Jihadist Insurgent Movements

Paul B. Rich, Richard Burchill, Paul B. Rich, Richard Burchill

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351705844
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia militar y marítima

This path-breaking collection of papers examines the phenomenon of jihadist insurgent movements in the Middle East and North, East and West Africa. It argues that military and strategic analysts have paid insufficient attention to the phenomenon of jihadism in insurgent movements, partly due to a failure to take the role of religion sufficiently seriously in the ideological mobilisation of recruits by guerrilla movements stretching back to the era of "national liberation" after World War Two. Several essays in the collection examine Al Qaeda and ISIL as military as well as political movements while others assess Boko Haram in West Africa, Al Shabaab in Somalia and jihadist movements in Libya. Additionally, some authors discuss the recruitment of foreign fighters and the longer-term terrorist threat posed by the existence of jihadist movements to security and ethnic relations in Europe

Overall, this volume fills an important niche between studies that look at Islamic fundamentalism and "global jihad" at the international level and micro studies that look at movements locally. It poses the question whether jihadist insurgencies are serious revolutionary threats to global political stability or whether, like Soviet Russia after its initial revolutionary phase of the 1920s, they can be ultimately contained by the global political order. The volume sees these movements as continuing to evolve dynamically over the next few years suggesting that, even if ISIL is defeated, the movement that brought it into being will still exist and very probably morph into new movements. Jihadist Insurgent Movements was originally published as a special issue of Small Wars & Insurgencies.

The Islamic State and the Return of Revolutionary Warfare

Craig Whiteside

ABSTRACT

The rise of the Islamic State (ISIS/ISIL) is not well understood at this point. This paper starts by comparing the Islamic State to the Vietnamese communists in a revolutionary warfare framework and makes a causal argument that the Islamic State’s defeat of the Sahwa (Awakening) movement in Iraq was the key to its successful establishment of control of most Sunni areas and the mobilization of its population for support. Islamic State operational summaries and captured documents are used to quantitatively establish the impact of the subversion campaign against the Sahwa and Iraqi government and trace the efforts of operatives in tribal outreach and recruiting. This research provides a valuable insight into the return of a powerful method of insurgency as well as a glimpse into the vast clandestine network that provides the strength of the Islamic State movement.

Introduction

The descent into disorder began years before the crisis, with whispers of the return of veterans from the previous war and the announcements from a political front representing a competing shadow government opposed to the incumbent. The murky deaths of political figures in the hinterlands are written off as banditry, local blood debts, and revenge killings unremarkable in a society long riven by internecine conflict. Seemingly random in pattern, the deaths soon become part of the rhythm of everyday life in the country, as unexplainable as they are inconsequential. The rising criminality in these areas soon block many government services in the area, a fact buried by the bureaucracy and invisible to the leaders of the state who believe that what they see in the capital is the reality of the state. Villages have no officials, taxes go uncollected, and schools have no teachers. By the time the state’s police and military units lose the ability to operate in these same rural areas, the crisis has matured to an existential crisis for the state.

This generic vignette is an amalgamation of several accounts of the Vietnamese People’s Revolutionary Party campaign to defeat the Diem regime during 1959–1963, but it also could easily pass for a description of what happened in the Sunni provinces of Iraq from 2008 to 2013 – long before the world discovered the Islamic State. Often incorrectly described as an ex-Baathist cabal that invaded Iraq from Syria and easily defeated an unmotivated and corrupt Shia Army of occupation, the Islamic State is better understood as a revolutionary movement that has learned, practiced, adjusted, and honed a successful politico-military doctrine in their state-building campaign. They have deep roots in the population and are determined to win the competition of governing with the Iraqi government. In short, they are very real and here to stay.

The inspiration for this research came from Bernard Fall, whose writings about the Vietnam wars often reflected an amazement of the subversive nature of revolutionary warfare and its paralyzing effect on government. Fall delighted in contrasting public pronouncements of government control by French military or American political observers who counted secure provinces instead of obscure assassinations or uncollected taxes.¹ The cumulative results of this subversion and an associated fear led others to claim that the exhaustion effect of revolutionary warfare was unbeatable, ‘a dynamic that will take over the world!’² Surely this was overstated, and the end of the Cold War heralded an end to ideological warfare, and the return of power and interest based conflict now that the war of ideologies was over – it was the end of history.³

The demise of revolutionary warfare turned out to be a fantasy.⁴ A little known movement known as Salafi–jihadism adopted it after the Afghan–Soviet War, due to the similarity of its struggle against powerful enemies and proxies that dominated an international system inherently incompatible with their ideology. The Salafi–jihadist movement suffered a long series of trials as it stumbled from failed revolution to crushed revolt, so much so that one of its adherents who later founded the Islamic State movement⁵ called it ‘the sad, recurrent story in the arenas of jihad’.⁶ Abu Musab al Zarqawi too failed, but his successors continued to adapt and evolve and implemented a doctrine that, in a series of operational campaigns, finally produced a pseudo-state⁷ with a reasonably effective conventional army and political apparatus. This interweaving of political actions with military ones is a clear indicator of an understanding of revolutionary warfare, a phenomenon rarely mentioned today in reference to the Islamic State.⁸ A careful study of the rise of the Islamic State will demonstrate that its adaptation of Mao’s revolutionary warfare concept – as executed by the Vietnamese communists and modified it to fit its Islamist ideology – best explains how the Islamic State rose to power.

To support this argument, I will first examine the revolutionary aspects of the Islamic State in accordance with revolutionary warfare theory. Next, I will trace the development of revolutionary warfare doctrine in the Salafist–jihadist movement to its current state of execution by the Islamic State. In the third part, I will conduct a structured comparison between the Vietnamese communists campaign in South Vietnam from 1959 to 1964 with the Islamic State’s campaign in Iraq from 2008 to 2013. Finally, I will test a hypothesis concerning the Islamic State’s defeat of the Sahwa (Awakening) movement as a necessary condition for their return to prominence in Sunni Iraq.⁹

Islamic State as a revolutionary movement

While often described as a ‘terror group’,¹⁰ the Islamic State actually fits the definition of a movement conducting an insurgency, defined as an armed struggle dedicated to replacing the government.¹¹ Revolutionary warfare is a more specific version of an insurgency, designed to use guerrilla warfare combined with political act...