For almost a century Palestinians had been the handmaidens of global jihad. While other jihadi movements had fought local power struggles in Egypt, Syria, Algeria, and Libya, Palestinian mentors had laid the intellectual foundations of a pan-Islamic struggle. Palestinian commanders, like Zarqawi in Iraq and Abu Muhammad al-Julani, the leader of the al-Nusra Front in Syria, experimented with their theories.
But America’s occupation of Iraq shifted jihad’s center of gravity. No longer were Sunni militants struggling for peripheral places like Afghanistan or Somalia, but for Baghdad, the Arab world’s heartland and former seat of the caliphate. Not only did America’s rule resuscitate an age of direct colonialism, it also upended 1,400 years of Sunni domination of Shias in the Arab world. “Sunni Islam is under attack,” protested a Jordanian juice-maker, typifying a popular response to scenes of American tanks roling into Baghdad “Ever since the second Gulf War, the West has been trying to break Sunni power. We have to defend it.”
Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi and the Caliphate
No sooner had Atatürk abolished the Ottoman caliphate in 1924 than Sunni revivalist movements began discussing its resurrection. At the World Islamic Congress in 1931, Haj Amin al-Husseini, the grand mufti of Jerusalem, had tentatively nominated himself for caliph. Hassan al-Banna, the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, suggested selecting the candidate by consensus. The pan-Islamic political organization Hizb ut-Tahrir proposed launching the caliphate with a military coup. But thereafter the idea had lain dormant, too ambitious even for bin Laden.
Three weeks after his capture of Mosul, Iraq’s second city, a scholar of the Prophet’s sayings took the step no other Arab leader had dared for centuries and declared himself caliph. Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi’s realm encompassed the wellspring of the world’s civilization, the Euphrates and Tigris valleys, a territory larger and richer than Jordan, with about eight million people under his rule. But his aspirations were borderless. Denouncing the sin of nationalism, he dropped the geographical references in ISIS, his group’s name, and rebranded it simply the Islamic State. By adopting the title of caliph, he had climbed above the status of Kings Salman, Hamed, Abdullah, and Mohammed and catapulted himself into the highest office in Islam.
Initially, some wondered whether he might serve as an antidote to Zarqawi’s vicious sectarianism and restore the religious inclusivity the post had commanded in Ottoman times. Though his nom de guerre, Abu Bakr, had been the first Sunni caliph, he renamed himself Caliph Ibrahim, recalling Abraham, the father of all monotheistic faiths and also his original name, Ibrahim Awwad. His family, though Sunnis, came from Samarra, on the banks of the Tigris 60 miles north of Baghdad. For generations his relatives had served as sweepers tending the forecourts of the city’s great Shia shrines. Sunnis as well as Shias earned their keep from the pilgrimage, and inter-marriage was common. Moreover, the family’s descent from the Prophet and their religious scholarship had won them the respect of Sunnis and Shias alike. One of Awwad’s cousins, Abdelaziz al-Badri, founded the Iraqi branch of Hizb ut-Tahrir in the 1950s, which at the time attracted Shias as well as Sunnis with its call to sweep aside Arab nationalist regimes and replace them with a pan-Islamic caliphate. Some of this outlook might have rubbed off on al-Baghdadi. Unlike Zarqawi’s rabid anti-Shiism, al-Baghdadi is said to have been sympathetic to Shia claims that Imam Ali and his sons were robbed of the caliphate after the death of the Prophet Muhammad.
Such pluralism belonged to a past age. Long before America invaded, Saddam Hussein had fused nationalism and sect. During the Iran-Iraq War, Hussein had countered Ayatollah Khomeini’s Shia revivalism by promoting his own credentials as a Sunni leader. To revive his flagging legitimacy after his rout in Kuwait, he launched a hamla imaniya, or faith campaign, banned the consumption (though not the non-Muslim sale) of alcohol in public spaces, closed nightclubs, turned the mosques into distribution centers for UN rations, and established a personal militia, the Fedayeen Saddam, which patrolled the streets as a kind of religious police. Muslim women again donned the veil, resurrecting a separate dress code for non-Muslims, after decades in which differences blurred. He required Ba’ath Party members to pass a religious exam and stopped party meetings for prayers. With Saudi finance in 1988, he opened the Saddam University for Islamic Studies, a religious college with a large component of foreign students.
Ibrahim Awwad enrolled there to study the Quran in 1995 at a time when Saddam was recruiting Islamists in the struggle to rally support against American-led sanctions and the isolation of his regime. He co-opted Sufi lodges and prevailed upon Salafis to open mosques across Iraq. With Hussein’s blessing Arab jihadis fleeing America’s bombardment of Afghanistan found refuge in Iraq’s northern Kurdish mountains. As U.S. forces amassed in Kuwait in 2003, jihadis from across the region gravitated to Iraq’s defense.
At first Awwad did not join them. But when American tanks parked at the intersection outside his student garret in Baghdad, something changed. He began preaching sermons at Abu Hanifa, Baghdad’s most prestigious Sunni mosque, condemning not only the Americans but their Shia lackeys who had welcomed them. He blessed the mounting armed resistance, and on February 4, 2004, U.S. forces detained him and shipped him to Camp Bucca, a vast open-air prison with some 20,000 inmates on the edge of Basra, Iraq’s southern port. The prison camp proved a particularly effective incubator for the Iraqi jihad. Ba’athists, Salafis, former army officers, and Sunni tribesmen spent the days debating, studying, and strategizing in identical orange prison jumpsuits that emphasized their common predicament.
Though released after only six months for want of incriminating evidence, Awwad had remained in Camp Bucca for long enough to be noticed. Inmates remember him as a mild-mannered figure with a devoted following. Unlike most jihadi preachers, he had the authority of a classical education. From his study of the chain of narration in the Prophet’s sayings, he acquired a knack for discerning tribal pedigrees and building alliances. On his release he returned to his doctorate at the renamed Iraqi University, assuming a mastery of religious sciences that other jihadis, including bin Laden and Zarqawi, never matched.
By night, Awwad became Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, helping Zarqawi’s group, al-Qaeda in Iraq, recruit and dispatch suicide bombers. The rapid turnover helped him advance up the hierarchy. American forces killed Zarqawi in 2006, and with other Sunni militant groups al-Baghdadi helped establish a new umbrella organization, the Islamic State in Iraq. Four years later, after further U.S. strikes on its leadership, al-Baghdadi was made the group’s leader. Bolstered by some 350 jihadis after the jailbreak from Abu Ghraib prison in 2012, his fighters swept up the Euphrates River into Syria, filling the vacuum left by a Sunni revolt that had forced Bashar al-Assad’s regime into retreat. With a third of Syria under his command by 2013, al-Baghdadi renamed his movement the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria and founded his capital in Raqqa, the summer seat of the most illustrious of the Abbasid caliphs, Haroun al-Rashid.
Had Iraq’s prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki, not so cavalierly alienated Sunni public opinion, al-Baghdadi might never have repeated his success in Iraq. In 2008, America’s generals persuaded Iraq’s Sunni tribes to switch sides and chase out al-Qaeda with the offer of arms, training, and finance. Known as the Sahwa (awakening), the program at its peak counted 90,000 tribesmen. But where the Americans had embraced Sunni tribes, al-Maliki considered their sheer size a threat. He stripped the tribes of their stipends, and appointed his loyalists in their stead.
Sunni Arabs erupted in protests that were remarkable for their absence of violence. They owed much to similar scenes shaking Tunis and Cairo, and continued despite crackdowns and show trials engineered by al-Maliki of their leaders on charges of corruption. Only after a year of demonstrations did Sunni activists despair of civil resistance and look elsewhere. When IS drove into Mosul on June 9, 2014, a resident recalls people welcoming them with flowers, as if Saddam Hussein had returned.
In both Raqqa and Mosul, al-Baghdadi gained control by negotiating alliances and employing shock tactics, rather than engaging in actual fighting. Unlike Hamas and al-Qaeda, which used suicide bombing against civilian targets, the next generation of jihadis turned suicide bombing into an offensive weapon and launched convoys of armored vehicles laden with explosives at enemy lines. Their supply of would-be suicide bombers seemed limitless. Brides were known to write a commitment to martyrdom into their marriage contracts. Hamas had spent months preparing recruits; jihadi groups in Iraq and Syria boasted a turnaround time of two weeks. The chosen candidates were almost always the freshest recruits. Veterans would hug and congratulate the designated martyr and hail him as a hero. The peer pressure was hard to resist, and war pensions offered a further incentive. With few job prospects, young men were worth more to their families dead than alive.
Such was the fear IS aroused that by the time its fighters had driven the 100 kilometers from the Syrian border to Mosul, the Iraqi army commanders in Ghuzlani, the country’s largest training camp in the north, had fled in helicopters. Leaderless soldiers threw away their uniforms and left for Kurdistan without firing a shot. Some local Sunnis simply switched sides, taking their weapons with them. The few that held out were too disorientated by truck bombs to coordinate their defense. With a few dozen pickup trucks, IS captured 2,300 armored cars and hundreds of millions of dollars of munitions.
As panic spread, Kurdish peshmergas retreated from the Nineveh plains without notice, abandoning Yazidis and Christians to their fate. A contingent of a few dozen militants in seven vehicles seized Tikrit in an afternoon. Cowed and perhaps wowed by IS’s success, other cities down the Tigris and Euphrates pledged their allegiance. Iraq’s security forces, on which over $100 billion had been lavished between 2006 and 2014, simply melted away. Within a week the Sunni Arab advance had reached the outskirts of Baghdad.
Mosul was al-Baghdadi’s greatest prize. The money from its bank vaults and its oil fields turned IS into the world’s wealthiest terrorist organization. Salary payments to its fighters exceeded those of soldiers in many regional armies, attracting jihadis from Tangier to Tashkent. But IS also won local support. Known as the city of officers, Mosul’s martial tradition dated back to the Assyrians. Its officer class had formed the backbone of Saddam Hussein’s army. And many rallied to al-Baghdadi, hoping he would revive the city’s lost glory, much as in 1920 when its elders tried to keep their status as a satrap inside the new republic of Turkey rather than surrender their autonomy to British-ruled Baghdad. With Baghdad under shared American and Shia control after 2003 the resentment of Iraq’s capital had only increased. Few Maslawis had shown much interest in al-Qaeda when it made its first bid for control of the city in 2006; far more rallied to IS’s cause in 2014.
Brimming with confidence, IS claimed to banish corruption, opened Mosul’s prisons, removed the web of grindingly slow checkpoints that had turned a ten-minute trip to the town center into a two-hour jam, and initially facilitated unfettered travel to neighboring Turkey. “We’re free,” celebrated a retired engineer. The dress code initially seemed disarmingly relaxed. Men could go out in public clean-shaven, and women with no more than a simple headscarf. IS forces, which included a significant contingent of foreigners, kept their distance and left locals, particularly tribesmen from surrounding villages, to police the city.
The various Sunni groups America’s invasion had disenfranchised—tribal leaders, Salafis, Sufis, Ba’athists, former army officers—prepared for another marriage of convenience. Al-Baghdadi’s second in command was a member of Saddam Hussein’s military intelligence unit. A second deputy was a major general in the Iraqi army. IS assimilated much of Ba’athism’s state ideology as well as its manpower. In place of the Ba’ath party’s idealized unified Arab state, it constructed an idealized unified Islamic one, destined to usher in a renaissance, and transform the Sunni sect into the nation-state of Islam. With echoes of the right of return Israel extended to Jews, it promoted the ingathering of Sunnis worldwide into the caliphate. Its methods seemed similarly lifted from Ba’ath manuals. IS used fear as a tool of control in a one-party, totalitarian state. Saddam’s cohorts graduated by killing a dog with their hands; IS cadres had to kill a prisoner. Both called their youth movements al-ashbal, or lion cubs.
If bin Laden was Islam’s answer to Trotsky, an elitist who dissipated al-Qaeda’s energies fighting enemies across the globe, al-Baghdadi was Islam’s Stalin, a populist focused on establishing a territorial base in the heartlands. As the Kurds had their regional government in Erbil, and the Shia their grand ayatollahs in Najaf, so the caliphate restored Iraq’s Sunnis with their lost center of gravity.
On the third Friday prayers after IS’s Mosul takeover, the naïvete of the optimists who had hoped for a new era of inclusiveness became apparent. Preachers declared Christians should leave, pay a monthly jizya of $300, or face death. Like Jews in the 1950s, those who opted to leave were fleeced on departure. IS fighters took over abandoned churches, cleansed them of crucifixes and icons whose half-naked figurines offended IS’s sensibilities, and left their furniture on the roadsides for Sunnis to claim as booty. They pinned black standards to the church steeples and used them as shelters, correctly assuming America’s coalition would spare them bombardment. A community as old as the Bible, 175,000 strong, shriveled to virtually none. “We’ve reached the end of Christianity in Iraq,” says Ghazi al-Rahu, who took refuge in Jordan, where King Abdullah agreed to admit a few thousand Iraqi Christians.
Worse was in store. Shias, who made up 10 percent of Mosul’s population, joined the exodus. And in August, IS forces advanced on the Yazidis’ holy mountain of Sinjar. Some 750,000 Yazidis took flight, but not before thousands of Yazidi women had been abducted and their husbands and fathers killed. “Spoils of war,” IS’s English-language magazine, Dabiq, called them. Islam permitted sex with non-Muslim “slaves,” including pre-pubescent girls, enjoined a fatwa. Dabiq quoted a companion of the Prophet as saying that “approaching any married woman is fornication, except for a woman who has been enslaved.” Two of the Prophet’s wives, it noted, were Jewish spoils of war, and Imam Ali had 19 slave girls. “I and those with me at home prostrated to Allah in gratitude on the day the first slave-girl entered our home,” added Dabiq’s supposed female author, Umm Sumayyah. Others cited the Quranic chapter called “The Women,” in which the Quran sanctioned the marriage of up to four wives, or “those that your right hand possesses.” Slave markets reopened after a century-long lapse.
The mass rape that ensued was not just barbarous lust, but a systematic weapon of war and part of IS’s program of cultural erasure. “The aim is. . . humiliation of whoever desires a religion other than Islam!” explained Dabiq. Destroy family units, shroud communities in shame, and capture, control, and convert their means of reproduction, and Yazidism would be erased forever and a new world of homogeneity rise in its place.
For all the outcry over IS’s treatment of minorities the prime target of IS was its Sunni population. It sought to purify them of cultural impurities and hone them into holy warriors equipped for regaining lost Sunni lands. A month into their rule, IS forces destroyed Mosul University’s chemistry labs and closed the departments of antiquities, arts, law, political science, and philosophy. Their bureaucrats introduced the curriculum used in Saudi secondary schools almost in its entirety. Torshe, pickled vegetables, were banned since the vinegar used might have come from wine. To encourage men to grow their beards IS banned barbers not just from shaving beards but trimming them too. It first required women to cover the upper body with a low-hanging himar, or veil, and then to don face-coverings and gloves too. Prepubescent girls, between ages six and nine, wore white veils, and could show their faces. Any girl older was required to wear black. The streets became as uniform as the faith, “full of moving black tents,” complained a lecturer at Mosul University, whose male students one day began wearing Afghan dress. Women could drive, an improvement on Saudi Arabia, but only—somewhat dangerously—with their faces covered. Offenders were pulled aside at checkpoints and stripped of their ID cards, which they could only recover on payment of a fine at the new sharia courts. Taxi drivers caught driving women without a male mahram, or guardian, incurred a fine of $42. Women were banned from leaving their homes during Ramadan.
Suspected homosexuals were pushed from the rooftops of high-rises. Stories circulated of a child whose fingers were severed for smoking and of a doctor decapitated for failing to resuscitate an injured fighter.
To fashion their brave new world, IS purged not only Mosul’s pluralist present but its past. The Naqshabandi Sufi order had initially backed al-Baghdadi’s takeover, but acolytes were subjected to reeducation. Their lodges were demolished. Other shrines and mosques built in graveyards were deemed to compromise the absolute worship of one God and accordingly “removed” and “torched.” Over a dozen medieval mosques in Mosul were leveled. The Nithamiya, the city’s twelfth-century Seljuk madrassa, was toppled on the erroneous grounds that it contained a shrine to Ali al-Asghar, the youngest child of the third Shia imam Husayn ibn Ali. Mosul’s public library and theater were set alight.
“We’re spreading monotheism across the planet,” celebrated one of IS’s henchmen as he took a drill to a lamassu, one of the colossal statues of human-headed winged bulls that guarded Assyrian temples. Behind him, the faithful invoked Abraham’s name and sledgehammered, bulldozed, and detonated the eighth-century BCE citadel of Sargon II. Amir al-Jumaili, an antiquities professor at Mosul University, recorded the destruction of some 160 ancient sites before fleeing the city, and showed me his diary entries:
5 March 2015—Nimrud attacked
6 March 2015—Hatra attacked
9 March 2015—Khorsabad attacked
The scale was unprecedented. Four of Syria’s six world heritage sites had been damaged when IS seized a fifth, Palmyra, an ancient city renowned in classical times for its pluralism. When its retired 83-year-old chief of antiquities refused to divulge where the site’s treasures were stashed, IS had him publicly beheaded and his body hung from a traffic light. Appeals for international intervention were met with hand-wringing. In March 2015, Iraq’s distraught archaeologists and antiquities experts gathered for a closed government-sponsored conference in Baghdad. Iraq had 12,000 archaeological sites—too many to protect, said Ahmed Kamel, the balding, bespectacled director of the National Museum of Iraq, which houses the country’s greatest collection of antiquities. (It was looted under America’s watch 12 years earlier.) His sole source of comfort was that 90 percent of Mosul province’s 1,763 sites had yet to be properly excavated. Some of the experts proposed promoting a resolution at the UN Security Council calling for the U.S.-led coalition to protect heritage sites. Others advocated the creation of a national antiquities guard. Iraq’s national security advisor, Faleh Fayadh, promised to consider this, and then nodded off during a presentation about the temple to the sun god at Hatra, which IS had also attacked.
In the conference hall, some of the delegates were crying. “La howla wal la quwa,” they mumbled (there’s no power [but God’s]), as a projector relayed footage of medieval minarets tumbling, and Mosul’s landmark, the dome of Nabi Yunus, collapsing in ruins. IS fighters erased Nimrud, the ancient Assyrian capital, with a chain of explosives, and fired machine guns at the Gorgon heads that graced the palaces. Tears made tracks in the presenter’s makeup. “They are trying to destroy a people’s identity,” said Fayadh, briefly roused from his slumber.
Archaeologists offered an explanation for IS’s rampage. Since the nineteenth century they had sought the rulers’ permission to dig beneath Nabi Yunus in the hope of uncovering the mythical throne room of the Assyrian rulers. Perhaps, they speculated, it might house the loot Sargon II captured when he destroyed the Kingdom of Israel in the eighth century BCE and carted its ten tribes into captivity. The Ottoman governor had refused to let Sir Austen Henry Layard, an archaeologist from the British Museum, excavate in the 1860s, lest he violate the site’s Islamic sanctity. IS’s new caliph had no such qualms. Two days after destroying Nabi Yunus, IS summoned al-Jumaili, the antiquities professor, and his colleagues to survey the rubble. “They are digging, not just destroying,” he said. Behind their lofty pretensions to defend monotheism lurked bounty hunters and tomb raiders.
By the same token, al-Jumaili reasoned that the video IS produced of the destruction of Mosul’s antiquities museum in February 2015 was designed to trigger international outrage, inflate demand, and jack up prices of those artifacts that survived. Many of the exhibits in the Hatra Hall were reproductions, but of its 30 original pieces, he said that the jihadis had hacked at ten. Footage from the priceless exhibits in the prehistoric, Islamic, and Assyrian halls was absent. Whole warehouses, he had heard from Turkish sources, were full of their loot. Using satellite imagery, the Washington-based AAAS Geospatial Technologies Project traced a five-fold increase in digs along the Euphrates Valley after IS took control. It counted 3,750 looting pits outside the walls of Dura-Europos alone, a third-century BCE Syrian trading hub. In the 50-hectare area within the walls, there were too many to count. An Iraqi government advisor estimated that mining heritage sites in Iraq and Syria had become the caliphate’s most lucrative source of finance after oil. Its cadres used earth-diggers to uncover the prime sites, while assigning lesser sites to individuals who paid a 20 percent cut of their earnings, sanctimoniously dubbed a khoms, or Islamic tithe. “The buying and selling of artifacts is what finances the beheadings,” says an American official. Half-jokingly, Arab intellectuals appealed to Western museums to resume their colonial-age plunder, if only to ensure the safekeeping of antiquities. “Let them steal our artifacts,” bemoaned Abdel Rahman al-Rashed, one of the Arab world’s most prominent journalists. “We do not deserve them.”
IS found fresh ways to raise funds locally, too, establishing a rudimentary tax base, and introduced a lucrative system of fines. It minted its own currency, issued certificates for import duties (which for a time Jordan treated as tax-deductible), and charged exit taxes, ending the free passage to Turkey and profiting from the flight of an estimated half-million of Mosul’s two million people. Graffiti daubed on empty properties warned residents who abandoned their homes that they would be deemed murtad, or apostates, if they failed to return within an allotted timeframe and would forfeit their property. A policeman who fled his hometown of Hit in Anbar province after its capture by IS received a photo on his mobile phone of his house. The word waqf, or Islamic endowment, had been scrawled on its walls. “Saudis and Tunisians have taken it over,” he told me. Its contents had been impounded or sold.
Curiously, foreign Islamists were spared much of the hardship that locals endured. They received perks for relocating. In its 2015 manual for women, IS contrasts its favorable treatment of foreigners with those of the “hypocritical states” of the Gulf, where foreigners
are obligated to pay a residency tax (iqamah) as if they were People of the Book, as if they are not equal to the people of the country in work, in healthcare, in social life and everything else. To hell with these laws, to hell with nationalism! Instead of this, in my state here, the Chechen is a friend of a Syrian, the Hijazi a neighbor of a Kazakh. Lineages are mixed, tribes merged and races joined under the banner of monotheism, resulting in a new generation integrating the cultures of many different peoples into a beautiful and harmonious alliance.
Foreign fighting elites were nothing new to Iraq. The Ottomans relied on Janissaries, emancipated Balkan slaves. The Abbasids had brought the Turks. But IS’s determination to construct a new community based on sect was remarkable nonetheless. According to Iraqi prime minister Haider al-Abadi, by 2015 foreigners made up 60 percent of IS’s fighting force. The largest component stemmed from North Africa and Saudi Arabia, but Europeans and Central Asians came in their thousands, too. The head of Tajikistan’s counter-terrorism police unit declared his allegiance to the caliphate. In Mosul’s upmarket district, Josak, locals complain that English and French are more widely spoken than Arabic.
Sameh Dhu al-Kurnain, a dual German and Egyptian national who heads Mosul’s education department for the IS, perplexingly kept the English department open but closed the French department, which the great orientalist Louis Massignon helped establish in the early 1950s. Despite his own foreign education, he banned Iraqis from studying abroad. “In the land of the caliphate we need mujahideen, not doctorates from the land of the kuffar,”—that is, jihadis and not unbelievers—he explained when a medic sought an exit permit.
“So how come you have a German doctorate?” the medic bravely rejoined.
“I left my wife, I left Germany, and married jihad,” al-Kurnain said, suggesting the medic do the same.
Counter-strike
With scant means to unseat IS themselves, some Sunni tribal elders responded to al-Abadi’s efforts to revive the Sahwa force of Sunni tribesmen his predecessor dissolved. Concerned for the fate of their tribal lands in the event of a government victory, tribal elders sent their representatives to Baghdad’s once luxury Al Mansour Hotel in the spring of 2015 to declare their allegiance to the Baghdad government, provided that any territory it recovered from IS reverted to their control.
But government officials had an unnerving way of talking about the liberation of Mosul, as if the battle was already won. Dates for a promised counter-attack came and went. The new Sahwa’s numbers didn’t quite stack up. In Tikrit, Saddam Hussein’s hometown, 110 miles from Baghdad, 400 IS fighters held out against a 24,000-strong force for two months. Only after Americans began aerial bombardments did IS finally stage a retreat.
For all the official bravado, a victory parade in Mosul seemed a less-than-immediate prospect. IS forces in Mosul are some 25 times more than those in Tikrit, and are readily reinforced from Syria. As if doubting the likelihood of an early conquest, even the Americans focused their bombings on IS’s edges, stemming their further advance rather than threatening their nerve centers.
Nor, for all their trepidation of IS, is it clear that most Sunnis favor such an assault. Many have learned to mistrust promises of liberation since the Americans first marched into Iraq, fearing it might just herald a fresh bout of sectarian cleansing. When propounding his plans for retaking Mosul, Iraq’s prime minister insists he has the backing of Baghdad’s Abu Hanifa Mosque, the base of the capital’s Sunni clerical establishment. But when I went to see them, its clerics sounded unconvinced. “Why should militiamen from Basra in the south invade a city in the north?” asks the mosque’s spokesman Taha Hamid al-Zaydi, who once studied with al-Baghdadi. “It will simply make matters worse.” His rhetorical questions suggest a latent sympathy with Mosul’s new order. “What is more important, killing a human or the toppling of stones?” he asks when I protest IS’s destruction of some of the world’s oldest antiquities. “Only mosques built over graves have been destroyed.”
Each time I try to talk to him about IS, he lists the crimes the Shia-dominated government in Baghdad continues to commit against Sunnis. In their conquest of Tikrit, Shia forces separated men and women, raping the latter and killing the former. “Life is normal in Mosul,” al-Zaydi says. “People of Mosul are more afraid of the future than of the present. We fear huge massacres to come.” As we leave, my driver tells me that al-Zaydi’s underlings in the corridor had joked about how much ransom I might fetch.
Although Shia militias pushed IS out of three central provinces—Diyala, Saladin, and by December 2015, most of Al Anbar—its forces quickly regrouped. Like a game of whack-a-mole, IS’s position astride the Syrian-Iraqi border helps it vanish from one town only to surface in another. No sooner had it retreated from Tikrit than it entered the southern suburbs of Damascus. Despite 11,000 coalition bombing raids, some with B-52s, IS proved not just its staying power, but its capacity to expand. In May 2015, it took Ramadi, the provincial capital of Anbar, and the Syrian city of Palmyra, replete with two gas fields, the country’s largest phosphate mine, and one of the world’s richest sites for antiquities smuggling. With its $1 billion of revenues, it withstood the impact of America’s $580 billion military budget and brought the 60-nation coalition to what Martin Dempsey, then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, called a “tactical stalemate.” “We’re just tinkering at the edges,” complained an American diplomat of the 12 air raids the coalition launched every night.
Many IS subjects who had known no rule but tyranny were resigned to swapping one dictatorship for another. And once they had paid their hefty fees, IS rule had some advantages. It offered more internal security and absence of corruption than many other parts of devastated Syria. There were no rival militias all levying separate fees. Economists at a Beirut conference in mid-2015 voted IS-held territory Syria’s best performing. Due to fear and a functioning court system, crime was rare. Indeed, so miserable were conditions for Iraq’s internally displaced that some 200,000 Iraqis returned to IS-controlled territory.
For all the vitriol its followers spouted against Shias, the IS’s medium-term goal seemed to be consolidation of its grip on Sunni communities, not the conquest of Shia ones. Possibly on account of his family background, al-Baghdadi made no mention of Shias in his sermon assuming the caliphate. He issued passes for Shia truck drivers to transport his oil. In Syria, he cut deals with the Assad regime, though he deemed the Alawite creed of its leader a form of unbelief punishable by death. He devoted more effort to fighting rival Sunni movements than Shia ones. Mecca, with all its material, political, and religious riches, was more of a target. IS propagandists highlight the differences between the Islamic State and the “Hypocritical State” of the Al Sauds, who had ridden the coattails of ibn Abd al-Wahhab’s forces to win a kingdom but had now prostituted their realm to the West. In April 2015, fighters in Anbar made their first cross-border raid into Saudi Arabia, and a month later began a campaign of destabilization with the bombing of Shia mosques in the kingdom. Its soft power was even more striking than its 70,000-stong force. In an online poll conducted in July 2014, 92 percent of Saudi citizens agreed that IS “conforms to the values of Islam.” Further afield, it proved adept at establishing a foothold in ungoverned spaces like Derna and Sirte in Libya, Sinai in Egypt, the so-called Khorasan Province on the Afghan-Pakistani border, the North Caucasus, and Yemen. That’s not to mention pledges of allegiance from Jund al-Khilafah in Algeria, Boko Haram in Nigeria, and Abu Sayyaf in the Philippines.
Perceived betrayals by Sunni monarchs and presidents have compounded hitherto scattered Sunni grievances and consolidated them into an increasingly solid vexatious rump. For all its horror, the explosive ascendancy of what began as a branch of al-Qaeda in Iraq inspired many Sunnis, who saw their sect becoming ever more marginalized. Regardless of whether IS’s forces themselves are overcome, left unaddressed, Sunni grievances will likely find expression again, perhaps in a yet more terrible guise.