24
Wakaz Hassan
Iraq
WAKAZ HASSAN SPEAKS in a loud, slightly atonal voice, and in conversation often asks for things to be repeated. From this, it seems possible he suffers from an undiagnosed hearing impairment, which might also help explain the difficulties he always had in school. “I was unable to memorize the curriculum,” he said. “I felt whenever I tried to study, I failed.”
After being forced to repeat a year of school, Wakaz simply dropped out.
By the time he was a teenager, he had joined the legions of other unskilled young Iraqi men who, while living in the family home, scraped by with day-labor construction jobs: hauling bricks, cutting rebar, mixing cement. When no construction work was to be had, Wakaz sometimes helped out in the small candy shop that his father, a retired bank clerk, had opened in Dawr, his home village just outside Tikrit, but it was all a rather meager and dull existence.
There was one potential way out. In stark contrast to Wakaz’s own middling ability to find employment, his oldest brother, twenty-six-year-old Mohammed, had been hired as an intelligence officer for the local security forces, and this sinecure held out considerable promise for the entire Hassan family. Given the culture of nepotism that Saddam Hussein had fostered in Iraq, and which continued to flourish after his demise, Wakaz could reasonably hope that Mohammed might someday work his way far enough up into the municipal ranks to bring his three younger brothers, including himself, into the security forces as well. But in June 2014, a series of cataclysmic events was about to break over the Sunni heartland of Iraq, and they would radically alter the fortunes of the nineteen-year-old day laborer in Dawr.
At the very beginning of that year, ISIS insurgents had wrested control of the crucial crossroads city of Fallujah in Iraq’s Anbar Province, then spread out to seize a number of nearby cities and towns. At the time, Wakaz knew very little about the group, other than that it sought to establish an Islamic caliphate in the Sunni lands of Iraq and Syria. Over subsequent months, however, Wakaz, like most other young Tikriti men, had seen the elaborate recruitment videos that ISIS produced and distributed on social media. These videos depicted warriors, or “knights,” as ISIS called them, clad in smartly turned-out uniforms and black ski masks as they rode triumphantly through towns they had conquered, great black flags flapping from their new Toyota Land Cruisers. Other videos from that time showed a decidedly darker side of ISIS—executions and crucifixion displays—but Wakaz claimed never to have seen those. In any event, the budding caliphate seemed far away from the sleepy and economically moribund town of Dawr.
By that June, it was far away no more. On June 6, a band of ISIS fighters entered the western suburbs of Mosul, northern Iraq’s largest city, just 140 miles up Highway 1 from Tikrit. Although it’s estimated that a mere 1,500 ISIS fighters participated in the attack on Mosul—and by some accounts, the number was far lower—within a couple of days, they had put the tens of thousands of Iraqi army and security forces in the city of two million to panicked flight. By June 9, the Highway 1 bypass road around Tikrit was the scene of a frantic stampede as thousands of Iraqi soldiers, many having already shed their uniforms, sped for the safety of Baghdad, one hundred miles farther south. But ISIS wasn’t done. After Mosul, they quickly advanced on Baiji, the oil-refinery town forty miles north of Tikrit, and then on June 11 rolled into Tikrit itself.
In Tikrit, just as in Mosul and Baiji, the Iraqi army offered virtually nothing in the way of resistance, with different units seeming only to compete on how quickly they could escape and how much of their weaponry they could leave behind for the enemy. But if the army fled the region, few of the local people did. Those remaining behind included Wakaz and his brother Mohammed.
The ISIS offensive of June 2014 marked one of the most stunning military feats in modern history. In less than one week, a lightly armed guerrilla force of as few as five thousand fighters scattered a modern and well-equipped army at least twenty times its size, capturing billions of dollars’ worth of advanced weaponry and military hardware, and now controlled population centers that totaled some five million people. While such a colossal collapse as that experienced by the Iraqi army must necessarily be a result of many failures—certainly, incompetence and corruption played major roles—much of it could be attributed to recent history.
Under the eight-year rule of Prime Minister Nouri Kamal al-Maliki, Iraq’s Shiite majority had come to dominate most every aspect of the national government, including its military, and to lord their newfound primacy over the Sunnis. For many residents in the Sunni heartland—and this included Baiji and Tikrit—this heavy-handed treatment spawned a deep contempt for both the central government and its army, whom they regarded as occupiers. Of course, that Shiite-dominated army was well aware of the locals’ contempt and deeply distrusted them in turn, to such an extent that at the first sign of trouble—in this case, a few Sunni jihadists riding into town vowing vengeance—the soldiers, fearing a mass uprising against them, simply bolted.
But this was not a completely unfounded fear, because what ISIS had very cleverly done was to establish sleeper cells in these cities ahead of time, both to initiate attacks when the battle was joined and to recruit new members to the cause. Among those recruits in the town of Dawr was Wakaz Hassan.
According to Wakaz, he joined ISIS on June 10, 2014, just as the guerrilla group became active in the Tikrit area but a full day before its attacks there began in earnest. His chief recruiter, he claimed, was none other than his brother, the twenty-six-year-old American-trained and Iraqi government–employed intelligence officer Mohammed. “It wasn’t for religion,” Wakaz maintained, “and it wasn’t as if I had any emotional connection to the group—at that point, I didn’t really know what they were fighting for—but because Mohammed said we should join.”
Omitted from Wakaz’s account was the matter of money. By the summer of 2014, ISIS was so flush with funds from its control of the oil fields of eastern Syria that it could offer even untrained foot soldiers up to $400 a month for enlisting—vastly more than an unskilled nineteen-year-old like Wakaz could make from pickup construction jobs. Of course, having now also seized the Baiji oil refinery, ISIS stood to turn its financial spigot into a geyser.
As pledging members of ISIS, Mohammed and Wakaz assisted in the seizing of Tikrit on June 11. The brothers also played at least a supporting role in the most horrific atrocity to occur during ISIS’s atrocity-laden June blitzkrieg.
Just to the north of Tikrit is a large Iraqi military training base still known by its American name: Camp Speicher. Thousands of cadets were undergoing training there when ISIS closed in. As might have been predicted from the conduct of Iraqi soldiers elsewhere, the regular army units and senior military command garrisoned at Speicher simply fled the compound at word of ISIS’s approach, leaving the students stranded. Wakaz was among those ISIS members who helped round up the cadets on June 12, but insists he played no role in what came next.
After separating the trainees by sect—Sunni to one side, Shiite to the other—ISIS gunmen marched hundreds of the Shiite cadets to various spots around Tikrit to be machine-gunned, the mass murders dutifully videotaped by ISIS cameramen for posting on the Internet. Traditionally, armies and guerrilla groups try to deny or minimize their war crimes, but not so with ISIS; when outside observers first estimated that 800 cadets were murdered that day in Tikrit, ISIS spokesmen boasted that they had actually killed many more. (The final death toll remains unknown, but estimates now range as high as 1,700.)
After the Camp Speicher massacre, Wakaz signed up with ISIS for a one-year enlistment—for a terrorist organization, it has a surprisingly formal bureaucracy—and was ferried up Highway 1 with a large group of fellow recruits to an ISIS compound outside Mosul. There, he learned the rudimentary skills imparted to new soldiers everywhere: running obstacle courses, breaking down and firing various weapons, tactical drills on maintaining squad cohesion on the battlefield. But soon enough his training took a more brutal turn.
On a morning in late June, Wakaz was summoned from his barracks by a senior commander. Instructing the teenager to follow, the commander led Wakaz to a field at the edge of the compound. After a few moments, they were joined by two other men, an ISIS fighter and a civilian who appeared to be in his thirties. The civilian was blindfolded, with his hands tied behind his back, and he was crying. The ISIS fighter roughly forced the crying man to his knees as the commander handed Wakaz a pistol. The former day laborer from Dawr knew precisely what was expected of him.
Wakaz Hassan demonstrating how his ISIS trainer taught him to perform an execution, December 2015
“They showed me how to do it,” Wakaz said. “You point the gun downward. Also to not shoot directly at the center of the head, but to go a little bit off to one side.”
In the training-compound field, Wakaz dutifully carried out his first execution. Over the following few weeks, he was summoned to the field five more times, to murder five more blindfolded and handcuffed men. “I didn’t know anything about them,” he said, “but I would say they ranged in age from about thirty-five to maybe seventy. After that first one, only one other was crying. With the others, I think maybe they didn’t know what was about to happen.”
Wakaz related all this—even physically acted out how a proper killing was done—with no visible emotion. But then, as if belatedly realizing the cold-bloodedness of his account, he gave a small shrug.
“I felt bad doing it,” he said, “but I had no choice. Once we reached Mosul, there was no way to leave—and with ISIS, if you don’t obey, they kill you too.”