Black Flags

by Joby Warrick

  As the standoff in Hama was coming to full boil, Assad introduced a new theme in speeches and public statements denouncing the uprising. No longer were the protesters mere “vandals” and “criminals.” Now the Syrian leader spoke of a struggle against “takfiris”—radical Islamists.

  “This kind of ideology lurks in dark corners in order to emerge when an opportunity presents itself,” Assad had said in a televised speech to the nation. “It kills in the name of religion, destroys in the name of reform and spreads chaos in the name of freedom.”

  The notion that the protesters of Hama and Dara’a were religious extremists was patently absurd. Indeed, the early demonstrations were remarkable displays of unity, drawing Sunnis, Shiites, Christians, Kurds, and even some members of Assad’s Alawite sect. Yet Assad would continue to insist that Syria was locked in mortal combat against jihadists who wanted to ignite sectarian warfare and transport the country back to the Middle Ages.

  The lack of a visible Islamist presence in the uprising seemed at first to undercut the president’s claims. But over the months that followed, two different groups—one inside the regime, one based abroad—would take steps to introduce true takfiris to the conflict, turning Syria’s domestic crisis into an international disaster.

  18

  “Where is this Islamic State of Iraq that you’re talking about?”

  In the fall of 2011, Jordan’s King Abdullah II phoned his Syrian neighbor Bashar al-Assad to offer a friendly warning. Though couched in diplomatic niceties, it was a message of fearful urgency, a wake-up call to an old friend whose burning house happened to be attached to his own.

  The monarch had tried to convey the message in subtler ways, sending personal envoys to Damascus to meet with the president and his ministers. Now he would appeal to Assad directly. Abdullah, almost alone among the region’s leaders, saw Syria sliding into a years-long civil war that would split the country and imperil the entire Middle East. A thoughtful response might yet avert the calamity to come. There were no signs of such thoughtfulness coming from Damascus, yet Abdullah would dutifully offer his best advice.

  The two men were not particularly close, though they had gotten along well and had much in common. Both were sons of powerful and iconic rulers, and each had been a surprise choice as his father’s successor. The two leaders had studied in Britain, and both had glamorous and thoroughly modern wives with Western educations and careers of their own. Even their children were friendly, having bonded over Super Mario video-game competitions during family visits. Yet the two leaders’ responses to the Arab Spring unrest had been worlds apart.

  In Jordan, as in most of the region’s countries, the revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt propelled large crowds of protesters into the streets of the capital, demanding change. Abdullah was prepared for them. He dismissed the sitting prime minister in favor of a popular and reform-minded former general, Marouf Bakhit, whom he charged with the task of cleaning up corruption and making local government more accountable. Then the king began introducing a series of political reforms to speed up national and local elections and devolve more power to the prime minister and his Cabinet. Jordan’s opposition movement quickly lost steam in the face of a monarch who seemed as determined to change the system as they were. Abdullah later explained that he welcomed the Arab Spring, because it gave him an excuse to shake up a tradition-bound political system that protected the country’s elite: wealthy oligarchs and rich royals who had no interest in giving up their privileges.

  Now the king hoped to talk Assad into considering similar reforms, for his own sake and the region’s, according to officials present when Abdullah began the diplomatic outreach to his old neighbor. The phone call between the two leaders began with the usual small talk about family. Then Abdullah proceeded to ask about the uprising and to tick off some of the steps he had taken and what he proposed to do next.

  Assad cut the king off.

  “You should worry about Jordan and yourself,” the Syrian said. The call ended shortly after that.

  The brush-off stung. Abdullah had expected more of Bashar al-Assad. Assad’s father had been a ruthless man, a striver who had climbed from poverty to power through a mixture of cunning and brute force. But Bashar was not his father. After assuming the presidency, he had impressed Abdullah’s aides by bringing in a number of young advisers who were intelligent and worldly, some of them having achieved success in international banking or multinational corporations. The Americans weren’t the only ones who believed that Syria’s president might still prove to be a true reformer, once he had built a sufficient power base to resist challenges from the generals and spy chiefs who controlled the country’s security infrastructure.

  “The king extended a hand to Bashar, thinking he could pull him in,” one of Abdullah’s senior aides recalled. “We thought, ‘Here’s a guy who could actually transform Syria and move it in a different direction.’ When the repression began—and then became increasingly violent—we were shocked.”

  The implosion of a neighboring country was no idle concern. Jordan shares a 233-mile border with Syria, and there were dozens of unofficial crossing points used by tribes that straddled the dividing line. A prolonged conflict would inevitably affect Jordan, Abdullah’s advisers knew. There would be refugees, perhaps, and a host of new criminal enterprises pitching camp in the border towns to smuggle in weapons and contraband. Jordanian businesses could lose access to the main transportation artery connecting them to markets in southern Turkey and the European cities beyond. A more serious destabilization could mean a loss of control over major Syrian weapons systems, from antiaircraft missiles that could shoot down passenger jets to Assad’s lethal stockpiles of chemical weapons. Even a few shells of stolen VX or sarin gas could kill hundreds, perhaps thousands, in terrorist attacks.

  To most security analysts in the fall of 2011, such an extreme outcome seemed unlikely. The common refrain, repeated by intelligence officials from Jerusalem to Washington during the autumn months, was that Assad’s “days are numbered.” The regime was now losing entire army battalions to defections, and the country’s dwindling supply of dollars—crucial for purchasing everything from ammunition and aircraft parts to the loyalty of pro-regime militias—was nearly tapped out. Assad’s military commanders had begun confining some of the army’s Sunni brigades to their barracks out of fear that they could not be trusted to fight for their president.

  But was Assad truly finished? Abdullah wasn’t so sure.

  The king and his security advisers parsed each day’s intelligence reports in endless strategy sessions. Often these were held late at night in the hilltop palace, with the monarch in jeans or sweat clothes, poring over briefing books and quizzing his aides over tiny glasses of Turkish coffee and tea. All signs pointed to a momentum shift in favor of the opposition, yet Abdullah, studying the furious maneuverings of another Arab leader whose hilltop command center was just a hundred miles from his own, could see glimmers of a plan falling into place.

  “This is going to take much longer than anyone thinks,” Abdullah told his aides.

  As the Jordanians saw it, the regime and the opposition each commanded about a third of Syria’s population. Between the two was a fearful middle, an anxious mix of ethnic and religious minorities as well as merchants and professionals who were waiting to see which side would prevail. If Assad could play to their fears—if he could successfully paint the rebels as terrorists and religious zealots bent on ethnic and sectarian cleansing—he could turn the fence straddlers into passive allies. More than half the country would support the regime, and Assad could likely count on controlling Syria’s most critical real estate: Damascus and Aleppo, the country’s largest cities and commercial centers, as well as the crucial seaports along the coast. He could thus afford to cede a few inconsequential desert towns to the rebels, for now.

  Assad’s bank accounts were running low, it was true, but, again, his predicament was not as dire as it appeared—not as long
as he could rely on powerful friends abroad. Iran could be counted on to bankroll its Syrian ally indefinitely, in order to preserve its supply route to Iranian-backed Hezbollah militias along Lebanon’s border with Israel. And Russia’s Vladimir Putin would be only too happy to sell weapons and parts to his longtime Syrian trading partners, who also happened to be hosts to Russia’s only naval base in the Middle East.

  As Abdullah surveyed the crisis that fall, it seemed clear that Assad had every intention of clinging to power. And despite predictions to the contrary, he appeared to have enough firepower, money, and troops to keep up the fight for a very long time. Multiple proposals for settling the conflict had been floated, including offers for a comfortable exile abroad that would assure the safety of Assad and his family and spare the country from a destructive civil war. But Bashar al-Assad was not interested.

  “This,” the king told his advisers, “is going to get quite bloody.”

  There was yet another ominous development that fall, a slight shift on the rebels’ side that barely attracted attention outside the community of intelligence analysts focused on Syria’s uprising. It was widely known that Assad had declared a general amnesty in the early months of the uprising, leading to the release of inmates from ordinary prisons, though not the protesters locked in the secret police’s special detention centers. Now Syrians were learning just how cynical Assad’s goodwill gesture had been. Among the inmates discharged over the spring and summer were a number of radical Islamists who belonged to known terrorist organizations. Some were jihadists who had been picked up while attempting to cross into Iraq to join the insurgency there. Others were suspected al-Qaeda members who had been snatched by the CIA and secretly delivered to Syria under the spy agency’s “extraordinary rendition” program. The freed Islamists were too few in number to threaten the regime seriously, but their presence inside the country would help supply a veneer of truth for Assad’s extremist claims: now there were, in fact, a handful of authentic jihadists in the opposition camp. It was the same tactic used by the Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi, who emptied his jails in an apparent attempt to sow strife among the regime’s opponents.

  Jordanian and U.S. intelligence officials studied the reports with a mixture of incredulousness and alarm. Among the released prisoners were several familiar names. Some had been part of the support network for the Jordanian terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, running weapons and recruits across the border into Iraq. Now they were free to return to old haunts and perhaps old habits.

  Still, measured against the region’s other crises, it seemed a small thing.

  “There are only a handful of true al-Qaeda types,” a Middle East intelligence official said of the jihadists who were observed setting up shop inside Syria in late 2011. “We know exactly where they are. And when this is all over, we know how to get them.”

  —

  At the same moment, other outsiders were watching the events in Syria with wary hopefulness, like a starving coyote eyeing a buffalo. These were men who had once called themselves al-Qaeda in Iraq, and disciples of Zarqawi. Now they spent their days hiding out in the shabby outer suburbs of Mosul and a handful of other towns, communicating only rarely, for fear of detection. They had adopted a new name—the Islamic State of Iraq—and they maintained the pretense that the organization was a real country, with an administration and departments and even a flag. That the state was fictional was clear even to family members. “Where is this Islamic State of Iraq that you’re talking about? We’re living in a desert!” one of the leader’s wives complained, according to testimony in an Iraqi police case. Yet, to the man at the top of the organization, the Islamic State was already real, and it was about to get bigger, God willing.

  The leader was new to the job, having been abruptly promoted from the group’s number three slot when the previous leaders were killed in a raid by U.S. and Iraqi troops. Unlike previous commanders, he was not a warrior but a scholar, a professor of Islamic law who held a doctoral degree. At just thirty-two, he was somber beyond his years, a man who prized correctness and was fussily attentive to even the most minor rules governing speech and dress. He had grown up as Ibrahim Awad al-Badri, the son of a conservative Muslim preacher from the Iraqi city of Samarra. His self-chosen jihadist name was Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.

  He was physically unremarkable, a man of medium height with thinning hair and a naturally thick beard that, in middle adulthood, had expanded into an unruly bush. But Baghdadi possessed a prophet’s fierce conviction in destiny—the world’s, as well as his own. As he had watched the Arab Spring uprisings unfold in the early months of 2011, he could see a divine hand shaping events, jostling and tugging at history’s great boughs until the ripened fruit fell at Baghdadi’s feet. It was sure to happen anyway, but to nudge things along, Baghdadi began offering helpful suggestions that February, through the Islamic State’s media arm, to the masses of protesters in Cairo. After finishing off their country’s apostate president, Egypt’s throngs surely must recognize their obligation to continue the revolution across the Sinai and beyond, the messages suggested.

  “Here in your midst has the market of Jihad opened and become easy to reach!” declared one missive posted to Islamist Web sites in February. “No mature, able-bodied person has any excuse to stay behind with those who refrain from making Jihad.”

  The same posting included a special plea to empty Egypt’s prisons, home to many of the country’s most committed and experienced Islamists. Nearly all of the Iraqi group’s leadership, including Baghdadi, had served time in the Middle East’s notorious detention centers. “Freeing the prisoners is one of the foremost of obligations upon you,” the message read. “Do not let things settle unless you free every last one of them.”

  The entreaties were ignored. To the dismay of Islamists around the world, the crowds besieging government ministries in Cairo and Benghazi showed little appetite for replacing a secular tyrant with a religious one. In Cairo’s Tahrir Square, the rhyming slogans chanted by demonstrators ranged from demands for better living conditions—“Bread, freedom, social equality”—to expressions of national pride—“Hold your heads high, you’re Egyptian!” Even after Osama bin Laden’s death in May, there were no calls for jihad, and no unfurling of al-Qaeda banners or portraits of the slain terrorist leader. Opinion polls showed steadily falling approval for Bin Laden’s movement throughout the Muslim world starting around 2004, or just around the time Zarqawi began commanding international attention with videotaped beheadings and suicide bombings. Support for attacks on Muslim civilians—the Islamic State of Iraq’s calling card—had fallen even more.

  Zarqawi’s diminished descendants would occasionally dispatch a suicide bomber into the Iraqi capital to kill and maim. In the months after Baghdadi assumed command, the group claimed responsibility for attacks on bank customers, on parishioners at a church service, and on a queue of young men outside an army recruiting office. But with American troops now out of the country, and with Iraqis focused mainly on the novel political theater of dueling partisans in the Iraqi Parliament, the attacks seemed increasingly pointless to everyone but the terrorists themselves.

  Baghdadi’s lieutenants could still build a lethal car bomb, and they somehow managed to find a steady supply of hapless adolescents willing to steer a suicide vehicle toward its target. But Zarqawi’s old organization was as hollow as its leaders’ talk about a Pan-Arab Islamic state. The group was nearly broke. It had lost its sanctuary and freedom of movement, so essential for communication, training, and resupply. And it was selling an ideology that the Muslim world seemed no longer to care for. Five years after Zarqawi’s death, the Islamic State of Iraq had become the thing that terrorist organizations fear even more than their own annihilation.

  It had become irrelevant.

  —

  The decline began soon after the death of Zarqawi, though initially it was hard to tell from the body count.

  Stripped suddenly of its charismatic leader and
chief strategist, al-Qaeda in Iraq still managed at first to maintain and even surpass the scale of butchery achieved under the Jordanian. The twelve months following Zarqawi’s death were the deadliest of the war for U.S. troops, with 904 killed. The monthly Iraqi civilian death toll hit an all-time high of 3,266 in July 2006, the month after U.S. bombs demolished Zarqawi’s Baqubah hideout.

  But the battlefield was changing. Violence-weary Sunni tribes, banding together into militias that called themselves “Sons of Iraq,” were beginning to drive foreign jihadists from their villages, sometimes killing them. President George W. Bush’s troop surge of 2007 had flooded the country with thousands of fresh combat soldiers. Most important, America’s highly successful “fusion cells”—the antiterrorism teams of U.S. intelligence and special-forces operatives—had taken the pursuit of Islamist militants to a lethal new level. The cities of the Sunni Triangle that had served as a sanctuary and operating base for Zarqawi were rapidly becoming hostile and even dangerous to his followers, day and night.

  At the U.S. special-forces base at Balad, the same formula General McChrystal had used to track and kill Zarqawi was yielding fresh successes each day, and often multiple times a day. The effort continued at a steadily rising tempo through 2008, when McChrystal received his fourth general’s star and a promotion to Joint Staff Chief. His replacement, Vice Admiral William McRaven, kept the same policies in place until U.S. combat operations in Iraq officially ended in 2010.

  The daily search started with an astonishing array of electronic sleuthing tools, capable of sweeping up every mobile-phone call, e-mail, and text message sent by anyone, anywhere in Iraq. When someone dialed a number that matched a phone in Balad’s growing terrorist database, technical teams went to work, tracking the caller’s location and movements. U.S. drones and airplanes served as mobile cell towers that could tap directly into calls made from suspicious phones. Airborne surveillance cameras gave U.S. spies enhanced capabilities to trail suspicious cars and trucks.