An Enemy Apart
DANA PITTARD
ISIS formed from the remnants of al-Qaeda in Iraq after the U.S. invasion in 2003, its members coming from the more violent and experienced fighters that split off and later fought against al-Qaeda.
The leader of the offshoot was a Jordanian thug turned Islamic extremist whose nom du guerre was Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.1 After fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan, he had moved into Iraq with the insurgency to fight against the United States and its allies after they brought down the government of Saddam Hussein in 2003.2
Zarqawi’s extremists were strengthened by veteran Sunni fighters who joined the insurgency after the U.S. disbanded Saddam’s army. Their numbers grew as the insurgency spread into the Sunni-dominated provinces of western, central, and northern Iraq. Zarqawi’s extremists opposed and fought against Iraq’s majority population of Shia Muslims.
From 2004 through 2005, I was a brigade commander with the U.S. Army’s First Infantry Division known as The Big Red One in Diyala Province, Iraq. The leaders and soldiers of my brigade fought several battles against Zarqawi and his fighters. In June 2004, we reportedly slightly wounded Zarqawi in a battle outside of Baqubah, the capital of Diyala Province. Zarqawi was later killed in 2006 by a U.S. airstrike near the town of Hibhib in Divala Province.
I deployed to Iraq again from 2006 through 2007 as the commanding general of the Iraq Assistance Group. I was responsible for the coalition’s hundreds of advisory teams that were assisting Iraqi Security Forces. It was a tough time to be in Iraq. Saddam Hussein’s former Baath Party had been a part of the ruling Sunni minority. Once Saddam was defeated and removed from power in 2003, the Shia majority had moved to take over Iraq and violence began in earnest.
Following the destruction of the revered Shia holy site in Samarra—the Golden Dome—by Zarqawi’s Sunni insurgents in February of 2006, Iraq moved to the brink of open civil war between the Sunnis and Shias. Violence peaked during the period from 2006 into 2007 and was marked by the highest number of Americans killed in Iraq.
U.S. and Iraqi security forces defeated Zarqawi’s organization—al-Qaeda in Iraq, known as AQI—during the surge of U.S. troops between 2007 and 2009. Unfortunately, some of the AQI survivors later escaped to Syria. By 2011 they’d helped form what came to be known as the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, or ISIS.
ISIS was led by extremist Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, an Iraqi who’d once been a serious religious scholar and had, in fact, been in U.S. custody in 2006—believed to have been imprisoned at Camp Bucca, Iraq. Under al-Baghdadi’s leadership, ISIS established a foothold in Syria, recruiting veteran fighters from more than 1,100 opposition groups fighting to depose Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.
By early 2012, ISIS emerged as a distinct and powerful entity in the Middle East, formed from fighters drawn from the shattered remnants of Zarqawi’s AQI and others recruited from hundreds of smaller groups opposed to the oppressive and murderous regime of Bashar al-Assad. Eventually, a third source of manpower emerged in the form of aggressive recruiting throughout the Middle East and the West.
In the summer of 2013, I quickly saw what set ISIS apart. Aside from their fanaticism—marked by the slaughter of innocents and public beheadings—ISIS distinguished itself as an impressive fighting force, one with ambitious plans and a disciplined army to carry them out. They were determined to move into Iraq from Syria and establish an Islamic caliphate across the region. Their plan was to rule under ancient Sharia Law based on Islamic rule in the 8th century. They intended to establish, essentially, a throwback religious dictatorship in which non-believers were slaughtered and women were regarded as property and sex slaves.
ISIS was sophisticated—not just in its military ability but in its recruitment techniques and use of social media for propaganda purposes. The terrorist group had consolidated its base of support in eastern Syria and prepared to spread its influence to Sunni areas in both Syria and Iraq.
ISIS Captures Fallujah
January 2014
ISIS made its first major regional statement when it launched an attack into western Iraq’s Anbar Province and seized the large Sunni city of Fallujah, just sixty-nine kilometers west of Baghdad.3 That first attack didn’t attract much attention in the worldwide media. Unfortunately, it was only the beginning.
I’d had several deployments to the Middle East by then, and I had seen quite a few radical Islamic terrorist groups. None of them, however, were as well financed, highly disciplined, and competently led as ISIS. When ISIS seized Fallujah, Lieutenant General Terry and I expected ARCENT would be called to serve as the initial headquarters to reinforce and support the Iraqi military and/or assist in the evacuation of American citizens out of Baghdad.
The call never came.
Although it was clear that General Austin, as the commander of CENTCOM, took the ISIS threat very seriously, it was not clear whether the Obama administration did. That same month in a profile interview in The New Yorker magazine, President Obama described the ISIS fighters in Iraq and Syria dismissively as the “JV team.”4
The statement couldn’t have been further from the truth. More decisive action earlier on by the Obama administration in the form of supporting Iraqi Security Forces (ISF) might have stopped ISIS from taking over nearly a third of Iraq by the summer of 2014.
The main reason ISIS gained a foothold in Sunni western Iraq was because of the oppressive policies and harsh treatment of the Iraqi Sunni population by Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and his Shia-led government. Al-Maliki had once been supported by the U.S. and had been Prime Minister of Iraq since 2006. But he and his government were heavily influenced and supported by Shia Iran.5
Admittedly, the Obama administration was caught between a “rock and a hard place.” Supporting al-Maliki against the primarily Sunni ISIS could give the appearance that the administration was anti-Sunni and pro-Iran. Most of the nearly one billion Muslims throughout the world were Sunni—that included our Middle Eastern allies such as Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Kuwait, UAE, and Turkey.
In May 2014, as the situation in Iraq worsened, General Austin ordered us to send a small group of senior U.S. Army and Marine Corps officers to assess and assist the Iraqi Army staff for no more than three to four weeks. As the threat of ISIS in Iraq increased, we decided to keep the assessment group there into mid-June.
ISIS Captures Mosul
By early June we were seeing indicators that ISIS was trying to infiltrate fighters into the Sunni provinces of Ninewa and Salah ad-Din in northern and north-central Iraq. However, it seemed like the Iraqi military had things under control. Four Iraqi Army divisions and one Federal Police division in northern Iraq each had approximately 5,000 personnel, and there were thousands of Iraqi Kurdish Peshmerga troops in the area as well. The Iraqi troops had hundreds of up-armored Humvees, machine guns, mortars, artillery, and even some tanks. The combined forces in the area numbered over 30,000 troops.
On June 4, 2014, Iraqi Security Forces killed the ISIS military chief—Abu Abdul Rahman al-Bilawi—near Mosul. The fact that ISIS’ military chief was in Iraq and near Mosul caused alarm bells to go off in both the military and intelligence circles throughout the Middle East. The conventional wisdom at the time was that, whatever ISIS had been planning, the death of their military chief would set them back by weeks or months.
Boy, was that wrong! Bilawi’s death so enraged the senior ISIS leadership that they accelerated their attack plans. They called their new operation Bilawi Vengeance to honor their slain military chief. On June 6, hundreds of pickup trucks carrying ISIS fighters entered Mosul—shooting and suppressing the city’s checkpoints and overrunning the Iraqi Army’s outer defenses. The ISIS fighters brutally hanged, burned, and crucified Iraqi soldiers during the attack.
Within four days, the ISIS force of 3,000 fighters along with Sunni sympathizers defeated nearly 25,000 Iraqi and Kurdish troops in Mosul.6 Five Iraqi divisions were overrun by the hyper-aggressive ISIS juggernaut. Many Iraqi soldiers dropped their weapons, changed into civilian clothes, and fled. Thousands of Iraqi soldiers deserted. ISIS captured over 2,300 American-made Humvees and scores of artillery guns, mortars, and other types of Iraqi military equipment.
ISIS killed over 2,500 Iraqi soldiers in the battle and captured thousands more. They also freed at least 300 Sunni inmates from the federal prison in Mosul—most of them joined ISIS immediately. Later, ISIS brutally executed an estimated 4,000 captured Iraqi soldiers and federal police officers and dumped their bodies in the single largest mass grave known to date in Iraq—the Khafsa Sinkhole. (The mass grave was uncovered by Iraqi troops in 2017 as they were re-capturing Mosul.)7
The fall of Iraq’s second largest city was an absolute defeat and a humiliation for Iraq and the Iraqi Security Forces. ISIS wasted no time afterward. They sent fighters south to threaten Iraq’s largest city and capital—Baghdad. Later that month, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi boldly preached at the captured Nouri Mosque in Mosul, declaring the creation of an Islamic State caliphate spanning much of Syria and Iraq.8
In the 2008 and 2012 U.S. presidential elections, President Obama had campaigned on promises to end the U.S. military involvement in Iraq, Afghanistan, and the Middle East. However, we couldn’t ignore the aggressive terrorist army that was taking over Iraq and Syria.
The only question was: How would America respond?
1 Jason M. Breslow, “Who Was the Founder of ISIS?” Frontline, May 17, 2016, accessed April 24, 2018, http://www.pbs.org/ wgbh/frontline/article/who-was-the-founder-of-isis/.
2 History.com Editors, “Saddam Hussein Captured,” History, July 21, 2010, accessed April 24, 2018, http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/saddam-hussein-captured.
3 Liz Sly, “Al-Qaeda force captures Fallujah amid rise in violence in Iraq,” The Washington Post, January 3, 2014, accessed April 24, 2018, https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/al-qaeda-force-captures-fallujah-amid-rise-in-violence-in-iraq/2014/01/03/8abaeb2a-74aa-11e3-8def-a33011492df2_story.html?utm_term=.ec59c5f85778.
4 Shreeya Sinha, “Obama’s Evolution on ISIS,” The New Yorker, June 9, 2015, accessed October 17, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/06/09/world/middleeast/obama-isis-strategy.html.
5 Yochi Dreazen, “Maliki Used to Have the Support of Both Iran and the U.S. Now He’s Lost Them Both.” Foreign Policy, August 13, 2014, accessed April 24, 2018, http://foreignpolicy.com/2014/08/13/maliki-used-to-have-the-support-of-both-iran-and-the-u-s-now-hes-lost-them-both/.
6 Liz Sly and Ahmed Ramadan, “Insurgents seize Iraqi city of Mosul as security forces flee,” The Washington Post, June 10, 2014, accessed April 24, 2018, https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/insurgents-seize-iraqi-city-of-mosul-as-troops-flee/2014/06/10/21061e87-8fcd-4ed3-bc94-0e309af0a674_story.html?utm_term=.5eff6b7eee21.
7 Bianca Britton, “200 mass graves of thousands of thousands of ISIS victims found,” CNN, November 6, 2018, accessed November 13, 2018, https://www.cnn.com/2018/11/06/middleeast/mass-graves-isis-un-intl/index.html.
8 “Isis Rebels Declare ‘Islamic State’ in Iraq and Syria,” BBC News, June 30, 2014, accessed April 24, 2018, http://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-28082962.