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AL-QAEDA AND THE ORIGINS OF ISISAL-QAEDA AND THE ORIGINS OF ISIS

 

 

 

In the late 1990s, there was little to indicate that Baghdad was one of the oldest and most fabled centres of cultural, political and commercial activity of the Islamic world. The city was bleak and depressing. In the summer, the heat shimmered above the sprawling poor neighbourhoods, and if children swam between the rushes on the embankments of the Tigris few others braved the foul-smelling water. In winter, fog shrouded the broad, empty thoroughfares and clung to the grim, concrete ministries. There was scant evidence of the city’s former glory, nor its fabulous and fertile intellectual activity, beyond some of the street names. One morning’s ‘thought for the day’ printed in the Baghdad Observer in early 2000 adequately summed up the general atmosphere: ‘Keep your eyes on your enemy. Be ahead of him but do not let him be far behind your back.’

In the centre of the city, on Mutanabbi Street, named after a brilliant tenth-century Iraqi poet, was the famous book market.¹ Literature, technical manuals and writing materials had been sold on the site for a thousand years or more – a part of the city’s history as a site of constructive exchange between cultures and communities in Asia, Europe and the Middle East over centuries. Baghdad was where the only remaining copies of the most important works of Greek philosophy were translated into Arabic, thus preserving them for posterity. A local saying paid tribute to the locals’ literary appetite: ‘Cairo writes, Beirut prints and Baghdad reads.’ Here on Mutanabbi Street works from all over the world lay piled on shelves in tiny shops or simply on the pavement.

Even in the early 1990s, Mutanabbi Street had been popular among middle-class Iraqis seeking original or translated copies of Western classics. But by the end of the decade, there was little demand for such works.² One stallholder showed me a volume of French Romantic poetry, a Hemingway and some dog-eared Shakespeare. ‘No one wants these any longer,’ he said. ‘Now they are just thinking about their chances on judgement day.’

The origins of Islamic extremism in Iraq do not lie in the creation of the Islamic State, or even in the US invasion of 2003, but in events that took place many decades before. Iraq was formed by the British in the aftermath of the First World War out of three provinces of the defeated and defunct Ottoman Empire, eventually becoming independent in 1932. In 1958, its monarchy was overthrown in a military coup and it was declared a republic. In Iraq, as in neighbouring Syria, it was Ba’athism, a modernising quasi-socialist ideology developed in the pre-war period, that became dominant. Religion was pushed into the background. By 1968, after a series of bloody coups and counter-coups, a group of Ba’athists had definitively seized power. Saddam Hussein, a young thuggish cadre from Tikrit who had risen up the ranks of the Ba’ath Party by acting as an enforcer to successive leaders, became president in 1979 and proceeded to eliminate any potential threat to his power with methodical and extreme violence.

Yet there were some things that Saddam and his multiple security services could not contain. One was the religious revival seen throughout the region. Iraq too was passing through a period of massive and traumatic change, with soaring rates of literacy, huge migration from the countryside to overcrowded cities, and oil revenues which were fifteen times greater in 1974 than they had been in 1972. There was a new inequality too, as well as a new exposure to Western values and ideas. Saddam, for all his brutal authority, was unable to insulate the population from either the political Islamism of the Muslim Brotherhood and its offshoots or the surge in personal piety and observance that was also part of the broader religious resurgence being seen across the Islamic world.³

This revival was further fuelled by the first Gulf War of 1990 to 1991, in which US-led forces fought Iraq after its invasion of Kuwait, and particularly by the sanctions imposed on the country in the aftermath of the war by the United Nations.⁴ The conflict destroyed much of the country’s infrastructure, and completed a process of economic evisceration which had seen the country’s per capita GDP slide from $1,674 in 1980 to $926 ten years later and just $546 in 1991.⁵ The sanctions then ruined what remained of the middle classes and plunged the working classes into misery. They also provided ample opportunity for the corrupt and powerful to get very rich indeed. For everyone else, life was a daily struggle to get fresh food, power, medicine. A controversial United Nations study claimed that around a third of all Iraqi children were malnourished. Saddam’s security sources intensified their campaign of intimidation and violence. One former torturer, who I interviewed in prison shortly before the war of 2003, described holding babies over boiling water to get parents to speak, and how women had been raped in front of their fathers. Videos that were later found of executions and torture showed much worse. In such conditions, many turned to faith.

In fact, there had always been a deep piety among the poor, but as religious networks filled the void left by the weakened central state this took on a more organised, politicised aspect. In both the Sunni and Shia communities, traditional faith or tribal leaders found their authority and influence reinforced after years of decline. The weakening of the state allowed others to build, quietly and carefully, a presence as well: clandestine preachers, funded by major institutions in Saudi Arabia and other conservative Gulf States, went from village to village and house to house. They concentrated their efforts particularly on the tough outlying zones to the west of Baghdad. The Muslim Brotherhood was also active and Shia Islamists attracted growing followings.

Recognising the trend, Saddam himself trimmed his secular sails to the increasingly devout prevailing wind, launching an Enhancement of Islamic Belief campaign in the early 1990s. Drinking and gambling were restricted, religious education expanded in schools and work started on one of the world’s largest mosques – to be known as the Saddam Hussein Mosque – in Baghdad. Officials announced the president’s recently discovered blood links to the Prophet Mohammed. For decades, Saddam’s state propaganda machine had reinforced a powerful anti-Western, anti-Israeli and anti-Semitic world view. Now an explicitly religious element was added. The state-controlled media was packed with religious programming, a radio station entirely devoted to readings from the Koran was launched, and even the youth channel run by Uday, Saddam’s depraved son, started to carry hours of lectures by clerics. ‘The Prophet Mohammed waged the Muslims’ first war against unbelievers during Ramadan and now we face the same circumstances. We must unite to fight,’ I heard a state-appointed cleric say in 1999 as he delivered a sermon in a mosque in Baghdad. Hundreds of US and British air strikes every year, which usually did little damage but were carefully publicised by Baghdad, reinforced the propaganda.⁶ In a school a teacher explained to me how her pupils were taught that ‘Iraq . . . is a rich country, an oil country, but that the Zionists and the Americans . . . don’t want any other countries to be advanced . . . The [US] government are causing the problem because they are run by the Jews.’ On a wall was a poster showing a pencil and an AK-47 and the slogan ‘The pen and the rifle have only one purpose. Even a student can be a warrior.’

Crucially, in addition to the perceived conflict with the West there was also a very real conflict among the Muslims of Iraq. This schism between Sunni and Shia Muslims originates in a disagreement over who should succeed the Prophet on his death in Mecca in 632 CE. Mohammed had left no clear instructions and a debate took place between his closest associates who eventually chose Abu Bakr, a close adviser, early convert and friend of Mohammed with a deep knowledge of the tribes of the Arabian peninsula and their allegiances. But the Prophet’s son-in-law Ali had long been seen as a strong candidate. Ali gracefully accepted the decision but many others didn’t. Support for his candidature united a variety of disaffected factions who were collectively known as the Shi’atu Ali, the party of Ali, or, eventually, the Shia. And it was in Iraq that their disagreement was seared into the cultural memory: fifty years after Abu Bakr’s succession, Ali’s son Hussein launched a bid to claim his birthright. Promised support failed to materialise, and Hussein’s small band of followers, including old people and small children, was annihilated by a much larger force. Hussein was killed, and his body mutilated. Over the next centuries, the split between the partisans of Ali, the Shia, and those of customary law, the Sunni, would come to encompass and articulate all sorts of ethnic, cultural and political differences.

When the British drew the boundaries of modern-day Iraq, they broadly ignored these sectarian divisions. They implemented their usual strategy of cultivating a local elite to do most of the governing for them, and echoing the example of the Ottomans before them this elite was largely drawn from the Sunni Arab community, despite the fact that mass conversion of rural tribes to Shia Islam in the late nineteenth century had left it very much in the minority.⁷ Though the Ba’athists had included some Shia early on, Saddam Hussein’s political, military and commercial support base had been almost entirely composed of fellow Sunnis. When the US invaded in 2003, Sunni Arabs comprised perhaps only around 25 per cent of the 26 million population.⁸ This meant that when US occupiers declared that they would create a liberal, free-market, Westernised and, above all, democratic Iraq, it was very clear who would be the winners and who stood to lose a dominant position that they had enjoyed for five hundred years.

With the toppling of Saddam, the eclipse of Sunni power was rapid and brutal. The US administrators appeared largely unaware of the history, demographics and sectarian competition in the country, and blithely reinforced the fears of the Sunnis by implementing a broad campaign of ‘de-Ba’athification’. Tens of thousands of Sunni civil servants and army officers found themselves unemployed. Millions just felt humiliated. ‘They cross the oceans to plunder our wealth. They don’t respect old people. I can’t sleep because of their helicopters. Even if the kids throw stones they shoot. They have taken my Kalashnikov, they have taken money from my house, they have taken my pride,’ one sixty-year-old shopkeeper in Ramadi, in the Sunni-dominated and strategically crucial Anbar province, told me in the summer of 2004 as US soldiers blew in the doors of neighbours’ homes with explosives and led men away, their heads covered in sacks. The massive public celebrations of a resurgent faith among the Shia majority, and the mobilisation of Shia Islamist militias, reinforced the Sunni community’s sense of existential threat.

Over the coming years, though there was much violence from the Shia community, it was groups of Sunnis who were responsible for the most effective and widespread attacks against the occupying forces. These were largely spontaneous, not primarily organised by ‘regime remnants’ as officials in Washington and London insisted, and involved groups of friends, colleagues, worshippers at the same mosque, even men whose children attended the same school, coming together, procuring weapons, learning new skills and finally launching opportunistic insurgent operations. An active fighter, who called himself Abu Mujahed, described to me how he had been a fan of American popular culture, particularly Aerosmith, the stadium rock band, and had welcomed the invasion. However, he had begun to doubt the intentions of the US and their allies when, watching Al Jazeera on a clandestine satellite dish during the initial campaign, he had seen images of civilian casualties. He had been deeply shocked by the generalised chaos which followed the deposition of Saddam and then angered by the continuing economic problems. By the summer of 2004, Abu Mujahed had decided that the US had invaded simply to stop Iraq exploiting its own oil and developing as a strong Muslim nation. Every morning he went out to execute mortar attacks on US positions before going to work in a ministry.⁹ Others laid ambushes before opening their shops.

Much of the essentially informal insurgency that erupted in the year that followed the 2003 invasion was organised along tribal lines, though religious networks also played a role. US troops trained in conventional tactics struggled with an elusive enemy. The western and north-western provinces of Anbar, Salahuddin and Nineveh rapidly became the epicentre of the violence. One man emerged as the most notorious among those taking up arms against the occupiers and their local allies. He was Ahmad Fadil Nazal al-Khalayleh, better known as Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, and was to become one of the most important and influential figures in the recent history of Islamic militancy and of critical importance in the formation of the militant groups that would eventually evolve into the Islamic State.

Al-Zarqawi was born in 1966 in the tough western Jordanian industrial city of Zarqa, and grew up in an unremarkable modest working-class family.¹⁰ A high school dropout, he had turned to petty crime by his early teens and was jailed for violence and sexual assault. On his release, influenced by Abdullah Azzam’s propaganda and a local conservative cleric, he travelled to Afghanistan.¹¹ Al-Zarqawi was too late to take part in the conflict against the Soviets but stayed for several years nonetheless, living on the margins of the extremist community in Peshawar and possibly fighting with the more militant of the Islamist groups during the civil war which followed the departure of Moscow’s troops.¹² He returned to Jordan in 1993 but was swiftly arrested on charges of plotting to launch bomb attacks in the kingdom and sentenced to fifteen years in prison. Released in 1999 in a royal amnesty on the accession of King Abdullah, Al-Zarqawi returned to Afghanistan, where he was introduced to bin Laden by an intermediary.

The two men shared little, in either background or views. Bin Laden had grown up in luxury, and was quiet, devout and highly educated. Al-Zarqawi was semi-literate, brash and had a superficial understanding of Islamic texts picked up from conversations with extremist clerics. Neither appears to have been particularly impressed by the other. But bin Laden was persuaded by an associate who felt that the younger man’s connections in Jordan could be useful and grudgingly agreed to provide a small amount of money to allow al-Zarqawi to set up a rudimentary training camp near the western Afghan city of Herat.¹³ This provided a home for a handful of followers, as well as their families, which in turn allowed al-Zarqawi to announce the formation of a group which he called Jamaat al-Tauheed wal-Jihad, the Union for Tauheed and Jihad.

Al-Zarqawi continued to keep his distance from bin Laden’s al-Qaeda. He had no involvement in, or knowledge of, the 9/11 attacks and was forced to abandon his Afghan base in their aftermath. He used contacts among Afghan Islamists made a decade before to cross Iran and reach a small enclave carved out by three militant groups in a corner of Kurdish-controlled northern Iraq.¹⁴ Ejected from the enclave by local forces and air strikes during the war of 2003, al-Zarqawi, now thirty-five, made his way to Iraq’s Sunni-dominated west, where he found support among members of his Bani Hasan tribe, the extent of which stretches across the border from Jordan into Iraq, and was able to attract many of the volunteers coming from across the Middle East to join the new conflict.¹⁵ He was also able to integrate several existing extremist insurgent networks into a functioning coalition under his leadership. A series of high-profile suicide bombings and attacks on US as well as local Iraqi forces raised his profile significantly, as did his role in the kidnap and killing of Western civilians. It was at this point that bin Laden got back in touch.

One of the original purposes of al-Qaeda was to build a coalition of groups around the world and overcome the disunity that bin Laden saw as one of the principal causes of the failure of the militant movement. He had made desultory attempts to organise a network under his overall leadership during the early 1990s while based in Sudan but had lacked the resources or the prestige. The deal he had been proposing to other factions was relatively simple: funding or other logistical assistance in return for nominal loyalty. This was not a particularly attractive offer from a young, little-known activist, whatever cash might be forthcoming to sweeten what would otherwise have been a fairly humiliating arrangement. Algerian groups peremptorily rebuffed bin Laden’s ambassador in around 1993, as did an Indonesian organisation approached at the same time. It was only after his return to Afghanistan in 1996 that such efforts began to meet some success. Here, as al-Qaeda’s profile rose, a series of groups travelled to obtain much-needed resources, particularly training. Not all swore allegiance, but some did, providing al-Qaeda with the skeleton of a network around the Islamic world and sometimes beyond. The attacks the group successfully executed between 1998 and 2001 brought a flood of donations, primarily from devout and wealthy individuals in the Gulf, and global notoriety. Unable to engage directly in the unexpected conflict in Iraq that erupted in 2003, bin Laden needed a proxy. So his motives for contacting al-Zarqawi were fairly transparent: al-Qaeda would gain a powerful presence on the ground in the most urgent and important theatre of extremist violence anywhere in the world since the 1980s, and maintain its recently acquired pre-eminence among militant groups too. ‘A strike against the United States in Iraq . . . would be a golden opportunity,’ he explained later.¹⁶

The benefits for al-Zarqawi were less clear, though potentially substantial. The former street thug, who carefully covered his prison tattoos when filmed or photographed, would gain a degree of respectability within extremist circles that he could never have obtained alone. He also, potentially, had access to logistic assistance, should he need it, and strategic guidance, should he want to take it. Yet al-Zarqawi had his own view of how to prosecute his campaign and appeared unwilling to listen to anyone else. One letter he sent to the al-Qaeda senior leadership in January 2004 made this very clear. After laying out his vision for the campaign to come, al-Zarqawi issued a blunt ultimatum. If the letter was couched in flattering terms, addressed to ‘the dwellers on the mountaintops, the hawks of glory, the lions of the mountains, the dear and courageous sheikhs, the two honourable brothers’, it was brutally honest. Al-Zarqawi was ready to ‘rally, obey and even pledge allegiance’ to bin Laden if his strategic vision was accepted. But if the leader of al-Qaeda ‘gauged things differently’, then that was fine too. Al-Zarqawi would go it alone.¹⁷

In the end, it was bin Laden who gave way. In October 2004, al-Zarqawi announced that his group had become the ‘Tanzim Qaeda al-Jihad fi Bilad al Rafidayn’, or ‘al-Qaeda Jihad Organisation in the Land of the Two Rivers’, a reference to the Tigris and the Euphrates and a deliberate rejection of colonially imposed frontiers and states. After a theatrical pause which must have enraged the Jordanian, al-Qaeda’s senior leadership publicly acknowledged the group as an affiliate.

The first component of al-Zarqawi’s strategy was simple: to seize and hold real ground – to endure and expand, as the Islamic State’s motto later put it. Much of al-Zarqawi’s time and energy over the previous decade had been spent looking for a secure base. Unlike bin Laden, who had always lived in relative security, al-Zarqawi had spent most of his life looking over his shoulder. In Jordan in the early 1990s, he had been jailed because he had nowhere to hide when the Jordanian security services came looking for him. In 2001 he had been forced to leave Afghanistan, and then, in 2003, his temporary haven in northern Iraq. He knew, from bitter experience, the value of having a secure base from which operations could be launched, and to which the mujahideen could retreat when in trouble. The creation of an enclave for his militants was also inspired by the historical example of Mohammed (rather than by the texts or principles of the faith). Al-Zarqawi described the group he led in Iraq as ‘the spearhead and vanguard’ of the Muslim nation. ‘This battlefield is unlike any other,’ he had explained in his letter to bin Laden. ‘This is jihad in the Arab heartland, a stone’s throw from [Saudi Arabia] and Al-Aqsa [mosque in Jerusalem] . . . We must spare no effort in establishing a foothold in this land.’¹⁸

This was not easy, however, as al-Zarqawi was well aware. There were ‘no mountains in which to seek refuge and no forests in which to hide’ in Iraq. Worse, local people would show hospitality but would not allow their homes to be used ‘for launching operations’. The result was that ‘the noose around the mujahideen’s throats [was] growing tighter’. One of his closest comrades, Abu Anas al-Shami, an extremist cleric who joined al-Zarqawi’s group and acted as its in-house religious adviser, described their plight in emotive terms. ‘We realised that after a year of jihad we still had achieved nothing on the ground,’ he wrote in early 2004. ‘None of us had even a lot the size of a palm tree on the whole of the earth, no place to find a refuge at home in peace among his own.’ Over the next two years, this would remain the case. Al-Zarqawi’s fighters took partial and temporary control of major population centres – such as Fallujah, the city in Anbar province – and smaller towns and villages across western and north-western Iraq but were not able to establish the safe base they sought. Even the small enclaves they were able to carve out were only ever tenuously held.

The principal challenge they faced was not the occupying forces of the US, and certainly not the weak Iraqi Army, but relations with local communities. There had been indications very early in the conflict in Iraq that the apparent welcome given to the Muslim volunteer fighters arriving in Iraq to join the battle against the US might not last indefinitely. Tensions had soon emerged, which became more acute as the militants imposed stricter and stricter rules on the communities they sought to control. These included bans on smoking, on watching (hugely popular) Egyptian soap operas and on worshipping at ancestors’ graves. Women were ordered to wear the full head-to-toe covering traditional in the Gulf but alien even in conservative parts of Iraq. The foreign fighter’s habit of taking local women as temporary wives led to further local resentment. Nor did the militants seem capable of bringing anything resembling security, which was about the only thing which could have made submitting to their authority worthwhile.

Though it was clear that anger was growing everywhere, with increasing clashes between foreign extremists and local communities, al-Zarqawi persisted. The energy he and his men devoted to ‘promoting virtue and prohibiting vice’ through preaching, public executions, torture and repeated edicts in Fallujah in the autumn of 2004, for example, was at least as great as that dedicated to constructing bunkers to resist the anticipated assault of US troops. Other factors also contributed to the growing backlash. When al-Zarqawi’s fighters appropriated lucrative smuggling networks they denied powerful tribal sheikhs the revenue on which their patronage networks depended, threatening the very basis of their status and power. The newcomers were also unwitting social revolutionaries. Senior appointments were made according to moral zeal rather than military achievements or position in a deeply hierarchical society. One of their senior commanders was, to the disgust of local sheikhs, a former electrician.

The problems with the first part of al-Zarqawi’s strategy to establish a base made its second main component all the more urgent. This was to attack Iraq’s Shias. These, al-Zarqawi had told bin Laden, were ‘an insurmountable obstacle, a crafty and malicious scorpion, a spying enemy and a mortal venom’. Among the many crimes of this ‘treacherous and disloyal sect’ were ‘patent polytheism, tomb worship and circumambulating shrines’. In post-Saddam Iraq, they were ‘creeping in like snakes to seize the army and police apparatus . . . while dominating the economy like their Jewish masters’. Their growing power needed to be destroyed.

The Jordanian’s animosity towards his co-religionists, though he would not have accepted them as such, was in part simple prejudice, common in a region riddled with sectarian strife. But there was cold calculation too.¹⁹ The ‘heretics’ were the ‘key to change’ because ‘if we manage to drag them into a religious war, we will be able to rouse the Sunnis’ who have ‘the sharpest blades’ and, ‘bolder and more courageous than the Shia’, would triumph amid the ‘clashing of swords’, al-Zarqawi wrote. The chaos and violence would also, by way of a bonus, ‘enrage the people against the Americans’.

Right from the beginning, ‘al-Qaeda in Iraq’, as al-Zarqawi’s group was erroneously known to most Western officials and analysts, had dispatched suicide bombers against Shia targets. Such attacks intensified through 2004 and 2005. Some targeted the police and the army, both largely staffed by Shias, but the majority did not. A double bombing killed sixty pilgrims and shoppers in the holy cities of Najaf and Karbala. More than 150 construction workers died in another in Baghdad. This, al-Qaeda in the Land of the Two Rivers said, was in retaliation for the operation which had forced them out of the border town of Tal Afar. Ninety-five died when three car bombs exploded in a vegetable market in the city of Balad. Nearly a hundred more died in a day of mosque bombings in the eastern town of Khanaqin.

The third component of his strategy involved the media. This had evolved dramatically in the half-decade since bin Laden planned his major, news-seeking strikes at the end of the 1990s. Digital technology now allowed extremists to control the production and dissemination of images themselves, one of the most significant developments in the history of terrorism. Violent extremists faced the same disadvantages as anyone else broadcasting online – the competition for any individual’s attention was much greater – but they reaped the rewards too. Unlike bin Laden, al-Zarqawi had no need to create content deemed newsworthy by media professionals if he wanted to communicate with ‘the masses’. He could create his own bulletins, carefully designed to speak directly to exactly the people he wanted to speak to, and disseminate them himself. He did not need, or indeed want, a plane flying into a Western building to get his message across, and so had no need, or desire, to make the massive investments such an operation required.

Nor did he have to worry about what might be considered too gruesome to broadcast, as soon became horrifically evident. The group set up makeshift studios-cum-torture chambers and filmed videos of decapitations. These were laden with symbolism: the orange overalls worn by the Western hostages and victims were identical to those worn by prisoners in the US prison camp at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. They were also horribly, unflinchingly graphic. The video which brought al-Zarqawi global notoriety was that of the execution of a young American contractor. This was downloaded around half a million times within twenty-four hours of its release. Many more videos followed.

The al-Qaeda senior leadership had been watching developments in Iraq with increasing anxiety. Despite its early promise, the whole project of developing the group’s presence in Iraq risked going very badly wrong, potentially inflicting irreparable damage on an image carefully cultivated over a decade or more.

There appeared little that the senior leaders could do about it, though. Bin Laden had fled Afghanistan under US bombs, reaching Pakistan in early 2002. By the time al-Zarqawi was reaching the height of his power in western Iraq in early 2005, the leader of al-Qaeda central was already installed in the house in the northern garrison town of Abbottabad where he would remain, cut off from telephones and the Internet, for the next six years until his death. Bin Laden’s deputy, al-Zawahiri, and others within the organisation repeatedly wrote to the leader of their Iraqi affiliate to remind him of the importance of maintaining good relations with local communities and encourage him, for the moment at least, to put any battle with the Shia on hold. Al-Zawahiri invoked his own experience in Egypt and spoke of how ‘popular support is a decisive factor between victory and defeat [for] in [its] absence, the Islamic mujahed movement would be crushed in the shadows, far from the masses who are distracted or fearful’. He told al-Zarqawi not to be seduced by the praise of the ‘zealous young men’ who had dubbed him ‘sheikh of slaughterers’, advising the younger man that ‘among the things which the feelings of the Muslim populace who love and support you will never find palatable are the scenes of slaughtering the hostages’.²⁰ Others reminded the Jordanian of what had happened in the early 1990s in Algeria, where the militant campaign to create an Islamic state had imploded in a welter of indiscriminate violence directed largely at civilians. ‘Their enemy did not defeat them . . . They destroyed themselves with their own hands by their alienation of the population with their lack of reason . . . oppression, deviance and ruthlessness,’ wrote Atiyah Abd al-Rahman, a senior Libyan extremist based in Pakistan who had spent time in Algeria.²¹

Yet al-Zarqawi continued. From his perspective, what he was doing was not just rational, but obligatory, and was rooted in his conviction that his project to create a true Islamic enclave depended on ensuring the people who lived there behaved as he believed they should. Any backsliding or weakness would mean a community which would be unable to resist internal or external enemies, as countless historical examples had shown. But few communities react well to being told how to live their lives, particularly by a group of outsiders who have little understanding of local cultures and traditions. This was something the US occupying forces in Iraq were rapidly learning and the militants would also learn: that the sentiments of local people needed very sensitive handling or the consequences could be catastrophic.

By the spring of 2005 clashes were being reported between the local tribes and the foreign extremists across Anbar and beyond. This set up a spiral of violence, forcing al-Zarqawi and his associates to crack down on the growing dissent to their rule, prompting more anger, and thus more repression. The primary targets of their brutality were now the very people they were supposed to be helping. When in late 2005 many of the leaders of the tribes of western Iraq decided they needed to participate in parliamentary elections, the sputtering confrontation flared into open warfare. For the militants, participation in elections was the worst form of apostasy, with the sovereignty of popular will placed above that of God. For local Sunni communities, who had gained nothing from their insurgency, it meant the possibility of regaining a fraction of the role they had once played in the government of their nation. When the tribes accepted the US military’s offer to protect voters against militant attacks, it was clear there had been a breakthrough.²²

In January 2006, in belated recognition of the need for at least a rebranding, al-Zarqawi wrapped his al-Qaeda in the Land of the Two Rivers into a broader coalition of insurgent Islamic militant groups which was called the Majlis Shura al-Mujahideen fi al-Iraq, or Mujahideen Advisory Council of Iraq. His was the only organisation led by and composed of foreigners within the council. But this was much too little, and much too late. It was also clear that it was purely cosmetic. In February 2006, al-Zarqawi organised the bombing of the Al-Askari mosque in Samarra, one of the most holy sites to Shias in the world. This, as intended, provoked outrage and finally made it impossible for senior Shia clerics to hold back their congregations. Within months Iraq was plunged into the hellish violence of all-out civil war. By the autumn, bodies with hideous wounds from drills and blowtorches were turning up every day in their dozens on roadsides, rubbish dumps and in the Tigris. Al-Zarqawi did not live to see the full horror of the sectarian conflict he had helped unleash. In June 2006, he was killed by two 500-pound bombs dropped by a US jet.

Al-Qaeda was facing problems not only in Iraq. By early 2006, the wave of support for extremism and extremist violence in the wake of the invasions of Afghanistan and of Iraq was ebbing fast everywhere. In country after country, approval levels for bin Laden, for suicide bombing, for attacks on the US or the West were plummeting. The reasons for this were not hard to find. One of the most revealing episodes of the decade’s conflicts, an event that indicated a genuine inflection point, came in Jordan in 2005 when suicide bombers attacked three luxury hotels in Amman, killing sixty people, including thirty-eight members of a wedding party. The attacks had been claimed by al-Zarqawi, on behalf of al-Qaeda. Almost all the victims were Jordanian compatriots. As polls revealed, public support for ‘al-Qaeda in Iraq’, for al-Zarqawi, for all strands of extremist Islam evaporated almost overnight. From 2002 to 2005 support in Jordan for violence against civilians in ‘defence of Islam’ had increased from 43 to 57 per cent, according to surveys by the US-based Pew Center. Another poll indicated that more than two-thirds of Jordanians considered al-Qaeda an ‘armed resistance organisation’, not a ‘terrorist group’. Six months later, polling by Pew revealed that support for violence against civilians in Jordan had halved to 29 per cent and confidence in bin Laden had dropped from 64 to 24 per cent.²³

The bombings in Amman showed that when violence was directed at an abstract and distant enemy, particularly the US, it was easy for people across the Islamic world to support it, but the reaction to extremist violence was very different when it was local policemen, soldiers, shopkeepers or siblings who were being killed. In every country hit by suicide bombings, backing for al-Qaeda, its ideology and methodology plunged. In Indonesia, support for radical violence had dropped six points following the bombing of a Bali nightclub in 2002 to 20 per cent, and then to 11 per cent after further attacks in 2005. In Morocco, twice as many people said suicide bombing was never justified after a spate of bloody strikes in 2004 and 2005 as before. The same could be seen in Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Egypt and many other countries too.²⁴ Militant groups everywhere began to weaken as the flow of recruits and money diminished. Security services, which had struggled to cope with the new wave of violence throughout the first half of the decade, now began to make real headway, bolstered by new powers, new understanding of their targets and, above all, a new flow of intelligence from communities which had now swung away from extremism. Al-Zarqawi’s death was a prime example: he had been located due to intelligence given to Jordanian security services by militant sympathisers disgusted at the attack in Amman.²⁵

In Iraq, this ebbing of support for the violent extremists among their fellow Sunnis continued. In August 2006, militants linked to the remnants of ‘al-Qaeda in Iraq’ killed a senior Anbar sheikh and dumped his body in bushes, rather than return it for immediate burial as Muslim and tribal custom demanded. The incident catalysed the formation of a coalition of Sunni tribes to battle the extremists, which became known as the ‘Sahwa’, or ‘Awakening’, Councils. These would collaborate increasingly closely with US forces, especially when the latter were reinforced with 30,000 troops during the so-called Surge of 2007 in and around Baghdad. Eventually there were 100,000 more of the Awakening auxiliaries, all paid $300 per month by the US taxpayer. By the end of 2007, the sectarian civil war was subsiding and the extremists appeared marginalised.

One reason was that there was less to fight for – the Sunnis of Baghdad, for example, were now confined to a few small enclaves. The Shia had effectively won the battle for the city. A second was a series of independent but mutually reinforcing decisions by regional powers which had all decided that their interests would not be served by the total collapse of Iraq as a state. Saudi Arabia moved to throttle the flow of its own citizens into Iraq, for instance. Tehran decided to consolidate its own massive influence in Baghdad – now effectively run by fellow Shias – through stability and continuity rather than change. Not all the death squads operating during the Iraqi civil war had been Iraqi either. US special forces, vastly aided by a streamlined process by which intelligence from raids was analysed and ‘operationalised’ before militants had time to react, located, killed or captured thousands of extremists, including many senior leaders.

Even though the violence declined, the social and political fabric of Iraq, already rent and tattered, had been torn apart. In 2007, in a symbolic attack on tolerance and pluralism, a suicide bomber killed thirty-eight people in Mutanabbi Street, the book market in Baghdad. Four months later came a second, equally symbolic but far more deadly assault: a series of simultaneous bombings which killed more than 800 people and injured 1,500 in a marketplace in the north-western town of Kahtaniya. The victims were largely Yazidis, from an ancient and much persecuted religious minority.

In such a vitiated environment, extremists in Iraq could survive, even if they did not thrive. The primary coalition of militant groups, known as the Islamic State in Iraq (ISI) since October 2006, retained the capacity to cause tremendous harm even in its much reduced state.²⁶ During August and October 2009, ISI claimed responsibility for four bombings targeting five government buildings in Baghdad which killed hundreds, as well as a series of suicide attacks targeting Shia. Even in 2010, an average of seventeen people died every day from suicide bombs or gunfire or executions in Iraq, and the country kept its position as the worst place in the world for terrorist violence.

And there were other causes for concern. Nouri al-Maliki, the Shia former Islamist activist who had been prime minister since 2006, appeared dedicated to an aggressively sectarian and authoritarian project which appeared almost deliberately designed to anger and frighten the Sunni minority.²⁷ Nineveh province, with its capital Mosul, remained especially troubled, the most significant base of violent extremist activism between Morocco and the Afghan–Iranian border. Contacts between ISI and al-Qaeda’s senior leadership in Pakistan continued, even if bin Laden and others complained that liaison was poor and communication intermittent.²⁸ But Western intelligence officials nonetheless judged the threat posed by Iraqi militants to be ‘relatively restricted’. ISI was ‘struggling a bit’, Major General Ray Odierno said. A year before the last US troops pulled out of Iraq, supposedly for good, US officials said they had killed or detained thirty-four out of forty-two of ISI’s top leaders.²⁹ These included, in early 2010, the head of the group. A new chief was appointed: Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.

A hagiography and former associates have described Ibrahim Awwad Ibrahim Ali al-Badri, better known as Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the leader of the Islamic State, as a devout, quiet youth. The truth is that we do not really know what the future leader of the Islamic State was like as a child or young man. We know he was born in the Iraqi city of Samarra in 1971. We know too that his parents were neither very rich nor very poor and that the family lived in the Al-Jibriya district of the city, a lower-middle-class neighbourhood.³⁰ We know, from al-Baghdadi’s graduation certificate, that he did poorly in English, extremely well in mathematics and decently in most other subjects.³¹ School was followed by several years at the Islamic University of Baghdad. Quite what he studied is not entirely clear, though it seems likely that, as supporters claim, he obtained a series of degrees, culminating in a PhD in Islamic studies.³² Through the 1990s al-Baghdadi appears to have been living in Tobchi, a mixed Shia and Sunni neighbourhood on the western edges of the Iraqi capital, among the outlying districts which would become a battlefield after the US invasion of 2003.³³ He may have been preaching and teaching in a local mosque. A picture from around this time shows an impassive, bearded man with a broad forehead, smallish sharp eyes and narrow lips. Much remains unclear about al-Baghdadi’s background, but what we do know is this: the environment in which he grew up during his formative years was one of religious resurgence, increasing regime brutality and corruption, ruinous Western-backed sanctions and air strikes, and extremist proselytisation. All, of course, before the invasion of 2003.

In the aftermath of the fall of Saddam Hussein, al-Baghdadi appears to have helped establish one of the first entirely indigenous militant groups motivated by extremist Islam. This drew recruits from tribal networks and neighbours in his home town and surrounding villages. Al-Baghdadi, now aged thirty-two, was picked up apparently by chance in a US sweep and interned in Camp Bucca, a vast prison built outside the southern port city of Basra. In prison he ran a sharia court, led prayers and impressed fellow inmates, guards and a US-appointed jail psychologist with his calm, quiet, serious sense of purpose. He was released from Camp Bucca after nearly a year of detention in late 2004.³⁴ By 2006, he appears to have gained some kind of official position on the ‘sharia council’ of ISI, perhaps acting as a key adviser to the group’s leadership. In 2010, he was appointed the new ‘emir’. This decision may not have been entirely due to his own ability or, perhaps, charisma. There is much evidence he was selected, over many older and more experienced figures, because he had religious credentials and a quiet authority which other figures, particularly a number of former senior Ba’athists involved in the group at the time, lacked.³⁵

Many of these former officials were extremely competent men, with long experience in Saddam’s military or intelligence services followed by almost a decade of violent insurgency. Nor was their adherence to extremist Islam superficial or pragmatic. It is very likely that some had been sympathetic to hardline ideas well before 2003, but, despite Saddam’s tilt towards religion in the 1990s, had probably judged it impolitic to be too overt about their faith. It certainly should be no surprise that in post-invasion Iraq, Sunni Ba’athist officials and soldiers, forcibly demobilised and under occupation, in deteriorating economic conditions, who were engaged in an insurgency against the US and then a bitter sectarian civil war, who had seen friends and relatives killed by US troops or Shia militia, who had often been detained by the US military or Iraqi authorities for significant periods, and who had been surrounded by varying forms of anti-American, anti-Semitic and anti-Shia propaganda for their entire lives, should turn to radical Islam. The former Ba’athists brought a hard edge of military capability, organisational experience and, often, an understanding of how to run both a state and a military campaign that many Islamists lacked. There had been reports of such collaboration as early as 2004 or 2005. According to Martin Chulov, the Middle East correspondent for the Guardian and one of the best-informed reporters in the region, this cooperation had matured into a true partnership around 2008 or 2009. It would continue to deepen after al-Bagdadi’s appointment as leader of ISI, with former Ba’athists coming to fill many of the most senior positions in the group.³⁶ In the June 2014 offensive against Mosul, a network of former Ba’athists led by the notorious Izzat Ibrahim al-Douri, a former vice president in Saddam’s Iraq and the man who had masterminded the faith campaign in the 1990s, provided invaluable assistance to ISI fighters. As a reward, a former Ba’athist general was appointed governor of Mosul after its fall. Al-Douri praised ‘the heroes and knights of al-Qaeda and the Islamic State’, thus substantiating a link between Saddam Hussein and the group founded by bin Laden, al-Qaeda, nearly twelve years after the connection, non-existent at the time, was used to justified the invasion of Iraq.³⁷

In time, further support for ISI came from Sunni tribes. Systematic discrimination, marginalisation and a series of broken promises had pushed Iraq’s Sunnis back into open opposition to central government by the time of the elections of 2010 after which al-Maliki managed to hang on to power. Not all were aligned with ISI’s goals by any means, but, in the shifting matrix of local conflict politics, many could make common cause at least temporarily. One particularly damaging failing of al-Maliki was his short-sighted treatment of those Sunnis who had earlier joined the anti-extremist Awakening Councils. These had often been organised by individual tribes and sub-tribes. Seeing them as a potential threat, al-Maliki undermined them, leaving them unemployed, unpaid and unprotected. As early as 2010, ISI had been targeting such fighters with the carrot of better pay than the government offered and the stick of an extremely unpleasant death in the case of refusal. The effort was part of a broader programme of outreach to tribes. Analysts Hassan Hassan and Michael Weiss describe an ISI tactic of offering leaders of minor tribes, or emerging younger leaders in major ones, control over an important resource, such as a particularly lucrative racket or smuggling route, if they pledged their support to the group and eliminated its opponents in their communities.³⁸ Al-Maliki eased the task of al-Baghdadi and his associates by continuing to stoke the Sunnis’ sense that they were targets of a regional campaign of annihilation. In 2013, security forces sent by the prime minister to clear Sunni protesters in Hawija, a town in the north of Iraq, killed scores and injured many more. The incident prompted armed clashes across much of the country. Increasingly, all ISI’s leaders had to do was to organise and direct the fragmented elements of a rapidly reviving insurgency. Even in mid-2014, according to some estimates, only a third of ISI’s combat strength was actually supplied by members of the group while the rest were fighters from other networks who were happy to join its armed columns as literal fellow travellers.³⁹

This was of particular importance when the leaders of ISI were presented with an extraordinary opportunity to expand into Syria. The strategic decision to exploit this unforeseen chance may also have originated with the Ba’athists within the group’s ranks. It led to a final break with al-Qaeda and fuelled the bitter rivalry between the two groups that exists today. It was critical to the emergence of the Islamic State as an independent, distinct entity, as well as of course to its eventual bid to re-establish a Sunni caliphate across a significant swathe of the Middle East, one of the most ambitious projects ever undertaken by an Islamic group.⁴⁰ It is a historical irony that this was only made possible by a series of uprisings led by people who explicitly rejected extremist Islam.

The ‘Arab Spring’ or ‘Arab uprisings’ began in December 2010 with the self-immolation of a Tunisian grocer, an act of spectacular violence designed to communicate a very clear message and inspire others, but one, in contrast to those orchestrated by Islamic militants over the previous decade, which harmed no one else. With their words and their deeds, the crowds that took to the streets in a succession of cities and towns across the Middle East over the following months reinforced the impression that al-Qaeda and all it stood for had been marginalised. The slogans in Egypt’s Tahrir Square, in Tunis and in Manama were for democracy and human rights, not for the establishment of an Islamic state. Religion remained hugely powerful as a political, social and cultural force, but the uprisings that roiled the region through 2011 and into 2012 seemed to stand in stark opposition to Islamic militancy.

Yet, as Egypt, Libya, Syria and Yemen all descended into various degrees of anarchy and violence, it soon became clear that this sudden and powerful wave of change, though certainly a challenge to extremists, might also be the break they needed to reverse their steadily declining fortunes. Political Islamists who had long been repressed gained free rein to organise, proselytise and recruit in a way that had not been possible for decades, even taking power in some states and earning a greater government role in others.⁴¹ Veteran extremists were released after years in prison, or returned from exile. Long-feared security services were disbanded, or remained disorientated and rudderless, suddenly unsure of the political and legal protection which had guaranteed immunity to the torturers and rapists that filled their ranks. As the first wave of euphoria turned to growing disillusion and anger, an ideal environment for recruitment, networking and activism was created.

In Syria, violent repression of peaceful demonstrators in March 2011 had prompted what rapidly became a full-scale rebellion against the long corrupt, nepotistic, brutal rule of the Assad family and their close associates. While the West dithered and moderates failed to unite, Islamists and Islamic militants stepped in. As the months went by, violence worsened and the regime worked to turn the growing conflict into a sectarian one. The Assads are Alawite, a Shia heterodox sect that comprised around an eighth of the population and was still viewed with some suspicion by many more traditional Shias around the world. Three-quarters of Syrians were Sunni, however, providing fertile ground for all those, inside and outside the rapidly disintegrating country, who saw the battle in terms of the Islamic world’s most fundamental division.

The background to ISI’s move into Syria was the success of Jabhat al-Nusra li-Ahl al-Sham (the Front for Protection of the Levant, JAN), the group set up by al-Qaeda’s senior leadership in partnership with ISI in the early days of the uprising against the Assad regime. This was a classic move in the tradition of al-Qaeda’s efforts over the decades to establish a presence wherever there was an opportunity to build capacity and spread its ideology, like a major multinational company trying to exploit a profitable new market. The venture in Syria was one of the more successful such projects. It was certainly more successful than the ill-fated joint undertaking with al-Zarqawi’s Iraqi start-up a decade before. By the spring of 2013, after nearly two years of savage civil war, JAN had emerged as one of the most effective and respected of the opposition factions fighting the Assad regime. It also controlled a substantial amount of land and some highly lucrative resources such as oilfields.

The exact catalyst for ISI’s attempt to assert its authority over al-Qaeda’s Syrian affiliate at this time is unclear. One possibility, suggested by a suspected ISI defector in a series of tweets, is that the JAN leadership refused an order from al-Baghdadi to send a team to bomb targets in Turkey on the basis that it might jeopardise Ankara’s policy of keeping their frontier with Syria open.⁴² Another possibility is that the seizure of the eastern Syrian city of Raqqa by JAN and several other rebel groups in the spring of 2013 made a long-contemplated move that much more attractive and urgent. Whatever the truth, al-Baghdadi announced in an audio statement released in April 2013 that he had renamed his own organisation the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS), and baldly stated that JAN was, effectively, its subsidiary. There was some justification for this claim, of course, as JAN had not only been set up by veteran fighters sent from Iraq by ISI but had been funded by their parent group since the outset.⁴³ However, it had then operated largely independently, and its leaders made no secret of their unwillingness to submit to their former chief. They publicly rejected al-Baghdadi’s bid to assert his authority over them, saying that they recognised only al-Zawahiri, head of al-Qaeda, as their leader. When al-Zawahiri himself intervened in the dispute from his base in Pakistan, it was to tell al-Baghdadi to restrict himself to Iraq and to ‘listen to and obey your emir’. The ISIS leader’s response was to repudiate al-Zawahiri’s authority with some of the bluntest language used by anyone in recent years of Islamic militancy. His group then launched an offensive against JAN and their allies.

By the summer of 2013, the group now known as ISIS, exploiting divisions among opposition factions and JAN’s own increasing disarray, had taken control of Raqqa, the only provincial centre not held by Syrian government forces. This was a tipping point, and led to a wave of defections to al-Baghdadi’s forces, particularly of foreign fighters attracted by its more aggressive approach and greater resources. These enabled further advances. Much as the Taliban had done in Afghanistan two decades before, the group now known as ISIS made rapid territorial gains as much through persuasion and coercion as through direct conquest. As its campaign gathered momentum, a range of disparate erstwhile opponents decided that their best interests lay inside the ISIS tent shooting out, rather than outside shooting in. As it had done in Iraq, the group paid particular attention to exploiting tribal conflicts to gain local allies.⁴⁴ In a region riddled with decades-old feuds and bitter competition for resources, this was not difficult to do. The powerful and fractious tribes of eastern Syria offered particularly fertile ground.⁴⁵ Fortified by the resources at its disposal, which now included the oilfields of eastern Syria and lucrative associated smuggling networks, ISIS advanced north and west, picking off successive centres of population and focusing on strategic points such as border crossings, oilfields and supply routes.

The expansion into Syria also brought them advantages on the Iraqi side of the (increasingly meaningless) border. Sunni communities there felt themselves to be part of a transnational sectarian struggle that would come to define the future of the region and their place within it. The Shia regime in Damascus was backed, diplomatically, economically and militarily, by Iran and had received assistance also from Hezbollah, the Lebanon-based Shia Islamist organisation. Tehran had also long backed al-Maliki in Baghdad, supporting his hardline sectarian policies and, as in Syria too, helping to organise a series of extremist Shia Islamist militias as auxiliaries to bolster Iraq’s weak, Shia-dominated military. Sunni states backed Sunni factions, even those following hardline militant agendas, with weapons and cash. These did not include JAN or ISIS but that did not matter necessarily. In this struggle the fault lines were well known. Indeed, some had been clear for centuries, if not a millennium or more. Nor was there any sense that the battle was already won or lost. Political scientist Vali Nasr has pointed out that although the Shia account for only between 10 and 15 per cent of the world’s Muslims, they constitute around half the population in the ‘Islamic heartland’ from Lebanon to Pakistan.⁴⁶ In this crucial zone, every effort could still count in swinging the balance one way or another, with massive long-term implications for either community.

In February 2014, al-Qaeda formally disowned ISIS. Al-Baghdadi’s response was to send a suicide bomber to kill al-Zawahiri’s personal envoy to Syria and allow subordinates to publicly deride the older man’s leadership of al-Qaeda. Now the new resources that ISIS had acquired in Syria could be switched to the Iraqi front, which had been carefully prepared by eighteen months of intelligence work, spectacular terrorist attacks on carefully selected targets, alliance-building and propaganda. It was veterans of their offensives against JAN, other factions and, much more rarely, Assad’s forces who would lead the summer offensive which saw Mosul fall and al-Baghdadi’s fighters reach the outskirts of Baghdad.

Al-Baghdadi – or possibly the former Ba’athist soldiers and officials who had formulated the group’s Syrian strategy – had pulled off an extraordinarily bold and aggressive manoeuvre, one that caught almost every observer, and most participants in the fight, completely unprepared. The group’s next move was even more audacious, and even less expected.