AGENTS OF CHAOS
IRAN AND AL-QAEDA
Iraqi’s Sunnis had just as much of a learning curve to adapt to as did the US military. Having squandered most of their political power through a disastrous boycott of the January 2005 election, they were not about to repeat the blunder again at the one in December 2005. The about-face was statistically staggering. In December, in Ramadi, Sunni voter turnout was around 80 percent, whereas in January it had been a measly 2 percent. The letdown, then, was commensurately disappointing. Shia political blocs again came out on top, albeit with a small margin of victory, which did little to dissuade many Sunnis of the conspiracy theory that al-Zarqawi had cleverly capitalized on and that suddenly appeared wholly realized: an Iranian-American alliance was purposefully keeping them from their rightful place as the true masters and custodians of Baghdad.
Sunni participation in the December election also had another disconcerting side effect: because many of the more nationalistic or “moderate” insurgents quit the battlefield in favor of trying their luck at the ballot box, AQI’s role in Iraq’s terrorism grew more concentrated. Additionally, less moderate non-AQI insurgents, such as the 1920 Revolution Brigades (named for Iraq’s anticolonial uprising against the British in that same year). And though Jaysh al-Islami (the Islamic Army), was vying with the Zarqawists for control of territory in Mosul, it was not yet ready to abandon Sunni rejectionism for reconciliation. AQI’s overreach had alienated many, but al-Zarqawi was still able to exploit demographic anxieties, which long predated the war.
Kanan Makiya, a scholar of Baathist Iraq, had forecast a dire scenario for a post-Baathist state in his 1993 book Cruelty and Silence: “After Saddam is gone, when people’s lives and those of their loved ones look as if they are on the chopping block, Sunni fears of what the Shi’a might do to them in the name of Islam are going to become the major force of Iraqi politics. The more Iraq’s Shi’a assert themselves as Shi’a, the greater will be the tendency of Iraq’s Sunni minority to fight to the bitter end before allowing anything that so much as smells of an Islamic republic to be established in Iraq. They see in such a state—whether rightly or wrongly is irrelevant—their own annihilation.”
Al-Zarqawi’s choice to Iraq’s Sunnis was therefore “My barbarism or theirs.” In order to make his option even more persuasive, he needed to dispel one of the greatest liabilities to AQI’s popular appeal—its perception as a foreigner’s jihadist army. He thus needed to “Iraqize” his franchise. In January 2006 al-Zarqawi announced the creation of the Majlis Shura al-Mujahidin fi al-Iraq (the Mujahidin Advisory Council of Iraq). Initially, this consortium consisted of six different Salafist groups, five of which were Iraqi in composition, leaving AQI as the sole outlier, albeit with central control over the council’s operations. Contributing to what was, in effect, a new marketing or “branding” strategy for takfirism was the chauvinistic and authoritarian behavior of the newly elected Iraqi government.
SHIA MILITIAS, IRANIAN PROXIES
Given the world’s current preoccupation with ISIS and the current US campaign against it, it’s easy to forget that a decade ago, the American military saw as formidable a terrorist threat in the portly, demagogic Shia cleric Muqtada al-Sadr. The son of the revered Muhammad Sadiq al-Sadr, who was killed by Saddam’s Mukhabarat in 1999, the younger al-Sadr by rights ought to have been confined to the lower rung of Shia religious leaders. He ruled an impoverished and overcrowded ghetto in northeast Baghdad formerly known as Saddam City and renamed Sadr City after the invasion. He founded his own paramilitary organization, the Jaysh al-Mahdi (Mahdi Army), not long after the regime’s fall, seeing it as Iraq’s counterpart to Hezbollah (“the Party of God”), the Iranian proxy paramilitary in Lebanon that had long straddled the fault line between US-sanctioned terrorist entity and internationally legitimized political party, occupying posts in the Lebanese cabinet and wielding furtive influence within the country’s ostensibly independent intelligence services and armed forces. The Party of God proved the perfect template for carving out a similar terrorist “deep state” in Iraq.
Like all warlords, al-Sadr wanted to rule his fief uncontested. Left largely alone by US forces, he created his own sphere of influence with the help of the Iranians. The Sunni conspiracy theory of a Washington-Tehran plot to destroy Iraq can have been met only with anger and bemusement by GIs who experienced firsthand how Iran sought to make life as bloody and difficult for them as possible. The Battle of Najaf in August 2004 was essentially a proxy war between the United States and Iran’s elite foreign intelligence and military apparatus, the Revolutionary Guards Corps-Quds Force (IRGC-QF), coordinated on the Iraqi side by an Iranian operative named Sheikh Ansari, who US intelligence concluded was embedded with the Mahdi Army in Najaf and was helping it conduct its combat operations. Ansari was an operative for the Quds Force’s Department 1000, which handled Iran’s intelligence portfolio in Iraq.
Iran’s hegemony in Iraq began well before the regime change. The devastating eight-year war with Iraq had turned the Islamic Republic into a place of refuge for hundreds of thousands of Iraqi Shia who fled Saddam. With Saddam gone, many of these exiles were able to return home to a country where the Shia were enfranchised by nascent democracy and to launch both political and paramilitary apparatuses upon an infrastructure that had been quietly and covertly built up for years under Baathist rule.
• • •
The Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI) was in fact a wholesale creation of Iranian intelligence and Mohammed Baqir al-Hakim. SCIRI’s armed wing, al-Zarqawi’s hated Badr Corps, operated as Tehran’s fifth column in Iraq. “The mullahs ran a very subversive campaign against Saddam long before we got into that country, and we were dealing with those same lines of communications before we got there,” said Colonel Jim Hickey, the former commander for the 4th Infantry Division brigade that captured Saddam in December 2003—an operation in which Hickey played a key role.
When the Americans arrived, Tehran’s campaign of sabotage and terrorism fell principally to IRGC-QF’s commander Brigadier General Qassem Suleimani, who answered directly to Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. A former CIA officer not long ago described Suleimani, who has understandably been promoted to major general in the years since, as “the single most powerful operative in the Middle East today and no one’s ever heard of him.”
David Petraeus, when he became the top US general in Iraq, got to know Suleimani quite well, referring to the master spy as “evil” and mulling whether or not to tell President Bush that “Iran is, in fact, waging war on the United States in Iraq, with all of the US public and governmental responses that could come from that revelation.” For Petraeus, Iran had “gone beyond merely striving for influence in Iraq and could be creating proxies to actively fight us, thinking that they [could] keep us distracted while they [tried] to build WMD and set up [the Mahdi Army] to act like Lebanese Hezbollah in Iraq.”
In 2007, five American servicemen were killed in an ambush in Karbala carried out by agents of Asa’ib Ahl al-Haq (the League of the Righteous), a splinter militia of the Mahdi Army set up with al-Sadr and Iran’s assistance. Not only had the Quds Force officer stationed at the Iranian consulate in Karbala quit his post shortly before the ambush took place, but one of the leaders of Asa’ib Ahl al-Haq, Qais al-Khazali, confessed to Iran’s masterminding of the entire operation.
Suleimani’s deputy in bleeding America in Iraq was Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, an Iraqi national who had lived in Iran and had been tied to the 1983 bombing of the US embassy in Kuwait. Al-Muhandis had gone from being a Badr Corps member to a full-fledged Quds Force operative before he was elected to Iraq’s parliament. He also set up another so-called Special Group—the American euphemism for Sadrist breakaway militias—called Kata’ib Hezbollah, which similarly targeted US forces.
Suleimani had spent his career in the 1990s stopping the flow of narcotics into Iran from Afghanistan; he’d spend the subsequent decade in the Iraqi import business. Al-Muhandis was selected to oversee trafficking one of the deadliest weapons ever used in the Iraq War: a roadside bomb known as the explosively formed penetrator, or EFP for short. When detonated, the heat from the EFP melts the copper housing of the explosive, turning it into a molten projectile that can cut through steel and battle armor, including tank walls. The US military reckoned that these devices constituted 18 percent of all coalition combat deaths in the last quarter of 2006. They were manufactured in Iran and smuggled across the border by Iranian agents working with the Badr Corps, then used by all manner of Shia militias, earning them the sobriquet “Persian bombs.” In July 2007 two-thirds of US casualties were suffered at the hands of these Shia militias, prompting Petraeus to assess the Mahdi Army as “more of a hindrance to long-term security in Iraq than is AQI,” as he wrote to US Defense Secretary Robert Gates. For this reason, many in the military advocated bombing the EFP factories in Iran, regardless of the diplomatic fallout. And whatever Petraeus considered telling the president, America was at war with Iran in Iraq.
General McChrystal’s JSOC arrested Mohsen Chizari, the head of the Quds Force’s Operations and Training staff, along with the Quds Force’s station chiefs for Baghdad and Dubai, in late 2006. (Chizari had just come from a meeting at SCIRI headquarters and been spotted by a US surveillance drone.) Another JSOC raid in Erbil, the capital of the Kurdistan Regional Government, intended to net Brigadier General Mohammad Ali Jafari, a senior Quds Force commander, but instead captured five lower-ranking Iranian officers. Eventually, “countering Iran’s influence” in Iraq got to be such a full-time job that JSOC bifurcated its task forces according to quarry. Task Force 16 would hunt down AQI, while Task Force 17 would go after Suleimani’s operatives and their proxies in the Special Groups.
In some cases, the United States discovered, its two enemies were secretly collaborating with each other. Suleimani intermittently helped AQI for the simple reason that any agent of chaos and destruction that hastened the American departure from Iraq was deemed a net positive for Tehran. In 2011 the US Treasury Department had sanctioned six Iranian-based al-Qaeda operatives, who had helped transport money, messages, and men to and from Pakistan and Afghanistan via Iran. “Iran is the leading state sponsor of terrorism in the world today,” Under Secretary for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence David S. Cohen said at the time. “By exposing Iran’s secret deal with al-Qa’ida allowing it to funnel funds and operatives through its territory, we are illuminating yet another aspect of Iran’s unmatched support for terrorism.”
Former US Ambassador to Iraq Ryan Crocker told the New Yorker in 2013 that a decade earlier US intelligence confirmed the presence of al-Qaeda in Iran—itself no great revelation, given that al-Zarqawi had made the Islamic Republic his fallback base after fleeing Kandahar the previous year. (According to the London-based Saudi newspaper Asharq al-Awsat, Suleimani is even reported to have boasted in 2004 that al-Zarqawi and Ansar al-Islam were free to move in and out of Iran at will through multiple border crossings—and that al-Zarqawi had even trained at an IRGC camp in Mehran.) However, Crocker claimed that al-Qaeda in Iran was seeking to strike at Western targets in Saudi Arabia in 2003. He enjoyed a somewhat amenable back channel with Iranian officials given the latter’s quiet assistance to the United States in routing the Taliban: a case of enemy-of-my-enemy logic that proved opportunistic and fleeting. When Crocker traveled to Geneva the same year that the United States invaded Iraq and prevailed upon them to halt al-Qaeda’s terrorism against America in the Gulf, they refused. On May 12, 2003, three compounds in Riyadh were blown up in a combination attack involving gunfire and VBIED bombings. Dozens were killed, including nine Americans. “They were there, under Iranian protection, planning operations,” the ex-diplomat recounted to the New Yorker.
Meanwhile, the sectarian deep state of al-Sadr’s fantasy and the Sunnis’ nightmare was indeed emerging with the collusion of the new Iraq government. After December 2005 SCIRI was placed in charge of Iraq’s Ministry of Interior, which commanded sixteen thousand troops. The outgoing Interior Minister was Falah Naqib, a Sunni who, along with his uncle Adnan Thabit, had cobbled together the first post-Saddam gendarmeries put to use by the Americans in the form of the Special Police Commandos and the Public Order Brigades. Naqib saw nothing but trouble in Iran’s fifth column running the national police force of Iraq. “We either stop them or give Iraq to Iran,” Naqib reportedly told George Casey Jr. “That’s it.”
Naqib’s replacement was Bayan Jabr, an SCIRI functionary whom the Americans viewed as less extremist in orientation than others members of the party. But, by way of trying to limit the damage he could still do, they arranged for Thabit to remain on as head of the Ministry of Interior’s armed forces. This posed no problem for Jabr, whose workaround solution was not to deal with or through Thabit at all and to simply replace the paramilitary forces under his command with loyal Badr Corps and Mahdi Army militiamen. The counterpart brigade in charge of West Baghdad menacingly patrolled the streets, blasting Shia songs on December 15, 2005, just as Sunnis took to the polls to participate in what was for many their first democratic election. A Ministry of Interior uniform conferred authority and impunity on active members of sectarian death squads.
A Badr-influenced Special Police Commando unit, better known as the Wolf Brigade, was one of the worst offenders. The Islamic Organization for Human Rights, an Iraqi nongovernmental organization (NGO), found that that Ministry of Interior was guilty of twenty cases of detainee abuse, six of which resulted in death and most of which were carried out by the Wolf Brigade in Mosul. According to a State Department cable from the US embassy in Baghdad, the NGO “described practices such as use of stun guns, hanging suspects from their wrists with arms behind back, holding detainees in basements with human waste, and beatings.”
Other Iraqi government institutions also fell under the sway of Shia sectarians such as the Health Ministry, the deputy head of which was Hakim al-Zamili, a Mahdi Army agent. Ambulances were used not to transport the sick and injured but to ship weapons. Hospitals, meanwhile, were refashioned into execution sites for Sunnis, driving many in Baghdad to travel outside the capital to seek medical treatment.
Iraq’s prime minister, Ibrahim al-Jaafari, created his own intelligence agency, the Ministry of State for National Security Affairs, headed by Shirwan al-Waeli, a man who funneled intelligence on US troop movements to the Mahdi Army and gave the Sadrists practical oversight over much of Iraq’s travel industry—the commercial airline sector especially. Right under the noses of US civilian and military authorities, then, the Mahdi Army was doing in Baghdad what Hezbollah had done in Beirut: seizing control of the major international airport and its attendant facilities. It ran the customs office, the sky marshal program, even its contracted cleaning company, existing employees of which the Sadrists murdered to create job vacancies for themselves. It imported weapons hidden in cargo holds of planes from Iran. It also had ready access to the international comings and goings of Sunnis—knowledge that, unsurprisingly, led to many kidnappings and murders.
No single episode better characterized for Sunnis the new republic of fear being constructed atop the ruins of the former one than Jadriya Bunker. A detention facility situated just south of the Green Zone, the bunker’s Special Interrogations Unit was run by Bashir Nasr al-Wandi, nicknamed “Engineer Ahmed.” A former senior intelligence operative for the Badr Corps, Engineer Ahmed was, like Hadi al-Amari, seconded to Suleimani’s Quds Force. When US soldiers finally opened the door to this dungeon prison, they found 168 blindfolded prisoners, all who had been held there for months, in an overcrowded room filled with feces and urine.
Nearly every prisoner was a Sunni, and many bore signs of torture—some were so badly beaten that they had to be taken to the Green Zone for medical treatment. Because it fell under the Ministry of Interior’s purview, Bayan Jabr was forced to answer for what had transpired. He claimed never to have visited the prison and dismissed the human rights abuses in a press conference. Only the “most criminal terrorists” were detained, Jabr said, and by way of showing how gently they had been dealt with, added “no one was beheaded, no one was killed.” Testifying to the grim cooperation between Shia-run ministries in al-Jaafari’s Iraq, Jabr’s predecessor, Falah Naqib, who lived only a few blocks from the Jadriya Bunker, claimed to have seen ambulances coming and going from the building, and speculated that prisoners were being transported in them.
“The Iraq War upset the balance of power in the region in Iran’s favor,” Emma Sky, the former adviser to the US military, told us. “It is common in the Arab world to hear talk of secret deals between Iran and the United States, and laments that the US ‘gave Iraq to Iran.’ ” This geopolitical perception, Sky said, accounts for one of the primary reasons that Sunnis have been attracted to ISIS.
RICHER THAN BIN LADEN
In 2006 the US government found that AQI, along with other Sunni insurgent factions, could collect between $70 and $200 million annually from criminal enterprises. According to Laith Alkhouri, a specialist on al-Qaeda at Flashpoint Partners, an intelligence firm, al-Zarqawi’s gangland past clearly influenced his career as a terrorist warlord. “AQI resorted to any number of methods to make money, from stealing US military weapons and trading them with other insurgent groups, to kidnapping and ransoming hostages. They’d raid the houses of top-ranking Iraqi army officers, then interrogate them inside their own homes. They’d tell them: ‘Give us the names, addresses, and phone numbers of other high-ranking army officers.’ Some of these kidnapping victims were very rich, and their families would pay. When that didn’t work, al-Qaeda would simply kill the officers in their houses.”
From 2005 to 2010 subsidies from Gulf Arab donors and dubious Middle East “charities” accounted for at most an insignificant 5 percent of AQI’s overall budget. Oil smuggling from the Bayji Oil Refinery, in Salah ad-Din province, was keeping al-Zarqawi’s apparatus in clover.
A Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) assessment conducted in 2006 found that “[e]ven a limited survey of revenue streams available to the insurgency strongly suggests revenues far exceed expenses.” AQI’s resources had by then eclipsed those of its Pakistan-based leadership, forcing Osama bin Laden into the embarrassing position of cadging for cash from his reluctant subordinate.
Nor would al-Zarqawi’s nominal junior status in the al-Qaeda hierarchy make him more eager to acquiesce to the instructions of his superiors. In July 2005 al-Zawahiri sent him a letter, couched in tones of fraternal advice, though the message was unmistakable: stop murdering Iraq’s Shia. The Egyptian believed that AQI ought to be pursuing a three-phase strategy. First and foremost, expel the American occupier; second, establish an Islamic emirate in the Sunni parts of Iraq; third, use this terrain to plot terrorist attacks against other Arab regimes. Al-Zawahiri counseled al-Zarqawi to avoid the “mistakes of the Taliban,” which he believed collapsed too quickly because it had played only to its support base in Kandahar and Afghanistan’s southern region at the expense of the rest of the country.
Al-Zawahiri was in effect flirting with a kind of jihadist nationalism, at least as a tactical tool to keep a parasitical organization from alienating its host country. Al-Zawahiri was the patient planner, whereas al-Zarqawi was the foolhardy warrior who thought he could battle any and all comers at once. There was one enemy that al-Zawahiri didn’t think it wise to take on, at least not yet: Iran.
Fearing that the Islamic Republic’s response to any AQI provocations in Iraq would be formidable (it already was that in response to the US occupation) al-Zawahiri told al-Zarqawi that “we and the Iranians need to refrain from harming each other at this time in which the Americans are targeting us.” This letter, composed in July 2005, reflected what ISIS spokesman Abu Muhammad al-Adnani would remind the Egyptian of in May 2014; that “Iran owes al Qaeda invaluably.”
The letter was never intended for public dissemination; as far as the rest of the world was supposed to know, al-Qaeda high command looked on their Mesopotamian emir’s performance with something less than unmixed enthusiasm. The CIA leaked the critical missive in part to aggravate what was then still a deep fissure running between the Sheikh of the Slaughterers and his masters in Central Asia. A lot of good it did.
On February 22, 2006, four AQI terrorists, dressed in the uniforms of the Iraqi Ministry of Interior, detonated several explosives inside the al-Askari Mosque in Samarra, one of the holiest shrines in Shia Islam and a mausoleum for two of the sect’s twelve revered imams.
The mosque had been built in 944 AD and remodeled in the nineteenth century, although its celebrated gilt dome, which was ruined in the explosions, was only added at the turn of the twentieth century. The day of the bombing, Iraq’s vice president, Adel Abdul Mahdi, a Shia, likened it to 9/11. Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani called for peaceful protests, while hinting that if the Iraqi Security Forces couldn’t protect other sacred sites, then Shiite militias might have to. One of Iraq’s NGOs found that after the bombing several hundred terrified Shia families fled Baghdad, while US forces announced an emergency mission, Operation Scales of Justice, to mitigate the anticipated wave of retaliatory violence against Sunnis.
The al-Askari Mosque bombing accomplished in the international imagination what al-Zarqawi had intended and what most Iraqis had already been living through for three years—a civil war.
Al-Sistani’s plea for restraint was not heeded by the Sadrists and Iranian-run Special Groups, whose weapons of choice for use on Sunni captives included power drills and electrical cords. Bodies were dumped in the Tigris River. The Mahdi Army also set up checkpoints in Ghazaliya, one of several strategically key towns that ran along a major highway from Baghdad to Anbar. Uniformed Iraqi policemen were enlisted to stop cars passing by and check the identity papers of the passengers; if they were Sunni, they’d be disappeared in an elaborate show of officialdom that was in fact a Sadrist form of ethnic cleansing.
Sunni insurgents paid the Shia back in the same coin. AQI and other Islamist insurgent groups, including ones that would eventually turn on AQI, used every horrific means at their disposal to push the Shia out of Ameriya Fallujah, a Sunni-majority town in western Baghdad that had been choked off and partially starved by the Sadrists. The Iraqi army and police, all answerable to newly installed prime minister Nouri al-Maliki, another Dawa party member, were seen as accomplices to the rampant killings and abductions, which al-Maliki appeared to be tolerating. This was the issue put forth in a classified memo, subsequently leaked, from Stephen Hadley of the White House National Security Council to President Bush in 2006, after Hadley’s visit to Baghdad.
“Reports of nondelivery of services to Sunni areas,” the memo read, “intervention by the prime minister’s office to stop military action against Shiite targets and to encourage them against Sunni ones, removal of Iraq’s most effective commanders on a sectarian basis, and efforts to ensure Shiite majorities in all ministries—when combined with the escalation of [Mahdi Army] killings—all suggest a campaign to consolidate Shiite power in Baghdad.”
Al-Zarqawi’s whereabouts had been a mystery to coalition forces since the Second Battle of Fallujah, although, according to Bruce Riedel, he’d actually been captured a few times by Iraqis who had no idea of the identity of their prisoner. He may even have once escaped from US custody on the sly. To find al-Zarqawi through his underlings, JSOC and the British Special Air Service (SAS) began rounding up lower-level AQI members in the spring of 2006. In one raid, during which the group’s leader in the town of Abu Ghraib was captured, US commandos found the unedited propaganda video of al-Zarqawi clumsily handling a machine gun. This detainee and another mid-ranking AQI operative captured separately outlined the jihadist network in detail, providing the Americans with the name of al-Zarqawi’s latest spiritual adviser, Abd al-Rahman. From there, it was a matter of reverse-engineering al-Rahman’s mode of communication with al-Zarqawi, via a series of couriers. US forces discovered that their target had been hiding in plain sight all along: al-Zarqawi’s safe house was in Hibhib, a town northeast of Baghdad and just twelve miles away from JSOC’s own headquarters at Balad Air Base.
On June 7, 2006, a US drone quietly surveilled al-Rahman making contact with al-Zarqawi. By early evening, an F-16 had dropped a five-hundred-pound laser-guided bomb on the location, followed by a second, satellite-guided munition. Iraqi soldiers found al-Zarqawi first, still alive but mortally wounded. He died as McChrystal’s men reached the scene. Jordanian intelligence, which had claimed to know al-Zarqawi better than he ever knew himself, took partial credit for his discovery.
In death, the Sheikh of the Slaughterers earned the kind of panegyrics from al-Qaeda’s core leadership that had eluded him in life. He was a “knight, the lion of jihad,” bin Laden announced in a bit of revisionist canonization. All foregoing words of caution to the contrary, he suddenly fully endorsed al-Zarqawi’s mass murder of Iraqi Shia as payback for their collaboration with the “Crusaders.”
THE NEW WAR STRATEGY
The death of al-Zarqawi hardly meant the demise of AQI. The Mujahidin Advisory Council he installed as a way to domesticate an expat-heavy franchise appointed another non-native emir: Abu Ayyub al-Masri, an Egyptian national who used another nom de guerre, Abu Hamza al-Muhajir.
He knew al-Zawahiri and al-Zarqawi personally. Al-Masri had belonged to al-Jihad in the 1980s. He traveled to Afghanistan the same year as al-Zarqawi, whom he met at an al-Qaeda training camp. When al-Zarqawi headed to Iraq in 2003, al-Masri went with him.
Al-Masri’s appointment was at once a continuation and repudiation of al-Zarqawi’s legacy. For one thing, he took the Iraqization program further when, in October 2006, he declared that his franchise was part of a mosaic of homegrown Islamic resistance movements, which he named the Islamic State of Iraq (ISI). Its demesne was Ninewah, Anbar, and Salah ad Din provinces, but also areas where Sunnis didn’t have numerical strength, such as Babil, Wasit, Diyala, Baghdad, and Kirkuk, an oil-rich and once cosmopolitan city that had been “Arabized” by Saddam in the 1980s and that the Kurds to this day consider their “Jerusalem.” ISI’s appointed leader, Abu Omar al-Baghdadi, al-Masri added, was a native Iraqi, whom the Mujahideen Shura Council had voted on to be its leader, yet who never appeared in videos or audio files, presumably for security reasons. Some doubted he even existed at all, until his corpse confirmed that he did.
But al-Masri had a different outlook on the purpose of terrorism than did his predecessor. After his succession became public, US forces captured AQI’s emir for southwestern Baghdad, who, in the course of his interrogation, spelled out what divided the two jihadist commanders. Al-Zarqawi, he said, saw himself in messianic terms, as the defender of all Sunnis against the Shia; al-Masri saw himself as a talent scout and exporter of terror, for whom Iraq was but one staging ground in the fight against “Western ideology worldwide.” In this respect, al-Masri was closer to al-Zawahiri as a grand strategist. “He came from outside, he was the guy sent by al-Zawahiri and bin Laden to be their man in Iraq,” Joel Rayburn told us. “But he joined up with al-Baghdadi, who was an Iraqi Salafist, so there was this inside-outside partnership. Al-Baghdadi lent the street cred to the operation; al-Masri was the supervisory muhajid standing behind him.” AQI was thus becoming more adept at navigating Iraqi power politics: the person said to be in charge isn’t the one necessarily in charge.
The al-Masri–al-Baghdadi duo served practical purposes, too. The Egyptian was the point of reference for an uninterrupted supply of foreign fighters, whereas the Iraqi didn’t want to openly marry himself to al-Qaeda for fear of losing Sunni support among insurgents who believed they were fighting a more nationalistically oriented jihad. Both men wanted to establish an Islamic emirate on the ashes of the Americans and their Shia helpmeets, but the difference was one of emphasis. Most of the Sunni groups that joined ISI protested, as military historian Ahmed Hashim notes, on the grounds that “they were interested in liberating Iraq and not in creating an Islamic state.”
Moreover, ISI focused on hitting what Laith Alkhouri calls “soft targets” like Iraqi military bases and Shia religious leaders. “This was intended as a PR campaign to remaining Salafist factions outside the al-Qaeda fold,” said Alkhouri. “The message was: ‘We are the only group that is looked upon as legitimate by all jihadi groups around the world. You guys are losing men every day. Why don’t you just join us?’ Jaysh al-Islami refused to join them, which is true to this day. So al-Masri and al-Baghdadi simply intensified their PR. Ultimately, they resorted to killing jihadists who didn’t join ISI in order to take over their operational territory. It was rather like a mafia turf war.”
In keeping with its name, the Islamic State of Iraq also transformed the Mujahideen Shura Council’s remit by creating and populating various other “ministries” such as one for agriculture, oil, and health. It was nation-building, or at least giving that impression. Most controversially, al-Masri, while reaffirming his commitment to bin Laden, also made bayat to al-Baghdadi, placing AQI hierarchically under the patronage of a newly formed umbrella. In jihadist terms, this was like taking a mistress and presenting her as your second wife to your first.
Al-Masri was indeed trying to have it both ways: to remain the emir of AQI while also flirting with outright secession from it to command his own independent operation in Iraq. It wasn’t until ISIS formally broke with al-Zawahiri in early 2014 that the deep and irreparable fissure created by al-Baghdadi’s pretensions of statehood and al-Masri’s subordination of his faction to ISI was at last revealed—by a very angry Ayman al-Zawahiri. In May 2014 he issued a statement in which he quoted an unknown third party who had characterized al-Baghdadi and al-Masri as “repulsive” fools. If al-Qaeda had ever reserved such animadversions for al-Zarqawi, it never publicized them.
THE NEW VBIEDS
The rise of ISI also coincided with the rise in frequency, and sophistication, of VBIED attacks. According to Jessica Lewis McFate, an Iraq analyst at the Institute for the Study of War, one reason why ISIS today projects a much larger military strength than it actually has owes to its expert use of these devices. Not only is the carnage from VBIED bombings extensive, but the weapon is as much about psychologically discombobulating the enemy in advance of a major military push. “We see them at checkpoints mostly,” Lewis said. “We’re looking more at VBIEDs or suicide VBIEDs as a tool to catalyst an attack or drive tension for an one. So, for instance, ISIS will conduct a VBIED bombing somewhere in Baghdad or along the Euphrates River Valley, and then will test to see how the Iraqi Security Forces and Shia militias respond to those attacks.”
From 2006 onward al-Masri had specialized in pursuing these kinds of attacks in and around Baghdad; factories for the outfitting of cars and trucks with ordnance were discovered in the Baghdad “belts”—the towns and villages that surrounded the capital and where, up until the “surge,” the United States had maintained a relatively light footprint.
ISI divided Baghdad and the belts into six zones, five centered around the city. Each zone was ruled by its own local emir. Digital intelligence on ISI, obtained in a JSOC raid, found that one such emir, Abu Ghazwan, who lorded over the thirty-thousand-man town of Tarmiya, managed a number of AQI cells in northern Iraq, including ones that were recruiting women and children for suicide bombing missions. Abu Ghazwan was also intimately acquainted with the schedules of US and Iraqi patrol units, how to avoid them, and how to lay traps for them. The Wall Street Journal reported that in mid-February 2007, a “massive truck bomb sheared off the front of the soldiers’ base in Tarmiya, sending concrete and glass flying through the air like daggers. The soldiers at the small outpost spent the next four hours fighting for their lives against a force of 70 to 80 insurgents.” (More recently, ISIS has targeted Tarmiya with VBIED attacks: in June 2014 it blew up the houses of high-ranking Iraqi Security Forces personnel and a former tribal Awakening leader.)
Abu Ghazwan’s overview of how his mini emirate functioned suggested that ISI wasn’t just using Tarmiya as a base of terror operations—it was actively building a statelet. “We are running the district, the people’s affairs, and the administrative services, and we have committees to run the district headed by my brother Abu Bakr,” he said with not a little self-satisfaction. Indeed, AQI’s occupation of Tarmiya was redolent of the kind of Islamic fief that had characterized Ansar al-Islam’s five-hundred-square-kilometer zone in Iraqi Kurdistan, or ISIS’s rule in the eastern Syrian province of Raqqa. Abu Ghazwan even had his municipal conveyances for his Tarmiya emirate. He drove around in a white Nissan truck confiscated from the Iraqi police force and repurposed as an ISI car. He also piloted a ferryboat taken from a water treatment plant along the Tigris River.
Abu Ghazwan’s personal history also highlighted another alarming trend of ISI warfare—recidivism. He had once been a detainee of the coalition, as had another man by the name of Mazin Abu Abd al-Rahman, who was newly released from Camp Bucca, one of the largest US-run prisons in Iraq based in Basra and named for a New York City fire marshal who had perished in the Twin Towers on 9/11.
As with al-Zarqawi’s Swaqa, Camp Bucca gained a deserved reputation for serving as much as a terrorist academy as a detention facility. Islamists reaffirmed their bona fides by preaching to the converted, but also by proselytizing to new inmates from the general population of criminals who may have gone into the clink as secularists or mildly religious, only to emerge as violent fundamentalists. In Bucca, al-Rahman not only learned the finer points of sharia, he also made friends with AQI bomb-makers and thus graduated from US custody as a new-minted expert in the construction of VBIEDs. Another AQI member later recalled how al-Rahman’s time in the facility also acquainted him with the necessary contacts to start his own jihadist cell in the northern Baghdad belt once he was released. As Michael Gordon and Bernard Trainor recount: “It took [al-Rahman] and two other men two days to build each car bomb in the Tarmiya farmhouse they used as a workshop . . .using stolen cars driven up from a parking lot where they were stored in Adhamiya and a combination of plastic and homemade explosives. The evening before an attack, the completed car bomb would be driven from Tarmiya back into Baghdad, where it would be stored overnight in a parking lot or garage before the bomber drove it to its final destination and blew it up.”
The founder of AQI had been found and killed thirteen miles away from JSOC’s headquarters at Balad Air Base. A major cottage industry for car bombs was thriving some forty miles north of Camp Victory.