them, everyone else would surrender.”

Triumphant, al-Rafdan began to exact revenge. He imposed harsh conditions on the Shuhail, exiling some members for a period of three months. (Even this was a tribally orientated form of punishment.) The fall of the town and tribe marked a decisive end to the al-Nusra’s purchase in eastern Syria, granting ISIS more or less total control over the province of Deir Ezzor.

The sacking of Deir Ezzor was remarkable, given that Jedid Ugaidat was the only place where ISIS had ever carved out a real presence for itself; and even there, it had so alienated the local population that it had been temporarily expelled.

MONEY TALKS

Al-Nusra’s routing in Deir Ezzor also derived from matérial exigencies, namely its struggle to control the province’s energy resources. The Albu Ezzedine tribe asked another clan, the al-Dhaher, which was loyal to al-Nusra, to share in the revenue of smuggled oil from the al-Omar oil field, located in a desert region near Shuhail. When al-Nusra refused and claimed the revenue for itself, members of Albu Ezzedine joined ISIS.

Predictably, Sahwa took root in places where ISIS had little to no organic support from the populace. ISIS’s wholesale takeover of Raqqa owed heavily to the fact that this province, more than any other, was essentially occupied by non-native fighters who fought and repelled minimal regime forces in 2013. There was no local rebel infrastructure in place beforehand, and the only military challenge that ISIS faced in Raqqa came from Ahrar al-Sham and al-Nusra, both of which were significantly spent forces after suffering mass defections to ISIS following the al-Qaeda divorce.

By contrast, rebel forces in Idlib, Aleppo, the Damascus countryside, and Deir Ezzor had fought the regime’s forces and more or less governed their liberated areas for about a year before ISIS was formed and could simply move in to conquer the conquerors.

In Iraq ISIS’s reign has been characterized by much the same native-foreigner dichotomy. In Mosul residents were alienated by jihadists moving in from Tal Afar, the border town where AQI resisted US forces in 2005 and dispatched child suicide bombers. Mosulawis look down on Tal Afarians, considering the mostly Turkomen population to be poor, uneducated, and unruly.

Similar complaints are often heard in other ISIS-controlled territories where raids carried out by members from one city or town on shops or residents in another are often ascribed to preexisting socioeconomic tensions.

ISIS’S DIVIDE-AND-RULE STRATEGY

ISIS is the first and only jihadist franchise in history to successfully pit members of the same tribe against one another. This was on grim display in August 2014 when members of the Shaitat in Deir Ezzor participated in the killing of hundreds of their fellow tribesmen, at the behest of ISIS. The same coerced fratricide happened again in the Iraqi town of Hit, where members of the Albu Nimr took part in the execution of dozens of their kinsman in October 2014. Such divide-and-rule tactics ensure that any tribal uprising against ISIS will necessarily be a fratricidal one.

In Qa’im, the other border town where the first rumblings of Sahwa were felt in 2005, a preexisting division between two tribes, the Karbala and the Mihlawiyeen, manifested in the position either eventually took on AQI. Members of the Karbala joined the Zarqawists, and the tribe lost dozens of its members in an American air raid against Rawa, where seventy insurgents were killed. Al-Mihlawiyeen, however, was opposed to AQI and later joined the Awakening councils.

Unsurprisingly, bribery has played its part in tearing tribes apart. In April 2013, after the rupture with al-Nusra, ISIS secretly sought to co-opt young tribal leaders by offering to share oil and smuggling revenues and promising them positions of authority currently held by their elders. Younger tribesmen were seen as more credible and popular, owing to their participation in the anti-Assad rebellion, whereas their seniors mainly sided with the regime or stayed neutral. One tribal figure from Albu Kamal explained how ISIS deftly used this generational-political divide in one prominent family months before it had even established any presence in the area. “They [ISIS] are giving him a portion of an oil well in the area,” the figure told us in December 2013. “They know that if they are to be eradicated in our area, who would be able to rally up people around him? Most of the other tribes in our area have no leadership; we have leadership and influence. They give him money, they protect him and consult with him on everything. The other option is, they would assassinate him.”

Such strategic forward-planning is what helped ISIS take otherwise impervious towns in Deir Ezzor in the summer of 2014, such as al-Muhassan, Shaitat, and Albu Kamal. In Mo Hassan, the seizure came as a shock to most local rebels, as the town was known to be hostile to ISIS. Its population is famously secular and has produced many professional soldiers and officers in the Syrian Arab Army. But ideology played no role whatsoever. ISIS simply bought its way in before it fought its way in, relying on the enormous stocks of American- and Saudi-made weapons it had seized from the Iraqi Security Forces in Mosul in June 2014.

ISIS AS MEDIATOR

ISIS has also shown itself to be remarkably adept at arbitrating disputes in tribal areas. It mediated a historic reconciliation in November 2014 between two warring tribes in the Syrian border town of Albu Kamal, ending what had amounted to a War of the Roses–style thirty-year argument between al-Hassoun and al-Rehabiyeen, whose members would occasionally fight each other. “We learned they had tensions so we brought both of them together and got them to reconcile,” an ISIS member who was involved in the reconciliation told us. “They agreed and were happy.”

As part of its administration of ruled territory, ISIS has appointed an emir in charge of “tribal affairs,” a Saudi national known as Dhaigham Abu Abdullah, based in Qa’im. He receives envoys to discuss local grievances or complaints—in many cases, residents from newly captured towns in eastern Syria cross the nonexistent border to meet with Abu Abdullah as they would a federal court judge. “People are racing to win the trust of the State,” said an ISIS member from Deir Ezzor, who accompanied one of those convoys of arbitration-seekers to Anbar. “[ISIS] is a new authority in our area and people rush to present themselves as leaders to push for their personal interests, and tribalism is above everything for these people. Our leaders know this, we’re not stupid.”

In areas where killings were carried out by fellow tribesmen or a tribe from a neighboring town, ISIS uses foreign jihadists or leaders from other regions to keep the peace. Here the importation of non-natives appears to be well considered. Saddam al-Jamal, who was responsible for the killing of seventy locals in his hometown of Albu Kamal, was not given a leadership role when ISIS returned to the area. Instead, he was tasked with the management of a refugee camp near Iraq. Al-Rafdan, the vengeance-taker from Shuhail, was reassigned to Raqqa.

Unlike al-Assad, but rather like Saddam, then, ISIS has made tribal outreach an integral part of its governing strategy, the better to keep the impossibility of another Awakening an integral part of its war strategy. Where it hasn’t scared or tempted tribesmen into submission with propaganda about “repentance” and the consequences of not seeking it, it has inserted itself as a buffer between feuding clans, relying, no doubt, on the experience and hard-won knowledge of its former Baathist leadership. Not for nothing did al-Baghdadi, in announcing the formation of ISIS in April 2013, explicitly refer to two categories of people: Muslims and the tribes of Syria.

ISIS’s success in playing tribes, or members of the same tribe, against one another is a product of policies it has followed since its battlefield resurgence in 2011. It has followed a divide-and-rule policy to ensure that social and tribal rivalry and hostility are more pronounced than any unified enmity to ISIS. That will undoubtedly complicate the issue of working with tribes to defeat ISIS militarily, because even if some members of one tribe decide to become sahwats, chances are they’ll be fighting their own kinsmen.

It is a fear often voiced by sheikhs in both Iraq and Syria. As Frederic Wehrey of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace wrote, ISIS “has proven to be a more adaptable and entrenched opponent today than its predecessor was in the mid-2000s, deploying a potent mix of extreme violence and soft power to both coerce and co-opt the tribes. Underpinning all of this are truisms that often elude tribal enthusiasts: tribal authority is fickle, hyper-localized, often artificially constructed, and therefore hard to fully harness.”

The volte-face situation in Iraqi Sunni areas was just as much a product of the policies of Nouri al-Maliki—and more directly the military campaign in Anbar in early 2014. The antigovernment protests in that province following the US withdrawal saw the rise of mainstream Sunni religious and tribal figures, politically in the protests camps and militarily in the Anbar desert—even though ISI was present in the background. Instead of taking these figures’ concerns seriously, al-Maliki portrayed his military campaign in Anbar in unequivocally sectarian terms. In a speech he delivered on Christmas 2013, he characterized it as an ancient war between the partisans of the Prophet’s grandson Hussain and the son of the first Ummayad ruler, Yazid, in the seventh century.

This disastrous miscalculation arguably cost al-Maliki his premiership. It certainly helped open the door for ISIS’s return in Anbar. “Once things settle down, the tribes will realize how the [al-Assad and al-Maliki] regimes marginalized them and get back to their senses,” the ISIS mediation official told us. “They are our people, but they need to know that they cannot get it their way. They have to understand we are the only ones who can help them and protect them.”

ISIS’s tribal strategy does have its limitations; the biggest being that it is still regarded as a temporary governing force, an ally that was made out of convenience or brute necessity. The tribes accept the temporary situation as the best of all worlds, and because they don’t want their areas turned into combat zones. But they don’t endorse ISIS ideologically or join it en masse because they calculate that its reign won’t last forever. Smaller tribes are joining ISIS, many of them driven by power politics rather than any sympathy for takfirism or the caliphate.