The Ugly, Complicated Story of ISIS
Before the war in Iraq began the United States military and retired Army Lieutenant General Jay Garner had laid several plans for what to do with the Iraqi Republican Guard once the invasion was complete.
On March 20th, 2003, we invaded Iraq.
On April 21st, 2003 the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) was established, intended to be the guiding entity for military expansion and movement for the remainder of the war. A command structure all countries involved in the invasion could coordinate with and through, with Lt. Gen. Jay Garner as the head.
May 11th, 2003 he was replaced by Ambassador Paul Bremer.
Ambassador Paul Bremer — August 5th, 2003
Five days after assuming his position Ambassador Bremer issued Order Number 1, then 7 days later Order Number 2, dissolving the Republican Guard and Ba’ath party.
The Guard members were predominantly Sunni Arabs who had enjoyed the equivalency of upper middle class. They scattered and were no more.
“In Iraq, for instance, remnants of Hussein’s Ba’athist regime, as well as militants whose organization would eventually become the self-proclaimed Islamic State, employed Sunni rhetoric to mount a resistance to the rise of Shia power. Sunni fundamentalists, many inspired by al-Qaeda’s call to fight Americans, flocked to Iraq from Muslim-majority countries, attacking coalition forces and many Shia civilians.” -Council on Foreign Relations
From 2003–2006 there were two predominant middle-east terrorist organizations who’s names should be familiar: al-Qaeda and Hezbollah. Al-Qaeda is a Sunni organization and Hezbollah is Shia. The two differ completely.
Again, here’s the Council on Foreign Relations.
Hezbollah has developed a political wing that competes in elections and is part of the Lebanese government, a path not chosen by al-Qaeda, which operates a diffuse network largely in the shadows. Both groups have deployed suicide bombers, and their attacks shifted from a focus on the West and Israel to other Muslims, such as al-Qaeda’s killing of Shia civilians in Iraq and Hezbollah’s participation in the Syrian civil war.
Look at this infographic for a moment.
This should help highlight that both Sunni and Shia are extremist sects of the Muslim faith independent of each other with entirely different goals. The few similarities are they’re both anti-American, either can be or are pro-violence, and operate within the same region.
There’s a reason things changed in 2006.
From the U.S. led invasion of 2003 through 2006, a Jordanian jihadist named Abu Musab al-Zarqawi gained notoriety and fame in the extremist Islamic world for his organization’s attacks on Shia mosques, civilians, the Iraqi government and the United States’ coalition forces. In 2004 he joined forces with the Osama Bin Laden al Qaeda organization.
Abu Musab al-Zarqawi — June 11, 2004
The chief deputy of bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri wrote a letter to al-Zarqawi in July, 2005 laying out the plan for a caliphate.
Ayman al Zawahiri — undated photograph
You can read the English translation of his letter in the link below.
Combating Terrorism Center at West Point: https://www.ctc.usma.edu/v2/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/Zawahiris-Letter-to-Zarqawi-Translation.pdf
A caliphate is not a rapidly understandable term. Take a moment to read these two paragraphs that will help you understand what al-Zawahiri was saying to his extremist counterpart they should re-establish.
Caliphate, the political-religious state comprising the Muslim community and the lands and peoples under its dominion in the centuries following the death (632 ce) of the Prophet Muhammad. Ruled by a caliph (Arabic khalīfah, “successor”), who held temporal and sometimes a degree of spiritual authority, the empire of the Caliphate grew rapidly through conquest during its first two centuries to include most of Southwest Asia, North Africa, and Spain. Dynastic struggles later brought about the Caliphate’s decline, and it ceased to exist with the Mongol destruction of Baghdad in 1258.
The concept of the caliphate took on new significance in the 18th century as an instrument of statecraft in the declining Ottoman Empire. Facing the erosion of their military and political power and territorial losses inflicted in a series of wars with European rivals, the Ottoman sultans, who had occasionally styled themselves as caliphs since the 14th century, began to stress their claim to leadership of the Islamic community. This served both as means of retaining some degree of influence over Muslim populations in formerly Ottoman lands and as means of bolstering Ottoman legitimacy within the empire. The caliphate was abolished in 1924, following the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire and the rise of the Turkish Republic. — Encyclopedia Brittanica
The caliphate is essentially a place. Al-Zawahiri was establishing the need for Sunni control of what is either largely Shia or United States coalition forces-held regions. Understanding what a caliphate is clearly points to the desperate land-grab executed by our modern-day ISIS forces.
This is taken directly from the letter al-Zawahiri sent al-Zarqawi:
If we look at the two short-term goals, which are removing the Americans and establishing an Islamic amirate in Iraq, or a caliphate if possible, then, we will see that the strongest weapon which the mujahedeen enjoy — after the help and granting of success by God — is popular support from the Muslim masses in Iraq, and the surrounding Muslim countries.
It should sound familiar. It’s become engine pushing modern-day ISIS forward. Al-Zawahiri puts forth the importance of establishing a statehood (or emirate), which would formalize their mission and existence, gaining support from the “Muslim masses.”
2006 expedited the forward momentum of al-Zawahiri’s plan because we killed al-Zarqawi in an air strike on June 7th. January of that year he had joined his organization with several others under the umbrella organization “Mujahideen Shura Council” (or MSC). A weak leader at best, his presence had little effect on the far more significant result of al-Zarqawi’s death:
On October 12, 2006, Islamist websites posted a video showing six white-clad, masked individuals who, according to the websites, were taking a traditional Arab oath of allegiance known as hilf al-mutayyabin(“oath of the scented ones”). — Middle East Media Research Institute
A day later, the MSC, al-Zarqawi’s organization declared the establishment of the Islamic State of Iraq (ISI), comprising Iraq’s six mostly Sunni Arab organizations. Over the next four years the Islamic State was battered by the U.S. led coalition forces.
On May 16th, 2010, something happened that takes us back to the very beginning of where we started. Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi was appointed the new leader of the Islamic State of Iraq. (http://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-28560449)
Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi — July, 2014
Al-Baghdadi filled in gaps and replaced the group’s leadership by appointing former Ba’athist military and intelligence officers who had served during Saddam Hussein’s rule. These men, nearly all of whom had spent time imprisoned by the US military, came to make up about one third of the top 25 commanders.
Even with the influx of thousands of foreign fighters, almost all of the leaders of the Islamic State are former Iraqi officers, including the members of its shadowy military and security committees, and the majority of its emirs and princes, according to Iraqis, Syrians and analysts who study the group. — Liz Sly, Independent.co.uk
These two paragraphs from an article in the New York Times on August 28th, 2014 summarizes what happened as elegantly as can be done.
ISIS, which calls itself Islamic State, burst into global consciousness in June, 2014 when its fighters seized Mosul, Iraq’s second-largest city, after moving into Iraq from their base in Syria.
The Iraqi Army melted away, and Mr. Baghdadi declared a caliphate, or Islamic state, that erased borders and imposed Taliban-like rule over a large territory. Not everyone was surprised by the group’s success. “These guys know the terrorism business inside and out, and they are the ones who survived aggressive counterterrorism campaigns during the surge,” said one American intelligence official, referring to the increase in American troops in Iraq in 2007. “They didn’t survive by being incompetent.” — Ben Hubbard and Eric Schmitt
On 29 June 2014, the organization proclaimed itself to be a worldwide caliphate. Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi was named its caliph, and the group renamed itself “ad-Dawlah al-Islāmiyah” الدولة الإسلامية, “Islamic State.”
When Mr. Bremer replaced Lt. General Garner as head of the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq there was just 12 days between when he assumed his leadership position and issued the two Orders that dissolved the Ba’athist organization.
When Ambassador L. Paul Bremer III arrived in Baghdad in May of 2003 as America’s proconsul in Iraq, he assumed the most powerful foreign post held by any American since Gen. Douglas MacArthur in Japan. While he knew little about Iraq when he was appointed by President Bush, Mr. Bremer became, as he writes in his revealing memoir, “the only paramount authority figure — other than dictator Saddam Hussein — that most Iraqis had ever known.” His mandate was as sweeping as his powers: to oversee the remaking of an entire nation, from its political institutions to its economic machinery to its security infrastructure. — Michiko Kakutani, New York Times
One cannot help but wonder: if Ambassador Bremer had taken more time in his new position to become familiar with the culture and war-time environment before issuing his first two executive actions that changed the future of extremist groups in Iraq and Syria, would he arrived at the same conclusion?
Instead he simply dissolved what had been an admired, powerful military force for decades and created the right climate for religious extremists to flourish.
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