By the time the United States withdrew from its long bloody encounter with Iraq
in 2011, it thought it had declawed a once fearsome enemy: the Islamic
State, which had many names and incarnations but at the time was neither
fearsome nor a state.
Beaten
back by the American troop surge and Sunni tribal fighters, it was
considered such a diminished threat that the bounty the United States
put on one of its leaders had dropped from $5 million to $100,000. The
group’s new chief was just 38 years old, a nearsighted cleric, not even a
fighter, with little of the muscle of his predecessor, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the godfather of Iraq’s insurgency, killed by the American military four years earlier after a relentless hunt.
“Where
is the Islamic State of Iraq you are talking about?” the Yemeni wife of
one leader demanded, according to Iraqi police testimony. “We’re living
in the desert!”
Yet
now, five years later, the Islamic State is on a very different
trajectory. It has wiped clean a 100-year-old colonial border in the
Middle East, controlling millions of people in Iraq and Syria. It has
overcome its former partner and eventual rival, Al Qaeda, first in battle, then as the world’s pre-eminent jihadist group in reach and recruitment.
It
traces its origins both to the terrorist training grounds of Osama bin
Laden’s Afghanistan and to America’s invasion of Iraq in 2003, and it
achieved its resurgence through two single-minded means: control of
territory and, by design, unspeakable cruelty.
Its emblems are the black flag and the severed head.
The Evolution of ISIS
How has ISIS, a 21st-century
terrorist organization with a retrograde religious philosophy, spread
from Iraq to Syria, Libya and beyond?
By Quynhanh Do on Publish Date December 13, 2014.
Watch in Times Video »
Since last spring the group, also known as ISIS
or ISIL, has been expanding beyond its local struggle to international
terrorism. In the last two weeks, it did that in a spectacular way,
first claiming responsibility for downing a Russian planeload of 224 people, then sending squads of killers who ended the lives of 43 people in Beirut and 129 in Paris.
As the world scrambles to respond, the questions pile up like the dead:
Who are they? What do they want? Were signals missed that could have
stopped the Islamic State before it became so deadly?
And there were, in fact, more than hints of the group’s plans and potential. A 2012 report by the United States Defense Intelligence Agency was direct: The growing chaos in Syria’s
civil war was giving Islamic militants there and in Iraq the space to
spread and flourish. The group, it said, could “declare an Islamic state
through its union with other terrorist organizations in Iraq and
Syria.”
State of Terror
Articles in this series examine the rise of the Islamic
State and life inside the territory it has conquered.
“This
particular report, this was one of those nobody wanted to see,” said
Lt. Gen. Michael T. Flynn, who ran the defense agency at the time.
“It
was disregarded by the White House,” he said. “It was disregarded by
other elements in the intelligence community as a one-off report.
Frankly, at the White House, it didn’t meet the narrative.”
No
report or event can stand in hindsight as the single missed key to the
now terrifyingly complex puzzle of the Islamic State. And assigning
blame has been part of the political discourse in the United States and
beyond: The decision by President George W. Bush and allies to
marginalize Iraq’s political and military elite angered and
disenfranchised some who formed the heart of the Islamic State. More
recently, President Obama and his allies have been criticized as not
taking seriously enough the Islamic State’s rise.
Having
declared itself a caliphate — the successor to past Islamic empires,
ending with the Ottomans — the Islamic State has made Syria and Iraq the
central arena for global conflict.
American
warplanes and soldiers are once again engaged in the region, along with
some from its allies. In an echo of the Cold War, Russia has committed
its own planes and missiles, a challenge to the West’s perceived
indecision and inaction. Wider struggles in the Middle East, between
Iran and Saudi Arabia, between Shiite and Sunni, are also playing out.
And fleeing the war and poverty of Syria and Iraq has been a continuous flow of migrants.
“There
was a strong belief that brutal insurgencies fail,” said William
McCants of the Brookings Institution and a leading expert on the Islamic
State, explaining the seeming indifference of American officials to the
group’s rise. “The concept was that if you just leave the Islamic State
alone, it would destroy itself, and so you didn’t need to do much.”
A Belief in Brutality
There
is no evidence that the two central figures in the Islamic State’s
ascendance ever met, but a faith in brutality — as a strategy unto
itself — was a shared belief. Both came from Iraq, seemingly a key to
top leadership in the Islamic State. Otherwise, they could not be more
different.
The
first, Mr. Zarqawi, a onetime thief, was a tattooed Jordanian and a
reformed drinker of extreme personal violence whose own mother had
proclaimed him not very smart. The full details of the second, an Iraqi
now known as Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi,
the group’s current and reclusive leader, are incomplete, but he is
known more as a quiet Sunni cleric, likely with an advanced degree in
Islamic studies, whose tribe traces its lineage to the Prophet Muhammad
himself. He likes soccer.
Each
was shaped by the larger forces of the Islamic world, in particular
religious zeal, Al Qaeda and America’s war with Iraq. Each rejected the
secular culture of the West, which many say was the target of the attacks in Paris.
As
difficult as it might be for Americans after the Sept. 11 terrorist
attacks and more than a decade of thinking of Bin Laden as the basest
terrorist planner, Mr. Zarqawi was perhaps more violent and more
apocalyptic in his outlook than the Qaeda leader. He grew up poor in the
industrial Jordanian city of Zarqa, in a two-story concrete house, with
seven sisters and two brothers.
His
youth was spent as a petty criminal, but after adopting a strict form
of Islam he turned to jihad and traveled to Pakistan and Afghanistan,
where he actually met with Bin Laden. Al Qaeda, though, was hesitant
about letting him join — an early sign of a rivalry that would fester
into a final split years later.
While
he had a reputation as a thug, Mr. Zarqawi demonstrated keen instincts
for strategic thinking. He clearly saw that the United States would
invade Iraq, slipping into the country in 2003, by some accounts setting
up sleeper cells to attack the invaders. Later, he took full advantage
of America’s marginalization of Saddam Hussein’s ruthless Baathist soldiers and bureaucracy.
Stoking
both attacks against American soldiers and tensions with Shiites, he
built an insurgency responsible for keystone moments of the early war:
assaults on the United Nations headquarters in Baghdad, the Shiite Imam
Ali Mosque and others large and small.
The
United States raised the bounty on him to $25 million, equal to that of
Bin Laden. But the videoed decapitations and wanton sectarian killings
of Muslim civilians — along with his desire to proclaim an Islamic state
— also provoked an unusual rebuke in 2005 from Bin Laden’s No. 2, Ayman
al-Zawahri (now the top leader of Al Qaeda).
Beheadings,
Mr. Zawahri wrote, may stir the passions of “zealous young men” but
ordinary Muslims “will never find them palatable.”
An American airstrike finally killed Mr. Zarqawi
in June 2006. Four months later, his successors declared the founding
of the Islamic State of Iraq. It was one of scores of Sunni groups
fighting mostly in northern Iraq, and accounts differ about how
effective or distinct it was. Still, Rod Coffey, in March 2008 an
American lieutenant colonel, recalls vividly finding the Islamic State’s
black, gold-fringed banner some 50 miles north of Baghdad.
“These
were people who, unlike Bin Laden, said, ‘We are going to control
ground now, create a government, create a society, run this place on a
steppingstone to creating a caliphate,’” Mr. Coffey, now 54 and retired,
recalled.
Near the flag, he found a mass grave of 30 bodies, executed.
‘Jihadi University’
Mr.
McCants, the Brookings scholar, has done deep research into the origins
of Mr. Baghdadi, the current leader of the Islamic State, but much
remains unclear. In his book “The ISIS Apocalypse,”
he traces the rise of a lower-middle class man born in 1971 in the
hard-line Sunni city of Samarra, Iraq. His family ties to Saddam
Hussein’s army were strong. His own bad eyesight would prevent him from
active duty.
Apart from his piety, one fact is not in dispute: Mr. Baghdadi is a former inmate of Camp Bucca,
the American prison in southern Iraq now widely agreed to have been
crucial in the formation of Iraqi jihadists, housed in proximity behind
blast walls and spools of razor wire. It earned names like “the Academy”
or the “Jihadi University,” where the United States would
unintentionally create the conditions ripe for training a new generation
of insurgents.
In
“ISIS: Inside the Army of Terror,” the authors Michael Weiss and Hassan
Hassan quote Maj. Gen. Douglas Stone, a prison commander in Iraq: “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 being killed in combat.”
One
who spent time there was Hajji Bakr, a former Iraqi colonel nicknamed
the “Prince of the Shadows,” who later became Mr. Baghdadi’s second in
command. He was killed in 2014 while setting up Islamic State operations
in Syria. Mr. Baghdadi himself was imprisoned for 10 months in 2004. He
was remembered not as an agitator but as calm and deeply religious, an
organizer, good at settling disputes and bringing inmates together.
‘It Grew Quite a Bit’
Looking
back this week, John O. Brennan, the C.I.A. director, recounted in a
speech to a Washington think tank that the Islamic State was “pretty
much decimated when U.S. forces were there in Iraq.”
“It had maybe 700 or so adherents left,” Mr. Brennan said. “And then it grew quite a bit.”
There
is little dispute about that initial success. The American military and
Sunni tribesmen, banded together in what became known as the Awakening,
left Al Qaeda, the Islamic State and other Sunni jihadists in disarray
by 2010. In June of that year, Gen. Ray Odierno, leader of the American
troops in Iraq, said that “over the last 90 days or so we’ve either
picked up or killed 34 of the top 42 Al Qaeda in Iraq leaders,” using
one early name for the Islamic State.
Americans
wanted to believe that the Iraq war had ended in triumph, and the
troops were soon withdrawn. But almost immediately tensions began rising
between the Sunnis and the Shiite-dominated government of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki
— supported by the United States and Iran, the Shiite giant to the
east. Salaries and jobs promised to cooperating tribes were not paid.
There seemed little room for Sunnis in the new Iraq. The old Sunni
insurgents began to look appealing again.
“The
Sunnis were just trying to survive,” recalled Col. Kurt Pinkerton, who
was an American battalion commander in Iraq at the time. “It was more
about survival and assimilation.”
Mr. Baghdadi was named head of the Islamic State in 2010,
and his group seemed particularly adept at exploiting these fears. Mr.
McCants recounts how they entered a period of concentrated “reflection,”
developing a detailed, militarily precise plan for resurrection in
2009.
The
document, parts of which are translated in Mr. McCants’s book, is
strikingly self-critical, acknowledging that the Islamic State had lost
some of its aggressiveness and did not control territory. It advised
adopting the American tactic of co-opting the Sunni tribes, conceding
that recruiting “the tribes to eliminate the mujahadis was a clever,
bold idea.”
The
document also makes clear the need for a media strategy — a
recommendation the group went on to follow with great success,
exploiting social media to spread its message and to attract recruits,
many in the more technologically savvy West.
A Promising New Front
Then a civil war broke out in Syria — a new and promising front for the Islamic State’s ambitions.
Protests erupted
against the government of Syria’s president, Bashar al-Assad, in 2011
amid the wider Arab Spring in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya and elsewhere. The
world struggled with how to help — with a weary America unenthusiastic
about engaging anymore — and after a brutal crackdown by government
forces, Syrian protest groups morphed into fighters. At first many were
army defectors and locals, focused on defending their communities and
overthrowing Mr. Assad. But because foreign fighters, some steeped in
extremist ideologies, often proved to be the best organized and funded,
they gained momentum on the battlefield.
One
distinguishing trait of the Islamic State, as opposed to other groups
like the Nusra Front and the smaller, more secular groups calling
themselves the Free Syrian Army, was its focus on establishing the
structures and trappings of a state and giving that priority over
battling Syrian government forces. (This has led to widespread belief of
a secret truce between Mr. Assad and the Islamic State, given credence
recently when the group was left off the list of first targets when Russia intervened to shore up Mr. Assad.)
As
the Islamic State established itself – at first not just in Raqqa and
eastern Aleppo Province and much of Deir al-Zour, but also in villages
and outposts scattered in Idlib and western Aleppo — its fighters drew
curiosity, attention and sometimes ridicule for their presumption. They
put up road signs at the beginnings of territory they held saying,
“Welcome to the Islamic State.”
Early
on, the Islamic State’s rivals underestimated it, only to face deadly
attacks from the group later. They were not the only ones — Mr. Obama
likened the group to the “J.V. team.”
And the Islamic State fighters often did seem like buffoons, especially
the foreign ones, who came from across the Middle East, Central Asia
and Europe. Many could not speak Arabic. And some barely knew anything
of Islamic theology. They posted on social media pictures of themselves
mugging for the camera as they swam in the Euphrates River, or
complaining that it was difficult to find Nutella in the shops.
But
some were serious, determined and ideologically motivated. “I have
chosen the state,” one man who identified himself as a Saudi fighter
said in an online interview, explaining that his interest was less in
overthrowing Mr. Assad than in striving for a caliphate, “because I
support its method of unification and implementation of the Shariah of God.”
The Islamic State did, in fact, succeed in building the semblance of a state, providing services as well as imposing the harshest of rules. It worked to self-finance, through oil, trade in priceless antiquities and, many say, simple criminal enterprises like kidnapping and extortion.
And, as it always promised, the Islamic State was brutal, frightening fellow groups and the wider world with practices like sexual slavery,
immolations, crucifixions and beheadings. Those included well-produced
killings on video, and spread through social media, of the journalist James Foley and others, ending often with a shot of a bloody severed head.
A Caliphate Declared
The
climax of the Islamic State’s rise came in June 2014, when it routed
the Iraqi military police and captured Mosul, Iraq’s second-largest
city, erasing the century-old border between Iraq and Syria established
after World War I. The caliphate had been declared the month before, but
soon after Mosul’s capture, Mr. Bagdhadi, in a black S.U.V., arrived at
the Nuri Mosque in Mosul in a rare appearance to make that state formal.
Wearing
a black turban signifying his descent from Muhammad, he said: “God,
blessed and exalted, has bestowed victory and conquest upon your mujahid
brothers.”
“They
rushed to announce the caliphate and appoint a leader,” he said. “This
is a duty incumbent on Muslims, which had been absent for centuries and
lost from the face of the earth.”
There
was another victory, which had played out behind the scenes in bitter
missives between Al Qaeda central, the Islamic State and its
Qaeda-sponsored affiliate, the Nusra Front. Mr. Baghdadi rejected demands from Mr. Zawahri,
leader of Al Qaeda after Bin Laden’s death, that he step in line under
his rule. No, Mr. Baghdadi said: The Islamic State was supreme and
separate. Al Qaeda central had become, in some sense, the cautious,
increasingly irrelevant uncle. Paris was the proof of that.
Experts Divided
The
carnage of the French capital — young Parisians gunned down by suicide
commandos — has intensified the fears and soul-searching of the West.
What was missed, and what can be done?
America has been bombing the Islamic State for over a year. Russia has joined the fight, for its own murky reasons. France has begun a new round of airstrikes of uncertain effectiveness.
At
United States Central Command — the military headquarters based in
Tampa, Fla., that is in charge of the American air campaign —
intelligence analysts have long bristled at what they see as deliberate
attempts by their bosses to paint an overly optimistic picture of the
war’s progress.
A
group of seasoned Iraq analysts saw the conflict as basically a
stalemate, and became enraged when they believed that senior military
officers were changing their conclusions in official Central Command
estimates in order to emphasize that the bombing campaign was having
positive effects. The group of analysts brought their concerns to the
Defense Department’s inspector general, who began an investigation into the complaints.
Similar
worries were echoed outside the military. “The Americans have been
bombing targets in Syria for 14 months and that didn’t stop the horrible
attacks in Paris,” said Robert S. Ford, a former American ambassador to
Syria and now a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute. “I’m not
saying bombing attacks are useless, and they probably have some limited
value. But we have to know this is not a long-term solution.”
Only a political solution that finally incorporates Sunnis into Iraq, he said, will work.
Even
in the weeks before the Paris attacks, intelligence analysts were also
deeply divided over the future of the Islamic State’s terrorism
campaign. Some believed that the group was content to keep a local focus
— consolidating the “caliphate” in Iraq and Syria, urging followers
around the world to launch small-scale attacks, but eschewing the
centrally planned “spectacular” attacks that had long been Al Qaeda’s
strategy.
Graphic
ISIS Is Likely Responsible for Nearly 1,000 Civilian Deaths Outside Iraq and Syria
At least a dozen countries have had attacks since the
Islamic State, or ISIS, began to pursue a global strategy in the summer
of 2014.
But other intelligence analysts were less certain, arguing that it was only a matter of time before the Islamic State turned to attacks against Europe or the United States that would grab headlines and sow fear in Western capitals.
Last
Friday, it seems, the answer to this debate revealed itself, though to
what end is unknown. Some experts wonder if the Islamic State has moved
to complete its apocalyptic vision in a final battle with the forces of
what it calls Rome, or the West.
A Move Too Far?
The question for the Islamic State, after years of expansion and success on its terms, even evidence of using mustard agent, is whether Paris proved one move too far — a brutality the world will not tolerate.
The group has already been under pressure from several angles: Aerial attacks have in fact damaged its moneymaking oil infrastructure.
After
losing the symbolic prize of Kobani last year in northeastern Syria,
and the Iraqi city of Tikrit in the spring, it has more recently lost
large stretches of crucial Syrian territory along the Turkish border to
Kurdish fighters backed by American airstrikes.
Graphic
How Kurds Captured Sinjar From ISIS
Efforts to stem the rise of the Islamic State.
The
organization has lately shown signs of strain, according to residents
of Raqqa and family members who have fled the area but keep in contact
with them. It is trying to press-gang boys as young as 15 or 16 into
fighting the Kurds. It is shutting down more and more Internet cafes,
seeking to control the flow of information. It has even resorted to
hectoring, plaintive advertisements on social media, showing pictures of
Syrian refugees packed into boats bound for Europe and excoriating them
for fleeing to the lands of “the infidels.”
And
while many of those refugees are fleeing the government’s and other
combatants, many others have indeed come from “the state” — and are
voting against life there with their feet, a powerful indictment of the
caliphate’s promise to create utopia for Muslims from around the world.
Though here again, there seems evidence that the Islamic State may be
taking perverse advantage, perhaps sending trained fighters back into
Europe with the innocents.
Like any organization that expands quickly then faces setbacks, it has internal tensions.
Some
complain that it is controlled by Iraqis who see Syria as a convenient
province. There are reports of dozens of executions and imprisonments of
Islamic State fighters trying to flee
the group. There are complaints about salaries and living conditions,
disputes over money and business opportunities, allegations that
commanders have absconded with looted cash and other resources.
And
there is growing anecdotal evidence that even some members of the group
— particularly locals who may have joined out of opportunism or a sense
that it was the best way to survive — have become disgusted, like the
larger world, by its extreme violence.
“I
still feel sick,” Abu Khadija, a Syrian fighter for the Islamic State,
said recently after witnessing the beheadings of dozens of war prisoners
near the Syrian-Iraqi border.
“I can’t eat, I feel I want to throw up,” he said. “ I hate myself.”
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