Black Flags: The Rise of ISIS

by Joby Warrick

Such hallmarks, like the voice on the audio recording, unmistakably belonged to Zarqawi, a man the Mukhabarat knew exceptionally well. He was, at the time of the bombing, the head of a particularly vicious terrorist network called al-Qaeda in Iraq. But the Jordanians had known him back in the days when he was Ahmad the hoodlum, a high school dropout with a reputation as a heavy drinker and a brawler. They had watched him wander off to Afghanistan in the late 1980s to fight the communists, then return as a battle-hardened religious fanatic. After a first try at terrorism, he had vanished into one of Jordan’s darkest prisons. This time he emerged as a battle-hardened religious fanatic who also happened to excel as a leader of men.

I wish we had kept referring to him as Ahmad the hoodlum. That would have been humiliating.

Few beyond the intelligence service had heard of Zarqawi when Washington made him a terrorist superstar, declaring to the world in 2003 that this obscure Jordanian was the link between Iraq’s dictatorship and the plotters behind the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. The claim was wrong, yet, weeks later, when U.S. troops invaded Iraq, the newly famous and well-funded terrorist gained a battleground and a cause and soon thousands of followers.

According to this, the US gave Zarqawi his platform.

Though some would cast his movement as an al-Qaeda offshoot, Zarqawi was no one’s acolyte. His brand of jihadism was utterly, brutally original. Osama bin Laden had sought to liberate Muslim nations gradually from corrupting Western influences so they could someday unify as a single Islamic theocracy, or caliphate. Zarqawi, by contrast, insisted that he would create his caliphate immediately—right now. He would seek to usher in God’s kingdom on Earth through acts of unthinkable savagery, believing, correctly, that theatrical displays of extreme violence would attract the most hardened jihadists to his cause and frighten everyone else into submission. His strategy shook the region as al-Qaeda never had.

Others were flogged with electric cables, burned with lit cigarettes, or hung upside down by means of a stick placed under the knees, a position the guards gleefully called “grilled chicken.

The guards, incidentally, were lovingly referred to as "hemorrhoids" by the prisoners; you know, for being total flaming assholes.

Zarqawi began memorizing the Koran, spending hour after hour reading, or staring blankly with the open volume in his lap. His diffuse rage took on a focus: a fierce, single-minded hatred for perceived enemies of Allah. The list started with Jordan’s monarch, King Hussein, whom Zarqawi saw as the illegitimate leader of an artificial country, responsible for the unspeakable crime of making peace with Israel. It also included servants of the regime: the guards, the soldiers, the politicians, the bureaucrats, and countless others who profited from the current system. Even prison inmates he denounced as kafirs, or disbelievers. To Muslims the term is no mere epithet; if used in a fatwa, it implies that the person has lost the protection of Islamic law and can be killed with impunity.

But the U.S. assistance came at a price. For months, the Bush White House had been pressuring Jordan to get behind its plan to topple Iraqi president Saddam Hussein. The squeeze had begun in the late summer, when the king met with Bush and his top deputies during an August 2, 2002, visit to the White House. The usually charming Texan was cool and stiff, as Abdullah recalled later. Aides warned the monarch that the president was upset over comments he had made to a British newspaper, accusing the Bush team of being “fixated on Iraq” and determined to start a war that would “really open a Pandora’s box in the Middle East.

Our feelings were hurt because you were telling the truth as you saw it. Oh yeah. One other thing. You were right. Love, GW

Publicly, the monarchy could claim that the missile-defense system would shield Jordanians from any errant Iraqi SCUDs that might threaten Jordanian territory. In reality, the Americans wanted an additional safeguard against a possible Iraqi attack on Israel in retaliation for the invasion. It was yet another sign that war was coming.

“Iraq today harbors a deadly terrorist network headed by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, an associate and collaborator of Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaeda lieutenants,” Powell began, just before Zarqawi’s bearded image appeared on a large screen behind the council’s circular table.

This type of statement causes me to lament the people who do not place value on the power of words. In particular, the use of the word "harbors" is misleading in the extreme.

Powell later described the presentation as one of the biggest blunders of his career, a mistake he would attribute to sloppy intelligence and wishful thinking at senior levels of the Bush administration. In reality, every word of the Zarqawi portion of the speech had been written by senior officials of the CIA after weeks of rancorous debate with White House officials over what should and should not be left out. To his credit, Powell rejected out of hand an earlier script written by White House aides, one that included much stronger claims about terrorist links gleaned from untested informants and unconfirmed rumors picked up by the Pentagon’s Office of Special Plans.

I remember how damaging this was to Powell. He was chosen to deliver this message because of his impeccable credibility. Many citizens wanted him to run for President (even though he persisted that that was not something he wanted). Regardless, he clearly became stained from this debacle.

Much later, intelligence officials and terrorism experts who studied the early war years marveled at Zarqawi’s strategic cunning. Whether deliberately or by coincidence, he picked targets that would confound U.S. ambitions for Iraq and ensure that the occupation of the country would be long and painful. The opening salvo against an Arab embassy would effectively discourage other Muslim nations from participating in Iraq’s rebuilding in a way that might give the Americans legitimacy. That blow was followed by two others that, in sequence, showed “brilliant strategy,” said Bruce Riedel, a senior CIA terrorism analyst who went on to advise two U.S. presidents. “By attacking the UN, he drove out all the nongovernmental organizations and discouraged anyone from opening an embassy,” Riedel said. “Then he went after the Shia-Sunni fault line with attacks on the Shiite mosques. “So first he isolated us in Iraq,” Riedel said, “then he put us in the midst of a civil war.

In the weeks after sixteen U.S. marines had been killed in a series of ambushes around the city, the Americans were in a vengeful mood. Firefights erupted daily in residential neighborhoods, and bullets tore through bedrooms where families slept. Checkpoint sentries reflexively shot at motorists who approached too quickly or failed to heed warnings shouted at them in English. In the desert outside Ramadi, forty-five Iraqis had died when American warplanes stuck a building that U.S. officials insisted was an insurgent safe house. Iraqis said the jets mistakenly struck a wedding celebration. Amateur video showed bodies of women as well as children and infants.

Not going to win us many friends I expect.

Shopkeepers who tried to stay open found themselves subjected to arbitrary and occasionally bizarre regulations. In some neighborhoods, grocers were threatened with punishment if they displayed cucumbers and tomatoes in the same stall. The jihadists maintained that the vegetables resembled male and female body parts and should not be permitted to mingle.

Wonderfully enlightened minds on these guys.

Though she had never met Zarqawi, she could not grasp that the leader of AQI had really wanted her to sacrifice her own life to kill mothers and children at a wedding party. The fault was probably hers, she said, for, deep down, she had never been sure that she would be capable of pressing the detonator when the moment came, with her future and that of so many strangers balanced on a tiny metal pin.

Assured that the Jordanians would protect him, “he just started spewing,” the official said. Suddenly the agency’s interrogators were filling notebooks with rare insider accounts of AQI’s command structure and tactics. One of Karbouly’s jobs, according to the former senior intelligence official, was to oversee incoming supplies for Zarqawi’s bomb factories—a job that gave him broad familiarity with terrorist cells around the country. “He wasn’t a bomb maker, but he understood how to get the material to the right places so it all came together,” the official said, “He was sort of like a project manager.

The government of Syria had allowed a mob to besiege the American diplomatic mission. And then, whether through inaction or by design, it had let the intruders rampage through the embassy grounds—a violation, in essence, of sovereign U.S. territory.

Now Syrians were learning just how cynical Assad’s goodwill gesture had been. Among the inmates discharged over the spring and summer were a number of radical Islamists who belonged to known terrorist organizations. Some were jihadists who had been picked up while attempting to cross into Iraq to join the insurgency there. Others were suspected al-Qaeda members who had been snatched by the CIA and secretly delivered to Syria under the spy agency’s “extraordinary rendition” program. The freed Islamists were too few in number to threaten the regime seriously, but their presence inside the country would help supply a veneer of truth for Assad’s extremist claims: now there were, in fact, a handful of authentic jihadists in the opposition camp. It was the same tactic used by the Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi, who emptied his jails in an apparent attempt to sow strife among the regime’s opponents.

That is one pernicious, cynical, brand of leadership.

Most important, the commandos had found a way to get under the terrorists’ skin. The insurgents were no longer the deadliest, most unpredictable force in Iraq. Now it was their turn to be afraid, and exposed. The truth, as Joseph and his comrades discovered, was that the Islamic State’s fighters were skilled butchers, but lousy soldiers. “They’re only good at terrorizing people who aren’t armed,” he said. “They think they’re good, but when we would wake them up in the middle of the night, they would crap their pants.” The skirmishes inside the darkened houses were silent and short, often three minutes or less. Those who wisely surrendered found themselves surrounded by bearded, heavily muscled Westerners wearing dark clothes, armed with futuristic-looking weapons, and accompanied by ferocious attack dogs. In Iraqi villages, the story spread of “ninjas with lions” who would burst into town and then vanish again. During the interrogations that followed, Joseph would sometimes seek to perpetuate the legend.

The U.S. troop withdrawal began in late 2007, and the last convoy of soldiers to exit the country would roll across the Iraq-Kuwait border on December 18, 2011, ending a deployment that cost nearly forty-five hundred American lives and left more than thirty-two thousand wounded. By the most conservative estimates, the Iraqi civilian death toll was twenty times higher.

The jihadists’ new chief, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, was a man of soaring ambitions, but in late 2011, well into his second year as leader, his boasts were as empty as the group’s coffers. The Islamic State of Iraq lacked resources, fighters, and sanctuary. And, perhaps most critically, it lacked a cause—a single big idea with which it could rally its depleted forces and draw other Muslims into the fold. Soon, within the chaos of revolutionary Syria, it would find all four.

The goal was to impose Islamic rule without borders, and the way to achieve this was to act boldly, trusting that Allah would bend history itself to suit his purposes. Al-Qaeda’s more pragmatic thinkers spoke of the caliphate as a distant goal, one that would have to wait until the Middle East’s secular regimes could be toppled. But Baghdadi believed the opposite: raise the caliphate’s ancient banner, and righteous Muslims would fall into line.

Had it not been for the U.S. invasion of Iraq, the Islamic State’s greatest butcher would likely have lived out his years as a college professor. Until 2003, life was steering him toward a quiet career of teaching Islamic jurisprudence to twenty-year-olds, rather than strapping bombs to their chests.

There was, however, yet a fourth possible outcome: prolonged violence with no clear resolution. In this scenario, the country known as Syria would disintegrate in a maelstrom that slowly consumed other countries in its wake, destabilizing the region for decades to come. Abdullah, in his discussions with aides, imagined a fractured Syria divided into zones controlled by Sunnis, Alawites, and Kurds, each supported and supplied by foreign partisans. Indeed, the contours of a future divided Syria were becoming clearer, with the regime clinging to defensive positions around the capital and coastal cities and leaving the parched, landlocked interior to the Islamists. “We saw a stalemate coming,” one of the king’s aides said.

Rhodes also suggested that disagreement between the president and his advisers over Syria was less dramatic than contemporaneous news accounts portrayed it to be. “I think, candidly, that a lot of people have used this debate to position themselves for posterity as being for doing something in Syria when in fact it wouldn’t have made much difference,” Rhodes said. The plan presented to Obama that fall “didn’t feel fully baked,” he said, and the president was unconvinced that arming rebel militias—assuming trustworthy allies could be found—would tip the balance. “This is a very hard problem, rooted in a decade of war in Iraq and decades of sectarian tensions in that part of the world,” Rhodes said. “Sometimes we would like to think we have more agency than we do.

The twenty-seven-year-old former computer programmer deliberately styled himself after his hero, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, for whom he briefly served before being arrested and thrown in the Camp Bucca prison in 2006. Now he sought to replicate his mentor’s look, from the shaggy black hair, cap, and beard to his penchant for posing unmasked for cameras while affecting the look of a jihadi superhero. Some of his video outtakes are unintentionally hilarious, as Abu Wahib tries karate moves or attempts to leap through the air while firing his gun. Others are simply cold-blooded.

Now Baghdadi had the core elements he needed for his reinvigorated ISIS army. Already, some of his fighters were moving to take control of small villages and towns in northern and eastern Syria, and now they would be joined by battle-hardened, ideologically disciplined fighters straight from Iraq’s worst prisons.

The newcomers moved quickly, once the city was secure, to establish the new order. A huge ISIS banner was draped around the clock tower in al-Jalaa Square—renamed Freedom Square—and the city’s new rulers began promulgating lists of behaviors that would no longer be tolerated.

Ironic.

reopened, everything had changed. The old textbooks and curricula—the “books of the infidels,” ISIS called them—had been tossed out, replaced by religious training. Meanwhile, the city’s hundreds of orphaned children and teens were moved to military camps to learn to shoot rifles and drive suicide trucks. Abu Ibrahim would sometimes see the young ISIS recruits in military convoys, carrying guns and wearing oversized uniforms.

For the occupiers, the Islamic State had finally arrived, at least in miniature. The men with the guns seemed happy with the state of affairs, because they were running the place. For everyone else in Raqqa, Abu Ibrahim wrote, all that was left was the “culture of backwardness and terror, after extinguishing the light of the mind.

After U.S. intelligence agencies released evidence showing that Assad’s army had fired canisters of sarin gas into residential neighborhoods on August 21, Obama signaled his intention to punish Assad for crossing America’s one clear “red line.” Yet, despite widespread outrage over the deaths, the White House could not muster the political support for a military strike. Congress blocked a vote on a resolution authorizing air strikes against Assad, and the Parliament in Britain—a country presumed to be a key ally in any military campaign—rejected a similar proposal by Prime Minister David Cameron’s Tory government.

Among Syria’s opposition leaders, the collapse, in their view, of Western resolve after the Ghouta attack was a tougher psychological blow than the chemical attacks themselves, Moustafa said. Some rebel groups that had previously aligned themselves with the moderate Free Syrian Army simply gave up and joined the Islamists, who at least paid better salaries.

Captured Iraqi soldiers were paraded before cameras and then gunned down in open pits. Suspected apostates were murdered in the streets, and priceless Babylonian artifacts—a source of cultural pride for generations of Iraqis—were smashed into powder. Such acts were welcomed by small numbers of religious conservatives whose views aligned with those of the Islamists. But among the Iraqis who had welcomed the Islamist guns, few were interested in Islamist rule. Now it was too late to rescind the invitation.