NoNonsense ISIS and Syria

Phyllis Bennis

• Publisher: Between the Lines
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781771133180
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Terrorism
• Index: Politics & International Relations

From its sudden emergence as a military force to be reckoned with in Syria and Iraq in June 2014 through its YouTube executions of hostages to its atrocious attacks in Paris in November 2015, the movement variously known as ISIS, Islamic State, and Daesh has captured the world's horrified attention. Where did it come from and how on earth should we respond?

This NoNonsense book places ISIS in the broader context of the US-led 'war on terror' from the Bush-Blair invasion of Iraq to Obama's drone attacks. Bennis makes a strong case for responses that build peace and justice rather than feeding the cycle of violence and terror.

1 ISIS

What are the origins of ISIS?

Political Islam in its modern form, as Mahmoud Mamdani states in Good Muslims, Bad Muslims, is ‘more a domestic product than a foreign import’. It was not, he reminds us, ‘bred in isolation… Political Islam was born in the colonial period. But it did not give rise to a terrorist movement until the Cold War.’ The Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt was born almost a century ago. Its followers in neighbouring countries contested for power (rarely winning any) with governments across the region. The mobilization against the US-backed Shah in Iran in the 1970s resulted in the establishment of the Islamic Republic of Iran under the leadership of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in perhaps the most powerful, self-defined Islamic government of the 20th century. But today’s movement known as political Islam, with its military mobilizations holding pride of place ahead of its political formations, emerged in its first coherent identity with the US-armed, US-paid, Pakistani-trained mujahideen warriors who fought the Soviet troops in Afghanistan from 1979 onwards. Continuing in the post-Vietnam Cold War 1980s, the Afghanistan War ended with the defeat and ultimate collapse of the Soviet Union.

The specific origins of ISIS, also variously known as ISIL, Daesh or the Islamic State, lie in the 2003 US invasion and occupation of Iraq. The country was already in terrible shape, following decades of war (the Iran-Iraq War from 1980-89, then the first US Gulf War in 1991) and a dozen years of crippling economic sanctions imposed in 1990. Even after the first wars, and despite brutal repression of any potential opposition and the long-standing political and economic privileging of the large (20 per cent or so) Sunni minority, the majority of Iraqis lived middle-class lives, including government-provided free healthcare and education, with some of the best medical and scientific institutions in the Arab world. The sanctions, imposed in the name of the United Nations but created and enforced by the US, had shredded much of the social fabric of the once-prosperous, secular, cosmopolitan country. The Pentagon’s ‘shock and awe’ bombing campaign that opened the US invasion destroyed much of Iraq’s physical infrastructure, as well as the lives of over 7,000 Iraqi civilians.

How did the 2003 invasion of Iraq affect the growth of ISIS?

Among the first acts of the US-UK occupation were the dissolution of the Iraqi military, the dismantling of the civil service, and the overthrow of Saddam Hussein’s ruling Baath Party. All three institutions represented core concentrations of secular nationalist interests in Iraq, and their collapse was part of the reason for the turn toward religious and sectarian identity that began to replace national identity for many Iraqis. At the same time, in all three institutions, particularly at the highest echelons, Sunni Iraqis were more likely to suffer from the loss of income and prestige – since Sunnis held a disproportionate share of top jobs and top positions in the military and the Baath Party. So, right from the beginning, a sectarian strand emerged at the very centre of the rising opposition to the occupation.

Despite the Bush administration’s dismissals of the opposition as nothing but Baathist leftovers and foreign fighters, the Iraqi resistance was far broader. Within months of the March 2003 invasion, militias and informal groups of fighters were challenging the US-UK occupation across the country. One of the earliest was al-Qaeda in Iraq or AQI, sometimes known as al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia, a Sunni militia created in 2004 by Abu Mussab al-Zarqawi. He was Jordanian, although it appears most of the early members of AQI were Iraqis. Al-Zarqawi announced publicly that AQI had pledged loyalty to the leadership of al-Qaeda and specifically to Osama bin Laden. The militia’s tactics included bombings and improvised explosive devices (IEDs), as well as reported kidnappings and beheadings. While AQI began with a focus on the US and other coalition forces, aiming to rid Iraq of foreign occupiers, it soon expanded to adopt a more explicitly sectarian agenda, in which the Shi’a-dominated Iraqi government, military and police forces as well as Shi’a civilians were also targeted.

Over the next several years, the forces fighting against the occupation of Iraq became more sectarian, moving toward what would become a bloody civil war fought alongside the resistance to occupation. Beginning in 2006, the US shifted its Iraq strategy, deciding to move away from direct fighting against Sunni anti-occupation fighters and instead to try to co-opt them. The essence of the Sunni Awakening plan was that the US would bankroll Sunni tribal leaders, those who had earlier led the anti-US resistance, paying them off to fight with the occupation and US-backed Shi’a-dominated government instead of against them. They would also fight against the Sunni outliers, those who rejected the Awakening movement, which included al-Qaeda in Iraq. And just about the time that the Sunni Awakening was taking hold, al-Qaeda in Iraq changed its name – this time to Islamic State of Iraq, or ISI.

In August 2014, when Iraq’s Anbar province had been largely overrun by ISIS, its governor, Ahmed al-Dulaimi, described for the New York Times the trajectory of an ISIS leader whom al-Dulaimi had taught in military school. ‘It was never clear that he would turn out like that,’ al-Dulaimi told the Times.

‘He was from a simple family, with high morals, but all his brothers went in that direction [becoming jihadists].’ After the US invaded Iraq in 2003, al-Dulaimi’s former pupil joined al-Qaeda in Iraq and was detained by US forces in 2005. According to al-Dulaimi: ‘We continue to live with the consequences of the decision to disband Saddam’s army… All of these guys got religious after 2003… Surely, ISIS benefits from their experience.’

Who is Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi and what was his role in the rise of ISIS?

In June 2006 al-Zarqawi was killed by US bombs. According to some sources, four months later Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi was announced as the new leader of AQI, having been released from 10 months or so in the US-run Bucca prison in Iraq. Other sources claim that al-Baghdadi spent as much as five years in the US prison, and that after the death of al-Zarqawi, AQI was taken over by a different person with a similar name – Abu Omar al-Baghdadi – who may have led the organization until 2010.

However long Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi spent at Bucca under the control of US troops, there is little doubt he would have seen, heard of, and perhaps experienced at least some of the brutality that characterized US treatment of prisoners in Iraq. Only a few months before al-Baghdadi was imprisoned at Bucca prison, the torture photos from Abu Ghraib prison had been made public. It is unclear whether any prisoners who experienced that brutality at Abu Ghraib or elsewhere were present at Bucca with al-Baghdadi, but it is certain that reports of the torture were extensive throughout the US prison system in Iraq.

The time in prison was also an opportunity for strategic planning and recruiting for AQI’s expanding anti-occupation and anti-Shi’a resistance. Other former prisoners in Bucca, in 2004 and later, recall al-Baghdadi’s arrival and the role he and others played in education, organizing and planning for future military actions. There is little doubt that al-Baghdadi’s time in US custody was instrumental in his rise to the leadership of what would become one of the most powerful extremist militias in the Middle East.

Before and during al-Baghdadi’s incarceration in the US military prison, the anti-occupation resistance was rapidly expanding. As The Guardian described it, ‘When Baghdadi, aged 33, arrived at Bucca, the Sunni-led anti-US insurgency was gathering steam across central and western Iraq. An invasion that had been sold as a war of liberation had become a grinding occupation. Iraq’s Sunnis, disenfranchised by the overthrow of their patron, Saddam Hussein, were taking the fight to US forces – and starting to turn their guns towards the beneficiaries of Hussein’s overthrow, the country’s majority Shi’a population.’

Did the US troop surge in 2008 diminish sectarian fighting?

Although the Bush administration claimed that its troop ‘surge’ of 30,000 additional US military forces was the reason for the relative decline in sectarian fighting by 2008, the reality was far more complicated. It included the buying off of most of the leaders of Sunni tribal militias, the impact of a unilateral ceasefire declared in August 2007 by Shi’a militia leader Moqtada al-Sadr, and the horrific reality that the sectarian battles had largely achieved their goal. That is, by 2008 most mixed villages and towns had been ethnically cleansed to become almost entirely Sunni or Shi’a. Baghdad, historically a cosmopolitan mash-up of every religion and ethnicity, had become a city of districts defined by sect. Whether Sunni, Shi’a, Christian, or other, neighbourhoods were largely separated by giant cement blast walls.

In 2008, the US turned its commitment to paying the Sunni Awakening militias over to the Shi’a-dominated Iraqi government. Almost immediately, payments stopped, and the US-backed government under Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki escalated its sectarian practices. More and more Sunni generals and other military leaders, as well as ordinary Sunni Iraqis, turned against the government even as US troops were slowly being withdrawn, and by 2009 and into 2010, a serious Sunni uprising was under way.

The Islamic State in Iraq, or ISI, had never joined the Sunni Awakening. It maintained its focus on fighting against the US occupation and the Iraqi government, although its military activities had diminished somewhat as the overall sectarian warfare had waned. But as the sectarian fighting escalated again in 2010, ISI re-emerged as a leading Sunni force, attacking the government, the official Iraqi military, and the expanding Shi’a militias allied to the government, as well as targeting Shi’a civilians. Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi was by that point (whether newly in power or not) the clear chief of ISI, and he began to strengthen the military capacity of the organization, including by several attacks on prisons aimed at freeing key military leaders of the group.

How did ISIS begin to expand beyond Iraq?

In 2011, ISI emerged for the first time across the border in Syria. The uprising there was just beginning to morph into a multifaceted civil war, and already the sectarian Sunni-Shi’a split was becoming a major component. That started with the proxy war between regional powers – Sunni Saudi Arabia and Shi’a Iran – but soon spilled over to include an internal divide between Syria’s majority Sunni population and the minority but privileged Alawites, an offshoot of Shi’a Islam. ISI took up arms against the Alawite/Shi’a regime of Bashar al-Assad in Syria. ISI was fighting alongside the wide range of secular and Sunni militias – including the al-Qaeda-linked Jabhat an-Nusra, or Nusra Front – that were already confronting the regime. Soon, ISI turned to fight against those same anti-Assad forces, challenging those who rejected ISI’s power grabs, its violence, or its extremist definitions of Islam.

ISI changed its name again, this time to ISIS – for the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. By some accounts the acronym actually referred to the Islamic State in Iraq and al-Sham, Arabic for ‘greater Syria’. (See ‘How did the name ISIS evolve?’) Still led by al-Baghdadi and loyal to al-Qaeda, ISIS was rapidly gaining strength, not least from its recruiting of experienced fighters and acquisition of heavier arms in Iraq. It fought on both sides of the Iraq-Syria frontier, against governments and civilians in both countries, capturing crossing posts and essentially erasing the border altogether. In Anbar province and other Sunni-majority parts of northern and central Iraq, ISIS was able to establish a large military presence, supported by many Sunnis as a useful protector against the Shi’a-dominated government’s sectarian practices.

A major difference between ISIS and other militias, and particularly between ISIS and al-Qaeda, was that ISIS moved to seize territory. In doing so, it was not only asserting the theoretical goal of creating a future ‘caliphate’, it was actually doing so by occupying, holding, and governing an expanding land base across the Iraq-Syria border. In 2012 and into 2013, ISIS expanded its reach, establishing territorial control over large areas of northern Syria, including in and around the Syrian commercial centre of Aleppo. ISIS based its core governing functions in the city of Raqqa, which in mid-2014 was named its official capital.

Soon, however, relations deteriorated between ISIS and al-Qaeda, and between ISIS leader al-Baghdadi and al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri. From 20l3 on, al-Baghdadi tried to bring the ‘official’ al-Qaeda Syrian franchise, the Nusra Front, under the control of ISIS. At one point ISIS announced that Nusra had ‘merged’ with ISIS, although Nusra denied the claim. Al-Qaeda leader al-Zawahiri, watching the rising power of ISIS and its ambitious leader, restated his official endorsement for the Nusra Front as al-Qaeda’s official Syrian counterpart. There were other disagreements as well, including the divergence between al-Qaeda’s religiously defined goal of establishing a global caliphate at some indeterminate point in the future and ISIS’s tactic of seizing land, imposing its version of sharia law, and declaring it part of a present-day ISIS-run caliphate. The disagreements and power struggles continued, and in February 2014 al-Zawahiri officially renounced ISIS, criticizing, among other things, its violence against other Muslims.

Five months later, ISIS declared itself a global caliphate. Al-Baghdadi was named caliph, and once again the organization’s name changed – this time to the ‘Islamic State’. Since that time, small groups of Islamist militants in Sinai, Pakistan, Afghanistan and elsewhere have declared their loyalty to al-Baghdadi and the Islamic State, although it remains doubtful those links are operational. Throughout the summer of 2014, as the Iraqi military largely collapsed, ISIS moved aggressively to seize and consolidate its hold on large chunks of both Syria and Iraq, including Mosul, Iraq’s second-largest city.

In August 2014 Patrick Cockburn wrote in the London Review of Books:

‘The birth of the new state is the most radical change to the political geography of the Middle East since the Sykes-Picot Agreement was implemented in the aftermath of the First World War.’

As the militants continued to enlarge their territory and consolidate their control of an ever-expanding population across the two countries, the Obama administration renewed consideration of direct US military intervention against ISIS. By late summer 2014 at least 3,000 US troops were heading back into Iraq. And with the very real humanitarian crisis of Yazidi Syrians trapped on Mount Sinjar as a pretext, the US launched airstrikes against Syria.

America was officially at war with ISIS. As Peter Baker of the New York Times described it: ‘In sending warplanes back into the skies over Iraq, President Obama… found himself exactly where he did not want to be. Hoping to end the war in Iraq, Mr Obama became the fourth president in a row to order military action in that graveyard of American ambition.’

Is there any precedent for the barbaric violence perpetrated by ISIS?

Much of what ISIS does is clear from massive international media coverage: kidnapping for ransom, whipping and other physical punishments, large-scale killing of civilians, and seizure of women and girls for rape and forced ‘marriage’ to fighters have all been well documented. Reports of ISIS destruction of irreplaceable, centuries-old works of art have devastated historians and archaeologists around the world. Some of the most shocking reported actions are used against those ISIS deems non-believers, including crucifixion and stoning to death. Some of those actions hark back to punishments used in ancient times. As is true of the eras in which the holy texts of other influential religions were written, the years of the Prophet Muhammad’s life were also years of wars and constant battles for survival; that harsh wartime reality, including its punishments and its brutality, is reflected in the Qur’an as much as it is in the Torah, the Bible and other texts.

And yet some of these acts are also all too modern. Beheadings, for example, are currently used by governments,...