by Meredith Tax
Until the nineties, Iraq had had one of the most egalitarian climates for women in the Arab world. Women in the cities dressed as they pleased and went around freely by themselves. But after the Iran-Iraq war and the 1991 Shia and Kurdish uprisings, Saddam courted the support of conservative tribal leaders. He set up colleges for Islamic studies and inscribed “God is Great” upon the Iraqi flag. As Islamists began to gain influence, Baath party officers stopped drinking and started going to mosques and studying salafi texts, and the state began to impose ancient punishments like amputation for theft and beheading for prostitution.15
Like other fundamentalists, the rising Iraqi Islamists were obsessed with questions of women’s mobility and dress. They assaulted women who wore short skirts, painting their legs as punishment. The government, instead of preventing the attacks, banned short skirts and said women could not go out at night without a male relative. One of the first actions of the new Iraqi Governing Council appointed by Bremer was to pass Resolution 137, overturning parts of the progressive family code. The Iraqi women’s movement mounted such a strong protest that Bremer decided not to ratify the IGC’s decision, but he would not meet the women’s movement’s other demands about representation in government and on the committee that was drafting a new constitution. Nor did he take any steps to prevent violence against women. As the violence increased, women soon realized that it was not just a consequence of war, but part of an Islamist strategy to create a state ruled by their version of sharia law.
Changes in the personal status code that Bremer allowed to go through also harmed women. A man was allowed to take a second wife without asking his first wife’s permission, and he could be sentenced to as little as six months in jail if he killed a female relative he suspected of immorality.16
With the US occupation in full force, Islamization went nuclear, with a predictably devastating effect upon women. As a 2007 report by the American feminist organization MADRE described it, “In spring 2003, as the smoke began to clear from the US invasion of Iraq, a wave of kidnappings, abductions, public beatings, death threats, sexual assaults, and killings gripped the country. The targets were women. US authorities took no action and soon the violence spread. Killings of Iraqi men and foreigners became commonplace as Islamist militias launched a campaign of terror that mushroomed into the civil war now raging across Iraq. While the militias were taking to the streets, their political leaders were taking their seats in a new Iraqi government. With money, weapons, training, and political backing from the United States, Iraqi Islamists have put an end to 85 years of secular rule in Iraq and established an Islamist theocracy. As Yanar Mohammed, director of the Organization of Women’s Freedom in Iraq . . . said, ‘We used to have a government that was almost secular. It had one dictator. Now we have almost 60 dictators—Islamists who think of women as forces of evil. This is what is called the democratization of Iraq.’”17
According to the MADRE report, by the summer of 2003, Islamist “misery gangs” were patrolling the city, attacking women who were not “properly” dressed or who behaved in a manner the men disapproved of. “According to a woman musician, ‘If the Islamists see me walking on the street with my flute, they could kill me.’” Female doctors were warned not to treat men and the reverse held for male doctors. Throughout Iraq, cities were “soon plastered with leaflets and graffiti warning women against going out unveiled, driving, wearing makeup, or shaking hands and socializing with men. Islamist “punishment committees” sprang up, manned by the Badr Brigade of the US-backed SCIRI Party and its rival, the Mahdi Army. . . . In Basra, the Mahdi Army ensured that women were virtually confined to their homes. Wearing pants or appearing in public without a headscarf became punishable by death.”18
As Shia fundamentalists took over the government and the streets of Baghdad, the Sunni fundamentalists of al Qaeda in Iraq organized resistance in Anbar Province in the Sunni heartland. Zarqawi’s methods included rape, murder, theft, kidnapping, and public beheadings; in fact, al Qaeda in Iraq’s rule in Anbar Province was so violent that other Islamists complained to the main al Qaeda leadership. In July 2005, Zawahiri sent Zarqawi a letter of reprimand, saying, “Many of your Muslim admirers amongst the common folk are wondering about your attacks on the Shia. The sharpness of this questioning increases when the attacks are on one of their mosques. . . . My opinion is this matter won’t be acceptable to the Muslim populace, however much you try to explain it, and aversion to this will continue. . . . Among the things which the feelings of the Muslim populace . . . will never find palatable are the scenes of slaughtering the hostages.”19
Zarqawi did not listen. In 2006, al Qaeda in Iraq blew up the al-Askari mosque in Samarra, one of Shia Islam’s holiest sites. By doing this, he hoped to provoke a sectarian war between Sunnis and the Shia majority, who were now firmly in control of the Baghdad government. He thought that once his fellow Sunnis realized they could fight back, they would wake from their apathy and seize power from the Shia.20 Zarqawi did succeed in awaking Sunni anger, but they turned against him, not the Shia. Al Qaeda in Iraq had ruled Anbar Province so harshly that the Sunni tribes who originally supported them changed sides in 2006 and joined the Sunni Awakening movement being promoted by the US.21
But this did nothing to improve things for Iraqi women, sexual minorities, religious minorities, and secularists. Houzan Mahmoud, the Iraqi Kurdish women’s rights activist, wrote that “political Islamists who are friends of the US and who dominate its puppet regime are no less criminal than Zarqawi and his thugs. The Badr corps of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIR) has been a key force in imposing religious totalitarianism on the Iraqi people, wielding its sectarian violence against women, above all. And the Mahdi army of Moqtada al-Sadr was rewarded for its terrorist activities in southern Iraq with seats in the so-called Parliament. Both forces regularly kill women, gay men and lesbians, and trade unionists. In some places Islamists are even ordering farmers to put shorts on their female goats and sheep. And in certain street markets the display of tomatoes and cucumbers is banned due to their association with genital organs.”22
Under the sectarian government in Baghdad, everyday life grew more and more difficult. While women continued to organize, they had to be extremely cautious to avoid becoming an assassination target for the government or Islamists. A reporter for The Independent wrote in 2006, “Across Iraq, a bloody and relentless oppression of women has taken hold. Many women had their heads shaved for refusing to wear a scarf or have been stoned in the street for wearing make-up. Others have been kidnapped and murdered for crimes that are being labelled simply as ‘inappropriate behaviour.’ The insurrection against the fragile and barely functioning state has left the country prey to extremists whose notion of freedom does not extend to women.”23
According to scholar and activist Nadje al-Ali, writing in 2013, “Acute violence in the form of car bombs and targeted assassinations, as well as kidnapping, forced prostitution, trafficking, and honour-based crimes are only the tip of the iceberg of much deeper and widespread forms of gender-based violence. Furthermore, there is a constant policing of women’s involvement in public activities, employment, general behaviour within the home and family, and dress code both by state and non-state actors.”24
The situation became so bad that by 2016 much of the work of OWFI, the Organization for Women’s Freedom in Iraq, was focused on setting up safe houses for battered and trafficked women trying to escape the militias.25 Despite its talk of human rights, in Iraq as in Afghanistan, the US had merely supported one group of Islamists against another.
Daesh is Born
In June 2006, Zarqawi was killed and the new leaders of al Qaeda in Iraq, Abu Ayyub al-Masri and Abu Omar al-Baghdadi, announced a name change to the Islamic State in Iraq. A lot of their people had been put in prison by the Americans, but that turned out to work in their favor, because the large American prisons—especially Camp Bucca, where al Qaeda/Islamic State in Iraq had i
ts own wing—permitted inmates to meet freely. As a jihadi called Abu Ahmed told The Guardian, “We could never have all got together like this in Baghdad, or anywhere else. . . . It would have been impossibly dangerous. Here, we were not only safe, but we were only a few hundred metres away from the entire al-Qaida leadership.”26
In Camp Bucca, al Qaeda members also met former Baathist security operatives and military men, including Samir Abd Muhammad al-Khlifawi, known as Haji Bakr, who had been a weapons expert and colonel in Saddam Hussein’s intelligence service.27 A number of former Baathists became Islamists in prison, at least nominally, and in 2010, when the two leaders of al Qaeda/Islamic State in Iraq were killed, these newly converted ex-Baathists became the power behind the throne. They chose a well-connected Iraqi cleric, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, to be their official leader.28
The Syrian civil war gave them their big opportunity. Syria was a dictatorship controlled by the Assad family and the Baathist party which, like Saddam Hussein’s Baath party in Iraq, was nominally secular but was, in fact, founded on power politics and manipulating ethnic and religious differences. The Assads are Alawi, a minority Muslim sect that is considered Shia by salafis. In March 2011, the Arab Spring protests spread to Syria, and civil society groups and students began to demonstrate against the government. These demonstrations were initially peaceful and anti-sectarian, but Assad’s military and police attacked the demonstrators so viciously that by the summer, soldiers began to defect and join the rebellion. At the same time, some demonstrators decided they had to take up arms to defend their villages from the government. Thus the Free Syrian Army was born, with the mission of overthrowing Assad; it was soon joined by various Islamist militias.
Since 2003 Bashar Assad, eager to embarrass the US, had been letting jihadis en route to fight in Iraq pass through his airports. Syrian Army officers would even escort them from their planes to the Iraq border. Some ninety percent of suicide bombers in Iraq entered through Syria.29 Thus the Syrian security police had longstanding ties with members of the branch of al Qaeda now calling itself the Islamic State in Iraq. Some of its fighters were Syrians and, in 2004 and 2005, as their organization lost traction in Iraq, they began to come home. Anticipating that they would want to take on Assad’s security forces, the Syrian government arrested them and put them in storage on a special floor of the Sednaya Prison, dubbing the floor the al Qaeda wing.
Like Camp Bucca in Iraq, Sednaya was a great place for Islamic State members to get acquainted. One ex-prisoner told reporter Rania Abouzeid, “When I was detained, I knew four or five or six, but when I was released I knew 100, or 200 or 300. I now had brothers in Hama and Homs and Daraa and many other places, and they knew me.”30
In 2011, as antigovernment demonstrations became bigger and more heated, Assad declared a selective amnesty. He let members of the Muslim Brotherhood and residents of the al Qaeda wing in Sednaya Prison out of jail, while continuing to imprison democratic opponents of the regime. Assad knew the jihadis he released from prison would take up arms, and thus allow him to say that the Syrian revolution was led by terrorists who wanted to kill Syrian minorities. It is fair to say that Daesh was fathered not only by al Qaeda and by ex-Baathists in Iraq but by the Assad government in Syria.31
In August 2011, during Ramadan, the Islamic State in Iraq sent eight men across the border into Syria, led by Abu Mohammad al-Julani, a Syrian who had gone to Iraq to fight the US and ended up in Camp Bucca. His mission was to start a branch of al Qaeda in Syria. Julani scooped up the prisoners released from Sednaya and recruited others eager to fight. On January 23, 2012, he released an audiotape announcing the formation of a new Islamist army to fight Assad, called the Jabhat al-Nusra, or the al-Nusra Front. He didn’t say anything about his connection with al Qaeda. Zarqawi had given the organization in Iraq such a bad name that Julani decided that al-Nusra would have to prove itself before mentioning its origins. He told his troops that first they would “show our values, deal with people well, and then after a while we’d tell them, ‘The al Qaeda that was smeared in the media? This is it. We are it. What do you think of us—Jabhat al-Nusra?’”32
Better armed, equipped, and trained than most of Assad’s other opponents, Jabhat al-Nusra quickly made its mark. For one thing, they used suicide bombers, which other groups in Syria did not. And unlike al Qaeda in Iraq, killing Shia or minorities was not their first priority. Instead, they presented themselves as patriotic Syrian nationalists. To ingratiate themselves, they distributed flour to bakeries as well as fighting Assad, and villagers told reporters that al-Nusra did not impose its fundamentalism on the communities it controlled—not at first.
By the summer of 2012, Jabhat al-Nusra was the dominant fighting group in four provinces of Syria: Raqqa, Idlib, Dier ez-Zor, and Aleppo. By December 2012, they had become so popular that when the US put them on the terrorist list as an affiliate of al Qaeda in Iraq, demonstrators marched with signs saying the only terrorists were in the Assad government. Even Syrian opposition leaders in exile condemned the US listing.33 They all thought Jabhat al-Nusra was a homegrown Syrian group that might be a little too religious but just wanted to fight Assad.
Back in Iraq, Baghdadi was not pleased. As the profile of Jabhat al-Nusra and Julani grew ever more shining in jihadi chat rooms, he no doubt started to wonder what the Islamic State of Iraq was getting out of all this publicity. Nobody even knew that Baghdadi was the emir who had sent Julani into Syria in 2011 and had funded Jabhat al-Nusra for more than two years. Surely the world had a right to know who was really responsible for all this success?
On April 8, 2013, Baghdadi released an audio message saying, “it is time to declare to the Levant and to the world that the al-Nusra Front is simply a branch of the Islamic State of Iraq.” From now on, he said, the two organizations were officially merged; the new group would be called ISIL, the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant—or, as its opponents call it in Arabic, Daesh. He did not bother to tell Julani before dropping this bombshell.
Within a few days, Julani announced that there would be no such merger. Clearly worried that other Syrians might think he was going to behave as Zarqawi had when he was in control of al Qaeda in Iraq, he said, “We reassure our brothers in Syria that al-Nusra Front’s behavior will remain faithful to the image you have come to know, and that our allegiance (to al Qaeda) will not affect our politics in any way.” Despite this effort, his announcement didn’t reassure other Syrian jihadis. A spokesman of the Free Syrian Army rushed to put distance between them, saying, “There has never been and there will never be a decision at the command level to coordinate with al-Nusra.”34
The quarrel between the two branches of al Qaeda buzzed around jihadi media to such an extent that Zawahiri became alarmed. In June 2013, Al Jazeera published a letter containing Zawahiri’s official judgment on the feud. Strongly siding with Jabhat al-Nusra, the letter said Baghdadi should stay in Iraq and leave Syria alone. In his capacity as emir of al Qaeda, Zawahiri dissolved the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant, saying Baghdadi had not been given the authority to set up any such merger. The two men were instructed to work separately for a year, after which they should report back so their work could be judged. In the meantime, they should stop quarreling and keep their men apart.35
Because Daesh was part of al Qaeda, Baghdadi was supposed to submit to Zawahiri’s authority. But instead of agreeing to disband his operation in Syria and stop using the name Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant, Baghdadi posted on jihadi forums: “The Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant will remain, as long as we have a vein pumping or an eye blinking. It remains and we will not compromise nor give it up.”36
An online media duel erupted, with each organization calling on the other’s fighters to switch camps. On June 20, Islamic State spokesman Abu Mohammed al-Adnani went on the attack, accusing Zawahiri of causing “sedition” by trying to get Jabhat al-Nusra, which had, after all, been started by the Iraqi organization, to secede from it. He also sa
id that in effect, by telling the two jihadi groups each to stay in its own country, Zawahiri was endorsing the national borders created by the hated Sykes-Picot treaty. Real jihadis knew that Islam had no national borders and no country.37
But the battle for leadership between Daesh and al Qaeda could not be resolved by polemics. It had to be resolved on the battlefield, by seeing who could take territory and hold it. Al Qaeda had never even tried to set up a governing organization. Would Daesh be able to do so?
Though Julani didn’t know it, he was not the only member of the Iraqi organization who had infiltrated Syria. At the end of 2012, Haji Bakr, Saddam’s former intelligence colonel, quietly moved to Tal Rifaat in Syria to develop sleeper cells there. The idea was to build a strong base in Syria and use it as a jumping-off place from which to retake Iraq from the Shia government.38 Haji Bakr’s objective was to seize enough territory in both Iraq and Syria to build his kind of caliphate—a pure Islamist state with an all-pervasive intelligence structure that would reach into every area of life, and from which no one would be protected. If this totalitarian vision was reminiscent of the Stasi, it’s no accident, for Saddam Hussein’s security people were trained by the East German secret police.39
Haji Bakr kept a little notebook full of his plans for founding the “Islamic intelligence state.” In January 2014, he was killed by a rival militia, who found the notebook and eventually sold it to the German media giant Der Spiegel, where it was painstakingly examined by their Middle East expert, Christoph Reuter. His analysis of Haji Bakr’s notebook makes it easy to understand what happened in Raqqa.40