WITHDRAWAL SYMPTOMS
ISI AND AL-MALIKI WAIT OUT THE UNITED STATES
The success of Sahwa and the counterinsurgency meant that more jihadists were not only being killed in battle, but rounded up as enemy combatants and jailed in American-run detention facilities in Iraq. The current leader of ISIS and a host of his lieutenants were once prisoners of the United States; they were released either because the United States deemed them negligible security threats or because the al-Maliki government had other motives than the military’s security concerns. The failure of foresight, many former US officials have told us, had to do with how these prisoners were identified and categorized once in custody. “Guys we ID’d and reported to be this thing in an organization—we did that because it made it easy to understand them,” a former Bush administration official told us. “So we’d say, ‘Well, he’s the emir.’ Fuck you, he’s the emir. It’s the fifth guy standing behind him who counts.”
AQI and ISI weren’t only using US-run prisons as “jihadi universities,” according to Major General Doug Stone; they were actively trying to infiltrate those prisons to cultivate new recruits. In 2007 Stone assumed control over the entire detention and interrogation program in Iraq, with an aim to rehabilitate rehabilitation. Not only had the internationally publicized and condemned torture of detainees at Abu Ghraib prison left a permanent stain on the occupation and America’s credibility in the war, but theater detainment facilities had also been used as little more than social-networking furloughs for jihadists. Camp Bucca, based in the southern province of Basra, was especially notorious.
According to one US military estimate, Bucca housed 1,350 hardened takfiri terrorists amidst a general population of 15,000, yet there was little to no oversight as to who was allowed to integrate with whom. Owing to the spike in military operations coinciding with the surge, the detainee number nearly doubled to 26,000 when Stone took command in 2007.
“Intimidation was weekly, killing was bimonthly,” Stone recalled in an interview. “It was a pretty nasty place that was out of control when I got there. They used cigarettes and matches to burn down their tents and mattresses, and when we tried to rebuild the tents, they’d just burn them down again. We thought they’d burn the whole goddamn prison down.”
Stone introduced a de-radicalization program, featuring lectures by moderate Muslim imams who used the Quran and hadith to try and persuade extremists that theirs was a distorted interpretation of Islam. He started to compartmentalize inmates into what were known as Modular Detainee Housing Units (MDHUs). “Before that, we had guys in thousand-man camp blocs. We used the MDHUs to segregate those who had been intimidated or beaten from those who did the intimidating and beating up.”
During his eighteen-month tenure, Stone either led, oversaw, or consulted on more than eight hundred thousand detainee interrogations, observing several “trends” among the AQI population. In a PowerPoint presentation he prepared for CENTCOM, summarizing his findings, Stone corroborated much of what Mullah Najim Jibouri had told military officials about this period, namely that foreign fighters were looked on unfavorably as “Iraqis [who were] trying to re-assume leadership roles.” Baathists were “attempting to use the ISI banner to regain control of some areas.” Jihadists cared more about their hometowns or local areas than they did about global or regional terrorism. AQI’s use of women and children as suicide bombers had “disgusted” many. Money, not ideology, was the primary motivation for joining AQI. Finally, AQI’s emir Abu Ayyub al-Masri was “not an influential figure to most . . .however[,] younger, more impressionable detainees” were swayed by the figure of ISI emir Abu Omar al-Baghdadi.
Early on in his command, Stone noticed a strange phenomenon that pertained exclusively to the takfiri detainees—they would enter Camp Bucca asking to join the AQI bloc, often with foreknowledge of how the prison worked and how detainees were housed. “Sometimes guys would allow themselves to be caught. Then, in the intake process, they’d ask to be put in a specific compound which housed a lot of the al-Qaeda guys. The takfiris were extremely well organized in Bucca; they arranged where their people slept and where they were moved to based on their Friday night prayers. In fact, one of the large cell areas was nicknamed Camp Caliphate. The more I heard it, the more I began to think, Even if they can’t get it done, they sure as shit believe they can.”
Prison culture in Iraq was such that anyone picked up by US forces without any form of identification would give his name and then have his biometric data processed. Iris scans, fingerprints, and DNA samples were collected from all detainees. But often the names given during the intake were fake. “Some of them would have a different name for every interrogation. It was only through biometrics that we were later able to track recidivism rates,” Stone said.
Early on, Stone said, he came across a detainee whose listed surname was Baghdadi. There was nothing inherently eyebrow-raising about that—insurgents often take their city or country of origin (or the city or country they’d like people to think they’re from) as a nom de guerre. But this Baghdadi stood apart from others. Stone said, “His name came up on a list of people that I had. They listed him as a guy who had significant al-Qaeda links. The psychologists rated him as someone who was a really strong wannabe—not in the sociopathic category, but a serious guy who [had] a serious plan. He called himself an imam and viewed himself not as a descendant of Muhammad—we had a few of those at Bucca—but someone with a very strong religious orientation. He was holding Sharia court and conducting Friday services from the platform of being an imam.”
This Baghdadi was pensive and hardly a jailhouse troublemaker. “We had hundreds like him in what we termed the ‘leadership category,’ ” Stone said. “We ended up referring to him as an ‘irreconcilable,’ someone for whom sermons by moderate imams wasn’t going to make the slightest difference. So here’s the quiet, unassuming guy who had a very strong religious viewpoint, and what does he do? He starts to meet the ‘generals.’ By that I mean, we had a lot of criminals and guys who were in the Iraqi army who called themselves generals, but they were low-ranking officers in Saddam’s army.” All the high-level former Iraqi military officials and hard-core Baathists, including Saddam himself, were detained at Camp Cropper, another US-run facility based in Baghdad International Airport. Cropper was also the processing center for Bucca detainees. “Some of the generals shared Baghdadi’s religious perspective and joined the takfiris—big beards and all of that.”
Stone said he believes that this man was in fact a decoy sent by ISI to pose as the elusive Abu Omar al-Baghdadi to penetrate Bucca and use his time there to mint new holy warriors. “If you were looking to build an army, prison is the perfect place to do it. We gave them health care, dental, fed them, and, most importantly, we kept them from getting killed in combat. Who needs a safe house in Anbar when there’s an American jail in Basra?”
A former ISIS member interviewed by the Guardian confirmed Stone’s appraisal. “We could never have all got together like this in Baghdad, or anywhere else,” Abu Ahmed told the newspaper. “It would have been impossibly dangerous. Here, we were not only safe, but we were only a few hundred [meters] away from the entire al-Qaida leadership.”
Abu Ahmed recounted how jihadist detainees scribbled one another’s phone numbers and hometowns on the elastic waistbands of their underwear and had a ready-made network upon their release. “When we got out, we called. Everyone who was important to me was written on white elastic. I had their phone numbers, their villages. By 2009 many of us were back doing what we did before we were caught. But this time we were doing it better.”
That a decoy al-Baghdadi was recruiting from the ranks of the lower or middle cadres of the former Iraqi army made perfect sense to Richard, the former Pentagon official. “We tend to look at the Iraqi army as a joke, but it was a professional army, a very large army,” he said. “What we would consider junior officers—such as captains, majors, warrant officers—we’d be dismissive of those guys in Iraq. In Arab armies, usually those are the guys that are the true professionals. The guys that rise higher than major, the real generals in Saddam’s military, have tribal connections, family money. They buy their way in. The mid-grade officers are the ones who matter. Those dudes rocked. How else are they going to make money? Their families are starving, they gotta make money. ‘I’ll put together a convoy ambush, piece together a couple of rounds into an IED, and these guys will pay me.’ Eventually they became pretty successful and they joined up with various insurgent groups, including al-Qaeda.”
Around 70 percent of Bucca inmates in 2008 were there for about a year or so. “What this meant in reality”—Craig Whiteside, a professor at the Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island, wrote in an essay for the website War on the Rocks—“is that your average Bucca detainee was incarcerated for a year or two before being released, despite being involved in fairly serious violence against the coalition or Iraqi government. There were even examples of insurgents who were sent to and then released from Bucca multiple times—despite specializing in making roadside bombs.”
AL-MALIKI VS. WASHINGTON
Camp Bucca was closed in 2009 in line with the Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) signed between Washington and Baghdad, which mandated that US-held prisoners either be let go or transferred into Iraqi custody, and that US troops be withdrawn from Iraqi cities by June 30, 2009, handing over all security responsibilities to their Iraqi counterparts. In December 2008 President Bush and Prime Minister al-Maliki signed SOFA in Baghdad at a ceremony more remembered for its violent disruption—an audience member threw his shoes at Bush—than its diplomatic breakthrough.
In reality, by late 2008 US soldiers were already largely confined to the outskirts of Iraq’s cities and were acting more as a stopgap on sectarianism than anything else. They protected Sunni and mixed communities from Shia death squads, which operated with state impunity, and they protected the Shia communities from the equally vicious violence of the remaining Sunni insurgency.
SOFA was certainly billed as a major victory by al-Maliki over the United States rather than a mutually agreed compact marking the end to a war. Its implementation date, June 30, 2009, was turned into a national holiday commemorating the “repulsion of foreign occupiers.” But it was what the prime minister did with his newfound internment authority that had the direst repercussions for Iraq. “The vast majority of prisoners were just let go, even the crazy Sunni ones,” said Joel Rayburn, who has made a close study of SOFA and its consequences for Iraq’s security. “Maliki thought that, as of 2008 and 2009, we were just holding innocent people who had been caught up in a sweep. The big problem was, we would capture someone based on intelligence—either signals intelligence or human intelligence—and then not be able to share our methodology with the Iraqis to explain why the captured dude was a bad dude. If it was intelligence where you had to take out all the sources, the Iraqis would say, ‘Based on whose say-so?’ They’d dismiss it. The entire Iraqi legal system runs on the authority of witness testimony. If you get two witnesses to say something, then it’s unshakable.”
Plenty of incorrigible AQI jihadists were also let out of jail after the end of US oversight of Iraq’s wartime penal system, as the late Anthony Shadid, then a foreign correspondent for the Washington Post, reported in March 2009. That month, 106 prisoners were released and headed straight for the Umm al-Qura mosque in Baghdad—among them, Mohammed Ali Mourad, al-Zarqawi’s former driver. Despite his likely involvement in two deadly VBIED attacks against a police station, Mourad had been let out of Camp Bucca after he was suspected of having founded a new jihadist cell consisting of fellow detainees. Shadid cited a senior intelligence official at the Iraqi Ministry of Interior who reckoned that 60 percent of freed detainees, be they Sunni or Shia, were getting up to their old habits again and rejoining active insurgencies or Special Groups. “Al-Qaeda is preparing itself for the departure of the Americans,” the official said. “And they want to stage a revolution.”
Where Baghdad didn’t rubber-stamp their freedom, the jihadists took matters into their own hands, mounting jailbreaks of their incarcerated associates, often by paying off or intimidating Ministry of Interior personnel to help them.
“It was easy to capture al-Qaeda people,” Rayburn told us. “We’d get them by the dozen, but they had an entire system for getting their guys back out, either by ensuring that their case was dropped in court or that through bribery they could be released early or, in the last resort, that a physical break of the prison could take place. They even had, at one point in 2008 or 2009, a ‘detainee emir’—a guy who was responsible for springing jihadis from the clink—just like they had a ‘border emir’ who’d coordinate the foreign fighter rat lines into Iraq from Syria. ‘Hey, Ahmad’s trial is coming up, here’s a list of the key witnesses. Go around, get them to recant or leave, or just kill them.’ Mosul was the worst spot in the country for that. We never got a full handle on the justice and prison systems up there.”
THE AWAKENING PUT TO SLEEP
Al-Maliki’s definition of the threats to a post-American Iraq derived from his own political and sectarian biases. Detainees whose only crime was fighting US forces were not deemed true criminals necessitating further incarceration. Members of the Awakening, however, who had previously fought Iraqi Security Forces or Shia militias, were not subject to the same magnanimous gloss on rehabilitation.
Long-dormant criminal cases against the Sons of Iraq remained opened even after the suspects had been deputized as state-sanctioned militiamen. No longer useful to al-Maliki, and with ever-diminishing US protection, they were instead harassed and bullied by the government they had served. Many were also arrested on spurious “terrorism” grounds. “Sunnis always talk about the release of prisoners who were convicted illegally or extrajudicially,” a former Iraqi government official told us. “The dropping of all these terror cases is a main demand of them now.”
Conditions were especially grim in Diyala province, which had been pacified at great expense in the preceding years and yet fell into chaos again after the surge. In August 2008 the prime minister had dispatched personnel from the Iraqi Special Operations Forces—one of the few effective counterterrorism units in the Iraqi security apparatus—into the office of the provincial governor of Diyala to arrest both a local councilman and the president of the University of Diyala, a Sunni. The operation resulted in the killing of the governor’s press secretary.
By the summer of 2009 the 3rd Stryker Brigade of the US 2nd Infantry Division had returned to Diyala, where it spent a year observing the crackdown on Sunni political power. It wasn’t enough that AQI was hunting Sunnis who had repudiated it; anyone affiliated with the Awakening was targeted for arrest by the state on dubious or nonexistent evidence. Such prejudicial justice didn’t apply to Shia prisoners, however, many of whom were released back into society with no questions asked—or so claimed the Diyala governor, who left Iraq in 2012 after a systematic campaign of intimidation by al-Maliki–appointed officials following the murder of his press secretary. More ominously, the Stryker brigade found, the central government was no longer paying the salaries of Awakening members. After a month or two without pay, they’d be liable to quit or even return to the arms of the insurgency they had previously repudiated.
The problem was no better in Anbar. Shadid interviewed Colonel Saad Abbas Mahmoud, the police chief of al-Karmah, northeast of Fallujah. Mahmoud claimed to have been nearly assassinated twenty-five times, by means crude and creative. “He was delivered a Koran rigged with explosives buried in the pages between its green covers, then, less than two weeks later,” Shadid reported, “his dish of dulaymiya, a mix of chicken, lamb, a slab of fat, and rice, was poisoned, sending him to the hospital for ten days. When he got out, two bombs detonated near his house in Fallujah.” Mahmoud was in charge of three thousand Sons of Iraq in al-Karmah who were paid a measly $130 per month—or were supposed to be. They hadn’t received their salaries in three months.
The original plan for the Awakening was to integrate these volunteers into a more official form of government service, hiring them to work in state ministries, for instance. The Iraqi agency tasked with transitioning them was called the Implementation and Follow-up Committee for National Reconciliation (IFCNR), and while it’s true that by 2010, nearly thirty thousand volunteers had moved from being volunteer watchmen into certified candidates for state employment, they still had to compete for government jobs, many of which were extremely low-level. Al-Maliki showed little interest in carrying forward a program originally shoehorned into place by the United States.
Mullah Nadim Jibouri claimed before he was assassinated that as of mid-2010, a full 40 percent of AQI was composed of deserters or defectors from the Sons of Iraq. This figure may be exaggerated, but it was certainly plausible given two key events that year that helped deepen the fissures reemerging between the tribes and the central government.
The first was Iraq’s national election, which al-Maliki didn’t win as easily as he had expected to, and technically didn’t win at all. The US assessment of his dictatorial tendencies were such that, even before the polls opened, Odierno feared a defeat for the incumbent might result in his putsch or cancellation of democracy in order to retain power. Many Sunnis say that’s exactly what happened anyway.
Even before the election, Iraq’s Accountability and Justice Commission—the sequel bureaucracy to the CPA’s de-Baathification Commission—banned more than five hundred candidates running for parliament because of their links to the Baath Party. Naturally, the majority of these were Sunnis and part of the Iraqiya alliance led by former interim Prime Minister Ayad Allawi’s faction. (Allawi, despite being a Shia, was seen as the mainstream Sunni electorate’s best hope for regaining the premiership.) Odierno, with good reason, saw that behind this broad-brush campaign of delegitimization lurked the hand of Iran’s Quds Force.
Despite preelection skulduggery, the vote went smoothly on March 7, 2010, with 60 percent turnout and little reported violence throughout the country. The one person it didn’t go quite so smoothly for was al-Maliki.
Allawi’s Iraqiya bloc won two more seats than did the State of Law Coalition, holding a 91-to-89 margin of victory. Iraqiya even performed remarkably well in the Shiite south, winning some two hundred thousand votes. The new parliament had been increased by fifty seats, from 275 to 325 in total, but the addition of legislators belied the near-categorical housecleaning that the election represented. There were 262 seats that went to first-time candidates, meaning that almost the equivalent of the previous parliament had been sacked. By all accounts, al-Maliki’s polling had been way off. He would need to form a government by partnering with any of the other major blocs. Defeat unleashed his paranoia in a grand fashion.
Despite the election being deemed fair by UN monitors, al-Maliki accused the body of conspiring with Iraq’s electoral commission to oust him. It was all a neo-Baathist plot, abetted by the United States, and he demanded a recount.
Al-Maliki used every means at his disposable—including legal rereadings of the constitution—to push the election toward power for his government.
Yet the electoral commission certified Iraqiya’s win. The following day, Iraq’s president, Jalal Talabani, flew to Tehran for negotiations between the State of Law Coalition and the Iraqi National Alliance. Iraqiya was to be stopped at all costs, even if it meant that rival Shia parties had to work together under the supervision and blessing of their foreign state sponsor, Iran. The new government would finally be decided through these negotiations and through more judicial maneuvering. Al-Maliki eventually formed a national unity government that also included Kurds and Iraqiya—but with the incumbent returning as prime minister.
Odierno, for one, saw how flagrant manipulation and Iranian meddling in a sovereign state’s election would be viewed by Iraq’s Sunnis. So did Ali Khedery, the former US diplomat who arrived in the Green Zone on the back of the invasion in 2003, and served as Ryan Crocker’s aide during the surge and Awakening period. Khedery maintains today that the US handling of the 2009 election only exacerbated Sunni grievances in Iraq, convincing many that they were being purposefully kept from power. The history of the postelection period did no favors in dispelling this assumption. Ambassador Hill had likened an Iraqiya win to the return of the Afrikaners in South Africa. Vice President Joseph Biden, whom President Obama put in charge of the administration’s Iraq policy, is recorded as saying, “Maliki hates the goddamn Sunnis” but nevertheless acceded to the return of this sectarian incumbent. “I know one guy, one of the most peaceful, moderate Iraqis you can imagine,” Khedery told us. “He had been a bottom-level Baathist, one of Saddam’s engineers. He says, ‘Look, I was never sectarian before. I never liked Iran, we fought a war with them. I love my country, I’m a nationalist. But I’ve become sectarian now because there’s nowhere else for a moderate or a secularist to be. We’re losers. I’ve become as sectarian as the people I used to hate.’ ”
As much as the consequences of the surge have been debated in US policy circles, so too has the wisdom (or lack thereof) of a categorical troop withdrawal from Iraq in 2011. Did this enable the easy reconstitution of ISI? Could it have been avoided with more fleet-footed or energetic diplomacy by the Obama administration, which had intended to renew and extend SOFA but had come to the negotiating table late in the day and with the air of being even less interested in maintaining a postwar US garrison than was the supposedly hard-bargaining al-Maliki?
There was actually little debate within the ranks of both the US and Iraqi militaries about the necessity to extend SOFA. Obama’s chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Mike Mullen, had advocated leaving a minimum of sixteen thousand troops, a figure deemed way too high by the White House’s national security team. “I’ll bet you my vice presidency Maliki will extend SOFA,” Joe Biden had said. But al-Maliki didn’t, owing to the fact that the minuscule troop number Obama ultimately decided on—3,500 personnel permanently stationed in Iraq, with 1,500 more rotated in at regular intervals for training Iraqi forces and conducting counterterrorism operations—wasn’t worth the cost of wrangling with his own deeply divided parliament, which had to ratify any bilateral agreement.
What the debate over military disengagement obscures, however, is that the United States withdrew politically from Iraq even sooner and arguably with more lasting consequence for the country’s future instability.
Colonel Rick Welch ran the national tribal leader program for the US military during the Awakening and helped transfer the responsibility for continued Sunni and Shia tribal outreach over to the State Department. What he found was a US foreign service ill-equipped to ensure the Sons of Iraq stayed on the right side of the conflict. As Welch recounted:
“The joke of the day at the embassy was: ‘If you want to know what the embassy is doing, go to the [commissary] on Thursday, and look at how much alcohol was on the shelf and compare that to how much was there by Saturday.’
“It was as if Iraq wasn’t still a conflict or war zone. The time when it needed the keenest and sharpest minds that understood the country was in that preelection and immediate postelection period because Maliki pulled a fast one with his supreme court. And the Sons of Iraq, the tribal leaders, would complain about what he was doing. They called it the ‘purge.’ Yet the State Department’s talking point was, ‘We’re really sorry to hear that, but Iraq is a sovereign country. We cannot interfere.’
“I remember this moderate tribal leader, with this look of incredulity on his face. ‘You cannot interfere?’ he asked. ‘Yes, we can’t interfere.’ ‘Didn’t I just see President Obama authorize the bombing of Libya? Wasn’t that a sovereign country? And didn’t I hear President Obama interfere in Egypt and say that Mubarak had to go? And didn’t I hear the president intervene in Syria and say that Assad has to go? Don’t you have sanctions against Iran, another sovereign country? Didn’t you invade our country and aren’t you still here? It’s not that you can’t intervene—we’ve watched you intervene all around us to remove long-standing dictators. What we hear you say is that you won’t intervene to stop a rising dictator right here and restore the democracy you brought to us.’ ”
Against Obama’s rosy prognosis in 2011 that Iraq was a democratic success, Saleh al-Mutlaq, al-Maliki’s deputy prime minister, had gone on CNN and said that Iraq was spiraling into “dictatorship.” “It is a one-party show and one-man show. Yes, al-Maliki is the worst dictator we have ever seen in our history,” al-Mutlaq noted without the slightest trace of irony given the dictator who had been overthrown in 2003. The United States, he charged, was blind and stupid to think it had the kind of leverage over Baghdad it believed it did. “The whole set of the government, from the president to the prime minister, was the decision of Iran,” he said.
To counter this criticism from his own cabinet, al-Maliki ordered tanks to surround al-Mutlaq’s home, as well as the homes of Rafi al-Issawi, now the finance minister, and his vice president, Tariq al-Hashimi. On December 18, al-Hashimi fled to Iraqi Kurdistan after al-Maliki’s security forces held his plane on the tarmac at Baghdad International Airport while he awaited departure. Al-Hashimi was allowed to fly off, but three of his bodyguards were detained for “suspected terrorist activity” (one later died in custody). The next day, an arrest warrant was issued for al-Hashimi himself. He remained in exile in Iraqi Kurdistan before moving to Turkey. In 2012, he was sentenced to death in absentia by hanging by a judiciary widely seen as acting under al-Maliki’s personal instructions.
These and other crackdowns on Sunni politicians precipitated Arab Spring–style protests in Sunni areas throughout Iraq—and a counterresponse from al-Maliki, which only aggravated them.
On April 23, 2013, three days after Iraq’s provincial elections were held, the Iraqi Security Forces razed one protest site in Hawija, near Kirkuk. They claimed to be searching for the killer of an Iraqi soldier at the site, and although stories differ as to what happened next, the aftermath is not in dispute: twenty Sunnis were killed and more than one hundred were injured. The Hawija violence led to Sunni violence throughout Iraq, targeting police stations and army checkpoints. The speaker of Iraq’s parliament, Osama al-Nujaifi, called for al-Maliki’s resignation in response to the carnage. Clashes spread to Mosul and Baghdad, where Sunni mosques were blown up and Iraqi security officials were yanked from their cars and murdered, and then to Shia cities, where AQI-style terrorist attacks took place. Sunnis took to calling for an armed national revolution, agitating for al-Douri’s Naqshbandi Army and Sahwa militias.
BREAKING THE WALLS
It hardly helped Iraq’s overall stability during this fraught period that AQI had used 2012–2013 to execute its Breaking the Walls campaign, which was characterized by eight daring attacks on Iraqi prisons, all designed to spring former operatives and replenish the ranks of the organization.
Jessica Lewis McFate of the Institute for the Study of War separated the growth of the ISIS campaign into four distinct phases. The first saw four prison attacks, including one against the Tasfirat prison in Tikrit in September 2012, an operation that freed one hundred inmates, nearly half of whom were believed to be al-Qaeda operatives slated for state execution. The second phase targeted locations along the Green Line—the demarcation point between Iraq proper and the Kurdistan Regional Government’s semiautonomous zone—no doubt designed to capitalize on roiling political and economic tensions between Erbil and Baghdad. The third phase saw the return of VBIED sorties in Baghdad and the belts region, targeting Iraqi Security Forces and Shia civilian areas. Here the jihadists sought to exploit another widening gulf in Iraqi society: that between the al-Maliki government and Sunni protestors who, inspired by the Arab Spring but mainly driven by domestic turmoil, had taken to the streets of Fallujah and elsewhere. The fourth and final phase began in mid-May 2013 and was meant to terrorize the Shia, clearly to precipitate another sectarian civil war and the return of Shia militias. Almost half of the VBIED waves during Breaking the Walls, Lewis McFate found, occurred in this phase, coinciding with the Sunni protests, which culminated in the most successful jailbreak of the entire campaign: the July 2013 freeing of five hundred inmates from Abu Ghraib prison. According to the Obama administration, whereas suicide bombings in Iraq averaged between five and ten per month in the years 2011 and 2012, from the period encompassing the last three months of Breaking the Walls, that number jumped to thirty per month.
By the end of the summer, more than seven hundred Iraqis were being killed each month, and the conditions for Sunni rejectionism turning into jihadist extremism in force had returned. At the end of December, in response to an ISIS killing spree, al-Maliki deployed security forces to Ramadi to put an end to the antigovernment protests. They withdrew in the face of tribal resistance. ISIS then sacked Fallujah on New Year’s Day 2014 and announced that it had become an “Islamic emirate” committed to defending Sunnis from al-Maliki.
“Maliki pushed the Sunnis so far that they had to rise up,” Rick Welch said. “They tried to get reforms, but they couldn’t. Tribal honor was on the line and revenge thinking was on the line. Maliki made this crisis.”